 I'm Kristen Lord. I'm the acting president here at the United States Institute of Peace. It's my great pleasure to welcome all of you here this morning to this workshop on conflict termination called Ending Wars to Build Peace. We're delighted to have you all here. It's a very important and timely discussion. For those of you who are visiting us for the first time, and if you are, I hope you'll come back, the U.S. Institute of Peace is a congressionally created, independent, and nonpartisan institution. Our mission is to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict around the world, and we do this by engaging directly in conflict zones, by providing analysis, education, and resources to those working for peace. USIP is very pleased to be collaborating with the U.S. Military Academy and its Center for the Study of Civil Military Operations and also the Rand Corporation on the very important, timely issue of conflict termination. Many have noted that it's easier to get into wars than to end wars, and history is with all too many examples, and one wishes we would learn more from them. Sixteen days ago, the world paused to remember the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that ignited World War I. Yet today, every one of us continues to deal with the aftermath of World War I, even now. In part, because of the efforts to end the war, we're more focused on revenge and retribution than on building long-term sustainable peace and justice. Since then, the United States has continued to struggle with the challenges of terminating wars, and hopefully this conversation today will help us do better in the future than we've done in the past. Well, Begin Today is pretty seeding with Dr. Gideon Rose, whose book, How Wars End, Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, has advanced our understanding of the challenges around conflict termination. I'm a big fan of the book. I told Gideon I would have brought my copy to hold up as on my Kindle, and it lacks the visual appeal of the actual cover, which is far more attractive. So I encourage you all to go on by the hardback, not even the Kindle version. Dr. Rose is the editor of Foreign Affairs, having served as managing editor of the magazine from 2000 to 2010. Before taking that position, he was the Olin Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. From 1994 to 1995, Dr. Rose was Associate Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs on the staff of the National Security Council. He received his BA in Classics from Yale, his PhD in Government from Harvard, and he's taught American foreign policy at both Columbia and Princeton. Gideon is known for asking hard questions like how the United States, the strongest nation in the world, wins military victories again and again, yet somehow struggles mightily to win the peace. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Gideon Rose. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen, and thank all of you. It's a great pleasure and honor to be here for somebody who simply writes about these things and studies them. The hope is that someday you'll be able to actually communicate things to the people who actually do things, and it's a great opportunity to do so. The smartest person to think and write about war, of course, was the great Prussian military theorist Klaus Witz, and he defined war famously as an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will. Klaus Witz also defined war as an act of policy, the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means. Smart Guy defines his subject completely differently in two separate ways. What gives? Did he not realize this was a contradictory? Did he mean it one time and not the other? Was this one of the passages that wasn't revised? I would argue that he defines it two ways because the great, central, enduring Klaus Witzian insight into war is that it is a jainist-faced, two-headed endeavor. It is both war as politics and war as force, and that the key Klaus Witzian challenge, you might say, is how to make the military means of war serve the political ends of war. The fundamental job of policymakers directing a war, whether in the military or in the civilian command authority working together, is to figure out how to harness military means to political ends. War termination is not a separate subject. It is a subset of the study of war more generally, and it is essentially the final stages of war. It is the question of how to close out military operations and wars and conflicts so that they smoothly achieve the ends that are desired and that the transition from the use of force, the continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means, becomes morphs into, as it were, the continuation of political intercourse without those means being used. So when you stop using force in a Klaus Witzian definition, wars end when you stop using force and continue the political discussion with other tools and means. The dual nature of war makes things inherently messy. It means that every action has to be judged according to two separate sets of criteria and in our system often two completely separate institutional bureaucracies. That's very confusing and complex and nobody likes to deal with a mess. And so we tend, both cognitively and bureaucratically, to try to make things much simpler, to separate the military and political things temporarily and bureaucratically. So there's a great American tradition of trying to say, okay, look, we understand that war is about politics and it involves the use of force to achieve political goals, but in order to reduce the mess, what we'll do is we'll have the politics skies, the National Command Authority and the diplomats and the politicians set the political goals and decide when we go to war. And then we'll turn things over to the military guys to fight the war and achieve the goals and then when that's done, they'll turn it back over to the political types who will deal with the post-war era. And this way we're not stupid, we understand that it's political and military together, but each has its own proper logic and its own proper professionals and so that's the way we'll deal with this. We'll separate that temporarily, political, military, political again. And the classic example of that actually, Tommy Franks actually wrote to Paul Wolfowitz at one point when Wolfowitz was the deputy secretary of defense asking about something having to do with post-war issues right on the eve of the Iraq War and Franks wrote to him, you pay attention to the day after, I'll pay attention to the day of. And this is sort of a classic sort of in some ways very logical approach. Look, I know military stuff, you do political stuff, that's not my job, my job is this. The problem is it's completely unworkable because the whole point of the Klaus Witzian dual definition is that everything in war is both political and military. I remember having this driven home in class once by a professor who was trying to make us realize just how central this actually was and he said there must be something, surely you all must think there must be something that's purely military, something like, oh I don't know, some routine bureaucratic aspect of the use of force. How about, okay, the boundary of a perimeter of a blockade for a naval blockade. This is obviously something that's a purely military endeavor that the naval authorities can do. And then he talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis and in fact during the Cuban Missile Crisis once we decided on a blockade of Cuba the Russian ships start coming towards the blockade and the White House is looking at this and going, oh shit, we don't know what we want to do if they actually hit that blockade and so the military was going, well you've got to make a decision, here's the blockade. And the White House says, no, pull the blockade lines in so that we have more time to decide so that they don't actually hit that yet and then we'll do a kind of thing. And in fact they do that and then there's a little more time and the situation gets resolved before Russian ships actually hit the enemy. And this was taught to me very simply as, look, even literally something as simple as the extent of a military naval blockade can be ultimately political. We know that the selfies that a lowly prison guard takes can be incredibly political. We saw that with Abu Ghraib. There is nothing, and the simplest political decision, a relatively minor decision on let's say the handling of enemy detainees and whether to give them sort of certain kinds of asylum can be an ultimately military decision. We end up fighting the last year and a half in Korea over the question of whether to give the communist prisoners in U.S. hands asylum rights. So there is no way to separate it out. And what that means is, as Klaswit says, the close of a war is when the military and political issues come together and that that's when the commander in chief acts simultaneously as a statesman. Now it's one thing if you have a Napoleon who not only is a genius but merges sort of political and military authority, right? We don't have systems in which we have Napoleons and we probably don't even have Napoleons, which is on balance I think a good thing. But it means that we deal with these things with fallible human beings in their separated roles in the military and in the political sphere. And what that means is that for countries such as the United States the challenge is how to think through these things in normal sensible ways and how to have the kind of bureaucratic and governmental cooperation and consultation at all stages and at all levels of the process so that this dual nature of war can be handled appropriately. I say in the book that the three basic lessons that stem from U.S. history in this regard are first that instead of thinking of the end of the war, the outcome of the war as something that sort of just results from your earlier stages that should be the goal that you want to work towards and that you should sort of figure out what goal you want and then sit back and try and reverse engineer it. The best example of this is Iraq in which sort of post-war issues and war termination issues and post-conflict issues were sort of lumped together as a classic phase four that was the terminology used at the time and then of course got entirely ignored for a variety of reasons, one of them being perfectly sensible. No one in the world has ever gotten to the fourth item on a to-do list. If you label things one, two, three, four you're obviously going to deal with one, two, and three first. The question of whether you're always going to deal with post-war planning after the fact instead of conflict doing that first was asked to one of the generals in Okanwa and he said, yeah, you shoot the wolf closer to the sled, which is a natural sense but for somebody actually doing operational planning but someone doing strategic planning has to think about the end goal because otherwise the earlier stages don't yield and accumulate to get you the goals that you want. And so the proper way to think about planning a war is to start with here's the result that I want, how do I get there, and then build the thing. So I actually said after thinking about this because there are lots of attempts to try to mandate post-war planning earlier on or add additional stages or later on. I think actually the simplest, silliest kind of but sensible approach to this would simply be to renumber the phases and in fact think of it as like a countdown, like a lift off which is you think of it your end result, here's what I want to achieve and then everything up to that is five, four, three, two, one blast off. So blast off is at the end when you actually have achieved what you want and by thinking about it that way it sounds like a silly little gimmick but what it would do is it would put the emphasis on making the earlier stages build and accumulate to the later stage that you want because if you don't do that, if you do it the reverse way then you're apt to be like the sort of person who jumps off a building and sort of they ask 90 floors down, how are things going? You say, hey, they're going great. And then you hit the ground a little bit later on because there's no way to judge the success of the earlier phases until it results in the achievement of an end state that is a durable, sustainable and acceptable end state. Now logical response to that is fine in theory that's a nice idea but in practice you can never possibly know what the end state is and no one ever does that and that's just a nice airy-fairy academic way of thinking about this that is impractical because the real world doesn't work that way. And to a certain extent that's true, the real world doesn't tend to work that way but the real world doesn't work that way not because it's impossible not because it can't work that way but because people choose not to have it work that way because policymakers, primarily by the way civilian policymakers, military guys are much better at planning than civilian officials because civilian officials and primarily the National Command Authority almost never does the proper forethought when it comes to war that they should. I've always thought that if the NSC were forced to do something like the simple five paragraph order before a war, we'd be a hell of a lot better off if you were to actually ask the president to sign. It's actually if you go back and look at the documents authorizing wars, it's scary how vague and illogical and abstract they are and how different they are from the kinds of documents that authorize even the lowest military actions within those wars. There's never any real sense of here's exactly why we're going to war here are the goals we're trying to achieve, here are our forces, their forces, here's how this is going to link up to that. If you were to force civilian decision makers to go through the kinds of planning and logic before they decide on things that the military does as a matter of course before its operations, we'd be a lot better off. But thinking about that and even if one can't get to a perfect definition of the NSC, the very fact of trying to consider things at the end and then say how do we work towards that? How do we build towards that? It's the right way to think about it because otherwise you always are simply dealing at the end of the war with the outcome of the actions and the choices that you made usually heedlessly or for some temporary short term reason at the beginning that leave you not where you want to be. If you sort of start from your trip by just walking then you don't know where you're going instead of saying here's my how do I map there. Second basic lesson that emerges from US history in these regards is that when you think about the end state and when you think about the goals that you're trying to achieve you should think about them in very concrete practical ways. We tend when we think about war objectives to think about very vague things victory or defeat, you know what? Those are lousy terms. Victory and defeat are so general. You kind of know defeat when you have it, but victory usually just means achievement of the goals that you want. So to say it's a kind of total logical thing saying we want victory and even defeat what actually how important is that? Does it matter how it goes? Or even ideological goals. We want freedom. We want democracy. We want security. All those things are nice. They're wonderful up there with mom and apple pie in the fourth of July, but they're so vague and so general that they're almost worthless as planning tools because the question then becomes how do you operationalize that? So what you really want policymakers to do before the war is to frame not just think about goals so you can design a strategy to achieve them but think about the goals themselves in very precise, careful ways and then price before buying. If we were to go to a store and make our purchases at the store without looking at price tags, we would pretty soon be broke unless we were Donald Trump or something like that because we would not know how much we were prepared to buy. But we set goals often without ever asking ourselves just how much those goals are going to cost. And one of the things that we do in war is we don't actually ask ourselves. My favorite example of this in the book that I talk about is the Korean War when I talk about that decision about the prisoners, which is nobody ever asked, gee, how much is this going to cost to give communist prisoners asylum? Because it turned out that the communist Chinese in particular but also the North Koreans didn't want their prisoners in our hands not coming back. It was a huge black eye to them. And so they ended up fighting for another year and a half and then it was a hugely messy end. We almost got into a nuclear war, literally, of all the issues, the question of whether to give foreign prisoners asylum. And it was because nobody ever bothered to say, gee, it's not just, is this a nice thing to have? Is this something we want? It's how much do we care about this and how are we going to achieve it? Even the question of what exactly it means, Woodrow Wilson, we famously fight World War I to make the