School of War - Ep 199: Jonathan Hackett on Our Failures in Iraq & Afghanistan

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

Jonathan Hackett, former U.S. Marine Corps interrogator and author of Theory of Irregular War, joins the show to discuss America’s post-9/11 wars and how irregular warfare works.  ▪️ Times      •      01:12 Introduction     •      01:30 A good interrogator       •      03:26 Afghanistan     •      06:15 In the interrogation room       •      12:10 The Reid Technique         •      14:27 Galula     •      17:10 A military solution           •      23:32 Voluntary acceptance       •      25:34 Irregular War      •      28:20 The war we have          •      31:33 COIN     •      36:10 Speaking the language       Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

We're going to go back to America's recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today, and to the broader question of a regular warfare. What is it? How does it work? And how, after 9-11, for the American military, did it all go so wrong? Let's get into it. It is the 50 for war this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the great situation in the ground. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Jonathan Hackett. most recently of theory of a regular war with a long career in the Marine Corps and the U.S. government beyond his writing career. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining the show. Thanks for having me, Aaron. Why don't we start a bit with your background, your Marine, you served overseas, numerous occasions, and you were an interrogator to include in Helmand Province.

Let me ask you this, and we can use it as a way into your background. What makes a good interrogator? I think being a good interrogator is being a good listener. And listening almost unnaturally is the best way to go about it because we have a very high tendency to respond and to fill empty space. So when the detainee isn't speaking, many people would automatically want to say something back or still that uncomfortable space. But really the most important spontaneous admissions kind of come out of the silence. And how does one get into this line of work of being an interrogator? in the Marine Corps. Did you have a contract for that? Did you transition over from something

else? What's your story? It actually came in as a signals intelligence analyst. So I worked at the National Security Agency as a Marine for about six years in different capacities. And I noticed that in the Marine Corps, the longer you stay in that field, the further away from a window you get. So I decided to make a movement back towards nature. So I thought that interrogation rooms are probably the most pleasant spots in the Marine Corps, but nevertheless. Yeah. So then I decided to do that. In the Marine Corps, we have counterintelligence and human intelligence combined into a single job field.

So I did that. We have a selection process for that. I went through that about 16 years ago. And my very first assignment, as you said, was to Hellman Province, Afghanistan in 2012 during kind of the height of the Marine Corps' involvement in that war. Yeah. Yeah, you and I are of a similar vintage in that regard. I was there. I think of it as peak coin, which is relevant to your book and to what we're actually

going to talk about today. Okay, so take me back to those conversations in Afghanistan then. What were your objectives in those conversations? And what were you learning, I guess, is my broader question. You had presumably day-to-day objectives you were trying to fulfill, but as you're there, you're learning about what the United States is up to there. How did you're thinking about Afghanistan and war develop as you were sitting there doing that job? Well, it was very interesting coming into that because the types of interrogations I was doing were tactical or operational level interrogations, you know, what's going on in the area, what's going on in the province, that kind of thing. Coming from the national security agency, we had very high level requirements, you know, for national collection. And transitioning to that tactical type of questioning was a little bit difficult to kind of narrow myself down into asking questions about what color poppies are growing on that field over there.

this summer and how much did those cost per kilo, which at the moment when I was asking that felt very insignificant. But then when I started to realize, oh, these actually fill up a national objectives as well because that Taliban is using those poppies to finance their activities, which in turn creates, you know, their whole shadow government is funded by that activity. So it's very important to know, is it the pink and white poppy this summer or is it the just pink poppy because there's a massive billion dollar difference in that if you're going to refine it, ship it to Pakistan or Iran and then onward to Europe or the United States. So that was kind of an interesting learning point for me in the very beginning.

And we still had some leftover things from previous conflicts in Afghanistan that were still relevant in those interrogations. Like for example, in 1980s during Operation Cyclone when the CIA was providing Stinger missiles to the Mujahideen, they also provided some other equipment, some anti-aircraft equipment. And one of the questions earlier in the time that I was doing interrogations, we had to ask about those because we knew that some of them were still kind of stray out in the battlefield. There were actually two that we thought of that were at Helmand at the time, and we knew the exact nomenclature of the devices that could shoot our own helicopters down. We didn't

end up finding them on my deployment, but that was always interesting to kind of insert those questions into a more tactical level line of questioning about what's going on in this province. I confess, I'm embarrassed to confess, I think, that having been there during a poppy harvest and the poppy harvest was a big part of my life and major factor in our deployment. I had no idea about the economic distinction between different colors, which only goes to show, which only goes, considering how relevant you're telling me that was, how screwed I was in terms of my lack of local knowledge. But it was all of us.

