School of War - Ep. 1: H.R. McMaster on the Gulf War

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Biography H. R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was the 26th assistant to the president for National Security Affairs. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served as a commissioned officer in the United States Army for thirty-four years before retiring as a Lieutenant General in June 2018. He is the author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World and Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam.  Times 03:10 - Introduction 04:02 - Biography 06:35 - Leading Eagle Troop 08:16 - Post Cold War preparation for Desert Shield and Desert Storm 15:17 - The Battle of the 73 Easting 23:17 - Advantages of the American military 26:12 - Overconfidence in American military dominance 29:16 - China's reaction to the Gulf War and technological development 32:30 - China's tactics 35:04 - The Biden administration's withdrawal from Afghanistan Recorded August 31, 2021

On the 26th of February 1991, a young armored captain led his unit, Eagle Troop's second squadron, second armored cavalry regiment, into battle in the desert of Iraq, meeting the enemy in a place so featureless that the engagement came to be known as the Battle of the 73 Easting. Eagle Troop devastated its Iraqi adversaries, who were well-armed and part of what was regarded as a formidable military establishment, inflicting grievous casualties on the enemy while suffering little in return. such encounters were occurring up and down the battlefield. It seemed like the American military had finally shaken off the legacy of Vietnam and notched a wind so lopsided that for a moment, the term superpower couldn't fully capture the nature of American dominance.

We'd need new terms like hyperpower and unipolar moment. And our future adversaries, Chinese communists and Islamic extremists knew that they would have to find new ways to fight us. They did. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

The people who knocked these buildings down. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. I'm Aaron McLean, and I'm delighted that you're joining me here today for this new podcast, which we're calling the School of War. So why a new podcast about a subject as grim as warfare? Today I work in national security policy in Washington, D.C., but I'm a Marine Infantry Veteran of Afghanistan, and I come from a military family.

My dad fought as an infantryman in World War II later went on to serve in Vietnam. So I'm personally familiar with the suffering and deprivation that combat imposes on troops and on civilians, unfortunately. enough to be in its vicinity. Avoiding war is a good thing, but I'm worried that Americans are increasingly avoiding knowledge of war. Few of us, proportionally speaking, serve in the military today. Fewer still have seen combat or been anywhere near it. Compared to the World War II generation, our collective national knowledge of combat is much less substantial. Meanwhile, the academic study of military history, of strategy is not exactly the trendy or popular thing on campus, except of course among the students who flock to such classes on the rare occasions that they're offered.

The overall result of all of this, I worry, is that we're becoming a nation that's increasingly ignorant about something very important. Avoiding war has its merits, but avoiding knowledge of war is dangerous. So, every week, I'll interview leading strategists and military historians to discuss momentous battles, campaigns, conflicts, policymaking in the course of major international competitions, the work of famous strategists or the legacy of important military commanders or statesmen in wartime. And today, we're just very lucky

to get going with somebody who is a leading strategist, also a military historian, and also a general who's commanded in time of war. H.R. McMaster joins us today. He retired from the Army as a lieutenant general having led troops in the Gulf War, which is what we're going to discuss today,

and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. General McMaster served as the National Security advisory advisor to the president in the last administration. He's a scholar. He has a PhD from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and he's a fellow today at the Hoover Institution. He's written essentially countless articles and commentaries on strategic affairs, an extremely well-regarded book about Vietnam called Derelection of Duty, and most recently a new book, Battlegrounds, the fight to defend the free world. A fascinating survey of America's strategic moment and our various challenges around the globe. General McMaster, thanks for coming today,

Why don't we start with you telling our audience about how you came to find yourself leading young troops in the desert back in the early 90s? How'd you grow up? What was your education like? What took you to the Army? Well, Aaron, I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I always wanted to serve in the Army from the youngest age. My mom was a great, great educator and an elementary school teacher, and she instilled in me, I think, an interest in history. And Philadelphia is a great place to be interested in history, especially history of our country. And then my father served in the Korean War as an infantry soldier and then became a non-commissioned officer in the Army Reserves and an infantry unit in Philadelphia in the Germantown neighborhood. I grew up in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia.

