 I have to tell you from the point of view of being the head of New America the pleasure of being there rather than here and just listening and taking notes and tweeting madly for the last two days has been fabulous but I'm equally happy to be able to moderate this particular panel. Yesterday when I opened my opening remarks I said that the future of war is not just about how it will be fought it will be about whether it will be fought and why it will be fought that we need to get beyond weapons we need to be looking at these deeper forces. So I saw with some irony of course this panel is exactly how it will be fought how will the wards of the 21st century be fought and to talk about that we have Peter Singer who is a senior fellow and strategist at New America and author of many books wired for war being one he's got a novel coming out I'll do a little call Ghosts Fleet in the in the spring. One of the things New America likes to do is to mix up different kinds of media and we've had many events focusing on science fiction and how science fiction informs policy and gets us to think so we're now moving into fiction not science fiction well no it's would you call it a science fiction book? No. But we'll hit it. You'll hit it. Okay. Projection maybe potentially. All right and to then David Kilcullen in the center who's the chairman of K-Rus Global Systems more importantly for our purposes he is an Arizona State University senior fellow in the future of war project also the author of The Accidental Gorilla and the the Urban Gorilla title Out of the Mountains which can also see and to my immediate left Brad Allenby who is the Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics at Arizona State University I love the fact that you can be a professor of engineering and ethics and is an affiliated faculty member with the Center on the Future of War at ASU also and we will be talking about his books on Civilizational Conflict one just coming out so Peter I'm going to start with you one of the things we did before this conference was to ping our future of war network about what is it that we are overlooking today as most overlooking today as we think about the future of war tomorrow so I want to start with Peter to talk about some of the answers to that question sure great so what we did is ask the network of folks that we've built which is 20 plus you know everything from the day of Colcun's and the brads of the world so I can see out in the audience people with experience and Navy SEALs to lawyers to technologists and hitting off of some of the themes that we've heard from before we seem to consistently get wrong the future of war so we ask this network that we have built what is it that we get most wrong about the future of war and it launched off the partnership that we have with defense one on the future of war channel and just as an aside the article it went up yesterday and it went so viral that it was picked up on dig where it's actually outpacing the James Vanderbeek video remake of Power Rangers now that doesn't give you street cred amongst a certain crowd okay so the answers of what we get most wrong about the future of war from this diverse group of experts ranged from some of the things we've heard misuse of history a lack of flexibility in our strategy you spoke about the how adversaries are picking up lessons from what works and how they'll apply it in the future some of the others that were interesting to me as it links back to the discussion for example with general Odierno was proxies how the future of war might be lots of proxy warfare and that's something that frankly we're not that good at as opposed to say the Russians who've made very effective use of proxy warfare although that's back to the future because that was cold war that was that was the argument another was and which is what the theme of my next book on what ghostly to is about is a return to the unthinkable which is major state warfare what would happen if two major states i.e. the US and China really did go to war and it's something that we have different attitudes and talking openly about or not it you know actually there's a really fascinating quote from the chairman sorry the chief of naval operations who said in discussing the potential of a US China war quote if you talk about it openly you cross the line and unnecessarily antagonize by contrast if you read this is a quote from a Chinese two star in the regime's leading newspaper quote we must bear a third world war in mind when developing military forces and so again there's there's all of these different things that we won't say we want to have happened but we ought to be willing to discuss in the future of war and so that's what the survey group responded great thank you so Dave I want to ask you about something you wrote it wrote about recently where you describe a Wolsey and security environment and I looked at that and I thought I really don't know what that means so I wanted to but you were you know talking about that environment ending and then where we go so explain to us what a Wolsey and security environment it means why it's ending and what is coming so I should say that this this concept of a Wolsey and security environment I did actually run this by Jim Wolsey over dinner and he agreed that it's okay for me to use the term about 22 years ago about you know a mile up the road Jim Wolsey who was President Clinton's first CIA director in his confirmation hearing was asked about you know what what do you see as the as the future challenges of the 90s you know about to come up on the