Conversations on Strategy features quick analyses of timely strategic issues. Topics are geared toward senior military officials, government leaders, academicians, strategists, historians, and thought leaders interested in foreign policy, strategy, history, counterinsurgency, and more. The series first aired in March 2022 and includes more than 25 episodes that range in length from 15–30 minutes long. Guests include Press authors and subject matter experts from the US Army War College and... read more
Conversations on Strategy features quick analyses of timely strategic issues. Topics are geared toward senior military officials, government leaders, academicians, strategists, historians, and thought leaders interested in foreign policy, strategy, history, counterinsurgency, and more. The series first aired in March 2022 and includes more than 25 episodes that range in length from 15–30 minutes long. Guests include Press authors and subject matter experts from the US Army War College and other PME and academic institutions who discuss hot topics like the Russia-Ukraine War, China, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, manned-unmanned teaming, infrastructure, terrorism, urban warfare, the Middle East, and more. The entire series can be found at: https://www.dvidshub.net/podcast/581/conversations-on-strategy-podcast show less
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This monograph introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese... read more
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This monograph introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese security in the short and longer terms. By joining deterrence theory with an empirical analysis of Taiwanese, Chinese, and US policies, the monograph provides US military and policy practitioners new insights into ways to deter the People’s Republic of China from invading Taiwan without relying exclusively on the threat of great-power war. In this episode, Dr. Jared M. McKinney, Dr. Peter Harris, Col. Rich D. Butler, and Josh Arostegui discuss Deterrence Gap: Avoiding War in the Taiwan Strait and the possible trajectories for China and Taiwan over the coming decades. Keywords: China, Taiwan, deterrence, One China, Chinese Communist Party, Silicon Shield, deterrence theory E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. show less
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This monograph introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese... read more
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This monograph introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese security in the short and longer terms. By joining deterrence theory with an empirical analysis of Taiwanese, Chinese, and US policies, the monograph provides US military and policy practitioners new insights into ways to deter the People’s Republic of China from invading Taiwan without relying exclusively on the threat of great-power war. In this episode, Dr. Jared M. McKinney, Dr. Peter Harris, Col. Rich D. Butler, and Josh Arostegui discuss Deterrence Gap: Avoiding War in the Taiwan Straight and the possible trajectories for China and Taiwan over the coming decades. Keywords: China, Taiwan, deterrence, One China, Chinese Communist Party, Silicon Shield, deterrence theory E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. show less
In this episode, Dr. Luke P. Bellocchi, Major Jamie Critelli, and Captain Gustavo Ferreira address strategic concerns the United States should consider when evaluating the current Asia-Pacific environment, including Taiwan’s potential food insecurity should China invade or blockade Taiwan, China’s supply of rare-earth elements and how a conflict with China might affect the US technology and defense sectors, and ramifications for the global economy if a Chinese blockade around Taiwan is successful.
E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.
Keywords: China, Taiwan, food insecurity, rare-earth elements, global economy
Jody Prescott and Brenda Oppermann discuss conflict-related sexual violence and the role of leadership vis-à-vis sexual and gender-based violence. While progress has been made in recent years, including United Nations resolutions in 1983 and 2000 and the US Women, Peace, and Security Act in 2017 [with its most recent iteration published in 2023], there is still much to do to address conflict-related sexual violence worldwide.
Keywords: conflict-related sexual violence; Women, Peace, and Security Act; human rights; leadership; United Nations
E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.
How are the Middle East and South America connected, and what does it mean for the United States and other countries in the Western Hemisphere? From geopolitics to economic repercussions, diplomatic relations, security concerns, global energy markets, humanitarian efforts, and more, R. Evan Ellis discusses the far-reaching impact of events in the Middle East.
Keywords: Israel, Gaza, South America, Brazil, energy
E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.
In this episode, Colonel Paul Lushenko, PhD, discusses drones and their use in Gaza and Ukraine. Lushenko is a faculty instructor, and director of special operations in the Department of Military Strategy, Planning, and Operations at the US Army War College. His most recent book, The Legitimacy of Drone Warfare: Evaluating Public Perceptions, was published by Routledge in January 2024.
Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.
Keywords: drones, artificial intelligence, Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia
Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the
Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists. Not everyone needs to know how to fly a plane to have an effective air... read more
Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists. Not everyone needs to know how to fly a plane to have an effective air force, but nearly all members of the military at every level will have to develop some level of AI and data literacy if the US military is to realize the full potential of AI technologies. Keywords: artificial intelligence, artificial wisdom, ChatGPT, large language model E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on the monograph or the podcast. show less
The 16th annual Kingston Consortium on International Security conference, “International Competition in the High North,” took place on October 11–13, 2022, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The conference examined the Arctic region in the context of ongoing climate change and against the backdrop of war in Ukraine. Over the past several years, the United States has acknowledged the growing importance of the Arctic as a strategic region, and the Department of Defense and each of the US... read more
The 16th annual Kingston Consortium on International Security conference, “International Competition in the High North,” took place on October 11–13, 2022, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The conference examined the Arctic region in the context of ongoing climate change and against the backdrop of war in Ukraine. Over the past several years, the United States has acknowledged the growing importance of the Arctic as a strategic region, and the Department of Defense and each of the US military services have published Arctic policies or strategies. In addition, the Department of Defense has created a new regional studies center, the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies in Alaska. Canada and the other Arctic Council nations have also acknowledged the growing importance of the Arctic region, revised strategic frameworks, and changed institutional approaches to ensure Arctic security challenges arising from great-power competition and other threats, like those to the environment, are addressed. This volume captures these ideas for the United States and its allies so all can benefit from this experience. E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: Arctic, Arctic Council, China, climate change, indigenous peoples, Russia show less
Taiwan has become increasingly important to the United States and its allies as the Russia-Ukraine War has united democracies against authoritarian expansionism and has developed an international democracy-authoritarianism dynamic in global affairs. Part one of this article clearly outlined the geopolitical, economic, and soft-power reasons why Taiwan is strategically important. Part two reviewed the development of US and allied policy statements on Taiwan and provides policymakers and... read more
Taiwan has become increasingly important to the United States and its allies as the Russia-Ukraine War has united democracies against authoritarian expansionism and has developed an international democracy-authoritarianism dynamic in global affairs. Part one of this article clearly outlined the geopolitical, economic, and soft-power reasons why Taiwan is strategically important. Part two reviewed the development of US and allied policy statements on Taiwan and provides policymakers and military strategists with incremental but realistic recommendations for understanding the current dynamic of the region and fashioning responses to deter further authoritarian aggression. E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: Taiwan, China, Russia, Ukraine, National Security Strategy, Biden Read the transcript: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/23/2003379988/-1/-1/0/20240122COS-PODCAST-TRANSCRIPT-BELLOCCHI_BUTLER_AROSTGUI.PDF show less
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This podcast introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese... read more
The likelihood China will attack Taiwan in the next decade is high and will continue to be so, unless Taipei and Washington take urgent steps to restore deterrence across the Taiwan Strait. This podcast introduces the concept of interlocking deterrents, explains why deterrents lose their potency with the passage of time, and provides concrete recommendations for how Taiwan, the United States, and other regional powers can develop multiple, interlocking deterrents that will ensure Taiwanese security in the short and longer terms. By joining deterrence theory with an empirical analysis of Taiwanese, Chinese, and US policies, the podcast provides US military and policy practitioners new insights into ways to deter the People’s Republic of China from invading Taiwan without relying exclusively on the threat of great-power war. E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: Taiwan, China, deterrence, cross-strait relations, Indo-Pacific, East Asia, US foreign policy, international security Download the transcript: https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jan/16/2003376954/-1/-1/0/COS-PODCAST-TRANSCRIPT-MCKINNEY_HARRIS.PDF show less
Dr. Conrad C. Crane and Dr. Brian McAllister Linn address the Army’s recruiting crisis—especially for combat arms. Talent management was identified as an issue for the Army in 1907 in a General Staff report and continues to be a challenge. The results of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force in 1970 may have complicated matters further.
