Decisive Point Podcast

In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/4/

Episode transcript: “Afghanistan: The Logic of Thinking Fast and Slow”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army, War College, or any other agency of the US government.

In your SRAD Director’s Corner series you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists, especially those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The spring issue contains the fifth installment of this series, and the focus is on Afghanistan. Thanks for joining us again.

Colonel George Shatzer

Thanks as always for having me. I enjoy discussing these important issues.

(Host)

Each of you articles in the series include a personal component. You have had direct experience in dealing with the issues and strategies discussed in the books you review. That’s true again with the topic of the US war in Afghanistan.

Shatzer

Yes, very true. I don’t claim to be an expert on Afghanistan but that country and the US war there have factored significantly in my Army career. The terror attacks of 9/11, emanating partly from Afghanistan, inspired my interest in national security and strategy and were a big part of the reason I chose to become an Army strategist in 2005. As a much younger officer then, I felt strongly that the so-called Global War on Terror should have remained centered on Afghanistan and the terror groups operating there. My views on that have changed some over the years, but the issue of our commitment to campaigning in Afghanistan remained the vital question all the way to the collapse of the campaign in 2021. And, I know we’ll take more about that later. I was also a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in ’05 and decided to write my master’s thesis on proxy warfare which led to me to research and write a lengthy case study on the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s and the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the development of the foreign terrorist base there. And while I would continue to follow events in Afghanistan closely, it would be another nine years before I actually served there in country. The experience was probably the most difficult of my entire career. That tour challenged me the most intellectually and was personally and professionally very trying.

Host

So, an easy question then – why did the US war in Afghanistan fail?

Shatzer

Oh boy. Joe Collins’s article in the same edition of Parameters does a great job at answering this. I offer many reasons why in my article as well. The reality is that the array of problems in Afghanistan is vast and their nature is so complex as to almost be alien to us as Americans. But if I had to select the one issue that set up the US campaign for failure it would be the mismatch in the aims of US political leaders and those of the US military.

For the Department of Defense, and especially the Army as the lead service in the campaign, there was a deep-seated reluctance to fully commit to a war in Afghanistan. Even years before 9/11, the DoD and the Army actually did a fair job of examining the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan and concluding that operating there was a dead end – a graveyard of empires as the phrase goes. So many books like the Bear Went Over the Mountain by Les Grau, The Bear Trap by Mohammed Yousef, and post 9/11 works like Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan were very popular and all played on the same theme: that powerful militaries go into Afghanistan and cannot deal with the terrain, the culture, and myriad other issues, and only end up wasting years and precious resources. So, DoD and the Army planned what amounted to a very large-scale raid of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001 to punish and oust the Taliban and to capture and kill as many Al-Qaeda and other terrorists as possible – and, critically, to not become so decisively engaged with a large footprint of conventional forces that would only lead to a long-term and aimless campaign vulnerable to failure.

But US civilian leadership had a different view. While they recognized what history had to say about major powers entering Afghanistan, they were rightly aggrieved by the Taliban’s treatment of its people, especially women and children and the internal violence that had gripped the country since at least the mid-1970’s. To US political leaders, 9/11 was proof that a deep commitment to and investment in Afghanistan was needed to end the decades of conflict there and eliminate so-called “ungoverned spaces” – the underdeveloped and seemingly chaotic hinterlands of Afghanistan that gave bad actors like terrorist groups free range to operate. So, while DoD and the Army were thinking “in and out with some training to get the new Afghan security forces up and running so they could quickly take over,” the US civilian authority was thinking, “nation-building, democratization, remaking Afghan society and bringing it into the modern era.” This fundamental misalignment of views set the stage for what followed – a never-resolved tension between a “realist” view (held mostly by the military) and an “idealist” view (held mostly by civilian authority. The military, imbued with a can-do mission first attitude, dutifully followed orders but never fully committed to Afghanistan because it assessed the country as beyond help. The civilian reconstruction mission was deeply committed to the future vision of Afghanistan but failed to be cleared-eyed about the profound difficulties there. Unfortunately, this created a tendency by both camps to overstate progress year after year.

This disconnect in views, aims, and assessments created a dynamic that badly undercut the campaign and made it much less able to deal with the whole host of other problems in Afghanistan that it faced.

Host

So, from a very high-level view there were serious issues. During your tour in Afghanistan you experienced how that played out day-to-day. Describe that.

Shatzer

Sure. Expanding on what I mention in the article, what I experienced even preparing for deployment to Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of our commitment. I should say that I deployed to Afghanistan as an individual augmentee to the mission, not as part of a deploying unit. The Army’s individual augmentee deployment preparation was geared almost exclusively toward training service members for personal self-protection while in country and refreshing on basic tactical soldier tasks. To the extent that there was training on Afghan culture or on the US campaign, it was barely more than what you might find on Wikipedia. Even as a senior lieutenant colonel who had done serious study on Afghanistan in the past, and did another round of my own professional study before deploying, I felt grossly unprepared to deal with the tough operational and strategic issues facing the plans team that I joined at NATO headquarters.

On top of that, as I mention in the article, the turnover in personnel in the NATO headquarters was tremendously disruptive. Most personnel were on six-month long tours with a small minority assigned for a year. In my year-long tour, the plans section had four US colonels serve as the chief of plans. Two different British brigadiers would serve as the plans director. It seemed every month there was an officer either joining the section, leaving the section or going on R&R leave. This contributed to a pervasive sense that many were just putting in their time – doing their reports, delivering briefings, engaging with Afghans – but at the same time detached from it all as they anticipated the next drawdown or going home. For most of my tour, LTG John Campbell commanded the mission and he recognized this short-timer attitude and approach. He tried to combat it. He frequently said, “Make the days count, don’t count the days.” Too many individuals were just counting the days. Institutionally, the Army was doing much the same.

Host

That’s a major point that Elliot Ackerman makes in his book, The Fifth Act.

Shatzer

Yes, he does. He relates how after nearly a decade in Afghanistan that the US Combined Joint Special Operations Task force headquarters was still made from plywood – a fact noted by our Afghan partners in the observation that “wars are not won with plywood.” Ackerman extends this point into a metaphor. The Afghan army was a plywood army, effective for some things but foundationally unsound in so many ways for trying to win an actual war. His point of course, is that our short-timer, always partly-preparing-to-leave approach undercut the effectiveness of everything we tried to do. We were always dealing with expedients, trying this and that for “quick wins,” but frequently shifting means and methods when priorities invariably shifted as people passed through the mission.

Ackerman recounts how he, like many other veterans of Afghanistan, tried in August 2021 to coordinate the evacuation of former Afghan allies as the Taliban completed taking control of the country once again. He describes doing this while on a family vacation to Italy, making frantic phone calls and direct messaging with people to try to arrange passage for Afghans through the chaos swirling around Kabul’s airport to get these people on flights out of the country. As a story-telling device, Ackerman doing this while on vacation is a great illustration of how we treated the entire mission in Afghanistan – doing what we could, constantly at the spur of the moment, while trying to get back to what we would rather be doing.

What seems so strange to me is the lack of concern or attention the failure in Afghanistan seems to garner from the American public. One really has the sense that after nearly 25,000 US deaths and causalities in Afghanistan, 20 years and over $2 trillion spent, that no one seems to care much. One would think the American people would be demanding more in terms of examining our actions in the war and holding people to account. But it seems we’re just not interested. On one level, this isn’t surprising. Most Americans were never invested in the war. It was something a small group of volunteers were dealing with in faraway backwards country. Americans went about with their daily lives. Perhaps they knew somebody that deployed or was hurt in the war, but probably not. On another level, Ackerman worries that the American character has weakened and we’re unwilling to hold ourselves to account. He attributes these to a number of mostly partisan and societal factors that he sees as threatening the very integrity of the United States.

What worries me more immediately is that the Army itself also seems uninterested in studying its conduct of the war. We used to pride ourselves as a learning organization, deeply committed to the after-action review process and to professional study. So far as I know, the Army is not conducting any major study of the war. In my list of other books to consider, I include a two-volume study that the Army published that looks at the war through 2014. The Army really needs to write volume three through 2021. I worry that the Army’s unwillingness to learn from Afghanistan is a sign of something lost professionally within the service.

Host

What does Tariq Ali’s book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan add?

Shatzer

Well, like Ackerman’s book, Ali publishes this collection of his writings very soon after the fall of Kabul in late summer 2021. The collection pulls together some of his writings since 1980 on the conflicts in Afghanistan. The subtitle of his book is “A Chronicle Foretold.” And his writings since the beginnings of the Soviet invasion do indeed seem to hit the mark across the decades in nearly every instance. Ali, a Pakistani-British political activist, clearly has an anti-American bias, but it’s hard to fault his conclusions about the results of foreign intervention in Afghanistan since they all unfold much as he predicts.

Oddly, the thing that’s remarkable about Ali’s book is that it really says nothing new about the failures in Afghanistan that many others, including Ackerman, haven’t already said. That’s the point – here is yet another work, written over the course of four decades that arrived at the same conclusions as those coming to the subject thirty or forty years later. It speaks to a fundamental lack of understanding about what Afghanistan is and what we were doing. This is beautifully illustrated in a reprinted series of letters from 2003 between Ali and the UK minister for trade, investment, and foreign affairs. In the letters, Ali is hypercritical of what he sees as abject US and NATO failures even in year one essentially. The UK minister takes him to task noting there has been positive progress made. Ali counters that the Soviets claimed the same things while ignoring just how bad the situation truly was.

This links back to my earlier point about the split between realists and idealists. Both camps turned a blind eye to the true difficulties. The realists were numb to them, expected them and so didn’t take any new actions. The idealists would minimize these issues, trying to convince themselves and others that the Afghans were improving their ability to deal with them when they really weren’t. Either way, the US never substantially altered its strategy or campaign in twenty years.

Host

You make very brief reference to two other books at the end of your article.

Shatzer

Yes, The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dörner and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Dorner makes a very convincing case that failure is not accidental. That there are real, substantive shortcomings in logic and attitudes that cause us to make bad decisions when dealing with complex problems. Similarly, Kahneman’s work explains the different logical processes (especially in deliberate and instinctive thinking) that we use in decision-making and how that often leads us to have too much confidence in our judgment. Neither book is about Afghanistan. But, for my money, both books nail the logical failures that to campaign failure in Afghanistan. The point is we have to make deliberate study of our logic in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And, again, I don’t see us doing this with respect to our conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

The DoD and US Army are understandably very concerned about building the capability to deter, and if necessary, win a future war with powerful nation-states like China. But, that can’t come at the expense of being ready for wars like we experienced in Afghanistan. Failure to learn from them today will set us up for failure again.

Host

It’s always a pleasure working with you. Thanks so much for making time for this today.

Shatzer

I appreciated the opportunity to discuss this today.

Host

Listeners, if you want to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.

About the author: Colonel George Shatzer is the chairman of the Strategic Research and Analysis Department in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College.

US military practice neither considers the gendered effects of kinetic actions in the planning and executing operations nor tracks and measures them. The Department of Defense’s implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017 instead focuses on the role of women in preventing armed conflict and resolving it. The implementation of the Department of Defense’s new Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, however, provides an opportunity to close this gap in an operationally relevant way.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/4/

About the author: Colonel Jody M. Prescott (retired) served as an active-duty judge advocate for 25 years and taught at the US Army Command and General Staff College and at the US Army Military Academy. He is now a lecturer at the University of Vermont, where he teaches courses on cybersecurity law and energy law. His most recent book is Empirical Assessment in IHL Education and Training (Anthem, 2021).

COL Prescott also spoke on this topic at the Women, Peace, & Security Ninth Annual Symposium hosted by the US Naval War College.

His portion begins at 42:30 in this link: https://youtu.be/NTw-UeR_ibA?t=2550

Since achieving victory in World War II, the United States military has a less than enviable combat record in irregular warfare. This exchange provides differing perspectives on where past decisions and doctrines have led to defeat and where they may have succeeded if given more time or executed differently. This episode responds to John A. Nagl’s article, “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars,” published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Parameters (vol. 52, no. 3).

