Irregular Warfare Podcast - Time, Space, and Material: Metrics for Assessing Irregular Warfare

Episode Date: September 24, 2022

This episode explores the conceptual structures that undergird irregular warfare. Dr. Thomas Marks and Chief Warrant Officer Maurice "Duc" DuClos join our hosts, beginning the discussion by addressing the various ways the US government defines irregular warfare. They continue by examining the interplay between nations and nonstate actors—and how sovereign states are increasingly adopting methods traditionally employed by irregular actors to achieve their larger geopolitical aims. Finally, they reflect on different frameworks that strategic- and operational-level professionals can use to plan, implement, and evaluate irregular warfare campaigns more effectively.

Do we know what the irregular warfighting functions are? You know, are they different? Are we looking at the tools and then probably even more so to Dr. Mark's point, at the policies and the organizational structures that were built for conventional war? And are those still the best for irregular warfare approach? And I would argue they're probably not. Imagine if a non-state actor achieves victory, such as the Russians did and became the Soviets. And then just as you had base areas that you used to seize power, you now have a nation-state which serves as a base area.

Welcome to Episode 62 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and my co-host today is Laura Jones. Today's episode explores analytical frameworks for thinking about irregular warfare campaigns. Our guests today begin by discussing how practitioners should conceptualize regular warfare. They then explore how nation states are adopting non-state methods to improve their abilities to wage regular warfare. And finally, they end by exploring useful frameworks for planning, executing, and assessing IW success. Dr. Thomas Marks is a distinguished professor at the National Defense University who has written hundreds of publications on warfare.

In 2020, he and his colleague David Ucko authored a monograph entitled Crafting Strategy for Irregular Warfare, a Framework for Analysis and Action. The second edition of this report was published this past week and serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Chief Warrant Officer 5 Maurice Duclos is the longest serving operator in U.S. SOCOM. His background spans the range of special operations, which includes being the active duty lead for the development of the Army and joint unconventional warfare doctrine. He now serves at now serves at USOCOM and lectures for the Joint Special Operations University on Resilience, Resistance, and Unconventional Warfare. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton

Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Dr. Thomas Marks and Chief Warrant Officer 5, Maurice Duclos. Dr. Thomas Marks, Duke, thanks for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Great to have you on the show. I'm happy to be here. Appreciate you guys having us on. So the theme for today's show revolves around how practitioners and policymakers can apply different frameworks for planning and assessing irregular warfare campaigns. And Dr. Marks, the monograph you authored with your colleague, David Ucko, really speaks

to that. Can you just briefly discuss what inspired you and Dr. Ucko to author this piece? you and Dr. Uco to author this piece? I think it's fundamental for those of us who are in this podcast to understand that everything revolves ultimately around what General Mattis called warfighting. And this should not surprise anyone. There always has been the knowledge in irregular warfare, particularly in special operations, but now in the forces as a whole, that kinetics enabled the solution to whatever the challenge was. focus upon search and destroy. This was understood even in Vietnam. Vietnam is quite misunderstood in its strategic structure. But where this impacts what we're talking about here is that a theory of victory, which had to have a strategic approach, is in the document operationalized through lines of effort, which themselves consist of conceptual campaigns, which are implemented through operational campaign. Dr. Marks, something you outlined in your report is that far from being ancill is that war is of a piece.

We divide war into regular and irregular as a legacy of World War II. It informs the very structure, not only of our forces, but of special operations with major activities, simply reflecting what grew out of World War II. Yet in reality, states have always faced dealing with foes abroad and dealing with foes within. And at one point, this was very simply put, both in doctrine and in academia, as internal war or external war. Thus, in an era of great power competition, you end up with a very peculiar bifurcation, which is going to cause us some trouble. On the one hand, we have to continue to be able to do successfully what emerges as internal challenge. On the other hand, the approaches that are used by all internal challenge, whether you're going back to the American patriots or more recently to the

likes of Mao and the Vietnamese theorists, has a particular way of using non-kinetic lines of effort as the major thrust, as the major quest for victory, even as kinetic support. We have now decreed that we will call this competition, and we've even introduced into our lexicon the term struggle, which has been doctrine for our major foes for more than a century. This means, on the one hand, the Department of Defense, under the rubric of security, is dealing with matters which, more correctly, belong in the realm of policy. So, Duke, in your personal opinion, how do academic theories of IW play out on the ground for the operator? How do you view the actual implementation of non-kinetic lines of effort

