Decisive Point Podcast

Policy initiatives in the Trump administration and the Biden-Harris administration significantly accelerated the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. This podcast supports the conclusion that the major factors in this defeat were the historical difficulty in governing Afghanistan, the Afghan republic’s two inefficient and corrupt governments, an ineffective US strategy, operational shortcomings by US forces, an ineffective Afghan military, Pakistan’s duplicitous policy, and the strength and determination of the Taliban. This podcast rejects the claim that the United States nation-building effort was a major factor in its defeat and concludes with a discussion of lessons encountered.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/3/

Episode transcript: “Defeat in Afghanistan: An Autopsy”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

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.

You’re listening to Decisive Point.

I’m talking with Joseph J Collins today, a retired Army Colonel and civil servant whose service has included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs, and OSD Collins is the author of defeat in Afghanistan and autopsy. And in the spring, 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome, Joe.

Joseph J. Collins

Thanks, Stephanie. With everything going on in Ukraine and worries about Taiwan, I’m glad that we can dive back into it for a bit here today.

Host

Let’s jump right in, you noted at the beginning of your article, and I’m quoting you here, “the United States failed to accomplish its objectives, whether judged in terms of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, or nation building.

This outcome represents a significant unforced error in American National security policy.” What prices did Afghanistan and America pay In this venture?

Collins

You’re correct. I think we failed in all of our major tests in Afghanistan. We failed overall, but in each of those tasks you mentioned, we failed in varying degrees. In counterterrorism, we finally did get bin Laden, and afterward, his successor, Ayman Zawahiri. We did prevent further attacks on our nation. But we left behind in Afghanistan a significant ISIS problem, as well as, perhaps, as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters who remain closely associated with the Taliban, Pakistan, and al Qaeda’s best friend, Saraj Haqqani. A US- and UN-designated terrorist, is now the old powerful interior minister in Kabul.

In the main counterinsurgency effort, US forces held their own but never decisively defeated the Taliban. We passed the baton to the Afghanistan Army in 2014, but, in the end, they lost ground, could not succeed and, finally, sensing Western abandonment or what they thought would be Western abandonment, they quit the field and nation building. We did much great work, but we were inefficient. We fostered corruptions, and our failures there were costly in the main, though I don’t see nation building and the nation building effort as a significant source or cause of our defeat. There, we talked about costs. We paid a steep price—nearly 2,500 US deaths, 1,200 allied deaths, and over 25,000 wounded over a two-decade period. We spent $2 trillion on this effort when all things are considered. But with all of that, Afghans suffered much more—66,000 dead soldiers, airmen, and police officers (and) 50,000 civilians perished. Most of them at the hands of the Taliban, which is a horrible toll for a nation of not much more than 35 million people. As a result of our defeat, Afghans lost civil rights and personal freedom. The country’s economy is in worse shape than ever. The clock in healthcare, education, and economic opportunity has been turned back to the terrible days of the 1990s. The women of Afghanistan are essentially under house arrest. That’s a steep price for that country.

Host

How did the Bush and Obama presidencies shape the war?

Collins

This is a 20-year experience for the United States. Bush and Obama each managed the war effort for eight years. Neither was able to put together a winning effort, but neither was willing to give up altogether. Both Bush and Obama, in varying degrees, were distracted by the war in Iraq. Team Bush came in country in 2001 looking to avenge 9/11. Their initial objective was to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and remove the Taliban from power.

President Bush quickly added nation building to the mission, knowing that if we failed to stabilize Afghanistan, extremists would just take over again. The first few years under Bush were quiet, but Iraq took first priority, even as the Taliban regained strength. By 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, team Bush realized that the Afghanistan effort needed help, and so did team Obama.

Obama campaigned on Afghanistan as the “good” war and argued that it would be first priority. As we were beginning to leave Iraq after an agonizing set of meetings over a few months, President Obama decided to surge in Afghanistan, raising our troop strength for the second time. This time to nearly 100,000, with the Allies adding troops as well. Afghan forces were reinforced, and an army of over 300,000 cops and soldiers was in the field. It was a promising start, but President Obama was true to his word. He gradually turned off the surge, beginning at the 18th month. By the end of his term, a few years later, U.S. forces were down to about 8,400 personnel. In summary, Bush and Obama muddled through, presiding over a deteriorating battlefield situation, but at the same time keeping faith with our allies.

Host

And Trump and Biden? How did they impact the effort in Afghanistan?

Collins

In contrast to their predecessors, presidents Trump and Biden worked for a total troop withdrawal. In the end, they broke faith with our Afghan allies, demoralized Afghan forces in the field, and opened the door to the final Taliban offensive. While our failure in Afghanistan really was 20 years in the making, presidents Trump and Biden bear special responsibility for the defeat. Trump came into office as a skeptic of the war effort. But encouraged by his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster and the theater Commander General Mick Nicholson, he stepped up efforts and made a modest trooper reinforcement. About a year later, he entered into direct negotiations with the Taliban without our allies at the table. In February 2020, his envoy signed the Doha Accords, promising a full US withdrawal by spring of 2021. Trump did not insist on a ceasefire or force the Taliban to come to the table with the Kabul government. Trump lowered our troop strength to 35,00 personnel. The bare minimum contractors at that time declined from nearly 10,000 to about 6,000. That’s after the Doha Accord up to the beginning of the Biden administration.

For their part, the Taliban made a series of promises, but the only one they kept was not to kill American advisers until the withdrawal was complete. Team Biden came in intent on a full withdrawal. They slid the withdrawal date to August, but they failed to read the situation. Their withdrawal plan, (was) marked by the embassy closure, the recall of our last and highly respected commander General Scott Miller, and the abandonment of our central base at Bagram Airfield. All of these things together drowned out our pledges of lasting support. For the Kabul regime, the Afghan army, who had sacrificed 66,000 dead to the war, lost the will to fight, and by the time we executed a single-point evacuation from Kabul Airport, the adjacent neighborhoods were under Taliban control. One hundred twenty thousand people, mostly Afghan, were withdrawn, but 70,000 of our allies in the special visa pool were left behind. As General Milley noted in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the withdrawal was a logistical success and a strategic failure.

Host

You note that the major factors that brought about the victory of the Taliban over Afghanistan and its partners are complex, but few. Please expand on that.

Collins

Decisive factors (in my mind), and this is certainly subject to argument—and indeed in the more than 50 things in the few books that I’ve written about Afghanistan, I’ve realized that the truth has been elusive and that perceptions matter. This is my arrangement of the decisive factors, and I hope your listeners and the readers of Parameters will come back and tell me where I went wrong and what their list is.

The first thing that I always mentioned is the difficulty of governing Afghanistan. This was not a showstopper, but it provided a very difficult context. Our leaders and modern Afghan leaders had to deal with a nation, Afghanistan, that was at war since 1978. Institutions were completely destroyed—public and private. Extreme poverty and underdevelopment was a given. Ethnic rivalries between the major groups (Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara) were a major part of Afghan history, and they continued to be a real problem for the government. There were also religious rivalries, (not only a Shia–Sunni divide, with the Sunnis being in the great majority) but there was also a difference in those who believed in the most primitive and fundamentalist aspects of Islam and those who had a more modern approach in the 20th century.

In Afghanistan, most leaders were deposed, exiled or executed in office. The only really good time of significant peace in Afghanistan was from the mid (19)30s up until 1978, which were dominated by the monarchy. But Afghanistan in 2021 was not a lost cause. Other factors carried more weight in determining our defeat. Clearly, the Karzai and Ghani governments left a lot to be desired. They seldom rose above ineffectiveness and corruption. The lack of modern institutions compounded this problem. The US also failed to develop and execute an effective strategy that you would unite all coalition efforts and chart a course to success. The Iraq effort compounded this problem. From 2003 to 2008, the time when Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan was spiraling downward, conditions in Iraq were often much worse.

It wasn’t just a question of material resources. It was, more importantly, I think, a question of the imagination and the decision-making time of Americans, senior officers and civilian officials. Throughout all this, the United States armed forces also bears a share of the blame for how the war was fought. Our armed forces showed brilliance in logistics and tactics, but much less skill and operational and strategic planning. We never achieved unity of command and never harmonized our counterterrorist and counter insurgency efforts. We built up the Afghan army and police, but we made them in our mold. They were large, slow, bureaucratic. They were also a complete shareholder in Afghan corruption.

The Afghan Air Force was slow rolled in the beginning and it never caught up. Only Afghan commando units, advised by coalition special operators, were predictably good and reliable in the field. A major factor also can be found in Pakistani policy. They played the United States like a fiddle. They exploited their status as an ally, essential to our logistical effort, while at the same time effectively supporting and providing a safe haven for the Taliban. One finally one has to give credit to the Taliban themselves. They fought valiantly and consistently. Again, this is part of an old irregular warfare pattern. The insurgents had more motivation and constancy than the forces of the national government.

Host

What lessons learned can we carry forward?

Collins

We did a book at the National Defense University called Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War. It was about Afghanistan and Iraq, published in 2015. We preferred (the title) Lessons Encountered to Lessons Learned because quite often when we found that we have learned the same lessons many times before and just not absorb them. It’s always a tough question. “Lessons encountered” is a more neutral term and one full of hope that people will study examples of this war. And again, this is something that I put forward to start the discussion, certainly not as the last word. The first and foremost, and what my army buddies used to call a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious), the United States of America should avoid being a third party in an insurgency where the insurgents have safe havens and strong foreign support, particularly from adjacent nations. That was a factor in Vietnam. It was a factor here in Afghanistan. You have to deal with that foreign support, or you’re making counterinsurgency almost impossible when you have a motivated enemy, as you did here in this case. Secondly, we have to remember (that) neither Iraq nor Afghanistan began as an insurgency. We have to be careful to keep our eye on the changing character of a conflict where we’re preparing for great-power conflict. That’s the first priority. But irregular warfare may not be far away, and we have to be able to make those assessments. And to change both in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were probably slower than we might have been to adapt to counterinsurgency.

Some of our earlier commanding generals, I would remind you here that a number of people in the Pentagon were not eager at all, particularly in the beginning, to bill Afghanistan as an insurgency at all, A third lesson: long, irregular wars (even if they are small wars) by some description will be expensive. Policy inertia and some costs will tend to keep us deployed for long durations. Large land deployments will be costly. The key decision I think, and this is another lesson, is when to commit to it and how to commit to them? It’s hard to break contact once you’re in a fight, but while raiding and air strikes have their place, they seldom create lasting results. By, with, and through is a useful technique, but there will be many cases where the presence of our forces on the ground will be necessary. Finally, it’s hard to avoid nation building as part of a long-term commitment. It would be nice if we could match a troop presence with simple counterterrorist operations. That was our hope at the beginning, but while it’s an attractive notion, it’s not practical. You have to help your allies out as we found in President Bush’s terms.

Host

Care to share your final thoughts before we go?

Collins

The wiser sleuths among the readers of the Parameters article will be able, between the lines, perhaps, to see some emotional reactions. I’ve been writing on the war in Afghanistan since November 1980, and it’s the end of Afghanistan in 2021. The way it ended was clearly a significant downbeat for me. I worry about our veterans who fought so hard there. And so many like General Campbell, General Nicholson, Scott Miller. Those who had so many multiple tours—people, particularly in the special operations community—who had spent so many different tours there. I feel for them even more. I feel for the people in Afghanistan. Their immediate future is bleak.

