 Welcome to the New America Foundation. My name's Peter Bergen. It's my pleasure to host two very good friends of the New America Foundation. One is Dr. John Nagel, who of course has a new book out, Night Fights, which was reviewed as it happens by Daniel Green, Dr. Daniel Green, who had never met Nagel until today and wrote this spectacular review in foreign policy for what is clearly a spectacular book. Dr. Nagel is the ninth headmaster of the Haverford School in Philadelphia. He was previously the president of the Center for New American Security. He's a road scholar amongst other things. He's written a previous book, How to Eat Soup with a Knife. And Dr. Green is a defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, author of the new book for the Fallujah Redux, The Iron Bar Awakening and the Struggle with Al Qaeda. And he's a military veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course, Dr. Nagel was also retired lieutenant colonel who served in Ambar as well. So Dr. Nagel is going to spend about 20, 30 minutes outlining the big themes and stories in the book. And Dr. Green is going to respond to that. And then we're going to have a moderated Q&A involving everybody in the audience. So John. Peter, thank you. I promise I won't go that long. Thanks to everybody for coming out. Thanks to New America for hosting this. Thanks to Peter Bergen for his intellectual leadership on these issues. One of the books I taught from at the Naval Academy when I had the privilege of being the Minerva Professor there was Peter's The Longest War, which I think picks up where Steve Kahl's Ghost Wars left off and is the best intellectual history we have to date of the Long War against Al Qaeda. I wrote this book with two hopes, really. One of them was that the United States would fight fewer wars in the future. And the other hope was that when the United States did fight wars in the future, it would do so more intelligently, less badly, more wisely, less cost of human life. And I dedicated the book to 23 soldiers from my task force who were lost in the fighting in Al Anbar in 2004. Veterans, as I say, at the end of the book of a war that did not need to be fought, that was not fought as well as it should have been. But they were good soldiers, to quote David Finkel's book, and deserved a better war. The book starts with my first war with Operation Desert Storm. I led a tank platoon in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 in the first cav. And a great little war, we took the Iraqi army from the fourth largest in the world to the second largest in Iraq in a period of 100 hours. And I thought that's the way war was supposed to be. Tank on tank, we shoot the tanks that don't look like ours, defeat them rapidly, and declare victory, and go home. And then almost exactly a year after the tank on tank fighting of Desert Storm, I got to participate in a simulated battle at the US Army's National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California, a place where we simulate tank fighting against other tanks with the world's most expensive game of laser tag. A great, wonderful investment in technology. It's designed to make sure that the army is prepared for the next war. In this particular fight, we're defending a large piece of desert. We backed up to mountains, which tanks can't get through and dug our tanks in an enormously difficult time-consuming process. We got all the tanks dug in. And just as we finished that process, we were attacked from the rear by insurgent fighters, guerrillas, fighting us with mortars, with light anti-tank weapons from a direction we hadn't expected. A mode of attack we were not prepared to take on. And a tank company of the US Army was defeated in detail by an enemy it couldn't see and hadn't prepared to fight. An enormously frustrating experience. And I got home and thought about those two experiences, cutting through an enemy tank force, like a hot knife through butter, and then a year later, being defeated in detail by light forces, infantry forces. And I wrote a piece about that, published as A Tale of Two Battles in Armor Magazine, a widely read. Among a certain group of people, and after continued to struggle with those questions, with those issues, and when the Army decided to send me back to Oxford for my second tour there to get my PhD, because we all make sacrifices for national security, I decided to look not at the tank-on-tank kind of warfare. I'd fought successfully in Desert Storm, but I think you learn more from a defeat than a victory. I decided to look at the kind of warfare where I'd been defeated in detail by light infantry force, by guerrillas, and insurgents. And so, as Peter said, I went to Oxford and wrote my doctoral dissertation, comparing the process by which the British Army learned to conduct counterinsurgency in the Malayan emergency with the way the US Army failed to do so fast enough in the Vietnam War. And I titled that piece after an observation by T. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, that wore upon rebellion as messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. And I actually read that phrase in Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a triumph I'd been for a run, it was in the tub, reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom, eating strawberries, drinking champagne, it's Oxford, that's what you do there. And hit that phrase, and knew I had the title of my dissertation. And finished in 1997, what I'm proud to say is the best, and ashamed to say is the worst, doctoral dissertation written on counterinsurgency in the 1990s, because it was, of course, the only one. Tried to get it published afterwards while I was a professor in the social department at West Point, unable to do so, literally rejection letters from university presses asking me why I was writing about a subject with so little contemporary relevance, and why didn't I look at something that people would be a little more interested in. Was not able to get it published until after the attacks of September 11th when suddenly insurgency and terrorism were very much in vogue, and got it published in 2002, with a preface describing US Army Special Forces writing horseback calling in airstrikes against Taliban forces after the attacks of September 11th. Having written the book, I went and did the research in Al Anbar province of Iraq, 2003, 2004, and found that counterinsurgency, which I thought was messy and slow and really, really hard, was harder and messier and far more difficult than I'd ever imagined. My task force lost 23, had 150 wounded, fighting in Al Anbar in a town named Caldea, a tough little town right in between the towns that you may have heard of, of Ramadi, the provincial capital, and Fallujah, both of them now in the hands of ISIS insurgents as is Caldea, the town for which we fought so very hard, enormously grinding, difficult year. We got back from Iraq to Fort Riley, Kansas, and my battle captain printed out coffee mugs that said Iraq, 2003, 2004. We were winning when I left, and we weren't, and we knew it. And I went from there to the Pentagon to work for Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wifowitz, which was a big change from Iraq, wait for it, at least in Iraq, I'd had some idea who I was fighting against. And you hope, you really hope, when you're on the ground, fighting a grinding protracted war, as we were, that somebody somewhere has a plan and it's all gonna work out, and that was not exactly what I found when I got to the Pentagon. The person I did find was David Petraeus. Captain David Petraeus had been one of my teachers at West Point. I now Lieutenant General Petraeus returning from his second tour in Iraq to take command of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Levenworth, Kansas, with responsibility for Army Doctrine. Talked to Petraeus about, had the chance to talk to him a little bit during one of his visits to Wifowitz's office and suggested to him that the Army really needed to write a new counter insurgency field manual, which we hadn't done in 25 years. He thought that was a great idea. Said he knew just the guy to do it, and told me to do it. I ended up being sort of the managing editor of that project, a man named Conrad Crane, who had been Petraeus' West Point classmate, Stanford PhD in history, wonderful man, pulled the team together that turned that manual and wrote it over the course of the year, 2006. And many people in the room helped with that process. The Rogues Gallery and the- Brighton Back. Yeah, way in the back where they belong. Were some of the people who helped write that manual. Published on December 15th, 2006. Downloaded a million and a half times in the next month. Translated and critiqued on Jihadi websites. Copies found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan. So we knew our enemies were reading it. We just had to get our guys to do that, right? Part of that process involved getting it published by the University of Chicago Press, which sent a copy to The Daily Show with John Stewart, where I had the privilege of having the funniest conversation John Stewart has ever had about an army field manual on camera. Confident, when I tell you that. Sort of extraordinary experience of David Petraeus having spent a concerted year deeply involved in the writing, thinking through how he would fight the war in Iraq if he got the chance to go back and take over. Followed by sort of writing that plan out and then being given the chance to execute it. George W. Bush, at exactly this point in his administration, six years into his administration, decided to make some of the boldest decisions of his entire presidency, replacing his Secretary of Defense, Donald Drumsfeld with Bob Gates. My eye's the best Secretary of Defense the country's ever had, replacing George Casey with David Petraeus in Command in Iraq against the advice of pretty much everybody, surging 30,000 troops into Iraq in early 2007, extending the combat tours of all of those soldiers and those already there, to the army soldiers, to 15 months. And Petraeus implemented this classic clear hold and build counter insurgency