Read the review and reply here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/16/

Email [email protected] to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Episode Transcript: Review and Reply: On “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m here with Alexander, special operations NCO, and Dr. John Nagle, author of “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars,” which was published in the Autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Welcome to Decisive Point, gentlemen.

Dr. John Nagl

It’s good to be here, Stephanie.

Alex

Thank you for having me, Stephanie.

Host

John, please give us a brief recap of your original article.

Nagl

The article argued that the United States has a somewhat acceptable record of conventional war since it became the greatest power on Earth, sometime over the course of the Second World War. Not just the greatest power on Earth but the greatest power the world has ever seen, with a power differential unknown in human history. But it does not have a similar record in irregular wars. In fact, our absolute abject defeat with helicopters off the roof of the embassy in both Vietnam and Afghanistan.

And while Iraq, arguably too soon to tell for sure, does have costs that far exceed any possible gain, I argued in the article that our record in irregular wars since we became the greatest power on Earth is 0 and 3. And I asked why that was and suggested that in the future, enemies of the United States would be very unlikely to confront us conventionally in what the Pentagon is now calling large-scale combat operations, but instead would fight us in ways where they know they have a chance of winning . . . in irregulars, wars, insurgencies, terrorism, the sort of wars that have stymied us for the last 20 years. And therefore, I argue that as the Pentagon focuses on preparing for war with China—to deter and, if necessary, to defeat China—it should spend at least a little time trying to understand why we keep losing irregular wars and more than a little time trying to make sure that we don’t lose the next one.

Host

Alex, you took issue with John’s piece. Please explain your perspective.

Alex

So, I really appreciated John’s analysis, and I absolutely agree that we definitely need to start with why and seek understanding in that. Where I disagreed the most was with his conclusion that if a country is important enough to fight over, it is important enough to stay for generations. I think there are some conditions on that—the most important being that a cultural climate must first be gauged in order to assess how successful or worthwhile a commitment will be. The duration of the commitment really doesn’t matter because if the cultural climate will not support a country’s efforts in war, that country is wasting its time unless it’s willing to colonize whoever it’s fighting.

It’s like trying to grow coffee in Alaska. Unless the climate in Alaska changes to support coffee growth, you’ll never be able to grow coffee there. Afghanistan was and is entrenched in tribalism and never fully developed into an industrialized nation state. Added to that, it is a culture that is generally hostile to anything originating from non-Muslim Western societies. So how long would be long enough to overcome those two deeply ingrained cultural dimensions to produce the functioning nation state that so many hope to achieve? I personally believe that there is no length of time that would have been sufficient to produce a fully functioning, self-sustaining democratic nation state with a strong national identity. Because the current cultural climate will not support it.

Host

Your thoughts John?

Nagl

I’m not sure I disagree with anything Alex said. And I’d like to congratulate him on his eloquence and on the coffee in Alaska analogy, which is absolutely terrific. I think the root of our disagreement focuses on Afghanistan, where I know Alex has spent some time, and I spent a little time. My argument is that the Afghanistan case is very similar to the Vietnam case. That by the end of American involvement in both of those wars, we had achieved what is, broadly speaking, the best outcome we can hope for when fighting a protracted irregular war—that is a country that still is deeply troubled. It’s only deeply troubled countries that face protracted insurgencies. Those countries that have terrific government, where the population all gets along tend not to have those sorts of things. In countries like Afghanistan and Vietnam, the best you can hope for is a government that has a foreign policy that is, broadly speaking, in accordance with the interests of the United States (US is the intervening state) that is developing its own security forces and can with a relatively small number, (some thousands of American advisers, supported by American air power), can keep the threat at Bay.

My argument is that that’s what the United States achieved in Vietnam, and it’s also what we achieved in Afghanistan. And I think we should be prepared if we’re going to fight a counterinsurgency campaign in a country to understand that we’re going to have American troops there, not for a generation as we did in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but for generations. And I can understand that people can disagree with that assessment. World War Two was . . . coming up on 80 years ago. And we still, four generations ago, and we still have American troops in Germany, Italy, and Japan. And will, in my estimation, for at least a century to come.

And second, those troops are . . . they’re at some risk, of course. But in the 15 months prior to the American departure from Afghanistan, when, of course, we lost 13 in a horrific incident, we had lost no American soldiers. And I believe that the benefit of maintaining a government in Afghanistan that is in US interests, precluding the Taliban from regaining power, maintaining control of Bagram air base (an absolutely invaluable lilypad in a very dangerous part of the world), and perhaps most importantly, preventing the radical Islamic extremists (who still threaten us and our interests around the globe) from having what analyst Peter Bergen called their best day since September 11th, the day that the Afghan government fell. I think that’s worth keeping a couple thousand American troops and a couple billion dollars in American aid flowing to the Afghan government, to infinity and beyond.

Host

Final thoughts before we go, Alex?

Alex

It’s interesting you brought up World War II, John, because I’ve definitely spent some time thinking about, well, what set apart nations like Japan and Germany from countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan? And I still come back to the cultural aspect, which in many strategic analyses is overlooked. Both Japan and Germany had a more organized nation state that was willing to accept defeat and allow the victor, I suppose, to rebuild a nation that was already a fully industrialized nation state. So, it’s just the cultural mindset in Afghanistan and Vietnam was totally different.

And it’s interesting to me that Vietnam became a communist country, and yet it’s a very different flavor from China today. And, in many ways, it is politically somewhat hostile to China’s actions. So it’s curious that Vietnam didn’t quite turn out the way that the domino effect might otherwise have indicated it would.

Nagl

Terrific points, Alex. I appreciate your strategic empathy and your appreciation for different cultures. Japan and Germany were, of course, pretty completely destroyed by the end of the Second World War. Fortunately, in neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan did the wars have that sort of immediate impact on society, although they did over time in both countries. I think, in particular, in Vietnam, I would argue, as a result of our misguided counterinsurgency strategy.

And so, I think the question is, for political decisionmakers, because both Vietnam and Afghanistan—those pullout decisions—what are you hoping to achieve? And if what you’re hoping to achieve is a country that looks like the United States, you’re obviously never going to get there. But if you believe that America has security interests in the region, which I very strongly feel it does in both Southeast Asia and in the Hindu Kush, then it may well be worth . . . I believe it strongly is worth . . . keeping a couple thousand American troops supported by air power there indefinitely.

And Alex is certainly right that history is an unusual thing that the future is unknowable. That it takes twists and turns, and that Vietnam is now closer to the United States than anyone could have predicted almost 50 years ago when that horrible war came to an end. Nonetheless, the suffering that happened in between in Vietnam and Cambodia with the Khmer Rouge and here in the United States in the aftermath of a lost war, which as Alex noted, may be one of the reasons why the United States turned away from irregular war, sort of subcontracted that out to our special operating forces.

I think that damage could have been avoided. More lives could have been saved, and Vietnam could be wealthier and safer, and a closer US ally now had we made some different choices, and, in particular, had we lowered our expectations and done a really hard calculation about our national interests. So I hope as we go forward that politicians will first understand that wars aren’t going to go the way they think they’re going to. They’re going to be longer and more costly, both for us and for the enemies we confront. And also, achieving an end state—a successful end state—in those wars is likely to require a multi-generational commitment of American troops as it has in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Korea.

Host

I think we have time, Alex, if you want to reply. And then last word to John.

Alex

I’ll reply. Thank you. I do agree with what John said about lowering the expectations or adjusting the expectations of what is it exactly that you hope to achieve and is that too grandiose of an expectation, given the culture? I suppose my main thrust with my points is that culture in the larger calculus seems to be largely ignored, and it should be given much more weight than it currently does.

Nagl

I agree with that. I was the Minerva Research professor at the US Naval Academy for a couple of years. Secretary Gates appointed me to that position in order to try to increase our understanding of cultures and societies in the wars that we were fighting then, when I was serving in that role about a decade ago. And I’m continuing to advocate for that kind of understanding today.

And I’d just like to close by thanking Alex for reading my stuff. You’re the one. I’d always hoped I’d meet somebody who would. And then engaging with me, both in writing and now in words, in a very thoughtful way that, hopefully, will help our army and our nation make better national security choices for many years to come. And I’d like to close by thanking him for his service. As a fat, old, retired guy, it’s men like you who keep us safe and able to get fatter. And I’d like to close by pointing out that round is, in fact, a shape.

Host

What a treat to talk with you both today. Thank you for your contribution to Parameters, and thank you for your time. Listeners read the review and reply in its entirety at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the authors: Dr. John A. Nagl is an associate professor of warfighting studies in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. He is the author of Knife Fights: A Memoir of Modern War in Theory and Practice (Penguin Books, 2014).

Alex is a special operations NCO.

In this episode: Global powers, regional hegemons, and non-state actors engaged in a perennial state of competition dominate today’s security environment. In response, the Department of Defense has adopted the competition continuum model of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict. The military could significantly improve its efforts to compete along this continuum and achieve national security objectives by leveraging the Women, Peace, and Security global policy framework that supports gender equality and values women’s diverse roles in global security.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/9/

Episode Transcript: “Enhancing US Global Competitiveness through Women, Peace, and Security”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m talking with Brenda Opperman today, associate professor in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the US Naval War College and author of “Enhancing US Global Competitiveness through Women, Peace, and Security” from the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Brenda. I’m delighted to chat with you today.

Brenda Oppermann

Hi, Stephanie. Thanks so much for inviting me to speak with you today. I’m really happy to be here.

Host

Your article opens with “Women, peace and security (WPS) is a global policy framework that supports gender equality and values women’s diverse roles in conflict and security.” Lay the groundwork for us, please, and explain WPS as a national security issue.

Oppermann

Thanks, Stephanie. I think a little bit of history might be helpful to understand what women peace and security is and kind of its genesis. So, in October 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, linking gender equality and international peace and security. It also recognized the importance of women’s full and equal participation in all peace and security activities, which have been, and, of course, as you know, continue to be male-dominated. Since Resolution 1325 was adopted, the WPS Framework has continued to evolve. There are now nine more WPS-related resolutions. And 100 countries have developed WPS national action plans, which is the primary mechanism to implement the framework.

In our own interests, the US adopted two national action plans. The first one was in 2011, followed by a revised what we call NAP in 2016. And then in 2017, the US passed the WPS Act of 2017, now called the WPS Act, becoming the only country in the world to codify its commitment to WPS principles. As a follow on to the Act, or required by the Act, I should say, the US also created a WPS strategy in 2019. And in 2020, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, USAID, and the Department of Homeland Security each developed a WPS implementation plan. DoD’s is called the “WPS Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan.” That’s a lot of words, so we call that the SFIP for short.

WPS . . . it’s a national security issue since it broadens our understanding of national and global security by highlighting the role of women in the context of conflict, peace, stability, and security, as well as the impact of gender equality in creating and maintaining security and stability. So more than 15 years of research shows that countries with greater gender equality are less prone to violent conflict and are more secure and stable.

Host

Let’s talk about the joint concept of integrated campaigning (JCIC). What is it, and how does it relate to this topic?

Oppermann

Yes, another mouthful. The joint concept for integrated campaigning, right? So, it provides an intellectual framework to help us conceive of today’s continually changing security environment—so, addressing any new challenge, to include security, calls for first thinking differently. In my mind, you can’t “do differently” unless you “think differently.” And the JCIC helps us to think differently about our complex evolving security environment by offering an alternative to the obsolete peace and war binary.

So, I like the JCIC because it proposes the notion of a competition continuum, which is a whole different way to think about security and how we maintain peace and security. And so the JCIC’s competition continuum is a new three-part model of competition. It involves cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict. I think this is really important because it reminds us that there are many ways to compete in the context of security. Those of us working in DoD essentially have many tools in the toolbox to compete more effectively. So having worked on women, Peace, and Security for decades, it’s kind of natural for me to start questioning how this framework and its principles were reflected in the competition continuum. Basically, I was thinking about how could WPS be leveraged to enhance our ability to compete? So I’ve watched over the years as efforts to implement WPS and DoD have steadily increased. I’ve seen how more and more people in defense and other places are becoming aware of women’s direct involvement in peace and war—the old binary.

