 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Bergen. I run the National Security Studies program here. And it's really with a great deal of pleasure that I welcome Max Boot, who is both a friend and also a very accomplished historian. I think this book, Invisible Armies, is going to launch Max Boot into the realm of historians that include John Keegan around Robert, i.e. the very first rank of historians. This is a massive piece of work that is surely going to stand as the authoritative and definitive account of guerrilla warfare from the Romans till today. Max is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's also the author of a number of other books, most well known as Savage Wars a Peace. He's advised the McCain and Romney campaigns. He's also over-advised both General Petraeus and General McChrystal. In fact, he was one of the group of people who wrote General McChrystal's famous assessment, which was leaked to the Washington Post in 2009. So Max is going to basically speak for about 25 minutes, outlining the big themes of his book, and then we'll open it up to a discussion and Q&A. Thank you very much, Peter. It's a pleasure to be introduced by somebody for whom I have as much respect as I have for you, and I appreciate those kind words all the more from a fellow practicing historian. And thanks to all of you for coming out. I'm delighted to provide you an opportunity not to do any work in the next hour or so, just to listen to me talk about this book. And hopefully there will be some benefit there. You know, when I spent the last six years writing this tome, which is now before you, I was undertaking something that was audacious and perhaps foolhardy, which is that I was trying to encompass 5,000 years of history between two hard covers. What I'm going to do here today before your very eyes is even more audacious and perhaps even more foolhardy because I am going to attempt to encompass 5,000 years of history in the next 25 minutes. For those of you who are much better at math than I am, I had to use a calculator to figure this out. That's about 166 words, years per minute. So fasten your seat belts. We're going for a historical journey. And I'm going to begin by talking about the origins of guerrilla warfare. Then I'm going to talk about what's changed over the centuries and what hasn't. Then I'm going to talk about how do you fight guerrilla warfare and finally about why it matters. Now the question I most often get asked, or the question I most often have been asked during the course of the last 6 years while working on this book is, aside from, don't you have anything better to do with your time, aside from that the question I get asked is, what was the first guerrilla war? And the answer to that is very hard to supply because in fact guerrilla warfare is as old as mankind. It's been around as long as mankind has been on this earth. Tribal warfare is essentially guerrilla warfare. I mean, think about it. Tribes don't have ranks. They don't have uniforms. They don't have formal command and control structures. They fight in loosely organized bands, often employing surprise, ambushing an enemy village, raping, stealing, pillaging, getting what they can and then escaping before the warriors of the other tribe can come up to inflict punishment. This is the essence both of ancient tribal warfare and of modern guerrilla warfare, this hit and run style of fighting, which is very different from the kind of conventional toe-to-toe battle that we have come to associate with what is sometimes known as the Western way of war and has been practiced since the days of the Greek hoplites. By contrast with unconventional warfare, what we call conventional warfare, a bit of misnomer, is only about 5,000 years old. It only arose around 3,000 BC in Mesopotamia. By definition, you could not have conventional armies without a state to support them, to provide taxation, logistics, uniforms, command and control and all the rest of it. And you didn't have organized states before roughly 3,000 BC. But even once you had the first organized armies, they were constantly facing the threat of rebels within and raiders without. In other words, they were confronting the threat of guerrilla warfare. Now, what that suggests to me is that the way we think about this entire topic is all screwed up. It's roughly 180 degrees removed from the reality because we talk about unconventional war, irregular, implying there's something wrong with it. This shouldn't be the way that one ought to fight, but in fact is the way that mankind has always fought. Now, this is obviously from the looks of it a very bright group, so I'll ask you a trivia question and put you on the spot. What was the last conventional war the world has seen? Anybody? No, more recent than that. More recent than that. More recent. Anybody? Bingo. A plus to the bearded gentleman in the back. Russia, Georgia, 2008, the Russian invasion of Georgia. That was in fact the last conventional war that I'm aware of in this world. And yet thousands of people are dying all the time in wars and places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Mali, Myanmar, Colombia, Mexico, many other places. These are unconventional conflicts, but we should not be surprised by their prevalence. It has ever been thus. This has always been the dominant form of warfare. This is not a new development. Every great power throughout history has had to devote a lot of its military resources to fighting irregular warriors. It's not just the U.S. Army and Marine Corps today. It was the Roman legions who were a pretty formidable military force, even when they were not led by Russell Crowe. And yet we know that at the end of the day, Rome fell. Rome was sacked and pillaged beginning in roughly 452 A.D. And why was that? Well, Rome, in many ways, was a superpower without peer, much like the modern United States. It didn't have a near peer competitor on its border. What it did have were a lot of tribesmen, those that the Romans charmingly called barbarians. And how did the barbarians fight? They didn't have centurions. They didn't have all the conventional paraphernalia of the Roman legions. They were tribal fighters. They fought essentially as guerrillas. And so they could not stand up to the Romans in open battle. And yet over the course of centuries, they were able to wear down the Roman Empire. Rome was ultimately brought down by the incursion of the Huns into Western Europe. A fourth century Roman historian left a very evocative and interesting description of how the Huns fought. He wrote, They are very quick in their operations of exceeding speed and fond of surprising their enemies. They suddenly disperse, then reunite. And again, after having inflicted vast loss upon the enemy, scatter themselves over the whole plane in irregular formations, always avoiding a fort or an entrenchment. Now that I would submit to you is a pretty good description of guerrilla warfare, whether practiced by the Huns a long time ago, or whether practiced today by many insurgent groups around the world. Now by stressing the ancient origins of guerrilla warfare and emphasizing what Attila the Hun did to bring down the Roman Empire, I don't by any stretch of the imagination mean to suggest that nothing has changed since the days of antiquity. Obviously, there have been a lot of changes. We don't wear togas anymore, except the parties, for example. But there are more significant changes. And I'll talk about some of them later. But I would suggest to you that the biggest change is what I call the three P's, the growth of politics, propaganda, and public opinion. And by the way, I'm very relieved that I could actually remember all three. So I'm not like Rick Perry standing up here saying like, Now what are those other two P's? I got them politics, propaganda, and public opinion. And the development of all those factors, as they affected warfare, I think became truly evident during the course of our very own revolution, which was fought not only on a conventional battlefield with muskets and bayonets, but was also fought with instruments of propaganda like Thomas Paine's supremely successful best seller common sense. Now when we tend to think about the battles of the American War of Independence, we think about engagements like Lexington and Concord, where the red coats were outraged to see these Yankee rascals slithering on their bellies and firing from behind rocks and trees and fighting in ways that were considered quite un-gentlemeny by the British regulars. And that was definitely a significant part of the warfare, especially in states like New Jersey and South Carolina where there was not a significant continental army presence to oppose the British. But I would submit to you that the conventional narrative that we have of the outcome of the American Revolution is a little bit skewed or a little bit incomplete. What I remember being taught back in my school days when the American Revolution was still taught in school is that it essentially ended in 1781 with the Battle of Yorktown. I would argue that's not quite the case because it's true that the British suffered a major defeat at Yorktown where Lord Cornwallis surrendered