 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome. Nice to see you today on this hopefully non-rainy sunny day. I'm Shamilah Choudhury. I'm a senior South Asia fellow here at New America. I've been a fellow for, let's see, since 2011, since I left the government. When I started here right before that, I was the NSE director for Afghanistan and Pakistan. So it worked quite a bit on some of these issues we're going to talk about today, specifically on the case of Pakistan. And now I'm also a senior advisor at Johns Hopkins Ice. And it's such a great kind of opportunity to have this conversation today with my colleagues, some of whom were previously in government, and I can assure you we all look much more rested and youthful now than we did when we were at the White House. And Steven, who just finished a book, looks great for having written this tremendous. And you brought the book, right? We need to... Oh, I'll ask you something. Right. There's your book, Accessories Sold Separately. Yes, please buy the book. So we have a combination of kind of the academic perspective today and the practitioner's perspective, and we'll look forward to your questions. The question we want to look at today are, you know, how have the counterterrorism strikes of the U.S. government changed under the Trump administration? So the discussion is going to be a combination of what was the policy and framework as defined by the Obama administration? What are the lessons we learned from that? And hopefully we can take that and then have a conversation about what is the Trump administration actually doing? How do you define what they're doing? Because a lot of these topics are very quiet and classified. And then hopefully that will lead us into a conversation about the future and looking at the threat of terrorism and what kind of posture and policies need to be in place for the U.S. to feel like it's protecting its people and the international community from terrorist threats. Okay, so let me just briefly introduce our guest today who will discuss these critical questions, Josh Gelzer, who is a future of war fellow at New America, an executive director of Georgetown University Law Center's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, and he is a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, an Obama administration. Also welcome to Luke Hartig, who's a fellow with New America's international security program and a former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, also under the Obama administration. And my friend Steven Tenkel, who's an assistant professor at American University School of International Service, and adjunct senior fellow at the Center for New American Security and the author of With Us and Against Us, How America's Partners Help and Hinder the War on Terror. I haven't read the book yet, it's so new, but I briefly looked at the table of contents and it covers kind of both the theoretical and conceptual, but then there's also each chapter is devoted to kind of one of the several hotspots of counterterrorism that the U.S. has been focusing on over the past decade plus, and so it's a great kind of tour de force of where we've been. So I definitely recommend reading it and I look forward to that myself. You can, if you're online and you're inclined to kind of tweet or post about this, you can use the hashtag CTunderTrump and then follow at New America ISP. And just quickly on the format, we'll do a couple of rounds of questions. We're going to keep this very informal. These guys are all friends, they've written articles together, they've worked together, so I think the best use of our time is to have it be as informal as possible. And after a few rounds of questions, we'll open it up for your Q&A. So save those good questions towards the end. Okay, so we're going to start with Stephen. Again, congratulations on the book. In it, you outline problems with the current U.S. approach, some longstanding, and then some that are unique to Trump. And in other writings, you've acknowledged that there's been a change in how the Trump administration is pursuing terrorism or countering terrorism. But it's not really clear what their strategy is. We see tactics in the news, but we're not actually sure why they're doing them and they haven't explained themselves. So I thought it would be good to start with you to kind of give us a scene setter of some of these topics of use of force, direct action, how they've evolved, and how they've shaped our partnerships and what you see happening today. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much and thank you to New America for hosting this. It's a great pleasure and honor for me to be up here with three friends who I've worked with in one capacity or another. And I should also note that while I wrote the book from an academic perspective, it was very much informed by my brief time that I spent working at DOD as well. I'd gone in thinking that I was going to write a book that looked more at the threat side of the picture. And when I was working a lot on Afghanistan, Pakistan issues at OSD policy, I was really struck by the ways in which our partner nations can be absolutely critical to what we're trying to accomplish, but also incredibly frustrating, which I think is an understatement when you're talking about countries like Pakistan, for example. And so that was really formative for me to come out and rethink the time of the book that I was writing. So diving in on your question, Shamila, in terms of how we've seen direct action evolve and what it looks like under Trump and what the implications may have been for partnerships. When we're talking about direct action, just so everybody's on the same page, we're talking about counterterrorism strikes, counterterrorism raids, air strikes, drone strikes, outside of areas of active hostility. So I'm just to put us all on the same page. We're not going to be talking about what's happening in places like Iraq or Afghanistan where the United States has had their military presence. We're talking more about countries like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya. Going back to even the Bush administration, of course, there was use of special operations forces for counterterrorism raids. Drones strikes are used relatively sparingly. There's one in Yemen in 2002. There's, I think, a total of 14 in Pakistan from 2004 through the summer of 2008. And it's in June of 2008 when there's a large escalation after Bush is informed and shown evidence of the Pakistani intelligence service and military supporting the Haqqani network, which is fighting U.S. forces in Afghanistan, supporting them directly. There's a large uptick and we get over 30 drone strikes between June 2008 and the end of the year. Technological advancements in UAVs, unmanned area vehicles, as well as the creation of an independent intelligence network in Pakistan, independent of Pakistani intelligence, helps enable that escalation, even if it's not sort of the cause for it. Obama comes into office and inherits those capabilities. And it's under Obama that we see, I would say, a radical expansion of the use of direct action, especially in the form of drone strikes and most notably in Pakistan, where the majority of them occur. I think it's important to put that escalation in context. When Obama comes in, he makes working by, within through partner nations a cornerstone of his counterterrorism strategy. And there's more emphasis and money behind building partnership capacity and not just for military capabilities, but also trying to promote development, governance, rule of law, things like that. And the intention is to get partners to share the costs and the risks of U.S. counterterrorism. But it's also beyond burden sharing to try to make counterterrorism more sustainable on the ground, which is to say that military gains can be ephemeral by getting partners to buy in, you give host nations more legitimacy, and you help build patterns of cooperation and give them the capabilities and capacity that they're going to need to solidify those military gains over the longer term. So this isn't just about burden sharing, although there is a component of it. Yet at the same time, while Obama is trying to do more to work by, within through partners, he's also prepared to work around them when necessary. And Pakistan, as you in particular will know, but Josh and Luke also, I'm sure, are imminently familiar, is an example of a partner where they are not willing or able to execute counterterrorism operations on the ground against terrorists that threaten the United States directly. And so drone strikes enable working around Pakistan. They're also used in Yemen where you have another problematic government can get into more of that during the Q&A. But while drone strikes enable working around governments, they also raise questions about the use of lethal force outside of areas of active hostilities. And in 2013, the United States puts in place a framework to govern that use of force, the PPG presidential policy guidance. I think Luke, you're going to dig more into the guts of that. So I'll just highlight very quickly a couple points before moving to Trump and then finishing up with a little more of a discussion of implication of partners and some of the changes of direct action. One is that the country where you're using direct action either needs to consent to the use of direct action or be unwilling or unable to address the threat themselves. Pakistan certainly qualifies. Not only unwilling or unable legally, but also it gave its consent for most drone strikes. And there needs to be a continuing imminent threat to the United States of the individuals who are being targeted in those strikes. So that's the framework that is put in place. By the time Obama is leaving office, however, the threat has evolved. The PPG is a product of its time. ISIS has not burst on the scene and you haven't had the civil wars really sort of come to fruition out of the Arab uprisings at the time. And there's an expansion of the way in which direct action is being used by the end of Obama's term, not just to work around difficult partners, but also to support partner forces on the ground. So for example, Libya is declared an area of active hostilities so that the United States can use drone strikes in support of partner forces on the ground against ISIS. This is the world that Trump inherits. Reportedly, as of 2017, the PPG has been replaced with principal standards and procedures and new framework. It's not as transformative as it could have been. I think my colleagues are going to talk about that. So again, I'll just highlight