 the I want to talk about My book Cassandra and I as counters for the future war which is really talking about the army and the Marine Corps trying to learn and Adapt to future to a current modern warfare under fire This this is actually this sign is outside that the main embassy in Baghdad that struck me is Is something kind of unusual? I don't know does that mean that everybody else was drinking while armed? I don't know That maybe some of the decisions that came out of that that particular structure. They may have been My background the term because I was actually named Xandra by a couple of reporters from National Public Radio looking at some of the things I had done before the war Back in 2001. I actually done a study called avoiding Vietnam looking at the American response to The war of Southeast Asia and said the American military Instead of deciding to learn from the experience their lesson really is we're just going to avoid these kind of wars anymore Instead of trying to learn how to do it better We're going to learn how to avoid them and I said it was time to develop a new counterinsurgency doctrine for the United States and then in 2000 and late 2002 I was put in charge of a joint in range C team for the army to figure out how to reconstruct Iraq and that George Oliver here from the night Naval War College faculty was also on that team and we came up with a plan to reconstruct Iraq It really was not in our purview to say not to do this But the consensus of the team was this is stupid, but that was not our purview So we came up with basically our goal was to show how hard it was going to be to reconstruct Iraq Problem was that we finished our study on the same day that Secretary Rumsfeld created the Office of Reconstruction Humanitarian Affairs under Jay Garner So the army was then no longer interested in our plan because the army no longer had the responsibility to reconstruct Iraq We did actually furnish it to the planners in in the Middle East and Kuwait Who are doing it and it did influence the what reconstruction plan was there But it all got derailed when Ambassador Bremmer showed up and started disbanding Iraqi army and some of the other decisions he made But we tried and because of these I got a certain amount of notoriety As somebody who had seen what was coming and had predicted it had just been ignored if you if you're aware that Anybody know Greek mythology the story of Cassandra Yeah, Cassandra is cursed by Apollo to always have to be tell truth to people and never be believed So that that's always the problem you can tell truth to power but getting hurt is the problem What happens though is in because of this and because of my connection to Dave Petraeus who was a classmate of For George and I he drew me in in late 2005 to become the author or the lead author for new counter-incernity doctrine He and James Mattis for the Marine Corps He came up with this idea of it was time to change the way the Army Marine Corps dealt with warfare. They're both veterans of Iraq They aunt they had seen the problems out there and they knew that the services needed to change To deal with the complexities of modern warfare. So this was kind of the Dave Petraeus model Which was basically built on getting a lot of teams out to the field to figure out what's going on and bring That information back to get into training education and also doctor and I tell people that you know my role in this is I was I was one tooth on one cog in Dave Petraeus's engine of Change, which is basically what I was and so I was going to be in charge of coming up with a new doctrine for counter-insurgency Which also become a driving intellectual force for other doctrinal changes to come It was a very atypical process to develop which is FM 324, which was the counter-insurgency manual the doctrine for the Army in the Marine Corps The it was done in less than a year, which is lightspeak if anybody who dealt with military bureaucracy and military doctrine And what wasn't just uniform people? We had all kinds of we had to surveying academics Montgomery McFate who's on the also the National Naval War College is anthropologist there was one of the key players on our team. We had the Army and Marine authors we had The Sarah Sewell who was the director of the the Center for the car Center for Human Rights at Harvard was one of the key players in the early Shaping phase of the manual we had people from think tanks. We had representatives the media Jim Fallows George Packer or Greg Jaffe Brought in so it was really a big general portray she's called his big tent We had a big tent if somebody criticized the manual you'd bring him into the tent try to make him part of the team We we had a vetting conference We're invited experts and look at it and I suggested that we have 30 smart people come in to talk about it The general portray said that's fine you can bring it up. I just want to pick who the 30 people are We ended up with 150 so his idea of 30 was much different than my idea of 30 But it was again there was less smart people from all over the United States. In fact international. We had Australians Brits a Lot of other countries were interested as well And they all contributed to it also the interagency. I got a lot of great ideas from the CIA for instance From Robert Smith William Smith and John Smith I I call him the Smith brothers But the bottom line is it was it was it was a big effort a lot of different people contributed General Petraeus read every word And I take he's a he's an SOB as an editor too. I'll say I sell a PTSD over what I call Petraeus pronouns If you ever write a sentence with this is or it is Make sure that the this or the it have a very clear precedent We had some many interesting discussions about some of the pronouns in the manual Now the intent of the manual was really to be focused on any kind of counterinsurgency, but because of the The way it was edited it really ended up focusing very much on Iraq the After the the final drafts were done. It was sent out to the field for Review we got 4,000 comments back from the field