United States and he said talking about the Soviet Union we've slain a large dragon but now we find ourselves in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes and in many ways the dragon was easy to keep track of so for 20 years after that from 1993 until I would argue the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 we lived in what I'd characterize as a Wolsey and security environment where we didn't worry about the dragons we worried about the snakes so peacekeeping counter-insurgency counter-narcotics counter-terrorism counter-piracy or the counter the transnational in my world of IR that was transnational security as opposed to geopolitics right and there are still people out there who are describing these as non-traditional or new security threats they're not anymore the dragons are back and the reason that they're back is because of the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and in going into Iraq and I believe the technical strategic term is cocking it up so badly what we did was to telegraph to all potential adversaries not only the limits of our capability but exactly how to challenge us in those capabilities and so if you look at what the Russians are doing in Ukraine some of the anti-access scenario denial things that the Chinese are doing if you look at the way the Iranians have adapted if you look at how ISIS has built on lessons from Al Qaeda and how today's Taliban which is dramatically different from preceding generations the Taliban have built on what those adversaries have learned people have essentially watched what's happened over the last you know 12 years or so since the invasion of Iraq and radically altered the way they're operating so today we deal with both snakes and dragons in many of the same places and at the same time and the different dragons from before they've actually learned a lot by watching what we've gotten wrong over the last 15 years so when you say different dragons meaning different states that we need to be worrying about I mean they operate in a different way I'll give you one example there's a unit running around Ukraine right now called the Vostok Battalion which is named after a television station in Chechnya and the reason it's named after that is because the brothers who owned that television station put their tribal allies at the disposal of Russian intelligence during the Second Chechen War and they turned them into something looking a little bit like a much more violent version of the awakening in Iraq and now the Russians are employing them as a kind of unconventional warfare tool on the other side of their territory against a completely different set of adversaries it's like we took the guy from Ambar and started running them all over the world as sort of mercenaries that for hire and the personnel has changed over the techniques have changed over but the some of the intent is still the same another example that I know Peter will probably want to talk about is the rise of cyber irregulars you know so just before the invasion of Georgia in 2008 the Russians got together a bunch of hackers and essentially gave them a choice of going to jail or working for Russians in the upcoming invasion of Georgia and what we saw was the ability to leverage non-state in some cases criminal actors to do much more than just screw with other people's information until recently that was the worst thing you could do to somebody with cyber attack with the emerging incident of things you can now have a physical kinetic effect with just cyber operations and I think that's where we're starting to see some of the stuff go so same actors but they've learned from what non-state armed groups so I also don't like the term non-state actors you know CNN is a non-state actor you know non-state armed groups what those groups have been doing has now sort of bled over into the techniques that are being used it's interesting what I remember someone saying that a non-state actors like talking about a horseless carriage that which is what we used to call cars right you all you you're looking backwards you're saying what it's not we surely are at a point where we can actually find find a name so I'm interested in light of the earlier panel certainly what you're saying is a lot of our adversaries think they can learn from history specifically they think they can learn from our history and what if you put together what Pete Pete said and what you're saying you're saying you're seeing the the snakes and the dragons much more complex environment that's one of the themes of this entire conference is the complexity of the of the threat environment professor Allen be you have taken that idea up one up one more level in popular science you have an article coming out that talks about civilizational conflict and I saw that and I thought I thought a lot about this actually recently Sam Huntington who is no longer with us of course wrote clash of civilizations back in the mid 90s right it was it was in foreign affairs I think in 1995 and it triggered all sorts of debate and of course he then published the book but I've been thinking about that of late is that what you mean by civilizational conflict well it's part of it I mean certainly if you read his analysis it's it's still a good cogent analysis I think you've got you've got snakes dragons and then you've got an additional level so one of the ways that that it's interesting listening to the talks that it seems to break down as you start off most people because we have a lot of military people because we are talking about war most people