Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Pentagon Bureaucracy and the Human Domain of War

Episode Date: September 25, 2020

What is the human domain of warfare, and will it be more or less relevant in great power competition? Who should own it? What does it take to change how the Department of Defense thinks about war? In this episode, Nick Lopez and Kyle Atwell dig into these questions and more with retired Brig. Gen. Kim Field and Dr. Sue Bryant. The conversation goes beyond defining the human domain of warfare, as the guests reveal how policy changes are considered within the Defense Department bureaucracy based on their experiences. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Really the special operations community was saying that, no, this is our domain. If the land domain is the Army, a little bit of the Marine Corps, and the air is the Air Force, and, you know, obviously, and on and on, then the human thing is ours. Question becomes, how do you organize, man, train, and equip according to this new concept or this new domain or this new warfighting function? States like China are not necessarily after territorial opposition anymore. It's not like World War II, where it's going to be land grab after land grab. Nobody wants the insurgencies. What they want is influence and they want strategic resources.

Welcome to episode 10 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. Your hosts today are myself, Nick Lopez, and my co-host Kyle Atwell. In today's episode, we dig into the human domain of warfare and Pentagon bureaucracy. Our guests kick off the conversation by explaining what the human domain is, how they believe it is relevant to current national security strategy, and whether a single entity like Special Operations or the State Department should own it. Additionally, both guests were involved in efforts to add the human element as a new domain of warfare while working in the Department of Defense, and they provide interesting insights into bureaucratic politics within the Pentagon. Dr. Sue Bryant is the Executive Director at Strategic Education

International. Dr. Bryant teaches grand strategy and military history at Georgetown University and defense policymaking at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She is a retired colonel with 28 years of active duty service and is a co-author of a book released in 2018, Military Strategy in the 21st Century, which will serve as a foundation for today's discussion. Brigadier General Retired Kim Field is the Executive Director of the All-Britain Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. She has served tours of duty in Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. After retiring from the Army, she served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the

Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production from 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 Kim Field and Sue Bryant. Kim Field and Sue Bryant, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. And we thank you for joining us today. Great.

Thanks. Thanks for having us. So I'll jump right in. Sue, you co-authored the book Military Strategy in the 21st Century, People, Connectivity, and Competition. It argues for the creation of a new domain of the human domain. What was the motivation behind this book and this project? Yeah. So I got involved in this book through Lieutenant General Retired Cleveland, former USASOC commander, and he was a massive advocate of the idea of the human domain and the idea of the human domain being sort of the missing link in warfare and how we can't exactly figure out what's going on and why we're failing to win the wars.

interesting to me was the reason that I got brought onto the project was I was the person who always made the wrinkled noses. And General Cleveland was like, you know, somehow I'm not really selling you the argument. And I said, well, sir, you know, I'm having a lot of trouble translating what it is that you're saying into how it is that we deal with it inside the Pentagon and inside the bureaucracy. Because you get into this whole idea of this human domain of warfare. And I remember saying to him, I'm like, well, of course, it's a human domain of warfare. If it weren't human domain, what would it be? Watership down? I mean, have you got rabbits on the battlefield? So how do you manage this? And what is it that you're actually saying? And so the book actually evolved as a result of a collaboration between Ben Jensen, Arnel Davie,

General Cleveland, and I on the argument of how do we make this idea more accessible? So Kim, you're laughing because you remember some of these debates inside the Pentagon. You want to go ahead and elaborate on some of them or should I? I was laughing at the wrinkled nose. It wasn't necessarily because the idea was such a bad one. In a way, it was instinctively appealing to many of us. But as Sue said, it was kind of like, wait a minute. Does this have more to do with Pentagon budget battles and defining roles at a time when we were transitioning? We thought we were transitioning out of coin

and out of these human population-centric wars, never going to do them again to something else, right? So there were a lot of looks and sort of those facial expressions all the way around. And do you mind providing a definition of what the human domain is and what would be different, you know, following the prescriptions of the book than what we have now? Well, the human domain is every aspect that we have to deal with the human being on the battlefield. So the problem set is it's moral, it's social, it's cognitive. But the thing that