within a more conceptualized framework of irregular warfare? That's a good question. I think that at least from an operational perspective or an operator's perspective, perhaps the better way to frame it, I struggle with what IW is still. And I know at this late in the game, I agree with everything Dr. Marks has said, but I think we've at least internally are using the term in many different ways still, even to this point with doctrine and with many operating concepts out there. So it was my job to write doctrine for the special warfare command and joint doctrine. And yet I found that much of our doctrine describes things. It doesn't define things, right? So this is even like in dictionaries, you'll look and it'll have this

word means this, this, and this. There's several different definitions. They're calling them definitions, but really it's common practice or common use. And so it's more descriptions than definitions. IW, from my experience, is usually looked at in one of five ways. The common one now we're seeing is kind of a replacement for this gray zone or this steady state phase zero, and it's being referred to as everything in time in this continuum out before war. So everything that's going on before war is IW. It's the IW before W. I don't think that that's correct. The second one is a method-centric approach. In some cases, our doctrine talks about the five pillars, right, or the five core activities of IW.

This is defining it by method. The problem I have with this is those methods are also used in W, right, in regular war. So guerrilla warfare or unconventional war, you know, depends on what time frame you're using, what it means, was used all over World War II as part of regular war. So it's not exclusive, right? It has no differentia from regular war. So I don't think this is the best use of the term either. The third way that it's being used is as the excluded middle. It's this is war, everything else is irregular war, right? So we think we know what war is, therefore everything else must be irregular war. And that's kind of the using irregular as an adjective, right? It's warfare done irregularly. And I don't think that that's accurate either. The next one is the focus or the

target centric approach. And this is that war focuses on the military and the government, irregular war focuses on the population and the government. So the target, I don't think this is accurate either. That would be like defining a car by why you're using it, right? If I'm driving to the grocery store, it's one thing. If I'm driving, you know, to work, it's another thing. The why shouldn't define what the actual concept of the tool is itself. And then the last one, and Dr. Marks actually brought this up, and I think it's a great point when he talked about the internal and external war. The old way of looking at this is is in defining irregular war as a relationship between actors. Our definition actually does this. In the very beginning of our definition, where it's not descriptive, it's talking about

state or non-state. Then it goes into the why, for influence on the population, for legitimacy, right? It starts describing the use of it. But I think that very first portion of it was probably the clearest, that state-on-state is war, state-on-non-state is irregular war. And some of the methods that have come out of the state-on-non-state, we're looking at those and we're equating those with irregular war now, you know, because those are the coin or the CT or whatever. We're saying, oh, well, that is what irregular war is. And we missed the actual differential. What made it different was the relationship between the actors. So I thought that was a great point about the internal and external that Dr. Marks made. That's, you know, probably the origins of it, and probably, in my opinion, still the best way to define it. I think Duke has absolutely hit the nail on the head there in all of that. Imagine if a non-state actor achieves victory,

such as the Russians did and became the Soviets, the Chinese did and you got the People's Republic, the Koreans, the Iranians. And then just as you had base areas that you used to seize power, you now have a nation state which serves as a base area. You don't simply jettison what has gotten you to where you are. All of our major foes have simply taken their doctrine and even in many cases, their organizations, such as the United Front Commission in China, and they have made them part of their state entities. They have then looked at the globe in the same terms that they originally looked at their nation-state opponent. And in an era where the Cold War has rapidly become ancient history, much less what was there before, people

forget that the Soviet Union stood up the communist international. Imagine a staff function dedicated to international revolution. Yeah, there's an excellent piece of that that I want to unpack. And it's that, you know, maybe what we're really talking about here isn't as much irregular warfare is the irregular warfare approach, right? And so I think that other nations have realized America's really good at warfare. You know, give us some tanks to shoot, tank on tank, got it, we're good. But it's that odd non-state counterinsurgency, civilian in the mix, that we're not really good at that. You know, Biddle touched on this in his book, Non-State Warfare, that we're not really good at that.

