 Before we begin, we have our question of the day, or the question for this panel, regarding a peace deal with Syria and what would be required for effective peacekeeping. You can read the question yourself. Please grab your little garage door clicker looking thing and respond to the question. Yes, there's no. All right. While you're doing that, we'll go ahead and begin. We assembled this panel because I've been working on this concept for a while now, and the concept of hybrid war is ... All right, not much question there. The concept of hybrid war is something that we're trying to figure out, as my colleague Rosa was saying earlier today, we're used to a war box and a peace box, and we have trouble at things that blur the margins. But trying to define what's in these blurry margins is very, very difficult. But I don't think it's any exaggeration to say that any word you use for this hybrid war, political war, ambiguous war, the gray zone, are deeply contested concepts that no one can really agree about. I thought a way to try to look at this from a different direction is to focus less on the where and the what, and more on the who. We're here today to talk about not so much the environment itself, but the people who act inside it. We've asked First Nadia to give an overview, and then we have some experts on some of these actors here to talk about it. With this, we'll go to Nadia. Thanks, Doug. I was given strict instructions today not to get into definitional debates, so I won't do that. I'm starting from the point that hybrid war does have value. The phrase has value. Why? Because the United States, centrally, is not very good at it. We haven't been good at it or appear not to be good at it. The U.S. confronts a specific form of statecraft, not new in all of its characteristics, but real and relevant. That's what Mike Mazar has recently written, and I agree with it. Because we seriously lag in this form of competition, it reminds us that we need to think better and do better at competing today. Where are our operational concepts to pursue no-contact war, a term used by Russia? Where are our concepts that seek to counter an adversary's effort to cripple a state before it realizes that conflict has even begun? And phrases such as interagency coordination and better interagency processes are not adequate answers to those kinds of questions. Where is the equivalent at the strategic level of a concept of operations and a fore-sizing approach that captures what has dominated for decades in most of our national security documents, the two regional conflict scenarios or more recent variations of that? What is the hybrid equivalent today? We've not developed a fore-sizing construct or a set of ideas to operationalize conflict in this domain. How would we deter a country whose power projection doctrine is based on hybrid warfare? And I think some of my fellow panelists are going to be talking about entities that have those kinds of ideas. Talking about investments to counter hybrid threats in predominantly technological terms is not sufficient, and that's essentially my read of how the last national military strategy approached the problem. Certainly the United States has sophisticated tactical skill sets in technology, in really smart and skilled operators, many of them in this room, but I think the problems start actually over that level of competition right above it. Political skills and key domains are not linked to a broader campaign plan that is driven by clearly defined political objectives. Thus, we have tactical successes, but they're not linked into a broader concept of operations linked to a political outcome, a desired political outcome. Yet, this is really the essence of our adversary's approach to hybrid war, made more complicated by the fact that for many of them, consolidation of gains and stability is really maintaining ongoing uncertainty, thus the frozen conflict problem that we have. So discussions about hybrid war, like this panel, should get us to identify ongoing gaps in our concepts of operations. And I'll present sort of five gaps, and there are probably more in this we can open up to discussion. First the integration of tools, many of which do not reside squarely in the military domain. We've talked about this all day today. Second, similarly, the simultaneity of instruments and the ability to move fluidly among required tools. We continue to have problems in that domain. Third, the problem of time. Hybrid warfare is ongoing. It generally requires a concept of thinking about persistent and continuous competition. What Hugh Strahan has written about strategy seems relevant. It begins as one sort of war can turn into another operation. Fourth, there's a problem of territory. Traditionally we think about interactions at the front. In the hybrid domain, we operate in depth and across boundaries, and I think the discussion earlier about the war in Syria where some of the journalists talked about, they talked about exactly this. And fifth, the problem of intelligence. What kinds of organizations and approaches do we need to compete along this continuum of competition? And finally, undergirding this all, I guess this is a sixth point, is that you need a political commitment about what we're competing for. And I think most of the panelists, when they talk about our adversaries in this area, that will come out clearly for all of them. Victory in hybrid