almost all of them focused on the soldier in Afghanistan Iraq and what they were seeing At that time also the last people to look at it in general general officers And they had all just come back from Iraq So the final version of the manual was focused very much on what was going on in Iraq and what would be needed in Iraq Any of you familiar with the doctor and what came out of it Well, it was it was different from the way we had approached it before it was Population centric was focused more on protecting a population and killing bad guys, but you still to kill bad guys, too It wasn't just focused on protecting the population But the first priority was protecting the people and the goal is to accept the government is legitimate Though the definition of legitimate is a hard one to come up with it's very much locally defined You know, it's we had some real battles over that in the writing team as well You got to be very careful how you apply force in this kind of war. You don't want to kill Five enemies and create 50 more because of the backlash and it's a mosaic war and I mean say it's a mosaic war It's different from village to village valley to valley town to town city to city. It's it's very hard to Understand the big picture because it varies from piece to piece. That's why I call it a mosaic war You need a lot of help military force is not going to be successful by itself. You need political help You need you know, it's essential services the economic development There's a lot of things involved need a lot of the civilian help bloody interagency help to be successful in this kind of war and Especially for you know, these are always away games for us. We're always going to leave So one of our big problems has always been we have to establish a host nation authority that's capable of sustaining itself once we leave We failed at that in Vietnam. We're having similar problems in Iraq and Afghanistan Now we the intelligence for the for the new doctrine was very different from the past. It's not your typical military intelligence It was very much cultural anthropology Very much social structures gender roles Political power who has political power and why how does how is this our decisions made? How do people interact? You had to really crack into the human networks to figure out how to fight this kind of war very different kind of intelligence And I'll talk about what campaign design a minute, but you've also one other problem of this kind of war What would the army that George and I entered you knew who the bad guys were it was the next Soviet rifle regiment coming over the hill Modern warfare is a lot different before you can start to plan You got to figure out what your problem set is and that's why you have to have this process called campaign design You've got a dissing you also are usually fighting a network of different enemies that take different approaches and you got to figure out what that is Information managing you got to manage information very carefully perceptions or reality in this kind of war. It's more important What people think you have done than what you have actually done? That's one of the problems we have dealing with something like al Qaeda and the Taliban They've been very good at manipulating the media to change the message. It's a battle over the narrative Again, it's what people believe happens is more important than what happens The main theme to learn and adapt well He is in the manual working with John Nagel especially one of the people on the writing team really push this idea You're learning in adapting. That's what modern warfare is all about That's what general Madison general Petraeus are trying to do for the Marine Corps in the army They're trying to make military forces that can learn and adapt The dominant approach is what we call clear-hold build you clear an area of the bad guys You figure out a way to hold it with some kind of security forces and you build institutions To give a people a better life. That's the way that you defeat an insurgency in the long run Though a lot of this is not just counterinsurgency. It also is modern warfare modern warfare amongst the people That's what it's all about these days very good the day of the You know, you're very rarely going to get the traditional tank-on-tank soldier-on-soldier combat Nowadays there's always going to be a lot of people involved a lot of more regular type forces This is a diagram kind of modern warfare really We have what we call lines of effort which are grouped Thematic actions for instance combat operations is one but it's not the only one you've also rebuilding host nation security forces Providing essential services the people improving governance to do an economic development These are all parts of your campaign plan and it's all wrapped in information operations. So people know what you're doing The idea is to change the populace Where a majority of the populace is supporting the government It's not just hearts and minds it's more than that you want to change you got to change people's behaviors Before you change their attitudes There are different parts of the anatomy sometimes you have to grab besides hearts and minds to make people change their behaviors and So there's some very coercive things that go on here as well But the bottom line is you're trying to change the people support for a legitimate governing authority You're trying to help and this is an example of how campaign design works this is the General Mattis when he was in the first Marine Division in Anbar province Realized that he had three different enemies. It's hard to determine if you're dealing with an insurgency or an insurgency Insurgencies and these kind of wars and he realized he had three different ones. He had a Sunni tribal insurgency He had a former Baptist insurgency and then he had al-Qaeda the foreign fighters coming from around there around the region to wreak havoc and And cause chaos and he understood he had to deal with each piece differently The Sunni tribes were just they were they were trying to feed their families kind