we were really looking at inside the book was the idea of connectivity and the idea of technology and the interaction of new technologies, including big data and connectivity in the internet, which has created different sorts of effects on the battlefield, which makes the human domain so much more important. What are you talking about? Talking about the ability to flash mob via Facebook, talking about the ability to basically destroy the tyranny of distance as a result of the connectivity. And these sorts of things, which are cheap, which are widely available, and which are near instantaneous, have changed the way that we're thinking about warfare and has changed the way that we've seen warfare. And so how do we take this human domain concept, which seems to be so naturally appealing to the special operations community, because this idea of engagement, this idea of influence, this idea of an indirect

approach also has a ton to do with the conventional force, but at the same time, how do we bring this in? And so back to my wrinkled nose, we're talking about human beings on the battlefield in pretty much every aspect. All right, that's great. Wonderful. Something's different. Something's happened. How do you operationalize that?

So you're not just talking about key actors and influencers wherever we're operating? You're talking about the entire population, potentially. When you're talking about the entire population, how do people maneuver and act in the battlefield, whether or not they're combatants or whether or not they're non-combatants? And so now you start getting into things like how do narratives matter? How does historicity matter? What does decision-making processes matter? How are people motivated and how do they move? Okay.

These are all important concepts. But the heck with it is what do you do with it? Okay. So then you look at it, and you take it against the idea of a domain. And so so this morning, because I knew we were going to do this, I'm like, Alright, let's go ahead and let me relook up domain. And let me give you, you know, the quick history of where this idea came from. Despite the fact we use it all the time, it's still terminologically imprecise, right? All right. So we can go back to 1947, National

Security Act 1947. And in it, and know that the National Security Act of 1947 was created as a result of a large bureaucratic fight between the Army, the Air Force and the Navy. And this wasn't about how we jointly interact. This was about how do I keep my elbows out around my fiefdom? And how do I keep my stuff mine? And so this great big bureaucratic fight ended up with different realms or lanes of warfare. And they were nicely defined that way. And we're good. Okay. And the thing about them is each one of them is physical. You've got sea, you've got air, you've got space, it's physical, it's domain. And oh, by the way, when you talk about domain, you're talking about ownership, right? From a Westphalian sort of, this is a state on state ownership thing. All right. So now we come back to sort of 1990s, early 2000s.

All of a sudden we've brought in information dominance and now that's where the word domain comes out. Okay. So now we have domains. We've got the land domain, we've got the sea domain, we've got the air domain, and now we have the information domain. And to quote back to Sesame Street, one of these things is not like the other. One of these things just isn't the same. And we get all troubled over what the information domain actually is, who owns it, and what does that mean bureaucratically in terms of the fights inside the building? So the idea of the information domain became so problematic that we changed it over into the cyber domain became so problematic that we changed it over into the cyber domain.

And so when you start to see these domains emerge, you have the air, sea, space, and although space is problematic in a different way, at least there's physicality attached to it. And you can say, yep, you can have that. All right. And, yep, there's ownership. And, yep, we have a, because you've got to bring it back to you. And yep, there's ownership. And yep, we have a, because you've got to bring it back to you. And yes, we have a congressional committee that can manage that, you know, because they're the ones who are going to go ahead and they're the ones who are going to approve things. But now you've got the human domain and you add that in. Well, one of these things is really not like the other

now, because the human domain, which is so all encompassing, and also is not just virtual, it's social, it's moral, it's cognitive. And it's this massive conceptual quagmire. And we say, okay, these are all domains of warfare. Yeah, okay, except for they're all incredibly different. And I think that that is where you start to get the real conversation and the real difficulty inside the Pentagon. And so whereas I think there's an intellectual, instinctual appeal inside the special operations community, this is in fact kind of antithetical to the preferred American way of war, which is high-end combat technology. Let's kick butt on the battlefield. All right, you want me to talk about the way people are motivated? So you mentioned that this new domain goes against the American way of war.

Can you talk a little bit about who tried to own this domain and some of the reasons why it didn't get off the ground? And Kim, if you have anything to add, you could jump right in there. I'll take that just a little bit, Sue, because it was there sort of at the beginning when General Cleveland and really the special operations community was saying that, no, this is our domain. If a land domain is the army, a little bit of the Marine Corps and the air is the air force. And, you know, obviously and on and on, then the human thing is ours. Well, everybody's like, well, that's crazy, because one special operating forces are just a capability you bring to bear across all domains and across all functions and across all missions. So that was further solidified in special operations and SOCOM as a

service, already has its own different budget, different way of different appropriation. And to say, okay, now you are responsible for all things human, right? Just didn't sit well. responsible for all things human, right, just didn't sit well. It didn't sit well. So things, you know, sort of evolved. And General Odierno, who really was in a budget fight, right, he was really in a fight, trying to hang on to end strength, trying to hang on to the Army share a budget at a time when the Navy and the Air Force were very much saying, hey, it's our turn now. Sue, can I ask you, do you think that SOF should own a human warfare domain or do you think it's broader than the special operations community? Oh, I think it's broader than the special operations community.