And then he got a direct commission during the Vietnam War, remained in the reserves and commanded a company in that same unit. I really was exposed to military service early and into military history and to the history of our country from a political and diplomatic perspective, history perspective as well. So that instilled in me a desire to serve in our army from a young age. I went to a Catholic grade school in Chestnut Hill called Norwood Academy. And from there, beg my parents to let me go to a military school, Valley Forge Military Academy, which is typically the opposite of what is the case with military schools. And I had a great experience there. And it was, as you can imagine, kind of a bit of a leadership laboratory when you thrust

adolescence into leadership responsibility over one another. and it piqued my interest even further in going to West Point and then getting commissioned in the Army. So it's what I always wanted to do. I mean, I remember one day at Fort Hood, Texas as a lieutenant in the First Battalion of the 66th Armor. When I, you know, I plan to transition to civilian life, you know, go work in industry somewhere and then go to maybe a business school or law school. And I went out with my non-commissioned officers and what's called a right arm night. where you bring your sergeants to the officers club and, and have drinks together and,

you know, and reminisce and tell competitive war stories, that sort of thing. And, uh, on that evening, you know, my sergeant said,

what are you doing getting out of the army? You, you like this too much, right? You got to stay in. And so I went home and taught to Katie about it and decided to stay in and wound up in the second cavalry regiment in Germany and, and then soon after that in Desert Storm.

And you, you know, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, you wrote a, uh, a justly famous. essay sort of mini history depicting a very significant battle that your troop and larger unit were in. The Battle of the 73 Eastings, what the piece is called by Captain H.R. McMaster, Eagle Troop,

second squadron, second armored cavalry regiment. Tell us about Eagle Troop. Tell us about the men you led into battle. Well, it was really an extraordinary troop. We had tremendous leaders there, the lieutenants and our sergeants. And really, that's what gives you combat power, right? are the competence of the leaders in an organization because really in combat, what you want to do is build up confidence, right? Confidence in your ability to overmatch the enemy in close combat when the stakes are literally life and death. And if you don't have that degree of confidence that's based in really confidence in your

weapons systems, obviously, an individual soldier training, but really in your unit, your troops, your platoons, your squads, your sections, ability to fight together as a team, that can lead to fear, right? And fear is the most debilitating. emotion that you can have in close combat with the enemy because it can lead to hesitation. It can lead to poor decisions. And so we were extremely confident in one another based on the quality of the leaders that we had in position, the toughness, the resilience, the dedication of our soldiers and really

our demonstrated ability to fight together as a team in really tough, realistic training that really paid off. It wound up really paying off in the battle. And I think that essay I wrote the day after the battle, that's the typed version that you cited, but I sat down to write my recollection of the battle the day after and then later incorporated the perspectives of soldiers, because I asked our soldiers, you know, this was the kind of the nascent historian in me, asked our soldiers and leaders to write it down, write down what you remember from the battle right after the battle. I put that in a number of archives at the Command

General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth and then also at the West Point, our library archive has copies of all those testimonials. Thinking back to 1990, 91, Desert Shield and Desert Storm, there was a long windup, ultimately to hostilities. You know, Saddam had obviously gone into Kuwait, George H.W. Bush marshaled a large international coalition. Before the hostilities kicked off, you're there as a young officer. What was the expectation there amongst the troops?

And to the extent you can speak to it, what was sort of the global expectation? regarding how tough of a fight this was going to be. If you remember, the Cold War had just recently ended, right? It's actually the same cavalry troopers of Eagle Troop who deployed to Desert Shield and then Desert Storm in the Gulf War had been patrolling the border on the day that East Germany lifted travel restrictions to the West in November of 1989, right? So less than a year before Saddam invaded Kuwait. And so there was a feeling, hey, the Cold War is over.

you know, what do we need, you know, a high, high degree of readiness in the Army for and so forth? But, but of course, we had all instilled the culture of the post-Vietnam Army, which was to be prepared for combat, right? There was a quotation from the chief staff of our Army in the beginning of our training manual, right, that we all sort of internalized. And basically, you know, this is General Carl Vano said, our sacred duty is to ensure that no soldier ever dies in combat because he or she didn't have the proper training, right? And so we trained even harder almost at the end of the Cold War that Saddam invaded in August of 90. Our cavalry troop was in a major training exercise where you fire all of your weapons systems and try to demonstrate the speed, precision, you know, and accuracy of all of your weapons and your cruise ability to employ those weapons.

And we're going to transition from that out to a major maneuver exercise against a British reconnaissance unit was the opposing force. And we came out to a big basketball court in our. barracks area and Graf and Veer training area in Germany. And we had drawn all the train features on the map and we're about to do our rehearsal for what we called it. It was zone reconnaissance in the cavalry. And I said to the troop, as I got them to huddle around, I said, we have to make the most out of this training exercise because the next operations order I give you may be in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. This is when the news just came over the radio, right, that Saddam had invaded Kuwait. And I just got a gut feeling that we were going to go.