of get back into society The Shi'at government had had basically pushed them out They were trying to re-establish themselves similar to the Bathas the Bathas has been kicked out of government by Bremer's orders The CP in the coalition prisoner authority. They were trying to find a way back in you could convert them if you approach them correctly The al-Qaeda fighters were different. You had to kill them You weren't going to reconcile with them. You're not going to bring them back in peacefully You're going to have to kill or capture them and so you've got different approaches For the different enemies and within each enemy group. You've also got a criminal element that had to be dealt with differently as well very complex problem set And what eventually happens over a couple years is we get these guys to kill those guys Eventually we get the tribes to turn on the foreign fighters and work with us I mean that's one of the nature I'll talk I'll show us off slide on this in a minute, but that That's the nature of this kind of warfare But we basically get these guys back into the system and these guys back into the system and they start taking out those guys And that's what happens in Anbar province part of the awakening there We had a lot of bureaucratic battles for the manual as well The just numbering the manual for instance, it's a it's 324 So initially it was 307 point 3-07 point 2 2 which meant it was a subset of stability operations Which is a different category of military Campaign much less violent than coin and I made the argument that we needed to Change that it was like a monk had walked into the Vatican told the Pope. I want to rewrite the Old Testament To people saying if you change the number of this manual the whole doctrinal system the US Army will collapse in a pile Two weeks later, Jenna Petraeus made the same suggestion and it was a good idea then So obviously they've been thinking about it the two weeks since I had given them the idea Same thing happens in reference bibliography I said we needed a reference bibliography to talk about suggested readings the lawyer said no You can't have a government publication recommending private works General Petraeus made the suggestion and again. It was a good idea Reading level most army doctor most doctrinal manuals and the military service are supposed to be an eighth grade reading level That's not because soldiers are stupid. It's because they're supposed to be read quickly We made the argument that No, we're shooting at a bunch of college graduates at battalion staffs and higher so the reading level should be higher We won that argument too, so it's a much more sophisticated manual than most in fact It is been used as a textbook at many major American universities Big issue over the Abu Ghraib and the Taney ops at the time. We had to resolve that We had a battle the Air Force about the airpower appendix It ended up that we had that the army referring between the Marines and the Air Force about what was going to go in that appendix in the manual The intelligence people of Fort Wachuku were very uncomfortable with our social cultural intelligence approach. It was new They didn't like it. It wasn't their idea It took us two months to persuade them to agree to it and in the middle of that Ralph Peters jumped in with some very nasty editorials in the papers that the manual was too soft and didn't kill enough people Got invited out to Fort Leavenworth had a debate We changed seven sentences in the manual to reflect a little bit about more killing and when the manual came out in December 2006 Peters wrote an editorial and said this is the most improved government publication in the last ten years Of course six months later when his latest book came out he changed back to hating it But that's you know, that's Ralph Peters the other part that's caused controversy is the paradoxes Which was my contribution to some of the doctrine. I mean my most important one The idea was that for this kind of warfare you got to think differently Then conventional warfare and friends at the first one the more you protect your force the less secure you may be You can't stay inside your compound You got to get out patrol among the people take some risk or you're not going to get intelligence You're not going to protect him you're not going to find out what's going on You know sometimes the more forces use the less effective it is You know you can you can it doesn't pay to kill an insurgent and create 50 more because of the backlash Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction enemies will often do do actions just to prod you to do something that will make people angry Or hurt a community Some of the best weapons for coin do not shoot Ballots and dollars are often more effective than bullets and bombs and these kind of wars We want to teach the host nation to do something on their own instead of us doing it for them If a tactic works this week it might not work next week if it works in this problem might not work in the next The problem is our enemies are learning adapting to We found out that something would the enemy come to the new kind of explosive device in Afghanistan and two weeks later They'll be doing it in Iraq It was you know the bottom line is you've got to stay ahead of your enemy's learning curve The last one here the way I wrote it was most important decisions are not made by generals Guess who the last people are to review a doctrinal publication The generals are they change the dang thing at least they kept it but they changed the most to many In fact, they added all these quote initially I didn't have the qualifiers in here because I just wanted people to think about these things But there was fear people would take these as dogma and laws and so they put the qualifiers in there But like I said that one they changed at the last minute, but at least I got part of it in But as I get into later The most important decisions encounter insurance are not even made by military people really Now a lot of people didn't like it still don't like it There's one group said