Some good news for us, but not for the Taliban, is that the nation, the country that the Taliban conquered, is not the same one that they conquered 1996. Half the Afghan population is under 25 and did not know the old Taliban. The Taliban, of course, despite their protestations, appears to be about as dumb as they were in 1996. It’s just an amazing combination of ignorance and arrogance. They will turn around and put all of their policy issues to a religious test. There’s no system of government and no religion that tells you that life is a suicide pact, and that’s in some ways where they are.

Women are now not just forbidden to attend high school and college, but they’re also forbidden to work independently for foreign humanitarian, nongovernmental organizations. Most of them had large-scale female staff because they were dealing with infants and children and healthcare and education. And Afghan women tend to dominate there. Mixing Afghan men and women is difficult, so the NGO’s wisely turned toward the female population in Afghanistan, which is so underutilized already.

We have unrest. In some of the non-Pashtun areas of the countryside there remains, of course, huge problems with ISIS. We have to keep an eye on ISIS and al Qaeda elements that are in the country. Sadly, I think this validates Clausewitz’s observation that. The results of war are never final. Afghan is an area of such strife that the export of conflict from conditions inside of Afghanistan is likely. At the same time, the Taliban today is much better armed and supported because of their victory against the Afghan army than they’ve ever been before. And so, when you look inside your own crystal ball for the immediate future of (Afghanistan), it looks bleak. And undoubtedly, as bleak as it was in 1996 when the original Taliban leadership took over.

Host

Thanks for your insights on this topic, Joe. And I echo your desire for feedback. I’ll make sure we have an e-mail address in the show notes.

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

Collins

Thanks for paying attention to this, Stephanie.

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: Joseph J. Collins is a retired Army colonel and civil servant. His 46 years of service included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs and OSD (Policy). From 2001–04, he served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. He has taught at the United States Military Academy, the National War College, and Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Collins holds a doctorate from Columbia University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

The US military must create standing, numbered, and regionally aligned Joint warfighting headquarters— American Expeditionary Forces (AEFs)—around a command council and a staff organized into Joint centers and cells. Calls for standing Joint force headquarters are not new, but the demonstrated military effectiveness of the Joint Task Force (JTF) model coupled with increasing service-specific resource requirements and tightening fiscal constraints have resulted in little evolution in joint force headquarters construction since the end of World War II.

Analysis of the historical record has shown that joint warfighting is best conducted with a Joint warfighting command subordinate to the geographic combatant commands. However, the Joint Task Force model is problematic because the ad-hoc, post-crisis activation of JTFs, along with their antiquated command and control structure, inherently puts the United States at a strategic and operational disadvantage. In the future, the US military will primarily maintain its competitive advantage, especially in great-power competition, by being a superior and sustainable joint force sooner than its adversaries. The proposed AEFs draw on generations of hard-earned experience to maintain and grow American supremacy in Joint warfighting in an increasingly dangerous world

Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/953/

Episode Transcript: The Future of the Joint Warfighting Headquarters: An Alternative Approach to the Joint Task Force

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests 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 Dr. Thomas Bruscino and Louis Yuengert, coauthors of The Future of the Joint Warfighting Headquarters: An Alternative Approach to the Joint Task Force, with Colonels Eric Bissonette, Kelvin Mote, Marc J. Sanborn, James Watts, and Commander Matthew B. Powell. Bruscino is an associate professor of history in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. He holds a PhD in military history from Ohio University. Yuengert is a retired Army colonel and an associate professor of practice in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the US Army War College. He holds a master’s degree in operations research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College.

Welcome to Decisive Point, gentlemen.

(Thomas Bruscino)

Happy to be here.

(Louis Yuengert)

Yeah, it’s great to be here.

Host

Great. Let’s just jump right in here. Your work offers an alternative approach to the Joint Task Force for Joint warfighting headquarters. Give our listeners some background. Why the need for change?

(Yuengert)

So Stephanie, Tom and I were teaching—this was two years ago—in the Carlisle Scholars Program. And in the scholars program, there’s a requirement that the students do two additional research projects. The reason we have the program is so that they have the space to do that. And in this case, one of the student committees for the Military Strategy and Campaigning course that Tom teaches identified that how we are organized for Joint warfighting was a vulnerability—and, especially, in near-peer competition. And so they asked Tom if they could explore this further after they had given their presentation as part of their research. And this paper was the result of that research effort. So, Tom, if you could talk about the need for change?

(Bruscino)

Yeah, so the work they did was they had multiple committees. And they had worked on Joint Task Forces and the formation of one, and they sort of got into the problems that are inherent in that: extensive delays in getting our warfighting headquarters; a lot of disorganization; some off-cycle training cycles; the need for what we have in the Joint Force, called the Joint Enabling Capabilities Command, which has to go and flies all over the world, filling in gaps. So they saw all this need with this.

Another committee was doing the Joint planning process, sort of looking at how we do the fighting, planning for fighting. And a lot of the Joint planning process is focused on sort of the day-to-day activities, the competition activities, campaigning activities of combatant commands and maybe doesn’t apply as well to the dilemmas of Joint Task Forces or Joint warfighting commands.

So this really kind of drove the thinking and the kind of the problem set that they were looking at, that we were looking at when we started researching and developing this monograph.

(Yuengert)

Yeah—just to add to that, we encourage the students as part of their research, if possible, to write something that could be published to have an impact. Either do it for a client—in this case, we did not enlist a client—or to do it so that it could be published and have some kind of impact. And in this case, I think it will.

Host

And what you all came up with was American Expeditionary Forces (American Expeditionary Force). What would this look like?

(Bruscino)

Yeah, so, American Expeditionary Forces: We chose that one because it has historical resonance, right? So, in World War I, it was American Expeditionary Forces (American Expeditionary Force) that General (John J.) Pershing commanded; World War II, it was Allied Expeditionary Forces (Allied Expeditionary Force). And our idea was we’re going to focus on this sort of American and Joint aspect of it, with an idea of if we can get that better, it can become combined down the road and work with allies. And then maybe it would transition to becoming an Allied Expeditionary Force. Either way, that was the idea of it. Now what distinguishes this is that there have been lots of calls for—and there used to be, and sometimes there still kind of are—standing Joint Task Forces.

But we felt like that wasn’t quite sufficient. We needed something that was a little more regionally aligned. We needed something that was more flexible and allowed to deal with the sort of the problems that have always gotten in the way of standing Joint Task Forces working. We don’t flesh out the exact examples of what these would look like in this. We talk about sort of what they would look like generally in any sort of combatant command region, the geographic regions where they’d be.

But the idea would be, sort of, we do have forces that are regionally aligned already in all of the services or literally in the regions. And the idea was that we would build the (American Expeditionary Force or) AEF headquarters out of the commanders and some key staff out of those to build these sort of standing AEF headquarters. Kind of have to read it to get into the details of what that looks like. We certainly hope people do that. But it doesn’t require as much sort of force generation as standing Joint Task Force headquarters do.

So it’s a little bit more flexible. And one of the sort of major innovations in it is kind of a callback to sort of the way we’ve often ended up doing things, which is that the AEF headquarters is run by the AEF commander but not really run by the commander with the staff, but run by the commander with the different component commanders as part of what we call a “command council.”

And so we sort of set up a whole bunch of ways that they could operate and they could do the detailed planning in each of the components and that a lot more of the conceptual ideas of how they’re going to operate as a Joint Force allow for better interoperability will happen because the conceptual stuff will be happening among these commanders who are thinking about this sort of bigger picture. And they’re really working together and knowing what their components are specifically able to do. It’s very difficult—and we say this in there—it’s very difficult for even the best, most Joint-educated Army officer or (US) Air Force officer to know how an Air Force wing operates if you’re an Army officer or how an Army corps operates if you’re an Air Force officer. And throw in fleets and (Marine Air-Ground Task Forces or) MAGTFs and all of that, and you can see how confusing it gets. And it’s only going to get more. So when we start bringing in (US) Space Force assets, cyber force assets, we need the people who do that for their business to be able to sort of talk to the commanders and think about how they’re going to work together instead of having a sort of spun-up Army staff become a Joint Staff and try to run these formations.

Host

How would this concept increase the likelihood of Joint Force interoperability and enable effective maneuver in all domains, including, like you mentioned, operating environments like space and cyberspace?

(Yuengert)

Well, Stephanie, I think some of the things that Tom talked about and the fact that the AEF would be a standing task force within each combatant command . . . so it would be regionally aligned; it would have the service component commands that are important to that combatant command. So, in (United States Indo-Pacific Command or) INDOPACOM, the (US) Navy staff of that component command is very robust because it’s mostly a Navy headquarters. So they would have those capabilities within the service component command. And the fact that the service components, the people who own the forces, have such a robust staff—they would be able to do, as Tom said, the detailed planning that came into any concepts for an operation that the command council would come up with because those commanders and some key members of their staff would be part of that command council in the first place. And so I think that the standing nature of the AEFs coupled with the opportunity to exercise it during Joint concept development, Joint war games, and experiments would help to solidify that concept of the AEF and the teamwork that those combatant commands and those staffs would have to do.

One of the things that is highlighted in the paper is that currently, there is no Joint headquarters that is, in the concept development, there to test out Joint concepts very well. And you take a service headquarters or you throw together a Joint headquarters that doesn’t usually work together to test those concepts, and now you would have a Joint headquarters that was used to working together that could come together. There’s no ad hoc nature to it, which is one of the major problems with the current concept. I think that as we mature and we have space forces that have their own component commands for combatant commands and a cyber force that has some plug into a combatant command staff, we’ll have the expertise in those domains to do the same kind of thing that we’re used to doing in the more traditional domains.

(Bruscino)

Yeah. To build on that, as it stands right now, when it comes to sort of the warfighting concepts, we try to figure out great-power competition, large-scale combat operations, what those would look like. The individual services are all doing their own concept development, and those are not necessarily aligned as well with the Joint concept. So, being kind of forced together, what’s great about this idea is that there’s good reason for the services to develop their own concepts because the dilemmas in the land domain are different than what’s in the space domain and different than what’s in the air domain, what’s in the maritime domain. And they should develop their own concepts.

What this allows is for us to sort of sort and stack, have a better idea to go and exercise those things and work on those things and then say, “Hey, what really fits together and what doesn’t? What should a Joint concept look like that actually has real buy-in from the different services because they’ve worked on it together, and they see the importance of doing it together?”

There’s an additional aspect of this, too. To the degree that we test Joint concepts—and we do—to the degree we test them, it’s sort of they’re temporary, kind of ad hoc. Like we say, almost all of this is ad hoc. We describe our Joint warfighting as it’s mostly done with pickup teams. And hey, they’re really good pickup teams. It’s a whole bunch of all-stars. It’s a whole bunch of all-pros, really. Our services are great at what they do, and so we can get by with that. But we could do so much better, especially as competitors get better themselves. And we should always be trying to get better. We could do so much better if we’re working together in these headquarters.

And then part of this, too, is that not only do they exercise it together, they’re gonna be the ones who fight it together, if necessary. This is extremely powerful, just on the most basic sense of having already well-developed relationships, standard operating procedures. We allow for room in this; it’s not a very rigid concept that we’ve developed in here. We allow for a lot of room for them to develop their own best practices. And we would imagine those would be tailored to the particular domains. There’s gonna be a different dilemma in INDOPACOM than there is from (United States Central Command or) CENTCOM, than there is for (United States European Command or) EUCOM. That was our sort of major focus on this, and we think it’s very important because it has all kinds of implications that would resonate throughout the force: warfighting and, then, for force development along the way, too.

