Sea Control - Sea Control 589: Non-state Special Operations with Craig Whiteside

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Links1. Non-state Special Operations: Capabilities and Effects, Ian Rice and Craig Whiteside, Routledge, 2025.2. The Isis Reader Substack.3. @CraigAWhiteside on X.4. @[e-mail] on BlueSky.5. Craig Whiteside personal site and publications.

you're listening to sea control posted by the center for international maritime welcome board sea control fans this is jay my guest today is dr craig craig white's white side co-author of the new book and non-state special operations capabilities of effects which came out in July 2025, and we're recording this in August 2025. So, Craig, welcome aboard. First off, please tell us a little about yourself. Hi, Jay. Thanks for having me. Huge SIMSEC fan. Teach your stuff. Teach your SIMSEC stuff in our courses for years. And I teach naval officers, army officers, and marines at the Naval Postgraduate School on behalf of the Naval War College. I'm at the resident program. We teach JPME1 for mid-level officers, and

I've been doing that about 12 years. I was a former Army officer, but I went back to school, got a degree in international relations, and was lucky and fortunate enough to get hired here at NPS by the War College and love it. Just love a really great mix of joint officers, studying a lot of different things. We've got everything from SWOs to METOCs to SUPPOs, but also we've got the Marines, Space Marines. I've had Space Marines last quarter and Acquisition folks. So we really do run the gamut in our discussions of national security,

which is what I teach. I teach TSDM, but it's a national security survey course for those of you who are not familiar with it. And, yeah, it's been a journey, but a great one. Nice, nice. Thanks so much. Really happy to have you on here. You've written a lot on TeamSec. Most of our listeners, I think, will be familiar with you and all. As always, I want to remind our listeners and that all opinions here are our own and not necessarily those of any organization with which

we are or may be affiliated. Craig, I think the terms special operations and non-state are both really simple on the surface, but can have many definitions and differing perceptions of what those are by whoever is looking at them reading them um just learning about these so could you explain a little bit about how you're using those concepts in this book please yeah i think it's i think it's really important obviously as a pme prof we we start with definitions we hammer home concepts what is deterrence what is he control what uh what is he denial right that and making sure the officers understand that stuff even though they seem simple uh what we and what we think is that there's kind of terms that are used loosely and we found a lot of value in in kind of

defining them up front and that's you know special operations uh they're not just the things that the cool guys do it's activities or actions this is from our joint doctrine activities or actions requiring unique modes of employment tactical techniques equipment and training often conducted in hostile denied or politically sensitive environments so that's that's just what they are in a nutshell, they're different types of operations than the conventional ones that all the services do. And they're done by soft special operation forces. And those are the people specially trained to execute those kind of special missions, right? There's an important distinction that I'll circle back to later. Why do states do them? For politically reliable

outcomes, right? And I use the bin Laden raid into Pakistan. You've got to do that right. you're violating the sovereignty of a friendly country you don't want to start a war uh and it has to be done very carefully no civilian casualties and and you know you come in out and get the get the person you want and don't screw anything up um and that's hard to do as everyone knows who's been an operator that there's always something going to go wrong so you have these kind of soft doing special operations right so how do non-state actors and And, you know, to define non-state actors, these are organized groups that are employing violent tactics on behalf of some type of, for some type of reason. And there are quite diverse reasons. And I'll get into that as well, hopefully, because we found that to be really equally important.

So these violent non-state actor groups of various types and categories, why would they do special operations? operations that that's that's kind of both uh the genesis of other research and like how we thought about why is this important um what we think is that it helps us understand how non-state groups campaign and that's in campaigning is an important uh kind of concept that's kind of been reinvigorated in our current strategic competition environment with china right how do we campaign in peacetime to to kind of to to stiffen uh our deterrence against china or russia or or even other actors right um so so that's why we think looking at these uh non-state non-state actors doing special operations uh but it still begs the question right why would these actors do

something you know like a special operation uh one they can't resource off right they don't have the resources to build a permanent set of forces that conduct special operations. They always operate with really low-risk tactics because they're in an asymmetric fight, usually against larger states. They're challenged resourcing, so they're quite good at developing their own resources, but they're pretty thinly resourced. They're not resourced like a state. They're not the United States of America. But they have the same strategic challenges. And so they adapt and innovate and they use special operations in just a different way. Same logic, just a different way. And that gets to kind of putting those two things together. You ask, what is a special operations?