that this this you know it goes back to some of Ralph Peters critiques They said the only way you win these kind of wars is by killing all the bad guys Edward look walk actually wrote a piece he called a military malpractice and said you've got it The only way it can be successful if you make the people more afraid of you than they are of the bad guys And we're not going to fight that way. That's just not the way we operate He said we should fight the way the Nazis did in World War two We're not going to do that's just we're not going to do that again Peters thought we should really focus on the enemy There actually was a group I got ambushed at a conference at NYU I walked in to do a presentation and find out the theme of the conference was counterinsurgency the new imperialism I Was not ready for that one, but there are some people that see this just another way to you know to Increase Western dominance of the world Some people have argued that civil wars like in Iraq are not coin in reality There's they have a lot of the similar internal warfare characteristics Some people have said that it's all new. There's nothing old Even al-Qaeda uses Maoist terminology in their doctrine. I mean the old ideas are still relevant even though there's a lot new as well The the the arguments that have carried the most weight are the impossible and dangerous arguments a guy named Jeff record at the year War college has argued that America can't fight these kind of wars because they take too long That with our political system can't last beyond a four-year cycle American public gets bored easy The American military doesn't want to fight these kind of wars. Therefore, we should not fight them Kind of the argument we should ignore them. We should avoid them problem is the world doesn't work that way But that's the argument there We're always going to lose these kind of wars because we we can't last more than four years I mean we've already just proved that in Afghanistan The argument has been most successful and it really has won the day is the dangerous argument that that focusing too much on counterinsurgency has caused us to lose our conventional capabilities and We got to focus back on those and And we've been we've been we actually convinced ourselves too much that we were too good at this and Ended up getting embroiled in counterinsurgencies that are too long and too expensive And again that argument has really kind of won the day and washed in these days It is our as our National security strategy says we're not going to do any kind of long-term Nation-building efforts at all. No counterinsurgency. No stability ops, even though we're still in Afghanistan and we're going back to Iraq Then there's one service who will remain unnamed that says we don't use air power enough in the doctrine I'll let you figure that with it, but they have called me a Luddite for what I have written So what happens is though General Petraeus takes this doctrine to Iraq in 2007 to put it into application and And you all you're all aware of the surge now the thing is you got to understand it's there is not a surge There are surges Yeah, I met with him in February 07. He was headed over there and he said there are four surges I need I need a surd a military surge I Need a surge in Iraqi political will I need a surge in American political will and I need a civilian surge Of capacity to go along in the military surge He got the extra military troops which he and General Deirno used mostly to push the bad guys out of Baghdad and to clear the rat lines around Baghdad a Lot of Iraqis and over there said the most significant part of the surge was just the announcement it was coming a Lot of the reasons the awakening happens is because Iraqis have the courage or are there their urge to Rise up against the foreign fighters like al-Qaeda is Reinforced by the American announcement. We're coming back in force and they felt they could take the leap and And they would be supported by us One of the reasons the surge in Afghanistan didn't work is because President Obama announces the surge at the same time He announces a deadline Which is stupid I mean the reason for the surges that doesn't tell people you're coming and you're going to help them You don't say we're going to be there for a year and we're going to leave Because then they have no incentive to help you which is what happens in Afghanistan We also have it. We have a surge of political will at home partly because the creation of the doctrine which convinced everybody we knew how to fight these kind of wars also because a Michael Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack do an article in New York Times in late July 07 that says the surge is working Which changed the tenor of the democratic political debates from how we get out of Iraq How do we take advantage of the success of the surge so that changed the whole Discussion of what was going on in Iraq and gave General Petraeus general earn no more time for the military operations to work The most the least successful part was a civilian surge Interagency just couldn't provide any more General Petraeus received the partial achieved the partial partial surge by giving civilian the civilian Provincial reconstruction teams the military commanders to take care of attaching them to brigades He and Ambassador Crocker also joined at the hip. They very successfully worked with Maliki But the problem was is when Petraeus and Crocker left a lot of that fell apart and the new administration did not continue It so a lot of the civilian Connections got lost fairly quickly. So that part of the surge was not as successful as he wanted it to be Now a lot of things did work in our favor. You know by the time this is going on the Iraqis have been at war For four years. They're pretty tired of the violence The Sunnis come to realization that aren't that the Americans are there really only hope to get a position back in society We became in many ways We became the referees between the Sunnis and Shiites was almost like a hockey fight any hockey fans here You know