world safe for democracy and Wilson defines he doesn't use the word regime change but that's what he's thinking about. He wants to get rid of authoritarianism in Germany as part of the settlement. But he never bothers to ask himself, and this is amazing for the only political scientist ever to be president, what democracy actually means. Is a constitutional monarchy in Germany acceptable? This actually comes up at the end of the war when the Kaiser is still in power but Germany becomes a parliamentary democracy. And the question is put to the U.S. negotiators over the surrender documents. Is this okay? And the discussion comes up and it's literally unimaginable to me that Wilson had never thought about the question of what democracy meant by having framed it as the U.S. goal. When we talk about freedom, when we talk about democracy, when we talk about security, we have to define those goals incredibly carefully in advance to know when we need to achieve them, what we have to do, how much price we have to pay. Finally, the last major lesson that occurs is lots of stuff happens in war. Things are always confusing and don't always go the way we want. Sometimes they go better than expected, sometimes they go worse. The first Gulf War went better than expected. The second Gulf War went worse than expected. And backup plans that challenge your assumptions and essentially give you options and contingency planning, which is, by the way, even harder to do than the regular planning, obviously, but at least giving you some sense of what your plan B is or what your fallback position is or your fall forward position. Gee, I would like to take this. We end up getting involved in a lot longer Korean war because there was no really good contingency planning done for, let's say, Incheon actually is an incredible success. Do we want to exploit that further? And so the decision to go north of the 38th parallel to push forward to the Yahoo, the Yahoo, sorry, not the Yahoo, is done by MacArthur bullying the Joint Chiefs largely on the basis of momentum and his own plans because the question of, gee, is the success going to be so great that we actually want to go forward and expand our goals? That was never really thought of beforehand. And so, yeah, at least some attempt to think through is necessary and appropriate. And he might say this stuff. People when I talk about this say, well, this is all common sense. It's nothing but common sense. And that's absolutely true. And then common sense. But just as in the real world, common sense is actually very rare in military operations and in national command planning in particular. I say this as a former NSC guy, a peon, but still it's amazing to me. When I studied this subject, I was continually outraged by how bad the planning was for such consequential acts of national policy as wars. Time and again, war after war after war, decisions were made of the most incredible consequence, but they were treated almost casually and done without much forethought, without much planning, and they led us into suboptimal situations in which we basically fumbled around at the end, trying by brute force or persistence or genius or improvisation to salvage things that should never have been posed or questions that should never have been posed in the first place. And the only thing that frankly that made it tolerable to go through this incredible litany of stupidity and human failure and bad decision making was the fact that after every one of these, I kept looking and saying, okay, well, why did this happen? And I kept looking for the thing that would make it happen each time. And it turned out that there was nothing other. Look, there are problems and challenges. It's always difficult, but human failure and frailty and sort of simply bad planning and lack of common sense was a repeated theme, and it could be done better in the future. And so the fact that if all we did was to think about the process of getting into wars and war termination more carefully, if that was all we did, we would actually be far ahead of the game. One of the ways I think about this is there are these interesting studies about investment performance in the market. Investors actually on average do more badly, do worse than the mutual funds even that they are invested in. It's not just that they pick bad funds, which they do, and pay high costs and pay high taxes and that kind of thing. It's that they do worse on average over time even than the funds they invested. How can this be? Because most investors, being human, are driven by fear and greed. Instead of buying low and selling high, they buy high and sell low, and they end up doing stupid things all throughout. We know what it is to lose weight. You eat relatively limited amounts of relatively healthy food and you get a decent amount of exercise. It is not rocket science. Tens of millions of Americans every year chase fad diets from all watermelon to all juice. I live in a place called Park Slope in Brooklyn and a couple of years ago there was this fad about cleansing. You know people going around drinking cayenne pepper and maple syrup and hot water and lemon juice and this was supposed to be... And these are smart, serious people. We don't follow the rules of common sense in ordinary life a lot. I think that after studying this subject a lot, what I came down to was the fact that most of the mistakes that happened in regard to wartime planning and post-war planning in particular come from people in high authority, mostly the command authority, but also the senior military leadership, often behaving in ways that are totally human, reacting impulsively to situations, getting caught up in emotions, dealing in short-term thinking with immediate constraints, rather than sitting down acting like the professionals they are and should be, and trying to think for the long-term and having the fiduciary responsibility that they have to make decisions for the nation as a whole, husbanding that and being prudential and careful in what they actually do. And I think that if we could instill those kinds of mental traits in our decision-makers at the highest levels, we would be a lot further along. With regard to some of the conflicts in particular that are going on right now, so just very, very briefly, there's an old story about a guy who's hiking in the woods and he gets completely lost and he stumbles into a clearing and he sees a little farmhouse and he goes over and he knocks on the door to the farmhouse and the farmer comes out and he says, sir, thank God I stumbled on this clearing. I'm trying to get back to town. Can you tell me how I get back to town? And the farmer looks at him and goes, well, the first thing is I wouldn't start from here. And so we screwed up, frankly, our post-score planning in both Iraq and Afghanistan so badly over the last decade and a half that that's kind of the attitude that I have towards those conflicts now and have for several years. It's very, very difficult. Once you make the mistakes badly early on, you're kind of screwed. Once we took out all of Iraq's governing mechanisms, we were saddled with a chaotic mess and had no plans for what to do to put it back together in some kind of way and we're dealing with the ultimate reality of that now. But there's a slightly more hopeful Chinese proverb that I also like that says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. And so, you know, since what is done is done, the real question now is, okay, so what do you do now? And what I would say is we have three basic conflicts, right? We have a rock which we're out of and asking ourselves, are we really out and do we need to go back in? There's Afghanistan in which we're heading towards the exits and then there are the group of the future conflicts from Syria on in which we have not yet entered and the question there is, what do you think about? And what I would say is, and we got into a very interesting discussion in the breakfast cocktail hour, as it were, beforehand with Ambassador Jeffrey about Iraq and I think the fundamental question being asked right now about both Afghanistan and Iraq is, are these countries absolutely vital to American national security? Because the question of whether you need, not just to care, but to care so much about their internal workings and events there that you are prepared to put American blood and treasure on the line to organize and stuff, is all the difference in the world between sort of a vital interest, something that's in the core and a non-vital interest, something that's essentially in the mental periphery? And the real question we're asking ourselves, the Bush administration essentially expanded after 9-11 the sphere of American vital interests further into areas that had not yet been seen to be vital. So we didn't code Afghanistan as vital in the 1990s. After 9-11 we did and suddenly events there became worth fighting over and worth controlling the political situation in order to achieve security. After the settlement in 91, we essentially coded Iraq itself sort of like North Korea as something outside the wire, outside in the periphery to be contained whereas Kuwait was sort of inside. Kuwait was more like South Korea. We stumbled into a kind of quasi-Korean settlement after the Gulf War where Iraq is into the north and Kuwait is the south. That wasn't entirely what we intended but that was what we stumbled into. Again, sort of the Bush administration reconceptualizes this and says, no, Iraq is part of our vital interest and we spend a long time fighting over both Iraq and Afghanistan and the Obama administration clearly, I think, its grand strategy is involved in redrawing lines of core and periphery. It's not isolationist but it clearly has a less expansive conception of American vital interests, a less expansive conception of what is a core interest than the Bush administration did and it's pulling those lines back in. It won't fight over Syria. It's not going to fight over Crimea. It's not even going to fight over Ukraine. We'll fight over Poland. We'll fight over the Baltics. We have Article 5 guarantees and so forth. We'll fight over certain areas in the Middle East but not others. And the real question we're asking ourselves now is are these areas in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a certain extent Syria as well, are these part of the areas that we will ultimately fight over or not? Because the question of specific policy is do we have a threat from ISIS or the Caliphate or the Islamic State? That's not the right question because sure you have a threat. Nobody but an idiot would say there isn't a threat but just because you have a threat doesn't mean you deal with it by going into militarily colonized the country. There are lots of threats around the world that even if we can recognize as threats we don't colonize the country as a result. And so the question we're asking ourselves really is is this a threat that is so significant and dealable with by our getting involved militarily on the ground that it's worth actually intervening in a major way or in the Iraq's case re-intervening, in the Syria case intervening for the first time, in the Afghanistan case in some ways as we look forward reversing our decision to withdraw. And what I would say is this is where sort of war termination strategy with regard to a particular conflict links up with a second level which is American grand strategy and in some ways this is actually really interesting because for most of its history the United States has been a rising power and it has expanded its scope of interest with its rise across the continent, south throughout the hemisphere, over to Europe, over to Europe permanently after World War II, over to Asia and to Asia permanently and starting in the 70s codified in 79 in the Persian Gulf, then even more on the ground in the Persian Gulf, then after 9-11 to a further level and the question that you're asking yourself with regard to war termination is not just how you're going to close out this war in a sustainable way to a political settlement that is viable and desirable and sustainable but how you're going to link that up with the broader pattern of U.S. foreign policy and if the broader pattern of U.S. foreign policy is to redraw the lines of our core interests such that there are areas outside the wire then the question becomes is this the part of the world that is tiger country that is Hickey, here are dragons it is part of the map that you don't care about enough to be involved in that you care about to deal with threats by fending them off but not by stopping them at their source or is it part of the world that is part of your core that you have said this is inside the walls and therefore we need to actually stay garrison them, protect them and make them part of the core American world order that's the key decision in many respects and it's not just one about war termination it's a prior one about interests and about goals and about whether the populations involved are absolutely necessary to American security in a way that the American order is going to be extended to we're going to push our mental periphery to include them and what I'll conclude with is my wife does a lot of animal rescue work and we end up taking in a lot of stray cats a lot of feral cats and there are three solutions in some respects there are feral cats that are out there and they can either be left out there or simply picked up by animal control and euthanized and so forth there's adoptions you can sort of take them and socialize them and adopt them out and give them permanent homes and then there's fostering and fostering is you sort of take them in you treat them a little bit you try and socialize them but they don't necessarily get permanent homes and fostering is a kind of difficult decision to make because it's really supposed to be a temporary process and if you don't find a home you're stuck with a foster and it clogs your entire system and it actually is difficult and so increasingly what is being done is something called trap neuter release TNR and trap neuter release is you take the feral cat you take it to a vet you neuter it or spay it and then you release it back into the wild so that you've done something for the problem because it's not going to replicate but it's also not going to be a drag on your permanent infrastructure because you're not going to maintain it you're not going to find a home and in some ways as incredibly sort of shallow and superficial as it seems this is not a bad way of thinking about some of the core decisions that have to be made for US national security policy and what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is there are parts of the world that are feral and that we are not going to deal with and we know we're not going to deal with we don't even make a pretense of dealing with there are parts of the world that are so important that we decided we have to adopt them we've adopted Western Europe and Europe more generally we've adopted Japan and the Far East they are part of our core interests we're going to protect them they're part of the family we've adopted some parts of the Middle East somewhat problem-child but still but then there are some other parts and these are parts that we sort of feel like we need to deal with and we sort of end up fostering if you think of Vietnam if you think of Iraq if you think of Afghanistan I would argue that what we essentially did was we fostered these countries and then we got tired because it was painful and it was costly and it was difficult and we never really thought of them as family we never really adopted them we never brought them in but we got kind of tired and so we sort of just said you know what, I'm sick of this I'm tired I'm out of here and we made some arrangements and we basically let them go and that was crappy for all parties concerned and if you're not prepared to adopt it's probably better to do something like TNR it's probably better to go in, defang deal with the immediate threat and not make any pretense of fostering because if you're going to foster for a very long time it doesn't do anybody very good and it clogs up the entire system and it saps your will and it doesn't ultimately help the people involved when you release them back into the wild and so the question we have to ask ourselves and the last thing I'll say is not just about war termination and how to close out a conflict specifically but whether the country involved whether the population involved is one that we are fundamentally prepared to adopt as part of the core American sphere as part of the liberal international order because if we're not then we should think of our war termination and our war planning options and our goals in the war in a much less radical way in a much more limited, narrower way than if we're saying yes these are part of the family and you're now inside the gates and we're protecting you bar none and those are the questions we have to ask about the conflicts before they start or now whether we're just out or whether we're on the way out but just how much do we care and that will affect what kind of actual policies we do thank you very much we will now turn to a panel that Tara Sonnenschein will moderate