is essentially winning the political competition. And that's where I was originally going to end, and I am going to end, but I just wanted to throw out an idea based on actually the discussions today. What if we thought about the term, although we're not talking about terms, but more as a competition? Take the war out of it and think about it as a hybrid competition? Why? Because it covers a spectrum of sort of what we've been talking about today. This morning, General Milley talked about achieving political ends through violence. That's at one high end. But the lower level ends that we've also talked about all day today are more of an ongoing competition. So thinking about it as a hybrid competition also then gets the agencies involved, the non-military, non-DOD agencies, non-intelligence agencies. It sort of forces them to think as well in more competitive terms. Thank you. So I'm going to talk about ISIS. I'm going to keep my remarks very tactical. We can go up to a more strategic operational level later. When we talk about ISIS and how ISIS fights and how they organize to fight, we're really talking about ISIS 5.0. The organization began as a guerrilla group that had members from the Saddam Fidein and from Saddam's military and from a variety of jihadist groups. It then went into a sort of terrorist asymmetric approach in 0607. After 2011, it was guerrilla again for a while, but then in the 2013-2014 time period, we saw what amounted to conventional maneuver and a sort of war of movement from ISIS. After the beginning of the air campaign in August, September of 2014, it's dropped back into something that I would describe as hybrid maneuver. When I use the term hybrid, what I mean is a mixture of conventional and non-conventional approaches. And in particular, in the case of ISIS, what we're looking at is conventional maneuver with non-conventional means. And I'll come back to that in a little more detail in a minute. As they move around, it's a pseudo-conventional light cavalry swarm, a main column that's led or flanked by technicals. It applies what we call recon pull tactics in the business. So it'll find a weak spot using recon groups and then pull the main column onto that target. It tends to move on multiple axes. And when it fights defensively, it always maintains an agile mobile network defense. It doesn't stand in one place and die. So it's an extremely maneuverist kind of approach. They have obviously had their capabilities transformed by the capture of hundreds of armored vehicles, heavy artillery pieces, and so on. And that really transformed the way that they fought for a period. But when they realized that that was making them vulnerable to Western air power, they dropped back to a much more hybrid approach. And the basic combat unit, as of about the middle of last year until now, is what I would call the independent platoon combat group. So we're looking at groups of 20 to 40 fighters. They move dispersed, but they tend to fight concentrated. They move in vehicles, generally technicals, so a vehicle that can provide fire support but can also carry troops. It may be armored or it may be lightly skinned. They have specialist IED layers and triggermen and observers. They often field specialist RPG teams designed to kill enemy headquarters or to operate on the flanks and deal with enemy tanks. They often work in a column of sort of three to five vehicles, which might have one or two heavy vehicles and another three to four lightly skinned vehicles. They're very operationally independent. So they might move several miles apart in advance. When one of these groups finds a target, they will concentrate to fight on that spot. So sort of collaborative swarming approach that we see in the way they fight. Let me give you two illustrations of what I mean by conventional maneuver with unconventional means. And then I'll stop and we can get through everybody else's discussion before we come back to have a conversation about this. So first one is ASCII Mosul, which is an area between Erbil and Mosul. In January last year, their Kurds made a significant breakthrough towards Mosul. ISIS launched 17 tanker trucks, heavily armored with spaced armor, each of them carrying up to four tons of Ampho ammonium nitrate fuel oil explosive, massive IEDs. And if you look at that, you say that's non-conventional. It's a suicide vehicle-borne IED. What they did with them was to blunt the armored thrust and stop it in a key area while they were moving their counter-attack force into position. So from a Western armored maneuver standpoint, it is an utterly conventional maneuver, which we call counter penetration. In the second example, in May of 2015, when ISIS took the government center in Ramadi, they began by moving a swarm of snipers forward to cover the T-wall, the fence around the compound. They then brought up under cover of snipers an armored bulldozer, which spent several hours pulling down the T-wall and creating a bridge about 70 meters wide. Then under cover of a big sandstorm, they put seven Humvees, each of which had about a ton of explosives in it. Each of the guys driving the Humvees was wearing a headset communicating with each other on a radio net. They moved to specific points around the edge of the bridge and detonated. Some of the explosions were big enough to knock down an entire city block within Ramadi. And once they'd created that bridge, they pushed