Well, so this is well past the time of, you know, if people have seen zero dark 30, they're familiar with, you know, enhanced interrogation, all that kind of stuff. This is well past that time. This is also a different program from things. kinds of programs that were permitted such things. Why did anyone ever talk to you? I remember people with Taliban connections giving me a hard time because they would say, oh, you know, your president said you guys are leaving in just a couple years. Why would we work with you? And, you know, it was difficult to have a really, you know, obviously you'd come up with something, but it was difficult to have

a persuasive answer to that. How did you deal with that or other problems? So actually, I had a detainee that was very proud to tell me that since Alexander the Great, the Burrace, the Burr, the British failed three times, the Russians failed twice, America will fail now, and you will fail again. And he was really proud to tell me that in the interrogation. And to me, it was kind of strange because I'm sitting in a chair, he's sitting on the floor, I have the control in that moment. But he was right eventually. And the most important part of that, though, is that he was talking to me.

So in his mind, he was getting a little victory, a little conversational victory. but that's in my mind also a victory for me because as long as you're speaking, as long as the detainee is speaking, not myself, but the detainee is speaking, I'm learning something about them. And maybe I can't use that with that particular detainee, but if let's say we've got three people from that same city that are somewhat connected, I could use that information from that individual and use it against somebody else that maybe is a little bit weaker in their resistance posture and then kind of break that weakness down. And I'll actually give you another example.

we captured three people from a village. So a Marine convoy was going through and the convoy was blown up by an IED. So they sent another group of Marines out to go and investigate what happened. No Marines were harmed, but an Afghan was killed, an elderly Afghan man.

And when the Marines got there, they were actually helping the Afghans pick up the body parts of this elderly man. And they noticed two men standing off to the side. One had a shovel, which is kind of ubiquitous. In Afghanistan, a man standing by a farm with a shovel,

especially in Helmand. And a younger man, maybe in his teens, standing next to that gentleman. So because they were there standing watching this happen, the Marines arrested them and brought them back to the detention facility where I spoke to them. So I spoke first to the younger one because I thought if the younger one will have a little bit of a weaker resistance posture. I was wrong. I made a wrong assumption.

He actually had a stronger resistance posture. But since I had him in there, you know, I talked to him for a while. And I realize I'm not really getting very far with him, but I got enough information about his village to understand the context that the older gentleman probably would respond to. So I went to the next one, to the older gentleman, come to find out, the Afghan who was killed was this older gentleman's father. So then I'd use that information because the older gentleman then told me that the other person was his son. So we've got three generations of people involved here. So I use the information about the fact that the son killed

the grandfather to go back to the son, the grandson, and tell and inform him that he killed his grandfather because he thought he had been harming Americans, but he didn't. He had instead killed his own family member unbeknownst to him. He just broke down crying. And he told me about how the Taliban had forced him to put that bomb there. He didn't want to do that. And so on and so forth. It's a very sad situation, very difficult situation, but it's important to stay rational as an interrogator in that moment to see what are the points you can press to get someone to want to talk to you. You shouldn't be forcing them to talk to you. They should be dying to talk to you. And I've actually had detainees in some situations that actually called for me in the middle of the night to speak to me

because they wanted to tell me something. I never even told them, hey, come find me if you need me. They knew that they could talk to me and I would listen to them and they would feel better about that when they left. So very different approach to what you described to the early days, you know, a lot of coercion and pressure. Instead, we use, especially in the Marine Corps, we used the World War II method that Hans Sharf used. Hans Sharf is kind of a famous person in the interrogation community because he was an enlisted soldier in a Luftwaffe, which is the German Air Force, and he interrogated hundreds, if not thousands, of American and British pilots. And without ever asking them a single intelligence-related question,

he was able to figure out where all the bomber squadrons are located when the next attack was going to happen, like strategic-level bombing raids into Germany, and he was able to safeguard multiple factories that the Germans were trying to protect in the rural valley without ever asking a single question about intelligence, because he used those moments to just speak to the people. and he collected little bits here and there. He kind of wove an entire story together and was able to move forces across the entire battle space

of Western Germany and protect his assets like that. So we kind of try to use that in our approaches as well. There's a lot there that I want to respond to, but the first story that you told, but you delivered in the most calm, restrained fashion is one of the wildest stories I have ever heard. The guy accidentally, did I have that straight? The guy accidentally kills his own.

