Irregular Warfare Podcast - What Have We Learned from Twenty Years of War?

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

What lessons should the United States and its allies take from twenty years of irregular warfare since 9/11? What will the future of irregular warfare look like? Episode 38 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast is a recording of the keynote policy panel, featuring prominent scholars and practitioners, from the inaugural Irregular Warfare Initiative conference held on September 10, 2021. The panelists address these questions and discuss the overarching theme of the changing character of irregular warfare. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm Kyle Atwell, the co-founder and director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, and today I am joined by Andy Maher, the Irregular Warfare Initiative Director of Engagements, to present a bonus episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We're jumping off the normal Irregular Warfare Podcast format by releasing the audio from the keynote policy panel discussion at the inaugural Irregular Warfare Initiative conference held on Thank you. learn from the past 20 years of conflict since 9-11 and the future of irregular warfare, particularly appropriate as the conference was held the day before the 20th anniversary of 9-11. With this motivating prompt, the panel discussed a range of topics from a reflection on the U.S. failure in Afghanistan, the important role of information operations in modern conflict, what institutional reforms might be needed within the U.S. government to succeed in future

irregular warfare contexts, and more. The panel included an exceptional cast of scholars and practitioners. First, Ambassador and retired Lieutenant General Doug Lute served in a multitude of roles, including that of Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the United States Representative to NATO. Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin is a Distinguished Professor of International Security at the American University and is the author of How Terrorism Ends, Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns,

and Power to the People, How Open Technological Innovation is Arming Tomorrow's Terrorists. Major General Richard Engel is Commanding General for Special Forces Command Airborne, with operational experience spanning most conflict zones of America's military commitments over the past 25 years. Dr. David Kilcullen of the University of New South Wales at Canberra has published numerous books examining irregular warfare to include Out of the Mountains, The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla, and Dragons and Snakes, How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. And hosting today's conversation is Dr. Jacob Shapiro, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, Managing Director of the Empirical Studies of Conflict

Project, and the author of multiple books and articles on irregular warfare to include Small Wars Big Data, The Information Revolution in Modern Conflict, and The Terrorist Dilemma, Managing Violent Covert Organizations. 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 the audio from our policy panel at the 2021 Irregular Warfare Initiative Conference. It's a real pleasure to host this discussion of irregular warfare policy

with such an esteemed panel. And I'd like to open up by asking a question for Major General Engel, who recently took command of 1st Special Forces Command, which has personnel stationed and deployed in more than 70 countries. And so I'd like to ask you to reflect a little bit on what you expect IW to look like over the next 10 to 20 years if we assume there will be no more large-scale counterinsurgency missions. Honored to join the esteemed panel today. Great opportunity. I know I always learn from the opportunity to learn from the folks that are here. Ambassador Lute, Dr. Kilcullen, Professor Cronin, great to join you. I guess I'd like to start off by, as we approach the 20th anniversary of Afghanistan, just say thanks to all the teammates out there, whether service members, whether interagency,

whether our allies and partners for your service and sacrifice. So, Jake, great question. What do we think IW looks like in the next 10 to 20 years? I guess I would start off with this. As it is with general war, I don't think the nature of IW is going to change, but I do think the character of IW will change. I still think that IW is primarily still going to be contested in both the information and the human dimension. Obviously, it's going to happen in a hyper-connected war with the continued diffusion of technology that somewhat levels the playing field. I think there's going to be less sustained CT or coin operations that you talked about,

but I don't want anybody to walk away thinking that CT is going to go away. I think that's a mission that we're going to have and we're going to have for some time. It's probably going to be more focused on strategic competition. It's probably going to be more about data and information than territory and ideology. And I think that we as practitioners have to start looking at irregular warfare as from a campaign approach. I think it needs to be persistent. It needs to be multi-domain. It needs to be trans-regional. It's going to be a lot less kinetic and more involving information operations, cyber space. But as we look at those, as we look at irregular warfare as a campaign, it still has to have objectives and defined outcomes. And to do that, I think

we're going to have to really have to change our mentality about how we think about irregular warfare and understand that the application of irregular warfare can be done across the competition continuum. And to do it most effectively, it's probably that's going irregular warfare can be done across the competition continuum. And to do it most effectively, it's probably that's going to have to be done. We had a discussion yesterday, I think it was a great point. As we look at irregular warfare, I don't think we can look at the outcomes in a binary aspect. It's not necessarily about win or losing. It's about imposing costs. It's about potentially using IW to deter or prevent conflict or reach some type of homeostasis. I think it's probably going to involve more proxies. And then I would offer again, I think

to do it most effectively, it's going to require even greater participation from the joint force, from the interagency, from intergovernmental, and from our multinational allies and partners. To do this effectively going forward in the future, I think it's really going to have to be a team effort. MR PALLADINO I'd like to actually pick up on that aspect of a team effort that you ended on, sir, and turn to you, Ambassador Lewton, and ask you to reflect a little bit on your time at NATO and share how you understand the Allied perspective on what the next 10 to 20 years hold for regular warfare, and also what that implies or what they see that as implying for their forces,

which then has implications for allies and partners and what they're able to execute on. Well, first of all, thanks to the sponsors and thanks for including me. I think NATO, as it looks at IW in the future, say 10 years, 20 years, it gets a little too fuzzy for me, but say 10 years, right? We'll very much follow the pattern that the US takes. So as General Engel said, near-peer competition is the password these days. We should notice that near-peer competition for NATO obviously is predominantly a competition with Russia, and that we're already conducting irregular warfare across the boundaries of NATO and Russia. I mean, think about the campaign, the Russian campaign in