another 21 IEDs through the bridge to target another series of buildings and then followed up with these mobile platoon combat groups. Again, you look at that and it freaks you out and you think this is completely unconventional. US, in fact, NATO doctrine for a deliberate obstacle bridge is suppress, obscure, secure, reduce assault. They followed exactly the doctrine that we follow. They did an exactly tactical maneuver, exactly as you would read about it in a Western field manual, but they did it using non-conventional means. So there is a high degree of hybridity to the way that ISIS operates, but I would argue that what we're seeing here is an entity that thinks like a state, fights like a state, is trying to be a state, but is doing so with non-state means. Much more to say about them, but I think that'll set the scene. All right, thanks. Yeah, talking about Ukraine, definitely not going to be as coherent as my fellow panelists. Basically, my experience is colored off of, again, it's at the tactical level, off two trips to the front of the Spetsnaz unit and a mechanized unit, both with the Ukrainian military fighting the Russian-backed separatists. Basically, you look in 2014, when the conflict popped off, it was a war maneuver. You had the separatists pushing Ukrainian forces back, backed by traditional Russian military units that had come over the border to kind of support some of the bigger battles, whether that's Ilovaisk, the Baltic steve. After the Ukrainians kind of pushed the separatists back, supported by aircraft and some volunteer battalions that had succeeded in some of the southern battles around Mariupol, the war quickly became static, trenches were dug by both sides, and that's kind of what we're looking at now across Donetsk and Lugansk. So when I got there, it was very much at this point of trench warfare. And what I saw as far as the Ukrainians fighting the separatists was a, it was very much, each side was dug in, there were trench raids, but what the separatists brought to the fight was kind of the threat of force that the Ukrainians always knew that if they pushed too hard or they got in too much trouble that the Russians could at any point mass and push through the lines. On top of that, the separatists were equipped with much better communication equipment, drones that could be, that were flown pretty much constantly at night. It was kind of a constant presence on the line is, you know, you would, you would hear them all night. And if you heard one and saw one, sometimes they could be identified by searchlights on the ground. That usually meant you had about five minutes until you had incoming artillery. Another thing that they had to deal with, you know, as far as hybrid, you know, this mixture of electronic warfare, using high powered radios on the Ukrainian side, could also basically allow the separatists to find and fix, fix the position. So happy to talk about it more, but I'm going to keep saying short. Right. Nier? I should add that this is my experience in Syria. You saw similar waves of like 15 armored suicide cars taken over Syrian army bases in places like Raqqa and Tabqa. Yeah. Anyway, as for Hezbollah, the Lebanese scholar Amal Saad has done some of the essential work on the, sort of the new Hezbollah. He's pioneered the work on Hezbollah as what she calls a resistance army, which defends its territory. And his last speech, which was like a week ago, Hezbollah leader, Said Hassan Asrallah, explained, actually, no, this is from a few years ago. Sorry. He explained that Hezbollah has evolved from armed resistance to popular resistance to a new school of warfare, which combines regular army and guerrilla fighters. And he attributed their new school to the slain Hezbollah leader, Ahmad Murnia, who modernized Hezbollah. Hezbollah is now in a sort of post-resistance situation. In his last speech, Nasrallah admitted that they're deploying men to fight ISIS in Iraq. He was commemorating the death of one of their martyrs called Hajj Alal Bosna, who had actually fought in Bosnia. And their new national security theory of preemptive warfare, they had applied it to Israel in the past, then now applying it against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. It's kind of that George Bush doctrine of fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here, implemented by some of the local actors in the region. And in this theory, the new U.S. is Saudi Arabia, and the new Israel is ISIS, al-Qaeda, Takfiris, terrorists, they use all kinds of terms to describe them. And we can trace Hezbollah's evolution. In 2000, when it expelled Israeli forces from most of Lebanese territory, it was an insurgent and a resistance on occupation. In 2006, it was defending Lebanese territory from a foreign invader. In 2008, there were some internal skirmishes. It was defending the resistance infrastructure from internal foes. And finally, in 2013, thanks to the civil war in Syria, Hezbollah became almost an army in parts of Syria, especially in Kusair, the town on the Lebanese border. And now Hezbollah's implementing counterinsurgency, at the same time as it's an insurgent, is doing homeland security for Lebanon, protecting the Lebanese homeland from suicide bombers being sent in from Western Syria, doing intelligence on alleged Takfiris cells inside Syria and Lebanon. It's reconciling with insurgents in Syria and negotiating with them so that they