are inherently continually bringing this back to the state the the Westphalian model if you will of of war and that's appropriate because that kind of violence is still going to be very much with us what some people are calling the next level of violence the snakes is neomedevalism that is to say that what you've got is a polycentric pattern of order violence and fragility that is playing most obviously right now across Africa Somalia is an obvious example but also playing in places like Ukraine where it has been militarized so you have a very different pattern of violence beginning to develop in this this neomedeval stage then above that I think you have civilizational conflict if you read some of the some of the work from the PLA what you see is that they're talking about virtually everything a society does as a weaponized effort to obtain advantage over another society we heard some different definitions of strategy earlier one obvious definition is getting people to do what you want them to do and if you take that definition and if you look at the way the Chinese are approaching it at this point what you begin to see is that you've got conflict not at the traditional level of war we shouldn't be talking about the future of war we should be talking about the future of conflict because we understand war to the extent we understand it a lot better than we understand conflict and if we push conflict to the level of civilizational conflict which is where it's going we don't understand it very well at all so the question earlier about what would you do if you were asked to take Mosul was a very good question because that's a military question the way we like to ask it what we really need to be asking ourselves is 50 years from now what will you have done to ensure that taking Mosul matter that you in fact achieve not just the tactical goals which we know how to think about but the much broader civilizational goals which we are frankly pretty bad at and so my argument is that the way we're conceptualizing and framing this is important but the step we're not taking is understanding that that is only a limited step forward and that the challenge before us is far broader far deeper and far more fundamental and we're not doing it so why call it conflict I mean what I'm hearing when you say you know different elements of society why isn't that competition I mean you look at China and we're partners in many ways in fact we're gonna have to partner with China on a lot of global issues and we're competing we're competing hard but why is that why why are why is it necessarily conflict rather than competition well because I don't view conflict as necessarily being violent or even or even being a zero-sum game I think that conflict competition however you want to phrase it is an arena we need to learn how to play in and play in effectively because it will flow down and affect those incidents of violence if we do it right in fact I think conflict does not mean more war conflict means less for example take China and our fraught relationship with China to be honest about the point if we manage China the way that the United States and Britain evolved that could in fact be significantly beneficial for both of us if we manage China the way Britain and Germany evolved that could be seriously problematic so one of the questions that that kind of analysis begins to raise is what are the significant differences from a civilizational perspective what made the difference in how those two events played out and most importantly how do we try to play those out with China so Peter this is the perfect lead back to you since ghost fleet you just said ghost fleet talks about great power war I have to just say I think I'm with the chief of naval operations it makes me deeply uncomfortable to talk about great power war with China for for a whole host of reasons on the other hand I take the point that if you don't think about it you can't think about how to prevent it so I take that point but how do you so I you might want to respond to professor Allen be but you may also I I'd like to hear how you describe a world of great power war with at the same time all these other threats where exactly we are cooperating with China on counterterrorism on on drugs drugs on clump we hope to be more on climate change so how do you describe that world so the first is to pull back on all of this and you know set it in the space of geopolitics like like Dave and Brad have done and so to paraphrase a foreign affairs article the reemergence of China onto the global stage is the most important international relations story of the 21st century but then they went on to say it's unclear whether that story will have a happy ending or not and then they pose the question of if we are entering a brewing Cold War with China and its junior partner Russia which doesn't yet realize it's the junior partner will the difference is with the prior Cold War is that China is not just a military competitor but is a true economic technologic competitor and that's how they describe this as an even worse scenario was the phrasing in foreign affairs of their parallel to the Cold War I I would say well there's an even worse than that even worse scenario which is that guess what sometimes conflict can break actually break out that the Cold Wars can turn hot and they can turn hot for a variety of reasons either deliberate or by accidental and in both cases it's it's better to talk about it so that you avoid the accidents and or better position yourself for deterrence to prevent it so the project I mean it's