two quick things. One is that it removes the continuing imminent threat standard to U.S. persons. So previously, the United States couldn't kill a courier if that courier didn't pose a threat. Couldn't kill a financier if that financier didn't pose a direct threat. Now it can. Second, devolves authority downwards. Proposed strikes, kind of terrorism rates don't undergo the same high level of vetting. What's the impact on our partnerships of these changes? First, there are some potential benefits. There are tactical advantages to removing the imminent threat standard both from a straightforward U.S. CT perspective, but also in that the United States can now support partner forces on the ground to a greater extent. And if you're asking your partners to go and fight these fights then being able to support them has benefits. Streamlining the oversight process also enables us to be more nimble and responsive to our partners. But these benefits at the same time come with potential costs. The first is although drone strikes enable us to work around partners or to support them, they also create other forms of dependence. You heard me say earlier that you need consent or you need a partner to be unwilling to address the threat. That's the legal threshold. The policy threshold is higher. Luke and Josh can both speak to this with much greater detail and I'm sure clarity than I can. But my understanding is you really don't want to do a drone strike in somebody's territory without their consent unless you absolutely have to. And so you're dependent on host nations for access. Of course you also need bases for drones. You also need intelligence support which means you're dependent on other countries to help support drone strikes as well. The danger of relying more on them or of lowering the threshold for using direct action, one of the dangers is that operational requirements for drone strikes increasingly crowd out the other elements of counter-terrorism the United States should be focusing on. Second by removing the continuing threat standard there is the risk that some of those other states that support direct action are necessary to support direct action but don't sort of sign on to this idea of a global campaign against al-Qaeda and ISIS are less willing to provide that support. And then of course there's always the risk of blowback that's something that's been long standing. We're seeing more partnered operations where U.S. Special Operations Forces are working more closely with counterparts on the ground we're lowering the standards for drone strikes so we can support our partners more. Without the right sort of vetting without sober analysis I would argue raises the potential for an errant strike that either hurts the United States directly or harms its relationship with a partner. And then finally I would say the biggest problem is that none of this is happening in a vacuum. Trump's strategy that agree that we can decipher it because we haven't seen anything published and they don't talk about this a lot he personally appears to lean overwhelmingly on military-centric tools. And so this is happening while diplomats are being hobbled while development experts are potentially being shut out that sends a message to partner nations that the United States cares first and foremost about the military instrument about killing terrorists not about other aspects of counter-terrorism it raises potential risks that any military gains will be ephemeral because they won't be sustainable. And I will close with this which is to say that direct action is an important part of any counter-terrorism strategy for the United States but it is not the only tool in the toolkit and when it is used on its own or divorced from a political strategy that is not a recipe for success. We've seen that in the past in the early years of the Bush administration when they were overly reliant on military tools and we run that risk again. So could some of these changes that Trump is putting in place have operational benefits? Yes, they could but only if they're married to a broader political strategy and we haven't seen that as of yet I'll stop there. Thanks Steven you did a really good job of looking at some of the outcomes of the framework and practice and I'd like Luke to take us back to those conversations inside the government on what was the philosophy towards the framework because whenever I look at policy I think of three prongs to it. One is the intended purpose and then two is the actual stated policy as it's defined and then three is the implementation of it. It's actually quite complex and it's a really messy process on the inside and once it exists sometimes you feel like you don't have control over it and that's why I think it's good to go back to what was the intended purpose of this and so you spent a lot of time at the NSC working on Yemen and then in the CT office and so I was hoping you could share some of that with us. Yeah, that's a great question and I think that's a really useful framework those three phases. I just want to again commend to the audience Steven's book I do think it's an exceptional read. It is written with the rigor of a first rate academic which Steven is but also the prose, the penmanship is really that of a first rate nonfiction writer so kudos to Steven on that book and I hope you'll all pick it up. I was also just impressed with how much he wanted to understand the reality of policymaking which I feel like was something that is often hard to find in academic books so that's very useful. Back to the three part framework that Shamaila laid out which I think is really useful in thinking about the drone policy at least as was practicing the Obama administration and as best we can discern is how it's being implemented in the Trump administration. I worked on the development part of it at the Pentagon the actual drafting of it somewhere between the Pentagon and the White House and the implementation at the White House just to kind of orient my involvement in this and I think if you think back and look at what the Obama administration was trying to accomplish it's helpful to think of kind of where the world of counterterrorism was at the time that the presidential policy guidance or the PPG was developed and ultimately rolled out. President Obama comes in very clear guidance that we need to focus on the right war the right war as it was is both Afghanistan as well as the broader fight against al-Qaeda it's not a global war on terrorism it's a war against al-Qaeda it's affiliates in its adherence and he enters that war with the capabilities from the military and from the intelligence community that have been refined over the past seven years mostly in the Iraq theater but also in the Afghanistan theater and so we have highly developed special operations forces highly developed ways of actually identifying and tracking terrorists and then the emerging drone technology which is actually developed quite a bit at that point it gives us a lot of capability to go after and conduct targeted strikes against those who would do us harm and so the theaters kind of emerge accordingly right we're going all in on Afghanistan we've got the surge and then in other theaters particularly places like Yemen and Somalia we're ratching up this kind of hybrid warfare where we're providing some training and assistance to folks on the ground and we're also accompanying that with drone strikes as maybe appropriate the world ends up in many ways looking far more bipolar than I think it is today and so let me just unpack that a little bit because I want to come back to that as I continue these remarks you have on the one hand kind of an Afghanistan or Iraq like theater that's to say it's full scale combat operations we have US forces engaged in the fight against the enemy when you're in that context a war like framework is really what's applied you have to of course divide by the principles of precision and discrimination and the other principles that underlie the law of armed conflict but at the same point when you have US forces in conflict with the enemy you're willing to loosen the reins of it in order to make sure that they have everything that they need and all of the use of force that they need in order to successfully accomplish their mission and in order to beat back enemies when they are particularly under siege from the enemy in a place like Yemen around say circa 2010-2011 where you have some significant state fragility to be sure but you still have a mostly stable central government with something approximating an insurgency in the countryside that framework looks very different from actual US full scale combat operations in Iraq or Afghanistan and I think President Obama realized that and realized that well we might use some of the same capabilities and some of the same tools and also terrorist threats in that Yemen and Somalia like environment the rules ought to be different because we're in a paradigm that looks much different than a full scale major combat war and so the rules that begin to emerge from that these are things that evolve in place over time but are ultimately solidified and codified in the presidential policy guidance focus on some big principles first of all let's define that area those Yemen's and Somalias as something other than the area of active hostilities or outside areas of active hostilities let's say that there's a different set of rules that go into place in that location or those types of locations second of all the president says if we're in those locations we're only going to take action against terrorist threats subject to a few specific conditions the first of those is that the terrorist threat that we have identified poses a continuing imminent threat to US persons the direct threat to US interests it is about US people being in harm's way and about that threat being imminent as something that needs to be disrupted secondly that action can only be taken if it can be assessed that capture is infeasible so we've really looked at our ability to capture our partner nations ability to capture other ways to minimize the threat and we've determined that there's no other alternative and thirdly that there is near certainty that millions will not be harmed in the strike or the operation that takes place which is a very high standard what President Obama felt was the highest standard he could set at that point in time and still be able to effectively go after the targets we needed to go after and I think the final piece of it isn't something that's necessarily contained within the standards of the PPG but it's sort of a function of the entire document and