You know, Biddle touched on this in his book, Non-State Warfare, is that the continuum of non-state and state is collapsing. And we're seeing more and more non-state actors fighting like state actors. But even more dangerously for us, we're seeing state actors fighting like non-state actors because they see that the way that we fight, that our doctrine, our way of war

is really predicated on conventional war, right? Not irregular war. So I think that it's cheaper, it's easier, and in many cases, that approach is something that states can wrap their head around. And we're seeing states act like non-state. And this proves a challenge for us when our whole institution of war really is still focused on this total war or this conventional war concept. And we haven't made that shift completely to the method of non-state. Even if we're using it against another state, this method of irregular warfare, which we would have used against a non-state, right? So there's a toolkit of conventional war and there's a toolkit of

irregular war. Who we use them against would be state on state would be war, state on non-state would be a regular war. But now that's changing and states are using those tools of irregular war. Now, is it still what I would say is irregular war or is it using the irregular warfare approach or using the irregular warfare methodology in the sense of conventional war or in the sense of even competition? So I think that's very dangerous. And we're seeing that these tools, unfortunately, without that nuance of understanding of the concept, people are just saying this is a regular war, right? So if you have a population-centric approach, or if you're doing info operations, or if you're doing non-kinetics, that's a regular war. Well, no, no, no. That goes on in regular war as well. The difference is some of those tools are better

in the irregular warfare context. And our enemy is seeing that those tools, those irregular warfare tools, were more susceptible to them. So I think that that's kind of the so what of it, in my opinion, is that we're seeing these, it's not a new thing, irregular warfare, Dr. Marks pointed out, it's not a new thing, but it's rising in popularity, especially against us, because they're seeing that that's one of our gap areas. So I jump in there and ask, when we talk about conceptualizing IW within the SEP framework, are we then talking about an American way

of irregular warfare, if such a thing even exists? And if so, does that then run the risk of framing, say, Chinese or Russian actions through our own IW lens? What dilemmas or obstacles then stand in the way of an effective response to IW activities from our adversaries? Our dilemma is not that we don't understand this. We have good concepts. We even have pretty reasonable doctrine. Our difficulty, of course, is that our legacy way of doing business almost precludes our meeting the struggle. And if you look back at the very first thing that I mentioned, who is supposed to be setting the course that we're on, as articulated in the Small Wars Manual. It's our policymakers.

Notice then where we're at strategically. Our monograph we're talking about is a Department of Defense publication. But ultimately, in a democracy, security has to take its direction from our democratically elected authorities. And as we experienced in Iraq and in Afghanistan and everywhere else, once violence of a certain level enters politics, just as in when riots break out, everyone turns to the people in uniform and says, what do we do now? I'd like to take it to, I guess, a more basic way to answer that question that frames it around the way that, you know, me as an operator, I understand it is, you know, I think there's always a best way to do something. There's stylistic differences, but there's always

the best way. And it's this finding the best way to do it is There's stylistic differences, but there's always the best way. And it's this finding the best way to do it is the challenge, right? Based on the environment, based on the conditions, the missions. So it'll force evolution to this point of optimal force design and optimal operational design. I think in warfare itself, we've looked at, you know, what are the differences of ways of doing irregular warfare? Well, in warfare, we had different doctrines. The Soviet had their doctrine, we had our doctrine. There was a best doctrine. There was a one that would be higher success if the conditional variables were the same in the same environment. And I think we saw that pan out again and again in the conventional side. And I think in the irregular warfare side or irregular warfare approach,

it's the same thing. There are certain ways to do this that are going to prove out to be the most efficient ways in the context of the environment and the mission and the rule set that we're fighting under. And I think that these are the ones that we have to start to look for if we're going to implement this as a force, is we have to say, what are those best practices in this tool set that once was applied only to non-state, but now we're applying it in general. We have a very good understanding of the like seven functions. Do we know what the irregular warfighting functions are? You know, are they different? Are we looking at the tools and then

probably even more so to Dr. Mark's point at the policies and the organizational structures that were built for conventional war? And are those still the best for irregular warfare approach? And I would argue they're probably not, right? And so we're talking about irregular warfare as if it is a set of activities, but we're not talking about it as if it's a mindset, a strategy, an organizational design, a policy design, right? We're not looking at it in the bigger context of what the implications of if we're going to fight the American way of irregular war. I would say we probably have done that in periods in history, right? This is probably in many reasons why SOF exists is because, you know, we looked at the way that the enemy was fighting in irregular warfare context. And we said, we don't have people who