Read Dr. Crane’s article:... read more
Dr. Conrad C. Crane and Dr. Brian McAllister Linn address the Army’s recruiting crisis—especially for combat arms. Talent management was identified as an issue for the Army in 1907 in a General Staff report and continues to be a challenge. The results of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force in 1970 may have complicated matters further. Read Dr. Crane’s article: https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/01/28/does_the_all-volunteer_force_have_an_expiration_date_878344.html Read Dr. Linn’s article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss3/3/ E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article. Keywords: US Army history, personnel policy, talent management, Army People Strategy, all-volunteer force show less
Drawing from archival materials at the US Army Heritage and Education Center and the United States Military Academy at West Point, numerous published primary sources, and a range of secondary sources, this monograph offers an overview of the China Relief Expedition from June 1900 to the moment of liberation in August. Its considerations range from the geopolitical to the strategic and down to the tactical levels of war. US forces partnered alongside the combined naval and land forces of... read more
Drawing from archival materials at the US Army Heritage and Education Center and the United States Military Academy at West Point, numerous published primary sources, and a range of secondary sources, this monograph offers an overview of the China Relief Expedition from June 1900 to the moment of liberation in August. Its considerations range from the geopolitical to the strategic and down to the tactical levels of war. US forces partnered alongside the combined naval and land forces of multiple nations, thus constituting the first contingency, expeditionary, and multinational coalition in American military history. In the face of numerous obstacles conditioned by enemy forces, the environment, and internal to the informal coalition itself, American forces succeeded in liberating their besieged legation. While the character of war has evolved since 1900, students of war should see through disparities that appear to separate the China Relief Expedition from the historical present. Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/961/ E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on the monograph or the podcast. Keywords: Boxer Uprising, China Relief Expedition, Taku Forts, Empress Dowager Cixi, Qing dynasty show less
The Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment serves as a guide for academics and practitioners in the defense community on the current challenges and opportunities in the strategic environment. This year’s publication outlines key strategic issues across the four broad themes of Regional Challenges and Opportunities, Domestic Challenges, Institutional Challenges, and Domains Impacting US Strategic Advantage. These themes represent a wide range of topics affecting national... read more
The Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment serves as a guide for academics and practitioners in the defense community on the current challenges and opportunities in the strategic environment. This year’s publication outlines key strategic issues across the four broad themes of Regional Challenges and Opportunities, Domestic Challenges, Institutional Challenges, and Domains Impacting US Strategic Advantage. These themes represent a wide range of topics affecting national security and provide a global assessment of the strategic environment to help focus the defense community on research and publication. Strategic competition with the People’s Republic of China and the implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remain dominant challenges to US national security interests across the globe. However, the evolving security environment also presents new and unconventional threats, such as cyberattacks, terrorism, transnational crime, and the implications of rapid technological advancements in fields such as artificial intelligence. At the same time, the US faces domestic and institutional challenges in the form of recruiting and retention shortfalls in the all-volunteer force, the prospect of contested logistics in large-scale combat operations, and the health of the US Defense Industrial Base. Furthermore, rapidly evolving security landscapes in the Arctic region and the space domain pose unique potential challenges to the Army’s strategic advantage. Read the 2023 Annual Estimate of the Strategic Security Environment: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/962/ Keywords: Asia, Indo-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, North Africa show less
The October 2023 attacks on Israel by Hamas are only the latest in a series of global crises with implications for the regional order in the Middle East. These changes and the diverging interests of actors in the region have implications for US strategy and provide an opportunity to rethink key US relationships there.
Read the original article here: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol50/iss4/10/
Download the full episode transcript here: https://media.defense.gov/2023/Nov/21/2003345028/-1/-1/0/COS-26-TRANSCRIPT-BOLAN-HARPER-HILLISON.PDF
Keywords: Israel, Hamas, Middle East, Iran, Turkey
In this podcast, US Army Col. Jon Klug and retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan discuss Ryan’s most recent book, White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, and its potential implications for future warfare.
In the summer of 1986, Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list as it brought to life World War III, although a nonnuclear version. Similarly, Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan’s new novel White Sun War offers a... read more
In this podcast, US Army Col. Jon Klug and retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan discuss Ryan’s most recent book, White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan, and its potential implications for future warfare. In the summer of 1986, Tom Clancy’s novel Red Storm Rising debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list as it brought to life World War III, although a nonnuclear version. Similarly, Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan’s new novel White Sun War offers a realistic and gripping “historical” account of a war for Taiwan set in 2028. Where Clancy had the Warsaw Pact and NATO, Ryan pits communist China against a coalition of Taiwan, the United States, Australia, Japan, and others. A longtime strategic commentator with 35 years of real-world experience, Ryan’s vision of a war in the near future is firmly grounded. He deftly uses fiction to explore the potential challenges of warfare and leadership in 2028. show less
Based on the monograph Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge and the Parameters article “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming,” this episode focuses on the ethics of trusting AI. Who is responsible when something goes wrong? When is it okay for AI to make command decisions? How can humans and machines work together to form more effective teams? These questions and more are explored in this... read more
Based on the monograph Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge and the Parameters article “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming,” this episode focuses on the ethics of trusting AI. Who is responsible when something goes wrong? When is it okay for AI to make command decisions? How can humans and machines work together to form more effective teams? These questions and more are explored in this podcast. Read the articles: Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/959/ Parameters article “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming”: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/14 Keywords: artificial intelligence (AI), manned-unmanned teaming, ethical AI, civil-military relations, autonomous weapons systems Read the transcript: C. Anthony Pfaff and Adam Henschke – The Ethics of Trusting AI show less
Who is in charge when it comes to AI? People or machines? In this episode, Paul Scharre, author of the books Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War and the award-winning Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and Robert Sparrow, coauthor with Adam Henschke of “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming” that was featured in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters, discuss AI and its future military implications.
Read the... read more
Who is in charge when it comes to AI? People or machines? In this episode, Paul Scharre, author of the books Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War and the award-winning Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, and Robert Sparrow, coauthor with Adam Henschke of “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming” that was featured in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters, discuss AI and its future military implications. Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/14/ Keywords: artificial intelligence (AI), data science, lethal targeting, professional expert knowledge, talent management, ethical AI, civil-military relations Episode transcript: AI: Centaurs Versus Minotaurs: Who Is in Charge? Stephanie Crider (Host) The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. I’m talking with Paul Scharre and Professor Rob Sparrow today. Scharre is the author of Army of None: Autonomous Weapons in the Future of War, and Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. He’s the vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security. Sparrow is co-author with Adam Henschke of “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs: The Future of Manned-Unmanned Teaming,” which was featured in the Spring 2023 issue of Parameters. Sparrow is a professor in the philosophy program at Monash University, Australia, where he works on ethical issues raised by new technologies. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy. Thanks for being here today. Paul Scharre Absolutely. Thank you. Host Paul, you talk about centaur warfighting in your work. Rob and Adam re-envisioned that model in their article. What exactly is centaur warfighting? Scharre Well, thanks for asking, and I’m very excited to join this conversation with you and with Rob on this topic. The idea really is that as we see increased capabilities in artificial intelligence and autonomous systems that rather than thinking about machines operating on their own that we should be thinking about humans and machines as part of a joint cognitive system working together. And the metaphor here is the idea of a centaur, the mythical creature of a 1/2 human 1/2 horse, with the human on top—the head and the torso of a human and then the body of a horse. You know, there’s, like, a helpful metaphor to think about combining humans and machines working to solve problems using the best of both human and machine intelligence. That’s the goal. Host Rob, you see AI being used differently. What’s your perspective on this topic? Robert Sparrow So, I think it’s absolutely right to be talking about human-machine or manned-unmanned teaming. I do think that we will see teams of artificial intelligence as robots and human beings working and fighting together in the future. I’m less confident that the human being will always be in charge. And I think the image of the ccentaur is kind of reassuring to people working in the military because it says, “Look, you’ll get to do the things that you love and think are most important. You’ll get to be in charge, and you’ll get the robots to do the grunt work.” And, actually, when we look at how human beings and machines collaborate in civilian life, we actually often find it’s the other way around. (It) turns out that machines are quite good at planning and calculating and cognitive skills. They’re very weak at interactions with the physical world. Nowadays, if you, say, ask ChatGPT to write you a set of orders to deploy troops it can probably do a passable job at that just by cannibalizing existing texts online. But if you want a machine to go over there and empty that wastepaper basket, the robot simply can’t do it. So, I think the future of manned-unmanned teaming might actually be computers, with AI systems issuing orders. Or maybe advice that has the moral force of orders are two teams of human beings. Adam and I have proffered the image of the Minotaur, which was the mythical creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man as an alternative to the centaur, when we’re thinking about the future of manned-unmanned teaming. Host Paul, do you care to respond? Scharre I think