Crimea and the Donbass today. It's kind of a classic case of the use of irregular warfare. In some cases, I think it actually crosses that boundary from irregular to regular warfare. But they're playing in that space. They're also playing in the space of very much in the space of information warfare. Think about Russian interference in our own elections in 2016. That election interference model is not new to NATO allies. The Russians have been interfering with European elections and campaigns for decades, but also misinformation campaigns, cyber attacks, energy intimidation. All of these are features of what I think we can expect in the future. And the reason for this, again, alluded to by General Ango, is that the fundamental nature of warfare hasn't changed, and neither has the fundamental asymmetry between our and NATO's conventional capabilities and those of our likely opponents. And it's that asymmetry that pushes our opponents

to look for other means, short of conflict. And in NATO language, that's short of what NATO refers to as the Article V threshold. So Article V of the NATO treaty says that that there'll be a collective response to an armed attack. Now, the NATO treaty was written in 1949, right? So armed attack was the was the was the password. But they've adapted over time the notion that armed attack can be construed by way of cyber tactics and so forth. So our opponents will continue to try to duck beneath that threshold, avoid the definition of armed attack, and NATO's going to have to adapt. The good news is that about two months ago, NATO accepted for itself a homework assignment. This is to rewrite what NATO refers to as the strategic concept. It's done about every 10 years or so. It's the foundational strategic document on which the alliance operates. So coming out of Afghanistan and rewriting the strategic concept, I think IW is going to feature in a

significant way in the next 10 years. So I'd like to pick up on a couple of themes you raised. First, the kind of pivot to information warfare and the role of technology and competition in that space. And ask Professor Cronin to share a little bit of her thoughts on how technology is reshaping that landscape. Because, you know, when we think about the ways in which Russia has used IW, many of the ones of the last five years are unthinkable, absent in this kind of algorithmically curated information environment that we all live in right now, or at least they're vastly more expensive for them to execute on. And so Professor Cronin would love to hear your thoughts on this and other aspects of technology shaping IW. Sure. Thanks, Jake. And thank you also to the sponsors and to my fellow

panelists. I'm honored to be in your presence and part of this group. Yes. So I'm going to talk in a little bit more sort of specific detail about particularly the non-state actor role in diffusion of technologies. General Engel, I agree with you wholeheartedly that the diffusion of technologies is narrowing the gap between the United States and its adversaries. It used to be that the U.S. had all the data and all the best technology. And that was kind of the RMA mantra, right? So that's not true. It hasn't been true for a while. Terrorists and insurgents and private armies don't have the best technology. They're usually second or third wave technology, but they're demonstrating their capabilities very well. And technologies that we used to

have control over are diffusing much more quickly than they used to. So the situation we face today is extremely different from the situation that we faced, say, eight or 10 years ago. And looking at the broader picture, I see three major areas that affect the future and the present of irregular warfare. The first is information operations. That's the one that everybody focuses on, especially mobilization. The second one is reach or power projection. And then finally is systems integration. And it used to be that you had to have all three of those. In order to have all three of those in capabilities, you had to be well-resourced and be a national army. But that's no longer the case, and it hasn't been for at least five years.

So starting with mobilization or information operations, we've seen that unfolding with the Taliban. That's not unusual to use communications to engage in information ops, either by exploiting them or shutting them down. But what's different today is the accessibility, the scale, the scope. Everyone has a computer or knows someone who has a computer, a cell phone connected internet. And there's mass interactivity. There's robotic replication of messages, live streaming of attacks. You remember that the first live stream attack was the 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall by Al-Shabaab. That's only, what, eight years ago?

Things are moving fast. There's greater potential for individual targeting, recruitment, grooming. There's a key development in the ability of people to platform hop and also use encrypted apps in recent years. them too. So you had HDS, for example, in Syria copying their call of duty motif. The Taliban paid close attention, and they've been building their information ops for the last couple of decades. I'd argue that their sophisticated use of information ops was far more important than their fighting. They communicated in five languages, so they were focusing both internally and externally. The IEA has a dedicated, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan has a dedicated team devoted to social media, especially Twitter. Hundreds of accounts promoting Twitter hashtags, trending and disseminating messages on Telegram, Instagram. There's a long list. They pay local Afghans also

to disseminate messages. And they're not just doing likes and retweets. They're actually cutting and pasting messages into completely new accounts. So this is very sophisticated work. The U.S. has provided platforms essentially for the enemies to exploit, and that has manipulated the battle space for irregular warfare. Plus, the second big thing is reach. That's been developing for a while. People use clusters of technologies like small UAVs, robots, simple autonomy, 3D printing. Islamic State, again, used quadcopters to intimidate the Iraqi population. In 2017, the Ukrainians used small drones to drop thermite grenades on ammunition depots. The Taliban have also used armed drones. For example, late last year, they used a DJI

Matrix to drop an explosive on the governor's compound in Kunduz and killed his bodyguards while they were playing volleyball. You know, this has a psychological effect. And so much of irregular warfare is about what the people think, what they fear, what they do. Simple systems have huge psychological impact. We may be able to afford $100,000 counter drone capabilities, but other folks can't. And that's important. We're developing drone tracking, drone technology to take these things down, but we're only a slight step ahead of how these second and third wave innovations are happening. More serious grade UAVs, you know, the Houthis given them by the Iranians. This is a bigger subject, but they're appearing throughout the world.

Facial recognition technology is widely accessible. In Afghanistan, we've relinquished biometrics. And with the aid of the ISI, I'm afraid that the Taliban, even as relatively primitive as they are in many respects, with Pakistan's help, I think it's likely they're going to be able to exploit those things. Plus, we're also much more vulnerable targets. The world is saturated with cyber physical systems that have sensors and are directly connected to the internet. And that's a hugely increased attack surface, not, I would say, primarily for the military, but for civilians. And if what you're trying to do is influence a population, that's an enormous change.

And then finally, just to wrap up, how do you handle all that data and that technology? This is where I see us going in the future. Systems integration. Our systems are so complex, data-rich, and advanced that we have to build degrees of autonomy into them in order to simply manage them. And there's a lot of interest among jihadist groups, as well as other informal groups and private armies, to use autonomy. And whenever the United States, China, Russia, Iran demonstrates a new capability, people are paying attention. And it's faster and faster, their ability to innovate. So autonomy is the future.

