Irregular Warfare Podcast - The Terrorist’s Dilemma: How Nonstate Actors Manage Covert Organizations

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative's new website, www.irregularwarfare.org, to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! It’s been described as the “terrorist’s dilemma”—the trade-offs between maintaining security and exercising command and control that terrorist organizations must make. But how can counterterrorism campaigns be designed to exploit that dilemma? What do government agencies and organizations charged with countering terrorist threats need to know about those pressures? And how should an understanding of the dilemma inform the development of counterterrorism policy? To explore those questions, hosts Jeff Phaneuf and Adam Darnley-Stuart are joined by two guests with deep expertise on the subject. Dr. Jake Shapiro directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and is the author of the book that forms the basis of this discussion, The Terrorist’s Dilemma: Managing Violent Covert Organizations. And retired Colonel Chris Costa is currently the executive director of the International Spy Museum and has decades of experience running and participating in intelligence and special operations around the world. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Well, first of all, I bristle when I hear characterizations of a low threat, the war is over, let's declare victory. All of these things I began to see, believe it or not, in the early days of the Trump administration, when we came in to the administration, understanding that terrorism was a big part, counterterrorism, of the president's platform, you know, to be strong on counterterrorism issues. And frankly, the previous administration was as well. What I think is incumbent upon governments to do is to look hard at the organizations they face,

how capable they are, how widespread the support for them is, and then think hard about what the things they have to trade off against are. And at that point, once you've done that, if you understand that for organizations to grow and coordinate, they're going to kick off more signal, you can start to calibrate your level of investment in engaging with communities. Welcome to episode 76 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Phaneuf, and my co-host today is Adam Darnley-Stewart. Today's episode explores the dilemma faced by terrorist groups as they struggle to maintain

the balance between operational security and operational effectiveness. Our guests begin by discussing the dilemma that terrorist organizations face between maintaining security and exercising command and control. They then discuss examples of effective counter-terrorist campaigns, what characterizes them, and how best to learn from successful efforts. Our guests conclude with policy implications which draw from a great understanding of the organizational pressures on terrorist groups. Dr. Jake Shapiro is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, where he directs the Empirical Studies of Conflict project. His research covers conflict, misinformation, economic development, and

security policy. He's conducted field research and large-scale policy evaluations in Afghanistan, Colombia, India, and Pakistan. He is the author of The Terrorist Dilemma, Managing Violent Covert Organizations, which forms the basis of this conversation. Colonel Chris Costa is the Executive Director of the International Spy Museum and a 34-year veteran of the Department of Defense. He served for 25 years in the United States Army, working in counterintelligence, human intelligence, and with special operations forces in Central America, Europe, and throughout the Middle East.

Notably, he has received two Bronze Stars for sensitive human intelligence work. Colonel Kostar was inducted into the United States Special Operations Commander Hall of Honor for lifetime service to U.S. special operations, and recently served as a Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of

irregular warfare professionals. Here is our conversation with Chris Costa and Jake Shapiro. Chris, Jake, welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks, Jeff. It's an honor to be here with everyone today. Jake, we'll start with you. What is the terrorist dilemma and why is it important to understand? So the terrorist dilemma is pretty straightforward, which is anytime you want to organize a bunch of humans to do a hard task, you need a bunch of coordination to make sure that people are connected. They're synced up on what the mission is. They're spending money in the ways that you want. And all of the things you do to ensure that coordination and that oversight, they create risks if you're in a counterterror environment, whereas the terrorist, you rely on secrecy to remain secure. You're not excluding government forces from your territory. You're operating where they can also operate. And so

if you're putting out the signals that you need to manage an organization, you're creating risk for yourself. And so the dilemma is that the harder you push on managing the organization, the more risk you create. And so there's always a tension between making sure that the harder you push on managing the organization, the more risk you create. And so there's always a tension between making sure that the team does what they're expected to do, and they spend the money as they're expected to spend it, and remaining secure and covert and safe from people who are trying to come after you. Thanks, Mike. Could you briefly unpack the four main dilemmas you go through? Just a brief snippet on each one. So the first dilemma is really between being secure and controlling the organization. For a number of reasons, the operatives the terrorists hire, they're action-oriented people. They're

there because for the most part, they believe deeply in a cause or they're there because they're being paid. They believe deeply in a cause. They tend to want to do a lot of things for that cause. And sometimes and often throughout history, that is counterproductive because they believe that the right amount of violence is more than it actually is. And they tend to do too much. And if they're there for monetary reasons, then they're often hitting the wrong targets and they don't have a sense of what will really advance the ideology. And so again, you need to make sure they're going after the right targets.

But the things that you can do to get them to go after the right targets, like reaching out and being very prescriptive about their day-to-day activities, that creates a bunch of links which government forces can take advantage of. Chris, you have an extensive career in counterterrorism. How do you define and think about terrorism in this context? and think about terrorism in this context? I actually agreed with much of what Jake wrote about. All of that said, just because we know that there are dilemmas associated with terrorists doesn't mean it's easy to counteract those dilemmas, right? Just because you know that some kind of condition is prevalent doesn't mean you're going to be successful. You've got to experiment. In essence, you have to lead in the policy sphere as well as the operational. The challenge of leadership from the counterterrorist perspective can sometimes be taking the long view so that you

allow organizations or at least their leadership to exert some control. One of the great successes, I think, in counterterror policy was the British effort against the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the 1980s and early 1990s. And one aspect of that is you had a couple of leaders who, around 1987, in Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, by all evidence that we can find, took a decision that they wanted to bring the group in from the cold, and they wanted to participate in the regular political process. But they couldn't do that right away because most of the group didn't want to. And the UK government at the time, we now know, had people deep inside their counterintelligence apparatus and could have acted against them at multiple points in time.