And again, when you talk about land domain, you know what that is. When you talk about air domain, you know what that is. When you talk about human domain, okay, I got that Rorschach inkblot. Is it a butterfly or is it, you know, what is it? And when you have that sort of imprecision associated with it, trying to then assign ownership to something, which is frankly, the sum total of human behavior at its broadest, and then trying to bring it down to something smaller, that's where you end up with the difficulty associated with it. And that is the argument that was basically going around the Pentagon at warp speed between 2012 and 2015.

If you don't have something like it, how are you going to make sure it happens? Domain is not the answer. In my mind, domain is not the answer. A service is accountable for domains. And it's just not going to work that its office is accountable for all things of the human domain. So the human domain never came to be, but if this were to have been written into doctrine, what would have been the second and third order effects

to this and would have that have meant more resources, the Special Operations Command and the Army? What would that look like? See, that I think is really a huge question associated with it because, you know, you would have these conversations about how important they were and what they meant. And then the question becomes because all of your services want to start running this through a Title X lens. How do you organize, man, train, and equip according to this new concept or this new domain or this new warfighting function? And everybody started staring blankly at one another when we started talking about the

human domain. What is the capability? What is the thing that you want me to buy? This was exactly the same time that we were going through sequestration. And this is exactly the same time that we were going through all of the strategic choices dialogue and the strategic choices dialogue and the strategic choices management review inside the Pentagon as a whole. And so it was ugly with a capital U because we were not just fighting amongst the other services, as well as the

agencies. It started getting tribal inside the army. You've got all of the armor guys coming up with armor stuff and you've got, you know, oh, the intel guys, but we need these capabilities. And so it became a very, very ugly race for who could get the dollars. And the problem set with all of these, I don't want to call them soft capabilities, but all of these non-material capabilities was who's advocating for them when we're in a knife fight over dollars. So my question for that is, is you're defining the struggle as one that the services couldn't figure out exactly how money stacked up against it. And there's some bureaucratic things going on. I wonder, did you have people arguing just against the concept of a human domain,

either because it's not as relevant in great power competition or the arguments against it? You know, I think that's hard. I mean, it's pretty damning in great power competition or, or the arguments against it. You know, I think that's hard. I mean, it's pretty damning to say it was all about the budget battles, all about the, you know, the tribal knife fights.

It was all about, you know, there was a certain intellectual rigor that was trying to put behind this concept. Like a domain means something. It's doctrinal, right? Over-foddy function means something.

It's doctrinal. What, how is this actually going to play out what are the group of systems assets processes things that are going to be different if you have a domain or a war fighting function right so nick you asked what are the second third auto consequences so my mind immediately went to well did you need to have that in order to keep some of those capabilities going that we knew needed to be kept going in human,

because the human centrality of war, and we were not talking about it in terms of connectivity so much, at least not as much of a fine point as Suze put on it in her book. Kim, what was your take? Did we need a human domain? I thought the domain thing was a bit of a stretch because I did. In part because I was not immune to the who was asking for it. Now, I'm a big golf fan, to be honest.

But the fact that any one service or service alike would claim the human domain to me was outrageous. And I was worried about the slippery slope. So what I continued to work on in the Pentagon was regionally aligned forces, was getting the first authorization for conventional forces for a security force assistance, right? These more connectivity and human-centered things that, and didn't want the army to lose sort of that part of, of what we ought to be very focused on in the army. And it wasn't really had nothing. It wasn't even terribly parochial. It was very much mission focused. And it's always interesting to me, the fact that, that when we start talking about this kind of thing, the human domain and the,

the human aspects, you start seeing, you know, partners and allies immediately go, yeah, absolutely. I don't understand why you guys are having trouble with it. Well, why do you think that is? Is that because they have less material resources and so defer to it? Or is it a different view of warfare? I would say it's both. And those are great questions. No, I think it's both.