and she'll do the introduction of our panel members you may all start to come up and Tara is a former Executive Vice President of the U.S. Institute of Peace former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy with a long distinguished career in journalism so Tara I'm going to turn it over to you now what I'll do is grab the hand step over you well is everybody intellectually charged and challenged at this point because you are about to have a real treat in the expertise to build on what Gideon Rose has said let me begin by thanking Kristen Lord and the Institute and Paul Hughes and also John Melkin of the Center for the Study of Civilian Military Operations at West Point he conceived of and supported this idea along with John de Blasio and it is really an important conversation and so I begin by thanking them and would you join me in a round of applause for the Institute of Peace now before I formally introduce folks I should say that the last panel I did that was as difficult as when war ends was a panel I did on when life begins now you think about it I had the best experts religious, political, secular and a conversation and I will just tell you that we came away with no consensus but I know today will be far easier and to help through this I am going to ask that you welcome and then I will join them first and foremost Lieutenant General Robert L. Caslin Jr. he became the 59th superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on July 17th, 2013 almost exactly a year to the day and prior to that assignment he served as Chief of the Office of Security Cooperation for Iraq he's had many deployments and assignments and decorations too many to list but we are honored and privileged if you would join me in welcoming General Caslin and seated if you haven't noticed another uniform that belongs to Lieutenant General Mark Milley he's held multiple command and staff positions in seven divisions special forces over the past 20 plus years serving in multinational forces in Egypt Panama, Haiti, Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan and other hotspots all on your wish list of destinations I know he has more medals and commendations than I can list he's been recently nominated for promotion to General and so we congratulate and welcome Lieutenant General Mark Milley I've been asked to call Ambassador James F. Jeffery Jim I find that very difficult because he is a man of such enormous distinction today he is a fellow at the Washington Institute focusing on U.S. strategies to counter Iran's influence in the Middle East he is one of our nation's top diplomats having served in your favorite places Iraq, Turkey and many other places would you join me in welcoming Jim Jeffery oh my missing, I'm just making sure Jim Cunder is here Jim Cunder a senior fellow at the Marshall Fund principle of his own consulting firm he's extensive government and private sector experiences at U.S. aid and other agencies he has deployed for the U.N. save the children the U.S. government to Afghanistan, Bosnia and for all of you who want a real wish list trip Somalia would you join me in welcoming Jim Cunder now I think Rick Brennan he's not, he's here someplace and I do want to acknowledge Rick Brennan senior political scientist at Rand and also a policy maker and I believe author of another book ending the U.S. war in Iraq with that I'm going to join these fine folks and we are going to shed light on what you've heard and then get your questions ready thank you very much well I want to give everyone a chance to reflect on what we heard from Gideon Rose but I guess if I had to boil it down I would ask one very simple question why war before we talk about termination why are we doing this in the first place and I guess I would turn I feel like now I'm in the middle of the egg the yolk and the white that he was kind of outlining and we should have mixed it up we can change seats we'll manage to create a holistic integrative approach but General Kasselin why are we even getting into our business to begin with and how do we define why we do what we do and then how we get out of it well I can talk about how we get out well I haven't been the director of officer of security cooperation with my incredible battle-buttling buddy Ambassador Jeffries as we went through that particular transition you go to war in the first place obviously it's a political decision that's made by our senior most senior leadership of any administration ideally based on our constitution with the backing of the American people and normally it's through an analysis of understanding what our national interests are and then what are the conditions that are out there that pose a threat to our national interests to the point that as our administration looks at different options of national power war which equates to the military use of national power is the mechanism that's elected and then of course once you get into war it becomes very turbulent and becomes an animal in itself and it doesn't normally move in the directions that you expect it's going to move it creates opportunities and it shuts down other opportunities and as you work your way through at some particular point everybody wants to kind of terminate fighting in most cases sometimes there's a strategic issue out there that the nations want to terminate fighting but there exists a threat within nations that even though we may not be at war with that nation that threat exists within the nation that threatens that particular nation so even though we may want to terminate war we still or somebody still has to deal with that threat that remains which is interesting in itself and then you go into war termination and I think we talk about war termination at the end of Iraq I think we had a Gallant war termination working with General Austin who was the commander at the particular time he analyzed every specific task and had the resources assigned to all the different tasks and they attracted magnificently all the way through when they left Baghdad on the 17th of December in 2011 to when they finally left Kuwait I think about four or five days later and the thing that my observation was from the Office of Security Cooperation was the issue was not so much war termination as it was war transition because there was an aftermath to the termination that you kind of had to deal with and had to kind of respond to for example I think it was right about the 23rd of December when Ambassador Jeffries and I all of a sudden received a be prepared to evacuate order from CENTCOM and we were the security cooperation element that was really there designed to work the Title 22 and the remaining Title 10 issues and all of a sudden CENTCOM said be prepared to evacuate and the reason we were going to have to evacuate is because we did not necessarily have the conditions that were set to allow us to remain on a legal basis so war transition in this particular case the termination was a gallon exit but war transition never prepared the conditions for the follow on organization to deal with the aftermath and it was during that particular time that we kind of went in turmoil and it took us over six months to recover from that particular incident. I want to jump over to you just to pick up on that and then we'll come back around the panel to this first question but that evacuation and that sense of transition from an end state to something else what is that about? Well we knew it when we saw it we had prepared for many months for a transition to the civilian side while simultaneously working for and hoping that we could continue a military presence which would have taken care of 98% of my problems well it didn't happen and so I had 98% of my problems with General Kastlin as my great colleague and friend in this and we invented it as we went along everything from trying to get convoys of trucks in to trying to keep our security assistance personnel who were responsible for security and Medevac and everything else at these various locations where we're supporting the Iraqi military and as I said you would invent it as you go along but one thing I drew out of it and I have to refer to General Kastlin here if you're going to be in a situation like this you better have a military sidekick who's willing to say hell no to his entire chain of command thank you General Wow I'm amazed I'm almost afraid to go further we're really deep under the hood already but this notion of the military and civilian having to think through so much as you look back and we were talking about earlier presidents and earlier wars how much is this jointness a part of the early consideration of war and then it's ending well I'll get to jointness you asked earlier why do you go to war you know if the city is kind of the best with fear, honor, interest kind of thing and that's basically let's break it down honor and interest so that has held the test of time for recorded military history sort of thing give me an example of fear why don't we go into Afghanistan in order to deny al-Qaeda any sort of safe haven because we were afraid honor there's lots of honor out there right now today is the 14th of July just a few weeks ago, 100 years ago Archduke Ferdinand gets killed so it began a sequence of events standard operating procedures war plans, mobilizations, etc but it was all based in the honor of the Habsburg Empire and then all of a sudden income of the Russians, income of the Germans and so on and so forth and they were kicking in based on honor, what they perceived to be some national interest and then I think if you could roll the clock back and you could tell the leaders of those countries at that time that the end state of World War I would be the slaughter of a third of European youth in a destruction of all their empires they probably in their own cost-benefit analysis probably would say I'm not going to do this had they stopped the war in December or January 14 or January 15 you had a whole different situation but they kept going for another four years so if they knew the end state before they started that they probably wouldn't have done it but they didn't and fear on our interest drove them and then there's a lot of other causal factors, there's the diplomatic underpinnings, the economic piece and there's a whole chapter in World War I but that's an example so there's some fundamental things that have driven nations to war over the years and there's elaborate dissertations about each one of those over time but fundamentally he kind of nailed it about 2,000 years ago or whatever he wrote it so fear on our interest I think it's held the test of time and the idea that interest and I think Gideon is spot on there when he says that the you know paraphrase Klausowitz the supreme art of a statesman is to determine the type of war you're getting into and figure out the end state before you get into it and all that well that's good and that's what we should do that's what we endeavor to do, that's what we try to do both on the civilian side and the military side before you get into it but we are deeply flawed as human beings and you cannot predict the future and war is a dynamic it's an interaction between competing wills and you cannot predict with a high degree of accuracy the direction it's going to go necessarily so Abraham Lincoln when he starts getting involved in the Civil War or the leaders of South Carolina they had no clue where that war was going to go I don't think King George thought for a minute that the Revolutionary War was going to end with the dissolution of the British Empire and North America so most of the time throughout history the decision makers who have decided to endeavor to engage in a war thought they had an end state and thought they had an achievable acceptable cost endeavor that they're about to get into but in fact looking backwards from history they really didn't have all that it's a very very difficult proposition I agree with Gideon that's what we should do but it's very difficult to do it at the time you mentioned the jointness piece as a military we operate as a joint force when we do contingency operations Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard that's a given we've been doing that now for a long time Gold Waters, Nichols really put it into law we've been operating as a joint force throughout the wars that have been going on now for 12-13 years but even before that the jointness I was thinking not only within DOD but on the civilian side you have to be jointly involved since you're going to be coming up and cleaning up the mess you know Tara I think the issue I'd like to introduce and you give me a perfect and tried and true Washington fashion I was looking for a way to turn your question into what I wanted to say anyway but when I read Gideon's book and I mean there's really great insights in there but the big question that seems to me unspoken in all this are the structural questions the form and function question Gideon's remarks this morning Gideon was saying we need smart people to do what they should be doing sitting around and thinking about these things ahead of time but Jim Jeffery used to serve as one of his many distinguished positions as senior deputy assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs now if you're that person today and you take Gideon's implications seriously you should be sitting thinking about what are you supposed to think about Iran, Iraq, the Maghreb, Yemen, I mean Lebanon what we don't have it never hurts in Washington conferences to state the blindingly obvious the State Department never had its Goldwater Nichols bill Gideon mentions in his book the great work that the State Department policy planning staff did with the future of Iraq project that everybody now recognizes we should have listened to but all 20 of those guys yelling as loud as they could into the interagency could barely be picked up by the receivers at CENTCOM so we don't have the joint staff we don't have CENTCOM's joint staff on the civilian side of the government so when we grapple with these really big questions of how come we win the wars on the going in end but we do such a lousy job on figuring out what we're going to do at the end who is there thinking about these things so you've got to get to the structural issues if we had a thousand guys at the State Department thinking about this stuff now my argument is you'd get a better product the problem is you've got nobody staff to do these things so you're training folks we like to think of it as quality what can you loan them is it numbers or concepts I'll go back to the 9-11 commission the 9-11 commission is the congress commission this commission to look at 9-11 and to understand what were the threads that led to the attack and what were the circumstances here within our government that allowed those circumstances to incur and there was a number of recommendations and one of the I think the most powerful recommendations that I wouldn't personally and a lot of people would still need to be enacted is to take Goldwater's Nickel to the next level so there's not necessarily Goldwater's Nickel within the Department of Defense like we did or within Department of State that Jim had advocated but to take it to the next level and have a Goldwater's Nickel where you work within all the departments of the United States government so that we become an inter department rather than a joint service model in the Department of Defense a joint department model among the United States government so that we understand what it means in the military to operate within state in their culture and Treasury and Justice in the other departments and then to take but we know we're not going to do it by ourselves we're going to have to have legislation to direct it because the services couldn't come together in a joint manner by themselves it had to be legislated so that's a recommendation where I think we ought to go to and there is an interagency process well I was going to say we have it's not as if we have to invent an interagency process one exists for precisely this kind of thinking so what's wrong with what we've got that gets to the basic question you've asked us to look at frankly if you look at a really serious operation the first Gulf War the interagency process worked extremely well there was a diplomatic line of operation there was a sanctions line of operation there was a military one there was even a financial one and everybody coordinated together much of the talk and I agree with Bob Castlin on how to focus on this is the nature of the conflicts we found ourselves in and that's what I want to just mention very quickly because it's crucial to the questions we're asking starting wars and ending wars as Gideon pointed out is difficult for anybody as 100th anniversary of World War I but it's particularly difficult for us Americans why first of all we don't really like Klaus Witz I was going to do all this and go into Klaus Witz but Gideon did it all for me but in a way by citing in his first reference to Klaus Witz's famous quotation policy he did something that Americans normally don't normally we say war is a continuation of politics by other means that's a mistranslation of the German and it's policy and high policy we use politics