But they didn't. And we don't know why for sure. But what that enabled is enabled Martin and McGinnis to gradually walk the group in, rein the violent people back, and set up so that in 1984, they could run a political process inside the group that got them to come in from the cold. Now, that kind of foresight and vision on the part of the policy leaders combating terrorist groups, that's a real challenge because at every point, you're facing a group that, for all the political reasons, you want to go after as hard as you possibly can. It's not always the right choice. From a counterinsurgency perspective, the Brits themselves rolled in thinking that they could take their transferable experience from maybe what they've read about in Kenya or what they did in Malaya or what they saw in Yemen. And what they realized is over time, they needed to change quite dramatically. And so, again, leadership was factored in. The way the Brits handled intelligence was an adaptation, really, to the battlefield they

were dealing with. And at the same time, the Brits, I mean, right up front, Jake, before I jumped into your book, I started thinking about the changes made by the IRA in terms of how they organized. They started off as an army, right? Hierarchical. That's how they started. And then they learned over time that that wasn't going to work. So all those adaptations took place as a result of leadership at some level. So really, you can't talk about policy, you can't talk about terrorism operations or counterterrorism operations without factoring in leadership factors in organizational design. How do you square the idea that terrorist organizations are a complex system with multiple dilemmas against the general characterization that terrorist groups are mundane and now

perceived to be a relatively low threat? Well, first of all, I bristle when I hear characterizations of a low threat. The war is over. Let's declare victory. All of these things I began to see, believe it or not, in the early days of the Trump administration when we came in to the administration, understanding that terrorism was a big part, counterterrorism, of the president's platform, you know, to be strong on counterterrorism issues. And frankly, the previous administration was as

well. We could argue about that all day long, but fundamentally, counterterrorism professionals are counterterrorism professionals. You look at the threat and you assess that threat, and then you figure out what's the best policy prescription. All of that said, when you think about the early days of the administration, there is a dizzying array of attacks. There was a pervasive threat to commercial aviation. There were things that were a high threat in terms of possibility of downing aircraft. a high threat in terms of possibility of downing aircraft. All of that said, some people,

flash forward five plus years later, want to suggest that that war is behind us now. It's not behind us. We're not necessarily focused on it. And it could revert its ugly head any day, virtually, in terms of a specific threat stream directed here at the United States, which might be considered significant. So there still is a terrorism threat from terrorists. And at the same time, we have to balance that out with other priorities. One of the things I think Chris highlights there is that understanding how these groups are organized and what their vulnerabilities are and their constraints and their potential is really helpful for thinking about how to right-size this threat among the set of things that we need to worry about. You know, when we think about the worst terrorist attacks in history, most of them were conducted by larger groups of

individuals working together and had some signal that was picked up by the intelligence organizations or military organizations in the countries where they happened. Those signals weren't always picked up on. For example, in the 7-7 attacks in Madrid, one of the main participants was actually an informant for the Spanish counter-narcotics police. So that was in principle a knowable thing, but the level of attention wasn't quite high enough. It was a large group that conducted the attack. And so when we think about this, we need that sustained right sized attention so that we pick up when you have large enough groups to do serious damage getting together. We're never going to be able to stop every random event by some individual acting on

their lonesome. But if we have enough sustained attention that we can pick up the larger groups, we're going to keep those high consequence, hundreds of people getting killed kind of events from happening. And that's really, I think, a very reasonable and tractable goal for our counterterror policy. Yeah, I think Jake's exactly right. It has to be scaled to the specific threats that we're dealing with, and it has to be balanced with other security concerns. And I think CT needed to be balanced and rebalanced and constantly assessed and sized appropriately. But you can't throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, right? And you can't overcorrect. You can't shift to another threat. We can do two things at once. And that was one of my constant themes as I left the

administration. We can do great power competition. And at the same time, we can do counterterrorism. We're seeing that on the ground in Syria with a sustained presence there, a small presence, but we see that we can do CT. We have the logistics in place, the intelligence in place. We have our partners in place. And at the same time, we're doing great power competition by virtue of being in that space to counter a maligned Iran, countering a maligned Russia. Jake, your book argues that the more we can see terrorist groups for what they are, ordinary organizations operating at a tremendous disadvantage, the easier it is to consign them to their proper place in the range of threats to society. Can we drill down on what is this proper place and why does that consignment matter? The proper place is going to vary depending on context and depending on the pre-existing

capacity you have when you hit the point where you're making the choice. So what that proper place was, I don't know, say for the Iraqi government in 2011 and 12, is very different than what it might be for a government, say in Belgium, that's thinking about a relatively small extremist movement that's concentrated in a few neighborhoods of a few towns. Those are just radically different challenges from the perspective of law enforcement, intelligence, and government. different challenges from the perspective of law enforcement, intelligence, and government. So setting that aside, what I think is incumbent upon governments to do is to look hard at the organizations they face, how capable they are, how widespread the support for them is, and then think hard about what the things they have to trade off against are. And at that point, once you've done that, if you understand that for organizations to grow and coordinate, they're going to kick off more signal, you can start to calibrate your level of investment in engaging with communities.