And I think my lieutenantist probably thought I was a little bit nutty about that. But we did train extremely hard from August until early November when we got the word that we were going to, in fact, deploy. This is when the Secretary of Defense read out the second cavalry regiment as one of the units deploying from Germany. And so we deployed quite rapidly to the desert in Saudi Arabia. We adapted our tactics, our techniques to desert warfare. we read and discussed and thought about the history of desert warfare, especially the campaigns in North Africa and World War II. And based on memoirs from, you know, from Irwin Rommel, the Rommel papers to General Ernest

Harmon, who was wonderful commanding general, a tremendous commanding general of the second armored division in World War II, to, you know, to Patton's papers and other memoirs of Desert Warfare, you know, we changed our tactics. changed our movement techniques and what we call battle drills, which are immediate responses to predictable sets of circumstances in combat, we, I think, became extremely well prepared, you know, for what we were about to encounter on February 26, 1991. Before the fighting, what was Captain McMaster's view of the Iraqi army? What kind of fight were you expecting? We thought that it was going to be a tough fight. You never want to underestimate your enemy.

But I was very much aware of our competitive advantages, especially those that are less tangible. level of training, you know, the confidence and competence of our soldiers and our non-commissioned officers and our officers and our ability, therefore, to employ our weapon systems to achieve overmatch over this enemy. And overmatch really in desert warfare comes from a number of factors, right? I mean, in desert warfare, you know, the side that shoots first gets a big jump, gets a big advantage, right? The side that can distribute fires to take out, you know, large numbers of the enemy in a short period of time gets a tremendous advantage. The side that can maneuver, not unlike maneuver at sea, right, because of the relatively

featureless terrain, and that can employ all arms into the fight, direct fire, indirect fire, or artillery or mortars, as well as the various weapon systems at your disposal, whether it be the missile systems and chain guns on a Bradley or the tank main gun, and understand how to employ those systems so you maximize your competitive advantages. And I think we were ready to do that. The Iraqis had a wide disparity in capabilities across their formations, across their combat units. They had these conscript units that were just kind of thrown out into the middle of the desert to look big, right? And to sort of try to get the United States to face the specter of and the coalition of massive casualties and therefore dissuade us from the attack.

And those units were easily bypassed. We have some short actions against them and then massive surrenders, which we passed on to other units as we continue on to the Republican Guard. But then the Republican Guard, who turned out to fight in a very spirited way, but they fought in a way that was maybe more appropriate to the 1980 to 1988 around Iraq War. And they weren't ready. They weren't ready for the U.S. military or the U.S. Army in particular on the day that we engaged them in close combat. And so therefore, their sense of time and space was off. they didn't really recognize the psychological as well as the physical effect of the Abrams tank, right? A 70-ton tank that can move it up to 50 kilometers an hour with a stabilized weapon system that allows you to fire on the move.

And with a weapon system that just never misses if you have a good crew and you prepare that tank for combat effectively. So I think we overmatched the enemy based on surprise, but not surprise in the sense that the enemy didn't know we were there. but the Iraqis had no idea about how much destruction we could visit upon them in a very short period of time. I often thought during my own time in uniform that if there were two weapon systems, I never wanted to find myself on the wrong side of, and I was grateful we're on my side. It was a cobra gunship and an Abrams take because I figured if one of those things ever really decided that it didn't want you there, there was a pretty good chance of it succeeding.

As you mentioned, you know, you step off, you cross the line. a departure, you move north through the desert with Eagle Troop with the whole seventh core, you face what, you know, I think is fairly described as light resistance along the way. And then all of a sudden, on the 26th of February, you find yourself in something somewhat different. What happened? Well, the night of the 25th of February, G troop under the command of my good friend and West Pointe classmate Joe Sardiano made contact with the enemy's first line, the enemy Republican guards, reconnaissance organizations.

And we made contact with some, you know, some elements of the, of those reconnaissance forces, you know, the next day as well. So we knew we were entering Republican car territory. G troop and in their engagement, they destroyed some of their BMPs, these armored fighting vehicles. And they captured some of the BMPs and the MTLBs, which are, you know, are just multi-purpose light armored track vehicles. And they brought them to the squadron command post. So we all met. The troop commanders came in to talk with the squadron commander. And we're examining the maps and their weapons.