I think that's where we're headed. In Afghanistan, we've just had a big demonstration of the effective use of information warfare, and they've also captured these databases. We're going to see this going forward. This is where we're headed. integration, and now individuals, small groups, private armies, irregular organizations are able to do all of them, and that's a huge shift in irregular warfare now. And the technology battlefield is entirely different from what it was a decade ago, and it will be entirely different another decade from now. So, Audrey, towards the end of your comment, you raised the question of, or you raised the claim that the Taliban's success was in large part due to real mastery in the synchronization of information operations and other kinds of operations. And I'd like to turn to Dr. Kukala and just to ask,

in light of that, is that one of the key lessons to draw from the last 20 years in Afghanistan? At this moment in particular, that resonates with, I'm sure, a huge share of our audience. But also, you know, what are the other lessons that we should draw from that conflict that can inform not necessarily what was done right or wrong, but that we should take and think about them as we move forward into the next decade? Yeah, no, that's a great topic to add to the discussion, Jake. You know, let's start by going right back to the beginning. On the 7th of December 2001, which was the day that the last Taliban stronghold fell in Kandahar, we had 110 CIA officers, about 300 special forces, and a battalion plus of marines on the ground in

afghanistan so a tiny ground force but we had the full weight of the u.s and allied air forces with us and much more importantly more than 50 000 afghans fighting shoulder to shoulder with us against the taliban and if you look at the periods of success that we've had in the last 20 years, that first campaign in Afghanistan, the combination of the surge and the awakening in Iraq, and then the counter-ISIL campaign in Iraq and Syria, they all tend to follow a similar pattern. So just to quickly draw out some lessons from that. The first one is that unconventional warfare and foreign internal defence types of operations have tended to work much better over the past 20 years than large footprint counterinsurgency. wars of occupation, that the times when we have been there as an auxiliary assisting a motivated partner and as the smaller partner in terms of size have usually worked much better. Second key lesson is, you know, don't get caught in a situation where we end up wanting it more

than our partners do. Like a lot of other people on this call, I've spent much of my waking hours the last three weeks frantically trying to extract our partner force from Afghanistan. And one of the startling things or the starkest things about that is that the Afghan elites that we've evacuated, or in some cases ran away, have done basically nothing to help their own people. have done basically nothing to help their own people. It's been us doing it, indicating that as for much of the war, we've wanted success much more than they have. And I think the third point gets to your point about propaganda or IO. The Afghan way of war is all about talking while fighting and fighting while talking. And we tend to do one or the other.

In 2001, we didn't even bother to negotiate a deal with the Taliban after they were defeated. This time around, the Taliban won and defeated us by a combination of putting military pressure on isolated garrisons while offering them a way out and then sending in trusted interlocutors to negotiate a surrender. And with that, and with the network effect where, sure, I can keep fighting, but all the other garrisons have surrendered, they're able to create a sense of inevitability, right,

that they were going to succeed. Napoleon said that, you know, the moral is to the physical, the three is to one. I think we see an even higher ratio here in Afghanistan. What we've seen is a moral collapse by the physically stronger party. And I think there's a huge lesson there from the standpoint of irregular warfare. It also underpins a fourth lesson, which is the critical importance of leverage. At many different times in the Afghan war, we gave away our leverage.

For example, when we announced the surge but simultaneously told the Taliban exactly how long they had to wait until we were going to leave. Or when, you know, 18 months ago, we gave away all of our remaining leverage in negotiating with the Taliban in Doha and thereby pulled the rug out from under the Afghan government. Fifth one I think is really important from a professional standpoint is that the partner forces we work with need to out-compete the enemy. They don't need to mimic us. They need to look and operate and have similar roles in society to the other irregular forces that we're trying to oppose, or in some cases, the enemy occupation force, rather than building elements

that look like us but are just sort of a cut-price version of US and allied militaries. Final two lessons, interagency balance. We need to really focus on trimming the military footprint down so that it fits what the interagency is capable of doing and what our partners are capable of affording, rather than trying to force feed other agencies to grow them rapidly like a Thanksgiving turkey

to the point where they can temporarily waddle alongside a gigantic US military force. And it's really important to, again, come up with a small footprint that is balanced across the agencies that need to operate. And then the final point, and this is not mine, it comes from Gordon McCormack, who's a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. The big lesson of the last month is insurgencies degrade slowly, states collapse quickly, right? States can appear to be fully functional right up to the last minute, but they have a lot of complex interlocking moving parts

that all have to work together. And when the system starts to unravel, it rapidly and chaotically collapses. The advantage that insurgents have is the more you shrink them, the harder they are to find and the slower they degrade. in that insurgent manner rather than tie ourselves or shackle ourselves to state structures that are just not survivable in these kinds of operating environments. So I want to pick up on, there were three things you said, Dave, that I really want to kind of put to the current and former general officers on the call, which is you identified the need to talk while fighting and fight while talking, the importance of out-competing the enemy, talk while fighting and fight while talking, the importance of out-competing the enemy, not crafting forces that look like us,

and then the understanding that there's a kind of nonlinear dynamic often on the side that we want to support, but a more linear dynamic on the other side. And I'm curious, Major General Engel and Ambassador Lute, how we should change the way we think about exercising and planning and training up the force to be able to take into account some of those insights. And it's been a long time since I was in the exercise, but they never ended with, you know, and then we're going to get to homeostasis. They always ended with something very different. And so I'm curious how you think we can change things to do better in these contexts that have the character that Professor

Cokhalen identified. Yeah, Jake, I think it's a great question. So there's obviously a number of challenges there. You know, we just described an insurgency for at least our part of it has been going on for, you know, for 20 years. How do you package into an exercise over a couple of weeks an outcome that takes 20 years to achieve? So there's a temporal aspect that makes it a challenge, but I think it's something we have to work towards. I don't think it's just insurgencies. I think it's the training on irregular warfare

as a concept writ large. How do we build exercises with the depth of scenario that allow us to exercise those capabilities inside our irregular warfare portfolio that actually deter us from going to a quote-unquote phase three and not the point of the exercise, which is just to get phase two so we can actually exercise the kinetic component of it. And I think we're working towards towards some of those. But I still think that we have some work to do. And a lot of it is just building in the depth of exercise that forces us to actually work through those capabilities.

exercise that forces us to actually work through those capabilities? Yeah, I'm not sure I can add a lot to those points, except to say that exercising irregular warfare is exponentially more difficult and more complex, harder to design than sort of exercising the conventional fight. You know, the opposing forces famous at the National Training Center and the JRTC, you know, the conventional units go to school on them. They train against an enemy doctrine and so forth. And irregular warfare opponents defy all that. I think training, if I were designing an overarching training concept, it would feature very heavily the study of history before getting boots on the ground. I mean, just going to school on the Taliban campaign, I would say the last decade is a masterclass in irregular warfare. And then perhaps based on a deep historical understanding or study,

then exercise vignettes, which get into a particular vignette, could, for example, get into the use, the effective use of the enemy's information operations, or the intersection between, as Dave Coquillan said, between the political impacts and the security impacts. And I just want to, aside from this question itself, go back and echo a point that we cannot miss that David highlighted. And that's this question of political collapse versus security collapse. You know, the major cities in Afghanistan did not fall to the force of arms. They fell to a campaign that put long, long standing, durable information at work, and they eventually collapsed by way of politics. You know, it's, and one last point, I don't want to dominate here, but the notion of talking and fighting at the same time.