dad having laid an IED for the Americans and whoops his dad's killed in the explosion, then the Americans stumble upon that guy and then his son. And reasonably, I mean, when you said guy with a shovel and a kid standing next to him, I thought to myself, well, 50-50 odds, they did it. And it turns out they did. But that's an unbelievable story. I mean, actually quite believable, but still shocking. It kind of captures the tragedy of what was going on there. You know, a lot of lower-level folks and smaller villages just getting wrapped up into the conflict on either side. and placed into danger

waking up one morning, not realizing like that's the morning that something happens. And then the second part of your remark on Sharf, I feel like that guy is a character in Masters of the Air, miniseries that came out

last year on the 8th Air Force, and there are a series of interrogation scenes, which I feel like are at least inspired by what you're saying. And it's really interesting to me, and I have no real, I mean, I have basically no serious knowledge of the field, which is your background there,

but, weirdly, to the extent that I do, it's from a police perspective because my dad spent a good chunk of his career as a cop. And there, as you know, it's all about either leverage or incentive. So you either have some power over this person, you're squeezing them. I guess you call it a form of coercion, or you're portraying yourself as their friend, which inevitably you're not, but they may not be quick enough to realize that. And that's basically the whole game. And you're describing some third thing entirely a kind of, I don't know, I don't know, don't actually know how to characterize what you're describing. Yeah, so actually, like, what you're

referring to is often called the read technique. And there's a whole script for this while law enforcement uses it. You can find it on YouTube. It's a lot of it is coercive to a degree, not physically, but the way that it leads the brain down a pathway tends to entrap someone in an answer that unfortunately is not always correct or accurate. And there's actually been a few cases that they've shown that someone has admitted using a knife to murder somebody, for example. And in fact, the person has never even met that person, but it's because the way the interrogation was conducted, the person felt that they must, they're compelled to answer in a particular way. So we actually are sometimes trained in that.

I went through the training board in 2013. Never used it. But we objectively thought it was not a good tool to use, especially for intelligence interrogations because law enforcement interrogations are looking for a conviction or an admission or a league. Intelligence is looking to answer a question. And we don't care if the detainee did it or didn't do it. There is no it to do.

Instead, we want to know more about the situation so that we can reduce uncertainty and protect forces and those kind of like larger military type things or intelligence type objectives. So your career carried on. You went other places. You supported the special operations community, intelligence community, and variety of different capacities. And along the way, you started thinking about what the hell is it we're doing here. I confess to having the same thoughts. And one phrase you used in your book that stuck with me is you're criticizing sort of a lot of the existing literature on irregular war or regular warfare, however you want to characterize it, as quote unquote state-centered colonial policing books, which I guess is a literal reference to something like David Galula, which I was trained on. All the officers in Quantico read David Galula in 2007 and 8.

Maybe we can talk about who that is and why it mattered. But I also took it as a bit of a swipe over the sort of modern run of books and you cite people like David Kilcullen by name. You seem like you're pretty dissatisfied by the reigning theory of the day. And I confess I share that dissatisfaction. How did the U.S. military, how does the U.S. military, assuming we haven't changed much in the last 15 years, think about a regular war? What is our theory of the – what is our house theory of the case? And what was wrong with it? We borrowed a lot of things from Galula, who was a French author, and Roger Trinkier is another one.

These French authors actually developed most of their ideas fighting in Algeria and Vietnam and other French possessions during the middle of the 20th century. And Trinkier in particular used a very extreme and brutal method of repression to get local people to do what you wanted, which is whatever it is that's part of its time. However, that information, the techniques he used were borrowed into U.S. counterinsurgency manuals, the field manuals. And I think that the problem with our military deployments is we have six-months appointments or even 15-months appointments, let's say, or if you're with a Joint Special Operations Command, you might have a four-month deployment or even a few days. That's not really enough time to solve an issue. And the people that you're there helping will have been there before you got there and they're there after you leave. And they have to pay the price for working with you. So it has to be worth it.