can do that. We need people who could be the gorilla, or we need people who can do that. We need people who could be the guerrilla, or we need people who can do these things that the enemy is doing to us and replicate those activities because we saw how effective they were in that context. And so we created force design and organizational and operational design and doctrine based on the irregular warfare approach. But I think over time, those organizations, policies, and doctrines become more conventionalized to fit into the peacetime military industrial complex and the command and careerisms and everything else, it becomes more conventionalized. And we lose the understanding of maybe not the irregular methods, but we lose the understanding of the thinking and the org design and the context and the policies and all of those other invisible things that support

that way of warfare. And I think that that's the challenge we're facing now is we can talk about irregular warfare as the how, the methods, but if we don't also talk about it in the context of the force design and the policy design and the thinking, then we're not going to be able to empower those methods to work. And they're going to just be word and we're going to fail because we're going to use the same approaches we would have used in warfare. And that doesn't match for irregular warfare, in my opinion. So something we've spoken about at length is just how difficult it is to grasp irregular warfare, right?

I mean, it can be nebulous. The semantics itself can be confusing. But I know for me, it really helps to think through frameworks. So for the mid-level careers who actually keep the security enterprise running, what are some concepts we can use? Dr. Marks, I found your piece particularly instructive in this, so maybe you could give us a synopsis of the analytical frameworks what you're responding to. And consequently, half of the monograph is dedicated to assessing the problem. What has produced it? How do our opponents see the same facts that we do? Framing, for example,

is a doctrinal term, but we tend to give it a miss and think of it as point of view. that it is the lens through which reality is seen. And therefore, if you have problems, if you have roots of conflict, you will have different actors analyzing them in different ways. And some of those actors, for reasons embodied in social sciences, which is why we take an entire year to teach the implementation of this, some of them choose violent responses to solution. Those solutions, though, will unfold very predictably when analyzed strategically. Finally, at any point in time, when you're asking, well, how do we grapple with this? You have to assess what is being done at that particular spot. Having done this, all of this still in the estimate, what are you going to do about it? What is your theory of victory? How are you going to assess the facts in a way which separates revolutionary leadership from its manpower? And how are you going to get inside their strategy and defeat it?

And this leads to a startling conclusion. Irregular warfare, whether you conceive of it as major activities or as strategic, holistic warfighting as we do, is not the cure. It is applied to an illness which returns the body to a state where normal politics can continue. And if normal politics malfunctioned and caused what is being analyzed in the monograph, there's a strong case it will malfunction again, but that doesn't mean the effort has been unsuccessful. Look at Peru. Look at Colombia. Both those efforts were spectacularly successful in an irregular warfare sense. They returned the polity to a steady state where politics, by its normal processes, could attempt once again to deal with the same roots which had produced the crisis. Yeah, I'd like to add to that a little bit. If we're talking about an irregular warfare toolset

that was effective between state and non-state, that now we're talking about an irregular warfare tool set that was effective between state and non-state that now we're going to apply to state on state or these other things, right? Then it becomes the tools that we use in the situation, but it's not defined by why we're using them. And so I think part of the problem in understanding the right framework is we're acting as if the framework of irregular warfare has a different ending and then regular war. No, it doesn't. That is not what makes it irregular. And so we need to be able to define what that victory condition would be if we were using regular war. So at the start, we said, what do we want to do here if we're using regular war?

Just ultimately, what's the endgame? What's the desired end state? And then we say, OK, well, maybe the best approach to this or the best tools to get there are through these irregular warfare tools that would have worked against a non-stater we found have risen to the best practices in this situation. And so I think the problem is we're trying to think for the most part that the end game or the end state or the win condition for irregular is different than regular. No, no, no. Those are the tools that we apply to that end state or desired victory condition. And so I always say a raid is a raid. It doesn't matter if I hit it unilaterally, the building, or if I train some partner force to hit it, or if the civilian population rises up and hits it, or whatever reason or method that I use

to attack that target, a raid is still a raid. And I can't start thinking that my objective and purpose is to empower the people. No, my objective and purpose is to leverage the people in order to do the raid for me, right? So I have a problem with population-centric warfare because I don't think they are the target. I think they are the tool. And unfortunately, if we lose sight of