I think it, again, was logical to James Larmont was the colonel working on it. And he and I published something in Parameters on regionally aligned forces. And he just couldn't really understand why it didn't make it, why everybody couldn't get the concept of it. You may not agree with it, but it was just like a fundamental lack of appreciation that we might want to have forces better able to understand the countries and cultures. And I'm not talking about learning new languages. That's way even, even SOF has a hard time with that, right? Talking about just this usability, this utility to combatant commanders

based on their region, based on understanding basically the human dimension of what is happening specifically in their geographic combatant command. Right. So, I mean, there was a lot of appreciation for it. There's good reasons why it didn't really take off. I don't want to put words in your mouth. If I understand correctly, Kim, it sounds like the idea that this would be exclusive to SOF was not appealing because it's really just part of the land domain or just part of the Army's holistically approach to warfare, whether you're a regionally aligned SFAB or conventional infantry brigade or whatever. It's not exclusive to one branch or semi-service. It's something that applies to everybody and therefore you shouldn't try and make it exclusive. Yeah. And it's not just,

again, for parochial reasons. We watched what happened um you know post 9-11 with with special operating forces right they became very much about direct action when when prior to that had sort of laid claim to security force assistance and other pieces of irregular warfare and then the conventional forces sort of left holding holding the bag they had to learn how to engage with partner military forces. And frankly, we didn't do a great job of it. So we're going to, you know, coming through Iraq, coming through Afghanistan, not knowing how to do this very well, not having an actual authority to do it outside of a named operation. We had to do it anyway inside a named operation. So it was a real problem that wasn't good for the country. It wasn't good

for mission accomplishment, right? So, and there were real advocates for this, like General Rodriguez was the force comm commander and, you know, he's the one who went to the hill with me and made this case, right? And it wasn't because, oh, you know, it wasn't the conventional soft battle, which is there for sure. It was really about this job is going to have to get done and we cannot count on that there's going to be enough special operating forces to do it. Yeah, you know, Kyle, you used a word that I want to pull on because I think it's incredibly important to what it is that we're talking about. It's a holistic view of conflict, you know, and it is the idea that you are across all of the instruments of power when you are trying to figure out how you manage conflict.

And I think every time I get into this discussion, I immediately want to turn around and go, yeah, all of the instruments of power when you are trying to figure out how you manage conflict. And I think every time I get into this discussion, I immediately want to turn around and go, yeah, but it's an even larger problem than that because everybody loves it when you do that, right? You go, well, all right. It becomes, oh God, here she goes. She's an academic. It almost becomes a Klaus Witzian conception of how you look at war versus sort of a non-Western cotilia or Sun Tzu conception of how you look at war. So is war, you know, the military use, is war the use of the military instrument on the battlefield, you know, against another military, or is war the sum of the conflict? You start seeing that the United States has difficulty with that, I think, based upon the way that we've conceptualized war all the way along, as opposed to some of our adversaries right now. And I think this goes straight into why we're

having trouble trying to figure out how to manage, you know, great power competition vis-a-vis Russia or how we manage things vis-a-vis China, because we're trying to box it in a way that is extremely difficult to do, because we're more comfortable with it. And that's the American way of war. Do you think that in the context of great power competition, this concept of the human domain is more important or kind of less important as we go forward? I think it's actually more important. And I probably have a minority opinion on this. But the thing for me is when you look at great power competition and you take a long view of great power competition throughout history, great power competition during the Cold War looked very different from

great power competition in the 19th century. And so from my perspective, the idea of great power competition in the 21st century, for us looking backward to say, well, what worked in 1985? And let's go ahead and figure that out again, it's taking a shortcut that's probably not right. And I think that great power competition is going to be more about flows. I think it's going to be more about connectivity, I think it's going to be more about trade than it's going to be about open conflict. And I think that that we have shortcut ourselves, because and again, it comes back to, you know, Kim, and it's the spectrum of conflict. And it's that messy middle chart. And it's the idea that if you can do high intensity conflict on, you know, Kim, it's the spectrum of conflict and it's that messy middle chart.