I think it gets at which Shamila was talking about which is that the implementation piece is so important and therefore the PPG prescribes a pretty intensive interagency process for going over targets and making sure that when we're going to use direct action we've made sure that the targets hit those certain imperatives and that we are fully aware eyes wide open and making good decisions around the foreign policy implications around the implications for our intelligence collection the full range of other foreign policy equities that might be implicated by taking direct action so that is the framework that is what President Obama puts forward in 2013 as kind of his best thinking on how to bound these types of operations and make sense of them there are a few things that I think become problematic around these and I think some of these Stephen alluded to but I want to unpack them a little bit further because of the topic of Stephen's book which is so timely around partnership and direct action is directly implicated the first of which is if you are going out and telling your partners that they are the answer right and indeed a year after the speech that President Obama gave at National Defense University in 2014 he goes to West Point and says okay this center piece of our counter-terrorism strategy going forward is partnerships so if you go out and say partnerships we're the partnership guys this is exactly what we want to do we want to really invest in our partners and then we tell our partners if you're facing threats we're not necessarily going to be willing to use lethal force to protect you because you're not a US person we immediately run into a significant conflict between what you say your strategy is and what your policy on the use of force actually allows you to do and it's a challenge and it's something we kind of face coming right out of the gate and it particularly becomes challenging because as we look at ways to be more effective in places like Yemen and places like Libya we find that often what we need to do are exactly the kinds of tactics that our military got so good at and have been so effective in working with our Iraqi and Afghan partners with and that is that we're going to put more US forces more US advisors out closer to the front lines they're actually going to be advising partner forces they're going to be providing an airlift intelligence support a full range of enablers that allow a partner force to actually be effective and in some cases that might need to include the use of force it might need to use the use of force because those partner forces come under attack and we need to protect them it might come into play because we want to help the partners by taking some offensive action prior to the partners going in there and the PPG framework doesn't really fully allow for that and so you see these exceptions that Steven was talking about about saying well part of Libya particularly the campaign we're going to undertake against ISIS around DORNA insert these are going to be kind of carved out from the PPG and we're going to say these don't apply the PPG framework doesn't apply and so that works in so far as it allows us to take some of those actions to be more effective in high interaction to our stated partnership strategy but it's also challenging for when you start to carve out some big loopholes in the framework you start to wonder well is the framework really appropriate for what we're facing and so the Trump administration comes into power and the first thing they do is say we're going to put all the stuff kind of on hiatus on the back burner for six months we're going to say the PPG doesn't apply we have other types of rules we don't know exactly what those rules are all this we're sort of reading the tea leaves from the press but we want military commanders to have the chance to be a little bit more forward leaning and to come back and evaluate and develop a new framework the framework that emerges again we don't actually know what this framework is because there have been no speeches about it there have been no public rollout what Stephen is talking about is mostly I think built off of reporting from the New York Times and from the Washington Post and other journalism outlets that have good sources on this but it is something that gives a broader applicability and a loosening of the reins when it comes to being able to use direct action and support of partners among other things for those of us who worked on the Obama framework the first reaction I won't lie is to be defensive to say we had a good framework why did we throw that framework out why is the Trump framework especially if you're upset about other things that the Trump administration is doing this must not be the right framework and yet I do think it's important to ask and it's worth asking at this point and any current policymaker should ask does the framework actually match the world we find ourselves in both in terms of the threat as well as what we want to be able to do against the threat and I don't know that the answer on that has been fully answered in a satisfactory way and that's to say when I talked earlier about the bipolar world of kind of a generally peaceful Yemen with a with a stable government and full-scale major combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan the polls on that in some ways have collapsed inward what was previously full scale combat operations in Afghanistan has turned into kind of a advise assist mission on steroids what we're doing in Iraq and Syria has always depended at least since 2014 on really putting our partners out on the lead and us providing air strikes and other support in order for them to be effective and similarly Yemen and Somalia and Libya have all kind of taken a slide backwards and these are the theaters don't look like a stable yet somewhat fragile place these look closer and more and more like Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria than they did before and so I don't know that the old framework fully makes sense to govern those two places but I think that's something that this administration should be working on and any administration should stop there thank you well I'm gonna have Josh answer a question and flash topic that you brought up which is what is the current state of the world today when it comes to terrorism and security threats and to the policies we have actually like work to address that so and Josh you were also in the tail end of the Obama administration you stayed some time for a little bit of time into the Trump administration so I think you probably got some good perspective there kind of on the mindset and the philosophy of the new team how would you characterize what they're doing right now even if it's not strategic and it's just tactical I think it's worth explaining not just to the Washington community but to the American public given you know every once in a while you'll see a news story of something that happens in Niger and then Somalia and then Yemen and these are all kind of piecemeal kind of anecdotes if you will that you know you really have to work hard to put it together into a narrative and so given your vantage point during that time piece that together for us and then walk us through how you see the this war on terror you know as we knew it post 9-11 into the future what should we be concerned about and what kind of partnerships need to exist to actually get at those challenges before answering the question I will abuse the opening minute or so to add my thanks to you to New America for hosting this and it's a particular treat to get to do this with two good friends Steven and I have been buddies since we were the lowest form of life grad students together but since then I very much admired his work and I will echo Luke's sentiments it's an excellent book and I heartily recommend that a lot of people talk about partnerships and counterterrorism but to grapple with the trade-offs between counterterrorism and other foreign policy interests and to dig into what partnerships actually can look like across the spectrum Steven's really done everyone who follows him he's a great service with the book and Luke has been a very generous colleague and friend since we got to work together in government and beyond so it's fun to get to be up here with all three of you now to actually answer your questions or at least try so I think the right place to start in talking about today's terrorist threat is still with ISIS in Syria and I know there's an inclination to move on from that in part because people want to talk about different things in part because there is a generally good news story of that threat diminishing but I still think it's the place to start you have far fewer fighters you have far less territory than ISIS held a couple years ago or even a number of months ago but you don't have that group eradicated and that means you don't have the threat that it continues to pose eradicated if anything you have what seems to be something of a slowing down in the progress to squeeze that group and thousands of fighters at least enjoying something of an opportunity to figure out what comes next for them in the Euphrates river valley region I'll come back to kind of where the counterterrorism pushes on that and what some of my thoughts are on the continuity versus a difference on that piece of it I also think when you talk about today's threat you stay in Syria but you talk about al-Qaeda in Syria and this piece of al-Qaeda splinter group from al-Qaeda whatever you want to call it has rebranded itself renamed itself a number of times I think it's easiest to think of it as the piece of al-Qaeda that has now set up something of a haven in a different piece of Syria more than northwest part of Syria from where ISIS has now been cornered to some extent and al-Qaeda in Syria has been in some ways patient it has in some ways played both the local and the regional as much or probably prioritize that over sort of playing the global field but I think it's perhaps a problem we will be talking about a terrorist threat we will be talking about increasingly in time to come that's not to say that other pieces of al-Qaeda are gone because they're not there's still a QAP in Yemen there's still Shabaab in Somalia and there's still al-Qaeda's kind of original senior leadership to the extent it remains in the AFPAC region though to my mind the center of gravity and even some of the real veterans of al-Qaeda have shifted to northwest Syria over time but I think you have these these remnants that of both al-Qaeda and ISIS some diminishing some actually surging a bit at least trying