actually join Hezbollah to fight Jabhat al-Nusrah. It's doing train or mentor to advisor stuff, just like American special forces, embedding its key guys throughout indigenous forces to train them and augment them. It's doing this in Syria with Syrian army and then local Shia forces as well in Yemen, in Iraq. And it's doing like pinpoint sort of special operations missions to augment the local security forces throughout Syria as well. It's using artillery, some of it's designed by itself, armored personnel carriers. It's even used some killer drones here and there. It's intercepting communications to help pinpoint enemy threats and both small unit warfare and large unit warfare, especially in Western Syria, the areas that are key to securing the Lebanese homeland. It's recruiting sources the way an intelligence agency would in Lebanon and Syria. And it has think tanks to think about conflict and the war of the future. And it's, of course, thoroughly embedded in the Lebanese state and ministries and universities, et cetera. Hezbollah sort of went through what the US military went through in 0607 when there was a shortage of manpower and we had to massively expand the US military and sometimes even reduce standards and accept guys who maybe had imperfect records. So Hezbollah had to massively expand as well to confront this huge threat both internally and throughout the Middle East. And that's also led to kind of shift in their standards. Maybe the guys who fought in 2006 were more ideologically pure and went through more rigorous training than the current batch. I should add just for a second, it's too bad nobody's talking about the Kurds in Syria because we see a very similar phenomenon. They're an army, but they're also an insurgency. It's funny, actually, that the US's main partner in the war in Syria is an insurgent against one of our key NATO allies at the same time. And the Kurds are doing counterinsurgency, they're doing clearhold and build, reconciling with Arab Sunni tribes, providing state services to them, and getting air support from the US and the Russians. We can talk about that maybe later. Hezbollah, I should add, is also doing press tours for foreign journalists. And they've identified intellectually that their new enemy is, they call it a variety of things, Saudi as the main threat, but Sunni extremism, Wahhabis, Takfiris, and they prioritize that over Israel. Because this new enemy is actually genocidal. So with Israel, they don't like them, of course, and they view them as an enemy. But Israel didn't have the aspiration to just wipe out, physically exterminate everybody that was a Shia or was it a post-state Sunni or whatever. But the Takfiris and Hezbollah's mind do have that. And yet Hezbollah hasn't radicalized along Shia lines to confront this new radical Sunni threat. In fact, they've become a little bit better at cooperating with other forces, more secular, the Syrian army, some local Sunni forces. They're Sunnis fighting alongside Hezbollah, just like they're Sunnis fighting alongside some of the Shia militias in Iraq. But in the speech of March 1st, Hezbollah's leader actually identified Saudi Arabia as the main enemy and identified the suffering of the Yemeni people as worse than the suffering of the Palestinian people. This was a very significant moment that didn't really get much attention in terms of who is their real threat today. But at the same time, they view some of these Takfiris, Wahhabis, whatever, as working in a way on behalf of Israel. So they're weakening Hezbollah and distracting it towards the East. So they've had to compensate by adopting new technology to fortify their border in the south with Israel, lest Israel take advantage of their distraction in the East and try to move up into Lebanon. So they're still very much focused, of course, on Israel. Just to conclude, the most fascinating thing that's happening is being tested in Syria today. Something that was only virtual in the past. There's sort of Shia access, if you will. It's the first time where we see Hezbollah, Iraqi Shia militiamen, Iranians, occasional Afghan volunteer, the Syrian army, working together, sort of hand in hand, side by side, with Russian air support as well integrated into the picture. And we have a limitless supply of poor Shia men coming from south Iraq, unlike Hezbollah and south Lebanon. So this new increasingly integrated force is going to potentially have tremendous ramifications for the future of the Middle East, for the confronting the threat which they see as emanating from Saudi Arabia and what could very well be, as I described earlier, a much longer war. So it's interesting to hear the commonalities between not only these three groups, I hadn't thought of the YPG until you just mentioned it, that's a great other example. We all seem to be talking about the same thing. You near talked about how they're both conventional and unconventional, or conventional and insurgents. You talked about conventional tactics with unconventional means. And in the piece on War on the Rocks, on my Palmer's plug, this week I wrote that they're insurgents who've retained their base but have adopted significant capabilities of a post-modern army. So what are these commonalities that we see and what does this mean for the future of the regular armies that have to confront this, those of us who are a little closer to the mainstream foreign policy establishment