hockey fight works, right? When does the referee step in? Everybody's kind of tired. They're starting to stumble Well, the Sunnis and the Shiites are both getting kind of tired and stumbling So the Americans kind of walk in and separate and play referee Al-Qaeda was also amazingly inept at insurgency. I Mean I talked to one shake over there and he said you know Al-Qaeda showed up and they said there are foreign There are foreigners coming and they're going to take your oil take your women and take away your religion So that Al-Qaeda shows up so six months later they say you know it's expensive protecting you people We're gonna have to start charging taxes and then in six months later. We're all lonely men far from home We need you we need your daughters as wives And then they then the last thing is they impose a very strict former Sharia law on the local the local Sunnis So the Sunnis say yeah, they were right there foreigners coming to take away our resources women in religion But it wasn't you guys it was them and so they turned they turned to us Amaze very good. I mean it's you should all be very proud of the soldiers sailors airmen and Marines that are over in Iraq In Afghanistan now and we're then because they have admit they have learned amazingly well how to do this How to disaggregate enemies and disaggregate friends because oftentimes our friends are a bigger problem than the enemies are Of course, I'd like to say it's because they read our doctrine and absorbed it in most cases because they're on their third or fourth tours They learn they learn over time We also helped that a lot of the Shiite militias pull themselves off the table And set up a truce a lot of that forced by Petraeus already are no actions But that helped us give it that less that took away one of our problem sets at a time was useful But unfortunately the gains were lost when we left Because the American forces were the glue of mosaic wars require mosaic peace The reasons you have peace in Anbar province are different from the reasons you have peace in Baghdad different from What reasons you have peace of the hour or Mosul and when the American forces pulled out and the diplomatic connections pulled out all those All those arbiters all the glue that held the piece together fell apart as well Now you get throughout some observations from Iraq and some of the things I saw and I was over there This is my mandatory. I know day Petraeus picture That's Dave. It's myself. That's a guy John Martin another classmate of ours Who is also over there working as an aide and this is? This is November 2007 in Baghdad What really struck me is that what we were putting on the shoulders are brigade commanders this kind of war is really a colonel's war It's their gate commanders war. It's not a general's war. It's a colonel's war This guy here is a guy named Ricky Gibbs. He was one of my students the Army War College and two years later I rend him he's in Iraq command of a brigade in South Baghdad. Here he is He's opening a hospital this Iraqi here is in charge of a new hospital open up in South Baghdad Colonel Gibbs's brigade Included 10 combat battalions, which is the same size as a division and his occupation zone was 1.5 million Iraqis That's a colonel in charge of that chunk of Iraq. It's amazing the responsibility put on those colonels They really we had to treat him like the British do and make the breeder generals probably but but it just did you know just It ties into the competence the people we had over there But also their immense responsibility we put on responsibilities we put on our leaders another betray us initiative Was to take people out of the forward operating bases You know that that great Tolkien term no more phobets Take them out of the forward operating bases put them out in these combat outposts This is a place called jerfo shocker About a hundred troops out there all by themselves about seven miles away from the nearest American base So they're really stuck out there on their own, but what happens is when they set up all these combat outposts like this With very competent soldiers, this is myself and general hantu and who's that going to be the Director of the army staff Steve Biddle An analyst from the council in form relations This is Boba cabbage now chief of staff at the work college John Henry Molts who was the captain in charge of jerfo shocker and Mike Garrett To eventually became a general officer who was the brigade commander at the time But we're all there. It was an immensely competent group They set up these combat outposts and what arises around these outposts or the Sons of Iraq This is a local shake who sent came down from to Crete to take charge of the Sons of Iraq Which are the local militia that rose up around these outposts mostly Sunni fighters some Shiites as well They start out being paid by us eventually some of them are paid by the Iraqi government Again remember that the the Mattis model for Anbar province that Sunni tribes are just looking to get paid It's paid to take care of their families get back into the into the system and this was one way to do it I'm out. I'm actually taking the picture. I'm out here with John Henry Molts the young captain And he turns to me as I'm taking his picture and he said, you know, I swear these guys were shooting at me last month And I said Captain Molts welcome to counterinsurgency Because that's what happens these so basically that the Sunnis turned to us and against Al-Qaeda Became our allies and not our enemies and of course the problem We had was then negotiating between the Sunnis and the Shiite government because the Shiite government was still scared stiff that if we gave Them weapons they would turn on the Shiite government very Tough diplomacy we had to do to get the Shiite government to accept these Sunni militias But again, they became a key fight a key tool in the battle against Al-Qaeda I'm not now this is general Hantun is not a slippery character. That is not the target of this Eventually went on to become superintendent West Point as well This is Al Boulani who