what the target is, and we think it's empowering people, and we have to empower the people because then they rise up on their own, and they're hitting the target without us, right? And they're doing those activities that we want them to do on their own accord. And that's important. But we can't lose sight of the raid is the raid or war is war, as Dr. Mark said earlier. I'd like to move on from just defining the problem, which, as you've mentioned, includes things like developing strategic estimates about your adversaries' motives and capabilities, to how we actually go about, no kidding, assessing effectiveness in IW campaigns. The military loves easily defined, immediate metrics like enemy KIA, territory lost or gained,

ordnance expended, cargo moved in and out of theater, things that are easy to count. But do these metrics add any value in IW? Are we examining the right measures of success? And if not, what should we be looking at for grading our performance in this realm? I think the first part in answering your question is to highlight what doctrine does, that this is a legitimacy crisis which produces our involvement. And therefore, that fundamental political reality will drive all that follows. A theory of victory then simply puts together the ways, which is the heart of the monograph, and then finds the means to implement the ways. In the case of the Colombians, even down to the operational and tactical level, they had to create many of the means, such as high mountain battalions, such as urban special forces, which had not existed. But the only point was to implement the theory of victory.

And the theory of victory was to restore legitimacy to the extent that violence was not seen as a logical or necessary component of changing things within a democracy. Just a quick follow-up to that. Duke, from a tactical perspective, how do you see this problem of measuring success? I know that in today's discussions on irregular warfare and great power competition, we really stress the importance of imposing costs on our adversaries and then finding a way to measure those costs, right? But for a grassroots practitioner, what does that even mean? Like, how should U.S. organizations spread out across a global theater of operations truly think about imposing costs on our adversaries? And then how can we possibly measure those actions?

think about imposing costs on our adversaries? And then how can we possibly measure those actions? So I study game theory and I study games, board games. I think board game design is a way to look at the mechanics of how board games are played out will make you understand the decisions that you're actually trying to get at, right? You'll abstract it. And so I asked myself, particularly, let's say in chess, if I'd walked in mid game into a chess game and I looked at the board, could I tell who was winning just by what was left on the board? Now, the players were on break. I'm looking at the board. Could I tell who was winning and see who was ahead in this game? And the answer is yes. And there was three conditions that allowed me to see who was ahead. And it was time primarily because in chess there's a clock, but also that pieces are developed. Like if I put my opponent in check, I'm actually moving him back in time

because he can't develop his pieces. So I'm getting ahead in time. I could tell by space, the D and E squares, D and E four or five, those have a better control over the board than squares along the corner of the board, right? There's key terrain. Everyone in the military understands key terrain, these ports, these airfields, these, you know, the canals, lines of maneuver. And the third one is material. In chess, I could look at the board and I could see who has more pieces on the board. There's also a piece value, right? So I can evaluate the value of the pieces still on the board. When I started looking at it in that context, I realized I could also template that into, in this long game,

an imposed cost and not, I can stop my opponent from doing what they're doing in their strategy, but I can just trip them up a little bit and I can impose this cost. And over time, that imposed cost may cause them to withdraw from the game, like the Soviet Union did, right? So we cost them in materiel and we cost overrided them. We didn't beat them, but we made it so they couldn't play the game any longer. And I think that this imposed cost strategy is where a lot of the asymmetric small forces using the irregular warfare tools, that survival is the number one thing that they're going after, right? The insurgent wins by surviving. Well, what are they doing? They're really imposing a cost time on the opponent who is under a clock because their politicians and their population and their budget is not going to allow them to maintain that forward projection power and occupation indefinitely. And the international will of the people to accept this foreign occupation is not going to go on indefinitely.