don't really find all this funny. So how does the West react to this? You want to start, Nadia? Well, I actually wanted to ask sort of a leading question, which I think ties some of this in, in the sense that if in fact they've developed these capabilities, Dave's, the conventional maneuver warfare skills, Doug's point about the modern post-modern army, why are we having trouble? I mean, in the sense that we, those are skill sets that we are pretty good at, at the tactical level in some ways. So what, what creates, what's created some of the problems we've had? And I would venture to say part of that answer goes back to the political parts that I emphasize, because at the tactical level, we should be expert. So to draw that out a little. I mean, I would just say that the only one of these groups that we're talking about that has ever fought US forces on the ground was ISIS, and it got its ass massively kicked, right? Part of the reason why these guys are succeeding is they're fighting other non-state actors or they're fighting a, you know, a less developed military. If we were to actually take them on the ground without, you know, limiting ourselves to air power, I think we'd have a different outcome. But I think the other point is, why are they similar, right? Because we could talk about Taliban, we could talk about YPG, you're going to see a very similar operational style at the tactical level. And I know we wanted to stay away from theory, but my theory here is that this is an adaptive response by different groups to common features in the modern operating environment, right? And that if that's actually the case, then there's a lot to be learned here by applying a bit of evolutionary theory and thinking about how emergent structures come out of these kinds of adaptive traits that different groups adopt. And I think, you know, Nira and I have similar experience in Iraq and also Afghanistan of seeing guys start from very different positions and end up with very similar tactics after being exposed to the same battlefield conditions for a period of time. I mean, I don't know if you saw that in Ukraine, but you know, certainly you would have seen it in Afghanistan too. So it's a theory, right? This is not that they're colluding, that they're actually evolving independently towards an operational style which, by definition, is really well adapted for taking us on. Right. Nira? I'm going to advance to Nadia's question. By we, you mean the U.S., we're not really confronting these forces. This is the way that we may have done in the past. And I agree with Dave. I mean, if the U.S. military is sort of in the Olympics and the combatants in the places that I'm visiting these days are more like the Special Olympics. I mean, nobody is that elite, actually. And Doug, I'll answer to your question. I'm not sure that this is actually going to be much of an issue for the U.S. unless we send ground forces into Iraq. These forces are going to increasingly confront similar forces. Because of this vision of state collapse that I have for the Middle East, it's going to be a lot of hybrid warriors fighting each other rather than a lot of conventional militaries. The only conventional military that they may confront are the Turkish military, the Israeli military. But they may never actually have to worry about a Western military. Right. I would also say Western militaries and full hybrid or guerrilla militaries are reasonably solid when taking on these kinds of organizations. The people that are in the most danger and the weakest are the groups that try to fight like a Western military, but don't have the gear or don't have the training or don't have the command structure. Sort of like the Iraqis before the fall of Mosul, right? In fact, the Syrian army as well, when it was first confronting the insurgent threat, took them a few years to be able to adapt to fighting a guerrilla force. In fact, it took them almost the same amount of time it took for the U.S. to enter Iraq, and Hezbollah played a key role in helping them transition from a conventional kind of Soviet style military to being better able to operate in smaller units with more independence and flexibility. In a bucket, I mean, that's exactly what we're doing in Ukraine with the Ukrainian military, with beefing them up, trying to give them the proper C2 because it made the separatists such a formidable opponent to a kind of aging Ukrainian military was having the ability to communicate rapidly, you know, and mass fires, mass troops, and push the Ukrainians back. The other thing I'd just point out is if you have a smartphone and you have a homemade mortar with no side on it, because through your smartphone you've got access to Google Earth and to a variety of other tools, and you can download a set of firing tables for your mortar off the internet, you can achieve first-round precision fire out to the maximum range of your system in a way that a regular military that's been trained on the like two or three generations old mortar that's like surplus to Western requirements cannot do. And it's the ability to repurpose consumer electronics and the massive connectivity that's, you know, expanded on the battlefield in the last 15 years that enables like the way that, you know, I think I'm right in thinking that Hezbollah actually has a fiber optic cable system, right, that it runs from. Yeah. To avoid Israeli penetration. Right. So, you