it’s a great paper and I would encourage people to check it out, “Minotaurs, Not Centaurs.” And it’s a really compelling image. Maybe the humans aren’t on top. Maybe the humans are on the bottom, and we have this other creature that’s making the decisions, and we’re just the body taking the actions. (It’s) kind of creepy, the idea of maybe we’re headed towards this role of minotaurs instead, and we’re just doing the bidding of the machines. You know, a few years ago, I think a lot of people envisioned the type of tasks that AI would be offloading, would be low-skill tasks, particularly for physical labor. So, a lot of the concern was like autonomousness was gonna put truck drivers out of work. It turns out, maneuvering things in the physical world is really hard for machines. And, in fact, we’ve seen with progress in large language models in just the last few years, ChatGPT or the newest version (GPT-4), that they’re quite good at lower-level skills of cognitive labor so that they can do a lot of the tasks that maybe an intern might do in a white-collar job environment, and they’re passable. And as he’s pointing out, ask a robot to throw out a trash basket for you or to make a pot of coffee . . . it’s not any good at doing that. But if you said, “Hey, write a short essay about human-machine teaming in the military environment,” it’s not that bad. And that’s pretty wild. And I think sometimes these models have been criticized . . . people say, “Well, they’re just sort of like shuffling words around.” It’s not. It’s doing more than that. Some of the outputs are just garbage, but (with) some of them, it’s clear that the model does understand, to some extent. It’s always dicey using anthropomorphic terms, but (it can) understand the prompts that you’re giving it, what you’re asking it to do, and can generate output that’s useful. And sometimes it’s vague, but so are people sometimes. And I think that this vision of hey, are we headed towards this world of a minotaur kind of teaming environment is a good concern to raise because presumably that’ not what we want. So then how do we ensure that humans are in charge of the kinds of decisions that we want humans to be responsible for? How do we be intentional about using AI and autonomy, particularly in the military environment? Sparrow I would resist the implication that it’s only really ChatGPT that we should be looking at. I mean, in some ways it’s the history of chess or gaming where we should be looking to the fact that machines outperform all, or at least most, human beings. And the question is if you could develop a warfighting machine for command functions then that wouldn’t necessarily have to be able to write nice sentences. The question is when it comes to some of the functions of battlefield command, whether or not machines can outperform human beings in that role. There’s kind of some applications like threat assessment in aerial warfare, for instance, where the tempo of battle is sufficiently high and there’s lots of things whizzing around in the sky, and we’re already at a point where human beings are relying on machines to at least prioritize tasks for them. And I think, increasingly, it will be a brave human being that overrides the machine and says, “The machine has got this wrong.” We don’t need to be looking at explicit hierarchies or acknowledged hierarchies either. We need to look at how these systems operate in practice. And because of what’s called automation bias, which is the tendency of human beings to defer to machines once their performance reaches a certain point, yeah, I think we’re looking at a future where machines may be effectively carrying out key cognitive tasks. I’m inclined to agree with Paul that there are some things that it is hard to imagine machines doing well. I’m a little bit less confident in my ability to imagine what machines can do well in the future. If you’d asked me two years ago, five years ago, “Will AIs be able to write good philosophy essays?” I would have said, “That’s 30 years off.” Now I can type all my essay questions into ChatGPT and this thing performs better than many of my students. You know, I’m a little bit less confident that we know what the future looks like here, but I take it that the fundamental technology of these generative AI and adversarial neural networks is actually going to be pretty effective when it comes to at least wargaming. And, actually, the issue for command in the future is how well can we feed machines the data that they need to train themselves up in simulation and apply it to the real world? I worry about how we’ll know these things are reliable enough to move forward, but there’s some pretty powerful dynamics in this area where people may effectively be forced to adopt AI command in response to either what the enemy is doing or what they think the enemy is doing. So, not just the latest technology, there’s a whole set of technologies here, and a whole set of dynamics that I think should undercut our confidence that human beings will always be in charge. Host Can you envision a scenario in which centaur and minotaur warfighting might both have a role, or even work in tandem? Sparrow I don’t think it’s all going to be centaurs, but I don’t think it will all be minotaurs. And in some ways, this is a matter of the scale of analysis. If you think about something like Uber, you know, people have this vision of the future of robot taxis. I would get into the robot taxi. And as the human being, I would be in charge of what the machine does. In fact, what we have now is human beings being told by an algorithm where to drive. Even if I were getting into a robot taxi and telling it where to go, for the moment, there’d be a human being in charge of the robot taxi company. And I think at some level, human beings will remain in charge of war as much as human beings are ever in charge of world historical events. But I think for lots of people who are fighting in the future, it will feel as though they’re being ordered around by machines. People will be receiving feeds of various sorts. It will be a very alienating experience, and I think in some contexts they genuinely will be effectively being ordered around by an AI. Interesting things to think about here is how even an autonomous weapons system, which is something that Paul and I have both been concerned about, actually relies on a whole lot of human beings. And so at one level, you hope that a human being is setting the parameters of operations of the autonomous weapons system, but at another level, everyone is just following this thing around and serving its needs. You know, it returns to base and human beings, refuel and maintain it and rearm it. Everyone has to respond to what it does in combat. Even with something like a purportedly autonomous weapons system, zoom out a bit, and what you see as a human is a machine making a core set of warfighting decisions and a whole lot of human beings scurrying around serving the machine. Zoom out more, and you hope that there’s a human being in charge. Now, it depends a little bit on how good real-world wargaming by machines gets, and that’s not something I have a vast amount of access to, how effective AI is in war gaming. Paul may well know more about that. But at that level, if you really had a general officer that was a machine, or even staff taking advice from wargamers from war games then I think most of the military would end up being a minotaur rather than a centaur. Scharre It’s not just ChatGPT and GPT-4, not just large language models. We have seen, as you pointed out, really amazing progress because a whole set of games—chess, poker, computer games like StarCraft 2 and Dota 2. At human level there is sometimes superhuman performance at these games. What they’re really doing is functions that militaries might think of as situational awareness and command and control. Oftentimes when we think about the use of AI or autonomy in a military context, people tend to think about robotics, which has value because you can take a person out of a platform and then maybe make the platform more maneuverable or faster or more stealthy or smaller or more attritable or something else. In these games, the AI agents have access to the same units as the humans do. The AI playing chess has access to the same chess pieces as the humans do. What’s different is the information processing and decision making. So it’s the command and control that’s different. And it’s not just that these AI systems are better. They actually play differently than humans in a whole variety of ways. And so it points to some of these advantages in a work time context. Obviously, real world is a lot more complicated than a chess or Go board game, and there’s just a lot more possibilities and a lot more clever, nefarious things that an adversary can do in the real world. I think we’re going to continue to see progress. I totally agree with Rob that we really couldn’t say where this is going. I mean, I’ve been working on these issues for a long time. I continue to be surprised. I have been particularly surprised in the last year, 18 – 24 months, with some of the progress. GPT-4 has human-level performance on a whole range of cognitive tasks—the SAT, the GRE, the bar exam. It doesn’t do everything that humans can do, but it’s pretty impressive. You know, I think it’s hard to say where things are going going forward, but I do think a core question that we’re going to grapple with in society, in the military and in other contexts, is what tasks should be done by a human and which ones by a machine? And in some cases, the answer to that will be based simply on which one performs better, and there’s some things where you really just care about accuracy and reliability. And if the machine does a better job, if it’s a safer driver, then we could save lives and maybe we should hand over those tasks to machines once machines get there. But there’s lots of other things, particularly, in the military context that touch on more fundamental ethical issues, and Rob touches on many of these in the paper, where we also want to ask the question, are there certain tasks that only humans should do, not because the machines cannot do them but because they should not do them for some reason? Are there some things that require uniquely human judgment? And why is that? And I think that these are going to be difficult things to grapple with going forward. These metaphors can be helpful. Thinking about is it a centaur? Is the human really up top making decisions? Is it more like a minotaur? This algorithm is making decisions and humans are running around and doing stuff . . . we don’t even know why? Gary Kasparov talked about in a recent wonderful book on chess called Game Changer about AlphaZero, the AI chess playing agent. He talks about how, after he lost to IBM’s deep blue in the 90s, Kasparov created this field of human-machine teaming in chess of free-play chess, or what sometimes been called centaur chess, where this idea of centaur warfighting really comes from. And there was a period of time where the best chess players were human-machine teams. And it was better than having humans playing alone or even chess engines playing by themselves. That is no longer the case. The AI systems are now so good at chess that the human does not add any value in chess. The human just gets in the way. And so, Kasparov describes in this book chess shifting to what he calls a shepherd model, where the human is no longer pairing with the chess agent, but the human is choosing the right tool for the job and shepherding these different AI systems and saying, “Oh, we’re playing chess. I’m going to use this chess engine,” or “I’m going to write poetry. I’m going to use this AI model to do that.” And it’s a different kind of model, but I think it’s helpful to think about these different paradigms and then what are the ones that we want to use? You know, we do have choices about how we use the technology. How should that drive our decision making in terms of how we want to employ this technology for various ends? Host What trends do you see in the coming years, and how concerned or confident should we be? Sparrow I think we should be very concerned about maintaining human control over these new technologies, not necessarily the kind of super-intelligent AIs going to eat us all questions that some of my colleagues are concerned about, but, in practice, how much are we exercising what we think of as our core human capacities in our daily roles both in civilian life but also in military life? And how much are we just becoming servants of machines? How can we try to shape the powerful dynamics driving in that direction? And that’s the sort of game-theoretic nature of conflict. Or the fact that, at some level, you really want to win a battle or a war makes it especially