What's a non-state actor? And then what is a non-state special operation? For us, we kind of derive it from a lot of the literature about state special operations so it's a high risk well-resourced uh specialized tactical military action that is a departure from what they normally do so it is unique just like what we our definition of special operations and it's intended to create an outsized effect so this is it's a tactical event that creates strategic uh consequences that are obviously hopefully help the group do that. And that's actually the definition and our three-part test. One, is it different?

Is it just different from what they do? Two, is it special? Is it something that not just anybody could do and you put a lot of work towards it, a lot of resources you don't normally have? And then number three, did the effect have, is it greater than that effect of the actual action? All right, thanks.

That's probably a better couple minutes summation summation of all the concepts that i've i've heard in a long time so thanks yes it's very good all right uh i gotta i gotta say i've been reading your stuff for our first became aware of you over 10 years ago when you were writing about i believe uh al-qaeda and the arabian peninsula and and isis before that was a before most of america knew what that was that was a pretty niche topic before it became um very well known so can i just ask like to go off a little bit there was there some particular event um that inspired you to research and write about um all all of this either this particular book or just the research you've been doing for at least over

a decade as far as i know on this kind of topic okay um you know that's a good question and it could probably elicit an even longer response and then my first response but uh i'll keep it short and say you know the the short story is that it was islamic state i that that's uh my my research topic and my my doctoral dissertation was actually on early islamic state and and had done it during the period before they established the caliphate uh so so that's uh and then their experimentation and innovation with special operations is something that i got into recently with my partner at mps uh because he teaches irregular warfare to you know navy seals and and army soft folks uh air force soft too uh so joint soft community here uh so he's he's kind of the expert

on special operations and i'm i'm looking at very deeply at this one militant group and we we kind to develop it from there but but i'll tell you what inspired us and it's the doolittle raid which is is a you know special operation that happens in the maritime domain uh it's done before the u.s has special operation forces right so that's what helps us make the linkage to how non-states can also kind of do ad hoc special operations so that's our inspiration if you look at the mission itself it's always kind of it's an odd it's an oddity that you you won't see it called as a special you won't see it described as a special operation but it's a special operation for the reason that you know that test that i just gave you you're using army medium range bombers

on a naval aircraft carrier you know that's never that wasn't done before wasn't even they weren't even sure that that could even be done watch it watch the videos of that folks if you haven't before watch those watch those come off the end of the uh of the flight deck terrifying right yeah it is it is yeah just watching it 80 years later you're like oh are they going to make it so it's it's different uh you're using specialized tactics because you know you you actually had to train they actually had to go to florida and then mock do a mock-up of the aircraft carrier to see if this could even be done they ended up ditching you know taking you know stripping down the aircraft just so that they could take off so you made these modifications

you had very highly trained pilots uh there's huge risk here right i mean you're going to uh those those platforms and pilots are probably uh you know you're expending they're expendable They're they're not coming back from this one way mission and they could be discovered. You know, you're taking your one carrier, you're taking the you're taking not your one carrier, but you're taking a very important asset after Pearl Harbor and sending it to Japan right off the coast of Japan to drop these bombers to send these bombers off. And the tactical effect is nil. Right. It drops on bombs, but it's the strategic effect. you know uh president roosevelt uses this as american propaganda to say for the american people to say look we struck back and we're going to come and also to telegraph uh that that the u.s

would be doing this more and more in the future as as the as the tide turned our way so so that's a that's a state special operation but it inspired us to think about well how do non-states you know use that same kind of logic and create these ad hoc task forces just like the u.s did with an army navy task force and then uh conduct special operations uh and we found um you know it hits a lot of what colin gray colin gray is is probably the most prominent author who's written on special operations although it's still an underdeveloped kind of theoretical place uh but he says like you know some of these secondary effects are humiliation of your enemies right that's what the do little raid is all about like you didn't think we could get here but we did and louisville