strategy to good effect, reducing violence by 2 thirds to 3 quarters. Over the course of the 18 months, he was in command in Iraq. Napoleon said, all my generals are good. Give me ones who are lucky. I would argue that Petraeus was both lucky and good. He took advantage of, nurtured the Sawa, the awakening, not the first attempt by Sunni tribes to rebel against al-Qaeda in Iraq, but the first one that was supported widely by the Americans and the first one that had the horsepower to succeed. Tragically, at the end of our second war in Iraq, against the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he's the Director of the Central Intelligence. By now, David Petraeus is Secretary of Defense. By now, Secretary Panetta is Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton, about as good a national security team as you're going to find. President Obama decided to pull all the American troops out of Iraq with predictably grave results, and we see that now with ISIS in control of the ground that my men, my friends, fought for, bled for. An entirely predictable, entirely preventable series of events. I spent a bunch of time thinking in the book about Afghanistan as well. Afghanistan, I posit, as a necessary war, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, an unnecessary war, even if Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction. I believe that he did at the time and still thought the invasion was unnecessary and likely to be a disaster influenced by people like Khan Krain. Afghanistan, on the other hand, an entirely necessary war when the Taliban refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda central. We had no choice, I don't think, as a nation, but to go in top of the Taliban and attempt to retrieve bin Laden and bring him to justice. We underestimated the resources required for that. We certainly underestimated the amount of time required for that. Far too early in that war, turned our attention away from Afghanistan to fight another war, an unnecessary second war in Iraq with predictable consequences for Afghanistan, the Afghan effort under-resourced until President Obama's tenure of the course of his first year in office, he made two decisions to surge troops into Afghanistan. Unfortunately, in my eyes, announcing coincident with the second surge of troops into Afghanistan, the withdrawal date of those troops undercutting his own policy off at the knees in theater before it ever had the chance to stand up. The people we were fighting against, both in Afghanistan and Pakistan, didn't hear the 30,000 additional troops, they heard the 18 month time on it. And so, Afghanistan, a place where I would argue counterinsurgency worked when it was tried, not the counterinsurgency was never really put into practice effectively long enough, hard enough. If there is a silver lining to what's happening in Iraq right now, to the rise of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, it is a clear clarion call for the administration to reverse its current Afghanistan policy, which has all American troops pulling out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. If that happens, I am confident that the next president of the United States will have to go back into Afghanistan just as this president has had to go back into Iraq. And so, if any good can come from the discussions I'm privileged to be having with people like this audience, my hope is that we will increase pressure to change current administration policy in Afghanistan and put more resources into the current war against ISIS, and I'll end here. I believe that the president has the right ends in mind for a strategy defeating and ultimately destroying the Islamic State. I believe that the president has the right ways identified that is having local forces, most of the Kurds and Iraqi forces conduct the on the ground fighting enabled by American advisors, American air power, American intelligence and logistics. The problem I have with the current policy is the means the president is allocating in support of those ways to achieve those ends. We're off by a factor of about 10 rather than 1500 advisors, we need 15,000 advisors. We need them embedded inside Iraqi and Kurdish battalions and brigades. We need to, once we have those advisors in those units our air power will be far more effective and the Iraqi units, Kurdish units will be far more effective and I can see a fairly rapid demise to ISIS inside Iraq. I cannot see for the life of me what the end state is in Syria. We chose not to arm, train and equip the moderate Syrian rebels in the summer of 12. That window is closed, most of those guys are gone, dead or departed, the environs. And so I don't know what end state the U.S. currently foresees for Syria, for the Islamic State in Syria and I believe that that is a decision that will be left to the next presidential administration. Thank you very much for that brilliant presentation. Daniel. There's sort of two themes I wanna talk a little bit about in John's book which I thought were very interesting and perhaps can help a lot of how we think about these future conflicts. The first is one of the big takeaways from John's dissertation and obviously his first book and the theme throughout the book is how do we help the army in particular but also institutions generally become learning institutions so they readily adapt to challenges they weren't initially designed and resourced to address. And part of that sort of flip side of that of course is how do they become unlearning institutions? How do they become sort of mired in a certain way of thinking of the world, a certain sort of resource balance that ill-equips them to deal with challenges they're not designed to address? And then the second sort of theme is sort of the civ mill relationship. Obviously John had a chance to witness the Bush administration, the Obama administration very closely and he saw how the civ mill teams worked or didn't work in many cases and then of course he at the implementing end he was in the Gulf War and had the benefit of a civ mill relationship that seemed to work generally well. And the thing I'd like to talk about there is how is it that we can help our formal institutions work better because a lot of the adaptations to these conflicts have typically come from people who are outliers to our bureaucracies, people who are on the margins. And this is true not just in the military but also in the State Department, USAID even in the intelligence community. So for example, one of the challenges just to go back to the Army, I think one of the challenges the Army had after the Vietnam War, which John talks about readily in his book is how did it unlearn the lessons of Vietnam? That course, what were the lessons of Vietnam? I think there are five or six sort of things we can focus on or point to that may have contributed to some of that because it was that unlearning of the lessons, if you will, that contributed a lot of our difficulties of initially conceptualizing the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan and organizing ourselves appropriately to deal with it. The first one I just want to focus on is frankly the untimely early death of General Crayton Abrams in 1974. He was the general who had essentially helped turn around the Vietnam War in many respects. He fought not just the insurgency with a whole of government approach. He also fought the main force units of North Vietnam in a comprehensive manner. So when he passed away in 1974 when he was chief of staff of the Army, he really wasn't able to sort of put his vision on the Army, sort of help elevate those general officers and others he had known to positions of leadership where they could help influence the future development of the Army as an institution. Along those same lines, he didn't have a chance of course to write his own memoirs if he would have written them anyway. He was a difference for personality, he may not have written them. And that's important because how we remember wars often influences how we fight future conflicts because not many people read very dry after action reports. I mean, they're a labor to write and they often are the last thing that stands between you and your family when you come home from a deployment. So often we refer to memoirs, we look to histories. Another contributing factor I would point to is the separate sort of institutional development of the US Army Special Forces community. That kind of specialization was absolutely necessary for a long time. I think over time though by developing separately it robbed the main sort of US Army as an institution from the benefit of the kind of personalities and others and way of conceptualizing combat that the Special Forces community in particular has. It's a contrarian abuse often and I think the Army was less well served by that separate institutional development. A third factor is I think frankly the switch to a all volunteer force obviously took place right after during the end of Vietnam conflict. I think what that did is it robbed the Army as an institution of sort of a broad swath of America that would never perhaps normally join the military or the US Army. And by getting these sort of unconventional people or people with just a different view of things in the Army it sort of prevented the institution from constantly sort of adjusting. You started to get a kind of closed society of people who sort of you start to see sons and daughters of people in the Army start to serve again and again it starts to become a closed community. I think in my perspective on that as I'm a reservist so I've mobilized three times. So I've been in the active duty side a little bit. I've seen that that I've stepped out. There's benefits to an institution regardless of it's the Army of having that kind of unconventional career path. Another sort of factor I point to this is really sort of dry is the 1958 Defense Department Reorganization Act. It's as exciting to say it as it is to live it. But it's an act that's often wrapped in the language of this solidified civilian control of the military. Gosh, President Eisenhower signed it. He was the major advocate