hard to carve out space for the kind of moral concerns that both Paul and I think should be central to this debate. Because if your strategic adversary just says, “Look, we’re all in for AI command,” and it turns out that that is actually very effective on the battlefield then it’s gonna be hard to say, “Hang on a moment, that’s really dehumanizing, we don’t like just following the orders of machines.” It’s really important to be having this conversation. It needs to happen at a global level—at multiple levels. One thing that hasn’t come up in our conversation is how I think the performance of machines will actually differ in different domains—the performance of robots, in particular. So, something like war in outer space, it’s all going to be robots. Even undersea warfare, that strikes me, at least the command functions are likely to be all onboard computer systems, or again, or undersea. It’s not just about platforms on the sea. But the things that are lurking in the water are probably going to be controlled by computers. What would it be like to be the mechanic on a undersea platform? You know, there’s someone whose job it is to grease the engines and reload the torpedoes, but, actually, all the combat decisions on the submarine are being made by an onboard computer. That would be a really miserable role to be the one or two people in this tin can under the ocean where the onboard computer is choosing what to engage and when. Aerial combat, again, I think probably manned fighters have a limited future. My guess is that the sort of manned aircraft . . . there are probably not too many more generations left of those. But infantry combat . . . I find that really hard to imagine being handed over to robots for a long time because of how difficult the physical environment is. That’s just to say, this story looks a bit different depending upon where you’re thinking about combat taking place. I do think the metaphors matter. I mean, if you’re going to sell AI to highly trained professionals, what you don’t do is say, “Look, here’s a machine that is better than you at your job. It’s going to do all things you love and put you out of work.” No one turns up and says that. Everybody turns up to the conference and says, “Look, I’ve got this great machine, and it’s going to do all the routine work. And you can concentrate on things that you love.” That’s a sales pitch. And I don’t think that we should be taken in by that. You want people to start talking about AI, take it seriously. And if you go to them saying, “Look, this thing’s just going to wipe out your profession,” That’s a pretty short conversation. But if you take seriously the idea that human beings are always going to be in charge, that also forecloses certain conversations that we need to be having. And the other thing here is how these systems reconfigure social and political relations by stealth. I’m sure there are people in the military now who are using ChatGPT or GPT-4 for routine correspondence, which includes things that’s actually quite important. So, even if the bureaucracy said, “Look, no AI.” If people start to rely on it in their daily practice, it’ll seep into the bureaucracy. I mean, in some ways, these systems, they’re technocratic, through and through. And so, they appeal to a certain sort of bureaucracy. And a certain sort of society loves the idea that all we need is good engineers and then all hard choices will be made by machines, and we can absolve ourselves of responsibility. There’s multiple cultural and political dynamics here that we should be paying attention to. And some of them, I suspect, likely to fly beneath the radar, which is why I hope this conversation and others like it will draw people’s attention to this challenge. Scharre One of the really interesting questions in my mind, and I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, Rob, is how do we balance this tension between efficacy of decision making and where do we want humans to sit in terms of the proper rule? And I think it’s particularly acute in a military context. When I hear the term “minotaur warfighting,” I think, like, oh, that does not sound like a good thing. You talk in your paper about some of the ethical implications, and I come away a little bit like, OK, so is this something that we should be pursuing because we think it’s going to be more effective, or we should be running away from and this is like a warning. Like, hey, if we’re not careful, we’re all gonna turn into these minotaurs and be running around listening to these AI systems. We’re gonna lose control over the things that we should be in charge of. But, of course, there’s this tension of if you’re not effective on the battlefield, you could lose everything. In the wartime context, it’s even more compelling than some business—some business doesn’t use the technology in the right way or it’s not effective or it doesn’t improve the processes, OK. They go out of business. If a country does not invest in their national defense, they could cease to exist as a nation. And so how do we balance some of these needs? Are there some things that we should be keeping in mind as the technology is progressing and we’re sort of looking at these choices of do we use the system in this way or that way to kind of help guide these decisions? Sparrow 10 years ago, everyone was going home on autonomy. It was all going to be autonomous. And I started asking people, “Would you be willing to build your next set of submarines with no space for human beings on board? Let’s go for an unmanned submersible fleet.” And a whole lot of people who, on paper, were talking about AI’s output . . . autonomous weapon systems outperforming human beings would really balk at that point. How confident would you have to be to say, “We are going to put all our eggs in the unmanned basket for something like the next generation Strike Fighter or submarines.”? And it turns out I couldn’t get many takers for that, which was really interesting. I mean, I was talking to a community of people who, again, all said, “Look, AI is going to outperform human beings.” I said “OK, so let’s just build these systems. There’s no space for a human being on board.” People started to get really cagey. And de-skilling’s a real issue here because if we start to rely on these things then human beings quickly lose the skills. So you might say, “Let’s move forward with minotaur warfighting. But let’s keep, you know, in the back of our minds that we might have to switch back to the human generals if our adversary’s machines are beating our machines.” Well, I’m not sure human generals will actually maintain the skill set if they don’t get to fight real wars. At another level, I think there’s some questions here about the relationship between what we’re fighting for and how we’re fighting. So, say we end up with minotaur warfighting and we get more and more command decisions, as it were, made by machines. What happens if that starts to move back into our government processes? It could either be explicit—hand over the Supreme Court to the robots. Or it could be, in practice, now everything you see in the media is the result of some algorithm. At one level, I do think we need to take seriously these sorts of concerns about what human beings are doing and what decisions human beings are making because the point of victory will be for human beings to lead their lives. Now, all of that said, any given battle, it’s gonna be hard to avoid the thought that the machines are going to be better than us. And so we should hand over to them in order to win that battle. Scharre Yeah, I think this question of adoption is such a really interesting one because, like, we’ve been talking about human agency in these tasks. You know, flying a plane or being an infantry or, you know, a general making decisions. But there also is human agency as this question of do you use a technology in this way? And we could see it in lots of examples of AI technology, today—facial recognition for example. There are many different paradigms for how we’re seeing facial recognition used. For example, it’s used very differently in China today than in the United States. Different regulatory environment. Different societal adoption. That’s a choice that society or the government, whoever the powers that be, have. There’s a question of performance, and that’s always, I think, a challenge that militaries have with any new technology is when is it good enough that you go all in on the adoption, right? When are there airplanes, good enough that you then reorient your naval forces around carrier aviation? And that’s a difficult call to make. And if you go too early, you can make mistakes. If you go too late, you can make mistakes. And I think that’s one challenge. It’ll be interesting, I think, to see how militaries approach these things. My observation has been so far, (that) militaries have moved really slowly. Certainly much, much slower that what we’ve seen out in the civilian sector, where if you look at the rhetoric coming out of the Defense Department, they talk about AI a lot. And if you look at actually doing, it’s not very much. It’s pretty thin, in fact. Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, when he was the secretary, he had testified and said that AI was his number one priority. But it’s not. When you look at what the Defense Department is spending money on, it’s not even close. It’s about 1 percent of the DoD budget. So, it’s a pretty tiny fraction. And it’s not even in the top 10 for priorities. So, that, I think, is interesting because it drives choices and, historically, you can see that, particularly with things that are relevant to identity, that becomes a big factor in how militaries adopt a technology, whether it’s cavalry officers looking at the tank or when the Navy was transitioning from sail to steam. That was pushed back because sailors climbed the mast and worked the rigging. They weren’t down in the engine room, turning wrenches. That wasn’t what sailors did. And one of the interesting things to me is how these identities, in some cases, can be so powerful to a military service that they even outlast that task itself. We still call the people on ships sailors. They’re not actually climbing the mast or working the riggings; they’re not actually sailors, but we call them that. And so how militaries adopt these technologies, I think, is very much an open question with a lot of significance both from the military effectiveness standpoint and from an ethical standpoint. One of the things that’s super interesting to me that we are talking about some of these games like AI performance in chess and Go and computer games. And what’s interesting is that I think some of the attributes that are valued in games might be different than what the military values. So, when gaming environments, like in computer games like StarCraft and Dota 2, one of the things computers are very, very good at is operating with greater speed and precision than humans. So they’re very good at what’s termed the microplay—basically, the tactics of maneuvering these little artificial units around on this simulated battlefield. They’re effectively invincible in small unit tactics. So, if you let the AI systems play unconstrained, the AI units can dodge enemy fire. They are basically invincible. You have to dumb the AI systems down, then, to play against humans because when these companies, like Open AI or DeepMind, are training these agents, they’re not training them to do that. That’s actually easy. They’re trying to train them to do the longer term planning that humans are doing and processing information and making higher-level strategic decisions. And so they dumb down the speed at which the AI systems are operating. And you do get some really interesting higher-level strategic decision making from these AI systems. So, for example, in chess and Go, the AI systems have come up with new opening moves, in some cases that humans don’t really fully understand, like, why this is a good tactic? Sometimes they’ll be able to make moves that humans don’t fully understand why they’re valuable until further into the game and they could see, oh, that move had a really important change in the position on the board that turned out to be really valuable. And so, you can imagine militaries viewing these advantages quite differently. That something that was fast, that’s the kind of thing that militaries could see value in. OK, it’s got quick reaction times. Something that has higher precision they could see value in. Something where it’s gonna do something spooky and weird, and I don’t really understand why it’s doing it, but in the long run it’ll be valuable, I could see militaries not be excited about at all . . . and really hesitant. These are really interesting questions that militaries are going to have to