You know, we had our idea of what talking to the Taliban would be, right? And for even the last four or five years, the last several ISAF commanders, even the military commanders admitted that there would be a political solution here, right? Not a military solution, which is kind of remarkable, right? Because that's all wars end with some be a political solution here, right? Not a military solution, which is kind of remarkable, right? Because that's all wars end with some sort of political solution. But we eventually got to admit to ourselves that there was going to be a political solution. But the political solution we imagined was a conventional diplomatic conference table in Doha somewhere, right? In a sort of probably overly ornate room, right, with the Taliban on one side, and the Afghan government on the other side, we would close

the door, okay, maybe Zal would stay in, right, but everybody else would leave. These two Afghan parties would negotiate, compromise and reach a power sharing agreement, which they would then initial with, you know, elaborate pens and a signing ceremony. So we imagined a top down political process. What actually happened was we got a political process, but it was micro. It was grassroots. It was bottom up. OK, much as David Kilcullen has already highlighted. So we have to be a little more agile here in terms of how politics and the security situation intersect.

So I'd just like to jump in there. Actually, Ambassador, I couldn't agree with you more about the political importance. I mean, we're all great Clausewitzians in the United States, and I used to teach Clausewitz for many years at the National War College. But for some reason, we have this belief, and it's coming out more than ever now in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, that those in the military should not be aware of or deeply sort of tutored in politics. And if you know the history of Afghanistan, what has just happened with respect to the tribes and to the ways that the Afghan National Army turned over their weapons in many places is absolutely consistent with what the Afghans have done in their way of warfare for centuries. So we saw this coming many years ago. And I think it's a shame that we weren't looking much more at the politics and the culture of the place long ago.

The other thing I would like to pick up on, Ambassador Lute, and what you said was that I think we should have had a regional agreement. And we really could have made an effort to try to reach out to the regional powers. And, you know, everybody's, you know, I hate the I told you so mantra that people have, but I was writing about this many years ago, how we need to have, you know, a broader agreement that can actually be stabilized within which the Afghan national government can be not just a proxy of the United States, but also have a more effective relationship with the regional powers around it. And the United States could have made that happen.

But then the last thing is on the interagency question, General Engel and Dave, I don't disagree with you at all that we need more interagency. But Dave, you were at the State Department. And we've been talking about having better interagency now since, I don't know, what, 2003 maybe? And it's not going to happen. When I was at the War College, interagency meant the military decides what the mission is and gets itself on the ground. And then it sort of sets Foreign Service officers and various other people from AID in the places that it wants them.

And yet the other agencies are not funded. They don't have the capacity. Even now in the Biden administration where we're talking about turning over to, you know, leading with our diplomacy, have you looked at how few people have actually been confirmed? We don't have a NATO ambassador. We don't have an ambassador to Australia, China, London, France, Germany. I could go on and I don't remember them all, but how are we supposed to lead with our diplomacy when we don't have diplomats on the ground? And oh, by the way, how are we supposed to lead with the interagency when we don't provide the kind of funding apart from DOD and Intel, which I'm not arguing against their funding, but why aren't we raising the other agencies so that they're actually able to do

something and fulfill this image of interagency that we've been talking about for at least 15 years? I might comment on that, Jake, if it's all right. Yeah, just to reinforce the point I made in the lessons. The goal here, I think, is not to grow the interagency so it can hang with the military. The goal is to trim down the deployed forward element of the military to achieve a balancing country. And, you know, when I was at State, we worked very hard to create sort of a State Department equivalent of Jedberg's and to have a capability to move with a J-set or to operate on the ground.

And we had a few people from USAID and from State. Later, we had the 3161 program. But, you know, I think part of what we did here was we had an interagency food fight about who should do what in the interagency instead of saying what do we need to do on the ground and then later on figure out which agency needs to own those people right um and i think that's a you know think about prts in afghanistan we had an entire civil affairs capability sitting idle for a large period but we had folks that wanted to build you know um a capability to demonstrate they were participating. And I'll point to one other interagency wrinkle, if you like, of the war in Afghanistan,

which is when we created the SRAP office, which we did for our purposes to create our belly button to coordinate strategy. And then every other one of the 54 countries involved went hey that's a great idea and they created their own s-rap as well and all we did was add another whole layer of i mean general luke can speak to this but a whole layer of just crazy coordination on top of what we were doing and the taliban had the great advantage that you know they were they were just one you know actor in a uh and we were trying to run this incredibly complicated, maybe 155 strategies when you added up all the military diplomatic and aid strategies of 54 countries. One other level of complexity here, I agree with what's already been said with regard

to the challenges of interagency, which I note now there's a new euphemism, right? Maybe because interagency cooperation didn't prove very helpful or descriptive, you know, it's now whole of government, you know, and that's, but it's just a euphemism, right? It will suffer the same sorts of challenges. But the Taliban had a huge advantage because they were on the battlefield for 20 years. I mean, look at who's populating the senior ranks of the Taliban had a huge advantage because they were on the battlefield for 20 years. I mean, look at who's populating the senior ranks of the Taliban government, transition government today. There are pretty recognizable feature folks. So that is not the case on our part of the conflict. Even the special ops guys who were conducting irregular warfare-like tactics or using those tactics in the field tended to rotate frequently and frequently not go back to the same place.

And when you apply that across the theater across 20 years, we have a whole bunch of people who learned a little about Afghanistan, but we don't have anybody who mastered the case. Well, we have a couple, David, I would put in that category. But that sort of understanding asymmetry or knowledge or expertise, the asymmetry and expertise, I think really caused us to pay a heavy price, all the way up to the last several weeks, when we didn't really recognize what was happening on the ground. Even by the way, before we withdrew, because the fuse that eventually led to the implosion of the Afghan state was lighted years ago, and has been burning slowly, almost imperceptibly for years. And it only led to the breakdown, the collapse of the state most recently. So there's a lot to unpack here in terms of expertise, cooperation, and so forth. Hey, Jake, if I could, I'd like to go back to a point that Professor Cronin made and just – and ask this from

the panelists is – you brought up the point that information played a pivotal role in ultimately the success of the Taliban, maybe as important as fighting. And I would agree with that statement. So my question is why do you think that the country, as you described, that built the platforms that our adversaries are using to, I would say, out-compete us in the information environment, why are we unable to compete effectively against Russia and China, let alone someone like the Taliban? Well, for one thing, we have a very complex situation with respect to regulation. And we created the tech platforms, but we really didn't think about the practical implications of how to handle their sort of positive and negative aspects.