Their weapons were brand new. They were clear that this was a well-equipped high priority unit. And their maps showed kind of the general layout of their defense. So we knew that we were moving toward Republican Guard main defenses. And so when I went back to the troop that night in the middle of pouring rain, it poured rain all that night, I issued a fragmentary order to them to be prepared for a movement to contact, you know, the next day, to identify the Republican Guard's main defenses. And the plan was then to vector in the heavy divisions behind us

into avenues that would give them advantage over the enemy, areas where the enemy was relatively weak, so they could penetrate the defenses. Well, of course, as it turned out, we wound up making direct contact with that enemy force and then overwhelming it in a 23-minute assault and a battle that went on much longer than that across the regimental front. But, I mean, we knew that we were moving toward the Republican Guard

on the night of the 25th, And then the next day, we began that movement directly to the east now, oriented on Kuwait, out of the Iraqi desert, in sort of a halting, controlled set of movements, which frankly was quite frustrating to me. But we were moving based on restrictions, placed on us, limits of advance, corresponding with the north-south grid lines on a map or eastings. So we had permission to move initially to the 5-0-eatting, then to the 6-0-eatting, then to the 6-0-eatting, then to the 6-5, the 6-7 and then ultimately the 7-0. And it was in the con, during these, you know, these movements toward the east that we made

contact with some of the enemy main defensive outposts and then ultimately made contact with and then penetrated their main defensive positions. You made reference to the Iraqis, you know, being kind of conditioned by their experience fighting Iran earlier in the 80s. What were the, as it were, the wrong lessons that they took away from that. Another way of asking the same question was, what should they have done differently? Well, the enemy brigade commander, he had been actually educated at Fort Benning, Georgia, when he went to the infantry officers, the captain's course there.

And his defense was actually fundamentally sound. What he had done is organized a reverse slope defense on the backside of an imperceptible rise in the terrain. And because we didn't have any maps to the area, we were navigating either by dead reckoning, but we didn't have a GPS signal or by GPS. we didn't realize that we were paralleling a road that ran west to east into Kuwait. And along that road was a barracks area. I think it was an oil workers barracks area that had been fortified with infantry. And that village or that barracks area sat astride not only the road, but a north-south running imperceptible ridge.

On the backside of that ridge is where Muhammad organized his defense, right? And it made sense. He strong-pointed the village. He thought we'd have to move down the road. the road and then we would bounce off that, then move over the ridge and on the back side of the ridge on the north and south side of that of that barracks area. He built kill sacks or engagement areas. He emplaced minefields on the backside of the ridge so the mines would disrupt our forward advance, maybe get us to stop. And then his tanks and his fighting vehicles

and his dug-in infantry were oriented into these kill sacks really at a range to the ridge of about a thousand meters. So he had equalized his weapons ranges and, and capabilities with our longer range weapon systems. But what he didn't really consider adequately was the fact that he didn't have sufficient depth in his defense and that our tanks, as we did, thanks to my driver initially, Chris Hedenskog, who decided to just wend his way through the minefield and tell me afterwards. He said, hey, sir, we just went through a minefield. And I instructed all, the rest of the tanks to move through the minefield and for the Bradley's to get into tracks of the tank. So the minefield didn't slow us down. He, they'd mainly put in antipersonal mines mixed

with anti-tank mines, but the anti-personnel mines, which would have been great for an attacking Iranian infantry popped like like, it sounded like microwave popcorn, you know, under the tracks of our tanks. He didn't disperse his forces enough. If you can imagine nine M1 tanks, M1A1 tanks firing around every three seconds and not missing. It doesn't take a lot of time. right to destroy a formation. They did not do, I don't think they're prepped to fire checks well and they're borsighting. Two tanks engaged my tank as I came over the rise right after I destroyed the first tank of the three that our tank crew destroyed in about 10 seconds.

And both those rounds fell short of my tank. I didn't even notice them. The tanks on my either side are the ones who told me later about that. And so they didn't have the level of training. They didn't prepare for combat the way that you should prepare for armored combat in the desert. And then the forces that he positioned in depth, we also rapidly penetrated by the continuation of our assault. Again, getting to his envisioning of time and space. And in particular, he had put a reserve position on a subsequent ridge about three and a half

kilometers beyond to the east of his main defenses. And as we solely climb that ridge, we destroyed the lead tank that we could identify in this coil, a circle of 18 T72 tanks. And then we enter, that assembly area of tanks just as they were trying to deploy against us, just as they were firing up their engines, which of course was too late. And we destroyed them before they could be deployed against us. And they consolidated on this ridge line and then shot and destroyed everything within a range of our guns. And then we continued the fight into the evening, but that was really the end of the major assault. So time and space, you know, relationships, not adapting to the enemy that you're fighting,