is the interior minister for the Iraqis Interior ministry basically was creating Shiite desk squads of God and kill Sunnis You know, we were training the troops The police the problem was the police that the Ministry of Defense controlled the Army, but the Ministry interior controlled police and they were creating Shiite desk squads and so Al Boulani was had just replaced the current guy He was a very sick was very evil sectarian and he was trying to change that But we ended up having more intelligence on our friends and our enemies I mean one of the things you had to do is you had to figure out who was really a friend who was really Was really not and a lot of the people especially in the ministry and interior were really evil people And we had to get them out of there before we could really turn the police around We did pretty good with the army The training in army went pretty well Now the problem of course is when we left Maliki changed all leaders out and put his cronies back in and all the good People we had created were gone But we did pretty well with the army the police was the biggest problem and the key guy here was this guy This is a major general Hussain Who was a Iraqi two-star that was put in charge of national police And with our help eventually relieved every brigade and battalion commander in the national police Because they were there are Shiite sectarians or just have to kill Sunnis He was a big hero with the Americans He did a great job turned the national police into a very useful organ against the bad guys And something that the people of Iraq could be proud of As soon as we left Maliki promoted him upstairs Put him in charge of border guards Put his cronies back in charge of national police the national police disintegrated after that But when I was over there in 2007, it was a pretty good organization based because of what Hussain had done We also There's a two-star Marine general in charge of the main detention camp at Buka could name stone And he sets up these interesting programs of what a coin behind the wire Even when you captured a bad guy the counter-insurgency effort did not end. It just changed focus And we end up with is what they called coin behind the wire He set up basically what you do is you bring in Somebody into the detention camp and they had about 25,000 people there when I was over there in november 2007 He has separated them into reconcilables the irreconcilable zero of 5,000 people mostly russians, Chechens Uh some Saudis and a lot of foreign fighters they they were you just locked them away and threw away the key The other 20,000 though you felt you could you could kind of rehabilitate So what you did is you brought them in You teach them to read You bring in moderate imams to teach them a moderate form of the Koran you let them read the Koran themselves You also give them job programs to give them usable skills You give them a you set up a legal system review their cases And when they are released they're released back to the local shake who then signs a loyalty oath and says he'll take care of them And the other guys in the released individual also signed a loyalty oath that he would Listen to the shake and stay out of trouble And they were actually firing what they called moderate missiles back into Iraqi society When I was over there they had fired about 2200 back And two had only two had been recaptured for doing bad things Any prison in America would have been proud of that kind of recidivism rate So it was a very successful program while I was over there To try to get try to to reform these people and get them back into society And now the other thing we had we had to change the whole court system to do it The Iraqi legal system When we came over there that the way a Iraqi trial was conducted is individuals arrested A confession was beaten out of them And then the trial was the individual trying to prove his confession was not true So we'd basically to turn their legal system or an adversarial system This is one of the new courtrooms in Baghdad This is where the witnesses and this is where the defendant is I asked the question about how come the witness has a core in but the defendant does not And one of the Iraqi lawyers told me that's because the the defendants are expected to lie And we don't embarrass them by having to put their hand in the court room Again, we still had some work to do on their on their court proceedings We also do a lot of movement control a lot of coercive We do more ethnic divisions than al Qaeda does We separate areas of Baghdad. I mean Baghdad Baghdad was a very cosmopolitan city. It was not when we left We divided sectors ourselves because that was necessary for security and we put a lot of these walls up In this case the Iraqis had painted them but though that's a wall we put up to divide Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods This is the Iraqi electrical system What happens is you've got you've got the major lines which are the the free electricity You want to screw up an economic system give people free electricity? What happened is people get about eight hours of free electricity then it would run out because the man was too high All these wires here run to local generators So what happens is you've got these local generator guys that when the main Power goes out they would turn on the local generators this picture on the cover of the book Is actually Baghdad at night and all those lights are lights being driven by local generators So bang, you know even though the the the free electricity ran out they still had plenty of electricity But it was not exactly the most organized of wiring systems I actually asked one of the generator guys. I said, you know, you must be making money hand over fist What what else do you need from the government? He said I want a job I said, wait a minute. Wait a minute. What do you mean you want a job? Well in the Iraqi because the Iraqis have been living in a centralized economy so long For them it was not a job unless it was given to you by the government So if you did something on your