Our adversaries, Russia and China, for unfortunate reasons, don't have those concerns. They're actually using our inventions very effectively, even while we're trying to figure out how not to be dissolving in a kind of a January 6th mobilization through the use of our tech platforms from below. We're trying to find the via media, and we're not even close. Our ability to actually function in a stable way in the use of warfare, but also, I would even argue more broadly in our society, has decades to go before we've effectively integrated our new tech platforms in ways that protect people's rights, but also provide stability at home and abroad. So I think that's a part of a much bigger

problem. And I don't think we've handled it well. And I think the campaign in Afghanistan was not unconnected to that. I'll add two points to that while agreeing with what Audrey said. One is that information is not a standalone battle space. It's an adjunct maneuver space alongside kinetics. And your information works to the extent your kinetics work and vice versa. So you're in a sort of a one-two punch. And we saw this from the Taliban, but we've also seen it from the Russians in Ukraine and from the Chinese. So I think that's one key point.

And the other one is the messenger is the message, right? So when you're a isolated Afghan police post in the middle of nowhere, it's not some random dude that turns up and says, hey, the Taliban are going to kill you all unless you leave. It's a guy you know, who's part of the community that you've seen for a long time that everyone has respect for. And he comes in and he's like, Hey, buddy, love you like a brother, but they're going to kill you. Right. And it's that, it's that relationship that's built over time between the messenger and the person receiving the message that makes it credible. That's why we've seen some failures from the Russians and the Chinese in attempts to influence Western societies, because they don't have that kind of commonality that you see with, for example, the Taliban.

So I think we have to, you know, really treat it as an adjunct maneuver space to kinetics and think of a sort of infokinetic maneuver rather than one or the other. David's last point really intersects, goes back to the security force assistance mission and our building of the Afghan security forces, both army and in the case of David's example, the local policemen. I mean, in too many cases, we designed an Afghan army that sort of was a national army, sort of modeled on our own image. And the result was when you got down to the tactical level that you had Afghan Tajik soldiers in Pashtun areas. So of course, they weren't familiar. They needed as many interpreters as we did. So it was a complete misfit in terms of

the force that we needed, the Afghan partner force we needed and the one we designed. Yes. And if I could just add in great agreement with those points, could just add in great agreement with those points. You know, we built this tremendous capability within Afghanistan. What was it, something like 12.8? I may not have the figure right, but internet users, 12.8 million. And then, you know, we didn't really think about the other side of information operations. We weren't really on top of the fact that those information operations could be used very effectively by the Taliban. So I want to ask a follow-up that's implied in a lot of what's just been discussed, but I do feel obliged to just point out that when it comes to the ability to operate in the information environment, and Dave just alluded to this, our great power competitors, our peers,

are often as disadvantaged as we are. So China's efforts to engage in Africa, for example, have as best we can tell from the best social science that's been done on this, been extremely counterproductive. People in the areas where they're doing lots of programs are way more anti-Chinese than people in other areas. And it's been increasing corruption in measurable ways. And so we're not alone in being kind of a giant elephant that's stomping around and missing the local context. But part of what was implicit in that last discussion is something that one of the participants asked, which is, you know, if IW is that much harder and more complex in the ways we've all been talking about, then why aren't we devoting the same institutional capacity to our

ability to conduct and support IW as we are to conventional warfare? Why is IW still an institutional as well as operational afterthought? I'll take a swing at that, I guess. So just from our aspect, and then we have to talk about this inside our force as well, and I think being the premier practitioners of irregular warfare, because the job of the Army is first and foremost to be lethal, and you have to be able to execute those court tasks to be able to close with and destroy the enemy, because the outcome, if you're not prepared for that, obviously is incredibly dire. So you have to be prepared for that. And then it becomes, okay,

how much time and effort do you have left to be able to do these other tasks that you do know are absolutely needed, but you're limited in either money, time, or people to be able to do them. And that's a challenge. That's a balance that we have to be able to come to grips with. And so I think it's, as we look forward, it's what, and I agree with the panelists and everything they've said here and some scribbling notes down. As I said, I always learn a tremendous amount when we do these. What are the lessons that we take from Afghanistan and how do we apply them into IW going forward, again, in a strategic competition environment? So how do we learn the lessons of, OK, we got we got beat in the information environment by the Taliban. How do we not ensure that we don't continue to get beat in the information environment by Russia and China?

There is as they're either stealing intellectual property or they're creating divisiveness in our country or attacking our elections. And so it's a matter of finding the balance from a military aspect of remaining lethal, first and foremost, but then putting enough capital towards those other things to be able to be part of a whole of government nation, because it's not a military problem to solve. I think we're part of the solution, but it has to be that overall team effort. I would simply add that IW requires such an interagency, such a whole government approach that actually has no home. I mean, inside the uniformed military, it does have home, special forces groups and so forth, but across the government, it doesn't. And yet,

we can be, we the military, can be as prepared as humanly possible, but we will always continue to fall short on this until we are organized for it. And frankly, if you look at the organizational adaptation across the interagency over 20 years, it's really minimal. I mean, we essentially went to the situation room, decided what we were going to do, and then everybody ran back to his cubbyholes, right, and did exactly what they did yesterday. And the plan for tomorrow was more of the same. So we never really, I mean, PRTs are a bit of a organizational adaptation, but as David said, they had shortcomings themselves. But short of PRTs, it's really difficult to search for organizational adaptations, even though we've been doing this

for 20 years, which is, to me, just remarkable. I'd put one slight comment on that while agreeing in general terms. There is one really important innovation, which is the fourth battalion um and and the capabilities that reside within that in the special forces group which is only a relatively recent adaptation although in some ways it takes us back to our our roots um but the other thing i'd say is what's just happened in the last month like you want gray zone. We just did gray zone, right? We're doing it now. And I think there's a huge amount of lessons learned in terms of how the organization can adapt and, and operate in that way. And we tend to think of the gray zone as