And it's the idea that if you can do high intensity conflict on, you know, the upper right-hand side, then everything else is a lesser included task. And I think that we're misconceptualizing it. So Kim, I know you've got a lot to say on that one. So I'll, I'm not going to spike. I'm just going to set for you on that. This idea of mission-tailored forces before, and I'm just picking up on Sue's point about lesser included. If you can do the big one, you can do everything else. In our humble, and I do mean humble opinion, that wasn't necessarily true. There are good reasons to modularize. There are good reasons to do things the way that we do them. Good budget reasons. There's good functional reasons to do them. But the fact of the matter is that once you lay out all that you need for the heaviest OPLAN we have, right? Once you lay that out, there's a lot left. You got to count the reserve

forces too, of course. I'm mostly talking about the army, but really talking about the joint force. There's a lot left. So but we refuse to do that in good measure to protect the active component versus the reserve component. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but there's a whole thing and it plays in this in this debate. But there's a whole thing and it plays in this debate. Right. But so I remember having a big meeting with the chief. You know, we were trying to make the case for mission tailored for part of the army being mission tailored.

Just part. You still have to have the preponderance of the army focused on highest risk, even if it's least likely, conflict. Must. That is a non-negotiable right so setting that aside and you know and i can remember him saying to me well you know what do you think keeps me awake at night what do you think that i worry about and what he said was interesting he said i worry most about losing a whole bunch of soldiers in that first battle because we lost the ability to really fight and i asked them you, you know, I probably shouldn't have publicly and I did lack some measure and I did not have a full understanding of the risk assessment that

our senior leaders have to make from all angles, political, budget, you know, vis-a-vis the other services. I did not have a full appreciation for it. But I remember saying, but what would be worse to lose a whole bunch of soldiers in the first battle or lose 10 times as many and the mission 10 years later, because we did not have the right capabilities seated in the force. And his answer was interesting too. He said, well, I'm going to mitigate that through leader development. I believe our young leaders can learn to do anything across that full spectrum of conflict. Right. And I fundamentally don't agree. I just don't agree. Yeah. That's interesting. That's a discussion that we have a lot is if you train an infantry brigade to do the hardest mission, which presumably would be some kind of, you know, large scale combat operation.

Can they adapt to counterinsurgency or can they adapt to security force assistance? It's interesting to hear you say that, that you're not certain. What's our evidence that we could? Do we have any evidence? I can remember at the height of the upsurge and downsurge in Afghanistan. that you're not starting that. What's our evidence that we could? Do we have any evidence? I can remember at the height of the upstirge and downstirge in Afghanistan, and we do battlefield circle all the time, unit to unit. And what you see is, you know, we were supposed to be, you know, Shona by Shona,

shoulder to shoulder with our Afghan partners, right? But what we would see is units grabbing an Afghan on their way out the door to go schwack some, you know, Haqqani. That's what you would see. You did not see Shana by Shona. We did not. We were not able to adjust our mindset. And there's there's probably some good reason for that. I am not sure we want to dilute that in a good chunk of our force.

I'm not sure. Right. So do you still need the human domain in um in in great power competition and major power competition yeah but it seems right what does that look like now we there's six empirical studies saying that war isn't gonna you know that war isn't gonna look like it is meaning that states like china maybe russia is an exception the states like china are not necessarily after territorial acquisition anymore. It's not like World War Two where it's going to be land grab after land grab. Nobody wants the insurgencies. What they want is influence and they want strategic resources. Two of the big ones. Right. Influence Iran influence. Iran is indeed a status quo geographic power.

But they want influence all over the Middle East, right? What does it take to fight that fight? Right? Sue's right. It's the human stuff. Yeah, I was waiting for us to see how far we went before we got to the warfighting function and the word influence coming out because the idea of a warfighting function and the idea of a war fighting function and the idea of engagement and influence was also a massive part of how this whole human domain argument played out in the halls of the Pentagon. And it was interesting because as we were starting to go, well, what do you really mean? What does that really mean? What is the capability that we need? How do we need to fight this? And I remember that my immediate brainstem snap was to the idea of influence.