And as we were talking about, you know, the folks in Afghanistan, for example, knew that we would leave eventually. And so they had to think about hedge in their future. What happens when the Americans leave? What do we do next? And how many risks do we take right now? And I think that wasn't considered in a large enough aspect to be successful for us. So we had human terrain teams and we had these other smaller components like AfPAC hands, which was another kind of civil engagement program.

Really great programs, really well placed. the Marine Corps had its Marine Advisor course and security cooperation group. These were smaller components of a much larger conventional approach to solving this non-military problem, in my opinion. And because we didn't make those the centerpiece of our strategy, the strategy was bound to fail because we were looking at Afghanistan or Iraq, or you name it, like a nail rather than a people problem. So we were being hammers instead of helpers. So I want to draw you out on this question of, you know, military solutions being inappropriate. I mean, in fairness, you know, after 9-11, we issue an ultimatum.

You got to give up al-Qaeda. The Taliban doesn't. We quite understandably go in. The Taliban take to the hills. We kind of screw up the structure of the political settlement, which we can talk more about. That's hours, if not lifetimes of conversation we could have about the bond conference and everything else. But nevertheless, it's, you know, we're there. There are Taliban and other people who don't like us, as it were, up in the hills and also down in the valleys.

And things get violent. Things get violent and then they get really violent after a few years. How is a military solution not relevant or applicable here? I think a military solution is part of a larger solution. But you have to ask yourself, after Operation Anaconda, where did the Taliban leadership go? well, they were not in Afghanistan. They were in Pakistan. Wasn't that the Pakistanis in the 80s who were helping us train to Mujahideen,

wasn't that the Pakistanis in the 90s who were helping us, and again, in the early 2000s, who were there to, quote, quote, help us, while in fact allowing the Taliban to live in Quetta down in Balochistan and actually run the Taliban from Pakistan remotely. And that's why Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. And perhaps the military part of it was helpful on the ground, but there's a political aspect that was never solved. And as soon as that political aspect was never solved, you would constantly have frictions

below that level. And when Klaus West said that, you know, war is an extension of politics by other means, what he meant was that the military part is a small kernel of a larger thing. And the way that we approached the conflict was more military first, everything second. Even the way that we got Karzai into power was a military method. And we were very successful in the very beginning, like Operation Anaconda, as I said, was a very successful special operation combined with the intelligence community, highly successful. It did exactly what was supposed to do. But after that, we didn't really have a structured political

end state beyond keeping Karzai there and the Taliban out, which sounds simple, but it's actually a very complex problem that I think we never actually had a working solution that was made the first priority in that conflict. Yeah, my take is, I feel like if you challenge someone around that time, they would have said they had a political solution. We wrote a whole constitution. You know, in theory, Karzai would one day be succeeded by someone else in practice? Maybe that was a little bit more complicated. But we had a political solution. The problem, from my perspective, I don't know if you would agree with this statement, was that we made a lot of assumptions about what a state ought to be based on our sort of post-Cold War witnessing of democratization in Eastern Europe and our, in my view, correct sense that the United States is more or less a successful polity.

So we thought, well, obviously, whatever it is in Afghanistan should kind of look something like us. And then we tried to take that idea and marry it somewhat awkwardly to a variety of. We sort of dusted some local color into it. If you read the Constitution, which, if I recall correctly, the Afghan Constitution, both guarantees women's rights. And then, like, a clause or two later, guarantees that Hanafi Sharia will be the law of the land. I never quite understood how those two things were going to go together. But nevertheless, it's not that my take is it's not that we didn't have a. a political vision. It's that we had a deeply naive political vision. And then I have, I think I

agree with you that we, we never devoted sufficient energy to resolving those paradoxes or problems that we sort of dealt ourselves at the top. And then, yeah, once people started shooting at us, shooting back was, was much more straightforward as a course of action. Yeah. And if you look back at like the 19th century when the British were there and they drew the Durand line, which separated Pakistan from Afghanistan, that was an arbitrary straight line. made on a math, not really accounting for culture, people, history, et cetera. And that happens all over the world. But I zoom in on that because we used a system of states, like you said, that came from the piece of West Valley in 1648, which is a very European method of looking at what a state is