occupation is not going to go on indefinitely. So there is a time on the occupier, on the attacker, and the time on the defender, on the asymmetric smalls, just survive, you know, and impose that cost in time. And it's winning through time, not through maneuver, as LJ mentioned earlier, it's not ground taken, right? It's you're winning in time. And I think that measuring that is something we can do. Those are measurable things. We can measure if our opponent had a strategic objective to build this dam by date X, and they had a certain amount of budget, we can say we set them back 10 years in that construction. Much like if they needed to get tanks from point A to point B in a conventional fight, and we delayed it because we blew up the railroad tracks. We can measure that time delay. We can measure time,

space, and material. There's very little else that we can measure. And so I'm not saying we stop the tanks ever from getting to point B. I'm saying we impose a cost on the opponent in material, meaning money. They're going to have to rebuild train tracks. They're going to have to pay off locals. They're going to have to, you know, and time to get those tanks to the point to where those tanks aren't at the right place and right time and they're not as valuable to them and their strategy as they would have been in their plans. And so I think that those three things, at least at the tactical level, gave me a tool to measure my operations and ask, if I do this activity or this operation, what's the imposed cost on the opponent? How am I tripping them? How am I setting

them back? And again, this isn't at the strategic level. I haven't done the work to apply this at any other level because this is a tool and a model I built for very much tactical and operational is this TSM equation and saying, how can I impose cost in time, space, and material? And how do I measure those things? Because those things are an objectable, measurable tool, something I could look at on the chess board in the battlefield. And I know where we're at. Building things like influence or legitimacy or will, those are very intangible and hard to measure, right?

But we can measure what exactly they're spending in material or what exactly they're spending in time or what exactly they're trying to do in location, right? What locations that they own and possess in key terrain. So I think those measurable things gives us an objective way to measure success in anything we do. Gentlemen, to round out our episode, I'd like to quickly get your thoughts on the implications from today's conversation. Dr. Marks, what are the takeaways for practitioners? And for you, Duke, what are the implications for policymakers in the irregular warfare space? The implications are that you must look, as I believe someone titled the book, at warfare as a whole. You must ask yourself, why is there a legitimacy crisis? And this may lead to something we call war or major combat,

to something we call war or major combat, or it may lead to our involvement in internal war, as it was once called. But the same principles are in play, and therefore the challenge must always be approached as one of legitimacy. We have to continue to evolve. If the world is changing, so the megacities and technology is changing the world. If the population we draw from is changing, the talent pool is changing in the states and the will to fight in the way they want to serve. And if the missions are changing, then our organizational design, our policies, and our doctrine have to change as well. And if that means that the spectrum of tools, much like I mentioned earlier in the non-state warfare, if states and non-states are collapsing in in this spectrum and starting to mismatch these tools, and they don't even see the difference, to be quite frank to Dr. Mark's point, they just

call it struggle. They don't have these false dichotomies that we have in our mind. I don't think Clausewitz did either. But I think that if these are a fact that the tools of irregular warfare are being used in regular warfare, and that it's not a cut and dry, black and white continuum of war and non-war, if these things are now intermixed, we have to adapt and evolve as well. We have to think about what the future of this implication means. And if we keep doing things the way we've always been doing, then I think we're not going to have the best results in the future. I think we've already seen that, to be quite honest. I think our recent failures have been because of this lack of adaptation and evolution to

look at what the current context requires. And we're still fighting the wars of the past. And so we hold on to these things as if they have value and not question what was the original reason they were being done, and is it still valid in today's context? And I think that we have to continue to evolve to look at the way warfare is and not the warfare we want it to be, because then we're going to just keep LARPing. We're playing warfare. And we're hoping that it's going to exist in a way that, to be quite honest, it's not.

And the enemy is going to find our gaps. And they're going to find out where our weaknesses are. And they're going to evolve. And we're going to stay stagnant. And that's the danger of what we've become, in my opinion. Well, gentlemen, that was a fascinating conversation on analytical frameworks for planning, waging, and assessing irregular warfare. Thanks so much for your time today.

This has been enormously beneficial in more ways than one, so thank you very much. Also commend you guys on the effort with the podcast. There's so many good episodes. And I just look forward to what you guys are going to do in the future because it's a great platform for talking about irregular warfare. Thank you again for joining us for episode 62 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Kyle and I discuss France's experience with irregular warfare in the Sahel with French Brigadier General François-Marie Goujon and Professor Will Reno. Following that, we'll explore the role of battlefield evidence in IW with retired Canadian Brigadier General Ken Watkin and Winthrop Wells. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners

to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter for access to our content and upcoming community events. The newsletter signup is found at irregularwarfare.org. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular Warfare podcast. It really helps expose the podcast to new listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government.

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