We know that women have been aggressors. They’ve been peacebuilders and have served as early warning signs of impending conflict and increasing conflict. So, while there’s been a distinct increase in situational awareness about women’s diverse roles in peace and conflict, I haven’t heard much discussion about women’s agency in the context of global competition. So I decided to look into it. I looked at women’s participation and the role of gender norms in the context of global competition— specifically, looking at the three ways to compete outlined in the JCIC. And so, my article discusses these using examples from Syria, North Korea, and China.

Host

What is the WPS conceptual framework and how can the Department of Defense leverage it in the context of armed conflict?

Oppermann

It’s just really important. I know DoD is generally focused on armed conflict, but the reason for the JCIC again is to have us think differently in order to face today’s challenges. And so, we can compete in other ways. As well. As mentioned earlier, WPS makes us think about the gendered aspects of security, to include things like women’s participation, the role of gender norms (very important), and gender equality. By using a gender lens to analyze the security environment, we conceive of it very differently. The gender analysis helps to overcome biases that can limit operational effectiveness. And by exposing the impact of women in conflict-affected areas, which is generally overlooked, a gender analysis reveals a security landscape that’s much more complex than we often assume.

So we saw this in Afghanistan, for instance. Once the army realized that the Afghan women were supporting the insurgents, it changed its tactics, techniques, and procedures, and reaped significant benefits. So as an example, while I was working in Afghanistan, the Army finally began to include female soldiers on raids in Afghan compounds. So, during a 2011 raid, on a compound in Kandahar Province, a female American soldier discovered a hollowed-out Koran tucked into an infant’s swaddling while she and other female soldiers were searching Afghan women. So, the Koran contained cell phones with the names and numbers of insurgents, handwritten lists of names, and other incriminating documents. So, this discovery improved counterinsurgency efforts directly and was a wakeup call of sorts for battalion commanders, who assumed that insurgent activity was solely a male domain.

Another example of how WPS principles serve to enhance our ability to compete at the level of armed conflict was US support of the homegrown defense forces in the Kurdish areas of Syria. The People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG, and its all-female People’s Protection Force (the YPJ), played a key role in the military defeat of ISIS. The Kurds enhanced their combat operations, right, by leveraging the talent, knowledge, and abilities of both men and women in their security forces, and so this enabled the US to successfully compete through armed conflict there by working closely with the all female force that displayed exceptional leadership, discipline, and combat effectiveness. And so another important WPS-related aspect of working with the Kurds in Syria was their deep support of gender equality, which was evident in their armed forces, as mentioned, with the two, all-male and all female forces that worked together and separately, as well as their democratic form of governance. And, as mentioned, research shows that countries that are more gender equal are less violent and more stable. Consequently, by partnering with the Kurds, we not only competed effectively through combat, but we also engaged in effective follow through.

The JCIC emphasizes that follow-through after armed conflict is a key component of the competition continuum because we all know from experience that winning a battle doesn’t equate with winning the war. Essentially, without critical follow-through, we don’t achieve our policy aims. So, in short, we’ve seen that supporting those who support gender equality translates to a greater chance of success when it comes to promoting long-term security and stability. And I think it’s really important for DoD to recognize that adopting what I’ll call a “WPS mindset” is the first step to doing this.

Host

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share before we go?

Oppermann

Yes. If you don’t mind, Stephanie, I’d really like to give a shoutout to the many people in the DoD who are doing exceptional work to operationalize and institutionalize WPS. While this work helps us to be a better force, I also want to highlight the importance of WPS as a means to help us improve our thinking—not just our doing.

So, the notion of a competition continuing with three distinct elements was developed to help us expand our thinking about how to compete effectively in today’s complex security environment. Women, Peace, and Security does the same thing. It’s also an intellectual framework, a conceptual framework, a mental model that enables us to see the global security environment as it is, which is something that is created and impacted by men and women in equal measure. So, adopting what I’ll call a WPS mindset would go a long way toward helping the DoD realize its full potential as an organization as well as its ability to envision and operationalize the competition continuum.

Host

Thank you.

Listeners, you can download “Enhancing US Global Competitiveness through Women, Peace, and Security” at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.

Brenda, thanks so much for your time today. It was a real pleasure talking with you.

Oppermann

Stephanie, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation.

Other Resources about Women, Peace, and Security

DPPA Women Peace and Security Policy, New York 2019.

UN DPPA (2020), Opening the Doors to Women’s Meaningful Participation, New York: United Nations. [7 pages] Poster also available.

DPPA: Guidance on Gender and Inclusive Mediation Strategies. New York 2017. Online: https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/1.%20English%20-GIMS.pdf

DPPA: Guidance for Mediators. Addressing Conflict-Related Sexual Violence in Ceasefire and Peace Agreements. New York 2012. Online: https://peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/GuidanceAdressingConflictRelatedSexualViolence_UNDPA%28english%29_1.pdf

UN DPPA (2020), From Words to Action: The Experience of UN Political Missions in Colombia on Women, Peace, and Security.

UN DPPA and UN Women (2020), COVID-19 and Conflict: Advancing Women’s Meaningful Participation in Ceasefires and Peace Processes, New York: United Nations.

UN DPPA (2021), Women Peace and Security (WPS) & Youth Peace and Security (YPS) Complementarities of the two agendas, New York

About the author: Brenda Oppermann, JD, MA, is an associate professor in the College of Leadership and Ethics at the US Naval War College. Before joining the Naval War College, she conducted stability operations in conflict-affected countries in Africa, Central Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

The US Army is unprepared to occupy and stabilize territory because it does not adequately educate active-duty officers to do so. One way to professionalize the Army’s ability to carry out military government and stability operations is to develop active-duty functional area officers who can advise commanders and integrate staff planning for these operations. In this episode, author Andrew Colvin analyzes case studies, doctrine, and commentary to envision specialized staff officers with foreign language proficiency, cultural skills, advanced academic abilities, and a strong professional ethic. These officers would enhance the Army’s competence in stabilizing territory to achieve American policy objectives.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/13/

Episode Transcript: “The Case for an Army Stability Professional”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today I’m talking with Andrew Colvin, an active-duty engineer officer in the commissioned corps of the US Public Health Service and author of the “Case for an Army Stability Professional,” which was published in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters.

Andrew, thanks so much for joining me today. I’m glad you’re here. Tell me what inspired you to write this article.

Andrew Colvin

So, I wrote this article because of my experiences as a civil affairs and engineer officer in the Army, and it left me convicted that we were missing something very critical to winning our nation’s wars. So, I began my research and discovered that I wasn’t the only one who thought this way, so I’ll start by stating the obvious. War is about exercising power over people and territory. It’s political at its core, but the army really struggles to translate violence into, say, a stable political arrangement that furthers American interests.

And doctor Nadia Schadlow does a great job explaining this in her book War and the Art of Governance. But as an Army, we have words for this concept—stability, operations—in military government. We have doctrine for this concept. We even have recent experience trying to implement this concept. What we don’t have and what we’ve never really had is the right kind of education for leaders who can guide the Army to success.

So, I wrote this paper to propose a solution to this problem, and I want to prepare conventional forces for stability operations during and after large-scale combat. And in a world of finite resources and time, stability operations are never going to get the attention they need from the Army. I recognize that. I think a workable solution is to invest in staff officers—leaders who are selected and educated to advise commanders and integrate staff planning for stability at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war.

Host

You recommend the Army develop stability professionals. Can you expand on that, please?

Colvin

I envision an active-duty functional area, a specialized officer career field to professionalize the Army’s ability to carry out stability operations, and military government. And I use the word “professional” in its highest sense in the Samuel P. Huntington sense of people who serve society as members of a distinct group with skills that require a lifetime of education practice to master. So this person I envision, the stability professional, is defined by three skills. One is their cultural awareness and foreign language abilities. Two is their advanced academic education. And three, is their military ethic and experience. And so I’ll elaborate on each one of those a little bit more.

First, for cultural awareness and foreign language skills, a stability professional practices their profession outside the United States by definition. They need a professional level of cultural awareness and foreign language proficiency. And again, when I say “professional level,” that’s not a buzzword. I have in mind the DoD standards of competence for both culture and language that are contained in DoD I 5160.70. The Interagency Language Roundtable Scale gives us ratings from zero to five. Zero being no skill and five being functionally native. A level three is called “general professional proficiency,” and that’s the minimum proficiency I believe a stability officer needs. And the Army can only get people with this level of proficiency in one of two ways. They either recruit them directly or they send them to spend a year or more in an immersive language education program like the Defense Language Institute.

Next is their academic knowledge. I believe full-time graduate study at a civilian institution is important to a stability officer for a few reasons. Stability operations are some of the army’s most complex and intellectually demanding missions. We’re talking about telling army officers to develop, implement, and manage government functions in a foreign country. That’s hard. And that’s not something most people in the Army know anything about; (it’s) not something any Army training institution is capable of teaching.

Of course, there’s more to it than just sending people to grad school. We need to make sure that the knowledge these officers receive is relevant to the Army’s mission. To do that, I believe the Army should partner with civilian graduate schools that can align officers’ academic studies with the Army’s stability operations tasks. These schools should expose officers to different ways of thinking and solving problems and giving them an intellectual foundation for stability operations. Ideally, this immersive graduate school experience helps officers make connections with leaders in academia and government who are working on peace and stability issues, and those are the kinds of relationships that can help the army pursue unified action in its future stability operations.

Finally, a stability officer’s military experience and ethic is an important part of this stability professional I envision. So-called civilian expertise by itself is not the solution. This is about officers who can apply academic knowledge in a military context. They are active-duty officers with years of military experience who are permanently assigned to conventional army units to manage a staff and advise commanders on stability operations, and these professionals need an ethic. This is especially true for the military. Without an ethic, you’re just a guy with a gun.

One of the things that struck me about the Army’s successful stability military government operations as I researched it through history was that the successful ones all seemed to have officers with this notion of diligent compassion at their center. When you look closely at these successes, the Mexican-American War, World War I, to an extent, and World War II, you find a handful of leaders who go against the conventional military wisdom that says all the Army is supposed to care about is lethality, killing the enemy, and publishing body counts. The successful ones approach the human welfare of civilians as a military necessity, something that they plan for meticulously. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that instability operations when the Army stands for humanity, we tend to be successful—when we don’t, we have a hard time achieving lasting strategic results.

Host

Once we get these stability professionals resourced and trained, what would that look like?

Colvin

It would look like a functional area. So officers in a specialized career field. And they would be assigned at all levels through the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war and command. So you’re talking about brigades, talking about divisions, corps, and combatant commanders. And there is a position for this on staffs already that the S9, G9, or J-9, depending on the echelon. The challenge is manning it in conventional forces and fielding the right people who can be there when a conflict starts because currently most of those in the conventional forces are slated to be staffed by reserve officers, and they’re going to face significant obstacles mobilizing and manning those positions in time for a large-scale combat operation.

Host

You know that there are some arguments against this idea. Will you walk me through them, please?

Colvin

Well, first, there’s the “not my job” argument. Some people say that the Army isn’t supposed to be involved in nation-building wars. My rebuttal is that because the objective of war is to make political change by force, all wars are nation-building wars, whether the US Army likes it or not.

Some say that other US government agencies, principally the State Department and USAID, are the country’s nation builders, and that’s correct in a sense. The 2018 Stabilization Assistance Review reaffirmed the concept that DoD has a supporting, not leading, role in stabilization. But while other government agencies can lead these efforts by implementing policies and programs, the wartime experiences of the United States, going back to our beginning as a nation, shows that the Army is going to have to shoulder a significant share of the burden for setting stable conditions during and after large-scale combat. And if we fail to do that, we’re going to have a bad time.

The second major argument is that “we’ve already got one” argument. There are certainly some people out there who would say the army already has what it needs for stability operations. They’d say, look, we have some active-duty civil affairs people. They get a few days of governance training. We’ve got some reserve civil affairs forces that have civilian jobs, and we’re even standing up a team of experts in the military government program in the reserve. So, we’ve got it covered.