even kind of plays coy on where these aircraft came from right they came from Shangri-La and and it's it's really fascinating but the video itself is proof that this is a propaganda effort by the U.S. to to kind of shore up our morale these are all reasons why any actor does a special operation and I'll also say that we another example we use in the book that's maritime is the British raid on Saint Nazaire on the Tirpitz dry docks which is called Operation chariot and it's a ship-borne ied right like we complain about our adversaries using these things but we uh as uh well the allies create this uh you know ship-borne ied and uh and use it to destroy the dry docks and take the turpits out of the fight a very asymmetrical way a very um indirect

way to influence the maritime battle without having to take the turpits on head-on thank you That was never, the doula raid is not something I was, I was, had in mind about this. So that was good stuff. And if folks want to, again, I encourage folks to read up on that if you're not, because that often the Air, the Air Force takes a lot of credit for that one, I think, but there was a heavy Navy involvement. And there was, it doesn't happen without the US Navy. Yeah, exactly.

Good stuff. I think, so now you've touched on the maritime domain, which, which is cool, of course, for our listeners here. I think if we talked about the non-state and the, not too long ago, we would have thought about mostly land power like ISIS. I mean, the two examples you used of older ones are, of course, from World War II, of maritime or from World War II. But ISIS, other terror groups, the FARC, maybe some, you know, drug cartels, maybe their operation like this, we might think of more land focused. But in the last many months, I guess, the Houthis, of course, in Yemen there have become

far more prominent in the maritime domain. People, I think, who, you know, weren't aware of things like maritime choke points that that sort of has made regular news how these sort of things can can happen um do you see what they're doing and have done is something is that new or are they are they following an older playbook do you do you see folks uh really is there are there innovations here or is it does it all sort of go back to something you know you could trace back to do little or the turpent trade there yeah i mean that's a that's a that's a tough question It's actually a question I spend a lot of time thinking about and have rarely come up with very good answers on. Knowledge transfer, particularly amongst violent non-state actors, because they're not as institutionalized as state actors, it's difficult to find the evidence on that.

I don't get to interview a lot of ISIS guys, so I don't know. And they're all dead, too. What their PME was like, exactly. Yeah, what was your PME like? Yeah, how'd you learn your TTPs? did you go to the war college right you know um so i haven't got i haven't got that and other than inferential you know you know did did uh hamas get its inspiration for october 7th from um you know the islamic states kind of really aggressive and high-risk operations that they

have done or even just just the general inspiration it's all it's too one for that one particularly too early to tell and then for others it's it's just been really hard to do and um i'm always on the lookout for it uh but um what i'd say about first the hooties we we use an example of the hooties as uh executing a special operation uh with their um their helicopter assault on the cargo ship uh galaxy leader in 2023 if you ever if you saw that yeah yeah yeah it's like i thought it was a deep fake ai i'm like absolutely just yeah i'm writing on non-special operations and i'm like there's no way they just did a you know a navy seal assault on a tanker yeah i mean i'm sorry a cargo ship yeah but and so you know and it did it have these uh you know did it have an

outside strategic effect not really i i i'm not sure that that actually does meet all of our capabilities but certainly it's a you know it goes almost like from the do-little rate it is very propagandish right right right we can do these kind of things uh but but more importantly from the houthis and and again we don't know a lot about the internal dynamics of of their decision making right but i think i think it's pretty clear what we've seen and we've done some really good panels here at nps uh naval war college workshops uh here at nps that uh have kind of done some lessons learned with our um our surface warfare officers and some of our um some of the intel folks and try to do some uh classified hot washes on you know what what's what are we

seeing how how is the navy reacting all that stuff you know just absolutely fascinating one of my favorite workshops we've ever done. But I think from the flip side, looking at the Houthis and not really knowing, you know, exactly what their decision making is, it's clear that they have an idea of campaigning. And that's kind of, even if they're not doing a lot of special operations, and to be honest, non-state actors don't do a lot of special operations because they are high risk, because it takes a lot of resourcing that they rarely have and cannot afford to squander. We can see the Houthis, from a campaigning perspective, took on the United States Navy, certainly challenged it. The Navy, I think, performed magnificently, but also had some close calls, really had some close calls in realizing that this actor, non-state actor, it doesn't control most of Yemen or politically control it, but is influential.