for it. And so it's sort of also forgotten at the tail end of the Eisenhower administration. And this acted a couple things. One is it took the chiefs of staffs as an institution, as a corporate body out of the chain of command. So the fielded force, the uniform military downrange no longer has a unified military chain of command back to the head shed, if you will, the joint chiefs of staff. Along those same lines, it also got rid of the chiefs of staff, not just the corporate body, but the Army chief of staff, the other chiefs of staffs from the chain of command. The book I think of when I talk about that is Mark Perry's good book called Partners in Command which talks about the Marshall Eisenhower relationship during the war. And you see very quickly from that book you've got the guy fighting the war is able to call, so to speak, the chief of staff and get direction and provide on the ground truth and that chief of staff is able to take that to the White House and the president has confidence he's getting the ground truth and it's all connected. That unified, I think, chain of command is actually very beneficial. But then you have that Army chief of staff nested within the joint chiefs. And so that corporate body for all its occasional dysfunction is a useful institutional process for a war plan to be looked at to be chewed on. Because each service has a different perspective on war and each service has its own kind of roles and missions that struggles over. And so that's one of the ones that play in the war if you will participate. I think that kind of process enriches a campaign plan. So in a way, what I would say is take Kami Frank's first cut at Iraq and Afghanistan. Thank you very much. It's an excellent first draft. The joint chiefs of staff now is an institution. Actually the chief of staff of the Army will now take it, Shinseki. He'll then take it to the joint chiefs. They'll chew on it and talk about it. And then they'll present it to Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush. I think that's a useful process. There were some downsides to it. I don't know if you guys now are put these reforms in. But I think that's a useful institutional change. And I also think too, when you have the joint chiefs as part of the chain of command, what that does, it does a couple things. It protects the civilian leadership from sort of bad decisions and provides military top cover for civilian leaders. At the same time, it protects the institution of the military from unconventional civilian ideas about how to wage war that may not actually work. It essentially allows the professionals to be in the right position and allows them to protect the administration when they have to change direction in the war. I think, for example, of General Ridgway during the Eisenhower administration. President Eisenhower asked him to go to Vietnam. What can we do to help the French to prevent their defeat in Vietnam? He came back and said, Mr. President, we're gonna need several hundred thousands of troops. It's not doable. That's a great thing if you're a politician, if you're President Eisenhower. You're saying, I've had my chief of staff who is an expert and a professional, evaluate the terms of the debate, the battle, the war. And so he said, we can't do it. I defer to his greater expertise. He gives political top cover to administration. Now, because it goes president, secretary of defense, the guy waging the war through the combatant commander, the secretary of defense being a political person is sort of high bound to the initial strategy. They're connected to it. To change direction is to admit a mistake, to admit fault, and that has political consequences. So as you have the chiefs of staff as a service, as a joint, as a corporate body, they can provide that kind of top cover. That's just, these are some institutional things, by the way, my background's political scientist. So this is very like institutional stuff. But I think a lot of the challenges we've had is just getting our institutions to work properly. And so we've often found these cutarounds through unconventional individuals who don't have typical kind of career paths in their institutions making it work. And that's great. We've all deployed Iraq and Afghanistan. And we know as often about personality. That's because institutions aren't well-designed to do what's required. So we constantly do workarounds. And that's also true at the strategic level as well. Thank you. John, any thoughts on? Let me pick up on Dan's excellent last point. One of the really interesting things about the war, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been as Dan suggests, that so much of the thinking and the policy changes originated in people who had no official position whatsoever, or who vastly overreached their own institutional position. So for instance, David Petraeus as a relatively junior, three-star general, commanding the Combined Arm Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was rewriting Iraq war strategy over the course of 2006. Hints of this rose to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He sent a snowflake asking about this, saying if strategy in Iraq was being rewritten, perhaps someone ought to talk to him, right? And he received a response, oh, Petraeus is just updating dusty old army manuals, don't worry about it, right? And that was somewhat true. But Petraeus from a seat where he was expected to have no influence on policy and be able to do no damage, in fact, was overturning decades of army thinking and current thinking on a war then happening. The role of Jack Keen, retired Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, who Tom Rick says in Fiasco became the, or maybe Tom's second book after Fiasco, the gamble, the gamble, Rick says that the Jack Keen became the de facto chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, promulgating a new strategy for Iraq, proposing hiring and firing Secretaries of Defense and theater commanders, despite the fact that as a retired four star, he had no official standing whatsoever. And arguably he became the most important military officer in the United States as a civilian retired four star. So Dan's exactly right, the innovative people saw a problem and found ways to subvert the system and come up with a different way to think about the problem and ultimately to attempt to solve the problem. Fred Kaplan tells this story well in his book, The Insurgents. It shouldn't have to be that way. The system should not fail as badly as it did, either in leaving the Army, the Marine Corps, as poorly prepared to conduct an insurgency as they were in 2002, 2003, not having a phase four plan for what happened after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. I'll give them a pass on what happened, not having a plan for what happened after the government in Kabul fell in 2001, but 2003 was a war of our choosing. We should have had a plan for phase four and then the system should have been able to read what was going on and innovate and change and adapt more rapidly and without all the workarounds that were required to do it. And so as people write future doctoral dissertations on this series of events, my hope is that they will think through both the role of personalities and the role of institutions in creating a more flexible, adaptive learning organization. Question for both of you, which is, it strikes me that everything that you've just said and everything you've written and thought about and lived suggests that fighting insurgencies is a prolonged exercise. And yet, the United States is part of itself conception is that it's not an empire to when you can debate whether it is or it isn't. But isn't there something sort of embedded in the sort of American kind of way of thinking about the world that actually prevents the kind of long-term investments? I mean, there would be necessary to get it right. I mean, it seems to me, I completely agree with you. I don't think Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush or whoever is gonna say, yeah, that's a really great idea. Let's pull every combat troupe out or any form of, on December 31st, 2016. So the point is, is Afghanistan, by any reasonable measure, is gonna be a long-term enterprise. And we keep, as you point out, John, on December 1st, 2009, when President Obama went to West Point and put the 18 month and everybody, that was the crawl on CNN before he even gave the speech. It was about the drawdown, not about the new troops. So the point is, is there something in the American kind of way of thinking about the world that actually sabotages the idea of these kind of counterinsurgency? And what is the answer to why the army, for instance, put Vietnam in the rear view mirror, other than the fact that it was an unpleasant experience? And was there something deeper here? I sort of think, like, you know, our whole government is designed to do conventional warfare, conventional diplomacy, conventional intelligence gathering, conventional development work. You know, that worldview tends to focus on activities in the capital with national level partners, formal institutions. We tend to be very force protection conscious. We tend to have a short-term perspective on long-term problems, and we rarely get to wisdom because our rotations are so frequent across the government that we're all constantly playing catch up and only get to situational awareness. And so we often fight wars that are convenient to our bureaucratic design and structures than they are on their own terms. There's this famous Rand study, which I'm sure John knows about in Peter, bureaucracy does its thing, by Robert Comer, who was a famous sort of Lyndon Johnson administration, later Carter administration policy official, who helped put together the Cords program in Vietnam, which was this unique creature of a unified, civ-mil organization that sought to fight the Viet Cong insurgency holistically, governance developments enduring local security, et cetera. And he wondered, why did it take so long for the government writ large to adapt to this challenge that they weren't designed to originally sort of work