know, this is like a whole level of communications technology sophistication that we haven't really seen before from any of the groups we've fought recently. Before we go to the audience, just quick prediction. Do you think we'll see this somewhere else? You know, Burma, Thailand, are these places where we could see this same type of adaptation? Do you think this is a significant, you know, kind of generational adaptation? Will we see it there? I don't think we're going to see it somewhere else. I think we're going to see it everywhere else. I think it's an application of basic adaption to the broader conditions of the environment. You already see it in Somalia, you see it in Kenya, you see it in South Burma, you see it in South Thailand. It's, you know, Mexico with the cartels, yeah. It's Farke going in that direction. Nadia. I agree. I mean, I think it gives groups that desire new political outcomes, maybe nation insurgencies, the means, they essentially see these concepts that are working, it's relatively easily, as Dave and the others on the panel have said, to acquire the technologies you need. And, you know, they're not held back by the lack of the acquisition of major programs. At the last point, you've, as you've all pointed out, they've never really faced a First World Army, you know, the Turks, the Ukrainians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, the Israelis, the Syrians. What happens when they bump up against the United States, the Brits, the Russians? And in the Syrian war, without too many ground forces, there's Russian Special Forces guys running around here and there, but it's largely from the air. And trainers here and there were the Syrian Army, but they quickly changed the picture. Right, I mean, what you see in your train, I think with the political climate, no matter how much we beef up the Ukrainian Army, there's only gonna be so much they can do in a defensive posture, and I don't think, I don't see them at any time, even, you know, fully up to speed, you know, fully modernized, or that you're gonna have to push, you know, come up against the Russian Army. However, sorry, but if the U.S. would have tried to do that, it ends up being an occupier over again. I mean, anybody who gets sucked into that game is gonna be vulnerable the way any occupier would be. Great, we'll turn to the audience. Once again, wait for the microphone and identify yourself. Young lady here on the aisle. Thank you. Anette Eidler from the Changing Act of War Program in the University of Oxford. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the risk of conflating the hybridity of the actors themselves, with how the different groups cooperate with each other, which is what I work on, so how different valenance groups cooperate with each other. I mean, I've done a lot of fieldwork in Colombia where the FARC, they just mentioned, actually subcontract criminal groups or where a parameter is to enforce with the Mexican drug cartels, although from the outside it might look like hybridity, but in fact, it's really just different actors that work together. Or you mentioned also Hezbollah that cooperates with actors in Syria. So have we maybe neglected to try to interrupt these links by focusing too much on hybridity? Thanks. I think you make it very point, right? Because hybrid means something different to everyone that uses the term. And I've applied it to mean non-state actors that fight like states, right? But take the FARC, right? The FARC have this idea of the combination of all forms of struggle, combination of all forms of lucha, which basically means that that's hybrid in its strategic concept, that when you lose militarily, you switch to political, when you lose political, you switch to criminal, and it's that kind of whole model, which that's nothing to do with technicals and fire support is to do with an entirely different concept of war, which comes from the Vietnamese in the 1950s, right? So like without critiquing the concept of the panel, in our academic writing, I think most people have started to move away from hybridity as a concept to be thinking a little bit more specifically about what kind of hybridity am I talking about, right? Which isn't to undermine the validity of the concept, but we just have to be more detailed on it. All right. Right here in front. Rob Johnson, the changing current war program at the University of Oxford. So it's double-act. First of all, it's very striking for all of us to hear common features from the past, synchronization, adaptation, and I was very struck, Dave, by your description. I thought if you substitute the word vehicle, it doesn't put the word light cavalry in there, as you sort of did. It's light government. We're talking about the Saracens in the 12th century, so it's really fascinating. Now, to that end, if there is something that we may learn from history slightly deeper than the recent past, if you were challenged to find one point of dislocation for each of the groups that you have identified, what would that be, and have the Russians beat us to it? One point of dislocation. One point of dislocation. How would you break up this structure? Well, for the region I study this new phenomenon, looking at it from an American point of view, these are basically all undeclared allies. So there's not much of a threat to American interest, especially post-nuclear deal and the potentially improved