So we think it’s a pretty important one, and we would love if everything we said was adopted. But if we just get people talking about this, about these issues, we’ll be pretty happy. And we give some people some different ammunition to bring to the discussions that are out there because we’re not the first people to think of this stuff. But we were sort of stunned about how many inefficiencies we have in our current system, how much disorganization we’ve had, how much we’ve had to kind of patch these things together and do things on the fly. We think it’s vitally important that, as we look to the future, we get better about how we go about Joint warfighting.

And bottom line on this, too, you know: We’re not alone in that issue. We did get guidance signed by all the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying we need to look at dilemmas of Joint warfighting, and that really was a lot of the motivation for doing this, too. So this is our modest contribution to a very, very big problem, and we hope it has some effect.

Host

Definitely a lot of great food for thought here today. And I just want to thank you both very much for your time. This was very insightful.

(Bruscino)

Thank you.

(Yuengert)

Thanks.

Host

If you’d like to learn more about the American Expeditionary Force, visit press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/953.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

About the Contributors

Colonel Eric Bissonette is a US Air Force pilot assigned to United States Forces Korea as the deputy commander’s executive officer. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the US Air Force Academy and master’s degrees from the Touro University Worldwide, the US Air Force Air Command and Staff College, and the US Army War College.

Dr. Thomas Bruscino is an associate professor of history in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. He holds a PhD in military history from Ohio University. He is the author of A Nation Forged in War: How World War II Taught Americans to Get Along (University of Tennessee Press, 2010), Out of Bounds: Transnational Sanctuary in Irregular Warfare (CSI Press, 2006), and numerous book chapters and articles on operational warfare.

Colonel Kelvin Mote, a US Army information operations officer assigned to United States Forces Korea, holds a master’s degree in national security from the University of Maryland Global Campus, a master’s degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College, and a doctorate in organizational leadership from Creighton University.

Commander Matthew B. Powell is a US Navy submariner who currently serves as the commanding officer of the PCU Iowa. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in engineering management from Old Dominion University, and a master’s degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College.

Colonel Marc J. Sanborn is a US Army engineer officer assigned to the Office of Security Cooperation – Iraq at the US consulate in Erbil, Kurdistan Region of Iraq. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the United States Military Academy, a master’s degree in engineering management from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a master’s degree in civil engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a doctor of philosophy in structural engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a distinguished graduate of the US Army War College and holds a master’s degree in strategic studies.

Colonel James “Jimmy” Watts (US Army) is a graduate of the US Army War College and the Carlisle Scholars Program. He is board-certified in cardiovascular medicine and is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and currently serves as the consultant to the surgeon general for cardiovascular medicine.

Professor Louis G. “Lou” Yuengert (colonel, US Army retired) is an associate professor of practice in the Department of Command, Leadership, and Management at the US Army War College, where he specializes in defense management and talent management. He holds a master’s degree in operations research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College.

This podcast argues the more trauma endured by a population, the more civil war the country will experience in the future. Drawing on mental health, trauma, and neurobiological research, it builds a new theory of civil war that fills existing gaps in current civil-war literature, and then tests the theory via statistical analysis of a large sample size (large-n statistical analysis). The conclusions will help policymakers and US military leadership better understand civil wars and the limits of American power to end them.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/7/

Episode Transcript: “Linking Trauma to the Prevalence of Civil War”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in 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 Dr. Erik W. Goepner, author of “Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War,” which appeared in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Goepner has a PhD in public policy from George Mason University. A retired US Air Force colonel, he currently works as a civil servant in the federal government.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Erik. Thank you for being here.

(Erik W. Goepner)

Hi, Stephanie. It’s nice to be with you.

Host

Let’s get started. Your article argues the more trauma endured by a population, the more civil war the country will experience in the future. Lay the groundwork for us, please.

(Goepner)

Sure. The trauma theory kind of has its origins in the experiences and observations of my Provincial Reconstruction Team. We were in southern Afghanistan in 2010—height of the surge, give or take—and the president had said words to the effect of “You have 18 months to get it done.” So we were busy iterating. If we found something that worked, we would do as much of it as we could—kind of channel your Will Ferrell, “more cowbell” here. And if we were doing things that weren’t achieving objectives, we tried to, as dispassionately and quickly as we could, jettison them and just stop doing them.

Not long into our deployment, we started to see different evidence that suggested trauma was having a huge, negative impact in Afghanistan and a significant impact on our ability to kind of achieve an enduring peace in the country. We’re in a culture—particularly, with the Pashtuns—where emotional control is like a really big deal. We’d go to shūrās, which are Afghan meetings where they have 20, 30, 40 village elders and government officials, and we’d see men going into hysterics. We would see examples of towns that were firmly under the control of insurgents rise up very briefly; push the insurgents out; and then, just as soon, kind of kowtow and capitulate to the insurgents again. But, perhaps most importantly, we’d see violence used frequently in everyday settings. You know, think of the idea of normalizing the use of violence in your everyday life.

So we’d be with a district chief. The district chief would get angry at another official in the public setting, would just smack the official in the head—like, really hard. You’d have middle-aged, field-grade officers in the Afghan police or the Afghan army. And when they would have a dispute, instead of debating it or just maybe flipping each other the bird, they would actually get into a full-blown brawl, you know, right there at the police headquarters.

And so that normalization of violence is kind of what got me thinking about this. Then, when I got back from my deployment, I had a chance to do some more focused research. And it turns out that the civil-war literature tends to ignore the threshold at which citizens will use deadly force against each other. And in the case of civil war, when they would use deadly force against their own government, it kind of gets either ignored or it gets treated as a constant, as if it doesn’t change from culture to culture or time versus other times. And despite any headlines that we’re reading, it’s really rare for one human being to take the life of another human being. The military’s done really interesting studies that show that even in combat, warfighters will go to fairly great extents at times to not kill in combat. So they’ll try to make it look like they’re participating, but they’ll take lengths to not actually discharge their weapon or discharge it in the direction of the enemy, hoping not to kill.

So if you’re a wannabe rebel leader, you’ve got a lot of problems, obviously. One of the big problems is you need recruits for your rebel movement. But, more importantly, you need recruits who are willing to kill their fellow human beings. You know, very specifically, you need people who are willing to attack their own government, to include their government security force. And that’s not an easy task. So that’s kind of the background of the “hurt people hurt people” trauma theory of civil war.

Host

You talk about three ways trauma might increase the prevalence of civil war. I’d love to hear more about this.

(Goepner)

So first and most importantly is how trauma itself may be a cause of civil war. And so the theory in a nutshell is that people become more violent as they’re exposed to severe and repeated traumatic stressors. And if listeners are wondering what a traumatic stressor is, the most notable or most severe would be things like torture or being assaulted with a weapon. Those have really profound, negative impacts on people.

So as people are exposed to repeated and severe traumatic stressors, it lowers the threshold at which they’ll use deadly force or which they use violence to kind of achieve their goals or to resolve their problems. And the pathway from the person to the trauma to the increased use of violence will typically go along three different dimensions. One, if you’re heavily traumatized, the likelihood that you’re gonna be a substance abuser increases, the likelihood that you will meet the criteria for one or more mental illnesses increases, and the likelihood that you will suffer from something called “diminished impulse control” also increases.

And diminished impulse control: easy example, you drive into work, you get cut off. Somebody with good impulse control doesn’t do anything, or they mutter under their breath. Somebody with diminished impulse control does something really unwise like chases after the person or actually sort of hits their car in response type of thing. And I’d like to share a cool example if I may.

Host

Absolutely. Please.

(Goepner)

Alright. So for Doctor Strangelove (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) fans, instead of the war room, think of the Afghan Operations Center. It’s the summer of 2010, and you have two Afghan colonels in a heated debate. One is the chief of police for the province, who all the Americans love. And the other is the chief of the (National Directorate of Security or) NDS, which is kind of like legacy KGB. So two Afghan colonels, both in their middle age, having a heated debate. And the colonel that we all loved—it’s worth pointing out that we also assessed that he had a substance abuse problem. He had spent all of his life in a war zone either receiving or meting out war-related trauma. And so he was like self-medicating was our interpretation. But we loved him. He was bold, daring, brave, and low on the corruption scale.

So unfortunately, in this exchange, he, the colonel that we loved, is kind of getting skewered by the other colonel. And so, there in the middle of the Afghan Operations Center, the one that we all cared for, Colonel Jelani, kind of got to the end of his rope. And so they’re in front of his subordinates. He removes his firearm, ostensibly because he’s gonna kill the other colonel. And then, thankfully, there was a American officer that was there, and he really bravely stepped in between the two of them. The officer didn’t speak much Pashto. Colonel Jelani didn’t speak much English. But the American was able to use kind of gentle hand gestures and kept repeating, “It’s OK, Colonel Jelani. It’s OK.” And Colonel Jelani eventually holstered his weapon. And so that kind of became like my North Star for the research in terms of what trauma can do to somebody and how it normalizes violence in their life for a variety of reasons.

The other two pathways: The traditional arguments for civil war have to do with grievance—like “I’m so angry with my government. I’m gonna take up arms against them.” And then, the other main theory is feasibility: “I’m gonna rebel against my government because I have the ability or the opportunity to do that.” And so trauma helps make those theories more robust. For instance, if somebody’s been heavily traumatized, it’s obvious that they have grievances. And those grievances typically can be focused at a particular person or a particular group. So that’s one argument. And then the second argument regarding feasibility or the opportunity for war is that when you think about a traumatized state like Afghanistan, and you think about how they recruit their security forces, they’re largely pulling from a really traumatized population. So the likelihood of getting an incompetent security force member’s pretty high. And so that makes civil war more feasible because it’s easier for a rebel force to fight against an incompetent security force than a competent one.

Host

Thank you. How does your paper test the trauma theory of civil war?

(Goepner)

So we’re gonna kind of geek out a little bit. I spent 23 years in the world’s greatest air force, so I may be a little geek, but I also have a little cool stuff in the history as well.

Host

I love it.

(Goepner)

First, I developed a trauma index, and I used four categories of variables. The first category relates to the most pernicious form of trauma, which is torture. The second category measured the amount of rape. Third category was war-related—and, here, we’re looking at like the length of wars; the breadth of wars across the country; and then, the intensity of those wars. And the fourth category of variables was more general forms of trauma, to include things like natural disasters.

And so I looked at the universe of countries from 1990 to 2014 and basically assessed scores that could have been as low as zero for essentially no trauma to as high as 100 for, essentially, “you couldn’t have any worse or more trauma in your country if you tried” type of thing. Not hard to imagine, but countries like Finland and Iceland: very low trauma scores. For that 25-year period, their score averaged under five. And then you compare that to the average country, which was about 27, and then you compare that with trauma states like Sudan, Somalia, and Afghanistan, who were all up in the 70s.