roughly 7,000 regulars to General Washington. But the fact remained that even after Yorktown, the British still had tens of thousands of troops in North America, they had tens of thousands more troops in other parts of the Empire, and they could have hired tens of thousands of troops from the German states as they had previously done. I can guarantee you that if our forefathers had been fighting not the British Empire, but the Roman Empire, the story would not have had a happy ending. I think there's a very good chance that Washington and the other founding fathers would have been crucified quite literally because the Romans never gave up or seldom gave up and would seldom allow a defeat on the battlefield to prevent them from exacting a terrible vengeance. The British Empire had the physical capability in the 1780s to exact a terrible vengeance upon the settlers in North America, but it did not choose to do so. And I would argue to you that the American Revolution was truly decided not on a battlefield in North America, but here in the House of Commons. The ultimate deciding turning point in the American Revolution was not a battle, it was a vote in the Commons, which occurred on February 28 of 1782. And it was a close vote, 234 to 215, a very narrow division over whether to discontinue offensive operations in North America. The House voted to discontinue offensive operations, which was a stinging blow to Lord North and his hardline Tory ministry. It led to the resignation of Lord North and the rise of Lord Rockingham and his wigs, who were committed to a policy of conciliation with their American brethren. Now I would suggest to you, this is something new in the annals of irregular warfare. And it's not, it was not entirely an unexpected or random development. It was something the colonists had actually tried very hard to achieve, because they understood that the outcome of the revolution was going to rest in large part on their ability to convince the British to let them have their freedom, which is something they did with pamphlets like Common Sense or with documents like the Declaration of Independence. They were doing what would today be known as information operations, targeting sentiment on the home front. And ultimately, they prevailed for that very reason. This is a pretty significant development. A great power, a superpower was not truly defeated on the battlefield, but nevertheless decided to stop fighting because public opinion had turned against the war. The very phrase public opinion I might add only appeared in print for the first time in 1776. It was a new concept. It was not something the Romans truly had to grapple with. But it was something that Great Britain and future states in the modern world would have to contend with in these kinds of wars. It's certainly something that we've had to deal with in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, where you can argue that the primary battlefield was not on a distant shore, but in the battle for public opinion on the home front. Certainly, the foremost strategist of insurgency, Mao was keenly aware of the power of public opinion. In 1938, after the long march, sitting in a cave in northern China working so intently by candlelight, he didn't notice the candle burning a hole in his shoe. He wrote one of the great classics of Insurgent Theory, an essay called On Protracted War. And Mao, of course, is famous for his aphorism that the people are like water and the army is like fish. He stressed the need to keep the closest possible relations with the common people. He told his troops, be courteous and polite, pay for all articles, establish the trains a safe distance from people's houses. Now, this was not advice that Attila ever gave to his hunts, okay? And the fact that Mao was giving this advice to his people was not a sign that Mao was a softy, that he was a sentimentalist, that he had a great regard for the welfare of the common people. Morally, he was probably indistinguishable in many ways from Attila to the Hun. But what Mao understood is warfare had changed in the 20th century. You could no longer fight this nomadic or raiding style of warfare of centuries past. To data be successful, insurgents had to generate base areas. They had to win over the population and control the population in their base areas so they could generate funds, food, intelligence, recruits, everything they needed to build up their armies so as to overthrow the government. That was why Mao was stressing public opinion and the need to keep it in mind. It was purely utilitarian. Public opinion has been even more important for terrorists. An activity which was described by the anarchists of the 19th century as propaganda by the deed. And that remains true because terrorists have even fewer military resources than guerrillas. They could not possibly hope to defeat a conventional force on the battlefield. They could only prevail by making a big splash in the media and by changing public opinion. Which is why, by the way, there was almost no terrorism prior to the mid-19th century because there was no way for terrorists to get their message out. It was only with the advent of fast printing presses, cheap newspapers, then the telegraph and then radio, television, the internet, all these other media of communication that terrorists could actually get their message out and they could be effective. The most famous terrorist of recent times, and Peter's good friend was certainly keenly aware of the power of the news media, which I suspect is why he talked to Peter in the first place, Bin Laden actually went so far as to say that the media war constituted 90% of the whole in the waging of Jihad. Pretty significant that that's how much importance he accorded to information operations. I would suggest to you that the growing power of the three P's helps to explain one of the interesting phenomena that I uncovered in the course of my research. My book is primarily a narrative of thousands of years of history, but at the end there is also a database, one of my few forays into the land of the social scientists, in which I quantified or tried to put down all of the insurgency since 1775, and what that uncovered is that the win rate for insurgents has been going up. Prior to 1945, insurgents were winning about 20% of their campaigns. Since 1945, they've been winning about 40%. So what accounts for that increase in effectiveness? There's certainly changes in areas such as more effective armaments, and I'll talk about that in a minute, but I would suggest to you the biggest difference is the growing power of public opinion, politics, propaganda, all these factors which enable even a relatively puny military force to bring down a superpower. That's been to my mind the biggest change in recent decades, but we should not go too far on the other direction because there was a tendency in the decades after World War II to hold up guerrillas as these ten-foot-tall superhumans who could not possibly be defeated by military force. A lot of that, I think, was really an outcome of a handful of high profile successes, for example Mao in China or Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. But remember the statistic I decided to you, even if insurgents in the post-45 period are winning 40% of their campaigns, what's the flip side of that? They're still losing 60%, and just as very few business startups ever become Apple or Microsoft, so too, very few fledgling insurgencies ever become the Chinese Red Army or the Viet Minh or or Viet Cong. And to make that point, I would cite to you one of the most famous insurgents of all time. A man whose visage once used to adorn every dorm room wall on the planet, and actually probably still adorns every dorm room wall at Mayama Mater, which is UC Berkeley. Now how did Che Guevara become such an icon and such a boon to makers of t-shirts and posters? Well obviously it was because of the success that he and Fidel Castro had in the 1950s and overthrowing the Batista regime in Cuba, which seemed pretty impressive at first blush, because here were these few hundred ragtag fighters in the hills overthrowing a regime with an army of 40,000 tanks, artillery, aircraft, all the paraphernalia of modern war as supplied by the U.S. of A. And it was impressive in its way, but becomes more understandable, unless surprising, if you delve a little bit deeper and you understand that Batista was fundamentally illegitimate. He was corrupt, unpopular, unelected. He had lost the support of most of Cuban society. Even the Cuban Chamber of Commerce had turned against him. And you know, when the Chamber of Commerce turns against the government, that's not a good sign. That was how Castro and Guevara were able to overthrow Batista, but like many successful generals, Che suffered from a case of hubris. And he imagined that he could replicate elsewhere the success that he had had in Cuba. He was cruelly disabused of this illusion first in the Congo and then in Bolivia, where he showed up in 1966 to foment revolution. And there is Che in the right hand corner looking particularly hairy there. But what Che found in Bolivia was very different from what he had found in Cuba because