grapple with and that have all of these important strategic and ethical implications going forward. Host Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share before we go? Sparrow I kind of think that people will be really quick to adopt technologies that save their lives, for instance. Situational awareness/threat assessment. I think that is going to be adopted quite quickly. Targeting systems, I think will be adopted. We can take out an enemy weapon or platform more quickly because we’ve handed over targeting to an AI—I think that stuff will be adopted quite quickly. I think it’s gonna depend where in the institution one is. I’m a big fan of looking at people’s incentive structures. You know, take seriously what people say, but you should always keep in the back of the mind, what would someone like you say? This is a very hard space to be confident in, but I just encourage people not to just talk to the people like them but to take seriously what people lower down the hierarchy think. How they’re experiencing things. That question that Paul raised about do you go early in the hope of getting a decisive advantage or do you go late because you want to be conservative, those are sensible thoughts. As Paul said, it’s still quite early days for military AI. People should be, as they are, paying close attention to what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment, where, as I understand it, there is some targeting now being done by algorithms, and keep talking about it. Host Paul, last word to you, sir. Scharre Thank you, Stephanie and Rob for a great conversation, and, Rob, for just a really interesting and thoughtful paper . . . and really provocative. I think the issues that we’re talking about are just really going to be difficult ones for the defense community to struggle with going forward in terms of what are the tasks that should be done by humans versus machines. I do think there’s a lot of really challenging ethical issues. Oftentimes, ethical issues end up getting kind of short shrift because it’s like, well, who cares if we’re going to be minotaurs as long as it works? I think it’s worth pointing out that some of these issues get to the core of professional ethics. The context for war is a particular one, and we have rules for conduct and war (the law of war) that kind of write down what we think appropriate behavior is. But there are also interesting questions about military professional ethics of, like, you know, decisions about the use of force, for example, are the essence of the military profession. What are those things that we want military professionals to be in charge of . . . that we want them to be responsible for? You know, some of the most conservative people I’ve ever spoken to in these issues of autonomy are the military professionals themselves, who don’t want to give up the tasks that they’re doing. And sometimes I think for reasons that are good and make sense, and sometimes, for reasons that I think are a little bit stubborn and pigheaded. Sparrow Paul and Stephanie, I know you said last word to Paul, so I wanted to interrupt now rather than at the end. I think it’s worth asking, why would someone join the military in the future? Part of the problem here is a recruitment problem. If you say, “You’re going to be fodder for the machines,” why would people line up for that? You know, that question about military culture is absolutely spot on, but it matters to the effectiveness of the force, as well, because you can’t get people to take on the role. And the other thing is the decision to start a war, I mean, or even to start a conflict, for instance. That’s something that we shouldn’t hand over to the machines, but the same logic that is driving towards battlefield command is driving towards making decisions about first strikes, for instance. And that’s one thing we should resist is that some AI system says now’s the time to strike. For me, that’s a hard line. You don’t start a war on the basis of the choice of the machine. So just some examples, I think, to illustrate the points that Paul was making. Sorry, Paul. Scharre Not at all. All good points. I think these are gonna be the challenging questions going forward, and I think there’s going to be difficult issues ahead to grapple with when we think about how to employ these technologies in a way that’s effective that keep humans in charge and responsible for these kinds of decisions in war. Host Thank you both so much. Sparrow Thanks, Stephanie. And thank you, Paul. Scharre Thank you both. Really enjoyed the discussion. Host Listeners, you can find the genesisarticle@press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters look for volume 53, issue 1. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the authors Paul Scharre is the executive vice president and director of studies at CNAS. He is the award-winning author of Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. His first book, Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, won the 2019 Colby Award, was named one of Bill Gates’ top five books of 2018, and was named by The Economist one of the top five books to understand modern warfare. Scharre previously worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) where he played a leading role in establishing policies on unmanned and autonomous systems and emerging weapons technologies. He led the Department of Defense (DoD) working group that drafted DoD Directive 3000.09, establishing the department’s policies on autonomy in weapon systems. He also led DoD efforts to establish policies on intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs and directed energy technologies. Scharre was involved in the drafting of policy guidance in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, and secretary-level planning guidance. Robert J. Sparrow is a professor in the philosophy program and an associate investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-making and Society (CE200100005) at Monash University, Australia, where he works on ethical issues raised by new technologies. He has served as a cochair of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Technical Committee on Robot Ethics and was one of the founding members of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. show less
Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Also, unlike the development of the bomb, effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists; almost everyone will have to... read more
Integrating artificially intelligent technologies for military purposes poses a special challenge. In previous arms races, such as the race to atomic bomb technology during World War II, expertise resided within the Department of Defense. But in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race, expertise dwells mostly within industry and academia. Also, unlike the development of the bomb, effective employment of AI technology cannot be relegated to a few specialists; almost everyone will have to develop some level of AI and data literacy. Complicating matters is AI-driven systems can be a “black box” in that humans may not be able to explain some output, much less be held accountable for its consequences. This inability to explain coupled with the cession to a machine of some functions normally performed by humans risks the relinquishment of some jurisdiction and, consequently, autonomy to those outside the profession. Ceding jurisdiction could impact the American people’s trust in their military and, thus, its professional standing. To avoid these outcomes, creating and maintaining trust requires integrating knowledge of AI and data science into the military’s professional expertise. This knowledge covers both AI technology and how its use impacts command responsibility; talent management; governance; and the military’s relationship with the US government, the private sector, and society. Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/959/ Keywords: artificial intelligence (AI), data science, lethal targeting, professional expert knowledge, talent management, ethical AI, civil-military relations Episode transcript: Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Joining me today are Doctor C. Anthony Pfaff and Colonel Christopher J. Lowrance, coauthors of Trusting AI: Integrating Artificial Intelligence into the Army’s Professional Expert Knowledge with Brie Washburn and Brett Carey. Pfaff, a retired US Army colonel, is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. Colonel Christopher J. Lowrance is the chief autonomous systems engineer at the US Army Artificial Intelligence Integration Center. Your monograph notes that AI literacy is critical to future military readiness. Give us your working definition of AI literacy, please. Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff AI literacy is more aimed at our human operators (and that means commanders and staffs, as well as, you know, the operators themselves) able to employ these systems in a way that not only we can optimize the advantage these systems promise but also be accountable for their output. That requires knowing things about how data is properly curated. It will include knowing things about how algorithms work, but, of course, not everyone can become an AI engineer. So, we have to kind of figure out at whatever level, given whatever tasks you have, what do you need to know for these kinds of operations to be intelligent? Col. Christopher J. Lowrance I think a big part of it is going to be also educating the workforce. And that goes all the way from senior leaders down to the users of the systems. And so, a critical part of it is understanding how best AI-enabled systems can fit in, their appropriate roles that they can play, and how best they can team or augment soldiers as they complete their task. And so, with that, that’s going to take senior leader education coupled with different levels of technical expertise within the force, especially when it comes to employing and maintaining these types of systems, as well as down to the user that’s going to have to provide some level of feedback to the system as it’s being employed. Host Tell me about some of the challenges of integrating AI and data technologies. Pfaff What we tried to do is sort of look at it from a professional perspective. And from that perspective, so I’ll talk maybe a little bit more later, but, you know, in many ways there are lots of aspects of the challenge that aren’t really that different. We brought on tanks, airplanes, and submarines that all required new knowledge that not only led to changes in how we fight wars and the character of war but corresponding changes to doctrine organizational culture, which we’re seeing with AI. We’ve even seen some of the issues that AI brings up before when we introduce automated technology, which, in reducing the cognitive load on operators introduces concerns like accountability gaps and automation biases that arise because humans are just trusting the machine or don’t understand how the machine is working or how to do the process manually, and, as a result, they’re not able to assess its output. The paradigm example of that, of course, is the USS Vincennes incident, where you have an automated system. Even though there was plenty of information that it was giving that should have caused a human operator not to permit shooting down what ended up being a civilian airliner. So, we’ve dealt with that in the past. AI kind of puts that on steroids. Two of the challenges that I think that are unique to AI, with data-driven systems, they actually can change in capabilities as you use them. For instance, a system that starts off able to identify, perhaps, a few high-value targets, over time, as it collects more data, gets more questions. And as humans see patterns, or as a machine identifies patterns, and humans ask the machine to test it, you’re able to start discerning properties of organizations, both friendly and enemy, you wouldn’t have seen before. And that allows for greater prediction. What that means is that the same system, used in different places with different people with different tasks, are going to be different systems and have different capabilities over time. The other thing that I think is happening is the way it’s changing how we’re able to view the battlefield. Rather than a cycle of Intel driving OPS, driving Intel and so on, with the right kind of sensors in place, getting us the right kind of data, we’re able to get more of a real-time picture. The intel side can make assessments based on friendly situations, and the friendly can make targeting decisions and assessments about their own situation based on intel. So, that’s coming together in ways that are also pretty interesting, and I don’t think we fully wrestled with yet. Lowrance Yeah, just to echo a couple of things that