from looking at them and saying, you know what? They are not making our lives better. They are not advancing our cause. And we should begin sharing some information on what they're doing with the authorities, because much as we don't like the authorities, we like what these folks are bringing on our community even less. Chris, you've written about the Sapov case as an example of the continued need for concern about lone wolf attacks. What can you tell us about the case? So first of all, just a little context. That October of 2017, the first week of October, there was a lone gunman in Las Vegas, right? An indeterminate motivation behind why someone would become a sniper in Las Vegas. The wheels of the CT community moved out smartly looking for a nexus overseas and joint terrorism task forces across the country really were trying to assess are there any ties to that shooter and cells here and, you know, respective cities somewhere

in the country that has a JTTF or not. It doesn't matter. Everyone was full bore trying to identify the motivation, looking for a nexus overseas, and it wasn't there. It still has not been found. It's indeterminate, as I said. Then flash forward till October 31st, 2017, Halloween. An individual that won the lottery to come to the United States was dissatisfied with his job. He was radicalized, much like many who are radicalized in this particular case. If I'm not mistaken, I don't want to misspeak, but it was more than likely he was listening to al-Awlaki, like many of the jihadists that I subsequently talked to, you know, were fond of doing, right? His message resonated. There was an anger there. There was disenfranchisement.

There was isolation, even though Sapoff had a family. And at the end of the day, he decided what he was going to do is rent a truck and drive on a bicycle path and kill innocents. And preferably, in his mind, he was going to kill moms on the bicycle path with their kids, getting ready to go trick-or-treating. As it turned out, he killed eight innocent individuals. You know, these kinds of attacks have been with us for more than 100 years now. We go back to the late 1880s, 1890s, early 1900s. We had anarchist terrorists who were avowedly not organized, conducting small-scale attacks, mostly then targeting political figures,

but conducting those attacks all around the world. You move forward into the 1970s, you had, as Chris mentioned, a wave of leaderless resistance attacks around the United States. There are some things that are different now in terms of the ready availability, or at least ready compared to historically of military-grade weaponry around our society. And so the number of casualties that an individual can expect to cause in a lone wolf attack is greater than perhaps it once was, as we tragically saw in Las Vegas. But the existence of the lone wolves is a function of society in which there are intense disagreements, and sometimes you get a bad draw and someone goes off the deep end and it's tragic and as Chris said very very hard to prevent. Chance one perspective is that terrorists by

their nature have limited existential threat to an entire society at large but succeed by striking fear into the individuals that make up that society so can they be in fact successful even if they cannot pose an existential threat to entire societies? If we define success as achieving the political changes that they espouse as their motivation in the first place, then the history of terrorist groups is just terrible. They almost never get significant concessions in the direction that they want in societies around the world. And this has been documented again and again by people looking at the broad swath of history and just asking a simple question of, like, how often do they get what's in the manifesto? Now, we have to temper that by saying and recognizing that political movements don't

go to terrorism unless it's a long shot. By the time you get to the point of deciding, hey, you know how we're going to advance our political goals? We're going to kill innocents to strike fear into others. You are way into long shot territory. And so when we ask, you know, do they succeed or not? It's not quite clear what the right baseline is. It's certainly not 50 percent of the time.

But whether it's, you know, 20 percent or 2 percent and any deviation from that is terrorism working is really hard to know. from that is terrorism working is really hard to know. Yeah. And then just to add on through the lens of, again, counterinsurgents or counterterrorism professionals, you have to also look at how does society change? How do law enforcement react? Or in the case of many societies, how do the intelligence officers, how do law enforcement overreact? And of course, probably too broad of a statement to say every terrorist group, but there is an overriding principle that suggests that terrorists want an overreaction from the state, right?

And many times the states oblige. So truly, counterterrorism has to be balanced in such a way that we don't overreact. When I reflect back on the 20th anniversary of 9-11, which we just saw not too long ago, right, many of the essays talked about how, as a nation, we changed, how we overreacted. I'll let others decide and assess whether that's the case. We didn't have an attack on the scale of 9-11, but we made some mistakes along the way, some overreactions. I mean, right now there's a debate about authorities for collection that this nation, the United States, and Congress will be debating. So do we want to take back some of the authorities that were given to the intelligence community? I would argue, no, we don't want to do that as long as there's proper oversight. There's a whole

other debate that Congress hasn't done the proper oversight. And again, we could set that aside, or we can re-engage on that. But the bottom line is states change in their counterterrorism fight or their counterinsurgency fight? There is a fantastic journal article by Andy Kidd and Barb Walter. And what they did is they basically said, look, terrorism is a strategy that works for a number of reasons if you're trying to resolve some uncertainty in a target population. And sometimes that uncertainty is in your own people about whether or not they can trust the state. And if that's the uncertainty that you're using terrorism to resolve, what you want to do is provoke overreaction by the security services.