And so one of the interesting things that the research showed is that when you have a low amount of trauma, the risk of civil war is negligible. It’s almost nonexistent. And that low probability of civil war stays until it dramatically increases as a trauma score approaches around 50. At that point, a country has about a one in 10 chance that year of going into civil war. And then just bumping it up from the 50s into the 60s, that one in 10 chance becomes one in five. And so it’s kind of a parabolic curve where low to moderate amounts of trauma do not seem to be associated with much civil war, but, once that trauma intensifies, you really see a rapid increase in the probability of civil war.

Stephanie, I’m gonna hit one more thing there, if that’s OK, on the testing.

Host

Yes. Please, absolutely.

(Goepner)

And so, in the actual testing, developed the index; kind of did correlations to show the different numbers and how they related to probability of civil war; and then, really kind of geeked out and did various statistical analysis. And I’m not gonna spend long on this because it doesn’t interest me much, and I can’t imagine it interests your listeners too, too much either. But the first analysis I used was logistic regression with something called “lagged variables.” And, basically, that’s just kind of the industry standard. So if you’re a civil-war researcher, you tend to use logistic regression with lagged variables. And so that’s kind of why I used those.

But if you’re looking at what the best or optimal statistical technique is, it would be something called “instrumental variables,” which I also used. And, basically, that helps get rid of the circular argument. It’s obvious, noncontroversial to say that civil war causes a lot of trauma, and, here, I am arguing that trauma causes a lot of civil war. And so it gets very hard to disentangle that relationship, and instrumental variables, in a sense, helps you bypass that because the variable you use is only related to trauma. You can demonstrate that it has no relationship to civil war, and that’s the way to kind of break the circular argument.

Host

Got it. So in that same vein, talk to me about conclusions. What conclusions can we draw from this study?

(Goepner)

So five conclusions. The number one, which would be “foot stomp, foot stomp, footstomp,” is that the United States should not intervene in the civil wars of trauma states because countries with high rates of trauma—and Afghanistan would be the poster child—are going to likely experience more civil war because of those high trauma rates because the trauma has institutionalized or normalized the use of violence in daily life. And that use of violence is a critical threshold for rebel leaders when they seek to recruit their rebels. So those countries are susceptible to increased future civil war because that normalization of violence is kind of at the ready and is accessible to rebel leaders.

The second one is “OK, if, failing number one, political leaders decide we still need to go in, then let’s estimate and plan for the negative effects of trauma on the host country before we intervene.” We do great planning as military warfighters, and so let’s incorporate that mental health angle, not in a soft kind of helping-agency perspective, but thinking about it from a security perspective. And that’s the third recommendation is that, yes, we all respect and have high empathy for mental illness trauma. But, in this context, we can treat trauma as a security concern because it does appear that trauma will have a certain impact or a certain effect on our ability as we conduct the war to achieve US goals.

The fourth conclusion would be to deploy mental health capabilities to the trauma states if we do go there. And this would be directed towards kind of the key government or security force leaders to try and minimize or mitigate the negative consequences of trauma on them. Because when you think of like an Afghanistan or Iraq, we were there in large part to build up those indigenous forces and capabilities, and it’s going to be very difficult to get them to a certain level of performance absent some type of mental health intervention.

And then the fifth is more predictive, and it’s the idea of including the trauma index in predictive models. So organizations like the CIA, (Department of Defense or) DoD, Department of State have a history of using predictive models to anticipate flash points across the globe. And my argument in the paper is that if we added the trauma index, that would help to predict potential hot spots—specifically with civil conflict, civil war—that the United States might find itself in in the future.

Host

I’m sorry—we’re almost out of time here. Can you give us your final thoughts on this topic?

(Goepner)

So two final thoughts. The first one is going back to recommendation one: The United States should not intervene in the civil wars of high-trauma states. It’s not a guaranteed losing proposition, but it’s really difficult, and there’s only so much that US efforts can achieve when you’re dealing with a population with high trauma rates, and the likelihood that they’re gonna slip back into future civil war is much higher than if they were a low-trauma state. And then the second and final thought is that we need to continue maximizing the use of America’s combat experience. We have 20-plus years of warfighting in different theaters, which has given us a lot of experience. When you think about warfighting, there’s a huge difference between the theory of warfighting. There’s a huge difference even in doing exercises related to warfighting as compared to the actual warfighting. So to the extent that we can get increasing numbers of America’s war veterans to share their stories, and, then, potentially, to combine those operational experiences with additional research and publish, I think America will benefit.

Host

Thank you for your time today. This was a really tough topic, but it was an absolute pleasure talking with you.

(Goepner)

Thanks so much, Stephanie. I appreciate it.

Host

If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more about the connection between trauma and civil war, check out the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

The skill and capacity of Army cyber forces have grown in the decade since their creation. This podcast focuses on needed structural changes to the Army’s portion of the Cyber Mission Forces that will enable their continued growth and maturity since the Army’s past organizational and structural decisions impose challenges impacting current and future efficiency and effectiveness. This assessment of the current situation highlights the areas military leadership must address to allow the Army’s cyber forces to continue evolving to meet the needs of multi-domain operations.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/8/

Episode Transcript: “Assessing the Army’s Cyber Force Structure”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

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

Decisive Point welcomes from the United States Military Academy Major John Fernandes, Lieutenant Colonel Todd Arnold, and Dr. Jan Kallberg, who coauthored “Assessing the Army’s Cyber Force Structure” with Major Nicholas Starck, Captain Richard Schmel, and Major Charles Suslowics. The article was published in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters.

Welcome to Decisive Point. Your recent Parameters article discusses assessing structural divides in the Army cyberspace force for better support operations. Lay the groundwork for us here and give us some background, please.

(John C. Fernandes)

Hi, this is John. I guess I’ll get started. So the Cyber branch and the cyber units have been around for about 10 years now. And so, we thought it would be a good time to look at some of the decisions we made initially and see if the decisions were the right ones and at what challenges may have arisen and how we might need to change things as we move forward to make sure that we’re the most effective force that we could be. So that’s the basis of the article.

(Todd Arnold)

This is Todd. And to add onto what John was saying, really a good time to do that reassessment now because the entire Cyber Mission Force and the Army’s teams have all been operating for the last three years as fully mission capable. So all the teams across all of the different services are now built and working and then doing their missions fully for a few years. And it’s a good point to actually go back and reassess them with “OK, did all those decisions we were making when we were rapidly building the force—do they still make sense?”

Host

Can you briefly explain the offense/defense split and your considerations for mitigation?

(Arnold)

Yeah. I’ll start with a little bit on why there’s a split. So when we were initially building up the Cyber branch, it was built kind of piecemeal. Some of the offensive teams started getting built first. And the two previous branches that had been doing a little bit in each of the offensive and defensive work started building units separately. The Army tasked them to build those separately. And nobody was really doing it fully. (Military Intelligence or) MI was doing a little bit in the offensive side, and Signal Corps was doing a little bit in the defensive side. And the Army said, like, “Hey, start building these things up.” And so those two separate branches started building the offensive and defensive teams. And then we formed a branch because we were looking at how the other services were doing it, and we felt like building a branch was really going to get it to the point where we are moving forward, we have a full career path for people dedicated in this space because it’s not good to do it piecemeal. But, at the same time, we already had units established that were building up these teams, and so we just kept those units, one brigade for offense and one for defense, and they just kept rolling with building the teams. And so that’s how it’s played out for the last 10 years.

(Jan E. Kallberg)

Jan going to join in here, more from a broader perspective. It’s really tricky to get us doing defensive cyber operations and being siloed in that environment without, really, help. Of course, where is the threat intelligence coming from? If you always get your threat intelligence from how you get hit, it’s like a tank that doesn’t know really what’s coming except what’s already in the air. That’s not good. Of course, then, we just wait for the terminal effect.

We’re also seeing that how you bridge this overlaps to avoid that you get one-eyed or—worst-case scenario—blind and how you sort of, say, have a proper knowledge and talent management through the force.

Host

John, did you have anything to add to this one?

(Fernandes)

Yeah. So I can start talking a little bit about what some of the challenges that then arose from the split. So now that we have this legacy division, we started to form almost silos within offense and defense where people who only saw one side or only saw the other or maybe didn’t understand how the other side works. And there’s benefit in being specialized, but we also noticed that there’s some challenges that come with that: not understanding necessarily what’s feasible, what’s realistic, what the costs are for doing things. And then just, sometimes, the . . . the normal human tendency to see inequity of one side looked like it’s more interesting mission or getting better funding or things like that. We thought that those are some of the challenges we’ve seen over the last couple years with this division.

Host

Something else you mentioned: divided chains of command—another structural challenge. What are your suggestions for resolving this one?

(Arnold)

As part of that buildup, the Army deliberately said, “These organizations are gonna run and do the operations, and these organizations are gonna be in charge of just building up and creating and training up the teams.” That was good for the buildup. But now, that’s caused that rift that you mentioned that there’s a split between the people that, like, just maintain administrative and training versus the people that are doing actual operations. And that kind of really takes away from the whole point of command and the way the Army sees command. And so at whatever level the Army decides to do it at, I think we need to reassess that split. And what we should really start doing is like “OK, who is in charge of, say, a CPT or Cyber Protection Team? Who should be in charge of that? What level of command should that be?” And start actually putting those people in charge of the command, giving them a little bit of a staff to take care of some of their administrative things, and actually planning, like, this is how the Army does things. And making the officers and leaders in charge of some of those traditional Army tasks, but within the Cyber branch.

(Kallberg)

So, yes—Jan here. Now, of course, we . . . we’re talking to the war college. We can’t leave the discussion without the strategic outlook. So we’re also thinking, you know, as things may be more reactive—how we see things, the (observe-orient-decide-act or) OODA loops get shorter, and we have a more mission command driven with intent out there going. And also that we maybe see it’s better to have more cohesion to be able to steer the organization quicker.

(Fernandes)

So, ultimately, I don’t know if there’s a simple solution for this one because a lot of the things we’re talking about are normal Army principles that we should be applying. We just think that we need to make sure we’re doing it very deliberately now, now that we’ve identified it as a challenge. Making sure we’re keeping unit integrity to the greatest extent possible, that we’re clearly just delineating who has what roles as we talk support relationships, command relationships, and that we are . . . we’re looking at how we deconflict as we have competing requirements. Are we doing deconfliction by time? Are we doing a deconfliction by priority? And making sure that those are very clearly understood because as the branch has grown, we can’t solve those with only five people in a room. We have to have a little bit clearer processes moving forward.

(Kallberg)

Also, as Colonel Arnold and Major Fernandes hinted—Arnold spelled it out more—I mean, we got data. I mean, we’ve been running this machinery now for 10 years. Why not put these data to use and hone it and make it better?

Host

So, going forward—give us your recommendations.

(Arnold)

I think it’s a good time to sit back and have the Cyber branch and leadership reassess some of those previous decisions and start looking at “OK, we made those decisions up-front. Do they still make sense?” And having deliberate, well-thought-out discussions on “Where should we go from here?” For instance, do we start integrating more of the command . . . mission command stuff that the Army traditionally does into the force and how it’s supposed to be done. What is that level of specificity or focus that individuals need in their mission? Should we have people that are a little bit more general? How many people need to be more focused on, like, offensive or defensive? Or what is that right balance between specialization and generality? So we need to make some deliberate decisions here in order to keep moving things forward. Ten years of building up all these forces. It was a very large task, and, now that we’ve got them built up, we need to stop, look at it again, and reassess like “OK, we’ve been operating for a little bit. We have the data. How do we move forward and continue making progress?”