to and beyond that you still have as you asked what we should worry about you have the ability to reach in the United States and radicalize people here under whatever ideology group wants to utilize ISIS of course did this in a way that appeared to be more compelling than al-Qaeda had been able to do previously not just here in the US but in Europe and elsewhere it had this ability to make folks who are not on the battlefield with them who might never go to the battlefield somehow feel like they were part of the ISIS project and thus willing to kill and die in the name of that project that's a remarkable thing and I'm happy to spend time and I know these folks have thoughts on as well what to do about it but that problem hasn't gone away and if anything it's been revealed for others to try to utilize and iterate on and improve from their own vantage point and finally I would begin to think about what a terrorist group like ISIS that's losing key pieces of territory tries to do to maintain or regain momentum and that's where this idea of novel cyber operations of the type that kind of terrorism folks have worried about for a while that haven't really come to fruition yet beyond the recruitment radicalization there you haven't seen the working to bring down a power grid or to disrupt a hospital's operations but you might because there's clearly some technological expertise that ISIS has had probably continues to have and what they might turn to when they don't have the physical territory to plot and build networks and carry out the sort of operations they've unfortunately been able to carry out over the past few years I would begin to think about that let me say we're just on the counter terrorism piece in relation to a few of those and then I look forward to more of a discussion you could tell different stories about the Trump administration's approach to some of these issues and whether there's continuity there or not let me start with the counter ISIS campaign you could tell a story of a strategy developed by the previous administration well underway by the time you get to January 20 of last year and that more or less continues and I think that's very much to the credit of the Trump administration and to the foreign service officers and military personnel and intelligence community members all those folks who are implementing it a campaign on the ground in Iraq and Syria that has now retaken something close to 90-95% you see somewhat differing estimates of the territory the group once held that has clearly squeezed the group pressured the group and that sounds like a lot of continuity it also sounds like a very good thing on the other hand you zoom out a little bit and the pieces that go around counter terrorism don't look quite as tidy they don't look quite as much defined by continuity you look at the diplomacy that's critical to that campaign and it starts to look a little bit shakier part of the reason that progress occurred and occurred as quickly as it did and I think both Luke and Steven reference this is because the US had capable counter terrorism partners on the ground and in Syria that was largely a force led by the Syrian Kurds those are the same folks whom one would hope would continue to clear ISIS from that pocket in the Euphrates river valley that I mentioned earlier but and I say this in large part thanks to reporting on this I see him sitting in the back there you have the Kurds largely turning away from that fight going back to defend against Turkey and Afrin some of them may be trickling back to that fight but if you don't get a ground force in the fight you don't clear out what remain thousands of fighters and diplomacy may not be what folks first think about when they think about counter terrorism but it really matters and those sorts of pieces don't seem to be exemplified by the same continuity that you might see in the operations themselves in the military operations themselves you don't see the holding together of the coalition quite as neatly in part because of the more erratic diplomacy and messaging generally from this White House and from this administration more broadly so there's a story that looks a little bit less defined by continuity as you zoom out from the strictly military counter terrorism piece let me put one other data point on the table for this which is Libya so towards the end of the Obama administration you see the campaign that Luke mentioned to clear ISIS from CERT a coastal city where ISIS's level of control was really similar to what it had in Syria and Iraq at various points you can find these images online you had ISIS flags being marched down main street in parades in CERT eventually you have a campaign to clear the group from CERT again using largely American air power and key partners on the ground local partners affiliated with the GNA the Libyan government drawn largely from Mizrata and it looks at least to my mind like almost a paradigm by with and through partners counter terrorism operation where the US adds its comparative advantage and it has good partners on the ground and it plans for the day after about what to do this doesn't need to be repeated an endless cycle of ISIS retaking the city and then the US having to show up again to drop bombs to clear the group and to some extent you see in this administration some of the operations you would expect to see from any administration in the aftermath of that strikes against the group as it attempts to re-gather in the desert in fact the first of those strikes was on President Obama's last full day in office then you see more under this administration so the pure military part seems like it has a lot of continuity but then if you zoom out a bit you see things that look less consistent you see first of all less transparency with respect to these operations both when they're occurring where they're occurring why they're occurring and how they fit into a broader strategic approach to Libya you also see less of an interest in the day after execution that I mentioned before how is cert a city that was really devastated by this group being rebuilt so that it is more resilient as the group tries to retake it and again you see in the broader diplomatic context the lack of relationship building and diplomacy that could create for Libya writ large a more sustainable arrangement where Libyans can do the counter-terrorism to the extent that needs to be done going forward so I'll leave on that note which is to say that in some ways it's the level of generality in which you want to talk about counter-terrorism and how partnerships fit into counter-terrorism it gives you a somewhat different answer as to where we are how similar it looks to where we were before and how effective things seem to be right now just a couple of comments and then I want to do another follow up question with all of you and we'll open it up one thing I think we definitely learned from the beginning of the Obama administration until the end is that good counter-terrorism policy is not just about counter-terrorism which all of you alluded to right and it's also not an approach that is restricted to any one government agency it's a whole of government approach if you want it to be successful and sustainable and I think that's definitely something we learned by the end of it and one would hope that that's something that is shared with the next administration whoever they may be and that gets built upon and there's always some kind of dismantling of policy because that's what every government needs to distinguish itself but one would think and hope that we would maintain that whole of government approach because without it I don't think we get it kind of the foundational issues of why terrorism is allowed to persist in some of these countries it's not just about the fact that there are non-state actors doing whatever they want a lot of it has to do with economic inequality some of it has to do with corrupt governments and states etc all of which is in Stephen's fine book every comment has to go back to the book by the way and the second point I want to just say which again we're kind of talking all around it is that you know the US isn't kind of we're not kind of innocent here I mean we've often taken a short term approach at the expense of long term objectives that we should have focused on right and I think that was very much my experience in education of working on Pakistan that it was the expedient approach was often the best one for the moment in time for the whatever political objective we had or if it was even a security objective you know the shorter approach was often the one that all sides wanted to take only to learn you know that few years later you know we should have done something different right but the key is that we learn those lessons and it would be prudent for the Trump administration to kind of take note of those so and I don't expect that short term versus long term theme to end I think that's just a constant issue that you struggle with in policymaking so one thing we alluded to Josh's transparency could you talk all of you but specifically could you talk about what are the expectations of transparency kind of from the or what should the public expect in terms of transparency and reporting from the US government sometimes now I feel like we're like a lot of these partners that we've had where they don't really explain to their own people what the US is doing in their countries and we're just kind of learning from the headline so what should we expect given that some of this information is very sensitive and it doesn't all need to be shared and then the second bigger question for all of you is and we've talked about this before as well is are we continuing the CT fight indefinitely what are the parameters for this kind of new security environment that we found ourselves in after 9-11 and how sustainable is using things like direct action when there are bigger issues like cyber policy and the radicalization of folks like just through the media and messaging from our own government and from the internet so that's a big question I don't think we're going to get the answer to but we'd love your thoughts I'm happy to start I'll say a word on each of those on the transparency point I agree with you and I guess to some extent I agree with the president that one doesn't want to show the enemy what one is about to do that's not what anyone would recommend about military or other forms of action but there's a whole lot of space to say a whole lot more than this administration is saying about counter-terrorism that in my experience and I think in the experience of many others