kind of a jungle with all these dangerous adversaries lurking behind the bushes, you know, but in the last month or so we've been doing the lurking, you know, and I think there's some lessons to learn on that because as our adversaries, Russia and China in particular, step forward and they take more of a dominant role in some places, they're essentially creating a target array. And I don't mean that necessarily as a warmongering statement, but just, it's just a fact of life that if you think about irregular warfare as imposing costs and you think about the cost balance and the way you affect an adversary's calculus, that's just actually shifted significantly in our favour

in the last month. And I think we need to think about how to get out of that sort of war on terror era defensive crouch and start to be a little more, you know, aggro, as we say down under. Yeah, I would only add that we're really good at being lethal. But of course, war is the continuation of politics by other means, right? So I think we need to be just a little bit more politically savvy, understanding that you don't necessarily have to be lethal in order to win a war, which we know now from the Taliban, which are heavily, you know, outgunned and overshadowed

and, you know, compared to the American military, should easily have been defeated. But politics is an area that we have a hard time integrating well into our lethality. And often the two work against each other, right? You know, the weakest and most dangerous time of the Taliban in their entire existence was late 2015, early 2016, when Mullah Mansur had basically provoked a rebellion inside the Taliban. They were, you know, Miran Shah Shura was in rebellion

against the Rabari Shura down in Quetta. You had guys out in Helmand running their own anti-Taliban Taliban. The whole thing was falling apart because the Taliban had figured out that Mullah Mansur had been lying to them about Mullah Omar being alive, that he'd been massively corrupt. And he'd been sort of like Wizard of Oz behind the curtain pretending to be Mullah Omar and everyone was massively pissed off with him. We solved their problem on the 21st of May 2016 with a drone strike where we killed Mullah Mansour. He popped up. He happened to be on our J-PAL.

We knocked the guy out because we saw him and we solved their political problem, right? And the current leader, Habatullah, came in after Mullah Mansur. So often the political goals we're trying to achieve run counter to the kinetics of what we're doing. And we've got to figure out how to do a better job with that, even at a more macro level. In 2011, we killed so many Taliban middle-level commanders that we reduced the average age of Taliban commanders in R.C. South by a full decade. So we basically wiped out the middle layer. And now we sit back and we say, why can't we get these guys to stick to an agreement?

Well, shit, we destroyed their command and control system. That's why. So, you know, the politics and the kinetics have to be integrated into a single, you know, cyberkinetic, infokinetic way of fighting. Otherwise, we can end up, at cross-purposes. Really easy to say, super hard to do, right? And super hard to translate that

into C2 arrangements and interagency structures and money and all that. But I think that is the challenge. You know, the Taliban are going to have their own political problems, right? I mean, so they had

two essential war aims, right? Jihad against us, so get rid of us, the occupiers, check. And then the second one was get rid of the puppet government, the proxy government, which they saw as imposed by us, check. So now what is it that actually provides the coherence for the movement, which has seen them as the more coherent political party for 20 years. I mean, David's right to note that there was a bit of a ripple there for a while. But generally speaking, and in relative terms, they were by far the more coherent, the more cohesive, and the more consistent of the political players, to include us, by the way. OK, so but now their politics are going to be challenged.

So it's going to be very interesting. While they're not now conducting irregular warfare, perhaps somewhat against the Islamic state, but they're going to have internal challenges, too. And it'll be interesting to see what happens when these two sort of cohering elements are taken from them. Yeah, and especially given the contradiction between the fact that they want international aid and legitimacy and the fact that they've got people who are, you know, defecting to ISIS-K because they don't believe that the Taliban is representing their interests. So it'll be a big challenge for them going forward.

Absolutely. You've got, I mean, Zabirullah Mujahid came out and said, you know, we've got an inclusive government and all the policy wonks at the Washington Post who didn't pay any attention to Afghanistan until about two minutes ago said, oh, it's not inclusive because it doesn't have women in it or Tajiks. That's not what he meant, right? He meant it's inclusive of all the factions within the Taliban that we have to unify. Otherwise, we're going to fall apart again. The big enemy for them is not ISIS-K

and it's not us right now, it's disunity. And you've got the Northern Taliban who are hugely pissed off. You've got the Haqqanis versus the Kandaharis. There's a whole group of different factional, you know, centripetal forces that are going to pull these guys apart if they don't get a grip on it.

If we really wanted to take them down, if we had the moral will to do that, that would be the place to start. But that's, I think, very much the problem set. And going back to something General Angle said right at the beginning, if I was going to make one change to Robin Sage or one change to the JITIC to make it more reflect the reality of irregular warfare as we've lived it in the last 20 years. It would be to include what you might call the guerrilla diplomacy phase, right? Where you got to get a bunch of people who don't necessarily want to work together to partner up for a short term operation. Think about the capture of Kunduz in September, October 2015.

That battle took about two weeks, but it took them nine months of guerrilla diplomacy to get the band together to actually do that operation. That's the political piece. And if you learn how to do that in training, you tend to be a lot more familiar with how they think from a political standpoint. And I think you tend to be more savvy in terms of applying the political warfare piece that goes alongside the kinetics. So this leads into naturally, I think, a discussion of structural changes and as a practical matter, how you get to them. And there's a good question from the audience on this, and it'd be interesting to hear the

panelists' thoughts on this, which is the audience member points out that our executive band structure is essentially the same as it has been since the end of World War II. It's based on a post-World War II Cold War structure, and Ambassador Lute alluded to this. And so the question was, is it time for a 9-11 type commission to examine how the interagency planned and conducted itself over the last 20 years, how policy was developed and implemented. And I think the subtext of this question is if we're going to change some of the things which led to problems that we've been talking about for the last hour, there has to be some like catalyzing event. And it seems like, you know, that kind of commission

and report has in the past served such a catalytic process in other parts of the government. So I'd be curious to hear the panelists' thoughts on that. Well, we typically don't adapt in the United States until we've suffered a crisis of some sort. Right. So you think of the adaptations at the end of World War II, then points in the Cold War. at the end of World War II, then at points in the Cold War, and certainly I think the last couple months have demonstrated that there's a lot to learn, and that we were not overall successful in Afghanistan. I think the same basic line applies to Iraq as well,