was able to kind of challenge our maritime assets in the Red Sea and then also kind of impact at the strategic level, right? They've reduced shipping in the Red Sea still, right? It's still down, it was the last time I checked. And they've tied it to a larger strategic political cause in Gaza and tying it to the ceasefire. Okay, will that shipping return maybe? but you know this is contingent on uh ceasefires and got a previous ceasefire etc and so you know

just this their sequencing of uh you know campaigning their sequencing of tactical events in time and space um you know makes us think that there's something beyond just kind of a random series of attacks on on ships you know whether they're targeting and that they're that they're campaigning and that's one of the things we were trying to do with special operations because special operations are obviously they're they're they're rarely used but they're used as a lot of times as specially placed uh transitions or inflections in campaigns and that's what operational artists do they're like oh you know we and we saw that with isis they wouldn't they're they're special operations a very few that they ever did were very much transition

between like uh okay guys hey we have to pick it up into a new set of a higher tempo uh guerrilla warfare tactics more you know hit and run very more robust and those kind of things and so i think that's what generally we see patterns and trends of in the non-state actors on from what their thinking and we don't know but we hypothesize that this is increasing right that that due to knowledge transfer they're able to they're they're better able to campaign to put these things together i'll i'll nerd out a little more and go could we get into a definition i think you explain pretty well a definition of campaigning or how you guys are seeing campaigning because that that does seem to be as in the book a little bit that does seem to be a big a big focus on this

which i think a lot of the casual observers would not think that was part of the the plan for these actors necessarily it's yeah so yeah yeah and i mean i think sometimes i'm i i'm thinking like well i mean obviously non-state actors we they campaign right they they've any non-state actor who's ever you know achieved their uh strategic objectives right they didn't it didn't happen through luck or happenstance like they have a plan right uh if you look at the Viet Cong and and uh and and the Vietnam War they're you know they create the you know the Tet Offensive and it's and it's uh you know country-wide attack they achieve strategic surprise on the United States um they even you know it's debatable whether they even lure large you know marine forces out into

case on to kind of allow them to to achieve the effect that they're that they want to on the on the major population centers and of course they believe at least from a causal you know strategic logic that there's going to be a strategic uprising i mean there's going to be a a popular uprising in the cities to get rid of the the american puppet regime and replace it with uh you know the communist um forces and that will win the war for them now all of that is does not turn out to does not turn out right and typical and that clause fits the infriction uh as well as kind of a delusion of you know what's gonna you know how how they're gonna win um and that's that's essentially campaigning from our from our doctrinal perspective it is a sequencing of

tactical events in time and in space in order to achieve operational or strategic objectives and so you know anytime you see a logic applied to these campaigns but you see it in terror groups Islamic State, you know, was often from outsiders would look at them and be like, why are they do these very horrific terror killings of civilians, this is going to backfire, it's going to backlash, it's not going to work. And it worked, right? The effect that they were trying to achieve through these horrible terrorist attacks was to get the government to really push back and even beyond the government to have the other side commit atrocities that would then push more and more Sunni Arabs to their side. And it worked. It worked for a period of time. It didn't work in the long run. But in the end, when you see these non-state actors kind of using logics like that, whether they work or not, I mean, just the idea that they're doing it is a form of campaigning. and i'm going to just keep i had not thought of the do-little rate on this so i'm just going to keep going back to that and going like that's it when i think about the do-little rate in a if that was another country doing it we might have said well well that was a failure they didn't take

out any major factories they didn't yeah that didn't work so much got wiped out exactly well a lot of them didn't make it back but yes we so that's that's a really interesting same i guess with the tet offensive or like that wasn't actually a i think we ended up winning most of those but of course in the end oh absolutely and the ted offensive is a is a great example because we often look at it as an operational defeat of the vietcong in fact for the next two to three years after uh 1968 and 1968 on the vietcong were a shell of themselves because they really invested everything into this idea that the population was going to rise up and the americans were going to get kicked out and and you know they they lost their clandestine cover