because of course that's dismissive we don't like it we don't believe in this as a country we believe that as he said and we're going deep into Klaus Witz now that that unique nature of war as something separate from normal policy basically a fight to the death of two wrestlers was another way he looked at it dominates and that to quote General McArthur there's no substitute for victory therefore we separate war from policy that's bad but secondly that's particularly bad for us because our policies are very convoluted ever since certainly World War I we're not fighting wars to defend ourselves as the French and the British did in 1940 one successfully one not against invasion we're not even fighting to expand our power as we did in the Mexican war or as we did in the Spanish American war eventually waging wars of choice for the expansion of our values Wilsonian the four the four freedoms those kind of things and we've been doing this certainly since World War II and I would argue in World War II as well that means that the policies we're trying to get do are really hard to get our arms around them and even more so because we're denying that we're even doing this for policy and we're doing this for some other vague reason to get to Gideon's point and I had to think about it because I started off nodding when he said yeah we kept the Korean war going for 18 months because we didn't want to give those prisoners back but then I remembered we gave hundreds of thousands of prisoners back to the Russians after World War II and it left a huge black mark in the psyche of the American military in particular and as a 23 year old army lieutenant what I have fought on Porkchop Hill Chinese and North Korean young men from going back to certain imprisonment and possible death I don't know what I want one of my children to do so well I've got one in Afghanistan on his third tour so this is a really complex set of issues we've got because we're basically in this thing not only as a country but as a international cause well now it raises cost and duration and it seems to me that two parts of the question is how long are we going to be in war it depends on how you define it and I guess looking and you mentioned it Iraq invades Kuwait August 1990 we were in there within six days is that accurate I think we were in Kuwait in six days we were in Saudi Arabia too in order to protect Saudi Arabia so we respond to things and there's a trigger and suddenly we're in something is our mindset already how long are we going to be there and what are we going to do when it's time to get out are we thinking at that very moment of entrance about the exit from the play well in the example that you mentioned here the first Gulf War the objective was to to liberate Kuwait to drive Iraq out of Kuwait so that was the end state objective so that was according to the Apollo doctor and that was going to be your end state that was your war termination objective and when that was achieved you remember the big dialogue in discussion whether or not we should go to Baghdad or not and they in the administration fell back on what was our objective and that was the objective right there and we dealt with the aftermath now some people would argue well the aftermath since you never went to Baghdad you never were able to you know take Saddam out with all of his other programs WMD programs that supposedly were there as well and all those sort of things but nonetheless this was our objective we achieved you had a checklist something very specific dislodge Iraq from Kuwait and check the box and mission accomplished not to use a phrase the question then becomes the second go around and if we stick with this for a moment to keep our coalition partners with us we had to stay on a defined set of goals so one could argue that that was a success until we moved the goal post and it seems to me that part of this is once you get out are you done or are you going to be coming back for chapter two or three or four we did an analysis because so many USAID foreign aid resources were being chewed up in conflict zones we tried to take a look at what are the deep drivers of conflict education is it your form of government and clearly the independent variable that just kept recurring was the greatest correlation between conflict and any other variable we can think of is previous conflict in the zone I mean these problems that's why this line of analysis is so critical because these are recurring deep political issues that we're going to face on a recurring basis Iraq there are going to be issues there whether we send troops or not it's another question but we're going to be there for a long time so the question is how do you engage civilian military thinking early enough in the process and the reason I keep coming back to these structural issues and the resource questions is in my experience I keep, first of all let me say there's been progress made I mean we've now institutionalized if we're looking at a military action the military does a great job of finding the humanitarians in the US government and saying you know we don't want to bomb that bridge because at the end of this thing they're going to have to run food convoy so we've made some real good progress but I still believe that many of these end state transitional phase four problems that is to say when the military hands over if you will we lose the battle at D-90 that is to say when the military is already cranking along on the planning process the civilians are holding an interagency meeting another pickup team and guys are introducing themselves to each other instead of having the resources to engage on phase four early enough in the process and I say that with great respect because the former deputy national security advisors sitting next to me but Jim from where I you know you're running a team of you know at relative hand the national security council it sounds so big and important it's a relative handful of people who are on detail from you know state CIA, USAID, Treasury or some place so I do believe there is a fundamental resource allocation we got a lash up earlier and I just argue that you know it's great to say we ought to be doing a better job the civilians ought to think about this stuff more but people are just running on a treadmill the war ends the conflict continues what I'm hearing is that the war part reaches a termination stage but the driving forces the reasons you got involved the national security interests that were operative at the beginning those continue so do we assume that if you went in you better be prepared for the really long haul yeah but it's at several levels again the first Gulf War which was more of a classic war sure they were sitting around in Kuwait in a quasi combat environment a few years later over Saddam sure they were issues after the war but basically it was a military mission it was accomplished brilliantly and we achieved a specific result we still had a Saddam Hussein to deal with just as we had before 1990 but we didn't have an invasion of Kuwait we didn't have about 25% of the oil reserves at least in the hands of one crazed dictator so that was a result and I think as I said under those circumstances the interagency process works well in the division of labor we have then you have wars where the fighting ends but we as a country have a huge what we call phase four our stability situation in this career in Japan is that the we broke it we fix it we have broken those countries and we felt that we wanted to fix it particularly as we had tried to fix Germany 30 years or 20 years earlier and we saw the results so this time we decided we would stay on and have a civilian military program both in Japan and in Germany to deal with the aftermath of our victory and we were very very successful and so we didn't need Goldwater, Nichols or anything what we're talking about right now frankly is Afghanistan Iraq and Vietnam we're talking about when we use military means for essentially social, political, economic nation building this is something that I would stop by saying if you can ever avoid that do and if you do do it if I am the exit strategy for these guys they don't have a very good exit strategy because it's very very hard for we civilians as Jim Cunder knows over decades in a non-conflict environment to do real economic change as I know as a diplomat involved with a dozen disputes from Nagorno-Karabakh to Kashmir to Cyprus it's extremely hard even when there isn't fighting to bring ethnic, political, historical disputance together and resolve these things so if the idea is we will secure the population we will tamp down the insurgency and we'll turn it over to the civilians to deal with the underlying political problems and create a Sweden we can't do that we can't deliver and better organization of the interagency process is not going to fix that so this is exactly the question that was put to the army war college strategic study and this institute that emerged with a report out of the war college said of Iraq and I quote to be successful an occupation such as that contemplated in Iraq requires many forces multi-year military commitments and a national commitment to nation building is that realistic from where you sit can you participate in something that is multi-year multi-cost national and do you have to care about that on your way in to dislodge a country or to remove weapons or to clear roads can you be thinking of this bigger enterprise well there's two things you ought to think about first and foremost the thing that's unique about Iraq and Afghanistan that's different from Germany post world war two and even Korea I would argue is that the strategic issue is how do you go to war against an enemy or how do you continue to deal with an enemy that exists within a country that you're not at war with so it's your enemy is in a country you're not at war with so if this insurgency still remains and we pull out then the answer to the strategic question is you transition almost to phase five which is to build capacity and build capacity in the security apparatus and I would also argue build capacity because good governance normally results in good security bad governance always results in bad security so that's where you have to really build capacity now so this is where you've got to provide the resources the strategies and I'd also argue from a big lesson learned from Iraq is the authorities the authorities from congress to be able to train advice and things that you need well we haven't even gotten to congress and I'm not going to go there I was going to add to that what Gideon was saying was it comes down to cost-risk cost-benefit risk analysis so how long you want to stay how much, how many, how long that depends on cost, risk and the benefit you expect to get from it and that goes back to fear, honor, and interest what are your national interests is it a matter of international honors or are you deathly afraid of what the outcome might be and that's going to determine the size of the military civilian domination, how much money for how long so in the World War II model we learned a lesson from World War I World War II ends and we decide that peace in Central Europe is fundamental to the national security interests of the United States you've got the rise of the Soviet Union even though they were our ally that was perceived by some of the senior leaders not widely known in the public at the time so the decision was made to stay the long haul and we're still there by the way so you know you look at Korea saying very similar thing Armistice was signed in 1953 but we're still there so that had to do with combination of fear, honor, and interest and cost, benefit and it's a relatively low cost to build the capacity to build some white space for a government to come into being so you had an authoritarian government there for a long time military style government democratic in the last 20 years so it takes a long time takes a long time and it depends on what your interest is and what you think the cost benefited in Afghanistan which I just came out of shortly ago we believe that the Afghans are the exit strategy the Afghan national security force the Afghan government and to build their capacity and capability so that they can stabilize the situation and protect themselves against the insurgent and terrorist threat our going in position why we went in there to begin with has never changed so the morphing of objectives we went in there to deny al-Qaeda or safe haven to attack the United States again so we've been working at that the way we decided to do that was by with and through Afghans and the means was through us initially at the beginning in the 010203 timeframe we were doing all of it there was no Afghan national security force we began to build it it slowly built over time in 09 we start getting on to an industrial level production of building that security force the question now and it remains are they capable enough to stand on their own to withstand the rigors of that insurgency you just made Afghanistan seem a lot easier frankly at least more understandable for a decade plus well that's what we've been doing Bob Kazinsman over there I've been over there multiple tours and that's what we've been doing from the beginning on through and many people in the audience have served over there so where are we at today we're at a point today where we have a significant sizeable security force that we estimate is capable of suppressing the insurgency is it capable of ending the insurgency annihilating it destroying it probably not but how much do you need so is it capable though of maintaining the government in power to stabilize the situation in order for the situation not to be a threat to the United States not to be an existential threat to Afghanistan that's a different question so we think that they're in pretty good shape but they're not capable of completely standing on their own so they need continued advice institutional advice continued money and that is what has been announced as our policy going forward so with a modest amount of money and a modest amount of advisors in order to keep the regime and keep the security forces going so that you don't have a resurgence of al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups let me because public opinion and political will is important in undergirding these conflicts let me open up to some of you I'm sure there are more questions and we can get to but if you would signal that you have one or if you want to write it down and send it down the aisle is there a question right away yes in the back row we'll get a mic to you if you would just stand up and identify yourself and we'll bring something over to you before we get actually or you can come to the microphone I don't know how we want to Hi thank you my name is Karen Volcker I used to be at the State Department I now work with an organization called Cure Violence and first of all I just want to thank you for pulling this together I think it's an extremely important conversation that we need to have we take a health approach to interrupting and stopping violence I'm wondering if there are some aspects of our approach that could inform your thinking as we go into this conversation first of all I think we need to understand that wars don't happen in a vacuum that there are people who are involved and these are people who are leading the decision to go into war on both sides how do we better understand what's driving those individuals and then think about who are the credible messages and how do we reach them in this approach similarly during the course of building the capacity that you talk about that's so important I don't hear any conversation and from my experience in Washington I don't see that we place a lot of funding to build the capacity of the local people to interrupt violence so not just the law enforcement or military capacity but really understanding that the violence happens because there's community norms that accept it and how do you change those norms how do you get to the people before they do the violence and there's several other aspects that I would just put out there let me mention here of course that the point is well taken the U.S. Institute of Peace was asked early in the Iraq conflict to come in and work on reconciliation and the violence that was occurring within tribes and across tribes and that was an important component of getting hold of the conflict before it spiraled out of control I'm not sure that all of us can get ahead of violence in these places or understand it enough to forestall the need to be there but anyone have a Karen is right and this is on a very specific subset of war and this gets back to Gideon's introduction where we have several different definitions of war for reasons that are complex but I support and it comes into the honor category of General Milley we have as a country and as part of international system a tremendous interest in countries developing one of the major inhibitors to development in the direction we want to see them and in extremists Afghanistan a danger to us is conflicts that are allowed to continue on so we have an interest in trying to deal with the sources of those conflicts trying to