But if you accept my criteria for stability professional, there’s a very simple way to test this claim. Get the commanders of all those units together and ask them to pull out their list of officers that, number one, speak a strategic language at an IR three level or better. Number 2, have a graduate degree that aligns with the Army stability operations, tasks, and, number 3, are permanently assigned on active duty to the staffs of conventional force units. I imagine those lists are not going to be long enough to sustain us in a protracted, large-scale combat operation.

Host

Give us your final thoughts before we go.

Colvin

A theme of my proposal is the importance of education over training. Training is what you do to prepare people to respond to predictable stimuli. You can train people to perform at a high level in very challenging circumstances, like jumping out of airplanes or fighting in urban terrain, but these circumstances and the actions soldiers ought to take are fairly predictable, nonetheless. Education is what enables people to find solutions to problems they’ve never seen before. Education is what soldiers need to prevail in situations that are so complex you cannot possibly train them for it.

Officers doing stability operations with all their political, social, economic, and ethical complexities need the right education to succeed. I believe the concept of the stability professional I’ve laid out here unifies ideas that are fragmented across conventional and special-operations commands and the active-duty and reserve components. I believe it’s important because stability operations should be a whole-of-Army effort. We currently do not have officers with the right skills where they need to be to make those operations.

Host

Thanks so much for sharing your insights on this.

Colvin

Great. Thanks for having me.

Host

Listeners, you can download “The Case for an Army Stability Professional at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters look for volume 53, issue 1.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the author: Lieutenant Andrew B. Colvin, PE, PMP, served on active duty in the US Army for nine years, including multiple assignments as an Engineer and Civil Affairs officer and two deployments to the US Central Command area of responsibility. He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and is currently on active duty as an Engineer officer in the Commissioned Corps of the US Public Health Service.

Contesting Paul Scharre’s influential vision of “centaur warfighting” and the idea that autonomous weapon systems will replace human warfighters, Sparrow and Henschke propose that the manned-unmanned teams of the future are more likely to be minotaurs—teams of humans under the control, supervision, or command of artificial intelligence. They examine the likely composition of the future force and prompt a necessary conversation about the ethical issues raised by minotaur warfighting.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/14/

Episode Transcript: “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today I’m chatting with Rob Sparrow, professor in the philosophy program and an associate investigator in the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society at Monash University, and Adam Henschke, an assistant professor in the philosophy section at the University of Twente, Netherlands.

Sparrow and Henske are the authors of “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming,” which ran in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome to Decisive Point, gentlemen. Set the stage for us, please, including Paul Sharre’s perspective.

Robert J. Sparrow

We’ve seen drones and teleoperated weapon systems play an increasing role in contemporary conflict. There is lots of enthusiasm for autonomy in weapon systems in the military, as I think 20 years ago, there was a paper in Parameters arguing that in the future the tempo of battle would increase to such a point that only computers would be capable of making the decisions that are required to win battles. So for a long time, there’s been a debate about the relationship between human beings and unmanned systems in warfighting. Recently, Paul Sharre has argued that we don’t need to worry about autonomous weapon systems taking over all the combat roles because, actually, the future of warfighting involves manned-unmanned teaming, and Sharre suggests that we should think of this on the model of what he described as a Centaur. A centaur is a mythical creature with the head and upper body of a human being and the lower body of a horse. And that’s a really nice image. You’ve got the human being in command and in control and the machines doing the physical work involved in warfighting.

We think that’s perhaps optimistic for a number of reasons, and that what we’ve seen, is really in applications, is it’s often easier to get machines to be making decisions than it is to get machines to do physical work. And so, for that reason, we think that the future of manned-unmanned teaming might be better imagined as what we call a minotaur. And so, rather than the human being in charge of the team, we suspect that in many roles, actually, the AI will be in charge of the team. And the human beings will be effectively under the command of the AI and doing the physical work, where the mental work will be performed by artificial intelligence.

Henschke

One way to think of Paul Sharre’s approach is, as Rob said, he’s advocated this view of centaur warfighting, and there the human is generally seen as the head, the decision-making part of the warfighting operation. And the robots and the machines, they do the, kind of, the grunt work. They’re the things that do the stuff on the ground. So, the way in which this manned-unmanned kind of vision is put forward in Sharre’s work is humans do the deciding and the robots, or the machines, do the fighting

Host

But you disagree. Will you expand on that please?

Sparrow

We do think that in many domains and in many situations it’s more likely that the machine will be in charge—or effectively in charge. We think that it’s quite hard to get machines to do something like move a gun into place or walk up the stairs or talk to these people and ask them where the insurgents are. Those roles, we think, will still need to be carried out by human beings. But, for instance, wargaming or identifying and tracking targets, those tasks machines can outperform human beings already in lots of circumstances.

If you are considering the team, we think a lot of the executive and cognitive tasks will actually be handed over to artificial intelligence, and the human beings will be left doing what the AI says. And so, in that context, you should think of this as a minotaur team, as a kind of cyber with an artificial intelligence head and the body made-up of human beings.

Henschke

On this, Rob came up with the idea of flipping the central view to suggest that we might instead think of these robot/human teams like minotaurs, where the thinking is done by the machine and the fighting, or the grunt work, is done by the humans. So, the robot becomes the head, and the human becomes the body, kind of flipping it from the central vision. The idea is that we ought to think of these more as unmanned-manned teams, like a minotaur rather than a centaur.

Host

I love that visual. Would you walk us through the key technical dynamics and the particulars of minotaur war fighting?

Sparrow

When people started thinking about artificial intelligence, they thought the hard task was going to be getting machines to do the things that we find difficult—playing chess, calculating, looking for patterns in data. But when people started building robots, what they discovered was the machines were quite good at that stuff. Machines were able to calculate . . . were able to do scheduling tasks. They were able to, in the end, play chess reasonably easily and very, very well.

Where machines struggled were doing things that children and animals can do, and so we don’t recognize as requiring sophisticated capacities— things like walking into a room and recognizing where the chairs in the room are or simply being able to walk up steps or pick up a cup. Those tasks actually turn out to be incredibly difficult for machines.

We still don’t have robots that can, for instance, walk into your office and find your coffee cup. Machine vision systems are much better but in complex environments, and where there’s a need to recognize context and maybe move around the cluttered environment, machines fail very quickly. If you’re looking for tasks to automate, if you’re looking for tasks that machines can perform, often where people end up employing machines is in these executive or cognitive roles. For instance, scheduling which offices get cleaned and making sure that there are people to clean them . . . that task can be outsourced to a machine scheduling system. Actually walking into the office and emptying rubbish bins, setting for the next vacuuming, that still needs to be done by human beings.

Host

Let’s talk about ethics. What are the ethical implications of minotaurs and minotaur warfighting?

Henschke

Well, one of the main things in the notion of the minotaur warfighting as we describe it in the paper is that you’ll have the machines, computers, and AI in a combination of technologies, directing and guiding how humans engage in a conflict zone. And as result of that, you’ve got decisions being made by machines carried out by humans. And this has quite a few ethical implications. One of the most interesting ones, or at least one of the first ones that we want to point out, is in these situations there might actually be a strong case for minotaur warfighting. If this would either decrease the likelihood of military mistakes, would decrease the likelihood of fratricide, and/or put your own soldiers at unnecessary risk, we might want those decisions to be made by the computers, by the machines. And so, there is a bit of an argument in favor, first, of minotaur warfighting, and, picking up from what Rob had just said, there might also be a case for minotaur warfighting in many situations over centaur warfighting.

So, if you think of what Rob was saying about navigating physical terrain, when we think of terrestrial warfighting—warfighting on land, for instance—that’s really really complex, really complicated physical environments. You might have sand. You might have water. You might have trees. You might have humans or equipment moving through these complicated environments. And in that sense, the centaur is probably gonna face a whole lot of trouble. Whereas the minotaur system, or minotaur unmanned-manned system, that might actually have a far better capacity to operate in these sorts of complicated, complex, terrestrial environments. So, there we might see that there’s actually a case for the minotaur warfighting if it’s going to increase both the likelihood of success and decrease the chances of making military mistakes.

Sparrow

We also think that people might be quite horrified by that prospect. I mean, really, the idea that you were just following a list of tasks or strategic objectives given to you by a computer system, I think people are going to really struggle with that. And there’s an understandable sense that human beings are valuable in a way that machines are not and that placing machines in authority or giving machines effective power over human beings is getting that relationship backwards.

We think there’s a relationship here with the debates about autonomous weapons systems, where critics of autonomous weapons systems have often insisted that machines shouldn’t be given the power to take a human life, that there’s something about the value of human life that suggests we shouldn’t let a machine make a decision about taking a human life. That intuition also, I think, counts against minotaur warfighting, because minotaurs, therefore AI systems, will be placing warfighters in harm’s way. They may sometimes have to put people into combat that they’re unlikely to survive, and I think people will balk at that, despite the fact that there are these very powerful arguments to suggest that might actually reduce the average risk to warfighters.

There’s some questions here also about what we expect when we give reasons to each other. And you know, it’s a really important ethical principle that when you are relating to someone, you should be able to provide reasons for the way that you’re treating someone. And there’s some problems with the idea of machines giving reasons. Nowadays, machine systems can spit out reasons. I mean they can give you what looks like a reason, but they don’t have skin in the game in the same way that human beings do. They don’t stand behind their words in a way that a human being does when they explain why they have ordered you to take on this very difficult task. So, there’s some questions here again, about whether it’s ethically acceptable to have machines effectively ordering people into battle.

Host

I read one of the potential scenarios in your article about what if AI uses humans, basically, as fodder to achieve a larger goal or greater objective. That rattled me somewhat, I’d never considered it.

Henschke

I was going to say exactly that point. One of the other really fundamental principles in ethical theory goes back to the work of Immanuel Kant. And one of the things he said is that we shouldn’t treat people as tools. We should treat them as ends in themselves. And if you’ve got a machine that, as Rob had said, lacks the capacity to morally reflect on decisions telling humans what to do and to go on and do things, there is a really significant concern that the humans there become like a tool. They become fodder. And that is something that goes against a really, really core set of foundational principles in ethics. So that’s something that is problematic, definitely for the minotaur warfighting (and) probably also for centaur warfighting in various forms that that might take as well.

Host

What should we consider going forward? This obviously isn’t going away.

Sparrow

So clearly a key question here is whether or not we can intervene to prevent minotaur warfighting from emerging, or perhaps control the sorts of tasks where machines are given effective power or authority over human beings. We worry about an arms race here. We think that minotaur warfighting will evolve because in lots of circumstances, we think these systems will win battles . . . that, essentially, a military force that leaves too many decisions up to human beings may struggle to compete with a military force that is more willing to hand over certain sorts of decisions to AI. So, there’s a potential for something like an arms race.

If you did want to try to prevent or slow down the development of minotaur warfighting, one obvious way of going about it is trying to build better robots . . . is to think about how we can build robots that actually can take on these sorts of physical tasks that are currently very difficult for machines. And we think one of the real problems there is the source of technologies that you would need to develop in order to get machines that can handle the complexity of the physical and the uncertainties of the physical environment might actually also make it easier for machines to work in other command roles.

Henschke

One other thing, too, that seems possibly quite obvious—there would have to be significant changes to training, education, and other ways in which the culture and practice of militaries operate. So, if we are going to go down some kind of minotaur route, then we’d need to recognize that the soldiers who are placed under the command of these machines, that they would have to receive particular training relevant to that. And also, quite importantly, the people who have the capacity to make the decisions about the minotaur warfighting . . . they would also have to undergo really specific training and education, understanding what the manned-unmanned systems are for, what their weaknesses are, what their limits are, what the implications are because there would be shifts in responsibilities, moral responsibility, who we assign moral responsibility to, and the training and probably some of the legal responsibilities would have to change as a result of that as well. So, one of the big important things would be to have a cultural shift in the militaries that recognize not just the practices of minotaur warfighting but a lot of the ethical, legal, and perhaps even social and cultural issues that might come around as well.