through? And that was a fascinating study to read. Aren't many, you can say that Rand are fascinating and gripping. But this one was is to help me organize my own set of experiences to understand why were certain people readily adapting to these problems? Why were others struggling with it? And I think that's one of the challenges. We don't really have a domestic political constituency to do counterinsurgency work. We have a hell of a great constituency for fighting conventional wars. There are defense contractors, there are bases all over the country, but the parts of our bureaucracy, most well positioned to deal with these problems are those that are least well funded and most politically weak. So for example, just to pick one office, I hope this doesn't cause it to be obliterated, but USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives, they lovingly say they're the special forces of USAID. They're a redheaded stepchild of that institution. Within the US military, particularly the Army, US special forces is certainly well resourced today, but in many ways it's still a bureaucratic side player. It's not essential. That's not often that people go to first when we deal with these wars. Within the State Department, you have State Department officers who love hardship tours. They self-select. They've made peace with the fact they'll never be Ambassador, they'll never be a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, and they're really happy with that actually, and they are constantly drawn to war zones, and they're good, but you only have a certain number of those people. You burn through them fairly quickly. So that's a lot of how we're designed is, we're just not designed to do this. And I think the reason we keep, I think we're sort of mixed views on how we do these things. I think being a revolutionary power, we like to think we have ideas for how the world should be organized, and we do as a country, and that's a great thing about our country. That often leads us to go overseas, but then our bureaucracies aren't well designed to bring that vision to fruition, and then we're sort of playing catch up. There's sort of a learning curve of intervention we go through. Our initial plan doesn't work. There's eventually a process where it runs into difficulties. People are fired, elections occur, and all of a sudden there's a new leadership that pops up of people who've learned from the ground, such as General Petraeus at a lower level, Crayton Abrams at a lower level, and then we finally get it right, but by that point, we're on the way out. Would you almost your assessment now of the extent to which the lessons learned are being internalized or forgotten? So the best single quote I've heard on explaining what Dan just said is a possibly apocryphal, unnamed Army Lieutenant Colonel during the Vietnam War. He said, I'll be damned if I allow the traditions, the history, the customs of the United States Army to be turned upside down just to win this goddamn war. So you gotta have priorities, right? And whether it's true or not, it's exactly on point. It's how the organization feels, or how the organization has felt. So in the wake of Desert Storm, the U.S. Army broadly speaking focused the next decade on figuring out how to do Desert Storm even better while the rest of the world figured out how not to let Desert Storm happen to it. Since then, and we've had another decade, almost 15 years now of war, where the rest of the world has seen what happens to the United States if you try to take them on in conventional combat and what happens if you use a protracted warfare strategy. The rest of the world knows what they're going to do. The future of conflict is not going to be tank on tank, fighter plane on fighter plane. We need to continue to maintain the capability to fight those kind of wars. We need to have a force in being that by its very existence prevents those wars from happening. But the wars we're actually going to be fighting are the grinding, messy, slow, savage wars apiece. Richard Kipling quote. And the army is struggling to come to terms, the U.S. military is struggling to come to terms with that realization. A very important step in the bureaucratic learning process came while I was still in the Pentagon, I think it must have been in 2005, 2005 or 2006. Open Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England signed DOD Directive 3000.05 which said that after 230 years of the U.S. military being responsible for doing two things, attacking and defending, adding a whole third mission set that the U.S. military is also responsible for stability operations in occupied territory. The truth is that we'd been doing more of that than we'd been doing attacking or defending over the course of the nation's history but it had never been enshrined as a priority in doctrine. And so the fact is that 70 years after the end of World War II, 70 years after the end of World War II we still have American troops garrisoning germinally in Japan. 60 years after the end of the Korean War we still have American troops in South Korea. 20 years after the war in the Balkans we still have American troops there. And so particularly in an era of an all volunteer force which Dan talked about, the President and the U.S. Foreign Policy Establishment has enormously way in what it does with its troops, with its all volunteer troops. And those troops have been, I would argue, part of the security guarantee that has allowed the extraordinarily peaceful, extraordinarily economically productive years since the Second World War. And we have to inform, educate our administrations about the role that those troops play and the absolute necessity. Now having seen what happens when we don't leave those damping rods in the nuclear reactor by pulling all the American troops out of Iraq that we don't do the same damn thing in Afghanistan in 2016. Well you both, you served in Urazgan and you actually wrote a book about it. Did you spend any time in Afghanistan, John? Only visits, war tourism, like a journal. So I mean, what's your prognosis? I mean, you know, we have had a national unity government between a group of people who don't really like each other but it seems to be sticking. We have signed a BSA, a basing agreement, the day after, as promised, as part of the campaign, promises that the both candidates made. You know, what's your prognosis for how things might turn out, Dan? I just hope we're there for it in a light, lean, long-term presence that's statistically sustainable. I had a chance to visit a province, serve in a province twice in 2005, 2006, and in 2012, a province called the Ruzgan. The thing I was most struck by being away from it for six years was how much Afghan institutions had developed and how they were more resilient. When I was first there, you'd have the illiterate warlord and you'd have the semi-literate administrative guys as deputy and then you'd have essentially a laundered militia that had become a formal security institution. When I went back in 2012, it's the little things that tell you stability has arrived, the fact they wear uniforms, the fact that they're proactive, the fact that they're more mired in their own bureaucracy now, which didn't exist before because they were predominantly illiterate. Those kind of things I was really struck by. And the fact you had the army, the Afghan national police, the Afghan local police, generally working well together, there was useful friction there because each had strengths and weaknesses and they sort of helped each other out. I was really struck by that. I think if we can just maintain a somewhat constant level of funding, allow Afghanistan with their minerals, et cetera, to develop a little bit more, I think that would put them in a good position but I think we need to be there to provide that logistical support, intelligence support, health, close air support, et cetera, by a light lean long term. I was really amazed at how much violence had receded in 2012. The nature, you know, not all violence is created equal, right? So the violence in 2012 was largely individual based. Assassinations, car bombs, and individual level kind of attacks versus 2006 you had 200, 300 man fighting formations seeking to take and hold territory. It was a very different war by 2012 but I think we need to be there for the long term and a light, long term and lean presence. John? Completely correct. Yeah. You both fought in Ambar and which is now basically controlled by ISIS. I mean, if we'd had this conversation three years ago, would you have been surprised by that and how do you feel about the whole? So the first paper I wrote after I became president of CNAS in 2009 was called After the Fire and it argued for a long term security presence in Iraq, argued, made very much the same argument that Dan has just made about Afghanistan, that Iraq has made enormous progress as it has essentially defeated Al-Qaeda in Iraq, flipped the Sunnis, defeated both insurgencies that we were facing when I was fighting there in 2004, Dan saw it, that fight a little bit later and argued that with a long term investment of 20, 25,000 American advisors, some American air power, logistics, some medical support that at very low risk to the American troops, we could maintain a stable situation in Iraq, prevent the reemergence of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and create stability, a degree of stability in the heart of the Middle East. We chose a different option with entirely predictable. Well, can I just drill down on that a little bit because you keep saying the phrase pulling out and the Obama administration, the clear, the Obama administration may have made mistakes here, but there was pretty clear signals from the Iraqis about what they didn't want. There's a really good piece in the current foreign affairs which is an insurgency counter-insurgency foreign affairs led by a debate between Max Booth and Dick Betts. I commend this foreign affairs to you. The next piece after the debate between the two of them is an analysis of just those negotiations. And the author whose name I've lost, I apologize, argues pretty compellingly in my