the leader in Bolivia was not this unelected, unpopular dictator. In fact, Bolivia had an elected president who was pretty popular and had actually carried out the kind of land reform that Marxist often promised as a calling card to win popular support. And by contrast, Che came in with a handful of outsiders, none of whom were Bolivian. They didn't even speak the local Indian languages. And so they had very little popular support. I think it's not much of an exaggeration to suggest that during his stay in Bolivia, Che's best friend was probably his Mule Chico. So it's no great surprise that within a relatively short period of time, he was hunted down and killed by these guys. Bolivian Army Rangers assisted by US Army Special Forces and the CIA. And this was the end in 1967 of Che Guevara, his corpse being poked by his enemies, an ignominious end for one of the most famous insurgents of all time. Well, I would suggest to you that if even Che Guevara, the storied guerrilla leader, could be defeated. Pretty much any insurgency can be defeated. It's just the question of how you go about doing it. All right. So how do you fight an insurgency? Well, we're very lucky in this regard that the British and French ran a controlled experiment for edification in the 1950s, highlighting different styles of counterinsurgency. You had the French in Algeria between 1954 and 1962. And you had the British and Malaya between 1948 and 1960. The French approach exemplified the male fist, fire and sword attempt to put down an insurgency by brute force. Whereas the British were more emblematic of what has become known as hearts and minds or population centric counter insurgency. So how did these different approaches actually work? Well, if you want to find out what the French did in Algeria, you don't actually have to stand here and listen to me. You can go home and rent the great movie, The Battle of Algiers, which I hope everybody here has seen, which was actually made by some of the FLN veterans of the conflict. A pretty accurate depiction of what happened in 1957 when the FLN started sending off bombs in Algiers, which were killing European civilians. The French security forces, the police and intelligence apparatus could not deal with this threat. And so they called in General Jacques Massoud and his 10th Parachute Division to take control of Algiers, which they did in short order, the elite of the French army. They had no problem in seizing control of the Caspa, the native quarter of Algiers, where they rounded up tens of thousands of men and subjected them to interrogation to figure out who were the insurgents lurking in their midst. Now we know what these interrogations were like in part because of the experience of this man, Henri Alleg, who was not himself Algerian. He was French, actually a French Jew who ran a Republican newspaper in Algiers. But that was crime enough to get him a visit from the paratroopers in 1957 who arrested him and took him to an interrogation center. Now we're all familiar with medieval instruments of torture like the rack or the iron maiden. Well, Henri Alleg was to be introduced to a peculiarly modern and fiendish form of torture, what the French security force is called the gizane, which is actually just a simple, hand-cranked dynamo originally developed to power field telephones. It has a couple of clips that you apply to the subject you're interrogating. And it has a handle that you turn. And the faster you turn, the more electricity comes out of it. Henri Alleg was to learn what this device could do when he was strip naked, tied to a wooden board with other straps, and he had the clips applied to his ear and to his finger. He wrote, a flash of lightning exploded next to my ear, and I felt my heart racing in my breast. I struggled screaming. But still he would not tell the paratroopers what they wanted to know. And so they took one of the clips off his ear and attached it to his penis. He wrote that his body shook with nervous shocks, getting stronger in intensity. When this still did not produce a confession from Henri Alleg, he was taken down off of the board, the paratroopers used his necktie as a leash, and they pummeled him viciously with their fists. They then introduced him to an interrogation technique that they called the tuyo, what we know as waterboarding. And Henri Alleg wrote, I had the impression of drowning in a terrible agony of death itself, took possession of me. After being waterboarded, he was left in a cell, still without his clothes, left to sleep on a barbed wire mattress and to listen to the thuds and the screams of other detainees in the same interrogation facility, getting the same treatment throughout the night. Now it's commonly said that torture doesn't work. Don't you believe it? However morally reprehensible, torture can be at least tactically effective, or at least it was for the French in the Battle of Algiers, because in fact, by torturing a large number of suspects, they actually managed to roll up the FLN and Surgeon Network in the city of Algiers. Within a few months, no more bombs were going off, and so the French could comfort themselves that their tough methods had worked. They had been perhaps reprehensible but necessary and had achieved their objectives. Or had they? Well as we know in hindsight what the French had done was won a tactical victory at the cost of strategic defeat. Because there was no way to conceal what was happening in this large city not far from the shores of Europe. Henri Allegfer, one after he was released from custody, wrote a best-selling book called The Question about his experiences. Others came forward, and as the French learned about what the security forces were doing in their name, support for the war effort declined. And not just in France, but in the US, at the United Nations and elsewhere. So that at the end of the day in 1962, de Gaulle had no choice but to grant Algeria its independence. Now that to me is a vivid demonstration of some of the pitfalls of a brute force approach to counterinsurgency. Now as it happens at virtually the same time on the other side of the world, a very different way of fighting was being deployed by this man, General Sir Gerald Templer, who should not be confused with this man, the actor David Niven, for whom he is a dead ringer. So this man, not this man, this man took over British forces in Malaya in 1952. When he arrived, he found that the Malayan Races Liberation Army, which was one of many communists slash nationalists and surgeon movements at the time, was running out of control. They were blowing up trains that even assassinated his predecessor as high commissioner. In fact, Templer drove from the airport in Kuala Lumpur to government house in a vehicle in which his predecessor had been shot to death a few months previously. The bullet holes were still in it. That must have been a cheerful ride. It would have been easy under those circumstances for Templer to decide that a strategy of terror was needed to win the acquiescence of the population. But that's not what he decided because he understood that the key to success was not terrorizing the population, it was controlling the population. And how do you go about controlling the population? Well, he used the number of methods. One of the most successful was moving large numbers of Chinese squatters into these new villages that the British constructed because they understood that these hundreds of thousands of Chinese squatters were outsiders to Malayan society. They had no title to their land. They had no Malayan citizenship. They were prime recruits for this communist uprising. And so what the British did was they relocated large numbers of these Chinese squatters into these new villages where they had sanitation, schools, clinics, fields to till. And oh, by the way, they were surrounded by fences and armed guards to prevent them physically from supporting the insurgency. There are other steps that the British took. For example, sending aircraft to overfly insurgent held areas. Not to bomb them, but to drop leaflets calling on their surrender. Sometimes they had loud speakers on them to call out individual insurgents by name and telling them to give up, which was a spooking and effective tactic. Templar also discontinued the fruitless jungle bashing in which the British army had engaged as the U.S. Army would later do in Vietnam, sending large formations thrashing through the jungle in search of wily gorillas who could never be pinned down. Instead, he placed his emphasis on generating intelligence about where the insurgents were actually hiding. He increased the size of a special branch and put in a premium on finding, on getting the intelligence instead of simply sending large units into the jungle. He even imported headhunters from Borneo to act as trackers for his men. But above all what Templar did was he placed his emphasis on winning over and controlling the population. He is most famous for two sayings. He said first, the shooting side of the business was only 25 percent of the trouble and the other 75 percent lies in getting the people of the country behind us. He also said the answer lies not in pouring more troops into the jungles, but