a lack of training and proficiency in weapon systems, probably poor pre-combat checks for the tanks that he had employed there. The major Muhammad, you know, when he was in his elaborate bunker just at the front edge of his reserve, his tank reserve. And he told me later, after we captured him, he spoke perfect English, that the first time he knew that he was under an assault was when someone ran into his bunker and yelled tanks, tanks. And he came out and ran up to a really elaborate observation post they had built,

looked out his binoculars, and he said that all of his Ford units, armored vehicles, were in flames already by that point. So he gave the order to deploy the reserve, which, of course, I mentioned was too late. He ran by foot with others to retreat, further to the east to the logistics area, which we mortared heavily, fired artillery against,

and then broadcast a surrender appeal. And then he came forward with the first 42 prisoners we took. And that's when some of our soldiers and then later the next day, I had a chance to talk with him and others. So that's the other guys. General McMaster, you sort of touched on this already, but explicitly assess for us in terms of Eagle Troops' own success. What element of that success was due to, we'll call them technological advantages,

the sort of the hardware, and to the extent relevant, I guess, the software advantages of the American military brought to bear against an inferior force. And what weight should we then also give to more timeless human factors, quality of training, quality of leadership, espriedicor, things like that that could be, you know, the same in 1991 as they were in 1891, essentially. I think the two are interconnected, right? So, you know, I'll tell you, one of the greatest aspects of fighting, you know, with the U.S. Army is that you have the U.S. Air Force, right? And U.S. Naval Aviation, right? I mean, so this whole time, right, from the attack into Iraq on the 24th until this battle on the 26th, I never once had to look up and think, is that friendly or enemy, right? So knowing that our, you know, our air services give you air service, give you air supremacy. I mean, that's a big, that's a big boost to your confidence, right? And, and, and, and then so, so is the technology you have at your disposal, especially, you know, the incredible, you know, lethality and protection that the Abrams tank provides you, right? I mean, I think in many ways,

in this fight, I mean, the safest place to be was an Abrams tank in the front of the battle, right? I mean, Bradley's are more vulnerable. And then, of course, some of our most courageous soldiers are driving around, you know, fuel trucks with 2,500 gallons of fuel behind it, right? I mean, So I think the confidence that your weapon systems give you the protection of armored vehicles, the combined arms and joint capabilities, that bolsters your confidence. And that gives you the psychological advantage, which is timeless. I mean, I remember John Keegan's phrase from the face of battle on this conclusion, right? This is a survey of battle in the same geographic area across four centuries.

And he concludes at the end that there were a lot of changes, right, in the nature of battle over time. induced mainly by societal change or technological change. But what he found that was, I think, most profound was a continuity, the human nature of war. And he has this great passage in the back of face of battle. I would pull it off my shelf and wouldn't disrupt our conversation. But it begins with what battles have in common is human. The struggle of men, and of course today men and women, struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them. And I found that to be to be a continuity in late, I guess late 20th century warfare in desert storm.

And of course, in the fights that I've had the privilege to be involved in in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well. Let's come forward 30 years to the present day. Relative to our adversaries, relative to the other guys out there in the world, are we militarily as dominant today as we were in 1991, less dominant or more? more dominant. I would say we never were that dominant, right, as we thought we were, even after 91. And I wrote about this pretty extensively in the introduction of battlegrounds. And I think you really put your finger on it, Aaron, these two experiences at the beginning of the 1990s, right, the victory in the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lopsided victory over the fourth

largest army in the world in Iraq. These created, I think, a sense of over optimism and even a touch of hubris and the belief that that really an arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of our free in open societies, over closed authoritarian systems, and America's technological military prowess, would guarantee our security well into the future. And the language of the 1990s associated with so-called defense transformation or the revolution in military affairs was hubristic because you couldn't read a sentence without the word dominance appearing in it. And I think what that sort of construct forgets, we talked about the human dimension of war as a continuity. Well, another aspect of continuity in the nature of war is its interactive nature. And the fact really that is the great