There are other situations, though, where the uncertainty might be about the staying power of the insurgent or the terrorist group and how hard they're going to fight, in which case provoking overreaction is not their goal. in which case provoking overreaction is not their goal. And it is often, I think, too easy to say, look, you know, terrorists are just trying to pressure the state. That's not the case. And the risk of overreaction depends and is kind of conditioned on what are they actually going after? Like, what are they trying to teach people through the violence? And it's not always that they should be feared. It might sometimes be that the government should be feared. In those situations, the kind of restraint that Chris talked about and avoiding those changes in society, which will prove the terrorist point, is a critical part of the reaction. And here again, the bottom line is, and Jake makes this point in his book, AQI, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right? And Zarqawi specifically pushed the envelope on indiscriminate

violence, trying to bring Iraq to the verge of civil war. Arguably, there was a low-level civil war. Certainly, it went beyond being incipient at a very basic level. It was significant. It was violent. And eventually, it became self-defeating. And I think that one of the lessons learned was the tension among the leaders. Again, Zarqawi didn't take direction. He didn't act like a good franchisee, if you will. He wasn't interested in taking direction from al-Qaeda central. So we see this time and time again. But Zarqawi is a great example of somebody that took violence to the point where it became self-defeating. That is another dynamic that Jake gets at in his book. It is something that policymakers and practitioners

have to be aware of and can take advantage of. Chris, one of the most fascinating things we observe, which really proves your point, is even within al-Qaeda in Iraq, you had this problem. We managed to get, over the years, a number of documents declassified from inside the group at the time the awakening was kicking off in Anbar province. And there's this amazing exchange in late 2005, early 2006, in which Zarqawi and a couple of the people in the central leadership group are berating the cell in Ramadi for going after people in ways that were culturally insensitive and therefore creating a reaction against the group. And the response to this is to call them into a meeting, which, of course, with what our forces were doing at the time and how they were operating was a massive risk for the organization. But they couldn't think of anything other than you guys down in Ramadi are screwing up so badly. We have to pull you in to give you a talking to just between AQI and Al-Qaeda, even within this radical, one of the most violent groups we've ever seen, a vile bunch of human beings.

radical, one of the most violent groups we've ever seen, a vile bunch of human beings, they were still arguing over where the line was and trying to rein the people at the point of the spear in from crossing it. And of course, as a counterterrorism person, people getting together, bad people on the battlefield, is a very good thing for putting pressure on our adversaries, which is another way of saying strikes, which is CT pressure, of course, is a euphemism for taking bad actors off the battlefield. There's no better way of saying it other than killing terrorists. And that happened to a high degree by counter terrorists on the ground and from the air in Iraq in particular. How does a state's use of terrorism tactics differ from that of non-state entities? One of the really tragic facts of history is that the way states have oftentimes

exerted control is exactly through things that would meet our definition of terrorism. They impose such costs on a population and do such vile things that the population acquiesces and doesn't fight back and doesn't resist. And this is a strategy that is as old as time. It tends not to last very long, but it is a fact of human history. One of the kind of amazing things social scientists have learned over the years is that this strategy of control can tend to leave echoes that last for hundreds of years. Some of the fault lines between countries in Europe, for example, in the period when European states were consolidating, they remain cultural and economic fault lines today, despite all those countries, all of the constituent parts being integrated into common polities for hundreds of years.

So state terror is a tactic that has worked historically, but it leaves scars and those reemerge periodically, particularly when political entrepreneurs find an opportunity to do so, as we saw throughout the former Soviet Union after that country fell apart. Yeah, and I just make the point that the United States is a nation of values and principles and ideals, and we have laws of armed conflict. The bottom line is we have to adhere to those laws and requirements, and otherwise it will come back and bite you. So when we started talking about direct action in the Trump administration, we factored into that discussion. A lot of effort was spent on how do we do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and our principles.

And since our policy was classified at the highest level, you know, I got beat up on occasion by people outside the government. Individuals, even after I left the government, would bait me to talk about that policy. And of course, I didn't talk about that policy. But when it was finally released, people were remarkably impressed that, you know, we built in this idea of, you know, ensuring that we did things appropriate to not just the law, but just what made good sense on the battlefield. All of that is to say that counterinsurgents are in a unique position of really establishing everything from checkpoints to controlling the population or population measures. And at the end of the day, what they need to do is ensure that they are not alienating the very population that they're there to protect.

Cyprus is a great example. Heavy-handedness by the Brits drove the Cypriots right into the hands of the insurgents under Colonel Grievous. So again, it's a timeless lesson. You know, not to plug a second book here, but in the follow-on to this book with my colleagues, Alec Berman and Joe Felter, one of the people we talked to is Vic Korpis, who kind of remarkable individual in the Philippines, who actually fought on both sides in their civil war at different points in time. And one of the things Vic talks about is the importance of when you are out on operations as either a government soldier or as an insurgent, taking attention to not cause harm to the civilians, the people caught in the middle,

because they can take small actions that help one side or the other. So there's this kind of perennial tension. Now, I don't want to look at this with rosy colored glasses. Like there are absolutely countries in history which have subdued populations through mass movements, through displacing people, through killing huge shares of the populations. Do you conceive of terrorists as purely rational actors, or are there elements of irrationality that go into their decision-making as you consider how to perceive and properly then deal with terrorist groups?