Dr. Pfaff has alluded to here is that, you know, overarching, I think the challenge is gaining trust in the system. And trust has really earned. And it’s earned through use is one aspect. But you’ve got to walk in being informed, and that’s where the data literacy and the AI literacy piece comes in. And as Dr. Pfaff mentioned, these data-driven systems, generally speaking, will perform based on the type of data that they’ve been trained against and those types of scenarios in which that data was collected. And so, one of the big challenge areas is the adaptation over time. But they are teachable, so to speak. So, as you collect and curate new data examples, you can better inform the systems of how they should adapt over time. And that’s going to be really key to gaining trust. And that’s where the users and the commanders of these systems need to understand some of the limitations of the platforms, their strengths, and understanding also how to retrain or reteach to systems over time using new data so that they can more quickly adapt. But there’s definitely some technical barriers to gaining trust, but they certainly can be overcome with the proper approach. Host What else should we consider, then, when it comes to developing trustworthy AI? Pfaff We’ve kind of taken this from the professional perspective, and so we’re starting with an understanding of professions that a profession entails specialized knowledge that’s in service to some social good that allows professionals to exercise autonomy over specific jurisdictions. An example, of course, would be doctors and the medical profession. They have specialized knowledge. They are certified in it by other doctors. They’re able to make medical decisions without nonprofessionals being able to override those. So, the military is the same thing, where we have a particular expertise. And then the question is, how does the introduction of AI affect what counts as expert knowledge? Because that is the core functional imperative of the profession—that is able to provide that service. In that regard, you’re going to look at the system. We need to be able to know, as professionals, if the system is effective. It also is predictable and understandable. I am able to replicate results and understand the ones that I get. We also have to trust the professional. That means the professional has to be certified. And the big question is, as Chris alluded to, in what? But not just certified in the knowledge, but also responsible norms and accountable. The reason for that is clients rely on professionals because they don’t have this knowledge themselves. Generally speaking, the client’s not in the position to judge whether or not that diagnosis, for example, is good or not. They can go out and find another opinion, but they’re going out to go seek another profession. So, clients not only need to trust the expert knows what they’re doing but there’s an ethics that governs them and that they are accountable. Finally, to trust the profession as an institution—that it actually has what’s required to conduct the right kinds of certification, as well as the institutions required to hold professionals accountable. So that’s the big overarching framework in which we’re trying to take up the differences and challenges that AI provides. Lowrance Like I mentioned earlier, I think it’s about also getting the soldiers and commanders involved early during the development process and gaining that invaluable feedback. So, it’s kind of an incremental rollout, potentially, of AI-enabled systems is one aspect, or way of looking at it. And so that way you can start to gauge and get a better appreciation and understanding of the strengths of AI and how best it can team with commanders and soldiers as they employ the systems. And that teaming can be adaptive. And I think it’s really important for commanders and soldiers to feel like they can have some level of control of how best to employ AI-enabled systems and some degree of mechanism, let’s say, how much they’re willing to trust at a given moment or instance for the AI system to perform a particular function based on the conditions. As we know as military leaders, the environment can be very dynamic, and conditions change. If you look at the scale of operations from counterinsurgency to a large-scale combat operation, you know those are different ends of a spectrum here of types of conflicts that might be potentially faced by our commanders and our soldiers on the ground with AI-enabled systems. And so, they need to adapt and have some level of control and different trusts of the system based on understanding that system, its limitations, its strengths, and so on. Host You touched on barriers just a moment ago. Can you expand a little bit more on that piece of it? Lowrance Often times when you look at it from a perspective of machine-learning applications, these are algorithms where the system is able to ingest data examples. So basically, historical examples of conditions of past events. And so, just to make this a little bit more tangible, think of an object recognition algorithm that can look at imagery and that (maybe it’s geospatial imagery for satellites that have taken an aerial photo of the ground plane) you could train it to look for certain objects like airplanes. Well, over time, the AI learns to look for these based on the features of these examples within past imagery. With that, sometimes if you take that type of example data and the conditions of the environment change, maybe it’s the backdrop or maybe it’s a different airstrip or different type of airplane or something changes, then performance can degrade to some degree. And this goes back to adaptability. How do these algorithms best adapt? This goes back to the teaming aspect of having users working with the AI recognizing when that performance is starting to degrade, to some degree, kind of through a checks-and-balances type of system. And then you give feedback by curating new examples and having the system adapt. I think giving the soldiers/commanders, for instance, the old analogy of a baseball card with performance statistics of a particular player, where you would have a baseball card for a particular AI-enabled system, giving you the types of training statistics. For example, what kind of scenario was this system trained for? What kind of data examples? How many data examples and so on, and that would give commanders and operators a better sense of these strengths and limitations of the systems, where and under what conditions has it been tested and evaluated. And, therefore, when it’s employed in a condition that doesn’t necessarily meet those kinds of conditions, then that’s an early cue to be more cautious . . . to take a more aggressive teaming stance with the system and checking more rigorously, obviously, what the AI is potentially predicting or recommending to the soldiers and operators. And that’s one example. I think you’ve got to have the context where, most instances, depending on the type of AI application, if you will, really drives how much control or task effort you’re going to give to the AI system. In some instances, as we see on the commercial sector today, there’s a high degree of autonomy given to some AI systems that are recommending, for instance, what you maybe want to purchase or what movie you should shop for and so on, but what’s the risk of employing that type of system or if that system makes a mistake? And I think that’s really important is the context here and then having the right precautions and the right level of teaming in place when you’re going into those more risky types of situations. And I think another final point of the barriers to help overcome them is, again, going back to this notion of giving commanders and soldiers some degree of control over the system. A good analogy is like a rheostat knob. Based on the conditions on the ground. Based on their past use of this system and their understanding, they start to gain an understanding of the strengths and limitations of the system and then, based on the conditions, can really dial up or dial down the degree of autonomy that they’re willing to grant the system. And I think this is another way of overcoming barriers to, let’s say, highly restricting the use of AI-enabled systems, especially when they’re recognizing targets or threats as part of the targeting cycle, and that’s one of the lenses that we looked at in this particular study. Pfaff When we’re looking at expert knowledge, we break it into four components—the technical part, which we’ve covered. But we also look at, to have that profession, professionals have to engage in human development, which means recruiting the right kinds of people, training and educating the right kinds of ways, and then develop them over a career to be leaders in the field. And we’ve already talked about the importance of having norms that ensure the trust of the client. Then there’s the political, which stresses mostly how the professions maintain legitimacy and compete for jurisdiction with other professions. (These are) all issues that AI brings up. So those introduce a number of other kinds of concerns that you have to be able to take into account for any of the kinds of things that Chris talked about for us to be able to do that. So, I would say growing the institution along those four avenues that I talked about represents a set of barriers that need to be overcome. Host Let’s talk about ethics and politics in relation to AI in the military. What do we need to consider here? Pfaff It’s about the trust of the client, but that needs to be amplified a little bit. What’s the client trusting us to do? Not only use this knowledge on their behalf, but also the way that reflects their values. That means systems that conform to the law of armed conflict. Systems that enable humane and humanitarian decision making—even in high intensity combat. The big concerns there, (include) the issue(s) of accountability and automation bias. Accountability arises because there’s only so much you’re going to be able to understand about the system as a whole. And when we’re talking about the system, it’s not just the data and the algorithms, it’s the whole thing, from sensors to operators. So, it will always be a little bit of a black box. If you don’t understand what’s going on, or if you get rushed (and war does come with a sense of urgency) you’re going to be tempted to go with the results the machine produces. Our recommendation is to create some kind of interface. We use the idea of fuzzy logic that allows the system and humans to interact with it to identify specific targets in multiple sets. The idea was . . . given any particular risk tolerance the commander has because machines when they produce these outputs, they assign a probability to it . . . so for example, if it identifies a tank, it will say something to the effect of “80% tank.” So, if I have a high-risk tolerance for potential collateral harms, risk emission, or whatever, and I have a very high confidence that the target I’m about to shoot as legitimate, I can let the machine do more of the work. And with a fuzzy logic controller, you can use that to determine where in the system humans need to intervene when that risk tolerance changes or that confidence changes. And this addresses accountability because it specifies what commander, staff, and operator are accountable for—getting the risk assessment right, as well as ensuring that the data is properly curated and the algorithms trained. It helps with automation bias because the machine’s telling you what level of confidence it has. So, it’s giving you prompts to recheck it should there be any kinds of doubts. And one of the ways you can enhance that, that we talked about in the monograph, is in addition to looking for things that you want to shoot, also look for things you don’t want to shoot. That’ll paint a better picture of the environment, (and) overall reduce the kind of risk of using these systems. Now when it comes to politics, you’ve got a couple of issues here. One is at the level of civ-mil relations. And Peter Singer brought this up 10 years ago when talking about drones. His concern was that drone operation would be better done by private-sector contractors. As we rely more on drones, what it came to mean in applying military force would largely be taken over by contractors and, thus, expert knowledge leaves the profession and goes somewhere else. And that’s going to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the profession with political implications. That didn’t exactly happen because military operators always retained the ability to do this. The only ones who are authorized to use these systems with lethal force. There were some contractors augmenting them, but with AI right now, as we sort through what the private