Okay. But then you have to go back to titles and authorities because everything is about titles and authorities and influence operations make people who are in title 10 very, very nervous because all of a sudden now you're starting to pull more into things which are political warfare, or you're starting to pull more into things which are soft-like or governed by different titles, such as Title 50, intelligence. And so the problem sets that you've got when you start taking your interlocking Venn diagrams and saying, okay, what is it that I'm really trying to do here? Have you just usurped what is covert or clandestine in the way that you're talking about things? And this is the other difficulty that you've got. So when I start going, well, this is about all of the different instruments

across everything. And oh, by the way, let's just make a great big pot of spaghetti, stir it up and say, okay, so who's in? You have some really significant issues in terms of your ability to operate. Kim, you're smiling at me because I think you've touched this as well, because I think you were trying to unroll the authorities issues associated with this. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Possibly this whole conversation about human domain and other war fighting functions. The Marines do have a new one. They do have a seventh. It's information. Right. The I think has adapted to gray zone that the mess that Sue's talking about. It demands all the different kinds of authorities. It demands different agencies that aren't used to necessarily playing

in conflict scenarios. Actually, it's one of the things I wanted to dig into a little bit is your experience at the State Department working as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in conflict stabilization operations. How did the State Department see that messy middle chart that Sue mentioned, which I understand as conflict in the gray zone? Yeah. And again, it's the same problem Sue was talking about is what exactly do you do differently? We need to call this thing something. Do we need to, you know, what is it that when we look at the future of war and what we're actually likely to face, what do we need to do?

Is it also how do you measure success? Like how do you quantify success in this in this field? Yeah. I mean, but we didn't frankly, we didn't even get there. You know, it was it was, you know, I mean, you are looking at outcomes. What do you want to achieve with the country team. We tried to get everyone on an information sharing platform to connect with each other, to talk all the time and move actions more as a response to real-time information. It was really ambitious and high in the sky. As far as I know, it still exists, but that was out of me when I was a DAS. General Votel was super supportive of working with other partners to actually try to try to think about how to, in this case, wage the terrorism fight a little differently. That was not necessarily gray zone. Right. Now, that was kind of almost old thing, but that's all we can come up with, frankly. Now, having said that, it was USASOC who came.

frankly. Now, having said that, it was USASOC who came. So, okay, backing up a bit, I got my assistant started to talk to Undersecretary Shannon, who was political affairs, to say, please, we need state to be involved in this, in this whole development of the gray zone concept. We really have to. DOD cannot run away with this and look for more authorities and different appropriations. We cannot. We've got to have state with us. And Undersecretary Shannon bought it. we cannot we have got to have state with us and undersecretary chan and bought it and uses that came with a whole bunch of people and very very dense powerpoint and my state department colleagues they were just lost i found myself as not a career foreign service officer the only one in the room responding to the slides because they were familiar to me right and in the break i went up and i talked to undersecretary chan and i said come've got to have more engagement here. I know there's

something we can provide. And he basically said, you know, the conversation is much too in the in the tactical, in the now. What we really need to be thinking about is leaping ahead, leaping over everything that they're describing right now to what exactly do we want the U.S. role in the world to be vis-a-vis major powers? And I was like, well, yes, that's true too. It was really interesting. But having said that, he came away with that and he tried to adapt the Global Engagement Center. He zoomed in on, this is more to your question, Nick, he zoomed in on communication, strategic communication, and adapting the capability they had for CT to the broader Ukraine kind of conflicts, right? The little green men, Russia, creating facts on the ground

without us being able to do anything about it. And he said, what state can do is we can figure out how to do better public diplomacy and other kinds of communication. So they did take it seriously. They have adapted. And they are sort of happy to go back to what they do best, which is bilateral relationship building. They always saw Syria through the lens of this is really about Russia. This is really about Iran. Right. Yemen. Really about Iran. It's not about Yemen. We don't really care about Yemen. You know, so the State Department is actually, I think, fairly well equipped to contribute when we're talking about gray zone and other major powers meddling about. No, but Kim, there's one thing I want to put in here that you brought out that I think is really important. And, you know, I started out with, oh, it's a knife fight. It's about, you know, resources. And I think inside the Pentagon, that's largely true. But what I have noted, probably over the, yeah, probably at least 15 years now, is this idea from the DOD going, hey, but how can we get other agencies involved in this? How can we bring the tent wider? How can we do more with this? So it's been very interesting

to me to note this consistent theme inside the DOD that like, hey, we don't want, this is not military. And as a result of that, sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn't, simply because we happen to be the ones who can get there at the time. But I really wanted to bring that up because I think it's an important aside with regard to the bureaucratic fights. Well, that's really interesting because a lot of people seem to argue that the DOD has so many resources that they essentially crowd out all the other agencies. But you're saying that from within the DOD, you saw a lot of efforts to outreach that for some reason were falling short, essentially. Basically saying the human domain should reside with the State Department. Pieces of it. Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing,