Sparrow

If people are freaked out by this vision. If people don’t want to see command roles handed over to AI, I also think that means that they should think again about autonomous weapons systems. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for autonomy in our armed forces for understandable reasons, indeed. The same reasons we think minotaurs will emerge . . . reasons that other people have been arguing that more and more tasks will be handed over to autonomous weapon systems. But machine autonomy here looks problematic in both cases, or neither. If you think it’s wrong to have a machine sending your troops into battle where they might be killed, it’s quite hard to explain how it can be OK to have a machine making decisions about which of the enemy to kill. So, there are some connections here between debates, we think debates that need to happen about so-called minotaur warfighting and debates that are going on at the moment about autonomy in weapon systems.

Host

Definitely lots of food for thought, here.

Listeners you can really dig deep in this and get into a lot of detail. Download the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters, look for volume 53, issue 1.

Rob and Adam, thank you so much for making this happen. I know we’re on three different continents. It took a little bit of effort. I really appreciate you making the time for this.

Henschke

Thanks very much, Stephanie.

Sparrow

Thank you, Stephanie.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and. Would like to. Hear more? You can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the authors: Robert J. Sparrow is a professor in the philosophy program and an associate investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (CE200100005) at Monash University, Australia, where he works on ethical issues raised by new technologies. He has served as a cochair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Robot Ethics and was one of the founding members of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.

Adam Henschke is an assistant professor in the philosophy section at the University of Twente, Netherlands. His research is concerned with ethics, technology, and national security, and he is interested in ethical issues having to do with information technologies and institutions, surveillance, cyber-physical systems, human military enhancement, and relations between social information technologies, political violence, and political extremism. He recently coedited the 2022 Palgrave Handbook of National Security.

This podcast offers a preview of the latest Parameters demi-issue and full issue.

Read the demi-issue: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/1/

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. I have Dr. Conrad C. Crane, acting editor in chief of Parameters, with me today to talk about the summer demi-issue and the forthcoming full summer issue of Parameters. Thank you for being here, Dr. Crane.

Dr. Conrad C. Crane

Glad to be here.

Host

Always glad to have you. So, the Demi issue—this is a relatively new product for the Army War College Press. It’s released about a month before the full issue of Parameters, and it addresses unfolding current events and topics critical to our readership. It generates interest in the forthcoming full issue, and it tackles the big questions being asked today in the fields of military strategy and defense policy.

What does the summer demi-issue have in store for our audience?

Crane

We’ve got a couple of very interesting articles. The first is an In Focus special commentary responding to future pandemics, bio security implications, and defense considerations by a couple of civilian PhDs—Diane DeEuliis and James Giordano. They look at the expanding bio threat landscape, and they look at the experience of COVID-19 and the challenges that put on (the Department of Defense) DoD, especially. And (they) argue for a modernized improved preparedness and response system.

They contend that the COVID-19 experience revealed a bunch of weaknesses, including the Department Defense’s inability to sustain the military mission while dealing with intra-governmental expectations to assist with other pieces of the government. And it’s really going to challenge how we balance our resources. So, it’s an interesting look at the future, perhaps, of these future pandemics.

The second piece is a piece of a Taiwan Forum where we’re taking a look at Taiwan in this issue and it’s on Taiwan’s food resiliency—or not—in a conflict with China. The authors there, Gustavo Ferreira and Jamie Cartelli, are both reserve officers. They deal with some military issues in their normal work, but they really talk about the dilemma that we face with Taiwan is if it gets cut off, it’s got about six month’s worth of food. So, the question is, how do you deal with the possibility that the Chinese may blockade or somehow degrade their ability to sustain themselves?

And they really look at the potential scenarios and findings that underscore the urgency for US leadership and for military planners to really develop long-term logistical solutions before this crisis happens. So two very insightful articles, (going in) a little different directions, but really should give our readers something to think about. And then, of course, there’s more articles coming in the full issue when it comes out about a month later.

Host

Speaking of the full issue, what can we expect? Do you have any idea what we can look forward to?

Crane

We’ve got a set of very interesting articles scheduled for the full issue, starting out with Dr. Allison Abbe, who’s one of the faculty here at the War College. The title of her piece is called “Understanding the Adversary: Strategic Empathy and Perspective Taking in National Security,” and she looks at this whole issue of how do you gain insight into the motives and mindsets of adversaries and partners? She looks at a number of different scenarios. It’s interesting that she talks a lot about this idea of strategic empathy, but in her conclusion, she says that the security practitioners don’t really need to aim for full empathy but for what she calls perspective and perspective taking, for her, is the most fruitful piece of strategic empathy. And she says that, basically, that that skill requires shifting in and out of other people’s perspectives, not adopting them.

So, you just gotta kind of understand what the other side is doing and shift. This frame shifting aligns with developmental approaches to systems thinking and how one views the system from the perspective of multiple actors. It’s an interesting discussion, again, to try to figure out how to look at these situations and come up with our own solutions. It’s very detailed. It also looks at how practitioners should use feedback to improve (and) how to use teams to make the effort better. I like her last recommendation (which) is that empathy researchers recommend maintaining humility and recognizing uncertainty. Even with all of this, where we end up is with a situation that we may end up being wrong, but we’ll do the best we can with it.

The next one is another Taiwan piece. Luke Bellucci has given us an initial introduction to what will probably be a two-part presentation by us. This will be the first part, which basically talks about Taiwan’s strategic importance to the United States and its allies, and he focuses on Taiwan’s location is obviously geopolitically important to the US and its allies. But it’s even more important to relative to China. He also talks about the commercial significance of everything that Taiwan does and how it’s a beacon of democracy for people of China and other people around the world.

The loss of Taiwan’s democracy to authoritarian China would undermine our credibility with our allies and obviously have long-term implications in the region. So that’s really what he looks at in this first chunk of his work. Part two, which will come in a later issue, will review recent changes to the strategic environment current responses, including a hard look at our own national security strategy.

Next, Nicholas Murray has a piece that’s called “Geniuses, Ride Their Luck: Clausewitz’s Card Game Analogies.” And the interesting thing about his piece is he talks about (how) the scholars talk about Clausewitz’s use of card games in On War and in other places. But they use the wrong card games. They use our own modern card games as examples, whereas Clausewitz, obviously, is writing a couple 100 years ago, and he’s not looking at the same card games that we are. He looks at the different perspective that you get with Clausewitz if you use these older card games. The main games that Clausewitz really references are faro, skat, and ombre, and one of the things is you can cheat a lot more. There’s a lot more uncertainty in results, and he says, you know, the degree of cheating in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century, gambling and card games undermines any claims that Clausewitz’s card game analogies represent any kind of reasonable degree of calculable probability in war. Basically, these were kind of very unpredictable card games because there was so much cheating that went on. And once you’ve got that, that these are far chancier games, it really changes a lot of the ways that people have to look at Clausewitz.

If you use the right card games that Clausewitz used, then the perspective on Clausewitz changes somewhat. It’s a very interesting discussion. The thing that really struck me going through it was he talks about how much cheating went on in these games, and, for him, it makes it very clear the commanders had to be willing to gamble and take a lot of risks in in their approaches to warfare. So it’d be interesting to see how other people perceive it, and I’m sure there’ll be some pushback from some other researchers. But one of the points he makes is, you know, if chance and luck in war is far more extreme than was thought, and players struggle to make rational decisions because of the extreme emotion involved, then scholars must revise the way they might use game theory to model behavior. Furthermore, if there is no baseline expectation of honesty, then the raw luck and emotion is enhanced, then genius as Clausewitz describes it, becomes even more critical. So, I thought those were really interesting conclusions out of that article. We’ll see what kind of comments we get back.

John Bonin and Jim Scuderi, a couple of researchers here at the War College, have done a piece on the institutional Army—six case studies and changing innovation. They’ve gone back and they’ve looked at some historical case studies of institutional army reforms over the last 160 years and done an evaluation of how they (the Army) operated. And they tried to provide some historical insights to inform current practices to fulfill the Army’s articulated 2022 Institutional Strategy. They end with a very hard look at Army Futures Command and predicting how that might go.

I mean, they look at the Calvary Bureau and the Civil War. They look at the peacetime habits and wartime changes in the Army after the Spanish American War in 1898, looking at the next couple decades, including World War I—that’s a very detailed study. They look at General Marshall and the development of Army headquarters for World War II and how that evolves. They look at Secretary McNamara and the development of the Army Combat Developments Command and the evolution of that particular process. They look at General Abrams and his 1973 reorganization of the army after Vietnam. They look at the role of some of his key assistants like William Depuy, and then they close with this look at Futures Command and try to speculate on some of the lessons from the early cases and how it might reflect on how Futures Command develops. It’s a very interesting study. It says a lot about implications for the Army for today.

One of the interesting things I thought . . . in their conclusion, they talk about one of the problems with a lot of these changes is that substantive change and adaption have to outlast the specific secretary and chief of staff. The problem is we lose a lot of these innovations because the country goes to war or something happens (a different commander changes priorities). That the dilemma is how do we keep these changes active? How do we keep the Army from going back to the way it was as soon as there’s a change in commander or some situation happens to make the army change its focus?

For the last full article, Spencer French has a piece on innovation, flexibility, and adaptation—keys to the success of Patton’s information and signal intelligence services in 1944. Patton had this image as this combat commander and we talk about this very pugnacious Patton, but he was a very competent and systematic organizer. And the way he adapted 3rd Army for the operations they ran into in Europe, he had successful integration of informational resources, a very consistent operating concept for information and available technology combined with his organized mobility and flexibility and these are the same elements that modern commanders are also wrestling with. French argues pretty well that they could benefit from viewing patent strengths and 3rd Army’s accomplishments and how they organized this really cohesive and flexible system for managing information not only for managing our information but denying it to the enemy and how that aligned operational concepts or technological capabilities. So it’s a very interesting piece.

We have a new director of strategic research at the Strategic Studies Institute, and he’s going to take a little different perspective than George Shatzer did. George would provide some book reviews or some other things. Eric Hartunian, who is the new Colonel in charge of strategic research is trying to explain research possibilities, and he wants to focus on, particularly in his first effort, the Republic of Korea and the situation there. It’s the 70th anniversary of our alliance. He looks at the quick region with key points, looks at threats in the peninsula and, he looks at the little bit of the implications of the current war in Ukraine on Indo-Pacific security concerns.

His essay is not meant to cover every contingency opportunity that the US Korea Alliance represents. It is intended to set the stage for important research into the known and unknown opportunities that leveraging the US-Republic of Korea alliance may present as a joint force continues to March into very decisive decade.

And, in the meantime, we’ve also tried to expand some things. We’ve added a whole number of book reviews. We’ve had quite a backlog of book reviews, and we’re trying to get rid of them. So, there’s going to be more book reviews in the issue itself, but we’re also initiating an online book review section. We’ll post book reviews there as well.

We also need to highlight there’s a new SSI website coming . . . late summer, early fall. We need people to keep an eye out for that. It’ll be the same kind of place, but it’ll be a new look and have new capabilities and new things for people to see. And we think it really will enhance our ability to get information out to our readers that they really need to get.

Host

There’s a lot going on at the Press.

Crane

We’re busy. We’re busy.

Host

Listeners look for the demi-issue at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Doctor Crane, thank you so much for your time.

Crane

Thanks for having me.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

In contemporary military operations, some problems are so complex they do not give way to linear solutions but require problem management instead. Combining the fundamentals of Dao De Jing philosophy with the US military design process offers a new perspective to analyze complex security problems, devise management strategies, and plan military operations. Applying this new approach to the complex security environment in Syria allows for a nonlinear mapping of long-term goals and a new perspective on relationships between key actors, environmental factors that restrict changes in the security environment, and where planners should focus their attention.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/12/

Episode Transcript: “Daoism and Design: Mapping the Conflict in Syria”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Joining me today are Colonel Ned Marsh and Dr. Heather Gregg, authors of “Daoism and Design: Mapping the Conflict in Syria” from the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters. Colonel Marsh is a US Army Special Forces officer and a current garrison commander within the Installation Management Command. Dr. Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall Center for European Studies and is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Welcome to Decisive Point, Ned. Welcome back, Heather.

Dr. Heather S. Gregg

It’s great to be here.

COL Ned B. Marsh

Thanks for having us on.