(Kallberg)

I think it’s also important to think about retention. When things happens in the commercial world, in the corporate world, it only takes one big verdict . . . multimillion-dollar verdict; everybody start to hiring defensive guys. So we also have these outer forces that we can move talent within the organization and be—to use a really 2020 word, agile—and match up the incoming threats.

(Fernandes)

And I think this is an important point in time to really be thinking about this because the Cyber branch is growing as we incorporate electronic warfare. And the 915th Cyber Warfare Battalion (915th Cyberspace Warfare Battalion), stood up not that long, is growing. So taking the lessons we learned with the 780th (780th Military Intelligence Brigade [Cyber]) and the (Army) Cyber Protection Brigade and making sure that we’re incorporating those lessons as we continue to grow so that we’re growing in the most effective way is important. This idea of “Do we specialize or do we generalize?” As we start talking about another area, electronic warfare becomes more important because we can’t specialize in three things. We have to pick one maybe, or we have to decide that some people are gonna be generalists. And as we expand the branch, we need to really be thinking about these things to make sure that we don’t have to do another look in another 10 years because we missed the mark on something.

(Kallberg)

And also, if we really specialize, we also are gonna end up with a problem that we can’t ramp up the organization. Of course, people are so specialized that there is no overlap. Remember 1942, when the Army has had to go big. And so to increase this organization, we have to watch, as Major Fernandes says, that balance.

Host

I hate that we only had this short time because, like you said, Major Fernandes, very timely topic. And your article really does give a lot more details about it. This is a great overview, and I would encourage our listeners—if this is interesting to you at all, check out the article. Thank you so much for your time and for your insight. This was a real treat.

(Kallberg)

Appreciate it. Thank you.

(Arnold)

Thank you very much.

(Fernandes)

Thank you very much.

Host

If you’d like to learn more about the Army’s cyber force structure and the authors’ suggestions for a path forward, you can find the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

The special operations community could best address the perceived ethical crisis it faces by professionalizing as an institution. While earlier assessments have attributed special operations forces’ ethical issues to a focus on mission accomplishment that led to a broken force generation process and a high operations tempo, such diagnoses obscure a more comprehensive solution. Using sociologist Andrew Abbott’s work on professions as a framework, this article explores the benefits of building the kinds of institutions that can claim a jurisdiction, develop and certify expert knowledge, and establish and apply a code of ethics that addresses special operations unique concerns so that it builds trust and better serves the American people.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/10/

Episode Transcript: “Professionalizing Special Operations Forces”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

(Prerecorded Decisive Point intro) Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests 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 Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff, author of “Professionalizing Special Operations Forces,” which appeared in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Pfaff is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and is senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from Georgetown University.

Alright. It’s always nice to chat with you, Tony. Thank you for making time for this today.

(C. Anthony Pfaff)

My pleasure. Great to be back.

Host

Let’s cut to the chase. Your article opens with this sentence: “Special operations forces (SOF) appear to be experiencing an ethical crisis.” Diagnose the problem for us, please.

(Pfaff)

Yeah. This article got its start when I was asked by, actually, a couple of members of the special operations community to weigh in on what they were characterizing as a crisis. And if you recall, in 2020, they were in response to a number of very high-profile ethical failures. Congress, on two occasions, asked special operations to do an ethics review.

I’m not going to be able to tell you the extent of the crisis or what its current status is now. But I will tell you, if Congress—who’s, in some way, your client—is asking for reviews, you have a problem. It’s a professional problem because it’s saying your client—in this case, Congress—doesn’t trust you. At least a little bit. And while it’s never all or nothing, that’s just still not a good thing. So in response, in terms of the diagnosis, you know, special operations did do a comprehensive review, which was a good start. It left much of the blame to external factors like a high (operations tempo or) optempo that was leading to breakdowns in leadership.

I think it mentioned also training and so on that set conditions for ethical failure. It also pointed out interestingly that . . . and some of the services from there was an emphasis on physical fitness and, I think, specialized skills and, among other things, led to a sense of entitlement among some of the operators that also contributed to ethical failures, which I think is also something important to note.

Another part of the problem might be—they didn’t connect the dots all the way, but—special operators start off in another service. And it’s that service that trains them to be special operators. Then they move off into the special operations community and (United States) Special Operations Command, and they may or may not continue to get professionalized in their original service. Special operations just doesn’t have that. I think they’ve got some of that infrastructure, but they don’t have a professionalized career path where officers, (noncommissioned officers or) NCOs, and others get certified, you know, as they progress in the same way the other services do.

And so I thought that was kind of interesting, and it suggested to me that there’s really an opportunity here, which is what this article is really about.

The idea here is at some level, these problems arise, maybe for the reasons that you’ve said, but there’s a solution to them. If you do the kinds of things that will make special operations more of a profession than what I think it is now, where it is a group of very highly skilled people who basically worked for the other services or the Joint Staff. And so here, it’s important to understand the concept “profession” being applied here. In the vernacular, we use “professions” in a lot of different ways. It can mean I got paid. I’m not using it in that sense. It can mean I’m really good at what I’m doing.

Here I’m using the sense in which a profession involves an expertise that gives professionals this exercise over jurisdiction that gives professionals the autonomy to use that expertise.

For example, in the medical profession. In the medical professions, their jurisdiction is the health of the client. Their expertise is being able to see to the health of the client. And as a result, they have the autonomy over that jurisdiction to do things like prescribe drugs or conduct surgery that a nonprofessional would not be allowed to do. So this idea of having a jurisdiction around which you exercise your expertise, that you kind of own. You have the autonomy to decide what the right and wrong thing to do is within that jurisdiction. And another ingredient is a code of ethics that sort of governs how you go about doing that because, ultimately, it’s maintaining the trust of the client is critical for that profession’s status. If you do that, if you start building that and building the institutions that can . . . and not only just build that expertise, certify it and others as well as govern, then you’ve got a profession. And my argument would be you’ll see better results.

One reason I also thought this was kind of the right way to go was I also looked at what the special operations community themselves were saying about ethics. And that’s when I looked at things like the field guide (A Special Operations Force Ethics Field Guide: 13 Ethical Battle Drills for SOF Leaders). And that’s when I looked at some of the things that I found in blogs and quotes. And you do have a sense where seeing a profession the way I just described it would actually change the way the members would think about things. So, for instance, if you look in the field guide, they frame these dilemmas. The field guide is a set of 13 dilemmas that they navigate, and much of it is very good. Don’t get me wrong. However, from a professional perspective, framing these dilemmas as “right versus right” misses the point. So here’s a good example.

One of the dilemmas is your special operations (commanding officer or) CO sees a friend of his stealing thermal sights from the arms room, and they say he now has a dilemma. Turning in his friend will do him harm, and he owes him a special obligation because he saved his life at one point. On the other hand, he’s stealing thermal sights. And so what does he do?

This is actually not a dilemma. A pretty different professional perspective: Professions are stewards. They care for the resources that, in this case, for the military, the American people have given them. You turn in the person stealing thermal sights. As a steward of the profession, you turn them in. If that person had a shred of professional identity left, the thief would understand why.

Because as a professional, you’re obligated to do these things. So, poof, something that actually may have seemed like a real problem goes away. Now how that impacts behavior, I don’t know. But if you start conceiving yourself as a steward, you’re probably gonna make decisions, and that gets ingrained in your identity because you now have an educating, training, and certification process that builds all that into you. You’re more likely to get people who aren’t going to tolerate these kinds of activities, and that will have good effects down the lane. And the other thing that . . . the kind of thing that came out is this idea that special operators are asked to do something unethical. And then, there’s a confusion when they leave that environment.

Well, it shouldn’t be, right, because that goes against my point about the concept of professions. Professionals don’t do unethical things; they do things it would be unethical for nonprofessionals to do.

So reconceiving things that way, I think you’ve got a better way of conceiving of special operations in the community, I think you’ve got a better way of thinking about ethical problems. I’m not gonna call them “dilemmas” because a lot of them aren’t. And also, if we look at the jurisdiction piece, there’s an opportunity here. Where does special operations operate? They were designed to operate below the threshold of war. I will tell you that that is largely ungoverned space. For a lot of the things that we do, there’s not a lot of international law. And there’s not a lot of reciprocity. And, for the most part, there’s no one taking responsibility for that in the way a profession would in terms of creating and implementing a coherent way to respond to the problems within that jurisdiction. That’s not exactly an ethical thing. But, again, if you have that, all this other stuff builds around it, and you’ve got now the institutional resources to A: Do good things, but also resolve a lot of the problems you have now.

Host

So let’s take it a step further. What are your recommendations then for professionalizing special operations forces?

(Pfaff)

So that’s a great question. The first thing to stress is that this isn’t all or nothing. No one’s recommending that, overnight, we stand up special operations as an independent service now competing with the other services for resources, over things the other service is gonna do. Whatever happens, there’s going to have to be an evolution. And so, what I think this framework does is point in what direction that evolution should go.

So what else can they do? Well, A: Let’s start looking, at an institutional level, what it means to have a jurisdiction. What is that thing (special forces or) SF does? One of the challenges for them is gonna be is SF is a pretty diverse group. You’ve got your special operators on the kinetic side or you got your Green Berets, your (US Navy Sea, Air, and Land teams or) SEALs, et cetera; you’ve got civil affairs; you’ve got information operations; you’ve got a lot of things. All these things are invaluable, are things that, you know, have to be brought together to have a coherent effect in conflict below the threshold of war. So let’s own that jurisdiction first. I don’t think they do. I think they they’re a force provider for other people who do that. But let’s own that jurisdiction and start figuring out what that means. And that will mean changes in curriculum at Joint Special Operations University and other institutions. But start figuring out what it means to own that jurisdiction and build that over time.

And as you’re doing it, part of building that expertise is understanding how the exercise of your skill within that should be governed. So let’s solve one problem now, which is the concern raised by special operators who have written about this: that they’re being asked to do unethical things. Let’s actually start looking at what SF code of ethics would look like in that environment, under that jurisdiction and start developing that.

So now you’ve got a professional identity, and now you’ve got an ethic governing the behavior that they previously saw as unethical. So that’s gonna actually help with your transition to other domains.

So that’s a start. And then you build from there, and where you build—that’s gonna depend on what other folks are doing. One thing about this concept of professions is we’re drawing on Andrew Abbott. He sees professions as in competition. So there’s going to be a little bit of that. We also see that competition is kind of healthy. I would argue that that jurisdiction’s underserved. Sure, it’d be great if somebody kind of picked that up. Yes, there’ll be some competition as the different services sort out how they do things. But the point here isn’t this. To claim a jurisdiction doesn’t mean there’s not a role for other services any more than the fact Army claims Landpower is its jurisdiction doesn’t mean there’s not a role, even in high-intensity conflict, for special operations forces. It’s just who’s building the institutional capacity to operate in that environment and exercise expertise in service of the client. And, right now, I would say that’s not happening in that space.

And as things evolve, I would work to evolve them in the sense of strengthening the institution to be able to do the things that I discussed earlier regarding governing behavior in that space.

Host

You note that your recommendations also raise several concerns. Can you talk about those for me?