should be. And so we took that very European method of forming a state and you said, you will have a constitution. Not only we have a constitution, you'll have a president. And not only we have a president, you're going to have this structure of elders and et cetera, et cetera. So we made it look Afghan, but in fact, it was kind of an Enlightenment era structure of a state, kind of an idealized version of a state, which we also tried in Iraq as well. We tried in other countries to varying degrees of success. But it's really up to the people to decide, do they want a democracy? I love democracy myself, but does that mean that because I love it, that this other group of people have to accept it? Just like we're talking about with interrogations, when you force somebody

to do something, you get a very different response than when somebody just wants to do it inherently. And if they want to do it inherently, there'll be very little for us to do. We can kind of stand back and maybe give them resources or a little bit of rudder steering, but otherwise forcing them is a little bit coercive. And you're only hitting extrinsic motivations at that point. You're kind of ignoring the intrinsic things that are pushing those people every single day when they wake up and ask, what do I do today? Yeah, this is complicated though, isn't it?

I, so I've had many, we're replicating here in recording a conversation, versions of which I have had, and I'm sure you have had many times with people like us who serve there with at the time limited understanding of what the heck was going on, even if we thought we had a, I certainly thought I had an okay understanding at the time and then was disabused of that notion. And another kind of complaining conversation I have had with, with someone with overlapping background to yourself is, you know, the problem with the counterinsurgency theorists take. on people like Galula and the sort of earlier wave of anti-communist, irregular warfare thinkers, is that they kind of edited out all the ruthlessness in Galula, that if you read, if you actually read Galula or watch, you know, what's the movie? It's the Battle for Algiers. Thank you. The Battle for Algiers, you know, which is sort of based on all this. You know, these are methods are used by the French in Algeria that the United States military, generally speaking, would not countenance. I mean, he's baking, he's baking people in ovens.

I mean, it's, it's ugly stuff. Yeah. And my interlocutor's point in this other conversation was there's, there's a, there's kind of a dark heart to the imposition of power. And we've just sort of whistled past that part of the story to a, to a nicer sounding story where we're going to provide all these nice things that are obviously good. And people are going to obviously elect for them. And in fact, what we should be doing is imposing order and security first.

And then kind of going on to other things second. And, you know, you could. Look at the Taliban, there's popular support for the Taliban here and there in Afghanistan, but for the most part, the Taliban did not worry themselves with too much. They didn't overly worry themselves with whether or not the Hazaris were going to accept them in the end. They were just going to impose that when it came down to it. So I guess that's my question for you is, you know, what is the role of a voluntary acceptance of a political settlement actually play here?

I think it has to make sense in their context. So if we had this menu of political options, we need to sell it in such. a way that makes sense for the recipient rather than just telling the recipient to take it. If you bring them a political solution, it needs to make sense in their context. And the Afghans had something like that called the Loyah Jirga, which was the great council of elders coming together and kind of very democratically deciding things. That is a fantastic method for them. It worked for them. But we wouldn't let them just stay with that. Instead, we said, you have to adopt all these other liberal democratic things that we're going to give to you right now. And I think a lot of us forget

that we got those liberal democratic outcomes through many revolutionary wars in Europe, in America. A lot of blood was spilled to get those liberal ideas. So for us to just kind of bring it to someone and say, hey, just take this. Like, as you said, we're skipping over a lot of that earlier foundational history that's actually really critical to each of those very unique types of liberty. Like liberty in France, it's different than Liberty in America, even during our Revolutionary War and France's revolution, the meaning of what is liberty had two totally different definitions. I mean, if you take Rousseau versus Locke, very different views on how government should be designed, but we look at it as, oh, that's democracy. We look at it that way now because it was a

long time ago and none of us were there. And then we bring those ideas kind of mashed together and give them to the Afghans who are looking at this alien concept that they've never had before, in a successful way, at least. And yet they have their own structures that already exist like the way of Jirga, that we're kind of forcing them not to use. So just to step back from Afghanistan and speak more broadly then based on what you just said. Sort of in other words, a regular war starts because there is some sort of government or sovereign or trying to be a sovereign entity that's just not getting it done. And it goes to war with some element of its people. It could be a faction of its population. It could be a good chunk of its population depending on the details. And that's a regular war.