historian and my old friend Conrad Crane says pithily, there are two ways to fight, asymmetrically and stupidly. And you hope your enemy picked stupidly as Saddam Hussein did in 1991 so that we could bring all of our competitive advantages to bear. But you know what? A lot of a lot of adversaries and enemies learned vicariously through the fate of Iraq's army. And they adopted the asymmetric. approach, right? And you see that, obviously, with jihadist terrorists who use box cutters and airplanes to bypass our military prowess and inflict on us the most, you know, the most devastating terrorist mass murder attack in history. And you also see it with the protracted, you know, insurgencies that we encountered in both Afghanistan and in Iraq after failing to consolidate

military gains adequately to get the sustainable political outcomes in both places. So I think in many ways. The overconfidence of the 90s was a setup, right? It was a setup for the strategic shocks and frustrations of the early 2000s. So you talk about how insurgents or future insurgents, potential jihadists, what have you, developed an asymmetric response to American military power. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the Chinese and the People's Liberation Army watching what was happening in 1991, which your point is well taken. And, the appearance of dominance may have been as much appearance as anything else. But nevertheless, I mean, to the world, it was a very dramatic show. And, you know, some of our listeners here will

remember, if not, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube, you know, the briefings that were done at the time showing footage from the battlefield of these precision airstrikes, which, you know, in the moment, you know, achieved on that scale were really, really something kind of new and impressive. And it was cinematic. The Chinese are watching this. They've also responded. They also paid attention and thought about, well, if we have to fight this thing one day, how the heck are we going to do it? It looks pretty formidable. How did their thinking develop? Well, Arneo, I write about this, and it's not the most readable monograph, I'll have to tell you, but it's available on the internet. It's called Cracking the Foundation, Defense Transformation and

the underlying assumption of dominant knowledge and future war. And in it, in it, I also, you know, write about the Chinese reaction. And, you know, there's the appearance of this monograph in 1999 of unrestricted warfare by some PLA, People's Liberation Army, theorists, and so forth. But of course, in the 90s, the Chinese studied the outcome of the Gulf work carefully, but they didn't have the resources to do much about it, right? It wasn't until the transformation in the global economy into the 1990s, you know, Deng Xiaoping's, you know, opening up. But that also are, I think, really poor decision, certainly in retrospect, to admit China

into the World Trade Organization in 2001, that really led to the, the, transformation of the Chinese economy in such a way that the People's Liberation Army got the resources and needed to do something about what they viewed as America's overmatched capability. And what the Chinese did was pretty smart, right? They developed some capabilities that look like ours, right? Advanced fighter aircraft, even an aircraft carrier, right? But what they put their main effort on were asymmetric capabilities that could break apart what they saw as their differential advantages. And those were offensive cyber capabilities, counter satellite capabilities. long-range precision fires, tiered and layered air defense,

electromagnetic warfare capabilities, swarm, unmanned aerial systems, and undersea systems. And so what they tried to do is take apart what they saw as our competitive advantages in our ability, especially, to conduct integrated joint operations. And joint operations are operations conducted across multiple domains by multiple service components, right? So the domains being, you know, aerospace, land, you know, sea or maritime, and then cyberspace, obviously, also. So this is what China has invested in and what China and Russia both invested in these capabilities in an effort to try to create exclusionary areas of primacy militarily that would challenge American freedom of movement and action.

And that would allow them to create servile relationships, right, with countries and areas where our military. military forces didn't have that freedom of movement in action, you know, with the message of to weak countries on the, on the periphery of the Eurasian landmass. I mean, the message is really who's your daddy, you know, and, and then also obviously to be able to contest, you know, the U.S. ability to project power into those areas in time of conflict. And so you see this playing out, you know, you saw this play out with the threats against the Baltic states, with Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, Russia's endeavoring to create these sort of anti-access area denial bubbles from the Arctic to the Baltics, to the Black Sea, to Syria, and to Libya,

so that they can contest freedom of movement and action in the eastern Mediterranean. And of course, China has been doing this as well, especially in an effort to create areas of privacy across the Indo-Pacific region, an effort to maybe isolate Taiwan as the first step in isolating its main regional competitor, which is Japan. So listening to you to describe it, it sounds like there are at least two major ingredients to the response. One is watching U.S. forces and coalition forces mass in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, there's a realization that, gosh, if we let the United States and its partners build

up that kind of force right next to us, it might be difficult to get it stopped. So response one is to create these areas, as you point out. where it would be challenging at best. I mean, it's kind of a euphemism to call it challenging to build up that kind of force posture close to one of our adversaries. And then the second ingredient is what in Crack of the Foundation, you talk about, you know, the expectation of information superiority, undermining that for American forces, making sure that information superiority is not actually something that we would operate with. Do you think that covers it? Are there other major ingredients that you would cite? Oh, yeah.