So I've contemplated that on more than one occasion, right? At the end of the day, it seems to me that terrorists are, in general, rational actors. They apply a certain calculus to their acts. That doesn't mean that some terrorists don't have psychosis and don't have personality disorders. psychosis and don't have personality disorders, but on the whole, they are rational actors trying to achieve an objective of using political violence to achieve some kind of end state, some kind of political end states. Remember, it's going to be political or it's going to be a religious objective, or in many cases, it's going to be chasing away the foreigner that has violated the space of the local population. So all of these things suggest that there is a calculus

that's built in to decision-making that's, on the whole, extremely rational. But again, I have to stress that doesn't mean that individual actors don't have a psychosis or don't have some kind of need for violence and excitement. And I think on the whole, we also know that a lot of terrorists do long for action and excitement and for some kind of change in their circumstance, their normal state of living. Couldn't agree more with Chris here. And something I emphasize with my students all the time is, look, these are terribly misguided human beings, and they have all the foibles and challenges that humans do. And so while they tend to be somewhat rational about how they match means to ends, they will have crazy, insane theories about political change. They will be poorly informed about how the target population is likely to respond to their acts.

They distrust each other and get in fights over silly things, just like normal people do. And so what we do to manage all of those things in regular life is we put people inside organizations that help them work together collectively more efficiently than they would if they were subject just to their individual peculiarities at all moments. And in so doing, these groups create vulnerabilities for themselves. And, you know, having empathy for them is not to excuse their actions in any way. I think it's a tool for better understanding what goes on and how we can more effectively reduce their activities and prevent them from getting things done. I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the radicalization process. There's all kinds of different models, Macaulay models in academic that's done a lot of work on radicalization. There's NYPD has a radicalization model. So let's step back for a second. Now we're talking, in many cases, we're talking about young males.

They come together with like-minded other young males. And at the end of the day, they came together. They listened over and over and over again to the same messages, and they fed off of each other. So they started off rational with some kind of anger or angst, So they started off rational with some kind of anger or angst, and they were looking for some kind of outlet for their anger, for their grievances, but they came together. One of the most fascinating things I learned about in writing the book was the similarity between how some of the early Russian Marxist terrorist organizations saw this process that Chris described to us and how some of the groups operating in Iraq against the Iraqi government in the U.S. saw it. And what you see in both groups is they describe a process by which people are recruited, they're radicalized, and then because of the exigencies of fighting and surviving as terrorists, they tend to then isolate themselves

from society. And they rile each other up more and more and start to develop really crazy ideas about what people on the outside will think about their actions. And then theyile each other up more and more and start to develop really crazy ideas about what people on the outside will think about their actions. And then they go off and do things that the leadership look at and are like, what the hell were you thinking? Of course, people were going to respond against that. But that radicalization process gets you in, but then it can take small groups of people, especially when they're trying to be very covert and secretive, into places that even their own political leaders, even the people who said from the start, we're going to achieve the political goal by killing innocents, even they look at and are like, that's wrong. We can't have you doing that. Last month, the commander of the US 160th Special

Operations Aviation Regiment asserted, even though we think that the war on terror may be over, violent extremism is still alive and well in the world. How does this square with the understanding of terrorism? Or what is he actually trying to get at here in this quote? I think my perspective is maybe, Jake, he just hasn't read your book, buddy. I think the problem of terrorism is going to be with us forever. It's not anything that's ever going to be solved. What we need to do is come with a very clear-eyed vision of what groups can actually achieve or not, and as we talked about earlier, calibrate our response to that. If we believe that every small group is going to be able to carry out an attack on the scale of 9-11, then the resources we need

to invest in CT are vast, and we really do need to be exercising kind of worldwide surveillance over all radical groups everywhere. If what we think is that was a massive historical anomaly enabled by the ability for five or six years of one group to run training camps in Afghanistan, through which they ran thousands of people every year to help them to get down to the tiny number of people they needed. to help them to get down to the tiny number of people they needed, and they required multiple failures of the intelligence and law enforcement systems in the West to follow up on leads and communicate and share information to pull the attack off, then we would look at that and say, whoa, okay, we are very far from the situation in which that could happen and will be for the foreseeable future.

Because of the very arguments that Jake makes in his book, the idea that there's organizations change, like ISIS, for example, when they came together, impatient with Al-Qaeda. This idea, Al-Qaeda said, oh, geez, we're not ready for a global caliphate. It can't happen. The populations aren't ready to resist against the West. And ISIS said they owe their origins to Zarqawi, right? They said, no, fundamentally, come one, come all. You know, we are needing foreign fighters from across the world come to this new golden era. We're going to go backwards in time and we're going to have a caliphate. And they did have a caliphate. And they did have a caliphate.

And they had a caliphate for time. And then what happened? The United States came together with, during my time, some 73 coalition partners. I think it's amped up to somewhere over 80 now, partners that still coordinate against ISIS now. But what happened was ISIS can no longer come together as an organization with planning time and space, physical space. They don't have that luxury any longer. So they went underground. Because they're underground, they're back to taking more time, having to exercise more patience to be far more local versus global. And at the same time, we do see networks metastasizing in places like Africa. We see more networks coming together in strange ways, different ideologies being set aside. We see that with Hamas right now. Some of the young fighters,

not Hamas fighters, other fighters, say we don't care about the ideology. We're not going to listen to the old people, their view from the Palestinian Authority. We're just going to come together. We're going to act against Israel. So there's this idea that individuals globally on all sides of the spectrum, again, are just searching for an ideology that fits. You know, Chris raised the example of ISIS, and it's such a perfect example of why organizations matter. So, you know, one way to read the story of ISIS and its emergence is you have al-Qaeda in Iraq, it gets beaten back, it figures out an organizational model that lets it survive