although there you have a different set of problems. The challenge is that the last time we adapted internally in the U.S. was after 9-11. So you saw the Director of National Intelligence, you saw the Department of Homeland Security, you saw the National Counterterrorism Center and so forth, which were all designed to sort of fix the problems found in the 9-11 Commission report. If you go back into the DOD experience, of course, the last big adaptation was the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, right, which mandated jointness inside the department. But remember, and as I talked to Capstone students and more college students about this, you know, we tend to think, well, Goldwater-Nichols was so logical

and has worked so well that everybody was for it. Wrong. All the joint chiefs well, Goldwater-Nichols is so logical and has worked so well that everybody was for it. Wrong. All the Joint Chiefs resisted Goldwater-Nichols up to the very end. And it is a classic case where it actually did take an act of Congress to get something done. Right. So that same sort of bureaucratic inertia and bureaucratic resistance to change, I think, would apply multiple times over if you tried to apply some sort of mandate for jointness or mandate for interagency cooperation across the government. So I'm not optimistic. say that, but we have a clear defeat. We have just suffered a very clear defeat that it is impossible to spin or talk ourselves out of, although I'm sure people are going to try to do that with great determination. And nobody ever sat down and racked their brains about, why did I succeed? They always just put it down to their own sheer, raw, naked, tactical brilliance. So I'm just awesome. it's when you have a defeat that you're actually confronted you know think about

the you know prussian army after getting their asses kicked by napoleon right which which uh audrey's written about or think about you know the germans after world war one it's being defeated that actually prompts that you know um real grassroots look at what do we need to do to change and i think we want to make sure we don't lose this opportunity that unfortunately we're now faced with to really do that. And while I fully agree with General Lute, I'm not optimistic. It's probably the best opportunity we've had recently to do it. And we want to make sure it doesn't turn into some kind of partisan propaganda match, but actually becomes a real hard look at what we need to do different. Yeah, I would support all of that. Only add that the problem with respect to comparing this to the

9-11 Commission is that you had Congress then. You had the ability and the will and the strong drive on the part of Congress to look at what happened and try to figure it out and come up with solutions. You don't have that now. You know, Congress is extremely polarized. I don't see the political will and I don't see a broad perspective that this is a defeat, more a kind of a, you know, reorienting. It's not clear across the entire political spectrum that that's how this is going to be interpreted. So I'm not optimistic. I don't think the 9-11 commission is the kind of thing that we're going to be able to come up with. I mean, look what just happened with the January 6th, you know, effort to try to get a commission. What could be more

existentially threatening than having people within our own country trying to, you know, overturn our Congress and overturn the, you know, them certifying the results of an election? What is more sort of core to the United States democracy? So I'm not optimistic. I agree very vigorously with my panelists, but I don't see it happening. Yeah, Jake, I agree as well. I don't think our national security decision-making apparatus is optimized for the 21st century. I know there's been some really good work done on this subject, the Project for New Security Forum, and James Locker, I think he did some tremendous work, who happened to be part of the Goldwater-Nichols effort in 1986 as a congressional staffer. I think we came very close there to success. We just didn't quite get there. But I think it's something we absolutely have to take on because the national security making apparatus just does

not move at the pace that things are happening in the world today. And it's only going to get faster. But we can take chunks out of it. You know, for example, we've all talked about the fusion of technology, a hyper-connected world at Offer. There's no home and away game anymore. There's no you can sit on the shores and just that problem is somewhere else. It's here and it's now, especially when we talk about from information perspective. But yeah, you look at how we are set up across all of our inter agencies, it's all based upon geography.

Whether there is no more, geography doesn't matter less and less, but yet that's how we're set up. And so those are things we can just start to pick apart to make us more effective and be able to deal with the future operating environment, how it's going to be in the 21st century and further on. I mean, if I could mandate two fundamental bureaucratic reforms, the first would be, while geography may matter less, it matters a lot when you're not lined up, right? And if you line up the bureaucratic maps of the US government, the Unified Command Plan and DoD does not align with the State Department organization. It does not align with either the analytical cells or nor the operative cells inside the CIA. So, you know,

as a combatant commander, for example, you've got your area, it's well established, but you've got to deal with most of the State Department just to coordinate in your area because they're not lined up. The second would be to admit to ourselves that we can't be a mile wide and an inch deep in terms of expertise. I mean, even the term general officer today, I think belies a problem. What we need is expertise, and that means sustained, focused, continuous engagement on particular problem sets, whether they're geographic or information or weather. But our current assignment process, much as it's reflected in our experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, is a revolving door, right? And so you can't build sufficient expertise to get at some of the problems we've suggested today. If you're learning Afghanistan on one year stints, and it's, you know, it's not

a pleasant place to operate, but the worst thing is to lose it after 20 years. So we never, in my view, built the expertise required to understand the nature of this irregular warfare problem. And part of that is our assignments process. I would, again, just I don't want to be the Pollyanna here, but I point to a couple of things that I think are positive steps. One is the SFABs, right? brigades that are regionally aligned and can pick up a lot of the slack in terms of what the gap between FID and COIN, that SFA piece, and work closely with an SF group in the field. I think that's a really important adaptation that shows some hope in terms of what we're talking about here.

And then the other one is innovations like the AfPak hands, which was temporary, but did actually make a significant impact on the ground. And I think, you know, I think it was Stan McChrystal said a couple of times when we were in Afghanistan, imagine how differently we'd be fighting this war if none of us got to go home until we won, right? And I think one of the things that the interagency often looks askance at SF, but also just DOD generally, is that we have these regular tours, if it's six months or 12 months or 15 months.