in the hearts and minds of the people. The word, the phrase hearts and minds had been used before including by a British general during the American Revolution but it was really when Templar used it that it became a byword and came to define this kind of counter insurgency. It's also been I think widely abused and misunderstood because there's a tendency to think hearts and minds is about handing out lots of free stuff to the people and hoping that they will like you in return. That's not how it works. It's actually based on two overarching factors and a very hard headed calculation of what it takes to prevail by which means providing first security and then legitimacy. Security obviously to prevent the insurgents from operating among the population but also legitimacy because Templar understood that if you offer nothing but death and desolation to those who seek to rule you will never be able to keep them down at bayonet point. And so what did he offer the people of Malaya? He offered them independence. He made a deal with the people of Malaya where he said if you support us the British to defeat this communist uprising we will give you independence. That was a pretty good deal. It made sense. The people of Malaya wanted independence so it gave them a reason to support the British war effort. I mean it seems like a no-brainer but the French did not do that in Algeria. They were asking their Algerian allies to support a continuation of French colonial rule which not surprisingly was not very popular. Now what Templar did focusing on security and legitimacy have those have been the hallmarks of most successful counter insurgencies throughout history. Even the Roman Empire which kind of got a bad rap because we always think of the phrase they created desert and call it peace. In fact there was a lot more to Roman counter insurgency than that. There was bread and circuses the pox romana the benefits of Roman civilization. They the Romans actually did quite a lot to woo over the people not just to hold them down at spear point. And likewise that has also characterized most successful counter insurgency campaigns and more recent history whether in Iraq in 2007 and 2008 El Salvador in the 1980s Columbia more recently Northern Ireland pretty much all those campaigns have been founded upon seeking to establish security and legitimacy. Now why does all of this matter today? If you listen to a lot of people in this town it doesn't matter. There's a lot of people who seem to think that our days of counter insurgency are behind us. We're out of Iraq. We're about to get out of Afghanistan. President Obama is going to make a troop drawdown announcement tonight in the State of the Union. Many in the military want to focus on the Pacific pivot. They want to get back to conventional conflicts preparing for conventional conflicts. That's the kind of war that they know how to fight and they're good at. Unfortunately I'm not sure that our enemies will cooperate with us. It would be great from a standpoint of the US Armed Forces that everybody would fight us in precisely the same way Saddam Hussein did. Put a big tank army out in the desert with a big hit me sign on it. We could handle that pretty easily. Unfortunately I don't think there are going to be that many adversaries as stupid or as obliging as Saddam Hussein who will fight in precisely the way that we prefer. Most of our enemies are a little bit smarter than that. They look at recent history and they understand that their best bet for taking on this superpower is to use irregular tactics. And so that's what they have done and that's what they will continue to do. The reality is and I'm sure Peter and I can talk about this later is Osama bin Laden may be dead but Al Qaeda for one is still very much alive as the burning of our consulate in Benghazi on September 11th of last year should remind us. It's actually expanded to new countries where it had not operated before and the destructive capabilities available to insurgents are also increasing. This is actually one of the most disturbing trends of the last century. When you think about the amount of firepower the amount of destructive capacity available to the individual it's been going up, up, up. And then when you think about Western campaigns in the third world in the 19th century Western armies were often encountering foes armed with nothing more than bows and arrows, spears, a few muskets. Today of course there is no corner of the world so remote that every young man doesn't have access to an AK-47, a rocket-propelled grenade, explosives. All these relatively low-tech infantry weapons that have taken such a fearsome toll among American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. And what's on the horizon? Well, it's not impossible to imagine that in the future insurgents could actually get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. If that were to happen you might imagine a small terrorist cell having more destructive capacity than the entire army of a non-nuclear state like Brazil or Germany. That's a pretty terrifying scenario because my concern is if that were indeed to happen George Clooney might not be around to save us. And what might happen? Well, I refer you to this chart, which I took out of a magazine that I'm sure all of you read. You probably have stacks of it in your basement. The International Journal of Health Geographics. This is from the 2007 issue to jog your memories. This was a scientific study of what would happen if a 20 kiloton nuclear device were set off in downtown Manhattan. And I'm using Manhattan where I live, so it's not to unduly alarm anybody here. But a 20 kiloton device is not that big. It's about the same size as the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. But what would it do if it were set off in Manhattan? Well, they calculate that the death toll would be over 600,000 and the more than 1.6 million would be injured. In other words, it would make 9-11 look like a Sunday in the park. Now, I don't mean to alarm anybody here or to depress anybody here. I'm not suggesting this is going to happen tomorrow. Knock on wood, it'll never happen. But it is a contingency we have to think about, especially when we, for example, see North Korea testing a nuclear weapon or Iran getting closer to a nuclear weapon or Pakistan in the throes of instability. This is not unimaginable because, in fact, insurgents have more power to do us harm today than they did centuries ago. The Roman Empire was brought down by barbarians. Today, we face our own barbarians, and I would suggest to you the first line of defense is trying to understand the problem, trying to understand the nature of insurgency, trying to figure out how do you do counter insurgency effectively. And those are all issues that I've tried to tackle in this book, and so I hope you will check it out. And with that. Well, thank you, Max. That's a brilliant presentation. Tell us a little bit about how you went about researching this book. You said it took six years. You know, some of the subjects that you've tackled in this book, whether it's the Napoleonic Wars in Spain or the American Wars against the Indians, each, you know, there have been libraries of books being written about each of these subjects and you cover the whole waterfront. In fact, much of your book is not about the issues. You've just talked about the more contemporary issues. Much of it is sort of going back further and in time. So how did you go about your research? Well, I think it was H. L. Menken who said writing is easy. You just open a vein and let it bleed. That's kind of how I feel about this. The writing actually for me was surprisingly difficult in this instance. I say surprisingly because normally I'm a pretty fast fluid writer, but it was very hard to write this book because it was very hard to encompass this much history and to make a narrative out of it that made sense because you wanted to hit the sweet spot between having too many details and too few and to give people a sense of the history without getting buried in the details while still bringing out some of the larger themes. And I struggled for a long time in trying to do that. And I had the help of a great editor who I think really helped me to put the book into focus. But even once I figured out how to write it, it just took a long time because you have to read an awful lot of books to figure out all these conflicts. You have to visit an awful lot of archives. And I was also helped, I will say, by the experience of traveling around Afghanistan and Iraq over the past decade because I gave me a vantage point that I think most historians of the subject have not had except those who have been in the military service which is actually getting to see a counterinsurgency in real time up close as it was developing when you don't know what the outcome is because there's a tendency in the historical game to write with hindsight bias to assume that everything had to work out exactly the way it worked out. And I think actually seeing one of these wars unfold in real time makes you realize how uncertain the outcome is and how it could go in multiple directions and just how complex and difficult