for a number of years against counterterror pressure, intense counterterror pressure from U.S. and allies. Basically, from 2009 through 2011, it's underground and surviving. The war breaks out in Syria. They move forces across the border. And very quickly, that organizational acumen, which was built up over a number of years, lets them begin to succeed and grow compared to the other groups that were just figuring it out. Because figuring out how to fight insurgency, it is hard, is a brutal, incredibly difficult task. So those other groups, as they're figuring it out, are getting out competed by a set of people who brought the knowledge from fighting the war in Iraq with

them into Syria. And then in 2013, the Iraqi government mismanages a protest movement in Anbar and parts of Nineveh province and basically puts the population into a situation where they are between a rock and a hard place. Their government is not giving an inch. And there are these experienced fighters across the border who are saying, look, we can come in and address this. And that's how al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is able to come back into Iraq and then transforms into the Islamic State. But the core of that was the organization. And the amazing thing is you can actually see this in their documents. I did a project with Howard Schatz and Patrick Johnson and some colleagues at RAND in 2015 and 2016 where we got declassified a range of documents from Al-Qaeda in Iraq and a range of documents

from ISIS. And it is literally some of the same forms being used from that earlier period to the later period. We've been unpacking the complexities of, in essence, organizational control from a terrorist organization's perspective. Are terrorist organizations, in accordance with these complexities that come with it, offering an alternative security mechanism to state-based security organizations? Or are they more likely to remain covert and a covert option for non-state or state entities? As a result of counterterrorism pressure, these organizations are going to become more clandestine or more covert.

Organizations are going to become more clandestine or more covert. They are going to operate in cells because they are extremely vulnerable. So it is kind of the organizational evolution of terrorist organizations that survive by adapting. So I think that organizations are going to be more clandestine, I think that organizations are going to be more clandestine, as specifically ISIS is going to be more clandestine because they know that the United States still has a footprint. There are some 900 troops operating in Syria, if you read media accounts and reporting. The chairman was just there,

chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley. The fight will continue, but the adversaries have gone to ground. Operating as a government, providing security, starting to engage in service provision for the population, you can't do that if you're under the kinds of pressure by mobile forces that ISIS is in places it controls in other parts of the world. Yeah, we'll absolutely start to see that transition. So where terrorist groups are facing relatively low quality forces or forces that don't have a lot of mobility to get out and reach them, and they haven't drawn the attention of the United States and its allies through targeting Western targets, they will absolutely engage in that.

And that's been part of the toolkit of rebels and insurgents forever. One of the developments in the world that we need to be a little bit more worried about is there are substantial portions of major cities in large parts of the world that are under the control and where the population is under the control day to day of armed organizations that are not the state. And those societies in many places have not figured out how to walk back from that equilibrium. They haven't yet figured out how to normalize those groups. And this is particularly prevalent in large parts of Central and South America.

That's a different kind of governance challenge. It's a different, it's not quite CT, it's not quite COIN, not quite law enforcement. It's something different. And we have not yet, as the U.S. and other wealthy Western countries, figured out how to help societies break that equilibrium. And doing so is going to be one of the key security challenges of the next 10 or 15 years. So Jake just talked about Central and South America. Specifically, I want to talk about MS-13, right? Is it a terrorist organization? Is it a transnational criminal gang? Is it an insurgent group? Is it some kind of malign criminal organization that really just wants to put pressure on the population and earn a little money by threatening them and charging

some kind of taxes? Your guess is as good as mine, or your judgment is as good as mine. But here's what we've seen as a result of MS-13 in Central America. You saw a country that said, hey, my population, said the president of El Salvador, is unhappy with rampant crime. So I'm going to build one of the biggest prisons you've ever seen. And we're going to start putting anyone that is associated with MS-13 in jail. And the population is happy because crime is going down. Now, what is the tradeoff? Civil liberties. What is the tradeoff? Perhaps more legitimate parties having a seat at the table in the future.

But it looks like some would argue, and I would make the case, that there has been deals cut with MS-13 to support the political party that's in place. So what is it, an insurgent group? Is it a gang that can destabilize a whole nation? These are the kinds of questions that the United States has to deal with, and other foreign partners have to figure out, how do we work with states that might be warming up to China and at the same time dealing with transnational gangs in a way that might be counterproductive to being a democratic nation. We live in an era of renewed focus on great power competition. What are the impacts of great power competition on terrorism and the way we understand

it? I want to go back, actually, to what I believe was the first episode of this podcast, where we talked about what great power competition would portend for irregular warfare. And I think the point we made then, which is still valid, which is the last era of intense great power competition, the Cold War, saw significantly more non-state violence, significantly more terrorism, significantly more insurgency, more rebellions, more within-state conflict than the era that we've just been through. And the reason, I think, is obvious, which is that when you have two great power competitions, the cost of direct military conflict is unthinkable. And so how do you

contest? Well, you support proxies. And in the supporting of proxies, you oftentimes kick off small-scale armed conflict. Don't expect that we are going to see a steady increase in the rate of violence out there in the world as we move into this Arab Great Power competition, because that's exactly what we saw the last time. I was on the Golan Heights looking down into a valley that was Syria, and there were ISIS camps, encampments, if you will. There was a civil war ongoing. There were Syrians, Iranians, Hezbollah. At the same time, I'm in Israel off to the horizon. You could see Lebanon. At the same time, there were Russians in that space.