because Kim's talking about information. Well, okay, D-I-M-E. Well, we used to have the U.S. Information Agency. Well, where's that now? You know, I mean, these are things that existed, you know, during the Cold War that we were spun up on that, you know, post-Cold War we let go of. And more and more of the mission sets accreted, I would say, almost by default to the DOD, because we have so many people and the DOD has so much of a budget. And at the same time, I think that I've seen, you know, multiple examples of senior leaders inside the United States Army going, yeah, but this isn't what we're good at. Isn't there someone else that we can help actually do this? And I've seen it happen on multiple occasions. But very often, you need it really

fast, you need it really bad, and you need a lot of money associated with it. And as a result, it defaults more to DOD as opposed to DOD trying to aggregate power. It's not a matter of whether the human domain belongs to the State Department or the human domain belongs to the Department of Defense necessarily. It belongs to all of us. we're saying is that we have to equip the Department of Defense in whatever service, in whatever way, to be able to deal with this dimension of conflict and competition, to be able to participate with others, to understand what others bring, to be able to draw on it, to be able to enable them, right? So it's not so much that who gets to be the one who gets to have the authority

necessarily. It's more about how, in fact, do you build, how are we equipping our officers and our soldiers and to work in cross-functional teams, cross-sectoral teams. Yes. Right. That's really the issue today. There isn't any one agency that can bring everything to bear anymore. It's just so clear. It's so clear. It's been written about ad nauseum. It's been studied ad nauseum. I don't think we've gotten much better. And in fact, because we haven't gotten better, DOD has accreted all this power. And while we are inviting of others, I agree with Sue on that. We are also, I'm not sure how sincere we are in it, frankly. Yeah, but it's been studied ad nauseum. But if you look at, if you go back a hundred years to the British trying to manage conflicts abroad,

the biggest complaint is interagency cooperation and stuff. So we studied it ad nauseum, but maybe they're, what is the solution really? That's like the classic government challenge. It really is. So we've talked about two things in broad terms, the first being what is the human domain in warfare and why is it important? And then secondly, how does this all play out when you try to change the way that people think about these terms at the strategic level?

So I think the broader question right now is what are the implications from your experiences and your research moving forward for policymakers and practitioners? So in the Congress, I think the Congress could pay more attention to the State Department for now. We haven't had a State Department authorization bill in 20 years. Not quite. It's 18 years, I think it is. That means we've had no vigorous debate over what our foreign policy priorities should be. Now, if the military is to be used in pursuit of a political aim, we ought to know what our foreign policy priorities are. So they owe that, in my mind, to the American taxpayer, to the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, to basically to everybody.

Once we have that right-sided just a bit, in fact, once you start debating foreign policy priorities, you might get a little bit more attention paid to the Department of State because they obviously have no constituency and the Department of Defense budget must be much, much bigger than states. We have a whole, you know, we got a lot of equipment. We got a lot of people. I mean, there's just no question. I don't like any, you know, when people say, well, it's so much bigger. Yeah. So what it has to be, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about influence. We're talking about people paying attention, right, to those things, those conflicts in the gray zone and the capabilities that we really need to develop for the future. So that's one thing. We've got to have the Congress do a better job, and the Department of Defense has to start talking about that.

So it is simply not enough for Secretary Mattis to say that, you know, if you underfund the state department, you're going to have to buy me more ammunition. Well, frankly, I'm starting to find this statement by sec devs and retired four stars and retired sec devs a little bit disingenuous because what in fact did you do about it when you had this chair when you had the real microphone right how did you enable state how did you enable others how did you change professional military education so for me other instruments of power in such a whole that the department of defense has to be a stronger advocate and that is not natural for any human who is responsible for an organization to say,

I'm not just going to take care of my organization. I'm going to look up and out. And that is a super hard thing to do. So those are not specific recommendations. Maybe it's almost just more diagnosis of the problem, but that might be the best I can do. Kim, I'm going to go in a different direction, because I think your answer was great. And I would not have come up with it. But you know, what is it that I'm looking for from Congress? What is it I'm looking for from policymakers right now? We have spent what three DOD budgets in the last six months on COVID bailout. Okay, we have, you know, and that is a ton of money. And we're getting ready to do another stimulus. And we're probably going to end up having spent four years worth of DOD budgets.