it is for commanders on the ground to deal with it, much more difficult than it is for a historian setting thousands of miles away to get it all down on paper. You know, if you were looking at the Afghan conflict, and you didn't know that it was Afghanistan, and you were told that there was an insurgency going on in a country 7,000 miles away from the United States and we see insurgents had a safe haven that had been pretty safe for a long period of time and that there was a corrupt government that wasn't that popular with the people. How would you score the chances of the success of the insurgents or the success of the counterinsurgents just if you looked at it that way? Well, the fact that you have a corrupt and popular government that doesn't really work very effectively, that's not unusual. That's true of pretty much every major insurgency because if you had an incredibly effective accountable government, you wouldn't have an insurgency to begin with. I mean, that's why we don't have massive guerrilla armies in the United States or Western Europe. You may have a few terrorists operating at the margins, but you don't have these massive uprisings like the Taliban which can only occur in a vacuum of bad governance and insecurity. So that's not unusual and that can be overcome. I think the most difficult factor in Afghanistan to overcome is the fact that the insurgents do have safe havens over the border. They do have external support. That's been, I would say, probably the biggest factor that correlates with insurgents' success or failure. It's not invariable, but more often than not, if you have a lot of outside support, it becomes much more difficult to put down that insurgency. And I would say, in the case of Afghanistan, in some ways, the best-case scenario resembles Colombia over the last decade because what's happened in Colombia is a decade ago, the FARC was on the verge of actually winning power. I mean, they controlled an area the size of Switzerland. And then President Uribe, who I think is one of the great world leaders and one of the great counterinsurgents of recent history, implemented this democratic security strategy, which is very similar to what we call population-centric counterinsurgency. And he did it with American support. But he was very successful in beating back the FARC. So now you can travel to Bogota or other major cities in Colombia. And it's pretty safe to do. Nevertheless, FARC continues to exist in part because they're able to hide out in these remote jungle layers. They also get support from Hugo Chavez and Venezuela. So, you know, even with the best coin strategy, the most you're able to accomplish in that instance is to beat them back to the margins. You can't entirely eliminate them. And I think that is that's kind of the best-case scenario in Afghanistan is if you can beat back the Taliban without actually eliminating them. And I think that has happened to a large extent in recent years in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the South. The big question, of course, is whether those security gains of recent years can be continued as U.S. forces draw down. How would you say in the case of Colombia, the FARC, I think, also increasingly became identified in the public mind as not a bunch of social revolutionaries but a sort of organized drug cartel. So do you think that that had some effect to, I mean, and if the analogy in Afghanistan would be, hey, the Taliban are killing a lot of civilians. They're not actually delivering anything of any particular use. Right. And the Taliban are also implicated, as you know, on the drug trade in Afghanistan. So again, we shouldn't hold up the insurgents, as I said before, to be these 10-foot-tall superhumans. They have weaknesses, too. And fundamentally, insurgency and counterinsurgency is a battle for legitimacy. It's a battle for governance. And the other side has a lot of weaknesses. The principal weakness being that the Taliban actually ran all of Afghanistan prior to the fall of 2001 and most people didn't like it. They didn't like what the Taliban delivered. That's why it was so easy for us to topple them with the help of the Northern Alliance in the fall of 2001. That's their biggest weakness. People don't necessarily like being ruled by the Taliban, but I think that the issue in rural parts of the post-tune built in Afghanistan is the current government is so corrupt, abusive, and predatory that some very traditional farmers will say, hey, I don't love the Taliban, but maybe they're better because at least I don't have to pay a bribe to get a verdict out of their courts. They will have these night courts that will deliver swift and summary justice without having to pay off the judge. So it's that security vacuum that creates and governance vacuum that provides an opening for them. But the Taliban, as I say, also have major problems and are not that popular. Certainly they have no popularity outside of the 50 plus percent of the Afghan population, which is not post-tune, but even among post-tunes, among urban post-tunes, for example, very little support. I mean, they have a narrow base of support, but sufficient for them to take over a lot of the countryside in the South and East if we were to let them do it. When you worked on the McChrystal assessment in 2009, what did you focus on and what were your own? I mean, because there were about a dozen people who worked on the assessment. I actually didn't work on the McChrystal assessment. I actually did an assessment for General Petraeus when he came in a year later, and I'll tell you what we focused on. It was a smaller group and it didn't have quite as many leaks, but I guess I can talk about it since Petraeus is out of uniform now, but we really focused on the governance. I mean, that was those of us who were involved in this group really thought that the crux of the campaign had to turn on improving Afghan governance because we thought that the corruption and illegitimacy of the Afghan government was what was creating the opening for the Taliban to come in. And unfortunately, I don't, I mean, we've done a few things, especially the U.S. military has done a few things to blacklist some especially corrupt companies to prevent them from getting U.S. funds and so forth, but we've never really done enough because we've tended to try to make these accommodations where we say, oh, well, we don't have time to deal with corruption in Afghanistan. Let's just cut a deal with whatever warlord we happen to find. We've had this very short-term mindset for the last decade. And as a result of that, we've tended to empower this very corrupt class of warlords and kleptocrats who are, you know, feeding off of our money machine and, you know, creating the conditions under which the Taliban can flourish. It's, you know, I think we've made a mistake by not focusing more on that driver of the insurgency. Louis, did you, in the course of your research, did you read The Shield of Achilles? Oh, by Philip Abbas? Yeah. Just struck me when you were doing your presentation, you know, how the nature, I mean, his basic thesis is how the nature of the state has evolved with each successive wave of new forms of warfare. Is that, is there something to be said about, I mean, is there an analogy on the insurgent side? I mean, as, obviously, you mentioned information technology, the media, that produces sort of quantum leaps for the insurgents. You're saying that the insurgents have evolved over the years? Well, that they too sort of, as the modern state evolves with largely driven by technology, you know, they themselves also benefit from the, Oh yeah, no, absolutely. And that's really, you know, I think the big innovation that I would credit Osama Bin Laden with, and I credit him in part through, you know, citing your work and the research you've done on how Al Qaeda was organized. I mean, as, I don't need to tell you this, I'll tell everybody else in case you haven't read Peter's fine books, but I mean, you know, I think the real contribution of Bin Laden was not so much, you know, adding, you know, religious fanaticism to the mix of motivation for terrorism because there have been religious fanatics as long as there's been religion. What he really did was he brought a modern management philosophy and took advantage of all these trends and globalization, the wage, you know, the most international insurgency we've ever seen. I mean, there have been previous waves of international insurgency, first with the anarchists in the late 19th century. But you know what, kind of by definition, the anarchists were not very well organized. They didn't really believe in organization. They were hard to regiment. And then you had in the 70s, you had various leftist and Arab terrorist groups who had some degree of coordination from the Stasi, the KGB, the Libyans and others. But Osama Bin Laden really took it to another level without a lot of, you know, without, you know, state support. He just did it as a non-state actor. He was able to take advantage of all these developments with computers and the internet, satellite TV, airlines, all these things that we kind of take for granted, the underpinnings of the modern globalizing