eyes that I think there are people in the room who are part of these negotiations. I look forward to hearing from them. But my understanding of the negotiations is that Maliki was willing to sign an executive order, president to president, guaranteeing the American troops in Iraq the same protections that they'd had during a previous executive agreement from 2008 to 2011. And that President Obama was unwilling to accept an executive agreement, president to president, he demanded that it be approved by the parliament. This Maliki was not willing to do for the relatively low troop levels that President Obama was willing to provide, 3,000 to 5,000 are the numbers I hear bandied about. And it's worth as you contemplate asking the Iraqi parliament to provide long-term legal protections to an American force occupying the country in 2011, right after what Iraq had just been through. It's worth contemplating how easy it is for the United States president to get a treaty through the Senate, right? And then understand what it was we were asking, we were asking the Iraqi government, the nascent Iraqi government to do in 2011. Finally, I will point out that the American troops currently serving on the ground in Iraq do not have a status of forces agreement. They don't even have a president to president guarantee of legal protections. The legal protections they are currently operating under are in a piece of paper signed by the Iraqi foreign minister. And so you can't have it both ways. Either our troops should not be there now under that degree of legal protection or we had the legal ability to accept a higher degree of protection than the troops they're currently serving have and those troops could have prevented this from happening. Sort of questions from the audience. Do you have a question? Please raise your hand, wait for the microphone and identify yourself. So we'll start with this gentleman here. Not microphone is right behind you, sir. Yes, hi, gentlemen. Kevin Winsing, retired Navy captain. I wanted to ask you a question about sort of restoring American trust when you're drawing red lines in the sand and doing things like that. How can America restore trust around the world? And I think you talked a little bit about the post-Vietnam era, the military industrial complex, you know, the sort of lobby against the counter-insurgency. Not a lot of money to be made in that. So those are the two questions about restoring American trust and the military industrial complex. I'll take the first, you take the military industrial. Great. So I mentioned how difficult Syria is and how I'm unable to see the end state in Syria. Part of the problem for that is that I think the president boxed himself in unnecessarily by drawing a red line in the sand against Assad and then obviously not following through on it. The real problem there, I think, is not just the loss of American credibility occasioned as a result of that decision, but it makes turning to Assad as a long-term security answer in Syria very, very difficult. And the fact is that Assad is not a particularly nice guy, but he's better than ISIS. And those are the only two options I see given that we didn't arm train and equip the moderate Syrian rebels in the summer of 12 and those guys are now gone. The only long-term options I see for ruling Syria are ISIS and Assad. And the famous Winston Churchill quotation, if Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons. Assad is better than ISIS. Faint praise, but maybe our best answer, that red line is gonna make it very, very difficult for this administration to deal with him as a long-term security answer in Syria. It's my belief that the administration is going to let the next administration figure out who is going to govern Syria. St. Augustine, the only purpose of a war is to build a better peace, a better peace in Syria, maybe Assad. Yeah. No, I think you're right. I think, I don't wanna say it's just a military industrial complex. There are a lot of contributing factors to it. How, for example, we remember conflicts. Most military memoirs are typically written by junior officers that are going to combat for the first time. They usually from combat arms. They don't frequently have a long-term perspective on an area. It's often a coming-of-age sort of character to it. Conventional wars tend to get written about war frequently than unconventional conflicts, which reinforces the conventional war narrative. And I'm sort of channeling the Great War of Modern Memory by Paul Fussell. How we remember a conflict absolutely influences how we fight the next one. And I apply that also to movies, for example. Everyone sort of thinks Zero Dark 30 and the future Chris Kyle movie that's coming out. That's the Iraq war or that's going after Al Qaeda when it's a holistic approach. It's sitting with Shuras. That's not particularly compelling video feed. It doesn't blow up, for example. Often victory is a whimper, not a thunder clap. There isn't frequently a decisive battle. Maybe there is occasional DMVM food type of situation, but frequently security in an insurgency environment when you get it right reaches this little tipping point and it's not particularly compelling. There are dozens of books on the battles of Fallujah and in many cases, appropriately, so for sure. But how Fallujah was eventually won really wasn't covered that much. It wasn't that particularly compelling visually or from a journalistic perspective. It kind of got the obligatory one or two articles to commemorate it, but other than that, it's not well known. And so how we measure success, we tend to mis-measure success in these kinds of conflicts, you know, so. Good, let's start with this guy and then we'll do you. Thanks, all right. Two questions. One, my name is Stuart Sloan, civilian. You hear the president and his supporters constantly use the phrase war weary America as an excuse for the kinds of decisions he made. I'd like to have your comment on that given we have a volunteer army with so few actually in combat. The second question has to do with you, Dan. You made the point, you decried the turnover, constant turnover, but you extended your comment not only to military but to civilian. But later that you said, well, we have elections and situations change. As a, I can only speak from personal experience as a former political appointee, I think it's wonderful that you get turnover in the government because new people get to look, they don't have a vested interest in all policies, they can look at it fresh and come up with new ideas. It would be horrible, I think, to have a permanent civil service. And that's, those are my two questions. To me it's a balance of factors, right? Right now we have constant rotations. So for example, in Yemen last nine US ambassadors have each served three year terms. That is everything to do with career management versus having a tailored approach to Yemen. So our bureaucracies deal with every country relatively equally, you know, if you have more formal institutions like France, and maybe a three years makes sense, but in a country such as Yemen, maybe you want your ambassador to stay there a little longer, you know, in Afghanistan, we had the Afghan and Afghan-Pakistan hands program. I mean, the amount of effort it took to get this fairly modest program established, the amount of energy it took to just get these bureaucratic career paths and just bend just slightly to create that. That took a whole war to do that. Versus these like steady state, like who knows Chad really well in this town? Well, you know, there might be two or three folks, maybe the more I apologize to those who love Chad, but like how do we find them and incentivize them to develop some expertise? You can have creative dissonance in an embassy. Yeah, maybe you still have the ambassador serve three years and that's fine, but maybe his or her sort of staff below the level there for five years or 10 years. You know, you're not gonna get a memoir like 41 years in India, which is a famous memoir, from that, you know, who was this detailer? You always constantly never get the wisdom about a place. And so because of that, you're sort of more open to sort of surface level interpretations of things. So I agree with you, you're gonna have to have some change. Of course, that's probably healthy. Sometimes you wanna get rid of people to improve the situation, but you do wanna have that steady state of expertise. And by extension, like think tanks, you'll throw a rock in this town, you'll find plenty of China experts. There are a ton of Russia experts. All the big countries and strategic countries are well-covered, but you know, heaven forbid you find a person who knows Yemen or Somalia or Chad or these kind of edges of empire that no one really makes a large career on, but those are the people you want when a threat comes out of it. Let me talk to the war-wearingness. It allows me to talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is this generation of young soldier sailors, airmen, Marines, many of them who signed up after September 11th, knowing they would be sent to war, who've done three, four, five combat tours and who are now being demobilized, in some cases involuntarily. Some of them are Army officers, Army soldiers being given separation notices from the Army while they're serving on combat duty in Afghanistan, even as we speak. So the nation is not war-weary, but those young men and women are war-weary and in particular, our special forces are war-weary. They are exhausted and the demand for them is going up, not down. And so one of my hobby horses, I've been advocating for a number of years. My last job in the Army was training advisor teams for Iraq and Afghanistan. We were the wrong people to do it. We were tank drivers. It should have been special forces training them. They were going to mountains and deserts. So of course we trained them on the plains of Kansas and rather than taking the best and most talented veterans, combat veterans, we were choosing people who had not yet been to combat, were not selected for any particular attributes that would make them good advisors in particular empathy. So I