doesn't sacrifice sensitive intelligence doesn't sacrifice the element of surprise that one wants for military and other sorts of operations and I think that's true both at the strategic level which is why are strikes and the pace of them up in a place like Yemen or Somalia it's hard to know whether one wants to criticize that accept that applaud that if one doesn't understand the strategic context for it what's the aim what are the new generally types of actions that are being taken and towards what sustainable end that's the sort of very high level discussion and even higher level of that how does this administration think about counter-terrorism they have not as Steven and I noted in a piece that I had the good fortune to work on with Steven they have not put out a counter-terrorism strategy they did talk about counter-terrorism in the national security strategy in some very traditional ways and I don't mean that as a bad thing if anything probably a good thing but it's hard to know when things do change what to make of those changes if one doesn't have the strategic context for them then there's also a very granular at the other side of the spectrum type of information sharing that strikes me as responsible and I know this is one Luke feel strongly about as well which is information purely on what we're doing after we've done it not before we've done it and in particular whom it's killing both in terms of combatants and non-combatants or civilians this was something that the previous administration worked towards more slowly than some would like but worked hard to at least say more about that and by the end did so and entrenched that commitment in an executive order ultimately Congress entrenched a related obligation on the defense department in a statute and when the deadline for both of those rolled around just under a month ago the deadline was simply ignored the information wasn't there and to tell the American people that sort of information how much are we doing and whom are we killing when we do it that strikes me after the fact as not just not harming things but generally is helpful to things because often this government and those who implement its policies are incredibly careful on what they do and often helps to defang a narrative to the contrary to put out the information as best we have it I have thoughts on your second question but maybe I should pass it on for others to chime in on that Sure so the question of like where does this all go and what does this strategy look like I think it's a really important and timely one there's a few things that jump to my mind on this you know for at least the last ten years we've had a counter-terrorism strategy across administrations that says we can't kill our way out of this we can't overly militarize our responses to this and yet if you look at our expenditure of resources in a number of different ways whether those are sort of policy financial or human resources we're overwhelmingly focusing on the military and intelligence angles of what we do one of the things that while it was very important to get the drone policy and the broader direct action policy right and we spent a lot of time in the Obama administration convening senior level meetings to make sure it was being implemented in the way that the president wanted to and that was very important that ultimately has an opportunity associated with it as well which is to say you know the real rubber meets the road and policymaking is at the deputies committee the number two of the departments and agencies across the US government and for every hour they're spending talking about a drone strike or proposed drone actions that is an hour they're not talking about building partnership capacity but they're not talking about things like dealing with terrorist use of encryption and other electronic communications methods cyber as Josh mentioned some of these really big either X factors or things that we've said from a strategic perspective that we think we have to get right if we want to have a fighting chance of really getting after the enemy secondly on this when it comes to more direct uses of resources not just the deputies time which is actually a very important resource but actual financial resources I just participated in a working group that the Stimson Center put out assessing the total expenditures and total cost of US counterterrorism efforts since 9-11 and we concluded that over 2.8 trillion dollars have been spent in the name of counterterrorism that includes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan includes homeland security includes a huge range of activities and if you break those numbers down the amount of that 2.8 trillion that was spent on foreign aid that's to say any sort of development includes equipment for partner militaries it includes countering violent extremism measures we might take in foreign countries it's less than 1% and if you count in the total cost of state and aid operations you kind of get these incredibly expensive deployments of diplomats to war zones you still are under 5% so we can say we can talk about our strategy all we want we can say that we're trying to not overly militarize it but as an old professor of mine he used to say don't listen to my speech or read my budget because that's where I have to make some real decisions and we have consistently emphasized the military tools there are a lot of good reasons for that they have to do with strictures that the congress has placed in the administration color of money issues on and on and we can certainly get into those but to say that our strategy is balanced is just not borne out by actual analysis of what we've actually done great so let me pick up that thread and go back to that question how long are we in this for let me also say that first of all thank you guys for the kind words you all should just know in the interest of transparency if the book is good or it is better because Josh and Luke spent long periods of time talking with me about a lot of the decisions they struggled with so to the degree that they were able to capture sort of that policy flavor it's because I've talked to people who were doing policy making at the highest levels but rest assured that all errors remain the office they are all mine yeah you know I think in terms of your question about how long are we in this for and there being other greater issues out there I think the national defense strategy recognizes this it says the counter-terrorism will no longer be the guiding principle from a security perspective and as somebody who's spent over 10 years working on terrorism counter-terrorism I am in violent agreement with that it should not be but at the same time I think it is naive to believe that we're going to sort of be able to put this behind us anytime soon um terrorist threats will persist and even if one believes that those terrorist threats are overblown which I think in some cases they may be uh policy makers and especially elected officials will feel the need to respond to them uh and will sometimes leverage them for their own purposes and so I think you know we are likely to see an ongoing focus on counter-terrorism even if it is not the top security focus for the foreseeable future I think there are several uh then consequences and assessments that flow from that we need to do counter-terrorism more efficiently and effectively and the Stimson Center project that Luke was part of you know the fact that we've spent 2.8 trillion dollars is in and of itself that I think the sticker shock should be right there for everybody but the Stimson Center then had to sort of go through and I think you guys had to estimate in some cases what was or was not being spent what was or was not counter-terrorism the fact that we don't know and that we can't do effective assessment monitoring and evaluation for where we're getting banged for our buck and where we're not getting banged for our buck needs to change because if we're going to be in this for the long term and we're not going to be able to spend like drunken sailors because we're looking at other at other issues that are going to be higher level then we need to to be more effective and efficient and part of that I think harder on ourselves internally organizationally in terms of how we do CT strategy and planning and how we do evaluations the other part right which we've talked a lot about is how to get more out of our partners and I think that goes to also knowing what we can expect from them and and Josh I think your points about you know the the curds on the ground and where that relationship is heading highlights two important factors one is that it's not enough to share a threat it's how you prioritize that threat relative to other threats and now that the ISIS threat has declined we're seeing right the curds are are there are other greater issues for them same for the Turks and for other other actors we're not going to be able to sort of get around that I'm always very skeptical that you can change a partner's threat perceptions but for that reason I think the politics and the diplomacy become even more important can you change the curds threat perceptions no can you change the southeast threat perceptions no but good diplomacy can help mitigate some of the sort of worst case consequences that can come out of that and that's I think what part of what's missing right now and so then I would close with this is there's there's I think two sides to the what should go under the CT bucket question and you know in true academic form I've got like a nice chart where I say here are all the different things that I think go under CT cooperation and I do believe that diplomacy is part of that and if you don't if you're not mindful of diplomacy as part of counterterrorism then you run into problems if you're not mindful of countering violent extremism as part of counterterrorism then you run into problems if you're not mindful of the fact that access or cooperation on detainees is part of counterterrorism then you run into problems especially when you're not mindful of the tradeoffs that take place between this the danger is that everything becomes counterterrorism and I think that's where you know sort of a very very rigorous internal assessments become important because you need to be clear about where things fit in terms of the counterterrorism strategy and where they don't that doesn't mean that everything is CT it means you have to understand where CT runs up against other foreign policy issues and I think that also gets to that point that you were making Shamila about the short term long term tradeoff that's something that