The other ingredients are to sap our will, right? And you see this with maybe cyber-enabled information warfare against us, what Russia is really trying to do. Russia in particular, because it doesn't have the same amount of resources as China, right? Russia's economy is about the size of Texas's economy or Italy's economy. So Russia's theory of victory is to drag everybody else down and therefore be the last man standing, so to speak, in Europe and vis-vis the West in the United States. And they're doing that by trying to polarize American society further to diminish our confidence in democratic principles. and institutions and processes, and therefore sap our will, right? Because deterrent capability, I think, is best thought of as capability times will, right?

And if will goes down to zero, as apparently our will did in Afghanistan, it will embolden our adversaries in ways that I think can be very dangerous. And so there are many other aspects to China's, China's, I think, efforts are not only military, not even primarily military, but are economic and political. But China is engaged in a strategy of co-option, coercion, and concealment, right? Co-opt countries, you know, co-opt companies, co-opt elites across the West with, you know, with the lure of profits and the benefits of Chinese investment, for example. But once you're in, once you're dependent, like Australia seemed to get for a while and other countries did, then they'll bludgeon you, right? And coerce you into conforming to their foreign policy and national security goals and objectives.

And then they'll just, you know, they'll conceal this and just say, this is just normal business practices. So I think the strategies for both Russia and China go way beyond the military and are, in fact, much more dangerous because of their pernicious nature. So let's talk, since you bring it up, let's talk about Afghanistan for a bit. So this is another situation where the story begins after 9-11 with a moment of really an impressive display of American military capabilities, intelligence capabilities, going into Afghanistan. I believe the first airstrikes were in October of 2001, of 5,000.

I recall correctly, you know, CIA and special forces elements on the ground at that time or perhaps not that long after. And, you know, after a relatively brief campaign, you saw the fall of the Taliban regime, its remnants, you know, more or less literally take to the hills. And thereafter, in, you know, an American effort to help create something in its place. And ultimately, beginning a few years later, you know, pretty long and ultimately bitter fight took the form of a counterinsurgency at times. And at other times, maybe something more complex. complicated. We are officially as of about 24 hours ago out. General, the master, you talked about the American will. It's certainly the case that opinion polls in recent

months and years, if you ask, you know, the average group of Americans, should we stare or should we go? There was a pretty, pretty consistent consensus on the side of go. But there's another side to that story now, which is having witnessed the disastrous finale in Kabul, people are pretty upset. And I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about are they upset at the execution of something that in general they still want? Or are there cold feet and second thoughts about the departure big picture? So here we are on the 31st of August. Where do you think it goes from here? Where do you think it ought to go? Do those who say that this will, this departure from Afghanistan is going to free us of this, you know, kind of strategic distraction and allow us to focus on the real adversaries like

China? Are they right? Are they on to something? Or are they missing? something. Well, I think this is the most misunderstood war, you know, in our history. And the misunderstandings are what led to our self-delusion that led to self-defeat in Afghanistan. The Taliban didn't win in Afghanistan. We defeated ourselves. And we defeated ourselves based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the war, right? What a Klaus would say, you know, the first duty of the statesmen or stateswoman is to not try to turn war into something alien to its nature. And what we forgot in Afghanistan from the beginning that, hey, war is an extension of politics. So whereas we had that very successful military campaign that you described, we didn't do adequate planning and we didn't

actually execute to bridge that military gain into a sustainable political outcome. What you hear today is we failed in Afghanistan because we tried to transform it to a Jeffersonian democracy. And Afghanistan wasn't yet Denmark, so we lost. And that led to a defeatist attitude. But what we had, though, Aaron, just a couple of a few years ago, was a very sustainable commitment to Afghanistan that helped bring to the Afghan army and in support of the Afghan government the same kinds of asymmetrical capabilities that allowed us to collapse the Taliban regime with a very small military force. But what do we do based on this defeatist narrative that Afghanistan is not Denmark,

so therefore we have lost and that we wasted trillions of dollars there and our efforts there, even though now we see what we did accomplish because we're seeing all those accomplishments vitiated, you know, by the brutal Taliban, you know, is this narrative led to a withdrawal of those same asymmetrical capabilities. But you know what? The Taliban maintained theirs, which is unscrupulousness and the willingness to brutalize civilians to incite fear to accomplish their political objectives. You know, you kept hearing there's no military solution in Afghanistan, but Aaron, I guess apparently the Taliban had one in mind, right? And so So our lack of will to sustain that effort is what led to self-defeat.