world. And he figured out how to use that to enable an insurgency that was waged across multiple countries simultaneously. And you know, obviously a very evil person, but you have to give him credit just for his innovation and his ability to knit all this together because nobody else had really done it. And nobody else had been able to wage this international insurgency in the way that he did. Most previous insurgencies were really localized in one country or one region. So he's certainly using the technologies we ourselves invented has taken insurgency to another level. Yeah, Max, you're familiar with the RAN study of insurgencies since World War II. And I think it had a counterintuitive finding, which is that, in fact, in the long run, time doesn't work for the insurgents. Because I mean, I think the kind of conventional views, the Taliban have the, all the time we have the watches kind of thing. So when you looked at all these insurgents and your own insurgencies and your own database going back to 1775, did you also find that, in the end, time actually worked for the government? Yeah, I actually, I basically, I can confirm that from my database if I can find it here because I actually looked at the success rate for insurgencies that lasted more than 10 years or less than 10 years. And let me see if I have it here. This was an early version here, but there was almost no difference in insurgent success or failure based on the length of the conflict. So there was no evidence that a more drawn out conflict necessarily favored the insurgents. That tends to be the case only in a very small subset of wars where the counter-insurgent is a foreign power fighting far from its own soil. And at that point, the counter-insurgent tends to have less staying power. But if you're fighting a homegrown regime, they're not going anywhere. And as long as they're not going anywhere, the status quo is they're in control of most of the territory and the government. And so the insurgents can stay out there a long time, but that doesn't mean they're coming closer to winning just as the FARC has been out there since the 1960s. I mean, the PLO has been out there since the 1960s. They're various separatist groups in Burma who've been fighting since the 1940s. They're not getting any closer to victory. They're not, they're still out there. They're not being eradicated, but they're not winning either. And the status quo favors the government because the government is what controls most of the territory. What about, so when you look at the Syrian conflict, how would you score the chances of that insurgency succeeding? That's a good question. I mean, I would say right now the Syrian conflict is in a bit of a stalemate because, you know, both sides get support, some support from the outside. Bashar Assad gets a fair amount of Iranian support. The rebels receive some aid from the Gulf countries. Not a massive amount, but some sort of neutral, you know, the foreign aid kind of equalizes. They both have major problems with legitimacy, which is also kind of neutralizing one another because Assad has lost the support of most of the Sunni population, but he still retains the support of the Kurds, the Alawites, the Christians, you know, some of these other minorities. He still retains some support among the business class and some of the elite, whereas the rebels have one control of a lot of the Sunni countryside, but because there are so many jihadists representing their ranks or so many extremists, they're scaring a lot of the non-Sunni groups in Syria, and so they can't quite win universal legitimacy any more than Assad can. I think, you know, I would say in the long run, it's hard to imagine that Assad could hold on to power indefinitely, but I think the war could certainly rage for quite a while unless there is more outside intervention, unless we were, for example, to adopt the proposal that Secretary Clinton and Director Petraeus and Secretary Panetta made last summer to provide arms to the Syrian rebels. If we did that, I think the regime would fall in relatively short order, as we saw in the case of Libya in 2011 or in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Final question before opening it to the audience. So on Afghanistan, the president's gonna make an announcement in the State of the Union tonight. What do you think is a sort of plausible number of, just from a sort of military perspective and also a sort of signaling to Afghanistan and its neighbors for the post-2014 Afghanistan, what kind of number would you pick between 3000 and 20,000 since that's the range that we've heard? Well, I think we have to be careful about timelines because as the Taliban often like to say, you have the watches, we have the time now, as we were discussing, that's not necessarily true, but that is their perception. And if we are setting a very strict timeline for the pull out of American troops, they can feed into that perception. The drawdown of 34,000, which he's gonna announce tonight, I think can work within the context of military campaign planning, depending on what the details are of that drawdown. But I think there's still a big question mark in terms of how many we're gonna have after 2014. And I would be more comfortable with the high end, which was suggested by General Allen of about 20,000 personnel doing advice and assist and counter-terrorism. The Afghan security forces have certainly made significant gains in the last few years. They're in the lead of the fight, they're taking more casualties than coalition troops and they're getting pretty good at infantry battle, but they still have major weaknesses with enablers like logistics, intelligence, medevac, air support. They're not even gonna have an air force until 2017 at the earliest. So it'll be very hard for them to hold together in the face of this onslaught from these insurgents who are supported by Pakistan unless they continue to have a significant amount of American support. And it's hard to know exactly what the minimum is. I would argue for, you know, why do we have to pick the absolute smallest number possible and run the risk associated with that? I think, I don't think the public is gonna care that much whether you have 8,000 troops or 18,000. And I think our chances of success are much greater with 18,000. So I would opt, you know, for endorsing the higher figure generated by General John Allen and the military planners. If you have a question, raise your hand, wait for the mic and identify yourself. This gentleman here. Yes, hi. First of all, thank you for this fascinating research and contribution. My name is Lou Viatt. I'm with the U.S. Mexico Foundation. And I go to your point of the fact of modern tools being now available to insurgent groups. And in the context of, let's say, U.S. national security, you cite the scenario of a insurgent group detonating a device, a nuclear device in New York City. I wonder what you think of the risk, the growing risk of a massive cyber attack on our capital markets or power grids or things like that. I think that's something we should be worried about because we are facing cyber attacks every day, a lot of which are linked to foreign governments like Iran or China. But it also is a form of warfare which is not that hard to pick up for non-state actors. It doesn't require a massive amount of infrastructure. All you have to do is go out and buy a laptop and you have more computing power at your fingertips than a supercomputer had 20 years ago. And all it takes is relatively decent education and computer engineering. There's lots of hackers in the world. And our infrastructure, as we've often heard from officials at the NSA and the Cyber Command, our infrastructure is very vulnerable because the military does provide protection for military networks, but we don't really do a good job of protecting civilian networks with the stock markets, banks, electrical systems, air control systems. I mean, on and on and on, we're so dependent on all of this electronic infrastructure which could be attacked by relatively clever hackers and I expect this will certainly be a tool of terrorist warfare in the future. Gentlemen, Bine. Mike Duffin with the State Department. Question about Usama Bin Laden. He was a teenager in the 1970s, early 70s where he witnessed the secular counter-surgency movements. In the aftermath of September 11th, we viewed him as an Islamist and we mentioned Hassan Albana or Sayid Kutub when comparing him to historical figures. Would you say now historians might shift comparing him to Guevara or Mao Zedong? Would you like to tackle that? Yeah, I mean, maybe. I'll, my one point about, I mean, Usama Bin Laden is best understood as a religious fanatic who, and it's very hard to explain anything he did in any other terms. And most of his followers truly believe that he and al-Qaeda and affiliated groups are on some sort of religious mission. And I think if you take that away from them, it becomes very hard to understand. Just as it would be very hard to understand the history of the crusades without reference to Christianity. I think that's true, but I would say that Bin Laden and his acolytes, although they may have been fanatical, they