There were, as I said, Iranians in that space vying for influence in the region. And that became, for me, a metaphor. We were in a counterterrorism fight. I was one person responsible in the U.S. government for overseeing our counterterrorism fight. And I realized that counterterrorism was just one line of effort, one line of operation in a broader counter influence campaign, which began to come in sharper focus for me at the end of the administration, when I realized, hey, this is what great power competition looks like. We're going to have to fight against terrorists and counter terrorism in the same places we have to counter malign influence from actors that are vying for competition. Jens, did we want to unpack a little bit further from a practitioner's perspective?

When we discuss malign networks and terrorism, how would you guys perceive a practitioner should assimilate this information to get practical outcomes on the ground across the variety of mission sets that they're probably going to be used for in great power competition? Chris's response to the last question really highlighted the fact of the environment we're going into, which these lines we draw between terrorist and insurgent and criminal gang, they're very blurry. They're context dependent. Organizations move between them all the time. If you look back at the conflict in Northern Ireland, many of the groups on the loyalist side were also very active criminal gangs doing traditional racketeering activities.

So if we think about that as the environment that people are going to deploy into, then developing that broad understanding and knowledge base can only help. So I think the answer to your question is that we need to prepare people who are going to go lead in these environments who are sufficiently flexible of mind that they don't overly index on this is a terrorist group, or this is an insurgent group, or this is a TCO, Transnational Criminal Organization. But look at the organizations they're facing in the political context that they're in, and then ask, where's the point of leverage against this organization? And I would posit that sometimes that's going to be kinetic, and sometimes that's going to be their supporting population, and sometimes it's going to be the sponsor across the border.

But which it is, is going to be different in every environment. It might change over time in one environment. So we want people who are going out there to be sufficiently flexible of mind that they can think about which is the right solution for the problems that they're facing at that point in time. I've met with tribal leaders that were giving me access. This is, of course, not as a policymaker, but as a human operator. I met with tribal leaders, gave me access to some of their tribal members that would provide intelligence that was useful in places like Afghanistan, where I was responsible for building a personal relationship. I was responsible for conducting human operations for the purpose of intelligence collection. In different circumstances, those same tribal leaders could influence large tracts of their physical space by connecting me with and influencing their other tribal members. We have to be smart in an operational environment on how we work with

those tribal leaders, how we work with those key influencers. It works its way up strategically and internationally, how our policymakers build partnerships, how we talk to individuals from Israel at the same time where we're able to talk to individuals that are at the Palestinian Authority. I mean, I went from talking to senior Israelis to talking to President Abbas in the Palestinian Authority. We have to be able to talk, to communicate, and to influence across a wide range of individuals with diverse interests. So non-traditional partnerships, looking at forging those partnerships, and we have to do so by building trust, right? We lost some trust

for a time with Kurds. We lost some trust with the Afghans that work with us. So we have to somehow regain that trust over time by redoubling our focus on partnerships because we cannot do it alone. We have right now, I think, a unique opportunity for building some durable knowledge across many elements of U.S. and allied governments because right now we have a generation of field grade officers and junior flag officers whose earliest career experiences were engaging with various kinds of non-traditional partners. And we have not had such widespread experience of that in our military and intelligence and diplomatic development organizations, probably in our lifetimes. Certainly not since the peak of the Vietnam War and a couple years after that.

And so there's a massive knowledge base out there. And this is part of why I think IWI is such a fantastic initiative. That knowledge base exists, but it's not there forever. People are going to rotate out. People are going to move on to other jobs. And it's not clear to me that we have learned how to instantiate in training pipelines, session pipelines, and the development of the next generation, a way to learn some of those things that were developed in an extremely brutal 20-year struggle in multiple countries. And if you think about those 900 people that Chris talked about now, according to public sources operating in Syria, the number of people who are going to rotate through that mission and learn to work with non-traditional partners is a fraction, tiny fraction of what did in Afghanistan and Iraq and various other places.

And so somehow it's imperative upon us to figure out how to get that knowledge base baked into how we develop the next generation. I don't know what the secret sauce is, so to speak, but I can say somewhat confidently that some of the success, arguably, that I've enjoyed is a result of intense study, learning, and surrounding myself with people that are interested, but having the discourse and then feeding the future leaders ideas that they can turn into some kind of success on a battlefield or diplomatically. I mean, I took risks in my career. I think they were calculated risks as a result of learning from, and I should have said this at the outset, from starting my career pretty early working in special operations and being mentored by special operations forces commanders. Chris just made, I think, a critical point for thinking about how we develop that next generation, which is that we can't look at places where we didn't get the strategic outcome that we wanted

and say there's nothing to be learned there. There are things to be learned there, both in the sense of the negative lesson at the strategic level, but also in all those strategic defeats, there were many positive lessons learned at the tactical and operational levels. And so finding ways to create an environment where those lessons can be cataloged and passed on to the next generation is a critical task rather than what seems instinctively easy, which is to say, ah, that didn't work out. We didn't get the outcomes we wanted. And so a pox on it, we're not going to learn from it. That's just the wrong way to think about the history of the last 25 years. Chris, you've written about the fact that we're