own that was not a job So running is the generators was not seen as a job Even though he had boxes of dinars in his garage from all the money was making from his generator work We had to learn to accept local solutions that was a hard thing for us to do but The Iraqi solutions tended to be awkward. They tended to take a lot longer But they were also much more permanent than what we came up with This is I'm having a meeting here with the The this is the governing council of a town called al-Zabai near Basra in the south This is the local mayor. These are the Loki Sunni and Shiite Shakes who talked about how they had getting along fine and how great everything it was working This poor guy up here is getting beat up as a guy who runs the electricity Difficult, but but the basically they were talking about that the how they had Solved their own problems with a lot of a British military help as well But this was a local group to come up with their own solutions And and when we were listening to them Again, it was hard for us to do a lot of times We also had to deal with people that had blood on their hands When general Petraeus sent up his reconciliation cells to do that He often put British officers in charge instead of Americans because the Brits because they're working northern Ireland were They had a much easier time getting along with people who had been killed them the week before than the Americans did This is the cultural thing about the way that that structure often worked Now again, I talked about the fact that in 2011 we pull out One of the things you've got to understand about American military interventions If you want to accomplish national objectives, we are always going to be there a long time And you probably you're the right age. You remember Bill Clinton were going into Bosnia will be out here in six months You remember the I'm talking about pulling out of Iraq in four months That never happens If we're going to be someplace and really want to make you fix the problems We're going to be there for 30 years Korea. It took 30 years after the Korean war before Korea became a democracy It'll take a lot longer than that in Iraq and Afghanistan You know, we're still in Germany. We're still in japan. I mean if we're really going to accomplish our objectives We're going to have to stay there a long time Everything a rat unravels in Iraq And I know how the heck you're going to fix the Sunni Shiite Kurd differences without some kind of an outside arbiter I mean the Iraq is a mess. We all know that it wasn't just the military withdrawal though diplomatic withdrawal was just as important Petraeus and Crocker were dealing with maliki every day President Bush was was handled was had weekly VTCs of maliki to try to teach him how to be a democratic leader All that ended when the bomb administration came in in fact orders went out to American ambassadors that Ambassador crocker looked to be too subservient to general Petraeus and no American ambassador should be that cooperative with a military leader again Uh a terrible terrible order that had had nasty consequences in Afghanistan especially Again, we know Iraq is still a mess, but again to me that's that's a failure of foreign policy not counterinsurgency I mean it's counterinsurgency. It wasn't allowed to finish It had created a window for Iraqi political reconciliation to occur But then the Iraqis and ourselves dropped the ball and that did not happen And now we're dealing with the consequences in Iraq right now Now to throw this out one of the We work under this model in washington of how american military interventions work military goes in There's some kind of a crossover point Where civilian organizations take over or the united nations and then they handle a transition to civilian authority from the for the host nation That's the ideal never happens that way I mean never happens that way civilian organizations never have the capacity And when we have a successful reconstruction the american military carries the main brunt all the way to the end But that's just not a model anybody in washington including do d wants to recognize But that's the result if you look at germany japan Any successful occupation we've had any successful reconstruction operation And we're still in Bosnia and Kosovo At least the NATO or ourselves It always requires a major military effort to make these things work And these are just this is a diagram to show that how long we are in a country you can actually work out the success of our Intervention is is is directly attached to the number of years we are there in most cases This is an example of how long we have in different places after major conflicts If to be successfully you got to be there a long time if you're there a short time you usually fail Now we've got a number of things wrong. We were doing this doctrine The whole process was upside down You're supposed to start with the national security strategy that leads the national military strategy That leads to your joint doctrine, which leads to your service doctrine We did it upside down We started the service doctrine that eventually drove our national security strategy. That was not our intent But there was just a vacuum there that we filled And that's one of the reasons that counterinsurgency got oversold coin is not a strategy Counterinsurgency is a way to accomplish a somebody else's strategy. It's it's a way to accomplish ends And those ends are made by politicians and voters not by the military the The military had no say in setting those ends in Afghanistan and Afghanistan or Iraq We did not pick the form of government or the leaders And another thing that we got wrong in the manuals We really should have been more explicit that the goals of host nation leaders were supporting are not necessarily the same as ours They can actually be very different And we've had major problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan Getting those leaders to do what we think they ought to do In many cases because what we think they ought to do goes against their own interests