smooth them over trying to regulate them trying to control them be it through our own efforts be it through the U.N. be it through peacekeeping be it through all of the tools of American power but it is only one aspect of conflicts and war and it is one that again it is very very difficult to use a military heavy solution for because we're sending people into areas where once the U.S. military is involved with troops on the ground actually either fighting or trying to support the efforts that she underlined it becomes it becomes in the minds of the American public a conflict a war and they're going to do a cost-benefit analysis does that include advisors I mean we have 300 advisors in Iraq you could argue that that's the pre text or maybe not to something bigger at what point are you at a war footing well that's the Obama administration makes that argument in fact to use the term slippery slope in May of 2013 and referring to Syria I in fact we debated this earlier other than Vietnam I haven't seen any slippery slopes in my entire long career as a student soldier or diplomat I think we know how to pull out of conflicts when they go back we have shown the ability to pull out of conflicts when they go badly Somalia Beirut in 83 so normally it's the use of security assistance as Bob Castlin and General Miley mentioned to build up local forces they are the first choice it's to try to resolve these conflicts to the extent we can it's to try to use economic support it's to mix all of these things to keep this below the level that the American public thinks we're in a war even at times Bosnia Kosovo Libya you can use military force but if it doesn't involve a lot of casualties on the idea that we have troops on the ground trying to do nation building you tend to avoid any kind of major reaction by the American public do you believe in mission creep as a concept does the military believe you can get into slippery yes I mean it can happen I'm not saying it does but it can on the issue that Karen was asking about is at the local level you know how do you prevent the violence sort of thing it depends question depends on the type of violence you're talking about so in the local levels in either Iraq or Afghanistan in many other places a lot of the violence stems from an inability to arbitrate disputes where you know so-and-so goes out and steals a go from someone else and then there's a so there's cultural overtones all of that that is beyond our capability as as westerners as a military as a state to burn or anybody else to actually go in and kind of change on that kind of stuff as opposed to a violence that's politically oriented towards attacking either the United States the West interest or the government in the case of Kabul as an example that's a different type of violence when you start talking root causes and you start getting into why men rebel why do young angry men take up the Kalashnikov and go attack for many reasons and theories out there as there are young men with Kalashnikovs but there is a certain element of truth to institutional development good governance rules of law education health care and giving individuals a stake in the society so if you don't feel that you don't have a stake in the society then you will probably become at least frustrated combined with the Kalashnikov if you got a little bit of organization leadership could lead to something more so the root causes even though there's lots of different theories and this very hot debate about all of that does have to be addressed and there are capabilities that we have militarily and or institutionally when the State Department and the broader U.S. government and more importantly the international community that can't assist can't solve but can assist but is it the professional soldier's job to think about all this is it part of the training and the preparation in preparing to go to war that you have to have all of these issues well this goes into my current head as a superintendent so we look at what are the attributes that we want in our young junior officers as they go into the United States Army or any service can going into the service and intellectually the intellectual development is one of the most key and important attributes that we realize that has proven to be effective leadership on the battlefield, this complex battlefield we've seen over the last 12, almost 13 years and so we focus on the intellectual development but I would argue one of the big lessons over the last 12, 13 years is that it's so important and this goes to Karen's question working with locals to understand the environment and the complexity of that environment because it is so complex and then to understand the culture and understand what all the different pressure points are and then understand the consequences that really takes intellectual development there's some commanders out there that have really blossomed not only at the strategic level but also tactically as a result of their intellectual understanding of this particular environment so there is if you don't do it no one else can do it so the officer needs to do that just embedded in that question is sort of trying there's a prevention part of this and I just think that's an area maybe a good book topic for the US Institute of Peace but I feel like we've spent a lot of analytical time in the last couple of decades naturally working on the problem areas the ones that didn't work very well I really think we need a good book on the ones that worked I mean I thought when I was the age of some of the folks in the audience that when I did when I died we would still be fighting in El Salvador but in fact that is a titanic success story that was a society that was riven to its core by ideological and ethnic fissures and I never thought they'd patch it together now the problem of course is drug gangs right guys from LA in San Salvador but in terms of a political they've succeeded I mean Philippines our diplomats and our soldiers have continued to isolate ever smaller the insurgency in Mindanao I mean there are a number in Panama when our intelligence picked up the fact that some of the FARC because of the success of our efforts in Colombia were being driven across the border into the jungle into the Darien jungle we got ahead of that as a country and offered capacity building to local people in Panama because the rift of the Panamanian government didn't reach that and we got ahead of that so what we what never makes the headlines of course is the 80 or 90 success stories the dogs that don't military effort and our diplomatic efforts and our aid efforts have headed off these things that never exploded on the front page so I just don't want us to walk out here today thinking this stuff never works absolutely most of the time it works there is a question from a webcast viewer going back to operation Iraqi freedom and just asking for clarity about what constituted winning or victory in that conflict and did it change over time and I think the question gets to do you accomplish your objectives and then your objectives or your circumstances shift but I think just reviewing again what was victory defined as in that operation and was it achieved could we count it in the success for that period of time I'll take that on officially and you have to go back to the statement of the president before we ran and the authorization given by the U.S. Congress the goal was to go after Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and more generally and these are the vague undercurrents essentially we had fought one war and numerous minor military operations against this guy for over a decade he had been invading or attacking neighbors repeatedly he was a U.N. major offender with dozens of U.N. Security Council chapter 7 resolutions against him and it was the general feeling was we had to do something dramatic about this guy gets to one of our concepts of war is there's no substitution of a victory we're not just going to keep on dealing with this problem we want to end this problem that was the headline version that we went into the war it's very clear and looking back and the best example of that is President Bush's second inaugural address in January of 2005 that the real goal that led to the kind of war we we waged and some of the decisions we made we decided that we were going to leverage a victory in Iraq to stimulate a democratic revolution in the Middle East analogous in some respects to what happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe that when you lop off the dictatorial violent heads of these societies they will evolve in directions that will on their own basically move them towards the green side of the ledger into societies that have evolved like Columbia, like El Salvador pretty big macro goal we've gone from something very specific and narrow to the meta concept and this was not clearly articulated to the American people because they would have had a lot of doubts and it was not even thought through completely among the people who were in the know thus we had the inside out and the outside in to get into a lot of details we didn't know whether we were going to immediately turn it over to the locals like we turned Czechoslovakia and Poland over to the locals in we didn't do it, I mean they did it themselves but we would just step aside after Saddam went and they would take over or we would stay on for some time as we had done in Germany and Japan and so we hadn't even worked out those decisions but we did have a vague goal of achieving this game changer in the Middle East as a whole leveraged out of Iraq and to a lesser extent Afghanistan and of course that particular military or political goal was not achieved but that raises this symbolic and substantive war ending moment as we look back over the sweep of history we've had moments where a peace treaty is signed or a ceasefire is arranged or a V victory or a country is liberated or prisoners are exchanged I mean there are certain things that happen that signal to the public it's over is that just a false hope that we're going to continue to have moments where we can declare an ending and move on okay well let me talk through what the Iraq model are framework so as the ambassador had mentioned we went to war in Iraq because we want to keep the world's most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world's most dangerous people we got to Iraq to realize that the world's most dangerous weapons were not there but war changes and war does not always move in the direction you wanted to move and it's not always the direction that policy makers wanted or even military strategists wanted and that's what happened in Iraq it moved and moved and moved later at the end of 2011 for whatever reason there was a strategic opportunity there that you had a representative governance that was actually working you had Swedes and Shias that were talking together at the table resolving differences you had Kurds and Arabs that for the first time in generations were dialoguing through representative governance and that's where we had our strategic opportunity so a snapshot so as war evolves it's important for strategists to understand when that opportunity that strategic opportunity presents itself and there is something that you may want to do something about it or not you know but you want to do something about it? Well I do but there's very few questions in a panel like this you can answer with one word but you said is it just a dream or hope the answer is yes it's just a dream or hope I mean these things look at the correlations they're Germany, Japan the things that have worked have required careful management I think it's useful to introduce the concept of spoilers because I agree with what the general just said I mean there are hopeful moments there was a hopeful moment after our troops arrived in Somalia there was a hopeful moment after peacekeepers went into Bosnia there was a hopeful moment in Afghanistan and for a long time as I think Gideon says in his book US troops look 10 feet tall and everybody expects them to do everything at that point and but you know the criminals are just waiting for the seams to open the spoilers are just waiting for the seams to open so and the seams often open because you know we're in Afghanistan but then we have to turn our attention to Iraq or there's a lot of stuff going on in the world so the ones that work are the ones in my mind and this by the way let me back up a step I completely endorse what Jim Jeffrey said earlier we got to be much more careful of where we decide to use our national treasure I mean we just can't hope is not a policy as a bunch of people have said but in most of these places where we put folks on the ground at the risk of their lives and limbs there was a hopeful moment but then it unless you sustain that effort you just can't hand it off Jim I'm not going to let some of our really smart DOD policymakers take all this in let's bring a mic down here can I coax you in our audience because we're at this very critical moment if you would introduce yourself thank you so much Tara for putting me on the spot thanks to our panel and to Gideon as well for a very stimulating discussion and there's so many ways to react and I'm Jim currently at the Wilson Center longtime co-conspirator with a number of colleagues here Ambassador Jeffrey if I were wearing a naval uniform I would probably take issue with your juxtaposition of immediate defeat versus extension of values I mean I think the global supply chains we have fought to keep you know antipiracy in the 19th century and the Mediterranean colon stations all throughout the world I mean we have had a national perceived national interest in for the global economic value and that was clearly I think the case in the Gulf War in 1991 but so just sort of a nitpicking point there but to all of you I think my basic question is on the planning methodology if you will how we think about these things one thing that I have frustrated at over my time in public service and we've got colleagues here including Len Hawley who's done a lot on contingency planning the issue of aggressively and skeptically analyzing assumptions what are the assumptions we're making let's recall that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice laid out an assumption which is you could decapitate Iraq, remove Saddam but the government would not collapse who was I mean who was really aggressively and red teaming if you will all those assumptions and whose job is it to articulate those assumptions and have a debate about that and finally just a little nitpick for our our two generals you've never done that before how do we keep the balance between the day of and the day after in terms of capacity and capability I'm thinking historically of the 8th Army in Japan which in 1950 had to deploy rapidly into Korea and was not ready to fight a war after having been in a stability operation for a number of years in Japan and that's a very big issue right now is as we downsize into what I'm thinking is called scalable stabilization I'm not sure we're there yet, thank you well let's take the three issues the minor on the navy taking issue with you do you want to respond only that I don't think we actually have a disagreement America's pursuit of these global Sonian objectives are projecting ourselves not just as a country but as a cause also is in our interest it's in our long term interest because the world full of Scandinavia's and South Korea's is a better place than what we see in the Middle East and secondly we have a great comparative advantage and have for 200 years in a open free trading system and it's a major component of both our national interest and any kind of liberal international order and was us listed as one of the 14 points so I think that we were pursuing our own interests but we're also pursuing interests for everybody else which I think makes us different but there's a lot of foreigners who disagree challenging assumptions red teaming the potential that your assumptions are flawed and the last minor from Afghanistan standpoint we did that on a routine basis General Dunford an ambassador was done regularly and was done in a formal way and then what stays how long how much huge amount of effort very detailed analysis done by General Dunford staff and my staff at the embassy in coordination with central command and joint staff etc so months and months of analysis to determine what we think was acceptable cost to the United States and the national community NATO and what kind of benefit would be and is it acceptable risk given what our interest and objectives are in Afghanistan you wonder from a historical standpoint I just remember when they were contemplating going to war in Iraq the office of the secretary of defense came up with 10 what ifs what if this happened what if this assumption was violated what if this assumption was violated you know to the president to the national security council and it was an effort to really analyze our assumptions and then start the thinking of what happens if one of those assumptions doesn't come through this is at the highest level this strategic level but this is like General Milley said this is something all of us on all sides of