They came out of of this, you know, this hybrid mode and they went full out and got white. I mean, just got mass, you know, just got absolutely even if you use the conventional firepower, the United States is quite, quite extensive. So but, you know, we write in the book, it's actually the special operation that's embedded in Tet. And it's the it's the attack on the U.S. embassy by 15 guys. they also failure by the way i mean never they break into the outer wall but never make it in thanks to like two or three marines you know thank god for two or three marines who were at their post and fought off you know 15 guys and um and that's almost all the security at the embassy by the way it was just you know shameful uh but um but it didn't matter it was just the fact that

they breached the the embassy knocked the great seal of the united states off the wall and the rumor was that they had taken the embassy and um general westmoreland actually went the first thing he did in tet was to go to the embassy and say everything is fine nothing to see here and the news people are going nuts because they're like this how did this even happen how in the world could this happen in the midst of a you know 50 000 man offensive across the country the entire country is going up in flames and everyone's looking at this 15-man assault on the on the embassy and it the strategic effects of that were huge it was on the front page of every newspaper and you know it's it's part of the shock for president johnson who's like my guys have been

telling me we're we're the you know we're dead light the lights at the end of the tunnel we're turning the turning the corner and um i don't think i'm gonna run for re-election i mean that is almost the effect of a 15 man squad uh and that's a special operation yeah and that's for i think conventional wisdom if you don't know too much about that tet scene is that like well we after tet we had lost the war and it was just dragging it out but i think for a lot of people who aren't too into that go and yeah to learn that actually we you know for lack of better we kind of want it but but oh yeah you know it's a tactical victory but in the end it's a maybe even a strategic victory but it's a political defeat for the administration and and the top leadership

in vietnam from a military perspective and that's it that's it yeah that's what we teach at the war college it's all about politics and policy and then you know strategy is just you know it's just something people are doing yeah yeah i think that just sheds a light a lot of light on how to look at things going on right now um again keeping it kind of maritime there aside from the hooties are you seeing other non-state actors currently making use of special operations in the maritime domain that maybe we're not you know as familiar with yeah that's a great question and you know there's been a lot I think there's a lot of terrorism that happens in the maritime domain obviously a lot of criminal activity or even kidnapping for hire but special operations are quite rare

in the maritime domain because uh the strategic it's hard to create a strategic effect out at sea that's going to impact most of our politically and strategic kind of interests are um our kind of land base although you could see you meant you made the point about choke points and i joke with my students all the time that sync columns should be considered a maritime combatant command because it's got the three checkpoints and we always talk about it in our in our uh strategy discussions and we've you know joking around that like it's going to be about time for a navy commander to take over which just happened so my students are like wow you know um yeah yeah yeah but i mean admiral cooper's been very uh influential in a lot of other ways too so

we've been following him as far as his kind of innovation i thought we were talking about hybrid fleets early uh before the show but yeah i mean he's been pretty instrumental and all that so um so there could be you know aspects of that like uh you know a terror attack on the suez canal that you know does the same thing that the stuck tanker did that a couple years ago right uh but we have we have seen some i mean in the book we have um there are maritime aspects to the hamas october 7th attack right so part of the restoration of the of the barrier that the israelis really thought was kind of impenetrable and they were like you know this is safe uh i was there a couple weeks before october 7th and they were just completely focused in on hezbollah to the north

and looking at a developing war with hezbollah coming up uh and just were not looking uh at the south but the envelopment of the wall happened in many ways aerial all right they breached the wall in many places they used drones but but they also um used a maritime infiltration as well So just that idea of just kind of overwhelming as part of what we call special operation, although obviously that's still details to be determined. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Mumbai assault, it does not happen without a maritime infiltration, right? I think it's the absolute critical aspect. There's no way a terror group from Pakistan is going to get into India, into one of its jewel cities and conduct a large rampaging terrorist attack. It's impossible for that to happen unless you are able to do maritime infiltration, which is not. it was it was actually fairly sophisticated and they put a lot of work into that aspect of it and i think it facilitated i mean they also use technology like you know i mean they use gps which

okay but they also use vip google earth and some other technologies that we argue in the book that is facilitating more and more special operations and some of those are obviously going to be in the maritime domain you could see al-shabaab get involved there's been some kind of weird collaboration between houthis and al-shabaab which shouldn't necessarily happen there on different ends of the spectarian sectarian divide but tamale terrorist group right that's yeah i'm sorry so yeah on the on the western side of the of the red sea and they've typically been very land-based but i think you know they are an al-qaeda affiliate they do they do adhere to its rhetoric about a global jihad against you know established status quo powers and so they're