funny for me to call it a novel because it's a novel with 500 footnotes that is every single technology every single trend is footnoted the real world version whether it's you talk about a certain weapon system to in the novel there's two characters who argue over whether a war with China would happen in one site see examples of you know every time great powers have risen at you know what is it 12 out of 15 times there's been a conflict between them in the status quo power the other one argues back exactly we've heard here no there's too much trade with them we owe them too much money and they have that argument they then goes to the foreign affairs article where someone said that or when a Chinese admiral talks about a certain island chain no here's the link to the Indio the Chinese Academy where an actual Chinese admiral said that so the idea is to play out a in our world we would call it scenario and someone would pay you know a consulting company a half million dollars to run the scenario in the war game I just do it in the in the space of a book but the quick thing to what will wars in the 21st century look like that's different I would hit you know five quick quick points to get out of the US China side of just major state war one and they'll be mixed between the things that we've heard here today they'll have everything from robotic systems to urban gorillas operating in the same conflict space two they'll go after asymmetries that's what adversaries have learned the US bring certain key advantages to the table our global logistics and basing and that includes our aircraft carriers to global ISR communication networks GPS domination of space a thinking adversary will go after those third that means the difference of a major state war in the 21st century from what we've experienced is it'll be multi-domain contestation that is you'll see fights in the air in space in cyberspace not just roadside bombing on the ground and so you know we say oh that be different though than trying to control I'm talking about the air and it's the difference between on cyber someone hacking sent comms Twitter feed and someone taking down GPS in air it's the difference between what's shot down more aircraft actually the only aircraft that got shot down in Iraq both 2.0 and 3.0 is our own air defense missiles and our own jamming it's now someone with a capability to actually shoot down and you've got to think about that or at sea we've been completely uncontested what happens when you've got to mix these all together so multi-domain that's what defines a major state war forth real quickly US technology advantage essentially from Korea onwards every time we've gone into a fight we've had a generation ahead technology advantage that's the inheritance that we were given that's not going to be the inheritance that the soldiers of tomorrow bring into battle and then finally it raises a really interesting question of the American home front because it's going to be things like cyber war and the like the American home front will be involved in a major state war how will the different players react whether it's defense industry that looks fundamentally different than it did back in World War two will it be able to produce in a major state war using our current system to what is Silicon Valley do in an actual war to what are groups like anonymous how did they play in a war and that that's what I want that's what the book plays with these different ideas of let's actually ask these questions rather than ignore them so that's that's lots to chew on and I'm going to ask both of you to respond it you picked up two of the things we've heard yesterday and today yesterday morning Missy Cummings said point blank you know the Israelis are better at drone technology or autonomous weapons and the Swiss are better at robotics and agreed that the American technological advantage certainly in the military and part of her point was that we have huge tech advantages but they're in the private sector I will no longer be there and then we heard general Jarno this morning talking about this multi-domain multi-domain multi-territory so multi-territory in terms of physical territory but multi multi-domain to me that sounds absolutely terrifying I mean it's it's all kinds of war in all kinds of places I one question and I mean Dave I'm going to ask you to respond just generally to what Peter laid out but one question I have is can that then be modular in other words can the opposite of declaring war in 1914 could you have a great power skirmish in one domain and pull back knowing this is coming rather than sort of okay now we're at war and it's all over the place involving everybody in multiple domains so Dave you've been on the ground in Syria with ISIS so you've seen one kind of the war they were fighting now from a very granular perspective I've personally not been on the ground in Syria although we've done some research there I would say to answer your specific point the there actually have been skirmishes across single domains they're going on now between our great powers but I want to step back to it to a book that I wrote two years ago the out of the mountains which I think gives some of the explanatory background to what Peter's talking about you know we we're seeing four noted in the novel yeah all right very you know four big big trends that are really shaping the environment in which this will take place which haven't really been talked about over the last couple of days but just to bring them up population growth urbanization littoralization the tendency for