But, you know, you still have guys that worked. Now, there's CIA officers now that have been working nothing but Afghanistan for 20 years, right? There's State Department people who did three to five-year tours in Baghdad or Kabul, and they look at us rolling in for our sort of 90-day or 180-day tour, and they're like, you know. So I think aligning temporarily and regionally aligning to the extent that we can preserve some of those adaptations and institutionalize them for next time. Hopefully we'll get to make new mistakes instead of making the same set again that we made this time around. David and Ambassador Lute, I think,

make some great points there. You know, my concern going forward is we've talked about the importance of interagency aspect of it. And most of us over the past 20 years have developed those relationships somewhere on a battlefield. And as those things go away, the concern is we're actually going to lose the relationships that we have built inside the interagency. And so I think we have to look for ways to almost do that forced integration. And do you want to go to, I agree, you know, on the geography piece, GCC is not a lot of state, not a lot of the CIA, not lined up with their intelligence agencies. That's always been a problem. And so I would offer one additional one, which is just like

we mandated joint services at some point, that you mandate interagency service, give somebody a joint quote unquote credit for serving in their interagency to force us into being able to work together. I think we're going to need that. Another thing I would offer too is a little bit of a change of mentality I talked about very beginning. We as a country, I think, have to be more comfortable with being able to conduct irregular warfare campaigns in that gray zone that David talked about and understand they're going to be long duration. They're not going to maybe necessarily have a defined outcome. It may be able to achieve some type of homeostasis and we're okay with that. We have to be okay with that. But it can't have this short mentality because that's not how those things will work. But eventually, as the ambassador said, it's better

than losing after 20 years. So I want to try and ask the panel how we resolve a fundamental tension in this last piece of discussion, because we want know, we want to not be a mile wide and inch deep. We want to line up the geographic distinctions between the commands above the country level, so that we have more synchronization between different elements of national power. We want interagency service at the same time as we want to be deeper in some set of places. We also want to be able to deal with campaigns and efforts that aren't nicely organized or tightly organized along geographic lines, especially when we think about competition with great power peers. And so how do we reconcile those two imperatives to both move away from

geography and be a little bit deeper in a set of places around the world? Well, I mean, I think you've got to have a blend of both, right? Because people still live on geography. So, I mean, getting ourselves organized geographically is a good start. But then I think there's an equivalent or parallel track to getting ourselves organized functionally. And the functional responsibilities for things like information and so forth are also not

aligned, right? So it shouldn't be surprising that while we struggle with cooperation on a geographic basis, we also struggle with cooperation on a functional basis. So I think you have to do both. I mean, and, you know, if you look at the wiring diagrams, the organizational diagrams of our departments, the pieces are there. There are both geographic areas, functional and functional areas, but they're not bureaucratically lined up and they're not forced to cooperate. So it's, you know, it's a sizable, it's a sizable challenge. I, you know, I know this sounds glib, but like by, with, and through, you know, I know this sounds glib, but like by, with, and through.

Let's take the example that we created, this amazingly awesome interagency system that would take somebody, put them through selection, give them all the field skills they needed, and then they would get to do nothing but five years of full immersion, cultural and linguistic training associated with, I don't know, Kalaygal in Afghanistan, right? And after that hugely expensive, extremely difficult process, that person would still have roughly the same level of knowledge as a five-year-old from that

valley, right? You're much better off to have people that understand the mechanics of how to do by, with, and through, how to work in that environment, understand the incentives that are on your partner, you know, sort of military or civil advising capability, and then can work with, you know, the smartest people from that valley to make it happen, right? And I think, you know, this is why we say that partnerships and people matter a lot more than, you know, technologies. And it's actually true. I mean, you know, I hate to admit that anything in our doctrine is true, but that one actually is. So, you know, I think that's where partnerships, ethnically appropriate SOF, by the way, which is one of our big weaknesses, and the ability to just tap into those local networks becomes really important.

Yeah, I'm just going to violently agree with both Ambassador Lute and Dr. Cullin. I think that we have a tendency to be extremely superficial in our knowledge of different regions, and there's every career incentive to do that. Because if you're seen as being too deeply aligned to a particular region, your career is not going to go beyond a certain level. You're not going to get to the executive level for sure. You really have to be able to be a generalist. Part of this is a cultural thing for the United States. And part of it is the way that our government was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War. I would say also that it's

very hard to talk about getting the State Department and AID, notably those two, to work equally with the other branches of government if they're so poorly resourced. And also, I mean, Congress is not giving the State Department the kind of support that it needs compared to other agencies. You know, I'm not just arguing for them, but we have a very unbalanced way of resourcing. We have an unbalanced way of lobbying Congress. If you look at the capabilities of our intelligence organizations and the intelligence committees, and if you look at the capabilities of our military,

their ability to lobby Congress, all fine things, not arguing against that, but where's the State Department? Where's our diplomacy? Where are our cultural experts? They're not in positions where they have a tremendous amount of strength and longevity and resourcing when it comes to the American government, in my view. Yeah, and I might be biased on the subject, but I'll absolutely, I agree with all the panelists. I'll hit a point that David hit on, which is, is it through with in my aspect? And again, biased being the practitioner of the indigenous approach, incredibly difficult to replicate that level of expertise that you're going to get by working with that partner. And so it's how do you build a force

that's capable of being able to leverage that partner and allowing that partner to be the face of the problem. And so information, I think, is a great example that when we talk about conducting information warfare, information operations, we always talk about, hey, what message do we want to create? It's not the message we want to create. It's what message is going to resonate within that target audience and who is the messenger of that. And about 98% of the places we're at, we are not the most credible messenger to provide that message. It's the host nation and they're the ones that are going to understand how that's going to resonate inside of their target audience. So it's working with that host nation to develop an effective

message that they think is going to be most effective inside that particular environment. So absolutely the through with and by. Developing the cultural expertise, you know, that and we we regionally specialize to be able to try to develop that over years. And I think we do a good job of that. And we build generational, not transactional relationships. You know, we start with folks that come in brand new in their militaries, and they end up potentially in senior positions of their governments. I think that provides us a lot of influence as we go forward that are available for the elements of national power to utilize. So I think we do a pretty good job of

that. But creating someone that looks like inside our force is incredibly difficult inside the professional development model that we have. And I think it's something that we have to get after because as we look towards the future, you know, I don't think that we necessarily have the right skill sets in our formations that we're going to need for the future. And so if, how do we go out and find those skill sets and then how do we be able to put them inside the professional development model that we can keep them as part of our team for decades. And we don't, we actually don't punish them for coming in for the, with the unique skill set that we're actually trying to build.

And that's something we're looking at. So on that small set of challenges from the panel to the next generation and the people on this call, on the, on the credits, thank you very much to the panelists. Thank you to everyone who joined. When we meet next year, we look forward to hearing from some of the several hundred people listening how you've addressed these problems so that the 10 years after the next one are much better than the last. Thank you all.

And we'll see you the rest of the day. Thank you. Thanks, Horst. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, folks. Thank you. Thank you again for listening to this bonus episode of the Irregular Warfare podcast.

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