argued way back in 2007, the first paper I think CNAS ever published, that it was time for the Army to build a long-term advisor presence, part of the organizational adaptation to the demands of these wars. It was fairly uniquely an idea endorsed by both Senator Obama and Senator McCain during the 2008 presidential election. It is something that still hasn't happened. And there was an earlier question about the adaptation of the U.S. military to these wars. When the U.S. builds the long-term advisory presence that it's going to need for these conflicts, for a generation, then we'll know that we really get it. Did you have a question, sir? Nope. I'm Dave Mattingly. I'm an OIF veteran in the J2 at Baghdad for about three years and then out at Abu Ghraib in 2005. You answered part of the question that I had as far as the advisory corps. And I think remarkably, the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines that were involved with the awakening movement and the Sons of Iraq did just that, but they did it just because they were thrown into the mix. They showed up one day and said, guess what, you're the new Sons of Iraq officer. But today, those Sons of Iraq aren't there anymore because we walked away from them. And I'm sure you've seen the quote about the officer who met one of the former leaders of it and he threw the command coins on the ground and said, what are these worth now? And if we're going to build that advisory corps and the long-term advisory process, we have to be able to commit to people that are going to work with us that we're going to be there. And I would say that that is part of the issue right now, not so much the governments, but the people have to be able to trust us to be there for the long-term in your else comments. That's exactly right. So one of the reasons why the Islamic State cut through Al Anbar like a hot knife through butter over the course of this year is because the Sunnis of Al Anbar in many cases thought that ISIS would be better for them, would take better care of them than the Iraqi government of Prime Minister Al Maliki, who the day after the American troops left in December of 2011, the next day he fired and arrested his Sunni vice president and has exhibited a pattern of behavior, of oppressing his Sunni population. And now the Sunni population of Iraq and in particular of Al Anbar is on the fence waiting to see if the new government of Al Abadi is in fact going to be a government for all Iraqis. The support of the Sunni population of Anbar is essential to the continued survival of ISIS inside Iraq. And we gave up the leverage that we had had with people like Conflict Junkie Ambassador, American hero Ryan Crocker, Dave Petraeus, who were able to leverage American military power to accomplish American political objectives of Shia inclusiveness of Sunnis inside the Iraqi government. We've got another lever now with the barbarians at the gates of Baghdad. It's going to be interesting to see if we can use that to pry decent behavior from this beleaguered government of Iraq and then keep American boots on the ground there for the long term to continue to shwey-shwey, slowly-slowly steer the Iraqi government toward inclusion. Who's in charge of Iraq policy right now? I think it's Vice President Joe Biden. There are many who are involved but few don't seem to be responsible. It's sort of, you know, Brett McGurk is certainly a key player in this for sure. General Allen I think has a lot of influence across the board, so I'm not exactly sure. Did you have a question, sir? Chris Coglanese with U.S. Pacific Command. John, you and I hash this out a little bit on the advisory core thing. One of the issues is we're downsizing the Army now. The problem is, and I've served for those, I've served as an advisor in Iraq. I was the last American soldier to serve in Samara. I've also served as a command and advisor team in Afghanistan, so I've got a little bit of experience at the cutting edge of this. As we're downsizing the Army, we're cutting a lot of the heavier ranks naturally because they're expensive. Colonel's are expensive. Mass Sergeant and Sergeant Major's are expensive. But that's where the rank has to go. So there's gonna be a bureaucratic conundrum of you're gonna have all these extra Colonel's, Lieutenant Colonel's, Mass Sergeant and Sergeant Major's just as an Army to do this stuff. How are we gonna resolve this? Second point I'd make is regarding, without getting into the politics of it, as the last guy in Samara, I had a conversation with Lieutenant General Rashid who now has a distinction of being the Senior Iraqi Ground Force Commander in Anbar Province fighting ISIS about our withdrawal. As I was leaving, this was in September of 2011 and then he told me, he says that, my kony was Abu Yusuf. He said, I've talked to Prime Minister Maliki. He wants you to stay. He wants the Americans to stay. But he can't get it through Parliament and he knows he needs to get it through Parliament and that's why you all must go. And I'll throw that back to the advisor question specifically. Let me take the advisor question if I can. So the Army, I think, has really struggled with the drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan to provide a compelling narrative to Congress and to the nation on what it's for. It also has the extraordinary gift of the most combat experience force the nation has ever had, going back to Valley Forge. And the combat experience of our mid-grade officers and non-commissioned officers is literally invaluable and irreplaceable. And so as the Army draws down, and I believe the nation certainly wants it to draw down, I would preserve one of the buzzwords being used as expansibility. So you draw the Army down and you want a flexible Army that can get big again if we need it to give that expansibility. What you need is Staff Sergeant, Sergeant's first class and majors. You can turn a major into a colonel in two years. You can turn a Staff Sergeant into a First Sergeant in two years in conflict, right? But it takes 10 years to build a Staff Sergeant or to build a major. And so what the Army should have done as it started the drawdown is held on to those mid-grades, put them in advisor units. By the way, there's plenty of places to send those advisors right now, right? Demand exceeds supply. If you build it, they will come. We didn't build it and they're coming anyway. And I believe that the Congress would be willing to support that if the Army got behind it and said we need to preserve this combat capability and we need to, this combat experience, we need to build this advisor capability given the way the world works, the way the world looks and we need to preserve an expansible Army and this is how you do it. I think that's a compelling narrative and I think it works in the budget battles. I know Armed Services Committee Chair, John McCain, would think it was a good idea. Senator Obama endorsed it in his presidential campaign. The Army has not seen fit to go back to both of them and say, hey, let's, we wanna do this, we're behind this. You said you were with us. Give us an extra 10 billion a year and an extra 30,000 spaces and this is how we're gonna use them. It hasn't even tried. Dominic here. And the lady in front of him as well, so. Eddie Becker. Filmmaker and observer of this and I mean, it really seems as if this solution, this military solution will continue to fail and it has to do with the inability of the governing structure in Iraq or in Afghanistan to govern and that has to do with the strategy of a war of decapitation where you basically remove the top and the government. I mean, so to focus in on that, why was it that the Congress of Iraq rejected the United States? Was it because they had to agree with the United States as its ruler in terms of like, this is, we'll find the people who agree with us rather than helping to develop the indigenous people to govern themselves, which is a structure that goes back thousands of years and they seem to work it out at times. And I mean, I just don't think that within the last 20 years or 50 years we could sort of like inject ourselves as the top of that and be successful. So this is a war of, I mean, America's wars of either, the early counter insurgencies war in the United States was of a, the war in Malaysia was a colonial war. The wars in the United States were wars of a settler colony destroying the Native Americans. And if you wanted to occupy a place, the only successful war is a war of a settler colony, like in Israel, which is also a sort of a settler colony, which isn't that successful in basically settling itself in areas where the people aren't agreeing with them. So the question is, with Vietnam, it wasn't a military strategy, it was that DM and Key weren't very good uniters of the people and they basically had their own self-interest. That's the same problem you're having in Iraq and Afghanistan. Okay. So, Mr. Yeah, you know, often when we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, we often knew the least about the country, but we were also at that moment in time when we had to draft a constitution. And we're most susceptible to the outside influence of groups that weren't particularly magnanimous. They were more interested in score settling, certainly in the case of Iraq. And then the structural weaknesses of those constitutions were masked through just the great energy of US diplomats and military personnel and development officials, who would control groups to get together, who would influence here, pressure there, and kind of make the system work for what it was. But then as after we draw out, once we leave, the fault lines in that structure become very evident. So for example, we often have a unitary state but a decentralized society. And then our efforts tend to mask those weaknesses. So I think often your strategy to fight insurgencies, you're organized like the enemy and you use his strategy against him. It's similar to, I think, for governing structures. You wanted to mirror as much as you can society in a way that causes people to focus on reforming poor governing institutions and not reject them and pull out