things to cluster on coast lines and the new trend which is this massive explosion in electronic connectivity that's taken place in just the last decade or so so to put it in perspective it's a those four again population urbanization littoralization and connectivity so it it took all of human history until 1960 and I'm conscious that I'm practicing history without a license and a room for historians but it took all of human history to 1960 to get to a total population across the entire planet of three billion people the latest UN projection is that we're going to add the same number of people three billion just into coastal cities in the developing world in the next generation between now 2050 right so I think you could argue that whatever the other factors that that will have some impact on where wars are fought and therefore how they're fought because you know wars happen where people live and so when people when an overwhelming majority of the planet but it'll be about two thirds live in coastal cities by the middle of the century that's the type of environment that we're going to see this happening and so I think because urban environments create a disaggregated battle space right so the biggest single battle that the US has been involved in since the beginning of the century was the second battle of Fallujah operation of Fandam Fury November 2004 17,000 combatants 40 days not one big battle of 17,000 people thousands of little battles of three four five people right that it's a disaggregated battle space so we're looking at I think small teams in networks operating in swarms in that disaggregated battle space I think we're looking at as Peter said a lot of autonomous systems so that the level of individual lethality that one person can bring to bear is dramatically higher than it has been in the past and an important point for those of us that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan we're moving away from an environment where you can secure something by occupation to an environment where you have to secure by interdiction so as an example of that FM 324 the counter insurgency manual talks about a number of roughly 20 counter insurgents per thousand population that translates into one rifle company per 5,000 people that could be one village in Afghanistan it could be half of an apartment block in a city you could put the entire US military into a mega city the majority of people living in that city wouldn't even know we're there so the ability to secure a place by densely occupying it which is what we did in Baghdad is not going to be there anymore we're going to have to think about how to secure or protect or control by interdiction which is exactly where so let me just make interdiction meaning preventing anybody from others from getting in rather than yes or as an example but ISIS has no possibility of capturing the city of Baghdad because of this issue of scale they're not trying to do that they're trying to cut off the roads in and out of Baghdad they're trying to dominate the belts around the city they're trying to control the city by interdiction and what we need to be thinking about is how to prevent that right maybe if you're going into Mosul the best idea is not to run a repeat of Fallujah 2004 maybe it's to think about unconventional warfare strategies and taking down the city by by interdiction ISIS doesn't have enough people to both defend the city against an external threat and control the city from within there are plenty of people running around Mosul that are opposed to ISIS with weapons ready to fight ISIS but we're talking about tanks down there you know knocking down the main door so we have to think about how to how to break out of that paradigm final point is we're not going to do FM 324 style counterinsurgency again not because it didn't work because it did work we worked in Iraq we tried to redo it in Afghanistan didn't work as well because the enemy had learned people have learned again that we're not it's not going to work again and so we need to be thinking about a completely different set of ideas as we as we go forward so we're about to go to questions so get your questions ready but Brad so you you raised neo-medievalism and I thought we really are back to the future because there was an article in 1996 in foreign affairs on neo-medievalism right around the time Sam Huntington's article came out but from that frame when I hear interdiction I hear siege I hear modern siege with different weapons but you so we're listening to a mill we're to accounts of a military that's going to operate on the ground in distributed networks with small flexible teams who are connected you've written that the the job of the military in the world you're imagining is managing transitions so that sounds very different so let's let's hear about that it's it's in addition to okay and it's in addition to because because if you're going to accomplish your mission you have to do the tactics right you have to do the operations right so you have to do interdiction what you have to understand in which I think the military does understand is that's not enough not in today's world that's not going to keep those cities what you need to do is you need to learn how to manage and control those cities through cultural norms as well which is extremely difficult let's what do you mean managing a city through cultural I mean you have to have a cultural structure that is attractive enough so that you can minimize the amount of attractiveness of other models the reason ISIS is effective is in part because culturally