Host

Your work says combining the fundamentals of Daoist philosophy from the ancient literary work of the Tao Te Ching with the US military design process offers a new perspective with which to analyze problems, devise management strategies, and plan military operations. Tell me more. How so?

Marsh

The Dao’s what we see as an alternative perspective to a Western mindset. The Western mindset tends to see life as linear, objective-based, a realm of cause and effect. Instead, the Dao sees life as a constant flow of events with some things that are in our control and most that are out of our control. The philosophy emphasizes the continuous nature of being that people flow through life around obstacles like water would around a stone in a river. I think the simplest summary is that we should worry about the things we can control and not worry about the things that we cannot.

There’s four fundamentals. The first is that there’s no permanent reality. So, our reality is an endless continuous stream of interactive situations. The second is that every event is the result of the interaction of all the preceding events. It’s never-ending. It’s a ceaseless development of new context. And this limits the value of concepts such as linearity, cause and effect, and prediction. Third is that we only see life from the perspective that we are in it. We’re the water in the river. We’re not standing on the shore looking at the water. Those fundamentals, they describe the reality. The fourth describes how we fit into it. The good news is that we have agency. Our path isn’t predestined. Our actions can shape the future and influence our environment. So, we recognize these realities. And then we cultivate ourselves, our organizations, and our environments to foster success. We can create emergent opportunities, and we can be successful.

Host

Heather, did you want to weigh in on this too?

Gregg

Thinking in these terms is particularly useful for complex problem management. So many of the problems that we see in foreign policy today are so complex that they don’t give way to easy solutions, and that thinking linearly and thinking that things have an immediate or near-term end state is not helpful. So, when you can’t think in terms of military end-states or objective end-states, what do you do? What’s a mindset that can help you think about problem management? And I think the Dao does just that.

Host

Let’s apply this to Syria, which includes intertwined politics, culture, economics, information, and more, as well as several types of conflict.

Marsh

The key is probably . . . how do we integrate . . . design is you go from where you are, you look at the problem as to how you want to get there. And you design a solution. And a lot of times that becomes very linear. It leads to lines of effort. It includes objectives. It provides a definitive definition of victory, articulates a military end state. Design is meant to be done multiple times, but a lot of times it’s done sequentially. It’s done once and we come up with an operational approach, and then we get frustrated when our operational approach doesn’t create the solution which we want in the timeline which we want.

I think the easiest analogy which I’ve come up with is if you think of child raising. I have a child and I want my child to have a successful life and be a successful adult and I can design a solution with an operational approach and try to execute that strategy. And the odds of it happening are pretty low. But if I take the philosophy of the Dao, and I think, OK, it’s endless. So, you don’t ever stop raising your child. Success has to be produced continuously. I don’t really have any knowledge. So, everybody’s a first-time parent. You only get one shot at being a parent. That your child goes through endless interactions, both internal and external. That they have their own agency.

The parent has to balance risk and understanding. We have to recognize that control is an illusion, and we have to have the long game. We have to be positional. Where do I put myself to best influence? And then, ultimately, I cultivate them. I cultivate myself. I cultivate my family. I cultivate the environment to foster emergent success. You take a structured design process to get there—ends ways means. Let alone if I step outside of childbearing and I go to a military problem like Syria, where you have adversaries who are trying to keep you from achieving your goal, your future vision.

The Dao allows you to take those two things and combine them together so you can iterate. You can adjust. You can be in the flow. I wanted to kind of get that out before we dove into how do we apply the philosophy and design together when you talk about a problem like Syria, which doesn’t really have set solutions because the interdependency. I’ll pause there.

I’m not sure, Heather, if you want to add a little context to that.

Gregg

What’s so fascinating about the conflict in Syria is how intractable it seems right now. I’m sure most of our listeners are well aware that there’s been a civil war since 2011. You had the emergence of the Islamic State within Syria. But then also in Iraq you had the decline of the Islamic State, or the demise of the Islamic State, but you still have ISIS present. You have Turkish interests. You have Israeli interests. You have Iranian interests and Iraqi interests and United States all in there. And Russia, I think, as I mentioned, all competing for security control, competing for resources, competing for bases and populations, and access.

So how to address these problems and understand what can we change and what can’t we change becomes crucial. We don’t want to waste resources and time. We also don’t want to make the situation worse. And so, thinking in these terms that Ned outlines are particularly important for thinking about what we can influence and what we can’t.

Marsh

There’s three interdependent problems which constrict solutions in Syria. First, the Assad regime has survived; they continue to survive because of external support. Two, the United States were unable to help the Syrian Democratic Forces establish dominant positions because Turkey, a NATO ally and ally United States, they’re steadfastly anti-SDF for their significant support for the Assad regime that they have Iranian support, that they get Russian support. Those are also super interdependent with regional and global geopolitical implications for the United States. And Kurdish fracturing internal is a significant problem.

And so, the United States can’t solve the solution of keeping the Syrian Democratic Forces in position and appeasing allies . . . the ally Turkey, that’s gotta be managed . . . anymore than it can push Iran or Russia out of Syria because that’s interdependent with other problems, which it can’t solve there. And so instead of frustrating ourselves on those, the Dao would seek to foster an environment which you can influence. And manage that problem.

The Dao planner should recognize what you can control and what’s not, what can be influenced and what can’t. Success is not a one-time proposition, like I stated. Anything which we would do in Syria, we would have to continue to do. There would have to be a solution in there. We would have to recognize that there’s no knowledge. That despite our limited understanding that we still can manifest success even if we don’t necessarily know how. And that ultimately that there’s no end-state in Syria. So, planners have to view that as an opportunity.

What can the US government do? If you look at it from the perspective of how the Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk has described it, it is avoiding maximalist goals, timelines, and objective end-states, and then getting back to basics of partnership, alliance, and patience and understanding that through the use of hard and soft power across time and space and throughout the Middle East, they can reinforce neutral goals. By creating an environment in Syria, you protect Iraq, you help Lebanon, you protect your allies in Jordan and interests in Saudi Arabia. And your integrated strategy becomes more holistic.

Host

You just answered my next question. How would Daoism and design work in Syria? Heather, did you want to add to that?

Gregg

This article has taught me that these are practices we’re not particularly good at in the United States. Things like patience, things like realizing that we can’t fix the problem in the near term and waiting for emergence, waiting for an opportunity that might change the dynamics and might allow us to take other actions. I particularly want to underscore the point that Ned made about building partnerships, getting back to the basics, and working with partners and allies because certainly this is a conflict that we can’t unilaterally fix. And that’s deeply important.

Marsh

It really is a merger of philosophy, a way of thinking with a methodology. Design doesn’t just lead us to the solution, it’s a great tool to get us to think conceptually, but you have to have an aligned philosophy with it. Some problems are linear. You can see a solution. I can design. I can apply resources. I can get there. Other problems are much more complex and complicated. And interdependence requires that you be a little bit more agile, a little bit more flexible with things like timelines. That sometimes you balance action with inaction. Sometimes maybe I don’t want to do something somewhere because I don’t know what the effect is going to be. Let me allow things to develop in due course, and then ultimately that I have some humility in what I know and what I think I know and what I can do and what I can’t do. But if you cultivate yourself, you cultivate your organization, you cultivate your relationships, and you cultivate the environment to become a place where things can grow, that can foster emergent success, that you can be successful.

Host

Any final thoughts you’d like to share before we go?

Marsh

I just want to say thanks. Thanks for the opportunity to have this in Parameters. Thank you for your time here today. And I want to say thanks to Dr. Gregg for all her guidance and mentorship as we’ve worked through this and her hard work, as well.

Gregg

I want to say thank you too for this opportunity and, Col. Marsh, for all that you’ve taught me in this process.

I would just close by saying that we’re in an age of strategic competition where things like victory and near-term end-states just aren’t viable. This is not the kind of security environment we’re in. And so, applying tools like Daoism with design helps us to think about what does problem management look like in the age of strategic competition and what should we be focusing our attention on? How should we be building partnerships and alliances, practicing humility? All these things that Colonel Marsh said, I think are just deeply important in an age of strategic competition.

Host

Listeners, you can download this and dig into all the details at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53 issue one.

Ned and Heather, thank you so very much today. This was really interesting and all the effort you put in to actually coming together to make this happen is much appreciated.

Marsh

Thank you, Stephanie.

Gregg

Thanks, Stephanie.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

Author information

Colonel Ned Beechinor Marsh is a US Army Special Forces officer and garrison commander within Installation Management Command. His previous Army and Joint assignments include 1st Special Forces Group, US Army Special Operations Command, and Special Operations Command Europe. He has served throughout the Central Asian, European, and Indo-Pacif ic geographic areas. He is a graduate of the US Army War College, the School of Advanced Military Studies, and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Dr. Heather S. Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies in Garmisch, Germany, and is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), and The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from Jihad to the Crusades (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

The US military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities have overlooked a key vulnerability in their assessment of a potential military conflict between China and Taiwan—Taiwan’s growing reliance on agricultural imports and its food stocks (except for rice) that could endure trade disruptions for only six months. This podcast assesses Taiwan’s agricultural sector and its ability to feed the country’s population if food imports and production are disrupted; identifies the food products that should be prioritized in resupply operations, based on Taiwan’s nutritional needs and domestic food production; and outlines the required logistical assets. These findings underscore the urgency for US military planners to develop long-term logistical solutions for this complex strategic issue.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/10/

Episode Transcript: “Taiwan’s Food Resiliency—or Not—in a Conflict with China”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Today, I’m chatting with Captain Gustavo Ferreira and Major Jamie Critelli, authors of “Taiwan’s Food Resiliency—or Not—in a Conflict with China.” Ferreira is a senior agricultural economist with the US Department of Agriculture and serves as an agricultural officer at the 353 Civil Affairs Command, US Army Reserves. Critelli, US Army Reserves, is a civil affairs officer serving as an agricultural officer in the 353 Civil Affairs Command. He’s a seasonal farm business owner and has worked globally in agriculture on five continents.

Welcome back to Decisive Point, gentlemen.

Jamie Critelli

Thank you for having us here, Stephanie.

Gustavo Ferreira

Thank you, Stephanie. Happy to be here.

Host

Your article . . . it focuses on Taiwan’s food resiliency. Please give us an overview of Taiwan’s agricultural sector.

Ferreira

I would like to start by emphasizing how recent supply chain disruptions, crop failures in some key producing countries, as well as the war in Ukraine, have pushed global food prices to record high levels and also reminded many countries about the risks associated with the dependency on food imports to feed their populations. In the case of Taiwan, as this country industrialized its economy and developed key manufacturing sectors such as the semiconductor sector, its agricultural production had been declining for decades. As a result, Taiwan’s ability to feed itself has decreased, and food imports now cover about 2/3s of its annual caloric intake. What’s problematic with this is that contrary to what we’ve seen in Ukraine(where the) United States and other NATO allies are being able to supply Ukraine with massive amounts of supplies through a vast shared land border. A similar effort will not be possible for Taiwan because of A). Taiwan being an island and B). China’s Liberation Army Navy and Rocket Force have now the capabilities of denying freedom of movement to any adversary naval force in the air. In the context of a conflict with China; it will be extremely difficult and risky for cargo ships and airlift to reach Taiwan.

Another challenge will be the fact that China will likely attempt to capture major operational ports to use them to dock their own merchant civilian ships to supply its invasion of Taiwan. As a response, the Taiwanese military will almost certainly try to deny China’s access to these ports via obstacles such as sea mines or sunken ships. With all main ports no longer operational, we believe the United States and its allies will struggle to transport and unload critical food supplies to Taiwan.

Nevertheless, it’s important to note that Taiwanese authorities are well aware of these vulnerabilities, and the build-up of public food stocks have been a central component of the country’s food resiliency strategy. And I’ll give an example, during the COVID-19 crisis the Taiwanese government shared that the population that the nation had enough Food and Agriculture commodity stocks to handle disruptions in agriculture trade for six months. That was their promise. Our own analysis also shows that Taiwan has enough food reserves to feed its population for about six months. After that, the island will have to import food products to meet its nutritional needs.