the government have got to really look at our assumptions and analyze them and then come up with contingencies that in the event this assumption is not going in the right direction we haven't gotten to presidential leadership and of course the history is you can have civilians you can have presidents who come from military backgrounds at some point as we take questions we really do have to look at commander in chief ultimately has to make decisions yes about war termination and why we go to war and how long we stay when we come home well I just want to loop this back to the earlier question I don't think we give that enough thought and some of these are deep issues dealing with American culture obviously we as a nation we tend to not sustain focus and that part of that comes not self-flagellation part of it comes with being a global power when you've got a lot of things to focus on to sustain the focus the analytical focus on any one of them who could disagree with trying to understand local politics better who could understand with a deeper dive on who could disagree with a deeper dive on trying to understand what effects your intervention are going to have in a given country and trying to think all that through and some of that is the good side of our democracy the congress wants to know what's going on and they're going to dive in and they're going to ask questions so we don't have the KDRC where somebody is sitting and thinking great thoughts all day long and it's all out in the public realm but I do go back to that earlier question I think we can do better and I gather Jim probably disagrees with me on this but I think we could do better in building the tools on the civilian side of the government to do a better deep dive on a more sustained basis and I do think it's an asset question I remember on one of these handoff situations one time the chairman the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was out in Afghanistan when I was out there and he was asking me we're ready to hand over some function to you guys I don't understand why you can't put five guys on that you know just five guys and my reaction to him was look five guys to me is like me saying to you general five guys if I just because the ratio of military personnel to aid workers in our government is one thousand he wants his own army so I mean so that's why I come back to these structural questions I think many of the points Gideon raised in this book are so right on point but we need to think more deeply we need to think more carefully but I do think that's a resource and structural question on the civilian side of the government you can't just flaw guys and say think more strategically think more strategically gotta give them the tools to sustain analysis the education system in the United States in our universities and graduate schools I think there's room to improve in that regard critical thinking as kind of a baseline but also strategic thinking that used to be a fairly common military history used to be a really common topic taught 30 40 50 years ago you can't hardly find it anymore so there's a series of things there in order to produce folks in the national security system that are strategist but also I would say I have not served on the national security council there's people in this room who have but I've been a customer of products coming out I also think that most people don't see those things that we if the public could see the level of rigor and the level of analysis that their government does do in granted once I get it wrong and so on but the depth of commitment and the depth of rigor and the depth of analysis done but the department of defense the department of state the joint staff the NSS the CIA military commands like ISAF right you see here in I think people would be fairly impressed would they have the patience would they have the patience to weed through the reports the products I mean we we're demanding a lot even this audience the patience and the focus here can we expect a country so large with so many domestic issues to be that engaged at the level of detail um Paul how much time do we have left 15 minutes are there some questions yes I want to make sure almost every hand in the room has gone up thank you a colonel John Mates liberal and full disclosure activities civil affairs officer out of Fort Bragg at the commandant's office down there Mr. Cunder keeps discussing resourcing and we don't resource solving this part of the problem we have something in the military commanders inherent responsible in the rule of law the difference between to take care of a population once you topple the government the difference between Gulf War one and Gulf War two commanders inherent responsibility kicked in we topple the government we take care of this in our doctrine we have lots of doctrine writers we think deeply it's called transitional military authority we failed to do that in Iraq and Afghanistan for two reasons one we just chose not to there was a very brief or non-existent period of transitional military authority which doesn't sound like a baton pass and is not in our doctrine we also failed to resource for it World War II Japan we spent years of training people we had civil affairs schools established at multiple universities multiple universities around the country some of our best institutions we prepared people to execute that transition both military and civilian in Iraq and Afghanistan as we increase the length of training for infantry soldiers because they're going straight into combat we shortened the training for civil affairs soldiers and took you know a month later a submariner is now a civil affairs officer so we're not resourcing for it the question I have is as we move forward how can we invest resources so we can execute transition properly in the future and just so we know the moda program I presume is still going training that's done with the institute to train defense Pentagon people to be able to help in accounting and civilian affairs is there not enough if we can round as we make hard resourcing cuts now we have a lot of work class ability to break something and our ability to fix stuff is rapidly being cut by the services it's not being invested in by the interagency several affairs on active duty today in the army got two brigades so you've got one in the special operations community and then you've got one I'm a commander of third court and we've got one based out of four so you got two brigades so you're not talking huge capability that's on the one hand but also as we look at history we have to be careful because we're looking backwards and we don't want to paint two rosy picture here about what we're walking into at the end of World War II there was civil affairs but it wasn't this massive organization that was going to fall in on Europe and all the infantry guys were just going to go away Germany was occupied for two consecutive years with a rifle company in every single village and those rifle company commanders and those rifle companies were not exactly civil affairs officers and the people were eating potatoes and boiling grass before the Marshall plant ever kicked in before it was even thought of and we didn't even begin to think of post-war Europe the mechanics of it until about late 43-44 almost in the eve of the Normandy invasion Gideon I want to come to you because one of the themes in the book actually is that America's material power and economic power it's a mistake to look back without realizing that as we became more powerful our burdens and responsibilities grew but our resources did not match that well I think that there's a sense in which the underlying strength of the nation underwrites the sense of ambition we have and when it goes up we do try and do more and it's not surprising that it's not just that 9-11 happened and we got scared and lashed back and lashed out but that this occurred at a time when we were stronger relative to the system than anybody had ever been since Rome so not surprisingly when we did lash out we did so in an extremely ambitious way and as we're feeling more restraint now we're sort of pulling back so I think those kind of things are like in terms of the planning and the resources I think that's all true but I think when you talked about presidential leadership I mean in a lot of sense sometimes the fish rots from the head as the saying goes and the staff and the planning and the professionals that are represented here are often frankly from the research that I've done in my cases not the problem if the world were run by deputies rather than principles but don't those deputies become principles? no they don't there's a technocratic glass ceiling and a political hack becomes the principle and then the national command and if the world were run by the staffs there would be a lot better run place and a lot of the planning that gets done gets ignored Ellen Lape since disagreeing in the top row she runs the Stimson Center Ellen was my boss at the NSC so whatever she says I always agree with thanks Tara I actually wondered if it's permissible to switch subjects a little bit but go back to something else that Gideon talked about I wanted to go to his Ellen Lape Stimson Center I wanted to go to his triaging of when you adopt and when you foster as a sort of setting different threshold for when the United Stairs cares a lot and when we care less but what I thought was missing from the discussion so far is it's not always the US that makes that call when we're fighting in coalition various like-minded groups of countries what's the sense of the panel on whether the capacity of other countries to help us with that adopt versus foster or the sort of messy war termination stuff I'm thinking of how do you assess how well we've done in getting other countries to help with emptying out Guantanamo or some of the residue of post conflict war termination or do you see other countries stepping up to the plate are the trend lines favorable on that issue or not burden sharing ambassador I'm cynical on that the best we can hope for some of it is pure inventory of military capabilities some of it is the problems most of our allies are democracies in some countries in Germany look at the scandals today basically have a world view than we do as comes to international security others understand that at the end of the day they can only make marginal contributions essentially we're it from the standpoint of convincing the American public to go along it helps to have a UN Security Council resolution it helps to have allies it helps to have a coalition of 40 but particularly if you get down to real fighting there are only a few countries that will do real fighting and only do it with relatively limited numbers of people compared to the number that we put into say Afghanistan or Iraq but the issue that the other issue that involves people other than us it's so important in making these decisions of outside the wire which countries we want to which cats we want to adopt and which isn't is how do the people feel and wondering why I was chosen for this thing other than I have three buddies with me General Miley is an expert on using Abrams tanks to facilitate diplomatic engagements but anyway which people by the way you're talking about which people matter the people the local people we haven't talked about them where we've been successful Germany and Japan we were the answer to the population security problem in both cases Russia where we've been in China to some degree where we've been successful in Iraq for example Kurdistan and in some areas of Afghanistan it's because the local people see us as the guarantor or the protector against something else the problem in Vietnam in Iraq and having spent been one of the last soldiers to leave Vietnam and having been present when the Americans left Iraq that's why I thought my value added in coming here was today because I saw two of the messier transitions we were dealing with populations to one or another degree that were at best ambivalent at worst thought that we were the enemy and that's a huge that makes a huge difference in how you evaluate the cost benefit if the locals are willing to bear their own burden because that's the real burden sharing we get if we get a local population that is willing to fight and willing to stand up and willing to put as the Germans did 14 divisions under arms by the end of the 1950s then we're in a much better position than when we're dealing with some of the messes we've seen lately Tara if I could just make a point on Ellen's statement because I think it's a critical observation particularly as we look at Afghanistan transition war termination and then transition because if you just do a quick comparison between Iraq and Afghanistan I know they're totally different but Iraq had the means at transition to generate its own income and Afghanistan doesn't so the gross national product from Afghanistan is particularly coming from donor nations which means it's got to be able to sustain the defense budget after transition and donor nations have got to be able to do that if donor nations leave when everybody else leaves I mean if they if their provision leads departs at the same time that all the other forces depart then the entire GMP and the defense budget dries up and then what does that what's the impact and implications on capacity security capacity of Afghanistan to deal with the threat that exists here so that's a critical component to this particular transition I want to begin to wrap up and then there'll be time to mingle for those of you with questions but one article over the weekend may have struck some of you general retired general David Barno talking about the nation emerging from 13 years of war battle tested but weary so one question are we now battle tested but weary and do we now have a new conflict and that's the conflict of dealing with peacetime and the change in ethos from what he calls the army's wartime ethos of individual initiative and what he terms the bureaucratic malaise that sometimes peacetime brings where leadership of a peacetime era war ends the adrenaline of war is gone do we have a challenge now of post post war termination how we as a nation use the time to look at lessons learned to read Gideon's book again and again and the products that are out there how do we use this time and does it bring its own challenges and I want to start here and come around and also give you an opportunity to close out some of your thinking well it's a thought provoking question it's a thought provoking analysis I guess I view it more as an opportunity than as a problem I mean it does give you a chance to catch your breath and take a look at what we've done right and what we've done wrong we've done some of each over the last couple of decades so I don't view it the words like malaise don't resonate with me war weary I mean everybody's war weary but that's not the point I just the only thing I would say is that then let's not picking up on the theme in Gideon's book here let's not take a look just at Iraq and Afghanistan which were both sui generous in their own ways had some very peculiar political dynamics with them I would say that when we take a look at where we want to go next how we want to configure our diplomatic and military forces that we as I was suggesting earlier throw the net a little more broadly at all of the kinds of successes and failures we've had let's look at Minda now and let's look at the Caucasus and let's look at El Salvador and take a fresh breath and I do think there are some things we can do better as a country both on the civilian and military side can I just make one last point about this while General Milley was talking about earlier I just had a chance to talk speak teach a couple months ago down at the Marine Corps University my old alma mater and you know it was really impressive that the majors who are going to be promoted this is their staff college so majors being promoted to lieutenant colonels were down there taking a year and I think I was really impressed at the curriculum they really were doing some deep strategic dives it was more how are we integrate all aspects of national power say in the South China Sea or someplace like that and those guys on that side I have faith that they get it what I was worried about was us because you know those guys were down there for nine or ten months I can't speak for the State Department if an aide guy got nine or ten months of training in his or her entire career they'd be a lucky individual and so I do still worry that you know we're going to get good partners on the military side of seeing this big strategic integration of how to end wars I fear on the surveillance that we need to ratchet up the training dramatically on this question of using peacetime can it bring its own bureaucratic and changing in feeling in the country or give us an opportunity to gear up real quick one let's be careful the American people worry of war unless they're worry of telling people at airports thank you for your service because they've contributed relatively little to this thing they haven't been working three shifts with Rosie the Riveter they haven't been paying higher taxes they haven't been having their sons