kind of sitting in that same very important space that the that the houthis are so you could see although they haven't really to my knowledge really really demonstrated any kind of maritime capabilities or ability to do effects in that domain. And the last thing I'd say to that is the importance of internal waters is something that a lot of, you know, we kind of leave that to the Coast Guard in a lot of aspects, but

certainly the United States, we have very substantial internal waterways uh we saw militants in the marawi fight in the philippines uh in mindanao uh use interior waters particularly uh these massive lakes to resupply its garrison um that was under siege for months uh before the philippine military uh really with the assistance of the united states task force that's there you know using isr assets to say you got a lot of lake traffic going on that was actually the insurgents, one, bringing weapons into the city, two, bringing money out of the city that they had looted and then were using it to further their campaigns in the rest of Mindanao.

And they brought a lot of out. And this was going on for months during the siege, before Morawi was liberated by the Philippine government. And they had to develop internal maritime capabilities to control these infiltration routes, they were all maritime, you know, by fishermen who knew the, you know, who could go back and forth.

And so those are, it's not, that's not a special operation either, but it's certainly more unique ways of using maritime domain to assist campaigning and other aspects of warfare. All right. Thanks. That was good. The last question as we start to wrap up, and I will have show links to some stuff here at the bottom, your book, of course, but any specific lessons that we haven't gone over yet, or maybe just general awareness you'd like SimSec listeners to take away from your research in this book? yeah i think um i mean that can be a tough question too because special operations is a niche topic and violent non-state actor special operations is a niche topic of a niche topic

and not one that everyone's like wow okay that's great but you know it seems like it's quite quite small and rare and i'm like well yeah actually that's true it is that doesn't happen a lot but one of the i would say i'll go back to your argument about that i'm like i'm gonna keep going to do a little analogy though it's a it has outsized effect though so it's this is you know i think this all has outsized effect so i i think it's it's more important than perhaps it's you know then we're just we think on the surface so anyway i'll make that argument for you yeah you that is that that should be my argument right like you know these are these are rare one-off events but man when they happen to you they really hurt they really hurt and yeah and you and you

really should do everything you can to make sure these don't happen to you again look at the israelis i mean their their world has changed since october 7th and um you know it started with a non-state special operation to to breach the walls um but i i'd actually like to talk about the typology that we developed because we're we're looking at okay so maybe non-state actors do you know if we're going to argue non-state actors do special operations and that these meet some kind of definition of what do different type of non-state actors and how do they think about and execute special operations differently, right? How do cartels do it differently than militant groups slash terrorists that do it differently than violent cults like

on Shinriko and, uh, in Tokyo, uh, or, um, proxy groups, right. Is that I don't always see the Houthis as a proxy group, but you have certainly Iranian proxies in the middle East that really are bid and are doing exactly what the Iranians say. And to me, that's, that's how to, uh, define proxy. So, um, the, the value of a typology, not just helps us understand variations in, in you know how they think about employing special operations or really anything for the effects that they're trying to achieve which are all different right so how we differentiated these non-state actors in our typology is really by well what's their motives are they are they thinking about political uh problems or are they um or are they more criminally uh motivated um you know are they

more selfishly motivated like cults and criminal groups or mercenaries uh and then their agency like who's is this something that they want to do or is it something that someone else is telling them to do and we saw variations in that but then we think you know these obviously have strategy and policy implications right so um and the one that really i've been thinking about a lot lately and i think you know is is certainly coming up in our in our strategy uh our national level strategy discourse is is cartels right like they've been designated as terrorist groups not entirely comfortable with that from one an academic perspective like they're they do terrorism but all of these mercenaries i mean states you could argue states and some states do

like russia does terrorism uh but that's not the definition right we don't define we call those war crimes right these are not these are not necessarily you're you're not going to accuse russia of terrorism and get that across the united nation because they're like no it's not non-state actors do terrorism states do not right and so we have these these ideas about what these are but it you know designating them as terrorists to cut their financing is great and that's no problem as long as we don't believe our own you know our own propaganda or our own we don't start drinking using our own stuff to use cartel uh lingo know because then you could you could really mistake right well you know these criminal