Especially when they want to retain power Now just some general observations on modern war. I just got a couple slides left and open the questions The again as I said most of what we talk about as coin is really modern warfare Ending these conflicts is immensely difficult when you have all these different Enemies out there. You'll never get them all to agree to anything So you you know in most cases you just have to kind of manage the conflict most than Most than more than than win it Savane aides you still can't do everything to require in this kind of war I mean we still have more musicians in department defense and we inform service officers in the state department You could fit the whole foreign service corps of the state department on one aircraft carrier That's how small it is And because of that mission creepers self-inflicted wound the the military always ends up doing a lot of things Savane should be doing Decapitation strategies are two-edged sword a lot of times you need those you need to have leaders you can talk to If you kill them the person to replace them is normally somebody you can't talk to You got to be able to disaggregate your friends just like your enemies Because you don't you know who your friends are might not be very clear actually In irregular wars if you think you are winning you might be if you think you're losing you definitely are This is a big one for the air force who controls the ground controls the message If you do a bombing mission and don't control the ground The enemy is going to spin that to look like you kill women and children blew up mosques You have to worry about the information aspects of any operation actually the special operations forces are bigger Eat more have made more mistakes like this even than the air force has And then they've they've been succumbed too much to lure killing people direct action We've lost the green berets now everybody wants to be a seal or a ranger because that's they get in the movies And that's how you write books But in reality the most valuable stuff soft can do is You know we've had a reversal of roles You know foreign internal offense security force assistance and essential mission But nobody wants to do it. They used to be a special forces mission. They don't want to do it anymore Now if you want to do Provide advisors do counterinsurgency you grab a conventional soldier marine You want to kill somebody you go get a special operations guy That's the exact opposite of the way it used to be and I think we need to go back to that myself We're still fighting one-year wars or four or seven month wars We're terrible on transitions In vietnam they worried about individual replacements. It's worse with unit replacements You have complete breakdowns in these transitions So we still end up have a hard time We have a hard time learning because as an organization leaves it takes its knowledge with it and the organization starts from scratch Uh Everybody likes precision bombs. Sometimes it's b-52s. They're still lovely Every so often you got to hammer somebody. So, you know, yeah, we talk about using force precisely Sometimes you got to hammer people And this is why I've been quoted on this a number of times. There are two kinds of warfare asymmetric and stupid Everybody's always trying to fight different nobody nobody's more asymmetric than us United States is the most asymmetric warfare fighter in the world Nobody fights like we do So whenever you hear the term asymmetric warfare, they're not talking about us. They're talking about everybody else which in some ways is a You know, again, I I think we misuse the term a lot But the bottom line is everybody's always looking for an edge. Nobody fights the same way You've always got to be be aware of the asymmetric aspects of any combat you're in Now some final dilemmas and counter-incerns you open into questions Again, I made this point a couple times US military interventions are always going to be long and costly to meet objectives Political leaders should be up front with that But they never are because they feel if they're honest that we're going to be there 20 years Nobody will approve the action Just because you can do counter-incernity does not mean that you should But counter to that just because you say you're doing counter-incernity does not mean that you are We never do counter-incernity in Afghanistan. We've been there now for 15 years. We have never done counter-incernity We've said we are but we've never committed the resources or done the actions that really are counter-incernity Again, this one is related to this one the most important decisions affecting coin are made by politicians and voters not generals I got this quote from general barbaro the j3 for general patreus in iraq in 07 I don't know if we have the wrong former government or the wrong people in it Talking about the iraqis Neither of those decisions the military had no role in either of those decisions We didn't have a pick. We didn't we didn't have any choice in leadership or the former government And yet that those are the really the key determinants of success and counter-incernity So the hand was already dealt to the military many aspects before they had to deal with it and again Much of what we call coin is really just modern warfare And and I actually been boy embroiled in a In a project for the partnership for peace for nato Trying to teach counter-incerned other nations and there were currently 37 nations signed up that want our instruction And I got to admit that talking about the frigant flyer miles of the 37 none of those places are what I would call garden spots Uh, I'm not So far I've been in nigeria and moldova and I'm not looking forward to some of the other countries on that list Uh, the last point though I'll make is an as an observation as a historian And again the current counter our current national security strategy says we're not going to do coin or stability operations again We have never been able to never do this again So as a caution everybody who says that we're not going to do this we will We always do