Is that fair to say is your definition? Yeah, I talk about that in my book quite a bit about sovereign dysfunction as the term I use for that, where the people expect something from the government and the government's not meeting that expectation. Now, Locke wrote about this pretty extensively. And if you read our Declaration of Independence, a lot of his words are in there, specifically talking about these great mistakes of government and people are just not willing to rise up and shake them off their shoulders. They don't do that until they're so repressed and so oppressed that they have no other way out. There's no other spigot to turn on to allow that to escape.

And in those moments, these people look for a violent solution because they feel that they have no other solution. Maybe they do have another one. But the way they feel in that moment is that they're backed against the wall and they have no other choice. Now, if the average person is feeling that way and then some leader comes along who's able to catalyze that feeling into a single movement, now you have a more organized problem against the sovereign. And, you know, it's just, again, sort of speaking at 30,000 feet. looking across the range of some of these conflicts. You know, what characterizes the methods of how insurgents fight? Like, how do these wars play out?

They play out in very different ways, and I think that's part of the confusion. When we look at, for example, the last 20 years, there was a lot of special operations folks on our sides wearing night vision goggles and going in the middle of the night, grabbing people. That works in certain context. In other contexts, the insurgents were more conventional, especially if you look at World War II,

the Yugoslavian partisans were more organized, than some of the Germans they were fighting against. In fact, Churchill observed that they were more successful in battle than the Germans were, and they did defeat the Germans numerous occasions. They were structured in brigade-sized elements. They had command-and-control, very good command-and-control. The British were there helping them a little bit, giving some special operations support before Special Operations was a doctrinal thing.

Yvlinoit writes about the partisans in Yugoslavia. Not very favorably, I would point out, but then he was a man of the right, and they obviously were not. So you're starting with the big prejudice there. Why does all of this matter today? I have it on good authority that we are washing our hands of the Middle East after some misadventures there. It's the era of Great Power Competition. Now, Great Power Competition has quote unquote gray zone warfare, but I take that to be something else entirely. That's more a question of tactics and operational concepts and sort of state cleverness manifesting itself out there and sort of battlefield-like. but not actually battlefields places or situations. Just like we did after Vietnam, we're going to kind of try to wash our hands of this difficult state building,

state backing, state vindicating stuff. So in 2025, Jonathan, you know, why should we be thinking about this? I think, first of all, the great power competition concept is an aspiration. And we always want to fight the wars, either the last war we fought or the war that we wish we had. and we try our hardest to ignore the war that we're having we're about to have. So that's kind of a philosophical point that I would just put there. But in 2025, as a capitalist world power, which we are,

we're involved in many, many parts of the world that require safety of our supply lines, of our economic relations with those countries and maybe not even countries, but portions of countries. Like in Morocco, for example, there's a part of Morocco, about half of it that's not recognized as a state by many countries, and that the U.S. used recently to recognize to get Moroccan favor, well, that kind of causes a problem in West Africa, if you're Algeria, for example, or if you're the Sarawis, which is the other half of Morocco, these have implications over time, especially in places in South America right now. There's a lot of liminal space,

which means kind of a gap between control. You know, if you look at Venezuela, for example, There's a lot of ungoverned areas there in Colombia. And if we don't notice that and yet still try to do economic things in those countries, our economic relations will be impacted by those things we ignored. And we need to think about that more holistically. It's not just the economic question or the military question. It should be a holistic approach to how do we maximize both our output and outcomes and their output and outcomes to get mutual benefits, which is, you know, mutual benefit is the best

benefit, in my opinion. And then it's also probably fair to say that great power conflict should it occur certainly doesn't rule out the relevance or even grave importance of irregular conflict as part of a broader complex of war. As your Yugoslavia example actually well illustrates, you have throughout the Second World War all manner of irregular wars that are very relevant in their regions to the ultimate outcome of the conflict. You've got wars like Vietnam, which are, again, they're sort of hybrids. You have a regular war in South Vietnam. The Viet Conguang, you also have maneuver war against conventional forces with the NVA. And the whole thing is a big, you know, a great power, superpower competition at the highest level. So I guess