from them, much like the Sunnis did. Yeah. This lady here. And just while we, yeah, I mean the Afghan constitution was, you know, we're still trying to undo the damage done. My name's Nehan Sari. I'm a visiting researcher at Carnegie Endowment. You talked about a light long-term presence. Are you, were you alluding to the small footprint approach or a more diluted or a concentrated version of that? And if I'm correct in presuming that such an approach requires more dependency on regional and local partners, but most of the time the partners are unreliable. I'm from Pakistan, so I know that. So I'm just asking you. Pakistan is highly reliable. Just asking you how, how do you, what do you see the efficacy of such an approach in the long term? Sure. I mean, I think we should shift to that approach in part because we've done a fairly decent job of building up Afghan formal institutions. As I mentioned earlier, I was really struck by how just not just the sheer size of the Afghan army, the Afghan police and the Afghan local police, but just their institutional complexity and sort of structures. I was really struck by that. So I think in a lot of ways this is an outgrowth of success. I think our bureaucracies want to have a risk-averse, you know, lightly and long-term presence. I don't think they really want to lightly and long-term presence, but we need to be decentralized. We need to be out there taking some risk for our soldiers who are partnered with these Afghan security institutions across the country. I'd hate to see us just kind of hunker down a couple, three major bases and do is like commuting capacity building, you know. I mean, I really think you have to be embedded with the unit. And that will bolster certainly the morale of that unit and that you also know you can bring additional resources to bear because you're a U.S. personnel. But I think in a lot of ways that should be how we do it, but I think in a lot of ways we're just kind of pulling back to large bases and just kind of washing our hands a little bit of everything and hoping for the best. And that's particularly true right now when those units are in combat. You can't combat advise five miles back from the forward edge of the battle area. We've got to assume risk and in order to succeed, in order to create less risk to the long-term threat of ISIS and the subject that Peter is thinking about now, Jihad coming home right to these places. So how would you assess the airstrikes? I mean, clearly, there's been a lot of them and every day you get, you know, St. Com press release saying we've killed, you know, we took out this ISIL HQ and five vehicles and there's kind of, you know, you must be at this, this must have tricked them over time to some degree, right? And they must change their tactics. They're not operating in the open, but what is the, so what is the long-term? If you're the, okay, so you're Baghdadi's military advisor and you were, and what would you be saying to him right now, A, about what we should be doing and B, about how this is looking for us in the long-term? Well, I think the first thing I would do is consolidate my gains that I have achieved so far by getting rid of potential fifth column, you know, elements within my territory. So anyone who's not Sunni Arab is on my list of people I would suppress, eliminate or push out just to solidify control. I would then on the flip side of that have a robust hearts and minds effort to convince those who are now under our control that we actually are much better for you than any alternative that would be presented to you. And, you know, ISIS has a pretty impressive, you know, tribal engagement strategy. You know, they have very good phase four planning actually, apparently. So, you know, they're allowing civil servants to simply just do your jobs, you know, and whereas we sort of got rid of a lot of them after being invaded obviously in Iraq. So I think those are things I would do. And I would just look for weak points in the coalition that we're putting together and try to slowly kind of create some discord between them, peel them off, raise the costs where appropriate. And then I might, you know, I mean, on the one hand, I think it's probably good for ISIS not to attack the U.S. homeland by sponsoring terrorist attacks, but that might be another, you know, strategy, you know. What I find most impressive about ISIS is actually their information operation strategy, which is good enough, virulent enough, that they are convincing 17-year-old Coloradan young ladies to travel to Turkey to join the fight in Syria, right? The same strategy has worked for British young ladies. So the specter of hundreds, if not thousands of Western passport-holding Jihad University graduates for the long haul for a generation to come is the strategic threat posed by ISIS as is the radicalization of people who never leave our shores, again, over the internet. And so I think their information operation strategy is enormously effective and extremely worrying. And we need to be paying a lot more attention to that yesterday. Yeah, but what do we do about it? Oh, and here you get into really interesting civil liberties questions, right? And that balance, I'm afraid, is going to swing as more attacks happen inside our borders. They may have a great social media strategy, but everybody they're appealing to is on social media, and that actually is very good for law enforcement. I mean, so we have a database of all the Jihadi terrorism cases we maintain here, and without exception, except people in their mid-40s who've been attracted by ISIS, everybody's got very active social media profile, which has turned out to be very useful for the government. So, yes, they had this great ability, but at the same time, it's sort of a double-edged shored. I kind of think we have to go through a process now where the US people don't want large numbers of US troops on the ground. So we have to see how this indirect approach works. Hopefully it will have some success, and we have to go through that process, I think, before anyone's going to be willing to suggest more troops over there in a substantial way. Ken O'Rabin. So, John, about knife fights. Obviously, so in terms of, there's been the long-running debate about counterinsurgency doctrine, counterinsurgency in practice, inside the US military and military intellectuals, and I know you've been involved in that debate. But, zooming out from that, this book in particular, what was the intellectual debate that you hoped to this book would enter into most cogently? Was it the counterinsurgency debate, or was it something else? I mean, what do you most want intellectually in terms of the marketplace of ideas? Where did you want to place this book? So, the intellectual heart of the book is the last chapter, counterinsurgency revisited, play on Yvonne Lois, Bride said, revisited. Similar but different. Similar but different. Where, yes, no turtles with diamonds. And it was an argument for fewer American interventions. So, I did not support the Libyan intervention. The only wars that I think have been necessary since Desert Storm have been the invasion of Afghanistan, the broader global war against Al Qaeda, largely conducted with drone strikes and intelligence, and now the current war against ISIS, which is only necessary because we mishandled the end of an unnecessary war, the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So, if I have a plea, it is fewer interventions conducted only when the US has a vital national interest at stake, and the US has to have, first, an end state for what it wants to achieve, and it has to be willing to invest in achieving that end state, a very, which is a generational project in the kind of wars that I foresee for the future. And so, the US has to have the capability to do that while taking that capability out of its scabbard as seldom as it possibly can. So, it's a kind of a complication of the power doctrine and the Petraeus approach, but is there a sort of problem, there may be harder square. The power doctrine works really well against an enemy where you can just sort of defeat them, and you have a, it's hard, you know. The hard part is giving politicians an appetite suppressant, right? Right. This is bad, somebody should do something, we're somebody, this is something, let's do it. Yeah. Right, and Libya, I think, is the best single example of this, that this administration in the wake of Iraq, this administration which came to power because of the mishandling of the aftermath, bungled aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, had no plan for what it would do after it toppled the Qaddafi, right? Is an indication that this is an equal opportunity problem. That this is a, right? You're not gonna see a more bellicose administration than that of George W. Bush, you're not gonna see, I don't think, a more pacific administration in philosophy than Barack Obama's, right? Both administrations relied on the use of military force to get rid of an immediate problem without any plan for the long-term solution. That's the problem I really wanna get at. All the way back, sir, behind you, Courtney. Oh, sorry. Kevin had one. Okay. Thanks, Peter. Sorry to worry about my rotator cuff. I'm sorry. Steve Locker, thanks for the form today. I guess sort of picking up on our last conversation, Colonel, could you give us a survey of the need for an updated AUMF, specifically the associated forces component and building on that and the remark by your colleague up there to the extent that there might be some level of war weariness, but there is a need for kinetic action. Could you look at the use of joystick jockeys and spec ops teams in helping essentially to continue what Dexter Filkins calls the forever war? Thanks. Dexter's book, one of many very good ones on these wars. I have, Michael Hirsch has a pretty tough piece out in Politico criticizing the administration's national security team today. In it, he says that a national security advisor, Rice, requested the repeal of the authorization for the use of military force earlier this year. The Pentagon said, oh, we need that. And that request was pulled, she