(Pfaff)

Sure! I’ve actually kind of previewed it. One way to interpret it—not the way I wanted to interpret it, necessarily—is do we make special operations a separate service? With all the things that brings on, that will really sharpen the competition that could lead to resources being diverted in ways that they really shouldn’t. It actually may be too big a lift right now for special operations forces to get from here to there. I’m not arguing that . . . like I said, none of this is all or nothing. This is more road map than an end state because no profession’s fully professionalized. No profession’s without its bad actors and ethical issues. In order to be fully professionalized, expertise has to continually evolve. The competition never ends. But I could see someone saying these recommendations entail dedication to resources and formal authorities and so on—which, it might in the future. It may in some ways. That’s not the starting point I think you need in order to get to where you want to go.

Host

Gotcha. Well, your conclusion kind of sums this up with a statement that I really liked, actually. “Divorced from the calling, individuals will have little reason to take the hard right and avoid the easy wrong and certainly little reason to hold themselves accountable for attaining the professional ideal.” Final thoughts?

(Pfaff)

So my point here is simply that having a professional identity, which only happens when you have a profession, is institutionally deep, makes ethical behavior less of an accident. And without it, you’ll see the kinds of things you’re seeing now where, without that professional identity, other factors, other reasons, other rationales for acting and acting badly make sense.

A strong professional identity would make those reasons and factors, et cetera, not make as much sense as well as create a community of people within that profession who see it the same way, making these bad outcomes less likely.

Host

Well said. Thank you. This was a good time!

(Pfaff)

Alrighty! Bye bye!

Host

Bye.

If you’d like to dig deeper into the concept of professionalizing special operations forces, you can find the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

The remarkable life of early-twentieth-century British adventurer Gertrude Bell has been well documented through her numerous travel books and biographies. Bell’s role as a grand strategist for the British government in the Middle East during World War I and the postwar period, however, is surprisingly understudied. This monograph offers insights into the role women play as grand strategists. It shows how Bell helped to devise Great Britain’s military strategy in the Middle East during World War I and its creation of the modern state of Iraq. Studying Bell as both a military strategist and a grand strategist offers important insights into how she helped to devise British military strategy in the Middle East. These insights include Britain’s efforts to work through secret societies and saboteurs to undermine the Ottoman Empire during the war as part of the Arab Bureau and the country’s attempts to stabilize the region after the war through the creation of the modern state of Iraq.

As importantly, studying Bell offers a glimpse into how this extraordinary woman was able to become one of the principal architects of British strategy and the exceptional set of skills and perspectives she brought to these efforts. Bell’s education, firsthand knowledge of the region, fascination with archaeology, and, above all, her ability to make and maintain relationships with key individuals were invaluable tools for shaping and promoting British efforts at retaining influence as a great power in the postwar era as well as Britain’s aims to secure key resources for the empire, including military bases and oil. Ultimately, Bell helped to shape British strategy in the region from 1915–26 because she was a woman, not in spite of it. She had access to both men and women within the local population, she used her social skills to connect and influence key actors in the region, and she brought decades of learning and firsthand experience traveling through the region and speaking with its people to inform and shape her grand strategy.

Additionally, Bell’s grand strategy offers important lessons for the challenges of creating peace and stability after war. Britain’s efforts at stability operations in Iraq following World War I demonstrate the inherent tensions in balancing an intervening country’s objectives and priorities with those the intervening country is trying to stabilize—especially, the challenges of creating transitional governments and including the population in stability operations. Bell’s unique legacy offers insights into the roles women have played and continue to play as influencers of grand strategy in male-dominated contexts and the importance of including diverse perspectives in strategic thinking.

Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/950/

Episode Transcript: The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

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

Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Heather Gregg, author of The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq, which was published by the US Army War College Press in July 2022. Gregg is a professor at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute. She’s the author of The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad and Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Welcome to back to Decisive Point, Heather.

(Heather S. Gregg)

Great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Host

Oh, absolutely. Let’s talk about your new monograph. Strategic Studies Institute Director Dr. Carol Evans notes in her foreword to your work that “The contributions women have made in devising both military strategy and grand strategy are surprisingly understudied and in need of greater attention.”

What a treat to read about Gertrude Bell. Please give our listeners an overview. Who was she?

(Gregg)

Yeah, so Gertrude Bell was this fascinating woman. She was born in Britain during the Victorian era in the late 1800s. She was born to a wealthy family. She was one of the first women to go to Oxford University. She was the first to get a first class in modern history, and she was fascinated with the Middle East. She started traveling there at a relatively young age. She traveled extensively. She learned the languages. She wrote travel books. She was even an avid hiker and a mountain climber, which is fascinating to me. But it was her language and her experience in the Middle East that got the attention of the British military. And she became very useful to helping devise both British military and grand strategy in the Middle East from World War I through the end of the war to the middle war period.

Host

When and where did she work, and how and why were her contributions important for British strategy?

(Gregg)

Yeah, so she became part of a small group known as the Arab Bureau that was stood up in 1915 in Cairo. And she worked with between seven to 14 people, very small group, including T. E. Lawrence that we know as “Lawrence of Arabia.” And she helped devise an unconventional warfare strategy, which was a strategy designed to frustrate and undermine Ottoman authority in the British Empire—I’m sorry, in the Middle East—and on behalf of the British Empire. So she was very instrumental in helping to devise that strategy and work with local leaders. And Lawrence of Arabia became famous because he went out and actually executed the strategy, but she was a part of a small group that formed that strategy. And then, after that, she went to what was known as Mesopotamia at the time—what we now know as Iraq—and she helped devise the military occupation of Iraq after the British government and the British military seized it at the end of World War I. And then, she actually helped create the modern state of Iraq, and that included putting the first king in power in Iraq, who she knew personally and who T. E. Lawrence had worked with. So she had a huge influence on both what happened during the war and then what happened after the war.

Host

So what were some of the techniques that Bell used to operationalize her strategy?

(Gregg)

Yeah, so she had a really interesting tool kit that I think shows that being a woman is actually an asset in certain circumstances. So, for example, she was very, very good at building friendships, and she built friendships that lasted a lifetime, both in the Middle East, but also back in Britain. And so one example of this is there was a bit of a fight that broke out between the Cairo office and the office in Delhi about who should control the Middle East. Should it be the government of India, the British government of . . . in India, or should it be Cairo, or should it be London? And Gertrude Bell happened to be lifelong friends with the viceroy at the time, who was who was in India. And she was dispatched to go to India and to smooth over this problem, which she did. So I think that’s a fascinating example of how this relationship she had had for a long time—she was able to work quiet diplomacy, friendship diplomacy, and resolve that problem.

She also built lifelong friendships with people in the region, and this included King Faisal (Faisal I), the first king of Iraq. She was his trusted advisor for several years, and he put her in charge of antiquities. And she helped create laws for Iraq that protected their antiquities from Western archaeologists coming in and taking antiquities. So her relationship building was just phenomenal and, I think, very important.

The second thing she did which I thought was really interesting was she was very good at throwing parties. And this might sound very superfluous, but it actually isn’t. She threw parties in a strategic way. She would put certain people in the room together so they could talk and meet one another. She was very instrumental in throwing parties for the wives of influential men. So she knew that wives had their husband’s ears, and so she was able to build relationships with those women, and then they, in turn, would help influence their husbands. So she did a lot of very interesting things, not in spite of being a woman, but because she was a woman. And I think that’s really interesting.

Host

How was Bell able to have such influence and hold the positions she held as a British woman during and after World War I?

(Gregg)

Yeah, I think this is a really interesting question, and it’s something that I still am not entirely sure I know the answer to. But I think that one of the things that’s very interesting is that it seemed to me that the British government saw her as useful, and that was the priority—that they knew that she had on-the-ground experience. She had language experience; she understood tribal dynamics and key leaders and their relationships to one another. And they saw this as useful.

So it’s surprising how little conversation there was about her being a woman and how much that her expertise was valued. I would also say that once again, her friendships were very important. So the fact that she knew T. E. Lawrence mattered. He was at the Arab Bureau first in Cairo. The first director of the Arab Bureau was actually not in the military. He was an academic and archaeologist, and they had also met on a dig, and so she knew him. So I think that was important too. But I think overall, this is a fascinating story about seeing someone as an expert first, and then seeing their gender second.

And so that’s very interesting and, I think, important contribution that her legacy has made.

Host

Let’s talk more about her legacy. What would you say Bell’s legacy is today? What can we learn from her?

(Gregg)

Yeah, I think there’s just a lot of things that are deeply relevant for today. I’ve already mentioned that, you know, building friendships is incredibly important. A second thing I would add to this is that building the right team matters for creating good strategy. So the Arab Bureau drew from academic experts, from civilians, from military. They would add experts and remove them, depending on the problem that they were looking at. But it wasn’t just the military having a conversation about what to do. They really built a team, a table that included a wide array of voices and perspectives. And I think that was legacy, and I think it’s really important.

Another thing that Bell leaves for us today is just how difficult it is to stabilize a country or region in the wake of war. So she had tremendous expertise. Her loyalties were to the British government and to the Crown, and her priorities were not to Iraq per se. But she was a British subject, and her loyalties were to Britain. I think she cared deeply about Iraq, but, still, the decisions that she made and the team made have lasting consequences and, frankly, many of those decisions, in retrospect, were probably not the right ones. And so I think it’s a very humbling story for me about someone with all this expertise and passion for the region, and things still didn’t go well when it came to stabilizing the country.

I would say also that she had a real emphasis on working through the local population to shape dynamics. And, again, Bell is a very confusing person to me because she cared deeply about the local population and cared deeply about the region. But then, she would she would pick and choose when she listened to the local population. So when they chose to put King Faisal on the throne, make him the leader of Iraq, he was not Iraqi. He had never been to Iraq. He was the leader that Bell knew and that the British knew, not the Iraqis. And so she didn’t listen, I think, as well as she should have in that instance.

But in other places, she did, and she cared deeply about the local population. So I think, yeah, for me, the big lasting takeaway is that stabilizing a state is very, very difficult to do in the wake of war.

Host

That’s fair. Do you have any final thoughts before we wrap up?

(Gregg)

Just I’d like to take a moment to thank the press for this opportunity to write about this fascinating woman. This was a (coronavirus disease or) COVID project for me. Gertrude Bell’s letters and documents are all digitized. They sit on the University of Newcastle’s (University of Newcastle upon Tyne’s) website in Britain. They’re excellent. They’re easy to navigate, and it was just a tremendous opportunity to learn about this woman and learn from her.

Thank you for this opportunity, Stephanie, to speak with you about Gertrude. And I hope that our listeners will download the manuscript and read it.

Host

I hope so too. I read it and really enjoyed it. So, well thank you so much for being here. This was a real pleasure.

(Gregg)

Thank you so much, Stephanie!

Host

If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to learn more about Gertrude Bell, download the monograph at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

Nuclear weapons have vastly raised the stakes and potential costs of crisis, making leadership and related human qualities of judgment and temperament crucial. This podcast analyzes one exceptionally dangerous US-Soviet confrontation, which barely averted war. Military and policy professionals will see how understanding the perspectives, incentives, and limitations of opponents is important in every conflict—and vital when facing crisis situations like nuclear war.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/11/

Episode Transcript: “The Cuban Missiles Crisis: Miscalculation, Nuclear Risks, and the Human Dimension”

Stephanie Crider (Host)

(Prerecorded Decisive Point intro) Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest 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 Dr. Arthur I. Cyr, author of “The Cuban Missile Crisis: Miscalculation, Nuclear Risks, and the Human Dimension,” which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Cyr has served as the vice president of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Chicago World Trade Center (World Trade Center Chicago). He taught at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Northwestern University, and Carthage College and is the author of After the Cold War: American Foreign Policy, Europe and Asia, published by New York University Press in 2000.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Art. I’m glad you’re here.