entering a fifth wave of terrorism. Can you define what that means and discuss why it's critical to our understanding of terror? I think we're seeing a shift, not just here in the United States, but globally toward an anti-government form of terrorism. In many cases, it's going to come, we don't like to say this, but it's going to come from the far right. It's going to be an amalgamation of white supremacists in some cases and neo-Nazis. There's going to be a mixture of witches, arguably, which just happened with the conviction of a soldier who worked in these different milieus. He was radicalized with witches, neo-Nazis, and jihadists because he was in search of a reason to exercise his grievance and attack his military unit. And he's going to prison, I think, for 45 years. So there's less purity in terms of ideology. think that worldwide, because of populism, because of polarization, we're starting to see a new wave of anti-government terrorism from Brazil to Germany. Arguably, some people say even here

in the United States, it's at an incipient level. Again, I'll let your listeners assess, you know, that theory, but I just, I am confident that we no longer should be focused on Islamist terrorism as the dominant threat. I think it's going to be a part of the narrative, but it's not going to be the dominant narrative going forward. So I think if you look loosely at the history Chris described, there are waves where the ideology seems to move in particular directions. Part of that, I believe, is where you can raise the resources. So for a time, the way to raise the resources was to wave a leftist flag. And so you had movements all around the world that took leftist positions, not because they were necessarily the right ones for the

environment, but because that was a way you could resource and support from the Warsaw Pact Eastern Bloc. Then there was a period of time when revolutionary movements, at least in the places where it was feasible, really shifted from having been leftist, as they were in much of the Middle East and the Arab world in the 60s and 70s, into being Islamist, because that was where the resources were, where you could gain resources. And that period, I think, has largely come to an end. And so the question I have in trying to decide for myself how worried I should be about the future Chris is highlighting is what's the set of funders and the revenue model for organizations that are espousing this set of groups? Are there some deep pocket donors out there or states that might want to get behind it in the way that the various countries and deep pocket donors did in

previous waves of terrorism. And there, to bring us to the kind of current conflict that's most intense, I worry that one outcome of the conflict in Ukraine is that Russia is going to start seeing supporting such movements around the world as a way to push back and reduce the pressure it is under in the context of the Ukraine. And if we begin to move into a world where Russia is supporting worldwide violent right-wing movements as the Soviet Union once did violent left-wing movements, then we could be in a very difficult place with respect to counterterrorism and moving back into an environment that we had in the 1960s and 70s where there was a community around the world that pushed a particular

set of ideological terrorism. I worry a little bit about that as an outcome of the current conflict. Jake, we'll go to you first. What are the most critical takeaways from this conversation for policymakers and irregular warfare professionals? I think the most critical thing to take away is that when we look out at the threats, if we think about the environment they're operating in, how vulnerable are they to security compromise? How hard is it for them to know what the right targets are? What kind of people are they recruiting? Do they view things in the way that the leadership of an organization does, or are they recruited for other reasons and then have to be controlled? We can think a lot and very carefully about how much is it going to be worth it

for that organization to exert control over them. And that will give us a way to carefully about how much is it going to be worth it for that organization to exert control over them. And that will give us a way to think about how secretive could this group ever actually be? How covert can they be? And therefore, what do we need to invest in being able to observe and prevent their activities? Yeah, I would just make the point that you have to balance your tools. You can't overuse one tool versus another tool. And I've made the point multiple times, mea culpa. I came into the Trump administration, or I went into the Trump administration with the idea that I would focus more on counter radicalization. At the time, it wasn't popular to talk about countering violent extremism. It became a bad word for a lot of reasons. But at the end of the day, early on in the

administration, because of the threat that was pervasive in the Middle East, in Syria in particular, in Africa, and all of Somalia, the Horn of Africa more specifically, we didn't have the luxury of focusing on counter-radicalization early on, but my policy team, after I left the administration, was able to take those ideas, is the value of the seemingly abstract knowledge that we might generate for people like Chris to think through what should be done in different circumstances and give them inspiration for thinking creatively about solving problems that, as Chris just described, they and their teams can then instantiate in policy that many of the listeners of the podcast are going to go out and execute. So we often talk about whole of society, whole of government approaches, et cetera, but it's nice to be in this setting and reaffirm that the things that are being done on both sides of this divide that we so often reify are informing the other. And there's a clear feedback loop that we've talked about today. so often reify are informing the other. And there's a clear feedback loop that we've talked about today. Chris, could I ask what is your single tear line, the bumper sticker for the

audience to take away regarding fifth gen terrorism? I think General Hayden talked about kind of a post-truth world. So now a post-truth world is clashing with angry populations. And from that, it's going to bubble up more terrorism that's going to be directed at governments across the planet. Chris, Jake, thank you for appearing on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Jeff, this truly was a privilege. It was a great opportunity to listen to insights from Jake, to have an opportunity to read his book. And I'm just super grateful that you invited me to speak to your audience. Thank you. Jeff, Chris, thank you so much.

Adam, I learned a ton today. Deeply appreciate the opportunity. Thank you again for joining us for Episode 76 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In the next episode, we discuss the future of Army Special Operations with Lieutenant General Jonathan Braga and Dr. P.W. Singer. After that, expect episodes on cyber lessons in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and America's by, with, and through approach to defeating ISIS. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode.

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