the Obama administration faced it's a problem that the Bush administration faced in other garb it's a problem that the Clinton administration faced and Bush senior faced and it's a problem that every administration faces the Obama administration and I think even the Bush administration to a degree wrestled with those issues and I think Luke you're absolutely right when you point to right all the spending on military and everything else sometimes maybe they didn't wrestle with them to the degree that which some of us might have liked maybe if they had a better sense of what they were going to get out of partnerships they would have known where they could drive a harder bargain and before more long term focused I think the danger with the Trump administration is not that they're confronting the same challenges in terms of diplomacy and it's importance or in terms of long term short term it's that I don't see them wrestling with these issues at the highest levels right so even if the Obama administration fell short even if the first you know the Bush administration fell short there's a cognizance of these challenges and wrestling with them as opposed to this sort of like well let's let's just try to kill our way out of this problem right diplomacy is hard let's not bother the short term often takes precedence over the long term let's let's just focus on the military piece that to me is one of the bigger issues is that we're not wrestling with them and so you're never going to get the perfect answer but you can't optimize your CT right or you can't mitigate against the bad stuff if you're not wrestling with these things on a day and day basis very well said another thought to add to that is that CT policy can be very transactional if you want it to be and it our own policy has been but we don't want to go down that path because it's not effective right and I think because the Trump administration is a very kind of transactional administration in everything and I think that's one of the stated kind of objectives of it's a known approach of it right and so you can you can see that happening at commerce and you know within the military partnerships and I think you can expect it in CT as well and if that's what we are to presume of their policy I think we're in for a lot of kind of cleaning up in the future right so that if I were to describe it in any way I would say it would be transactional and one final point on budgets I'm glad we brought this up we don't you know I would just caution that we don't want to dismantle a bureaucratic infrastructure that now exists to deal with CT that we didn't have when 9-11 happened right and so there's a wealth of expertise and knowledge in the bureaucracy we didn't have before and now that the threat has shifted there is a very natural tendency to say okay well we need to clean this you know let's dismantle this and focus on this part of the world and I would hope that we've learned those lessons that we don't want to do that and I think we all agree on that point but it's just a note of caution as we watch you know the administration looking at where it can cut costs and in some places you know for example the State Department you do need to actually trim some fat but it has to be done in a very careful and thoughtful way because as we said diplomacy is very critical to effective CT policy so I think there's a lot of good work to be done in that space so let's thank you to our panelists let's open up for some Q&A please identify yourself and state your affiliation and please ask a question please yes and we have my fronters coming around Cameron Bacari Center for Global Policy so CT policy has it shifted in the sense that we are now dealing with not your traditional terrorist threat the terrorist entities have morphed into insurgent groups from there into state actors so one of you guys can explain that how has that changed CT policies I mean is it now bigger than CT are we looking at a bigger enterprise than what we traditionally know as classic counterterrorism I'm happy it's already go for it yes yes I think it's absolutely morphed and I think one of the issues that when people tend to think of counterterrorism they tend to think of the nuts and bolts pieces of it there's mechanics to this law enforcement piece, military piece and those are all still there and I think we were actually talking in the back and forth and a lot of that is still we've been doing that for a while and that runs reasonably well but as I think you've heard from the conversation you're dealing with war fighting organizations you're dealing with non-state actors that can take and hold territory and govern territory for a considerable amount of time Shamila was referencing some of those risk factors in terms of economic deprivation lack of rule of law, poor governance things like that we're talking about the importance of diplomacy when dealing not just with other states but with other non-state actors in terms of Kurds and so because of the nature of the threat is bigger and because I think the threat is bigger but that there are more factors that we recognize today are informing that threat the nature of CT has changed and that's not to say that the old pieces of counterterrorism are no longer important and it's not to say that every time you go promote rule of law or do diplomacy or anything else that it has to have a counterterrorism piece but it is to say that because the threat is bigger because there are threats from state supported non-state actors because there are non-state actors that increasingly have access to weapons and technology that states enjoy because they are able to take and hold territory for long periods of time because you're dealing with war fighting organizations that are able to do propaganda on the level that states were able to do propaganda historically reaching mass audiences of course the whole box needs to get bigger you need more instruments to deal with that doesn't mean that every instrument is always going to be a CT instrument but it means that counterterrorism is going to touch on different components of the government and so that's I agree wholeheartedly you don't dismantle the bureaucracy I think you do sort of try to get more out of it but yeah that's that's one of the reasons why you've seen that growth I'll just add one thing to that which is that in a lot of ways the counterterrorism apparatus that we have that's incredibly effective is put in place and designed to prevent another 9-11 style attack that's when the investments were made and Al-Qaeda in the way that Al-Qaeda operates again our bureaucracy is meant to address that it's a shadowy membership based group where organizations and individuals within the organization have in many cases known each other for decades and so you have these sorts of things where all Shabab and AQIM swear by ought to Al-Qaeda and Zawahri or Bin Laden says you know essentially let us think about it right there's this long kind of period of courtship before they're actually allowed in as a full scale entity you have Al-Qaeda primarily operating in these shadowy web forms in kind of the under side of the web and you have ISIS operating out in the wide open and operating actually a social media campaign and attempting to build a movement and a movement that's not built on these long term plots that can be devastating in the scale of 9-11 but that are also susceptible to disruption at multiple points but rather these homegrown by on extremist type threats and on one issue after another the U.S. government is just not properly equipped to necessarily deal with these are dealing with the online threat is really difficult when we've got the First Amendment and we can't exactly go out and say and say this content which we find offensive but doesn't break any laws needs to be taken down that's something we can't legally do and even if we could it'd be a hard thing to do given the ethos of our country and so you can kind of tick through these things and ask yourself are we really properly equipped for this threat or is the bureaucracy the bureaucracies perhaps are pejorative but the institutional capabilities we've built can they be adapted to address to this new threat and that is something that I hope this administration and really any administration would be dealing with at this point. Just to add on quickly the cycle you describe is the same one Mao said every terrorist group wants to become an insurgency and every insurgency wants to become the state and that's the classic cycle so the question becomes are we seeing folks succeed in getting further down that cycle and of course there were groups that were able to hold territory before ISIS there was the FARC there was Boko Haram but they didn't hold Mosul they didn't hold Raqqa they didn't hold as a whole territory the size of England so there was something distinctive about ISIS and about the way it purported to govern including taxing and doing all sorts of things very much for its own benefit but to govern or to look like it was governing in a way in a way on a scale that was different this in some ways then goes to the question earlier about sustainability of counter-terrorism because it is incredibly costly to do what we do in Yemen or what we do in Somalia maintaining the infrastructure to take strikes at the pace that the Obama administration was taking them or at the pace that the Trump administration is taking them it costs a lot but that's dwarfed by what the counter-ISIS campaign looked like at its peak in Iraq and Syria it's dwarfed in just pure frequency and equipment involved and dollars involved and I think you get to that point it begins to look particularly unsustainable if you have to do it again and again when a group has taken territory like that because that's what really to dislodge a group from territory it's managed to take it's really hard, it's really expensive and often requires military force unlike some of the other ways you can intervene when it's more of a network operating but not holding territory which then asks the question how do you make sure you don't have to go back and do it again and how do you stop the next group from being able to go down that from the aspiring terrorist group to the next purported state or proto state or quasi state or whatever ISIS was and the answer to that comes before the military tool gets involved and it's where you hope there are the type of deliberations that Stephen was mentioning earlier that I'm not sure we are seeing right now but that are critical if you don't want to be stuck fighting these sorts of fights over and over again Thank you This gentleman in