(Arthur I. Cyr)

Well, thank you for your kind invitation and for the opportunity to do the article for Parameters.

Host

Of course. We’re excited to have you.

Your article talks about the Cuban missile crisis. Give us some context, please. What makes this crisis distinct from others?

(Cyr)

It was particularly close—a particularly close call. It was particularly increasingly evident with the passage of years after the October 1962 confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union. It was geographically close. We and our allies had put lots of weapons, including nuclear missiles, in Turkey and Italy, close to the Soviet Union. But this was only 90 miles away from the US, and the communist threat 90 miles away was a major theme in the legendary presidential campaign between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Kennedy, in effect, outflanked Nixon on that.

Host

Will you please briefly walk us through the highlights of the Cuban missile crisis?

(Cyr)

Yes. Cuba had become an increasingly intense focus in American politics. At the very beginning of the Kennedy administration, uh, the administration stumbled badly with the disastrous and total failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion—CIA effort to land anti-Castro . . . heavily armed anti-Castro exiles at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba and launch an insurgency, which they confidently told the president would be successful.

That, it’s clear now, not only fed controversy in the US, but encouraged Nikita Khrushchev to place the missiles in Cuba following a very steady buildup of conventional forces there.

Host

Let’s talk about some of the lessons learned. Some of these weren’t even evident for years. Can we talk about that? What were they?

(Cyr)

Yes, indeed. Well, the problem of perception and, especially, misperception of the other side, always a great and perhaps principal challenge in international relations, which is why diplomas . . . diplomacy is such an important and, also, difficult occupation—Cuba, Castro, the US, Kennedy, Soviet Union—that they’re very reckless. Nikita Khrushchev had very different perceptions of what would be accepted and what was possible in international relations. The Americans, interestingly enough, were obsessed with not Cuba, but Berlin, where it was . . . anything that happened in the world, including in Laos and Vietnam—anywhere, literally, was related to Berlin. And, in fact, the evidence is clear that after the announcement of the missiles in Cuba, Khrushchev and associates hoped to use that dramatic change in the strategic landscape to apply new pressure and successfully force the Western allies out of West Berlin, which was another island, metaphorically, surrounded by East Berlin, East Germany, and the heavy and very powerful Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe.

I hope that’s clear. But it made the stakes very high. But the basic lesson is how easy it is to misperceive what the other side is planning to do. Nobody around Kennedy, with the single exception of CIA Director John McCone—not a government professional, not an intelligence pro, but a Republican businessman—was brought in to succeed Allen Dulles (who’d been discredited), the longtime head of the CIA and was basically a fall guy for the Kennedy brothers after the Bay of Pigs disaster. With the single and very courageous exception of McCone, the Americans simply persuaded themselves the Soviets would never try to do this.

Host

How are some of these lessons still relevant today?

(Cyr)

Well, we still have a nuclear-armed world. I don’t believe. But it’s important to keep in mind what I just said about misperception. I think partly because of the lesson of the Cuban missile crisis and partly because nuclear weapons since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings which finally brought a thankful end to World War II in the Pacific and the surrender of Japan—nuclear weapons are so horrific that they continue to operate as a deterrent on the other side. But, thanks in part to the Cuban missile crisis, we’re no longer so inclined to engage in wishful thinking, I believe, collectively and assume the other side is not going to act.

And communication: Kennedy and Khrushchev, to their great credit, established the so-called “hotline,” which was not a cell phone, it was not a landline, it wasn’t even initially a satellite phone, but it was a very complicated telecommunication system, an old-fashioned, big, clunky teletype machine. One was placed in Moscow, and one was placed in Washington. And the two sides were able to communicate much more readily than before. Today, telecom is no longer a problem, but miscommunicating, misunderstanding what the other side is going to do and wants to do is as dangerous as ever.

Roberta Wohlstetter (W-O-H-L-S-T-E-T-T-E-R) is the single, I think, most important analyst well worth reading. She did a classic book in 1962—Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision—analyzing and explaining the US intelligence failures regarding the Japanese surprise attack on our naval base on December 7th, 1941. She also did an article for the fine journal Foreign Affairs in 1965, applying the same lessons to the Cuban missile crisis. She’s extraordinarily durable.

Host

Thank you. Do you have any final thoughts for us before we part ways?

(Cyr)

We’re very much into quantitative analysis, and hard data and hard information is important in our military (quite rightly) from the start of warfare. But, certainly, the US Army and military services today give a tremendous amount of attention to data analysis. Our military is also quite valuable and fortunate in the sense that leadership is essential in academia, but also in government circles. I do believe—and I don’t think it’s just old age—I do believe that with the end of the Cold War, we’ve become more and more obsessed with what we like to do: analyze data. You see it in all walks of American life, including business. But leadership intuition, the human dimension, has never stopped being important, and it’s more important than ever before. (John F. Kennedy or) JFK looks better all the time. Whatever shortcomings may have been—and, obviously, his ineffectiveness early in his administration—he played a singular and decisive role in holding off nuclear war. The advisers he brought together when we first learned about the missiles in Cuba uniformly wanted to attack Cuba. We know now that there was some sense, especially on the part of Defense Secretary (Robert) McNamara, that the Soviets had some sort of short-range nuclear weapons in Cuba, but they had far more than Americans estimated at the time. And in a moment of insanity, Nikita Khrushchev had quite privately given one . . . his principal commander in Cuba the OK to use nuclear weapons without asking Moscow if the Americans invaded.

The Soviet submarine—the B-59 under command of Valentin Savitsky—harassed by US surface ships dropping hand grenades and signaling depth charges, which the Soviets assumed were lethal, trying to force them to the surface, finally did so. American aircraft were busy shooting tracer bullets around the submarine. Savitsky ordered the torpedo tubes open, including one that held an atomic torpedo. He was going to destroy the American flotilla around him. He was gonna destroy his own submarine and launch a nuclear war. Vasily Arkhipov—by good fortune, a Soviet fleet staff officer happened to be on the submarine, and he literally physically prevented Savitsky from carrying out that order. Commander William Morgan, the captain of the US destroyer USS Cory, as described in the article, went out of his way to make sure that by, uh, searchlight signaling, Ensign Gary Slaughter apologized to the Soviets, who were, by that time, standing out on the deck of the surface submarine. We apologized. Commander Morgan brilliantly kept the atmosphere down. He kept telling his men “Let’s keep those Russian bastards happy. Let’s reassure them as much as we can.” Those courageous and very sane gentlemen literally prevented a nuclear war.

Kennedy, at the top, crucial US and Soviet military people confronting one another deserve a lot of credit. It was far closer than anyone realized at the time, even though everyone knew it was a dangerous situation.

Host

I can’t even imagine. Thankful for clear heads, right? Calm demeanor.

(Cyr)

At that time, yes. More important than ever. And the more we go on after the Cold War without, thank God, a general war, I think the more easy it becomes—especially for intellectuals, I must say, but also some military people—to be very casual about the risks these kinds of weapons involved.

I meant one final point without getting too personal. I was working at a supermarket after school and on weekends in October of 1962 in Los Angeles, California, my hometown, which was a prime target area. President Kennedy, the evening of October 22nd, made a public speech readily available on YouTube—and people should watch and listen to it—announcing the not attack, but quarantine, blockade of Cuba. When I showed up for work the next morning, Alexander Supermarket in Hollywood, California, was totally jammed with people. It wasn’t a riot. As far as we could tell, people paid for things. But, for the first time in my life, I really not only saw, but smelled, fear—a very curious, primordial kind of animal sense that arises when people and other creatures are terrified. It was an exhausting experience. It was a tiring, sort of monotonous job. But for the first time at work, I was completely exhausted. At the end, one poor woman—I took her out to an elegant Lincoln Continental. She had two shopping carts full of nothing but bottled water and toilet paper. It was really a very sad as well as scary time. We should all keep it in mind because, thankfully, Americans have not had to experience anything like that since. Very, very close, and don’t believe anyone, especially some professor who uses game theory and abstract conceptualization to argue that it never really was that dangerous.

Host

Oh, my goodness. Thank you for sharing that story. I appreciate your time so much and your insight. It was such a pleasure talking with you, Art. Thank you.

(Cyr)

Well, thank you, ma’am. Anytime. I’m always available to Parameters and the US Army War College.

Host

If you’d like to learn more about leadership and the human dimension as viewed through the Cuban missile crisis, you’ll find the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3.

If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform.

Although the People’s Liberation Army is not yet a global expeditionary force on par with the US military, the former has nevertheless significantly expanded its ability to operate abroad. Through enhanced technological capabilities, robust relationships with foreign militaries, increased access to overseas military bases and dual-use facilities, and the implementation of major structural reforms, the People’s Liberation Army has built a more integrated joint force capable of conducting a wider and more complex array of missions. This volume advances the understanding of the People’s Liberation Army’s capability to conduct overseas missions by examining China’s military relations with Europe, Africa, and Latin America; the country’s military activities in the Indian Ocean, polar regions, and Pacific Island countries; and the emerging roles of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force and the Joint Logistic Support Force. This volume finds the People’s Liberation Army is engaged in a wide range of activities throughout the world, including port calls, joint exercises, seminars, and personnel exchanges. China sells weapons to some parts of the world and seeks to acquire military and dual-use technology from others. In addition, the People’s Liberation Army seeks to increase its capability to operate in parts of the world, such as the Indian Ocean, Pacific Island countries, and polar regions, where the organization has only had a minimal presence in the past

Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/951/

In this episode, Colonel George Shatzer focuses on North Korea and the Kim family regime. He reviews Becoming Kim Jong Un: A Former CIA Officer’s Insights into North Korea’s Enigmatic Young Dictator by Jung H. Pak and Rationality in the North Korean Regime: Understanding the Kims’ Strategy of Provocation by David W. Shin and shows how these books might help readers better understand North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-Un and the implications of his actions for US foreign and military policy in the region. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in East Asia.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/5/

Claims that China has taken “Russia’s side” in the Ukrainian War oversimplify Sino-Russian relations. Garcia and Modlin contend Sino-Russian relations are a narrow partnership centered on accelerating the emergence of a multipolar order to reduce American hegemony and illustrate this point by tracing the discursive and empirical foundations of the relationship using primary and secondary materials. Furthermore, they highlight how the war has created challenges and opportunities for China’s other strategic interests, some at the expense of the United States or Russia.

Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/4/

Episode Transcript

Stephanie Crider (Host)

Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.

The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guest 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 Dr. Zenel Garcia and Dr. Kevin D. Modlin, authors of “Sino-Russian Relations and the War in Ukraine,” which was featured in the autumn 2022 demi-issue of Parameters.

Garcia is an associate professor of security studies in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the US Army War College. His research focuses on the intersection of international relations theory, security, and geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific and Eurasia.

Modlin is an instructor at Western Kentucky University, where his research interests focus on security studies and international political economy. He holds a PhD in international relations from Florida International University and a master’s degree in economics from Western Kentucky University. He also served as a senior legislative aid for retired congressman Ron Lewis.