were also shrewd and cunning and they read history and they read Mao, they read Che Guevara, they read all these theorists and there were lively debates within al-Qaeda about how to apply these tenets of classic insurgency theory to the kind of campaign they were waging in. And they were certainly inspired by what happened in Vietnam, Beirut, Somalia, all these instances where they saw the United States getting chased out of a country by a regular warfare. That was a lot of their inspiration for the kind of warfare that they waged because they read the history and they basically decided, hey, this is a smart way to fight against the superpower. They're actually very vulnerable to this kind of warfare. Absolutely. My name's Dave Price and I'm a retired journalist and educator. He gets to spend my time attending these wonderful things. I really have two questions. First of all, you list the names from Attila Vahan all the way up to Osama Bin Laden. In insurgents, how important is the leader in this essence? Obviously it's important. But how important is it compared to conventional warfare? More, less, and how would compare? That's my first question. So if you'd answer that first. I would say in insurgencies, the leader is even more important than in conventional warfare because kind of by definition in a conventional army, you have this structure, this bureaucracy and obviously outstanding individuals can influence combat performance in various ways. But there's a basic mean which is provided by the infrastructure and officers who go to staff colleges and all this other kind of stuff. Well, insurgencies don't have staff colleges unless they develop them themselves. I mean, everything has to be built from the ground up by an insurgent leader. And so this was one of the fascinating things for me in doing this research is these outsized personalities. Not only Attila Vahan, but people like Garibaldi or Michael Collins, T. Lawrence, many others who were not, by definition, they were not really company men. They were entrepreneurs who built their own organizations by sheer force of personality. That's a huge, huge factor in this kind of warfare. And by the way, I would argue the other way, too, that many successful counterinsurgents have also been kind of oddballs who are not exactly products of their typical military culture. They tend to be people like Marshall Lyotte, the great French theorist of the spreading oil spot in Morocco from 1912 to 1935, who preferred to hang out with writers like Proust rather than drinking at the officer's club or Edward Lansdale, the quiet American who was such an outlier within the bureaucracy that it was said that when he appeared in Saigon in 1965, the CIA station chief damn near dropped his martini glass. And often the people who fight insurgents most effectively are like the most effective insurgent leaders, people with a large personality who don't fit easily into a bureaucratic structure. Your answer brings up kind of a follow-up question. In your study, did you find similarities in character? We're always saying like looking for a profile of a serial killer profile of this. Is there such a thing as a profile of a successful insurgent leader? And my question would kind of have something to do with this where you could look and say, oh my goodness, we better deal with this because this guy or this woman has it, whatever it is. I mean, I think it's very hard to say any more than it's possible to say what's the profile of a successful entrepreneur or a successful political leader. I mean, a lot of it has to do with intangibles like charisma, which we generally recognize, but are very hard to describe or to write down what does charisma actually mean? You sort of know it when you see it. But I think that's the single biggest factor is you have to be able to convince people to follow you without necessarily having this institutionalized base of support where you can court-martial somebody for not following you. You have to attract them on your own based on your powers of personal persuasion. And the last question, talk a lot today about drones and that type of warfare. What effect, if any, does that have in terms of, you know, we're talking about fighting a technological war. This is a distance war. You talk about getting bogged down in Vietnam, in jungles, a drone doesn't get bogged down. So what, if any, impact does that have? Well, you know, I get asked about drones a lot because I guess they're kind of the big subject of the day, but I would say they're just one weapon among many. They're not, I will not say that they've suddenly transformed insurgency beyond recognition because there have always been attempts by counterinsurgents to decapitate insurgencies to kill or capture insurgent leaders. And this is just one method that allows you to do that. But I mean, we, the Israelis, many others have tried to kill insurgent leaders with manned aircraft just as much as with drones or with commando raids. I mean, this is just another way of doing it and it allows you to operate at relatively low risk. So it's particularly attractive. But I, you know, I would not get carried away with the potential of drones. I mean, I think they're a useful tool and I'm in favor of, you know, the drone strikes in Pakistan and so forth because I think they're one of the few useful tools we have to contain the power of al-Qaeda but they're not going to fundamentally at the end of the day in the war because to do that, you have to be able to control the territory in which the insurgent group operates. And unless you have some governmental force that has security, that has legitimacy, that can control that territory, insurgent groups can regenerate after drone strikes and that's what we've seen in the case of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, many others which have lost a lot of their leadership but have managed to keep on ticking. Gentlemen over here. Max, you mentioned that, is it on? You mentioned that globalization is one of the things along with the franchise model that's allowed al-Qaeda to be more powerful than more local insurgent groups. Is there a way to fight back using a kind of political model more than on the ground force that capitalizes on things like people who might be susceptible to the ideology in places like London or Paris and getting imams on our side, getting people in Afghanistan to win them over ideologically? Well in the case of Western Europe or for that matter the United States or other advanced Western democracies, I think the most powerful tool of counterinsurgency that we have is the power of assimilation which is something that the Romans, the Chinese and many other ancient empires were very familiar with because that was the way they ended revolts or prevented revolts was by assimilating the people that they ruled by making them Chinese or Roman citizens by sharing their faith, their language, their way of life with these people who may have been outsiders but then became assimilated to their nation. That's I think a lot of the reason why we don't have more of a domestic terrorism problem in this country is because we're pretty good at assimilation. There's not a large disaffected Muslim minority in this country as there is in Europe and so they face some real problems unless they can do a better job of assimilation. I think that's from our standpoint, that's domestically, that's in many ways the most effective thing that we can do when you're looking at foreign lands and places like Mali, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, whatever. In that case, it's a different mission. The mission there is to try to improve their level of governance so that you have responsible states that can actually control their own territory. Very, very hard to do but unless you can do that you're not gonna be able to deny that territory to jihadist groups. Gentlemen in the back. Max, back to your research and development of this book did you find a constant battle between definitions of whether they're insurgents or rebels or four generation warriors or small players or this or that and how'd you overcome that and I guess does that also include whatever you found all say colonial wars and things like that? Yeah, there's no question that the linguistic battlefield is one of the major wars where irregular conflict is fought and there is no commonly agreed upon definition of terms like guerrilla, terrorist or many others and it's a very confusing situation because in the modern era, certainly pretty much all counter insurgents have tried to label their enemies as terrorists. I mean in Malaya where the British faced this classic communist slash nationalist guerrilla movement the official designation was communist terrorists capital C, capital T and likewise today we tend to label everybody that we fight in Afghanistan and Iraq as being a terrorist even though a lot of them I would argue are actually closer to guerrillas. How what do I mean by those terms? I mean I can tell you how I define them. Others will define them in other ways. I basically, my view is that there is basically continuum of conflict with terrorists at the bottom then guerrillas, then conventional armies