there's all sorts of reasons to be focused on it and carrying. But I take one of your main points that the United States is still not thinking about it in the right way. You know, 15 years ago, ish, we made a real effort at getting better at this stuff. And that's what the coin movement was. And you and I both are skeptics of the fruit, the intellectual fruits of that exercise. And the results in Afghanistan and Iraq are both pretty bad. I don't think you can describe, I don't think you can describe all of those bad results to the coin theorists, but you can describe some of them. I can only really speak to Afghanistan. Maybe it's more complicated in Iraq. What did they get wrong and what do we need to get right as we are in some ways already

in and other ways gearing up for another round of human conflict? What immediately comes to mind is the three-block war concept that the Marine Corps had in the 1990s that General Krulek, who was our commandant, came up with about a, let's say a corporal, a very lower-level enlisted person, standing there on a street corner. Within three blocks, he could be fighting an insurgency, he could be handing out rice and grain, and he could be doing peacekeeping operations, the same person doing those three seemingly different things, I think if we look at it from that perspective,

that there are multiple goals we can accomplish with the same person, and we maximize that or multiply it across the total force, even though we're military instruments, we can carry a lot of other tools with us that we can use simultaneously, rather than just having a soft special operations team going in and doing a direct action rate. Maybe we should coordinate that direct action raid

with the civil affairs team that's going to be in there tomorrow, morning digging a well. So that after we've grabbed that person from the bed, go into that town, the next day with a totally different U.S. military presence, the person in that village is going to look at it as, that's just the U.S. military. They're not going to understand the difference. And instead, we need to also look at it that way, too, that we are part of a larger thing that has to have several little components inside of it, almost like campaign planning. There's all these different things working together towards the same outcome, but they have to actually be synchronized, especially in a conflict like this where politics, economics, political institutions

really matter. They matter perhaps more than the violence itself, because the violence is kind of a symptom. It is also a very important aspect of what's happening every day with people on the ground. But what if we could reduce it, prevent it, change the way it's perceived? What if the people that live there realize they don't want it? Recently, we saw that in Gaza, Palestinians were protesting against Hamas for the first time, which is very, very, very significant. And I think that should be maximized more rather than kind of a bliff on the news cycle. That should be a huge, you know, shout that, hey, there are people here who are unhappy with everything going on. This is your opportunity to look at it from a non-military perspective and solve a social problem perhaps.

Yeah. And, you know, you see how difficult it is for the Israelis to exploit that, because I agree completely. I've been following it closely. And, you know, the Israelis who have been looking at Gaza for forever. As an intelligence petri dish, they presumably have, in some fashion, a pretty good understanding of who's who there. But even so, I mean, leveraging that information into something that actually sticks as hard. In the American context, you know, it just strikes me, and we've alluded to this already, but we shouldn't, in my view, we shouldn't look past just its centrality as a problem. You pointed out, you know, the Brits would stick around in places for a long time. They It would have these political agents.

The political agents, I have it on the good authority of a lot of British novels I've read about India. If the military had to be called in to quell some riot, they saw it as a failure. Right. It was they had screwed up. They had lost control. And like, sometimes you lose control and you have to bring in the kind of, you know, the mouth-breathing infantry to fire a couple of volleys into the streets. But that didn't mean you had done a good job as a political agent. You had failed.

And we, you know, we're complaining that, you know, our military has short deployments. And so the officers who have been. now as diplomats and political strategists, perhaps a bit unfairly, are then doing it in six-month sprints, which renders the absurd even more absurd. Well, you know, where are the political agents? And to have such an institution, to have diplomats who, like, lived in a country for a very long time, would also require a kind of more, well, an attitude that accepted that our role in guaranteeing order was more like the British than I think Americans are comfortable accepting. And so as a result, we we we just generally speaking have no idea what we're doing we can't we we we end up in a

in peak coin in Afghanistan 2012 when you were there 2010 when I was there with all sorts of strategies and metrics and arrows on on maps and I mean this literally like I mean like I can picture what I'm talking about as I say it that just don't get any chart yeah they just don't matter because what matters is the opinions of you make up a number a few thousand people maybe who are in elite positions in different communities and like what they choose is what's going to go. And we don't even know half the time who those people are or how to condition their thinking. And strategy, political strategy, what it comes down to it, is about affecting and manipulating

and seeking agreement slash coercing slash intimidating, sort of depending on the day, those people. And like, find me the regimental commander, or not to, you mean, find me anyone who actually had like a holistic view of the place. I mean, no one even speaks the language. No one even speaks the language. We don't even care about that. It's funny, actually, in 2011, right before I went to Afghanistan, we had a language class, and they said, you can pick a Dari or a Poste. Go ahead, pick one.