they have picked us very small demographic and they have learned how to be extraordinarily effective at energizing that demographic young adolescent males who have weak identities or no identities because of the situation they find themselves in we're not going to beat ISIS militarily we will control ISIS militarily and we have to do that but we're not going to beat them which means that wars of the future are not going to be the kind of Klaus Witze and or Joe Minion contest that we all know and love they're going to be extraordinarily difficult cultural challenges and social challenges and the military has to learn how to do that so if you look at the short term military necessities it's the kind of thing we've been talking about all day but look at the longer term one of the questions that the military has to be able to answer for itself and for our society because nobody else is competent to answer it is the question of how do you manage a transition towards a world that is significantly neo medieval how do you manage the rise of China knowing that you're going to have significant problems from both the Chinese and the American publics who are probably not understanding the necessity for that realignment so that and the reason that the military needs to be involved is not because they're necessarily going to be great at it at first because I even anticipated my next question why the military but okay well the question then is is so you would trust our political system the way it's breaking down now so so it's a it's a challenge and nobody is going to control the process that's going to be very hard for the military it's going to be very hard for everybody but when you're dealing with these complex adaptive systems the idea that you control it is simply wrong the idea is that you need to learn how to push it in the directions you want and you need to do that effectively and it needs to be part and parcel of your military tactics your military strategies so what you need is you need a close with that also understands that it is civilizational conflict that needs to be managed not just the traditional military well I definitely think Joel but they're in the center I think this point about understanding that you can't control things is very important it's very important as part of military education it is very much at variance with the traditional idea of trying to control an environment either by occupation or in the battlefield so and it assumes an acceptance of uncertainty that is a big shift so Joel I hear a lot of conversation about complex introduce yourself I'm sorry Joel Garrow with the new America Foundation and with Arizona State University I hear a lot of talk about complex systems about networks especially cyber networks why don't we have a National Guard division or for in Silicon Valley aren't most of these problems the ones if we're having civilizational warfare and if one of our tacit advantages is Silicon Valley why don't we militarize it well Peter there's a number of reasons and you know we hosted in this very room on Monday similar conference looking at the field of cyber security and what was striking as played out and was covered in the media is the distance between Silicon Valley and the National Security establishment all the more so in the post-snowden era second you have so there's a just put it bluntly there's distance in terms of distrust and there's a legacy effect of that and including on what happens if we go to a real war second the question of the model is the National Guard model the most appropriate one for cyber security and cyber war that's what we've done we've tried to take a new capability and put it into an old box I would argue that the Estonian model of their Civil Defense League is a better one because rather than it being someone saying I'm willing to join the National Guard and reserves and meet these physical requirements get this rank and be liable for call up to anything from Afghanistan to Haiti to a cyber conflict the Estonia model is more like a militia model or a civil air patrol model where you're pulling in experts but not dropping them into a formal military organization I would much prefer to have that model who hates that model very much D.O.D. and contractors because they're like that's our space absolutely right yeah I think that's a very good question the real reason is that that D.O.D. does not have a culture that would allow them in any way shape or form to manage a Silicon Valley operation you know some somebody who's high on coke skittles and slinging code is is not a good candidate for basic training it just isn't so what you need somebody tweet that high on coke skittles and slinging code keep going I'll never be able to travel the Silicon Valley or maybe I'll be a keynote who knows so I think that what we need to do is we need to figure out how to engage Silicon Valley in the direction we want without undermining the values that make them Silicon Valley how do you engage Disney how do you engage your financial structure I mean you can imagine the masters of the universe trying to work with with the code of military ethics well never mind I won't make a snarred comment so so what you need to do is you need to figure out how to get this very complex very culturally different mix to work together without impeding what makes them unique in other words how do you this is going to sound bad I don't mean it this way how do you militarize American soft power without destroying the very thing that makes the soft power powerful so we have a lot of learning to do and my