So when you start looking at what this means for our deficits, and what this means for our debt, in terms of the United States of America, we haven't been in worse shape in terms of how much, you know, debt we're carrying and what our deficits look like since World War II. But when you go to Congress, and in fact, I've actually had the privilege of asking several Congress people in the last couple of weeks, hey, what do you see it? They're like, well, the DOD is saying the next year's budget is going to be flat. Excuse me, there is nowhere to take money from, except from discretionary spending. And, you know, discretionary spending, the lion's share of that discretionary spending is the Department of Defense budget. It dwarfs absolutely everything else. For me, I think that

the thing we need to get real about, and I think the human domain and how we start looking at partners and allies and how we start looking at how we're defining our future operating concepts, needs to be viewed through the lens of the fact that we have a financial crisis coming in a big way in terms of what it is that we're capable of spending. Now, our DOD budget's massive, and it's really hard to cry poverty at three quarters of a trillion dollars a year. But at the same time, it's not enough to fund everything that we want. And people would say, it's not what we want, it's what we need. Well, I think we need to understand that we can't do everything that we feel we need to. And how do we start really prioritizing? And I think that that goes into the conversation that Kim just had with you, which is what are our foreign policy priorities and how is it that we want to attack them? Attack being probably not the best word. How is it that we want to manage them? And that for me would be something that I think would be incredibly illuminating if we had that conversation.

So that's interesting. You're saying that the focus on the human domain is essentially an economically sound approach to projecting American power in the 21st century. time when we have such a huge say-do gap between, oh, we're going to do this, but at the same time, what is it we're doing? Well, we're pulling troops out of here, and we're pulling troops out of there, and we're defunding this. How do we get our strategic priorities stated and do what it is that we're saying that we're going to do? And I think that we have to get that straight, and that is a very large policy issue. So it's not all about resources, and the conversation always goes to that. And yes, budget equals policy, and follow the money. And that's all true for sure. But really, it's just having letting other people have a bigger voice at the table. And DOD enabling that, like just deliberately saying, what do you think, Mr. Ambassador? What would you do?

You know, just little things like that. It's little things like National Security Council meetings. I'm talking DCs, PCs. You know, how they run is that you start with an intel brief. Japanese committees and principal committees? Yeah, you start with an intel brief, and then you pretty much jump right into what are we going to do about it? And because of the political and news cycles, what are we going to do about it is almost always short term.

Who does short term stuff other than talking? It's defense. It's USAID a little bit, but their money is programmed out as well. So it's kind of changing. It's, I think it's having DOD play a role in recognizing the limits of what we can actually accomplish, the outcomes we will actually achieve. Chairman Dempsey always used to say, it's not my job to tell the president what we should do. It's only what we could do. And he was so right. But also in, is maybe what we cannot do, no matter how hard you want us to. And Chairman Epstein was great about doing that, too. But our can do attitude sometimes gets in the way, frankly.

And when we're talking about influencing humans, the State Department really understands the limits of that. They understand the limits of when interests do not align, there's only so much you can do. And so this is, I think, this human thing we're talking about is influence. That's the outcome you want. You want to be able to influence. We influence a certain way with a certain set of tools and others influence with others.

This has been fantastic. And I think it's a good place to stop the conversation. I want to thank both of you for coming on the Irregular Warfare podcast. I hope it's been moderately useful and I hope you've been slightly amused. Very entertaining. Kyle and Nick, I certainly appreciate you having us on. It was fun. Thanks for listening to episode 10 of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode, Dr. Joe Felter of Stanford University and Colonel Dennis Aclarin from the Philippines Army Scout Rangers will join Shana and Nick to discuss the characteristics of an effective indigenous partner force based on their experiences fighting insurgents in the Philippines. After that, Nick and I will speak with Dr. Melissa Lee of Princeton University and Lieutenant General Retired Ken Tovo about subversion and the effectiveness of unconventional warfare as a national security tool. Please be sure to subscribe to the Regular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. tool. Please be sure to subscribe to the Regular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. You can also follow and engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and don't represent those of West Point or any other agency of the U.S. government.

Thanks again, and we'll see you next time.