the front So just to answer the first one briefly the NDAA entrenched a requirement for the Defense Department to indicate in the previous year so by May 1 to indicate in the previous calendar year the number of CT strikes that it take in the I think civilian and combatant casualties associated with them and to his credit Secretary Mattis was asked about this around May 1 it was maybe that morning the day before and his candid answer was I gotta look into that and my understanding is DOT has since indicated that it plans to put out that figure by June 1 which is fast approaching but I think it would be great to press on where that is because I think these requirements their law so that in and of itself makes them important but I also think they serve a value and democratic accountability and then giving people a sense of what their government or giving the world a sense of what the US government is doing in these various theaters I'm happy to start with that the sort of operations that come to the public's attention sometimes in the tragic aftermath or the aftermath of a tragic event like the one that occurred in each year they of course are going on around the world in fact they're often indicated in the report that the executive branch provides to the Congress every six months on where we have troops doing certain things even in the unclassified portion of that and when they go as wrong and as when they become as tragic a moment as that is where you lose service members life it becomes you sort of zoom in on it and say well what were those troops doing there worth losing their life for that is almost an impossible formulation of the question to answer instead you say why do we have troops in places like that and what are they doing obviously with the hope that you never lose their lives and its credit DOD seems to have now looked into it and to be in the process of implementing things to try to prevent that recurrence but why are they in places like that in the first place I think the answer actually goes to where I left off in my previous comments about you're trying to ensure the groups that are already emergent they're not just nation threats they are emergent don't become the next ISIS quasi state they don't take over the sort of territory without our help can happen unfortunately that's agnostic as to whether any particular mission and any particular set of authorities is the right one to accomplish that but I do think if you want to cut them off before they become the insurgent let alone the quasi state to have our service members who can train partners who can do so responsibly and who can hopefully at some point then go home rather than be stuck there forever that's why they're there in the first place and I think there's a validity to that yeah I would agree I do think though that there is a point where when you're going to put US forces in harm's way even in relatively small members that it's worth that dialogue and it's something that Stephen was speaking about earlier to say to the American public you know we face the following types of threats this is where they're from this is what we think they can turn into you can talk about that the nature of that threat and the intelligence underlying it without compromising any sources and methods and then use that to say and therefore that's why we have to be willing to take some risks including sometimes the risk of putting our own service members into harm's way to address that threat I don't think that case has been adequately made by this administration I could argue based on what I knew about the nature of the threat when I left government two and a half years ago that would be the case but I don't know what that threat picture looks like right now and I haven't heard that discussion and I think you're starting to see it blow back not just in the case of the four service members who lost their lives in the Sahel but also a lot of questions around what's happening in Somalia and particularly some of the civilian casualties we've seen from operations there associated with our commando raids and our advisory assist missions that are really worth having that conversation about to see that happen I would just add a couple of quick points one is on that question of where service members are deployed my understanding is it has gotten that is another area where transparency has declined and it's become harder to be able to determine where it is that the military is putting people at particular times so that's just to say that that's another area where we've seen declines in transparency second I'm in agreement with both the rationales for why we may potentially have service members in Africa and in the need for a more full-throated discussion of that I think we've talked a lot about the Trump administration today I think it's worth just putting out there Congress has a role to play in this as well and has not been playing that role for a long time and so that I think it has an important role to play in that debate and there are members that are trying to make that happen but by and large Congress I think could be taking a much more forward-leaning approach to this and then the third is talking about there's a way of looking at this which is the geographic expansion of where US forces are operating I think the other question that deserves unpacking is what role are they playing you heard us tossing on terms before like building partnership capacity training equip and we've we're now at least from what can be gathered based on the open source you guys may have more fidelity in this than I do I think increasingly moving away from just training and equipping or even training advising and assisting to doing train advice in a company and so we're doing partnered operations where increasingly US forces are are out there with their foreign counterparts potentially in more places and the authorities for what they can do are you know are wider and so I think that then raises a question of was what's happening in Niger a training and advising mission or was it something that was closer to right a potentially combat mission if those authorities are going to be in place to allow them to go after right somebody for capture kill mission and you get the firefight that you got and that's something I think that is still sort of being unpacked and it's hard to do in part because of the transparency issues that we were talking about. There's transparency but then there's also just like basic communications outreach strategy deficit right I mean I remember when we went into the Balkans Bill Clinton explaining on kind of nighttime news that this is what's going on and this is why we're going into it and I would say I would argue this is a lot harder because these are not kind of clear cut conflicts and they're not it's not just one conflict but we could do a better job of educating the American public on kind of the use of you know these kinds of soldiers in various parts of the world so thank you for that question I think there was this woman over here please wait for the microphone yeah please wait for the microphone Hi my name is Saba Shahan and I'm with the voice of America and my question is that if you could put in a nutshell the policy and the change you know in the spending from Obama from Bush to Obama to Trump administration and you talked about you spoke about accountability transparency so do you see any accountability efforts in words in terms of accountability and assessment so the the NDAA mandated that the Department of Defense has to do assessment monitoring and evaluation for all security cooperation and assistance programs that's not just specific to counterterrorism that means anytime the United States is providing security assistance to a howlier partner or it's doing training or other types of cooperation military exercises things of that nature that there needs to be assessment monitoring and evaluation and DOD set up an office that was working on putting all of that in place that that work continues right there are it is a massive undertaking there are debates about how to do it you know there has been some good work in terms of applying best practices there's ongoing debates about how much to spend on that right like the international best practices you spend 3% of your budget nobody wants to spend in government 3% of their budget on AM&E you know so that's ongoing the other I would just mention the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at least earlier this year I understood to be looking at a similar mandate for the State Department in part because the acknowledgement that the State just needs to be measuring as well and in part I think out of concerns that the Department of Defense and military is already so far out in front you know in so many ways in terms of driving our policy that to now have them being so far out in front in terms of assessing monitoring evaluating how this is being used and state to not have that capacity could further draw you know widen that gap between each Department's capabilities I think in terms of the question of going from the Bush Administration to Obama Administration to the early Trump budgets there's a couple of trends that emerged first of all that the initial big investments were made into the Bush Administration and it's helpful to maybe split this into sort of the standing homeland security intel type apparatus we need to keep us safe on a steady state versus the incremental costs of the wars from Iraq, Afghanistan and to a somewhat lesser extent Iraq and Syria and you have these massive investments after 9-11 in creating the Department of Homeland Security and creating the Director of National Intelligence I think most people who track this field would feel like those were largely prudent investments although certainly a case can be made that we could spend more or less on Homeland Security in the particulars and achieve similar outcomes the one that has been tricky to bring in has been the cost of the wars and it's been difficult for a number of reasons early on the Bush Administration didn't want to put a real price tag on some of that some of that I think they didn't know exactly what it was going to be in other cases I think they wanted to low ball to the public the total cost of those wars and so we did these emergency supplementals that would come up every 6 months then every year and the Obama Administration tried to put some discipline around that by creating the Overseas Contingency and the U.S. Administration label to account for all of that war spending and there was specific criteria for what you could put into that budget and what