concern is not that we don't cover things that we're covering in here my concern is that we think by doing that we've really addressed the big elephant in the room which is the civilizational structure okay I'm going to take a couple more questions together and then I'm going to give you so you all can choose and because we're just about out of time there they're in the back yep well this is one of the interesting topic that discuss but I think there is another topic that have to be discussed to that I'm sorry introduce yourself okay I'm in this are in I am former senior advisor for high fees council in Afghanistan there is one topic that we have to discuss this to that how to evade the future of war nowadays in Afghanistan the emergence of ISIS is an imminent threat that replacing Taliban and hopefully Taliban will be reconciled but there is possibility that it will be a big and huge threat for the Afghan government my question is that how the fundamental approach should be implemented in Afghanistan to avoid the future emergence of such a war that will trigger Afghanistan in the the international forces in Afghanistan okay so one of you there there was another sir in the uniform more ladies and gentlemen my name is Lieutenant JG Chris O'Keefe I work on a junior member at the Pentagon so I'm in the very bottom row of the acquisition process and the personnel process and where I'm where I struggle to meet the two worlds I've done some work in the in the startup realm and also in the military and the current process we have in place are just iterations of a 30 year process we're coming to the end of them acquisition personnel I struggle to see how we are able to be agile enough to adapt to the rapidity of the threats you're discussing but the only organizational change can really come internal and it's a congressional military partnership and I don't really have a good grasp on how to go about affecting that change could you elaborate on that great I'm sorry right here and I'll give you the last one so we have Afghanistan and acquisitions those are the two questions on the table I'm Harlan Ohm it's a very simple question if you're gonna fight war if you have to fight a war how do you define what's winning and what's losing and you get the last question Ian Wallace new America I'm just coming back to the responses to that last question which are really about co-opting US soft power for war the problem with that is some of the companies that we're talking about some of the biggest American based companies business models depend on their perception of being transnational or supranational companies and I wonder how that dynamic shifts the future of war okay so I'm we're gonna go down Brad first and in opposite order that we started just to amplify Ian's question if you'll remember after Snowden when the US government responded oh we only spy on foreigners the response of Silicon Valley would be you mean the majority of our customers right because most of them have a larger market share outside the United States so it's exactly that tension they may be based in the United States but they are global corporations and the idea of being close to the US military is is harming their business directly so let's go so we have the the big win how do you define winning and losing we have the question on on the specifics from Afghanistan on procurement and this last one so I'll start with you so most people I think don't recognize that there's still a very high level of of mortality among Americans in Afghanistan is just among the contractors the level to which American military operations have been privatized is talked about among others by Peter but is not necessarily fully appreciated we've talked about very traditional things in in most of this discussion trans nationals don't have any homes and if you create an environment where they feel that you're impacting their bottom line too strongly they're going to leave part of managing in a neo medieval world is knowing how far you can cooperate with trans nationals and where their true loyalties lie so I think it's a very significant issue I don't think we thought much about it we assume that that there's American companies and they're bound by state boundaries and that's the game and that's not true at all so the question is not just how do you how do you get them to work with you if you're the Department of Defense the question is given the constraints they face and their opportunities elsewhere how do you get them to work with you which is a far more subtle and difficult question on the on the question of how do you know if you're winning and losing I think the answer is you don't I think that what you have Shawn McFade had a had a cute little phrase where he talked about what you've got is durable disorder and I think what you've got is a situation in most of the world think about the difficult issues we talked about earlier in most of the world is a situation where you don't have a Claus wits and win you don't have a victory beyond which you don't go we could do that the first war in Iraq we can't do that anymore not with the big ones we face how do you ever know that you beat nicest you don't until your culture is demonstrably superior by the fact that it's accepted by most people and it undermines their model a lot durable disorder the question you know Hayek might have said that was creative destruction we know in the special operations community the term that's used in the era of persistent conflict I think that's a that's a sort of almost a synonym for that one of the things that we