drafted those of us who remember Vietnam know what a war that can be worrisome on the American public they haven't had a huge huge domestic dispute over it there are people up here with a dozen hash marks whose families are wary but we'll deal with that in terms of how to cope with peacetime I think of the last page in works book From Here to Eternity when the captain's wife Deborah Kerr in the movie is being evacuated by ship with her 10 year old son after Pearl Harbor and he's saying mommy you're going to miss this war and she looks at him and says don't worry son there'll always be another war we are a national security state we have been so since 1940 1940 not 1941 1940 when we activated the national God and the entire international system is based upon that fact and it is now under stress not just in Afghanistan or Iraq it's under stress in the Ukraine in the South China Sea it's under stress throughout the Middle East and the military is going to use this time I'm sure to prepare its people for the next conflict just as I was in fifth corps in the G3 the operations shop and I was working for a general named Don Starry who was busy hammering away what became Air Land Battle that we then used in 1991 to great effect so I'm convinced that as we said the military will use this time well well the civilians it's hard to say once again folks the civilian bureaucracy operated brilliantly in the first Gulf War because that's normal the military had a military mission the state department had a diplomatic mission at the UN the tin cup thing keeping the Saudis happy keeping the Israelis happy Larry Eagleburger literally sat on the Israeli cabinet to do this USAID knows how to do its jobs if you define war as broad nation building transformational Vietnam's, Iraq's and Afghanistan's trust me you don't have a civilian bureaucracy that can do that so my first order is don't do it the second thing is if you're going to do it the military can do it the military can throw more people at these kind of problems than the rest of the bureaucracy together they can draft up people who know a hell of a lot more about municipal management than anybody in USAID of the state department and they've got a lot more of them in the reserves we talked about Germany in the town of Butzbach after World War II the PRT chief if I can use that modern term was a guy named Henry Kissinger who aside from having grown up in Germany he had a veteran infantryman and that's what you need in those kind of experiences of course the critics will tell you that's a militarization of foreign policy and I would say that even when people aren't shooting at you which was a situation in Butzbach in 1946 under those circumstances the military is where I would give the knot when people are shooting at you trying to get civilians out there and I've spent three years doing it in Iraq is a very complicated question to you folks to carry carry the water well I read General Varno's editorial there and I've known him for years a great soldier, a lot of respect for him and I think it was a good article, a good piece kind of to us in uniform to put a warning flag up to us to make sure that we know to keep the combat edge so to speak and I take that to heart we don't want a stifled initiative, bold thinking etc that's been developed over many many years and right now we have an exceptionally experienced combat force especially the ground force, the army and the Marine Corps exceptionally combat experienced very very good junior leaders in the non-commissioned officer corps and in the officer corps and up to the rank of major and even some lieutenant colonels some of these officers and NCOs know deployment combat operations all of us have deployed and now you're getting into the general officer ranks most of your all your ones and twos and three stars now have deployed multiple times etc etc so we've got a very experienced and savvy force we've got to maintain that combat edge as we go forward in terms of readiness because as the ambassador said the world's an interesting place none of us are notion down as we can't predict it but just all you gotta do is pick up the paper read the headlines you've got you've got Korea, you've got Israel around you've got Syria, you've got Gaza you've got the situation in Iraq and of course you've got an ongoing situation in Afghanistan you've got the South China Sea and there's probably 10 or 15 others out there so we don't know where and when we will next be committed so our obligation as a military is to make sure that we maintain a very high level of readiness and not allow ourselves to atrophy the third core for example right now today and for their near term future I've got 18,000 troops deployed just out of the core not the army but just that core so deployments are continuing they're all into Afghanistan they're into a variety of different places so that will keep up that edge General Odinero has initiated the regional line forces concept deployment schedule up to Korea to Africa Middle East to Europe etc etc and that will keep a certain degree of what General Barno refers to as the adrenaline deployment but our professional challenge is to maintain combat readiness because we don't know when the next one happens and to keep that at a very sharp age so your day tomorrow begins as superintendent and as you look out you've got to do all this if the next if the next adversary for the army is going to be peace unfortunately we have a senior leadership in the army that has seen this before and that's post-Vietnam and the rebuilding of the army post-Vietnam in the 1980s and General Milley and myself a lot of senior officers have been through that we were lieutenants and we were captains during that particular time and we rebuilt the army all the way to the point of 1991 where in four days we overthrew the Iraqi army and I said the army was not won in Iraq the army was won 20 years earlier over the National Training Center going back repeated rotations so that we became professions and experts at our profession and so we got to remember and I really acknowledge what General Barno is saying but it's got to be in the context of standards it's got to be in the context of our values of what our character and what we're all about it's got to be a disciplined initiative and when you put all that together and create the command climate that allows people to take initiative to underwrite that risk and to advantage their potential we'll continue with a great army with great soldiers, great leaders developing those leaders all the way from where we are as cadets to lieutenants and to where the army and General Milley and all of the other army leadership well on that note I want to again thank the institute and all of you for what has been truly inspiring and enlightening and I hope for all of you informative session we get a break and then I believe there's some working sessions so thank you and feel free to mingle a bit and enjoy the rest of the program our next speaker is Dr. Rick Brennan from the Rand Corporation you all may go ahead and stand down who will discuss his work on Iraq and the war termination that occurred there Rick comes from a career of both in the military and as an intellectual expert on the issues he was a founding member of the office of peacekeeping and peace enforcement back in the day and I'd like to welcome him please Rick could you put the slides on please I have a very hard task one is following the great opening by Gideon and then the distinguished group we just had and I also understand that I am the only thing between you and lunch and so this will make it even more difficult what I'm going to do is talk to you a little bit today about the lessons that we learned from a study that was done for General Austin that was started in March of 2011 Ambassador Jeffrey was instrumental in making certain that we had the resources of the embassy so this was not just a DoD look it was a look from the DoD USFI as well as the embassy what was going on in the US government so it was a very broad range of issues that we looked at as we know December 18th, 2011 last military personnel moved out of Iraq and as we talked about this it ended one of America's longest wars and one of the most the history's most complex transitions from military to civilian and I'm not going to go into a lot of details here but when we started this transition there were 30,000 tasks that the military was in the process of conducting in Iraq and all of those tasks had to be turned over, completed or terminated most of which went to Ambassador Jeffrey and what we used to talk about as being an expeditionary embassy and he took that over as well as General Kasselin so the process of going through this was extremely challenging I will say though as I look back on this most of this transition was looked at at the process of handing over activities it was more about kind of leaving a unit left in contact than it necessarily was looking at what our new strategy would be I love this quote from Winston Churchill and we've had conversations about this earlier today whether it be spoilers what happened to us when we went into Iraq initially when we went in we started off with the ground invasion the ground invasion went great three months later we had victory and then lawlessness started to creep in and lawlessness soon turned to a growing insurgency and the growing insurgency in 2005 with the bombing of the dome turned into a full out civil war and during this time period you also had neighboring countries getting engaged and being spoilers with Iran first getting involved as an adversary army militants in 2004 Saudis and Kuwaitis involved so this war that we got ourselves involved in started to turn in ways that we never anticipated by the time we got to the end of the war if you wanted to take a look at Iran for example there was an internal assessment done in USFI that judged that nearly half of the injured and killed that occurred in Iraq where it was a result of Iranian sponsored violence with their militants so neighbors caused problems we didn't understand what we're getting into we didn't understand the Iraqi political structure and it evolved into something that no one could foresee but we get to 2006 2007 the surge the awakening and I'm not going to go into details we have dialogue over what caused things to occur but by time we get to 2008 we see a fundamental change taking place in Iraq and levels of violence are down historic lows by time we get to 2009 and we're starting to see Iraq move along we talked about it Afghanistan build a capacity building that was the primary goal of the US military and the embassy was building the capacity of the government of Iraq built the capacity of the economics political capacity working on the Iraqi security forces so there was some significant progress that was made 2008 the strategic I'll go to the next 2008 the strategic framework agreement was signed what occurred at that point is we grafted the first joint campaign plan that would really govern the transition and the end of the war and this transition the plan that was developed in 2009 carried over into 2010 and so the goals remain the same if you look at the overarching goal of the campaign then there was in the yellow on the very top but we wanted to have a sovereign stable self-reliant Iraq that could be a partner in the region that was the overarching goal and what we chose to do on the political security and economic and diplomatic arenas was move sequentially from stage one which was to end on January 1st 2010 then stage two would end at the end of the security agreement when everybody anticipated there would be a follow-on agreement and then we would move forward into kind of the long-term kind of partnership with Iraq but what actually started to happen is at the end of stage one as we were looking at putting together the 2010 JCP it became very clear that we were not going to meet the goals and objectives that had been established in stage one and a conscious decision was made at that point that we would not change the goals and objectives that we would continue to start to work on them as we went along and the reason we didn't those goals and objectives weren't changed was because we were on an end date of December 31st 2011 and regardless of where we were if we had to go to zero those were the goals and objectives that needed to be achieved so the important part here is what's on the bottom banner starting in 2009 the Joint Campaign Plan remained conditions-based but at the same time it was time and resource constrained and so you started to see a huge gap started to grow between the goals and objectives and the resources that were available to achieve them and this is what we are trying to make right here so if you go on the left side three years leading up to 2011 the growing mismatch of goals and objectives and the internal and external strategic assessments that were characterized all came to look at the problem that we were having so this mismatch that we saw in 2009 and 2010 should have triggered in a fundamental reassessment of our strategy and were we going to be able to achieve these goals and objectives were these still the goals and objectives that we wanted since there was a new president in office was he accepting those goals and objectives that had been first articulated by the previous president none of those broad strategic reviews were conducted there was a war termination assessment that was conducted in the field conducted in November of 2011 and what that war termination assessment did was take all the goals, objectives policy pronouncements that had been given to USFI identified where they were looked at whether or not we had achieved them or were moving towards progress or were nowhere near it and what was found was that about 20% of them could be declared achieved probably 50% were still in progress and another 20 to 30% were nowhere close and that's where we ended the operation in 2011 so if we're going to do a strategic assessment of war termination assessment what do we need to do I think the first thing you need to do is look at the threat, what's the environment that you're in the United States made a lot of progress in Iraq but one of the things that we didn't do was eliminate the fundamental causes of what was talked about as the drivers of instability we all know about the Sunni, Shia and Kurd divide but there's a divide within the Shia and Shia and the Sunnis are divided and so within this very complex Iraq mosaic was a situation where everybody was fighting for power and resources the government of Iraq capacity whether it would be an economic or political or the capacity of the ISF still needed an enormous amount of work to go on if you look at the quarterly reports that were sent to Congress what you'll find is that there are huge gaps in the capacity of the Iraqi security forces on areas like intelligence maintenance, training they lacked any form of fixed air support that were they were at that and this advise and assist that General Kasslin tried to follow through with afterwards where he had no authorities to do after the ISF funds ran out in October of 2012 all of that those huge gap gaping holes in the capacity of the ISF remained and there was no action taken on those we also had the violent extremist groups where we talked about the external influence so the important part is by 2010 Iraq was kind of stabilized it was moving in the right direction if you looked at all the trend lines and I'll show you the next slide but if you look at the trend lines they were all kind of going in the right direction but Iraq remained very fragile and on the left side I just want to point out when you're looking at today in Iraq and whether or not we'll be able to find a solution to what's increasingly beginning to look like the disintegration of the state of Iraq you have to look at the politics inside the Sunnis desperately fear the future a future where they'll have no role and that have no benefit from the government of Iraq the Shia are deathly afraid of a surgence of the Sunnis and being oppressed again like they have been for hundreds of years and the Kurds who have their own sense of oppression fear both and what you see just happening recently with the Kurds basically taking all of their historic homelands because the ISF moved away they essentially have gotten all that they wanted having to go through the political process again just to highlight as an example one of the assessments that was done in Iraq looked at where we were moving and I just want to kind of go through this very quickly because this assessment was done in September of 2010 and what it shows is that if you take the middle road the projected operating environment this is where it looked like we were going again very growth was occurring change was occurring very slowly but we knew we needed to do a lot more and if you look on the downside as we have passed 2011 the things that we were afraid of sectarian Shia GOI the government of Iraq the Sunni exclusion from political process all of these issues that we were most afraid of have actually come to fruition and what we have today is Iraq as a strategic challenge so what are the lessons