sector/government roles and expertise is going to be, we have a situation where you could end up . . . one strategy of doing this is that the military expert knowledge doesn’t change, all the data science algorithms are going on on the other side of an interface where the interface just presents information that the military operator needs to know, and he responds to that information without really completely understanding how it got there in the first place. I think that’s a concern because that is when expertise migrates outside the profession. It also puts the operators, commanders, and staffs in a position where (A.) they will not necessarily be able to assess the results well without some level of understanding. They also won’t be able to optimize the system as its capabilities develop over time. We want to be careful about that because, in the end, the big thing in this issue is expectation management. Because these are risk-reducing technologies . . . because they’re more precise, they lower risk to friendly soldiers, as well as civilians and so on. So, we want them to make sure that we are able to set the right kinds of expectations, which will be a thing senior militaries have to do. And regarding the effectives of the technology, so civilian leaders don’t over rely on it, and the public doesn’t become frustrated by lack of results when it doesn’t quite work out. Because the military, they can’t deliver results but also imposes any risk to soldiers and noncombatants alike is not one that’s probably going to be trusted. Lowrance Regarding ethics and politics and relations to AI and the military, I think it’s really important, obviously, throughout the development cycle of an AI system, that you’re taking these types of considerations in early and, obviously, often. So, I know one guiding principle that we have here is that if you break down an AI system across a stack all the way from the hardware to the data to the model and then to deployment in the application, really ethics wraps all of that. So, it’s really important that the guiding principles already set forth through various documents from DoD and the Army regarding responsible AI and employment that that is followed in the hereto. Now, in terms of what we looked at from the paper, from the political lens, it’s an interesting dynamic when you start looking at the interaction between the employment of these systems. And really from the sense of, let’s say, of urgency of at least leveraging this technology from either a bottom-up or a top-down type of fashion. So, what I mean by that is from a research and development perspective, you know, there’s an S and T (or science and technology) base that really leads the armies—and really DoD if you look outside from a joint perspective the development of new systems. But yet, as you know, the commercial sector is leveraging AI now, today, and sometimes there’s a sense of urgency. It’s like, hey, it’s mature enough in these types of aspects. Let’s go ahead and start leveraging it. And so, a more deliberate approach would be traditional rollout through the S and T environment where it goes through rigorous test and evaluation processes and then eventually becomes a program of record and then deployed and fielded. Whereas it doesn’t necessarily prohibit a unit right now that obviously says, “Hey, I can take this commercial off-the-shelf AI system and start leveraging it and go ahead and get some early experience.” So, I think there’s this interesting aspect between the traditional program of record acquisition effort versus this kind of bottom-up unit level experimentation and how those are blending together. And it also brings up the role, I think, of soldiers and, let’s say, contractors play in terms of developing and eventually deploying and employing AI-enabled systems. You know, inherently AI-enabled systems are complex, and so who has the requisite skills to sustain, update, and adapt these systems over time? Is it the contractor, or should it be the soldiers? And where does that take place? We’ve looked at different aspects of this in this study, and there’s probably a combination, a hybrid. But one part of the study is we talked about the workforce development program and how important that is because in tactical field environments, you’re not necessarily always going to be able to have contractors out present in these field sites. Nor are you going to have, always, the luxury of high bandwidth communications out to the tactical edge where these AI-enabled systems are being employed. Because of that, you’re going to have to have the ability to have that technical knowledge of updating and adapting AI-enabled systems with the soldiers. That’s one thing we definitely emphasized as part of the study of these kinds of relationships. Host Would you like to share any final thoughts before we go? Lowrance One thing I would just like to reemphasize again is this ability that we can overcome some of these technical barriers that we discussed throughout the paper. But we can do so deliberately, obviously, and responsibly. Part of that is, we think, and this is what one of our big findings from our study is, that from taking an adaptive teaming approach. We know that AI inherently, and especially in a targeting cycle application, is an augmentation tool. It’s going to be paired with soldiers. It’s not going to be just running autonomously by itself. What does that teaming look like? It goes back to this notion of giving control down to the commander level, and that’s where that trust is going to start to come in, where if the commander on the ground knows that he can change the system behavior, or change that teaming aspect that is taking place, and the level of teaming, that inherently is going to grow the amount of trust that he or she has in the system during its application. We briefly talked a little bit about that, but I just want to echo, or reinforce, that. And it’s this concept of an explainable fuzzy logic controller. And the big two inputs to that controller are what is the risk tolerance of the commander based on the conditions of the ground, whether it’s counterinsurgency or large-scale combat operations versus what the AI system is telling them, Generally speaking, in most predictive applications, the AI has some degree of confidence score associated with its prediction or recommendation. So, leverage that. And leverage the combination of those. And that should give you an indication of how much trust or how much teaming, in other words, you know, for a given function or role, should take place with this AI augmentation and between the soldier and the actual AI augmentation tool that’s taking place. This can be broken down, obviously, in stages just like the targeting cycle is. And our targeting cycle and joint doctrine is, for dynamic targeting, as F2T2 EA. Find fix, track, target, engage, and assess. And each one of those, obviously more some than others, is where AI can play a constructive role. We can employ it in a role where we’re doing so responsibly and it’s providing an advantage, in some instances augmenting the soldiers in such a way that really exceeds the performance a human alone could do. And that deals with speed, for example. Or finding those really hidden types of targets, these kinds of things that would be even difficult for human to do alone. Taking that adaptive teaming lens is going to be really important moving forward. Pfaff When it comes to employing AI, particularly for military purposes, there’s a concern that the sense of urgency that comes with combat operations will overwhelm the human ability to control the machine. We will always want to rely on the speed. And like Chris said, you don’t get the best performance out of the machine that way. It really is all about teaming. And none of the barriers that we talked about, none of the challenges we talked about, are even remotely insurmountable. But these are the kinds of things you have to pay attention to. There is a learning curve, and to engage in strategies that minimize the amount of adaptation members of the military going to have to perform, I think it will be a mistake in the long term even to get short-term results. Host Listeners, you can learn more about this, if you want to really dig into the details here, you can download the monograph at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/959. Dr. Pfaff, Col. Lowrance, thank you so much for your time today. Pfaff Thank you, Stephanie. It’s great to be here. Host If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the Project Director Dr. C. Anthony Pfaff (colonel, US Army retired) is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of several articles on ethics and disruptive technologies, such as “The Ethics of Acquiring Disruptive Military Technologies,” published in the Texas National Security Review. Pfaff holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and economics from Washington and Lee University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Stanford University (with a concentration in philosophy of science), a master’s degree in national resource management from the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, and a doctorate degree in philosophy from Georgetown University. About the Researchers Lieutenant Colonel Christopher J. Lowrance is the chief autonomous systems engineer at the US Army Artificial Intelligence Integration Center. He holds a doctorate degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Louisville, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from The George Washington University, a master’s degree in strategic studies from the US Army War College, and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the Virginia Military Institute. Lieutenant Colonel Bre M. Washburn is a US Army military intelligence officer with over 19 years serving in tactical, operational, and strategic units. Her interests include development and mentorship; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the digital transformation of Army intelligence forces. Washburn is a 2003 graduate of the United States Military Academy and a Marshall and Harry S. Truman scholar. She holds master’s degrees in international security studies, national security studies, and war studies. Lieutenant Colonel Brett A. Carey, US Army, is a nuclear and counter weapons of mass destruction (functional area 52) officer with more than 33 years of service, including 15 years as an explosive ordnance disposal technician, both enlisted and officer. He is an action officer at the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (homeland defense integration and defense support of civil authorities). He holds a master of science degree in mechanical engineering with a specialization in explosives engineering from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. show less
The 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America identifies China as the “pacing challenge” for the US military. This podcast examines the process by which China’s military capabilities are developed, the capabilities China’s military is seeking to acquire in the future, and the resulting implications for the US military. To date, all the extant studies have merely described the capabilities the People’s Liberation Army is currently acquiring. The monograph goes... read more
The 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America identifies China as the “pacing challenge” for the US military. This podcast examines the process by which China’s military capabilities are developed, the capabilities China’s military is seeking to acquire in the future, and the resulting implications for the US military. To date, all the extant studies have merely described the capabilities the People’s Liberation Army is currently acquiring. The monograph goes further by drawing on the Chinese military’s publications to identify and discuss the capabilities the People’s Liberation Army seeks to acquire in the future. The monograph finds China’s military is engaged in a comprehensive program to field a dominant array of military capabilities for ground, sea, air, space, and cyberspace warfare. Countering these capabilities will require the United States and its allies to engage in an equally comprehensive effort. The monograph’s findings will enable US military planners and policy practitioners to understand the long-term goals of China’s development of military capabilities and to anticipate and counter China’s realization of new capabilities so the United States can maintain its military advantage over the long term. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/960/">Read the monograph here.</a> show less
In this episode of Conversations on Strategy, Lukas Cox shares his thoughts on being an intern working on two collaborative studies for NATO.