groups are very um they're very uh reactive to pressure because they're really interested in making money and the bottom line so so they're they're willing that you know they'll they'll defer to to states that are coming down hard on them like okay hey if if we start seeing a negative cash flow because of this we're just going to do something different um but that's quite different than you know fighting isis or you know dropping bombs on violent uh you know groups like uh that are politically motivated um and so you know i think that's just something we have to think about from a you know strategy perspective is we just kind of lump these guys together and start believing our own rhetoric that they're terrorists um you know these two

groups react very differently to pressure. And I also, you know, think that the two groups have very different asymmetrical advantages against the United States, right? Terror groups do not have very deep roots inside the United States that they can then leverage to do coercion to get the United States to back off. You know, very many cartels do have that kind of leverage and influence in the united states and they're not as you know their principal asian problem is a word is a phrase we would use in an academia to say like you know isis had very tight control of its folks when it did atrocities it meant to do them and it was planned and perpetrated to for the a particular effect uh but it doesn't have a lot of freelancing going on but that's not the same for criminal

groups right who might be mad that you've taken their their uh their uncle their favorite uncle off the you know off to prison and you know are gonna are gonna do some retribution and there's no there you know criminal groups just don't have that coherence or discipline and so you could you know the the unintended consequences i think could be really tremendous and that's you know again that's some that's what the typology helped us understand was how these groups did stuff differently and and for different reasons right in our in our book the criminal group you know created a monopoly the the example we use for uh for a you know a car a criminal group or cartel special operation is a monopoly of artichokes which which were grown here on the central

coast of california so very close to home see them all over but they had they had uh from the grower to sellers in new york city they had they owned that entire supply chain from from transport growers transport to the grocers and we're making like you know like 95 profit on every dollar was it was amazing and you know their ability to do that and use violence to kind of enforce each aspect of that and have it go on for years until it became a national you know crisis i think the fbi and the mayor of new york city had to you know ban artichokes to to try to break this monopoly and that's how criminal groups you know think versus um you know uh terrorist groups and i think that's just some that's a takeaway that that at least i you know that was my most valuable

takeaway from doing the research was how valuable um understanding different motives and um agency for for these type of non-state groups nice well thanks gregory that's that's a great takeaway and gives me and i think our listeners a lot to think about and i hope we all delve a little deeper uh with the book they're out from rutledge i'm going to uh i said i'll have the link to that on our show notes i'll remind folks too we're recording uh again in august 2025 so if things change get worse hopefully maybe get better um anyway that this is our time stamp on this because sometimes these aren't out for a few weeks so there may be there may be things evolving in time there um and where can we find you online and what are you working on next craig oh i'm uh at craig

whiteside on uh on x and uh also on blue sky although i don't post a lot as a government employee that's a precarious and you know dangerous but i do yeah i do uh like to um you know, to see what people are reading or thinking about occasionally. I do have a substack called the ISIS Reader, which I'm putting a lot of the non-state special operations that did come out of the ISIS research and are researching to the ISIS Reader book. And then I'm hoping to publish soon with one of my students, Lieutenant Joe Durgan. He's a surface warfare officer here at uh at mps he's almost done he's almost done his thesis poor guy suffering through uh you know writing a thesis uh for his master's degree and uh he's looking at russian maritime gray zone

tactics which uh you know it's kind of in that irregular space and uh i'm hoping to publish with him something uh somewhere on um you know what his kind of research uh has done on i'm trying and figure out why is Russia expending or executing unconventional statecraft in the maritime domain, and what is this getting for them? How is it achieving kind of the strategic effects, the same kind of things we're asking about for non-state special operations? So, yeah, I'm hoping to publish that with him, but he's got to finish his last chapter first.

Extra pressure on him now. I'm going to send this to Joe finish your thesis that's right we're all thinking about you buddy well Dr. Craig Whiteside thanks again for joining us really appreciate it looking at the book and for all the listeners

out there thanks so much for joining us and we will see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © transcript Emily Beynon