Host

In the event of a naval blockade enforced by China, which food products should be prioritized in early stock build-up efforts or resupply operations based on Taiwan’s nutritional needs and domestic food production?

Critelli:

Taiwan, population 23 million, is actually the 16th largest food-importing country in the world. As you heard from Gus, it’s heavily reliant upon food imports to meet its needs, and certainly, any naval blockade will disrupt these flows. Food products must be prioritized in any efforts to build up stockages pre-conflict and should be included in US and allied resupply operations during a conflict.

Specific food products we consider are prioritized based upon two factors. First is widespread consumption of the food product already by the Taiwanese population, so we know that they eat it. And number two, a large volume of Taiwan imports due to the inability of domestic production to meet the demand nationally. When we look at the food that the Taiwanese are eating, about 50 percent of the calories come from grains. A large chunk of this is covered by domestic rice production, so we can exclude that, but wheat, corn, and soy are almost completely imported to meet the needs because there is no domestic production. In fact, the imports of wheat, corn, and soy amount to some 9 million metric tons annually. Wheat is used for them to produce flour, while corn and soy are almost exclusively used as livestock feed, predominantly for poultry and hogs. Next up on the list would be animal protein, 50 years ago, the average Taiwanese citizen derived 75 percent of their protein needs from plant sources and 25 percent from animal sources. The new mix is now nearly 50/50. A third of this animal protein comes from fish. The grains that I mentioned earlier are used to feed poultry and hogs. There is barely a domestic beef sector in Taiwan, so all beef is imported. With fish, however, the coastal and deep sea fishing industries provide it, but in the event of any naval action, these industries will be limited as well. So to produce fish, it will need to move on to shore into aquaculture facilities. Both fish and chicken are remarkable at transforming their rations into protein and should be prioritized in production to reduce the grain import needed to provide protein sources to the population in the first place.

Finally, while it isn’t a food stuff, do not forget about chemical inputs. These would include fertilizers and pesticides needed to grow plants as well as any chemical inputs and antibiotics needed for increased levels of dry land aquaculture. Despite whether the country needs to transition to a higher level of domestic production or it needs to start eating lower on the food pyramid due to a naval embargo, it will still need the means of sustaining itself with increased domestic agriculture.

Host

What logistical assets would be required to strengthen Taiwan’s food resiliency?

Ferreira

In this study, we developed three scenarios that assess the ability of Taiwan’s food system to endure a partial or a total Chinese Navy blockade. These scenarios are not intended to be exhaustive.

We started with scenario number one, which assumes that China effectively denies US and Allied food resupply operations. So, in other words, Taiwan becomes completely cut off from the rest of the world. Under this scenario, Taiwan will not be able to get external assistance. They will need to have sufficient food supplies at hand right at the beginning of the conflict. This is because while the current food stock levels may sustain Taiwan for six months, they will be insufficient in the event of a much more prolonged naval block. And let’s not forget it has been a year and two months since Russia invaded Ukraine, so nothing is certain about how long any military operation will last. So Taiwan will be better off being prepared for a longer-term scenario. To do so, we proposed two particular strategies. The first one is to increase its food reserve levels, and the second one is to increase its domestic food production. But we gotta say that, unfortunately, these two options also come with their own challenges and limitations, and we’ll cover those in a minute.

Starting with the first one, increasing food reserve levels for that, Taiwan will have to make major investments in storage capacity and strengthen its strategic stockpiles of key materials to include foodstuff. The problem here is the large storage facilities, and you can think of grain silos or cold storage warehouses; they’re also very vulnerable targets. Therefore, you know, Taiwan’s military will have to, at the same time as they build this infrastructure, they will also have to think about developing protective systems to defend this critical infrastructure from either kinetic or cyber attacks. The second option, which will be to increase domestic food production in order to make Taiwan more resilient, will come with also some problems.

So first, in order to boost more traditional agricultural production, that will take time, and it will require significant changes in the country’s rather antiquated agricultural system. The other thing is the island will be also capped by its limited farmland and agricultural labor, so if we want to go the traditional route, there are those limitations.

We propose to circumvent those constraints that Taiwanese authorities consider two options. The first is to develop a victory garden program. Back in World War I and World War II, the US developed this program, and just as an example, by the end of 1944, about 20 million victory gardens in the United States accounted for large shares of the country’s total annual fruits and vegetable production. So they were instrumental in maintaining food security during a major conflict. The second strategy will be well placed for a country that is as densely populated as Taiwan. And this would be the use of hydroponics which will allow many households to produce leafy greens within their own houses. There are some issues here, too. Hydroponic vegetable production has a steep learning curve and also requires considerable upfront investments. While these new surpluses will be dispersed throughout the country and, therefore more resilient to Chinese attack. They’ll also only partially mitigate the problem, and this is because they will produce food categories in where Taiwan’s already highly sufficient, and that’s vegetables, fruits, and roots. Nevertheless, it will provide some relief to the population, at least in the short run.

The second scenario contemplates the United States and its allies, anticipating that they can sustain limited resupply operations to Taiwan, even within the context of a Chinese naval embargo. And the rationale for this, we think along the lines of what’s happening currently at the Black Sea and Ukraine and Russia. So Ukraine and Russia agreed on the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which has kept critical grain corridors open to international buyers. We think that China could also allow limited maritime traffic to bring essential food products to Taiwan in order to avoid a major humanitarian crisis. So under this scenario, however, it’s unclear whether commercial shipping companies will be willing to operate (in) that region. And that’s due to the elevated risk and high operational costs. Think about really prohibitive insurance rates and even the difficulty obtaining things such as shipping letters of credit. In that case, the US and allied navies may need to ensure the arrival of critical food supplies to Taiwan using their own logistical assets. This raises another question, (which) is whether the US military and the Allies can replace those commercial operations.

And this is because this will include all different classes of shipping vessels to bring bulk cargo and containers and ranging from small vessels to very large ones. So think about what it would take to bring the volume of soybeans imported by Taiwan in 2021, which amounts to 2.6 million metric tons. So that will require about 47 Panamax-sized vessels. This is the largest ship that can cross the locks of the Panama Canal. Because of such large import volumes, that also will rule out completely a Berlin Airlift-type of operation, especially if China contests the airspace surrounding Taiwan.

Still, under this scenario, other logistical considerations include, that most agricultural imports arrive to Taiwan through four main ports. So it would be essential for those ports to stay operational and even to expand their capacities to sustain full supplier operations. Another issue is that about 90 percent of agriculture imports that arrive to Taiwan come through sea routes, and out of that, 85 percent comes through shipping containers. So why is this important? Taiwan’s heavy reliance on shipping containers is a vulnerability because China is the world’s top producer and exporter of shipping containers. The recent supply chain disruptions during COVID highlighted that issue.

The last scenario looks at the situation where the United States and allies foresee an impending Chinese naval blockade and begin to quickly coordinate food resupply operations before the blockade is in force. In this situation, it will involve the United States first anticipating the imminent invasion and naval blockade, and then we’ll have a limited window of opportunity to start resupply operations and try to bring as many foodstuffs as possible before maritime traffic to the islands is completely disrupted. Because time is essential, it will be challenging for allies to contract and mobilize the additional civilian maritime and military maritime transportation assets that can quickly bring the additional food supplies before the conflict begins. Also, in that situation, like Major Critelli mentioned, the United States and allies will have to prioritize transportation of certain food products, those should be upfront in those operations before that window is closed.

Finally, on the receiving end, Taiwan would need to have sufficient infrastructure and the supply chain channels to receive, absorb, store, and distribute the sudden spike in imports of such large volumes of food commodities. Otherwise, what might happen is that the food products make it to the island, but they end up getting spoiled or go waste due to waiting longer periods at the shore or improper handling, or inadequate storage capacity.

Host

What conclusions can we draw from this?

Critelli

The global focus at the moment is on Ukraine and the Black Sea Grain Initiative and the relative food insecurity of several countries around the world appearing as a result, but we can also draw lessons from that conflict that would apply to a potential conflict involving Taiwan. Ukraine is a major global food exporter, so the bulk of impacts are felt outside of Ukraine. Taiwan as a major food importer, will feel the impact inside the country. Taiwan focused on economic development instead of focusing on ag development, so the global impacts we will feel in the event of a Taiwan embargo, would be felt downstream. Globally, they would be felt within the supply chains of semiconductors, for example in other items, and there would be third order impacts appearing elsewhere that we haven’t even thought about.

As Gustavo mentioned, Taiwan is very different from Ukraine due to its geography. So in many cases the response in the event of a conflict must be very different as well. We must consider novel approaches to ensuring Taiwan can meet its nutritional needs over a long time horizon. We must look at Taiwan strengths and weaknesses and see how we can pivot a weakness into an opportunity to meet their needs based on what they already do well. We, therefore, propose more aquaculture and hydroponics and more of a closed-loop production network with local production as much as possible. We can reduce the impact of an invasion by drastically reducing dependency on imports. We must do everything we can to prevent a conflict from happening in the first place. A war in this part of the world, involving the countries who could be parties to it would be absolutely catastrophic. NATO doesn’t exist in the Pacific. We need to pursue a diplomatic approach with a group of nations to best position Taiwan to prevent or to speedily deescalate emerging conflict.

Ferreira

As we got deeper in our research, it became really clear that US and allied efforts to break the blockade will very likely be unsuccessful or difficult at best, and in this matter, China could endure the consequences of a prolonged confrontation much better than Taiwan could. And going back to what Major Critelli said, the time to prepare is now, in order to increase that resiliency to the island.

Host

Thank you so much for making time to speak with me today.

Ferreira

Thank you, Stephanie, for giving us the opportunity to talk about our paper.

Critelli

Thank you for having us, Stephanie.

Host

Listeners, you can read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 2.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the authors: Captain Gustavo F. Ferreira is a senior agricultural economist with the US Department of Agriculture and serves as an agricultural officer (38G) at the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, US Army Reserves. He holds a PhD in agricultural economics from Louisiana State University, and prior to joining the federal government, he was an assistant professor in agricultural economics at Virginia Tech University. He has published numerous research articles in top-ranking economics and military journals.

Major Jamie A. Critelli, US Army Reserve, is a Civil Affairs officer serving as an agricultural officer in the 353rd Civil Affairs Command. He is a seasonal farm business owner and has worked in agriculture on five continents. He also serves as the director of the Operational Excellence Department at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He graduated with honors from Cornell University with a degree in horticulture and holds an MBA in supply-chain management from ETH Zurich.

In an evolving and expanding biothreat landscape caused by emerging biotechnologies, increases in global infectious disease outbreaks, and geopolitical instability, the Department of Defense now faces challenges that alter its traditional approach to biothreats and prompt the need for modernized, improved preparedness for—and response to—potential biothreat scenarios. These challenges further complicate specific weaknesses revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, including the Department’s inability to sustain the military mission while meeting intragovernmental expectations to assist with civilian public health resources and services.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss2/8/

Episode Transcript: “Responding to Future Pandemics: Biosecurity Implications and Defense Considerations”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Decisive Point welcomes Drs. Diane DiEuliis and James Jordano, authors of “Responding to Future Pandemics: Bio Security Applications and Defense Considerations,” which was published in the Summer 2023 issue of Parameters.

DiEuliis is a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, and Giordano holds several distinguished titles, including the Pellegrino Center professor in the departments of neurology and biochemistry.

Thank you for joining me today, Drs. DiEuliss and Giordano.

Dr. James Giordano

Thank you.

Dr. Diane DiEuliis

Thank you. It’s great to be with you today.

Host

Your article addresses three primary factors that have complicated the evolving landscape of biodefense threats. What are they?

Giordano

Let me take the first. The first one that we mentioned is emerging biotechnologies across a spectrum of potential applications in recent developments. These include, but certainly aren’t limited to, things such as gene editing. Probably the one most people are most currently familiar with is the use of a particular gene scissoring tool called CRISPR CAS9. But realistically, what that does is that just adds to our current armamentarium and makes our current armamentarium more facile and far easier to both acquire and use with regard to the existing techniques and technologies for gene editing to modify the genome and perhaps direct various phenotypes (expressions of physical characteristics). Going right along with that is the vast field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biology ranges everything from the molecular to the mass effect to the subcellular all the way to those things that can produce social change and a variety of different applications.