Welcome to Decisive Point, Zenel and Kevin. I’m really glad you’re here. “Sino-Russian Relations and the War in Ukraine”—please give us some background on this. Where does China weigh in so far?

(Zenel Garcia)

Thank you, Stephanie, for having us.

There’s a couple of things in the background that are important to know. Right now, China’s position towards the conflict in Ukraine, the war in Ukraine is complicated by the fact that it simultaneously wants to maintain a stable relation with the Russian Federation. It sees the Russian Federation as a key partner in a possible, emerging, multipolar order. And at the same time, it kind of needs Russia to continue to play a security guarantor role in Central Asia in particular.

This is very important for China because, historically, having negative relations with Russia would usually undermine stability along China’s frontiers. So, on that side, right, it has every incentive in the world for the moment to not place itself diametrically opposed to Russia. At the same time, China’s trying to portray an image of being a responsible stakeholder in the international system, being a champion of sovereignty and territorial integrity in the international system, and it’s basically avoiding having to call Russia’s actions an act of aggression. So you can see that this connect there kind of places China in a very difficult position.

Host

Thank you, Zenel. Kevin?

(Kevin D. Modlin)

As part of this emphasis on the multipolar order, what we’re seeing is that it includes elements of agreement and disagreement throughout all that. That’s not uncommon in any state relation dynamic. But it seems that their articulation of multipolar orders emphasizes their autonomy in operations, that there’s not as much coordination behind that.

Host

Your article talks about Sino-Russian relations and promoting a multipolar order, as you just mentioned. Can you expand on that piece for us a bit?

(Garcia)

Sure. China and Russia have had a pretty rough relationship throughout the twentieth century. They went from the Russian Empire having been one of the countries that the Chinese government . . . the Republic of China before the (People’s Republic of China or) PRC was founded had identified the Russian Empire as one of the culprits of unequal treaties that had basically carved up Chinese territory during the nineteenth century. You fast forward and the Russian Revolution, you know, creates a (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or) USSR.

But the Republic of China then begins to try to negotiate some of these treaties over time. Most of this goes into the sidelines as China’s kind of falling apart through civil war. But once you have the PRC formed, one of the things that was supposed to be a very positive development for the PRC was that it had established a close relationship with Russia, the Soviet Union, and that this actually translated into one of the largest technological transfers of the twenty-first century from the Soviet Union to China. And it doesn’t even last a decade before the two countries end up in a Sino-Soviet split, fighting skirmishes along the borders. All of this results in thousands of incursions, according to Chinese sources, by Russian-backed militias into Chinese western frontiers. And so, they don’t have a very positive relationship.

Most of this gets settled, however, through a rapprochement of sort during the late 1980s. And by the 1990s, they were able to solve the majority of their territorial disputes. And it is here . . . that relatively positive process of settling the border, where you have the Chinese and the Russian leaders articulate that their aims are to play a role in the emergence of a new, multipolar order.

Why do they want this? Because from their perspective, the unipolar moment is inherently detrimental to their interests. In other words, the United States can act as it wishes without necessarily having to take their interest into account. And if you’re sitting in Beijing and Moscow, of course, this is not a positive development.

(Modlin)

Going forward from that point, these relations continue. So they’re articulating a similar sense of an order. In contesting that sense, they’ve built somewhat of a foundation. We see this through the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) and their interactions. So it has some substance to it at this point—that this is both the path they’re choosing and accepting with each other. But it involves this flexibility as well. So it’s a very different framework from us in the US when we think about relations and agreements—that they seem to usually embed some type of obligations to each other, and these are much more restrained. So there are agreements, but they usually entail less commitments to each other.

Host

What challenges and opportunities does the Russian-Ukrainian war pose for China?

(Garcia)

I think the biggest problem that China’s facing right now is that the Russians committed themselves to a conflict, and nobody expected them to perform this poorly.

My guess is that if the Russians have been successful in all of their original aims, even if the Chinese would have had some trepidations about the spillover second- and third-order effects across the world, at bare minimum, the Russians can at least be seen as having played a key role in demonstrating their capability as a capable pole in the international order. Their poor performance here kind of makes it difficult for the Chinese because they can’t see Russia unilaterally fail because, if it fails, then who else is left to play this other role in a multipolar order?

India could potentially fill that role. But the Chinese and Indians don’t necessarily get along. They have their own territorial disputes to deal with. The EU is certainly a big actor for the Chinese, mainly as a trade partner, but they’re dedicating a lot of resources to try to make sure that the EU is autonomous from American foreign policy because it . . . fundamentally, they don’t think it is, in a sense that the United States and its NATO allies, they don’t necessarily see everything eye to eye. But when push comes to shove, in this case of Ukraine, there’s a sense of greater unity.

And so if Russia’s not playing this role of a pole, then that’s a significant challenge. They cannot see Russia inherently lose everything in this conflict. That’s probably the number-one challenge that they have along with, of course, that this conflict is a very clear act of aggression. There’s no way that you could paint this in any other way. And the Chinese are refusing to make the argument that this is in fact an act of aggression. They’re basically calling on all sides to kind of play a constructive role in settling the disputes. We clearly know who started this conflict. And so that kind of undermines China’s long-standing position of being a champion of sovereignty and territorial integrity. That’s not a good look because this is something they’ve tried to promote. As far back as Mao (Zedong), this is one of the key foreign policy principles.

Host

Conclusions and implications. What do we need to know?

(Modlin)

Building from this point, I think it presents an opportunity for us to think about a framework of relations among states that have some interactions, but not the degree of interactions that we anticipate. And by “interactions,” I’m emphasizing the aspect of commitments. Some countries are willing to incur cost to help other countries in the system, and this is a mutually beneficial aspect to an agreement. But they also involve costs, and we have not seen that element in the relations between Russia and China, so they’re avoiding long-standing commitments to each other, especially when it entails security risks. So how does that look conceptually? I think it’s going to be a really important way to organize our thinking going forward in Russia-China relations. Because again, we come to the table making assumptions of relations that are a little more different than what we’re seeing here. So they could still articulate this idea and rally other followers in this concept. And from our experience watching the relations among NATO, we would say, “Oh, well, there’s commitments that are following here. And it’s possible that that could evolve at some point, but, as history suggests and as Zenel outlined, there is not a pattern of that at this point. Again, it’s coming back to these concepts that I think will help us organize in a slightly different way so that both we’re realistic in what’s going on between Russia and China and we’re not overly pessimistic or optimistic. So it’s both the lens of realism and constructivism.

(Garcia)

I wanted to add on to Kevin because I think that nuance is very important. We hope that the article brings that out. This notion that, well, what we’re hearing China say sounds very pro-Moscow. Therefore, they basically have already thrown their lot entirely with Moscow.

But when you actually begin to unpack “What is it that they’re doing,” it doesn’t look that way. Because the Chinese have other interests. In other words, they’re navigating a very different strategic environment than we are, right? Our expectation is “Look, this is a clear act of aggression. These are the things that we are trying to do to compel the Russians to change their behavior. So, get onboard or you’re clearly not onboard. Clearly, you’re on the opposite side.” And I’m not entirely sure that that kind of approach really works in an international order that is becoming more multipolar—meaning if you were still in the Cold War, where there’s two clear camps, so to speak, foreign policy can definitely look a bit more binary—very black and white I meant in regards. I’m not saying that’s also positive, but that’s what it looked like. It’s a little bit more different now, and you definitely see this play out in the global south.

And I think this is one of the important takeaways, in my view, for American policymakers, which is: Number one, we already have other kinds of interests and conflicts with China as it is. And so, we actually need to understand how the Chinese are viewing these particular problems, even if we don’t necessarily like how they respond to them. Because that helps us design policy towards China and elsewhere more effectively if we’re actually able to see the problem more clearly.

And so, if we can obviously see that there’s a lot of discursive agreement between Moscow and Beijing, but that, in practice, they’re both trying to avoid serious commitments to each other—especially security commitments, as Kevin was outlining—then that means that there’s always room there to negotiate. There’s always room there to kind of shape behavior. That’s one of the things that we concluded with.

We actually do have a relatively successful history of shaping Chinese behavior. The problem is that we assume that if they don’t entirely take up our preferred position on an issue automatically, that’s a loss. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If you’re able to kind of keep moving the needle forward over time, then I would call that a successful approach to shaping another country’s behavior, especially if they’re becoming more relevant in the international system. The fact that you still have that kind of influence to shape Chinese behavior means quite a lot. So it’s not necessarily doomsday, so to speak. There’s room there for us to improve things.

Host

Do you have any final thoughts or anything that you would like to address before we go?

(Modlin)

One additional aspect that I think is going to mold this dynamic between Russia and China, that’s just as consequential as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is the shifting economic outlook for China.

So this is going to have them less outwardly focused. They seem to be much more inward in consumption production and policy focus. And so, this is gonna make a big deal for China’s economic growth and how this projects influence. So we may have a situation where both China and Russia are articulating this idea of multipolarity in this decade, but maybe not in as strong a position relative to last decade. I think an outstanding question that we do not know the answer to is “Will that mean that they will coordinate more, or will they coordinate less in that type of a scenario?” This is, of course, speculative.

(Garcia)

And to kind of back Kevin on this, too, all foreign policy starts domestically. And if you’re looking at what’s going on in China right now, you have the 22nd party congress (20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party), which should be coming up in October. We know for a fact Xi Jinping’s gonna go up for a third term. But China is having significant economic issues that it needs to deal with. So it’s not entirely falling apart, as some people will try to assess. But China does have a lot of economic issues. It has a banking issue, it has a real estate issue, it has a regulatory problem that it’s slowly trying to mature. And so all of these are major policy things that are gonna cause significant domestic pain for the party. And they really haven’t encountered this level of discomfort economically since the late 1990s, when they were trying to reform the state-owned enterprise system that produced about 50 million unemployed people in China—all of this so they could accede to the (World Trade Organization or) WTO.

They’re definitely trying to grapple with a lot of domestic pain from the economic spillover of the conflict of their own policies domestically and, of course, the global supply chain issues that are affecting the global economy today. So all of that to say, “That actually allows us to have a greater role in shaping Chinese behavior.” Why? Because their corporations are not exposed to the Russian economy the same way.

The Sino-Russian trade is minimal. But their companies are extremely exposed to American and European markets, and they want that access. That’s what keeps the machine going, so to speak. That’s an area where you could definitely negotiate, and you could definitely try to establish a better working relationship. I highly doubt that we’re gonna skip into the sunset and kumbaya, so to speak. But you can’t ignore that China exists and that it is a great power. Therefore, you’re gonna have to figure out a working relationship with them in the twenty-first century.

(Modlin)

And we may be seeing elements of that right now with the Biden administration revisiting tariffs and sanctions on China. And we’re expecting discussions between Xi and Biden. This is in the context of China not committing as much to Russia as we had anticipated. So maybe there is this opening as a result of that arrangement. I don’t know if anyone would have expected that these trade negotiations may be accelerated as fast if there hadn’t been the context of the war in Ukraine.

Host

What a pleasure. Thank you, gentlemen, for your time and your insight. Also, thank you for your contribution to Parameters.

(Garcia)

Thank you, Stephanie.

(Modlin)

Thank you very much.

Host

Listeners, if you’d like to learn more about the war in Ukraine and China’s role or lack of it, check out the article. You can find it at press.armywarcollege.edu. Look for volume 52, issue three.

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