you couldn't so things that we saw early on happening like the Army and the Marine Corps saying you know there have been these modernizations and updates to tanks that we wanted to do for years and we didn't have the budget for it so when we bring the tank back from Iraq or Afghanistan let's just go ahead and do that upgrade while we're at it and we'll fund it out of the war spending that really caused the war spending to be bloated beyond probably what were the real costs of it have largely been cut out and put away and some of that is because the imposition of criteria and some of that is because we're just spending a lot less money in those theaters to begin with and I think that's good, I think it's good to have some of that rigor around the budget and I think it's also good for us to have some honest conversations about does it make sense to have so much of the Special Operations Command's budget in that sort of supplemental account we're going to need SOCOM at its current end strength for the foreseeable future for counter-terrorism, for counter-proliferation for a huge range of asymmetric threats and we shouldn't be saying that that's a supplemental budget that could go away at some point in the future I think with the Trump administration it's hard to tell because there have been these kind of irresponsible skinny budgets that are released that it's hard to tell how serious of a policy document those are versus just an attempt to make a strong case about fiscal austerity and in many cases involve dramatic slashes to the State Department's budget increases to the Pentagon budget although not always clear that it's in the most strategic way and then Congress takes a pretty active role and kind of reshaping it into what they think it ought to look like and so I haven't seen a really frank and I think honest budget conversation with this administration yet that really lays out our resources and how they're going to help us accomplish a range of national security objectives including but not limited to counter-terrorism Good, all right, thank you Yes, let's take two final questions just have five minutes so these two folks here please wait for the mic Thank you very much for a very nice presentation my name is Peter Svirina from the Russian Embassy As you said, the terrorism is a global threat and as it was mentioned several times by the representatives of the administration no one country can fight it alone Russia has suggested to establish a global front to fight against terrorism and it's still the goal but I would like you to just think out loud a bit about the what countries the US must cooperate with to raise the effectiveness of counter-terrorism measures Thanks a lot Okay, and then this woman over here just at the end Did you have a question, ma'am? Kelly Blahoste, American conservative magazine just a contextual question we know and you had mentioned that the number of drone strikes had gone up exponentially from Obama to Bush I think it's in the 50s for Bush and then I think Obama it was like 565 we didn't get those numbers officially until the end of the Obama administration Do we get any sense of whether or not there's been an escalation in direct action or are we still waiting for some official numbers you mentioned the NDAA mandate but do we have a sense of what if we're talking about an increase in direct action or is everything just speculative at this point under Trump I'll jump on that one first so first of all the administration hasn't released its comprehensive role of sort of the aggregate statistics of actions across the areas outside of active hostilities that said in some cases the Pentagon has released specific numbers and then there are three really good outside organizations that track drone strikes New America being one of them the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London is very good as well as is the Long Ward Journal housed over at the foundation for Defensive Democracy so pretty good bipartisan type trackers there the numbers have definitely gone up outside of areas of active hostilities if you just look at the Pentagon's actual release numbers for Yemen it's 120 this year 2016 versus 2017 so the final year of Obama administration year in the 40-50 range if I recall correctly and then 120 in the first year of the Trump administration and the numbers reported by those three organizations I mentioned show increases in Somalia and I don't remember exactly how the other theaters shake out but the aggregate would be almost certainly higher they also show somewhat higher civilian casualties those are hard to assess without any context around them which is to say in some of the cases in Yemen and Somalia it appears that our strikes may have been in support of partner nation ground forces if that were the case they might not have been abiding by the same rules of near certainty of no civilian casualties and so you might expect some higher levels of civilian casualties that's why that context around I think is so important and I'd be hesitant to sort of make any absolute statements about that in the meantime and I'll just take a brief stab at the question on what CT partners we should be working with I think the answer from my perspective is all of them in the sense that I think we too often we think about partnerships think about how do we help a country that is facing a terrorist threat within its own borders build the capabilities it needs but we also need to be thinking about our traditional allies we need to be thinking about regional partners we need to be thinking about multinational organizations and there are various case studies of these where each one of them whether it's the French and Africa or the Amazon mission in Somalia being incredibly effective against some of our shared threats I think Luke nailed it on the numbers I'm not sure I have much to add on that in terms of partners I sort of begin where Luke does in terms of canvassing what's out there we go into counter-terrorism endeavors with partners most readily available who are a lot like us we begin with Western European countries that are not geographically proximate to wherever we're worried about the threat emerging from who have capabilities similar to ours in a lot of ways ours are often superior or at least greater in number but we go in with similar folks and that's not exactly what you need that's not in any way to shake a stick at the wonderful partners we have but sometimes you need people who are simply the partners where the problem is emerging from or those with different capabilities and sometimes that can get harder because you want to engage in this effort with those who share a certain commitment to the law of armed conflict and policies about ensuring that there's an appropriate respect for at least attempts to avoid civilian casualties and guarantee that you won't have them and that's where I think partnerships can get more difficult both with those who we often call the host countries the countries from whose soil the terrorism threat emanates and from others who may be active there and ultimately if you find a partner who's not meeting those thresholds that we consider either legally or just morally appropriate it then becomes quite difficult to figure out how to navigate that and either point them in a direction suitable as a partner if they're open to that or figure out how to deal how to deal with the situation without that but there is this tricky balance between needing to work with partners who aren't like us because they often have things that we don't have including sheer proximity and at the same time adhering to the values that we both believe in because we believe in but also because we think they're important for counter-terrorism and for maintaining the moral high ground that counter-terrorism requires I would just briefly add on the numbers right when you look at aggregate that we've talked a lot there has been the increase in Yemen and in Somalia I think I looked at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism not too long ago it looks like there was the Somalia had at least doubled in 2017 over 2016 there's also questions about whether strikes are being reported as right it might be you'll have five strikes but it's reported as one strike because it was in the same location or something like that so there's questions about how the reporting but I would also point out that unless I'm mistaken strikes in Pakistan have come down considerably from the high point and so that you're going to see more in places like Yemen and Somalia fewer in places like Pakistan so that will sort of impact what the aggregate number looks like as well I think it's worth keeping in mind that strikes in Pakistan were partially intended for degrading Al Qaeda were also partially intended for force protection for US forces in Afghanistan whereas now as Luke was mentioning in places like Yemen it may be force protection for partner forces rather than necessarily for US forces so just sort of put some context around those numbers on the issue of partners that we work with I'm in agreement with Josh I think there's an important importance of looking both at who our close allies are that sometimes are our natural partners or natural allies and also places where we're going to need to work with somebody because that's where the threat is but I would also add on another piece to that which is I think often when we look at partnerships and what we want out of our partners we tend to come at it very much from sort of what is the threat and what is it that we think that we need and I would argue and one of the things I do try to argue is that the United States would do well to be more cognizant of what it can actually expect from its partners so not to what we need from you and what do we want from you because it's nice to want but what can we actually expect from you and I think that's where you then get into not just what is that partners capability and capacity but also what other threats does it face what else do we have going on with that partner when it comes to foreign policy right are we potentially competing in other places and trying to cooperate on counterterrorism or are things sort of benign outside of CT or do we have a pre-existing relationship with you for other reasons those are all questions that I think you know individual policy makers certainly that I've spoken to but collectively as the policy making community we could potentially put more emphasis on wonderful well thank you everyone for joining us and these great questions and please join me in thanking our panelists for a great conversation thanks thanks thanks