Certainly, we’re concerned about those things that directly affect humans, but realistically, there’s a number of things in synthetic biology that can disrupt and affect the ecologies and the environments upon which humans are dependent and interact. And this can then have ripple effects. And, really, I think the potentiator, and as Diane and I both have argued in print, the force multiplier for these is the use of big data coupled with forms of machine learning that are iteratively becoming forms of artificial intelligence. You put all these things together and you got yourself a juggernaut of biotechnological capability with a broad, broad range and field of different applications and uses and potential misuses. Diane?

DiEuliis

Thanks, Jim. Tagging on to that as a second concern is the fact that we may be looking in future at an increasing incidence of emerging infectious disease. And as the world’s population grows, we see more and more infringement of human populations into natural habitats. And as you know, much of emerging infectious diseases that appear in human beings comes from what are called zoonotic jumps, or a jump from a disease pathogen in an animal that then becomes adapted to human populations. And then we could see pandemics resulting from that. As we move into the future, we may see more incidences of zoonotic jumps, but also, we see things like people living in more close spaces in urban environments, which in some cases could just be an incubator for spreading diseases in a pandemic fashion. So, this is also a reason for why we need to reexamine the biothreat landscape. Jim, did you have more to add to that?

Giordano

If you take a look at the second and the first, in other words, the increased incidence and perhaps prevalence of infectious diseases, both in humans and in other species upon which humans are dependent—and the use of biotech—one thing is not mutually exclusive from the other. As the COVID crisis brought into stark relief, many of our emerging biotechs are prompted by, if not in direct response to what may be seen as biological risks and/or threats such as COVID. But more than that, I think, what tends to happen is that you do get this march along, whereby the biotechnology is beginning to address more and more areas that are so representative of human susceptibilities and vulnerabilities. And in so doing, that interface between those things that are environmental, from the microbial level all the way to the geopolitical level, become the targets of those things that we can use biotechnologically to assess those risks and threats, and to engage those risks and threats, in a variety of different ways. Diane?

DiEuliis

Those are really interesting points, and one of the things that we talk about in the paper is this sort of irony in emerging biotech in that some of these tools and the emerging capabilities that are offered by biotechnology are sort of the same tools that we want to use in order to mitigate things like pandemics, things like COVID-19. The goal is going to be moving forwar how to balance that how to balance the potential emerging threats that can come from these expanded capabilities while at the same time safely leveraging these technologies for the benefits that we can get out of them. And there’s a wide swath of benefits that could be used both by DoD and the community writ large that could be used to combat bio threats into the future.

Host

How do you see these factors playing out against the changing landscape of bio threats?

Giordano

I think we’re seeing an increased ecological disruption, everything from that writ large, climate change, for example, and the total human footprint over a period of time, particularly over the 19th, 20th now to the 21st century. And, I think writ small, as Diane noted, what we’re seeing is urban and suburban spread and sprawl, but also an increased level of commercialization and technologization of various environments that then disrupt those environments in those ways that make those environmental niche factors far more feasible, viable, and, therefore, accessible to humans and human populations.

So, these two things work together, both as respective of human progress and perhaps also as intentional disruption. I mean, seeing the ecology and the environment as a battle space, whereby disruptions of that ecology can then prompt individual and collective notions of dread and threat, forced migration, and/or in some cases, various responses, I mean, true responses, particularly in the psychological operations base, can be seen very, very importantly as a domain of perhaps non kinetic engagement, which then gets us directly into kinetic engagement. The use of these bio threats and bio risks as weaponizable entities on a variety of scales, from the individual all the way to the international.

Host

So, through this lens, what should the Department of Defense consider when it comes to maintaining readiness and preparing for the next pandemic?

DiEuliis

I really have two areas of response to that, and the first one is . . . of course, we learned quite a bit in responding to COVID-19. That entire experience really highlighted a number of things that DoD needs to be concerned with moving forward. The first of which is DoD obviously does defense support of civil authorities. Sometimes we nickname that DSCA. That’s an expected role that DoD has played for a long time is supporting civilian authorities in responding to disasters, or, in this case, a pandemic of global proportion. But at the same time, DoD needs to protect the warfighting force from whatever it is that’s happening and needs to maintain readiness in the warfighting force.

So, one tension that was revealed during COVID-19 is that our civilian response to the pandemic was leaning heavily on the DoD for logistical and other kinds of support. So that may not be the ideal situation moving forward because DoD quickly learned that extending itself to support the civilian response had some drawbacks on the DoD side. We were quickly depleting some of our stockpiles of response materials in the way of PPE and other kinds of things as simple as nitrile gloves and other things that are involved in that. That is one thing that DoD will have to strike a balance. How much can they lean forward in supporting the civilian response versus how much to continue to maintain their protection of the forces internally.

The second piece of that gets to more of some of the things that we cover in more detail in the paper. And that is this sort of overlap space between the general health and welfare of warfighters versus protecting war fighters from very specific intentional bio threats. Let me describe that in a little bit more detail. It’s general purpose is keeping a healthy fighting force keeping people from getting sick, helping when they’ve been sick, get back to health and get back into the fight. These are just general considerations of health and wellness that the Department of Defense utilizes the same kind of medical advice, treatments, therapeutics that everybody else uses. And they rely on whatever is considered best practice in general public health to maintain the readiness of the fighting force. But DoD has to worry about specific biothreats.

So, by this we’re talking about things like the potential of, say, an anthrax attack or someone who may try to recreate a smallpox and infect warfighters with something like that. So, we have a program that’s devoted specifically just for nasty things that war fighters might be exposed to in their daily work or their deployments. And so Dod has full control of this latter program, the investments, and what they do to develop those kinds of therapeutics.

On the other side of it, on just the health and wellness side, they’re completely at the mercy of the public health community in the US. What COVID-19 demonstrated is that readiness was somewhat compromised because DoD had to wait for the CDC, for general public health authorities, to provide them with things like test kits and diagnostics, whereas in the other category, DoD develops their own diagnostics and their own medical countermeasures. So, looking forward, in addition to balancing this DSCA problem and how much should DoD lean forward in helping defense support of civil authorities, they’re also going to have to navigate this space in terms of how much should they rely on the public health community to provide them with what they need if they cannot provide it rapidly enough in the case of a pandemic or other kind of bio threat.

Giordano

It sort of does get into the idea of this interface between what is cooperation and what is competition, not only with regard to intranationally, in terms of what are they cooperative domains and what are the competitive domains for resources, services, and goods during these times of crisis. But more broadly, and I think as COVID, once again, has illustrated quite well, is that this is multinational. I mean, let’s face it, at its core, science and technology have a strongly cooperative bend. I mean, realistically, what we find is that these things coming together under a convergent scientific approach utilizes technology to advance science and utilizes science to advance technology, and certainly intranationally, or within allied economic and scientific groups, that’s very much, de rigueur.

But very often it’s some kind of overarching or undergirding competitiveness that provides the prompt, in other words, to get to some proverbial metaphorical finish line first—to a new cure or new treatment, some advancement. And those things can have a variety of different pay offs from the financial all the way to the idea of international power, and even perhaps military leverage. So, what we found is that when that competition gets too stripped, too dense, as COVID has shown, that can be a zero-sum equation. And no one wins because there’s not that necessary sharing of resources, knowledge, capabilities. By the same token, we do recognize both macro and microeconomic factors, and that frank openness of that level of gross cooperation can very often stultify competitive drives and, therefore, can be problematic in the same way.

So, if we’re looking more of a plus some possibility, what we’ve entertained is this idea of cooperative competition or coopetition because what it really does is it defines key areas of dependencies. One group may be dependent upon another group to establish and maintain relative dominion within a particular niche or milieu or field. But what it actually does is it leverages leverage, and in so doing, creates balance, whereby these domains of capability and power are decided upon through some process of deliberation, discourse, and dialect. And there are actually ways that we discussed both in the paper and elsewhere about how this may be entertained. But then ultimately this reaches some form of an equilibrium whereby A, whatever A may be, cannot be achieved without B, and B cannot occur and be achieved without A. So that mutuality accents and very often brings to the fore the cooperative necessity and the competitive domain. And we view that as a realistic sight picture, particularly in strategic ways, in light of the genuine and authentic risks and potential benefits that can be yielded through science and technology going forward.

Host

Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share before we go?

DiEuliis

First and foremost, I want to thank my colleague, Jim. It’s always a pleasure to work with you and it was great writing this paper together. And thanks to Stephanie for hosting us for this podcast.

I encourage folks to take a look at the paper. And I would say that one thing to keep in mind as we are all coming out of this COVID-19 experience is that just about everybody … federal agencies, state, and local public health authorities, international forums, the WHO, the Biological Weapons Convention. Everyone is scrambling now to understand the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of what did we do well, what did we not do so well, and many, many efforts are going to be focused on what should we do in future to do a better job. And there’s going to be a lot of investment, a lot of churn, a lot of activity in the space. And so, I encourage people to really think carefully and to not just have sort of knee-jerk responses to the aftermath of COVID-19 but to really sort out some of these issues in a thoughtful way so that we can really carefully plan and prepare for next time.

Giordano

I agree. And thanks very much both for your interest in our work and your attention to it and providing this wonderful forum, and we would encourage the listeners of the podcast to get in touch. Our emails are available at the end of our paper and certainly has our contact information.

A lot of the work that Diane and I are engaging, both that which is funded by the DoD and other federal agencies and that which has been sort of representative of our long-standing careers in this space, address not only this issue in particular, but the broader field of issues of balancing the apparent benefits of bioscience and technology and also recognizing, appreciating, and addressing those burdens, risks, and harms that can occur if you do certain things or if you don’t do certain things. And once this begins to occur on the multicultural, multi-natural global stage of the 21st century, I mean that multinational stage by itself, I think, produces particular opportunities and challenges. And so addressing these things in that forum and it with those realities is going to be an ongoing focus of our work. So again, thanks to the listening audience for your attention and your interest. And uh, thanks to you as well, it’s been a pleasure.

Host

Listeners, I echo what my guests just said. I suggest you read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53 issue 2. You can get into so much more detail here.

This was a really great time. Thank you.

Giordano

Thank you.

DiEuliis

Thank you

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

About the authors: Diane DiEuliis, PhD, is a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University. Her research focuses on emerging biological technologies, biodefense, and preparedness for biothreats. Specific topic areas under this broad research portfolio include dual-use life sciences research, synthetic biology, the US bioeconomy, disaster recovery, and behavioral, cognitive, and social science as it relates to important aspects of deterrence and preparedness. DiEuliis has several research grants in progress and teaches various foundational professional military education courses. Prior to joining National Defense University, DiEuliis was deputy director for policy and served as acting deputy assistant secretary for policy

and planning in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), Department of Health and Human Ser vices. She coordinated policy in support of domestic and international health emergency preparedness and response activities, such as Hurricane Sandy and Ebola outbreaks. She was responsible for the implementation of the Pandemic All-Hazards Preparedness Act, the National Health Security Strategy, and the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE).

James Giordano, PhD, MPhil, is the Pellegrino Center Professor in the Departments of Neurology and Biochemistry; chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program; director of the Cyber-SMART Center’s Program in Biotechnology, Biosecurity, and Ethics; chair of the Sub-Program in Military Medical Ethics at Georgetown University; and senior bioethicist of the Defense Medical Ethics Center (DMEC) and adjunct professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences. Giordano is senior fellow of the Project on Biosecurity, Technology, and Ethics at the US Naval War College; Stockdale Distinguished Fellow of Science, Technology and Ethics at the United States Naval Academy, and senior science advisory fellow of the SMA Branch, Joint Staff, Pentagon. He has previously served as Donovan Senior Fellow for Biosecurity at US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM); as an appointed member of the Neuroethics, Legal and Social Issues Advisory Panel of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); as research fellow and task leader of the EU-Human Brain Project Sub-Program on Dual-Use Brain Science; and as an appointed member of the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections (SACHRP).