And now we're seeing the price for it. You mentioned the fact that the war, it was in the minds of many unsustainable because the lack of public support, you know, I think you could say that the reason for that is that three presidents in a row said it is not worth it. And, you know, it's a futile endeavor and therefore withdrawal should be our objective. Well, I mean, big surprise that the American people concluded that as well. But I think a lot of Americans are looking at the catastrophe. astrophy that is unfolding.

And then you have this morphing into a political, you know, political disaster in terms of our credibility with our European allies. Remember America, America's back narrative, right? And then how mad everybody, what was about the insulting tweets that Donald Trump was about our European allies? Well, how about just abandoning your allies and not giving them the opportunity to even evacuate their citizens? I mean, do you think we should be maybe concerned about that and the effect that has

on a reputation, or how it emboldens our adversaries. I mean, I think that you can draw a direct line from the unenforced red line in Syria after the Assad regime committed the mass murder of innocence using nerve agent to Russia's annexation of Crimea and invasion of Ukraine, you know, to China's development of islands in the South China Sea and weaponizing. So, hey, I think that this is just the beginning of not only humanitarian catastrophe, but a political catastrophe and a security. threat because jihadist terrorists are emboldened by this. This is a victory for jihadist terrorists

who want to commit mass murder against us. You know, we conjured up in Afghanistan the enemy we would prefer, right? A more benign Taliban. How's that working out? A Taliban who would share power. How's that working out? A Taliban that's separate from and would be a partner with us against jihadist terrorists. But of course, you know, the Taliban is completely intertwined with al-Qaeda in our jihadist terrorist groups, especially the Hikani network, Shiraj Hikani, who is a specialist in kidnapping and mass murder, is in charge of security in Kabul now. So I think it's time to stop pretending, Aaron, you know, because we've been pretending about Afghanistan and we're about to suffer the consequences of a lost war. Many people, I would say in particular, President Biden,

in the way that this was conducted, I think assumed that there are no consequence. to surrendering to a terrorist organization. And we're just beginning to see those consequences now. You know, you talk about the role of presidential leadership and all this. I served in Afghanistan under President Obama, which was an odd moment because you're certainly right. President Obama was quite clear about what was at best, depending on, you know, the year we're talking about his ambivalence towards the American presence in Afghanistan.

And yet I went as part of a surge, as part of an increase in troops. no one has satisfactorily explained to me how the existence of an independent narco-terror state in the heart of Central Asia is going to make it easier rather than harder to focus on China. I suppose part of the account, I'm curious to know your response to this, is we're going to do these over-the-horizon strikes. This is on the theme of what we've been discussing this whole hour in terms of American technological dominance and our love of technology and military affairs. We are so powerful, General of Master, that from over the horizon, if you're a terrorist, you rear your ugly head in Afghanistan, our sensors are going to find you. We're going to discern your intent and we're going to snuff you out. What's your view of that plan?

It's a pipe dream. It's a complete pipe dream. When you lose access to human intelligence, human intelligence that's essential to identify an enemy that is intermingled with the civilian population, there's no way you can make up for that with communications intelligence or signal intelligence combined with surveillance capabilities. It's just impossible. So everybody wants to reduce counterterrorism to a targeting exercise, right? But you have to recognize with the Taliban, there are tens of thousands of targets, all of whom are trying to avoid being classified as such. And by the way, they're intermingent with civilian population. So we're just going to start dropping 500-pound bombs, and we don't care about how many innocent civilians are killed. Of course, we're not going to do that.

So this is an organization that will essentially use a captive population as human shields as they continue to terrorize that population and plan, prepare, and execute attacks against us. You know, I mean, these are the enemies of all humanity. Afghanistan exists on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization. The world is a much less safe place because of our capitulation to the Taliban and our self-defeat. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we might be able to begin recovering from this and to begin to try to remove the stain of 2021. Well, that's, I think, a good place for us to wrap up for today.

It was a real pleasure talking to you. I learned a lot. I'm sure everyone listening did as well. General McMaster, thank you very much. Aaron, thanks. And thanks for this great podcast. I mean, I think the whole idea of making sure that we try to understand how the past produced the present as the first step of understanding, you know,

and learning about our future, projecting into the future. It's just a great initiative and so glad to be part of it. Thank you. Sir, thanks for joining School of Work. Appreciate it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.