that we can learn I take it Iraq just looking at Iraq is in Afghanistan they're both so generous I understand that but let's take a look at this to see how we can extrapolate this first of all I think the determination assessment has to start at the White House and this type and the interagency it's got to be driven from the top down with information about the details coming from the bottom up so define what our interests are and again if you have a situation where there's a presidential change presidents get to make choices they get to change their policies and if there's a different evaluation of the goals and objectives are in a region that's fine but that should be articulated in that strategy again realistic goals we need to decide what a post-transition military presence would look like early in the process so that we can start making plans to work on that and if it's decided that we don't want to leave military presence there what are we going to do with the interests of moving them out because when they leave you're going to have a vacuum that occurs just as when a military force invades it's going to change political dynamics within the country when you leave it's also going to change the political dynamics within the country we need to understand that and think through that political process General Kazan will talk on ours about the issue of authorities that prevented him from doing the types of missions that needed to get done what are the types of authorities that we would want to be able to give to the embassy to OSCI or to some other entity in order to give them the capacity to continue to do that which the government our host government would like us to continue so when we both want to do it how can we make sure that happens there's a big challenge in Iraq the last two bullets you know nation starts a war nation should end a war and ending war means more than the end of military than the military leaving because we did end the U.S. operation in Iraq but the war continued and we're seeing the downside of that right now so transition planning if we look at what was taking place enormous amount of uncertainty in both Baghdad and Washington there was ambiguity in 2009 to 2011 in terms of what we wanted to do the U.S. planning tended to focus on the issue of whether we're going to keep a residual force and if we did what size that residual force would be not what our goals and objectives are going to be and how we're going to pursue those following the U.S. presence so there was no clear determination made on where we were going on this until the middle of 2011 the other thing that was extremely challenging for us was the fact that we had no government to deal with because the government of Iraq had not gone through government formation the ministers and many of the Iraqi government were unwilling to talk to us and the embassy was restrained in terms of the degree to which they could engage the government of Iraq so this caused some significant problems for Ambassador Jeffrey as he got to the point of having afterwards of having even the preliminary authorities to do things in country as they talked about right before the end of the beginning of 2012 the fact that they almost had to leave country talked about the political transition we have to think about this thinking through the concept of the political transformation when you leave when the United States military leaves the country there is a fundamental transformation not only the political dynamics within the country but also the relationship of the United States and that country that was not thought through completely and caused some significant challenges afterwards this was key there was no light between General Austin and his staff and Ambassador Jeffrey and his staff those two leaders worked together as a team and this is one of the great successes in terms of modeling what you want to do in the future is what took place here but it needs to be done in theater in terms of transition by these senior leaders and decision makers it goes through the entire issue the campaign plan work through the interagency all those things that I think would have been better had we moved forward in this process the other issue is collaboration with congress that was a major challenge for many of the things that we wanted to do because you started to shift from the armed forces side of the house to the foreign affairs and the dollars issue became major problem sets for them so as we start developing our strategy it's bringing members of congress on board early engaging them and the other thing we need to do is engage the host nation and it's not just host nation buy-in because buy-in kind of says that we're going to have a US position and we're going to take that US position and try to have the host nation accept it but rather what we need to do is to deal with the host nation what do you need what do you want we didn't do that as much as we could have and if you look at what happened to the police training program for example that failed miserably after we left because the Iraqis didn't want it and so we wasted a lot of taxpayer money in doing things if we had had a dialogue with the host nation we wouldn't know that this wasn't going to work out so some observations and recommendations first of all I went to Afghanistan for a couple of times after Iraq and everybody warned me Afghanistan is different from Iraq so don't go in there saying that you see how things are planning and that's true but there were an enormous amount of similarities when it came to the war termination planning process in reality many of the lessons learned that we've talked about and these are just a few of the lessons but a lot of the lessons learned have been adopted General Austin and SENTCOM has looking at a lot of these things and has made significant progress but one of the things we really haven't done is got to the point of developing a national war termination strategy of taking it there has been a war termination assessment and SENTCOM has not been done by the interagency and again I think this is something that needs to get done if we as a nation are going to end the war in Afghanistan in a manner that protects the the enormous treasure that has been invested in that country this was going to be the cover to the book and as I started to think about it and talk to some of my colleagues it dawned on me that maybe this was a wrong cover because it kind of suggested that we were closing the gate on Iraq and in retrospect in many ways we did I think we lost our effort we lost the focus that we're going to place on Iraq we have challenges the FMS program is slow to respond we're unable to maintain the issues of authorities we couldn't do the advice training and assist mission beyond so there are lots of things that caused us to have problems I think as we, historically as we look back on this there may be an opportunity to look at that maybe we would have been able to revert some of what we're seeing now if we had anticipated these holes that we're going to have in our strategy so with that I'll open it up for questions how much has what's ultimately happened in Iraq been driven by the emergence of the problem and the festering of the problems in Syria and if you hadn't had Syria collapsing and metastasizing as much would you still have been able to sort of get by and muddle through in Iraq one of the enduring challenges that we saw in Iraq was the possibility of a resurgent al-Qaeda in Iraq and in 2011 you started to see spikes of violence that were beginning to demonstrate the capacity for large-scale operations but your point on Syria is exactly right, what we had happened is AQI had a safe haven in Syria they became war-hardened you had Iran with the funding Iraqi Shia groups in Syria these organizations became very war-hardened and so you ended up having a very highly trained Sunni extremist group and a more highly trained Shia groups that are now back in Iraq fighting the same battle that they were fighting in 2006 and 2007 and so that's a challenge but I think that Syria did aggravate the situation in Iraq Hi Rick, Karen Walsh from BGD quick question you talk about the final part of Iraq in the door shutting and there's some type of narrative throughout the military that we're seeing Afghanistan looking at Charlie Wilson's war question of Congress saying no to funding so from the experience that you had in Iraq looking back how much was Congress's decision to shut off the funding levels post the shutting of the door something that might trickle into Afghanistan and create that dynamic as well Thanks Karen, that's an important question that I wanted to do I think as you're developing this termination strategy it can't be something that's developed in a closet that nobody knows about if you're going to stay someplace for a period of time then you need to start building public support for it and you need to be able to demonstrate why what we're going to do in the long term is in our U.S. national interest and that has to be done consistently throughout the process of developing this strategy otherwise you're going to get there and Congress isn't going to be behind you they aren't going to provide the funding that's necessary and you could end up with Charlie Wilson's war but again I'm hopeful at this point that we don't see that but obviously it's something that we'll have to see where it goes in the next couple of years Is it worth it was it worth it actually to have the war in Iraq provided now this weapons of mass destruction were fabricated by the United States and turned out not to be true do you think in the aftermath that it was justified to have such war it's always to look back in history and try to make a decision on whether something was worth going in in 2003 what we do know was that at the time period of 2002 and 2003 virtually everyone believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction the intelligence community was wrong but it was not only the US intelligence community it was also intelligence communities around the world it was even Saddam Hussein so I wouldn't go back and say we shouldn't have gone in because of that was it worth it a lot of changes have been made I think but at this point in time it's looking more and more like what's happening in Iraq is going to be something that we're going to be unable to recover from or they're going to be unable to recover from but I think we'll have to let history kind of make that judge on whether it was worth it Hi, I'm Alan from the Student Center for African Research Resolutions I was interested in your conversation about the religious disparities and the cultural heterogeneosity of the region in Iraq and noticed that it's a similarity to Yugoslavia in the fall of Tito I was curious if you thought there could be hope for a singular nation of Iraq following the current situation with ISIS and their expansion or if you think the situation like the breakdown of Yugoslavia is more likely I am not very hopeful at this point and I'm not very hopeful for a number of reasons first of all the Sunnis at this point have concluded and it's not just ISIS it's JRTN it's 1920 it's many of the tribal leaders they have all kind of joined together and have said that they can't trust the Maliki government I'm not hopeful because there is no consensus among the Shia while Assad are still Hayes Maliki they can't agree among themselves which of the Shia leaders should be the one to lead them through this and then the Kurds who have finally gotten their historic homeland Barzani has been very clear that there is a new reality and it's doubtful that he is going to be willing to give that up so you've got these three different groups now and I think you're at a position where it's going to be very, very hard for the Sunni to make any additional progress in Iraq moving south has moving into Shia territory and the Kurds aren't going to give up their land and unless you're going to look through some sort of federation or some other issues I'm not certain you can put this back together again but I know that the goal is to try to do that it's just going to be very, very challenging. Hi, excuse me, I'm Trisha Dejanara and I'm a professor at New York New University and a constant red teamer for the Army and I'd like to go back to your point about if you start a war you have to end it and I think there's two issues there that we're not really focusing on the first one Mr. Kunder did I think we don't set up our civilians up for success and we don't have them necessarily the State Department in the development set up for that strategic success that they need not because we don't have great people there but just because the system prohibits it and the second issue there is the value that our civilians do bring to the table and it's understandable that we're very supportive of our military these two long wars but we forget about the value of the civilian side and making sure that they understand that civil military relations are also important and how to make those transitions so those are the two points I'd like to make. The contributions of civilians in the Iraq War is something that really gets a lot of underreporting not only US government civilians but also contractors we couldn't operate in a zone of conflict today without the contractors that go out there and you get the bad press with Blackwater or some of those other organizations but by and large the contractor support is critical for what's taking place I've always spent five years in Iraq and I had an opportunity to work with a lot of government civilians and one of the things that always struck me was the challenge of getting government civilians in Iraq part of it, the reason is as Ambassador Jeffery said many of them don't want to go into war zone but the other thing is many of the government organizations are already tapped out as you're talking about customs and border control for example they are they are committed doing their job day in and day out there is no flexibility there is no reserve if you will in the civilian component the military can do that we can surge forces, we can surge people we can put large groups of people together the civilian organizations don't have that so where this leads us I think you need to be working on creating capacity and also trying to figure out how we work together as a closer team but again, we did a lot of really good stuff in Iraq and I'm certain that Afghanistan made a lot of progress in that and I think we just need to continue that progress and then march forward as we're looking at civil military cooperation Katya Negacheva, Don Lantos Human Rights Commission in Congress you mentioned engaging the importance of engaging with the host nations I imagine it's a great challenge in a nation broken by war and all kinds of crisis to find people with whom to consult on what it is they want and to ensure that they are in fact representative of the society so could you speak a little bit more about overcoming or dealing effectively with the challenge of proper communication with the host nation let me just kind of focus on Iraq for a second there was a government of Iraq and the government of Iraq was the organization we needed to deal with the challenge that we had in 2010 was at the very time where we were trying to think about our transition and ending the war the government of Iraq was in chaos because they couldn't come together and form a government and it was an eight month long process or longer during a time period where there was virtually nothing that we could do to talk through them so had there been a government of Iraq formed if they had followed through with their constitutional mandate of how fast they would have formed a government there would have been some organizations that we would be able to talk to my bigger issue though was that when you're talking to the host nation find out what they want don't try to put the American solution on what it is that we think they need find out what they want we want to professionalize the police they had very little interest in the professionalization process that we were putting into place so before we start spending money and effort and moving them down the road find out whether or not they're willing to accept it and thank you by the way I'm Paul Hughes of the U.S. Institute of Peace playing the role of the emcee for right now and before we break for lunch I would just like to thank all of our speakers that we've had today Dr. Gideon Rose General Kasslin General Milley Mr. Cunder and Ambassador Jeffrey and certainly Tara Sonnenschein for her masterful handling of a tough conversation and also Dr. Rick Brennan what we're going to do now is take a break for about 15 minutes use the door downstairs here our first floor exit lunch is a box lunch that will be ready to be selected by you off the tables that are in the back of the Great Hall close to noon and there are some of you who know who you are who have been asked to join some working sessions after lunch I would ask that at 1245 you be in room B241 which is on the next level up and USIP staff will help direct you there again thank you all for joining us for what has been a very important and insightful discussion