and then weapons of mass destruction and terrorists tend to be the least capable militarily they tend to be relatively small groups of a few dozen, a few hundred individuals who primarily target civilians because they don't have the capacity to target security forces and they don't typically control territory whereas guerrillas tend to be larger guerrilla armies can be thousands, tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands they can often control quote unquote liberated territory and they often devote the bulk of their efforts to fighting the government security forces and then of course you come to the conventional forces which are uniformed and fight in the open have front lines and all that. I mean that's how I define these terms but you can have an endless linguistic debate and in fact among specialists in the field there isn't an endless linguistic debate and of course some groups are hybrids yes, that's actually an important point is that a lot of groups are not purely terrorists or guerrillas and that's why in this book I include both terrorists and guerrillas because I think it's pretty artificial to say one or the other because many groups for example the Viet Cong engaged in terrorism and Saigon, guerrilla warfare in the countryside and then conventional operations and cooperation with the North Vietnamese army in the highlands so they did the whole spectrum of conflict and this was just one group so these definitions are fluid and tactics often change so that's a very important point it's very hard to label one group as being exclusively one thing or the other they often are multiple things at once. The gentleman over here. Hi Mr. Bhutan, thank you for being with us today I'm currently reading War Made New which seems like the thesis to this antithesis if you wanna maybe think of it that way and that's a book about the technology in society and politics and nation states going to war at least as far as I am so far through the book into World War II, as you now are doing this book tour and talking about this, are you, where are you going next? What's the, is there a synthesis when you look at the states, the non-state actors where does this lead you to next? I might have to leave the synthesis to somebody like Philip Abbot who's much smarter than I am but I don't think that I'm not sure I would agree, I mean thank you for reading my book by the way, I appreciate that but I'm not sure that I would agree that War Made New is the antithesis to invisible armies because War Made New is really about revolutions and military affairs in the way technology has changed warfare over the last 500 years but one of the points that I do make in that book is technology has made much more of an impact in conventional operations than it has in the unconventional realm and you might say I more fully developed that point in this book because what I point out is that unconventional warfare has always tried to negate the firepower advantage of a conventional army with the gorillas attempting to hide. I mean that's essentially what they do, that's why I call this invisible armies. If they came out into the open with our modern targeting technologies as a result of the computer revolution we can pulverize any individual basically anywhere on the planet with a great deal of precision but we have trouble identifying those individuals which is what makes insurgent groups so hard to grapple with. I don't think that they're opposites, I think they're looking at different aspects of warfare. Just to follow up, what is your next book gonna be about? I get asked that sometimes. At the moment, my focus is entirely on getting the word out about this book and so I gotta sit down in the summer and formulate a next project. This gentleman and then this gentleman. Oh, hi. Hi, I've been chatting with Amrila Salah lately and some other of the old guys of the old guard of the Jamiat and we noticed that General Dempsey about a week ago stated that the mission going into beyond 2014 will be to quote unquote stabilize Pakistan. Some of those guys are kind of shocked about that and I'm wondering what you think the mission is and what it's going to cost going into the future. In the mission in Afghanistan? Yes. Close to 2014. Well, I didn't see that statement by General Dempsey but I think that is one of the multiple reasons why I think the USG wants to remain engaged in Afghanistan because aside from trying to stabilize Afghanistan and prevent it from being used as a launching pad by terrorist groups, I think there is a sense that it gives us a platform from which to try to influence developments in Pakistan in the final instance to do something like mounting the Assam bin Laden raid which we couldn't have done unless we had that air base in Jalalabad but also gives us some visibility and some ability to influence developments across the border. Whereas if Afghanistan were to follow the Taliban I think there is a real concern that this would destabilize Pakistan as well because of the close links between the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, this nexus of Jihadist groups that are fighting on multiple fronts. We've been talking about a Hugh Grine staff and we're Facebook friends, Max. We've been talking about external invisible armies but in recent times in America, the extreme far right wing especially since Obama has taken office have put out like a propaganda thing like especially with the UN gun treaty and now with the new town and everything else happening there seems to be more of a right wing challenge or an extremist challenge in America. Had you studied that at all or? I don't look into it too deeply. I mean, I don't wanna be overly dismissal of it because obviously the most costly act of terrorism prior to 9-11 was carried out by Timothy McVeigh and so there is the potential for those kinds of acts in the future but maybe this is just sheer ignorance on my part but I'm not losing a lot of sleep over what some of these gun nuts in Idaho are up to and I'm sure there are some dangerous cults out there and it is something I hope that the FBI and other groups in law enforcement will keep an eye on but I don't view it as being the kind of massive national security threat that all these Islamist insurgencies for example that we face throughout the Middle East I think are. Any other questions? This gentleman here. What is your take on the legitimacy of anonymous and what impact that could potentially or what that could turn into? The legitimacy of anonymous? Anonymous, right? The internet-based. The hacking collective? Legalist organization which releases leaks data from the government or from corporations. You stumped me. I mean I thought I've encountered most questions. This one, this one I have not encountered. I don't really know what to say. What's your, you have a suggestion? I thought I answered your own question. I think it was more of a question actually but. Well this is the danger of asking a question. I'm gonna put you on the spot to answer it. Well I mean it's an organization that has no leader which is a little bit different than some of the insurgencies that you were talking about. Or at least none that I'm aware of and people join from all over the world and it doesn't matter. I mean the ideological links I think are murky but they sort of go where the wind blows and if someone has an idea of what to attack or what information to release, it's just sort of a hodgepodge. It seems like a people that jump on board. And they have these minds or people with a set of skills that I certainly don't have and maybe our government doesn't even have. And so is it a danger? I'm not sure because they've done good things also like releasing information about the whereabouts of people who obtain child pornography. But at the same time they pose a threat to national security secrets, so I don't know. Well the one observation I would make and I think you probably know more about them than I do but I will say that this phenomenon of sort of leaderless networks is increasingly a common one and in fact you see today very few truly hierarchical top down types of insurgencies in the way that you saw with Mao or Ho Chi Minh or other kind of classic communist leaders who instill this kind of discipline on their followers. Right now it tends to be much more undisciplined and there tends to be competition among multiple groups. I mean that's why it's so hard in many ways to bring stability out of chaos in places like Libya, Iraq, Syria. There's not really a central insurgent poly bureau you can talk to and the modern technology enables as I say ever smaller groups that do be ever more destructive. So they don't necessarily need the vast infrastructure provided by a traditional insurgency command and control and so they can do a lot of mischief in very limited groups and I suspect that's even more true on the internet and you know will be characteristic of various groups of hackers fighting for various causes over the years. Well I want to thank Max Boot for a really brilliant presentation and his books are for sale outside. I'm sure he'll sign them. So thank you very much Max. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.