So I picked Pashio. And that was it. There was no, like, where are you going to be deployed to in Afghanistan or where might this matter most? And so did my year of Posteo, fantastic, then I get deployed to an area that speaks Dari exclusively. Some of our detainees spoke Poste, sure. But I didn't speak it to the level that was required for that to be useful. So it was a year wasted on something that I could have spent helping my deployment and helping the people I was going to be there for in Afghanistan, both the Afghans and us. And instead, I learned a language that I never used.

Yeah. It's also insurious. And it speaks to the lack of existential stakes for the military organizations involved. You know, you manage your piece of the pie for your period as a commander or at whatever level you are. And so long as the division is still there when you leave it, you know, you didn't really lose. You know, in World War II, you know, you could lose a division. You know, you could have catastrophic failure. You could lose the war and lose American freedom.

Like there could be catastrophic failure. And that had a way of concentrating the mind. I don't feel like anyone in leadership, I could consider myself, you know, as a platoon commander, but nevertheless, you know, my platoon was there at the start of the deployment. It was there at the end of the deployment. Did we win in Marja? I don't know. I could make a case that we made some progress here and there. but certainly the overall bigger effort that we were a part of did not win.

And, you know, no one's career was really negatively affected by that in the end. And it was just, I can do you one better. My Arabic was pretty decent when I joined the Marines. And I took the test and I got paid extra and everything. Never once set foot in Arabic speaking country. Not once. Yep. That's the way we do.

And also, you have the foreign area officer program, which is fantastic. And we have a lot of foreign area officers in not the Marine Corps, but the other branches, that that's their career. You know, they come in as a young officer. and all the way through general, they can serve as a senior defense official or defense attache. They've got great language skills. They've got great relationships built with the people that they work with. The Army's got the state partnership program, which is similar for the National Guard.

Well, if you spent 30 years doing that, where's the give back of knowledge to the institution when they leave? And a lot of them are kind of stove piped. They're almost ostracized in some ways. Either you're going to work at the Pentagon when you're stateside or you're going to work in the embassy when you're overseas. And we don't want you at the conventional units because you're going to bring your suits. and your etiquette to us, you know, and that's kind of the way it sometimes feels. I worked in half a dozen embassies, and I've worked in defense attaché offices in Jordan most recently. And there's almost like a community that's very difficult to break out of once you're painted with that foreign area

officer brush. And you try to come back and give those ideas. Planners aren't interested in that. They're not interested in the long-term ideas about culture and society and all these things. Maybe they are, to a small degree, but that's not what the campaign plan asks for. it asks for end states and how to get there with the means we have available. And there's a lot of times we don't ask with bigger questions that these people in our same institution could possibly help us with. Yeah. I mean, I guess in the military's defense, in a way, it's sort of rejecting this foreign

organism or, you know, the antibodies are fighting against this foreign area officer thing that doesn't really make sense in the conventional military. It's a bit beside the point. And the only reason it really needs to exist is because of the failure of other parts of the U.S. government to fulfill, I'll keep using the term just because I don't have a better one, the political agent role in these difficult places where people are actually there, they actually live there, they actually speak the language, they actually know who's who, they actually can pursue the American interest.

But the people who should be doing that, they're rotated through as well. Their language skills are not great, and they don't often have the resource. The only organization with resources is the military, which doesn't know how to do it. Sorry, the subject brings out like the most skeptical, cynical side of me. I think that's really healthy because that's how we get better. We look at what are our flaws and how do we make them better next time? And if we don't stop asking that, maybe we will be better off next time. But I think that's what happened with the last conflicts.

We kind of forgot the Vietnam lessons. We forgot the colonial policing lessons. We forgot our own lessons even from the Revolutionary War or ignored them or thought they were from a different time. And so we kind of didn't put the value on them that maybe we should have. So maybe in the next conflict, we can not break the chain this time. That is a good and non-suicidal intentions inducing note on which to end with you, Jonathan Hackett, veteran, patriot, author of Theory of a Regular War.

It's been really interesting. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.