relationship we're gonna see between the U.S. and Iran and the fact that in some ways the U.S. is providing air cover for some of these Shia forces. I mean, we're all fighting the same enemy here. So there's not much of a motive for the U.S. to disrupt this particular new kind of Shia anti-Takfiri alliance. Yeah, if I understood the question correctly, I mean, I think the hinging point between the separatists and their ability to fight comes with Russia's alignment and their political aims and the separatist political aims, which converge in a lot of areas, but also diverge. So I think if there's gonna be a place where you can kind of drive a wedge, that would be it. I would say, if I understand again the question correctly, the biggest weaknesses are they're really bad at holding ground. They typically don't do a good job of protecting populations while also holding ground and they can man control and logistics are very weak. What you see is a collection of combat units, not a military institution, and you can dislocate it in that way. But in some ways that's also a strength because I think the strongest element of the way certainly that ISIS operates, I would say the Taliban and to some extent YPG and others is they have modular structures down to a very low level that can be racked and stacked in completely different ways depending on the environment and can just flow through the environment without having to get new orders. And they have multi-role platforms, right? So platforms that can be fire support, they can be troop carriage, they can be heavy, and you don't have to issue special orders, people can just interpret. So what that means is that, sure, they have weak command and control, but it doesn't really matter because they just have general principles and they march to the sound of the guns. In a general way, I'd say that their strength has been predicting, I think, for good reason, our constraints and our range of activities and what we will or won't do because we tend to announce that in advance in many cases. So the flip side of it is maybe that they've become comfortable in those predictions and if we could think about how to disrupt that, that might be an avenue of strength. I think they remain tied to, at the end of the day, still insurgents. They're tied to the population that's both their strength and their weakness. When ISIS runs out of ungoverned Sunni Arab spaces, they have problems. Hezbollah doesn't seem to do well outside of Shia Arab spaces. When they bump up against a different ethnic group, that's when they have problems. And we have time for, we'll go to Harlan. I have a declaratory statement I wanna try to rest into a parliamentary question. As the term war on terror was, I think, unfortunate use of the phrase hybrid and asymmetric, likewise it seems to me ignores history because all war is hybrid or asymmetric to some degree. 200 years ago, Wellington's campaign in the peninsula. World War I, believe it or not, with cyber propaganda, the regular warfare in the form of Lawrence was certainly what we would call hybrid and Vietnam was indeed hybrid. So my question is, are we making a mistake in ignoring history in trying to use terms like hybrid and asymmetric when indeed these have been parallels throughout all of history and by ignoring history, we're not gonna be able to use it to take on these adversaries which are using in many ways traditional tools used differently? I'd say no, actually. I don't think we're ignoring history. I think essentially we've gotten a little bit lax and I don't think in this community we're denying that this is an historical anomaly but essentially we've just gotten lax in certain areas and I think that that's what this is about, essentially pointing out areas that we need to refocus and improve. That's how I interpret it. That's why I think the phrase actually has value because it's reminding us of some key things that we need to think better about. I don't know if HR is here but the statement's broken, I've said it maybe still is but I don't tend to think about this in historical terms at all. The conceptual underpinnings for the way I think about these adversaries are evolutionary biology, the constructal law, issues like complexity theory and I think that that actually gets you much further into thinking about how to fight these guys as distinct from how to understand them in their historical place in the universe which is interesting. But I think that we won't don't want to ignore history. We don't want to be like the guys who wrote the fourth generation warfare theory which is an awesome description of current warfare but a terrible caricature of the history of how we got here, right? So I don't want to discount it but I would say to me that tools that allow you to unlock this problem are mainly from the world of hard sciences actually. What's new to the extent that I know history is that groups like the Kurds in northern Syria has ballad other actors who are small nine state actors very guerrilla like are now able more and more to act like a state whether militarily or even politically in terms of services that provide security services or state services and the technology that they're using. So to me that does seem like a new phenomenon. All right, any closing statements? We've covered it. All right, with that we'll turn over our remaining 50 seconds back to the panel. Thank you very much. Thanks.