see in our work in Latin America and Africa is what we call conflict entrepreneurs people that are continuing to fight not because they're looking for some object beyond the war as Classwoods would have said it but because the existence of the war gives them something they want so they're fighting to preserve the conflict and continue it not to end it on terms favorable to them so I'm going to focus on Afghanistan really quickly I think it's incredibly important and under discussed now because people are sort of washing their hands of the conflict firstly to be a little bit flippant if ISIS wants to take on the Taliban ISIS is about to get crushed and I think that's something that I would love to see happen and you know you've already seen Mullah Raif get get killed you've seen a number of people across Badaqshan and across the eastern side of Nangaha turn against ISIS so if ISIS wants to bring it to the Taliban I'm sure that they will they will lose and in fact I would really like to see some of the tactics that the Taliban have turned on us be turned on on ISIS but the second point that I would make is a broader point which I think is where you're getting to in both Iraq and Afghanistan we created part in the militaries in our own image that was a mistake right and to their great credit the Iraqis have been able to move on from some of the bad things we taught them to do to figure out how to operate effectively it's time for Afghanistan to do the same thing I would like to see the ANSF particularly ANS off take a lot of the counter-incurrency stuff and the foreign internal defense stuff that they've been taught and rip it up and recreate it in their own image and say let's forget what the Americans taught us well let's not forget it let's take it to the next level let's apply a little Afghan ingenuity and a little better understanding of society and an understanding of what motivates people in Afghan society and create something that looks different and only then will you be able to say what technologies and techniques and so on are best suited for Afghanistan going forward it's clear to me that Afghanistan cannot win if it tries to recreate with its level of resources what 50 Western countries fail to do with all their combined resources so there has to be a different set of techniques and the only people that can really answer what those techniques should be will be Afghans themselves and I'm talking not about every Afghan I'm talking about the blooded commanders that have a dozen years now of experience fighting these guys who have learned what works and what doesn't work in their own certain specific circumstances applying that I think is where we need to go next. What you're really talking about is frugal innovation applied to military tactics okay where I'm being very bad we're six minutes over so Peter you have the last word but please do address the acquisition question because I think it's an important one the procurement question. Absolutely I'll go in inverse order so in Ian's question of multinational corporations and the like for the book the research wasn't just citing the articles by you know I see a lot of the people in the room it was also doing interviews of the people who would be players in such a war and they range from interviews with US Marines and fighter pilots to Chinese generals to Silicon Valley venture capitalists and not to give away the book but basically to this question the scenes in it one is in a Silicon Valley venture capital how do you react in the space another is at the Walmart shareholder meeting how do they as a multinational corporation playing this and then another is in Moyok North Carolina headquarters of the company formerly known as Blackwater what role do PMC's play in a major state war so I won't give away the book other than to note that second who's winning or not it's a lot like the reaction that I had in the panel of the lawyers talking about what's war or not at the end of the day Judge Potter Stewart put it best we know it when we see it you know for all the data quant and the like we know when we're winning or not doing well acquisitions the big fundamental problem I would put out there for the US as we move forward is to learn from history and I'll misuse examples and just put it this way what are we building today that is the equivalent of the Gloucester Gladiator that was the best last biplane it had another nickname if you were actually forced to fly it in World War two it was called the flying coffin or for the Navy example what are we building today that is the modern-day equivalent of the USS North Dakota the last American pre dreadnought battleship that actually we constructed after the dreadnought already hit the way so it came out already obsolete what are we doing today that's along those lines and then finally to the ISIS in Afghanistan question I'll take a different I think our strategic challenge towards ISIS is to distinguish between what are actions organized by them Allah how bin Laden al-Qaeda definitively organized the 9-11 attacks from Afghanistan top-down selected members funding alike what is organized by ISIS versus what is just inspired by the ISIS brand and so there's a lot of things whether it's a Sydney coffee shop or Europe or some of the things in Afghanistan that I would put in the inspired by brand category versus organized and those lead to very different reactions and I worry we're making certain miscalculations by combining the two as if they're the same thank you so join me in thanking a panel that has given plenty to chew on thank you