said that to the Senate, that request was pulled back. And we are now, of course, operating in Iraq under the terms of the authorization for the use of military force, which is one of the most flexible documents in recent American history. We have stretched that bad boy pretty far in fact, to use it now against an organization which was expelled from the authorization, allows us to use force against al-Qaeda. The Islamic State was, of course, expelled from al-Qaeda for being too violent, which is impressive in and of itself, right? And so, yes, I would like to see a renewed legal authority for that. I think that there is no appetite for doing that in the Senate. I also, or the House, particularly now, it's, right, it's November of, almost November of an even numbered year. But there's also no real opposition to the use of force against the Islamic State in either House or Congress, despite the supposed war-wearingness of the American people. If anything, the criticism the administration has taken, as from the Washington Post today, is that they're not taking this fight seriously enough. My hope is that they will begin to do so in the near future. The gentleman here. And we'll grab a question there as well, as we would take two together. I'll follow up, if I could, a bonus round on economic development, the role of economic development in Iraq, Afghanistan, but also globally, right? So we don't have to fight so many insurgencies and troublemakers around the world. Paul Brinkley was brought in by Gordon England and everyone back in 2006 or 2007, helped build businesses. So the economic angle on development. Yeah, sure. Let's get this, we're running out of time, so let's get to take another question here. In the week after the Blackwater Convictions, could you comment on the use of outsourcing to private contractors? Would you wanna start with that? Sure, so the role of outsourcing to private military contractors. We had far fewer troops in Iraq and Afghanistan together at the same time than we had in Vietnam. A big part of the reason for that is that we outsourced a lot of the functions previously performed by uniformed military in Vietnam. The vast majority of the logistical support and some of, even of the trigger-pulling duties, we outsourced to contractors. I have far fewer problems outsourcing logistics to contractors. I think that's a very wise move, given the expense of the all-volunteer force. The most costly people the government has are government employees. Contractors are significantly cheaper. It's easier to expand and shrink that force. Even though the contractors may be getting paid more. Even though the contractors may be getting paid more for that particular year, the pension costs, the healthcare costs, all that sort of stuff, that accrue to government workers over the long term. I have real problems with putting government contractors in shoot-no-shoot situations. How about intelligence? In intelligence gathering, I'm fine. In intelligence analysis, I'm fine. In drone-pulling, drone-trigger-pulling, I think that's inherently governmental function. I think that that should be reserved to U.S. government employees. You know, the Brinkley office was a heck of a story. The office was essentially created to help the Iraqi and Afghan economies sort of do a survey of them and help them stand up and be more viable. And one of their greatest bureaucratic components was the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department. And a lot of people don't know this, but a lot of that, that particular office came out of Secretary Rumsfeld's efforts. And I mean, it's good that it's at DOD because it politically has more cover, but really, in a way, a lot of ways it shouldn't be there. I think that's sort of like the third or fourth, if it's ever something that people think of when we intervene in a country is how can they have a physically economic economy that's sustainable for our strategy there and for their strategy once we depart. I think it was an excellent office. They did a heck of a job surveying the private economies of Iraq and Afghanistan. They helped rediscover or discover, depending on how you look at it, the fact that Afghanistan has between one to four trillion dollars worth of minerals and other things, the natural gas fields and then the worth of the country in a viable economy in a lot of ways, but still work in progress. So I think that's not ever talked about much and I don't know who the bureaucratic advocate for that is typically, it's usually this military, the diplomats and USAID kind of weighing in, Intel weighing in, the Department of Commerce is nowhere to be seen, US trade reps are nowhere to be seen. So I think God, that office is there, but it's not, it's kind of personality dependent, Brink is a little departed, so we don't hear much of it now. John Min here. Hi, I'm Jamil Khan, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins Science. If we look at history, we see that powerful Western militaries have been unable to defeat weaker groups from Algeria to Vietnam to Afghanistan and even in Iraq today. So one way to look at this trend is a quote from a Vietnamese general who said, you are eventually going to go home and we are going to stay. So I guess in that light, what does victory look like in Iraq militarily and politically from a Western perspective, knowing that we will eventually go home? So success in Iraq in my eyes is a government that has the nominal support of all of the Iraqi people that successfully transitions democratically without widespread violence as the Iraqi government just has and that is ultimately sovereign, that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force inside its borders. I believe that that was within our grasp in 2011. We pulled defeat from the jaws of victory, defining that as victory by pulling out all American forces. I believe that it is not too late to regain that, although doing so will require the more expenditure of lives, American and Iraqi and more American. And Iraqi treasure. The fact is that the United States doesn't have to leave. As we demonstrated in Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, if it is important enough, if ground is important enough for America to bleed on it, it is important enough for Americans to stay there so that the next generation of Americans doesn't have to bleed on it again. It's a lesson we failed to learn, failed to follow during the First World War, we got it right after the second and unfortunately we got it wrong again in Iraq in 2011. One of my highest hopes is that we're now having reintroduced American boots on the ground in Iraq, that we don't forget it again. Or there will be a fourth Iraq war in my lifetime. We're gonna take one more question. Hi, I'm Don Kraus with Citizens of Global Solutions. So most of this conversation has been particularly from a U.S. military perspective, which makes sense based upon the book. But more and more the conflicts that the U.S. has asked to engage in are conflicts where we're working with coalitions of other countries, we're asking locals on the ground to play a greater role on them. When we're thinking about the aftermath of these things, we're talking about the United States presence over the long term, but we're seeing situations like Kosovo and others where there's other countries also engaged in that process as well. Do you see a need for greater institutional building of capacities for interoperability between countries so that when these situations come up, we're not reinventing the wheel each and every time, each and every conflict, reinventing the coalition and putting it all back together again? Great, thank you. Absolutely, and I think in an era where we're unwilling to send troops overseas increasingly and where a lot of conflicts take place in countries that never reach the threshold of conventional war, that privileges deep subject matter expertise, it also privileges a long term perspective and also to do the strategy well, to have some sort of visibility at a bureaucratic level much higher than those countries typically get. For example, when Brennan was in charge of our Yemen policy, he was a stone's throw from the president's office, so Yemen got a lot of attention, but once he departed, it's an afterthought. Of course, other crises have bubbled up, but this is replicated again and again in countries like this. Yeah, absolutely, I think that kind of ability to work with other partners is central, but we keep forgetting that we have US Army Special Forces, which were expressly designed to deal with these small wars, so to speak, and to kind of privilege the ability to work well with partner countries, and they reach all the way up to the general officer level. I think that's an institution that often doesn't get as much attention as it needs, and I think that's a place to look for doing this better in the future. So I actually wrote my senior thesis at West Point on armaments cooperation in NATO with just the Cold War was still hot then. I actually wrote it on a corner of then major Petraeus's desk. Petraeus was the speechwriter for Jack Galvin and the Supreme Allied Commander Europe. So I've been thinking about ways to increase cooperation, interoperability for 30 years for a very long time. Interestingly, there's a piece in the Navy Marine Corps Times just today stating that the US unwilling, because of administration policy, to put American boots on the ground inside Iraqi Kurdish frontline battalions where they're exposed to direct combat is looking for local partner countries to do that. It is my belief that in that particular case and in the broader case, America's allies will be willing to follow but only if America leads. And certainly in the case of the current war, we have not yet shown real determination to do what needs to be done to defeat what I believe is a clear and present and growing threat not just to the United States but to our allies around the globe. On that note, we want to thank Dr. Nagel, Dr. Green for a very interesting presentation. And I'm sure Dr. Nagel will be willing to sign books shortly outside. Thanks, thank you all so much.