Read the collaborative study Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 2) here. https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/956/
In this episode of Conversations on Strategy, Lukas Cox shares his thoughts on being an intern working on two collaborative studies for NATO.
Read the collaborative study Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 2) here.
Read the collaborative study What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare here.
Episode Transcript: On Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield and Critical Infrastructure... read more
In this episode of Conversations on Strategy, Lukas Cox shares his thoughts on being an intern working on two collaborative studies for NATO. Read the collaborative study Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 2) here. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/956/">Read the collaborative study What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare here.</a> Episode Transcript: On Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield and Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army, War College, or any other agency of the US government. Today I’m talking with Lucas Cox, who at the time of this recording was an intern with the Strategic Studies Institute and a graduate of the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. He assisted with two collaborative studies: What the Ukraine, Taught NATO About Hybrid Warfare and Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security Resiliency. Welcome, Lucas. Lukas Cox It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. Host Tell us how you ended up working on not one, but two books for the Army War College. Cox So, this is all a great opportunity from my dear professor and mentor Dr. Sarah Lohmann. She’s a University of Washington professor at the Jackson School, which is where I got my undergrad in international studies. And so, we do this great project called “the task force.” It’s sort of a capstone project. And it’s a great opportunity to work as a team and to get into the real sort of meat of policy issues and present our findings to actually someone on the ground, someone that’s actually in the field, which is something that you don’t really get at four years in the university, especially in Washington state where we’re away from the the policy world. And so, I had the privilege of being in her task force and being chosen as the chief liaison for our task force to deal with NATO Center of Excellence for Defense Against Terrorism (COE-DAT), as well as everyone here at SSI under the guidance of Dr. Carol Evans. That led to me leading the writing of the first chapter of this main book. I was able to present our findings on that chapter remotely at two conferences in Turkey at the COE-DAT at conferences over there and there’s another one coming up in October, which I’d love to attend as well. And so that led me to the great opportunity that Dr. Evans and Dr. Lohmann said, “Why don’t you come aboard and keep working on these projects and sort of see the project through for that book at least?” And then the energy security hybrid warfare book is another project of Dr. Lohmann’s that she’s been working on for the last couple of years, at least, with NATO Science and Technology Organization. Those are two simultaneous projects, and I volunteered to help in any way I could with those. It’s been really exciting. Host It sounds exciting. What do you see as the most important take away from the chapter you wrote for the critical infrastructure book? Cox I had the great pleasure of wrapping up my internship here over in Upton Hall at the US Army War College, and I chose the issue of foreign acquisition of European infrastructure. And so, this is an issue that has to do . . . it’s continent wide . . . it has to do with the EU and with NATO and with the US, as well. Is that over the past few decades, a lot of critical infrastructure (and when we say that a lot of it is infrastructure that’s needed for military operations), it’s become privatized, which is great for competition and consumer choice and innovation and all that stuff. But it also means that sometimes you sacrifice resilience and redundancy for profit and price in a way that you wouldn’t if it were under government leadership with the security apparatus in place. And more than that, since . . . mostly since the early 2000s, a lot of that has come under foreign control. So, you think about Russian gas pipelines and being able to get a hold on an energy supply for Europe because a lot of not only the gas and the oil, but the infrastructure that delivers it, is at least partly owned by Russian companies. And so, there’s that as well as a lot of Chinese firms are coming into Europe and buying infrastructure and constructing ports. It’s part of that Belt and Road Initiative that is so in the news. It’s a huge decades-long project for the PRC (People’s Republic of China). A lot of those concerns come from the closeness or direct supervision of these firms from the Chinese government and fears that either through direct control or through political influence or predatory financing, especially in countries that are strapped for cash and need new infrastructure, that those pieces of critical infrastructure being under control of Russia and China pose real threats to their usability and their reliability for European defense. And a lot of these points are a port or a railway where if that goes down or that’s unable to be used, then a whole NATO or US or local military mission could collapse. We made a few policy recommendations for NATO to take a more assertive role as an advisor and as a supervisor working together with the EU because the EU is the one that has authority over laws and regulations in Europe but NATO also having an important role to play in, hopefully, guiding that process in a way that local governments can’t or don’t when they have their own local standards that may not be up to snuff. Host What was your experience like doing analyst work for the first time and on such an important project? Cox It was daunting, but also really exciting. Probably my favorite thing, despite all of the crazy deadlines and the 300 pages of spellchecking that I just came here from doing was really the delegation of Dr. Lohman to me to be able to do some of the real important work. It took me a little bit by surprise, but definitely not surprised by her trust in me—and her guidance. So, a previous intern had constructed these maps in the hybrid warfare energy security book where we’re looking at vital points of European infrastructure for each of the 12 case studies that authors have written. And so there were, say, ports or energy grids or pipelines detailed on these maps, and we were assigned with giving them a threat assessment, are these under cyber risk or disinformation risk in a time period of six months, a year, two years. That was especially difficult being assigned that and, for example, here are all these energy grids and wind turbines and nuclear plants in Germany and Poland and Belgium. And my job was to learn as much as I could about them, learn as much about the overall security situation and come up with a threat assessment—whether these places were going to be attacked in six months by Russian cyber operations or disinformation. And so that was really important work to do for an intern. But I was very honored to have that role and, going forward, hopefully in my career will be sort of a great foundational experience. Host What’s next for you? What are your future plans? Cox I am finishing up here at the Army War College, going home to Seattle, and then I’m going to be traveling a bit starting in September, ultimately to end up in Brussels working as an intern, which this experience allowed me to do with the Science and Technology Organization, which is the outfit that is overseeing and partnering with us for that hybrid warfare energy security book. I am very excited for all the work that they do. I know it’s a small office in Brussels, sort of in the middle of the action at NATO headquarters, which is very exciting for me. It’s been a dream to work for that organization for a long time and then after that we’ll see. Host This was a real treat. Thanks, Lukas Cox It’s so nice to talk to you. Host Listeners, if you’d like to read the collaborative studies, visit press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the author: Lucas M. Cox, at the time of writing this publication, was an intern with the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College and a graduate of the University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies with a degree in international security, foreign policy, peace, and diplomacy and a double minor in political science and Russian, Eastern European, and Central Asian studies with a focus on the former Soviet economic and security spheres. He is also the 2023 University of Washington Triana Deines Rome Center Intern and will begin an internship at NATO’s Science and Technology Organization in April 2023. show less
Medical resilience is a key critical infrastructure in a nation’s preparedness against vulnerabilities. Pandemics such as COVID-19 are potent disruptors of this infrastructure. Health systems that are considered low-resourced have adapted and deployed seemingly simple but effective methods to survive such disruptions.
Read the collaborative study here.
Episode Transcript: Medical Resilience in Pandemics
Stephanie Crider (Host)
The views and opinions expressed in this... read more
Medical resilience is a key critical infrastructure in a nation’s preparedness against vulnerabilities. Pandemics such as COVID-19 are potent disruptors of this infrastructure. Health systems that are considered low-resourced have adapted and deployed seemingly simple but effective methods to survive such disruptions. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/957/">Read the collaborative study here.</a> Episode Transcript: Medical Resilience in Pandemics Stephanie Crider (Host) The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. Today, I’m talking with Wuraola Oyewusi, author of “Medical Resilience and Pandemics,” in Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure and Resiliency Handbook Two (Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency Handbook 2). Welcome to Conversations on Strategy. I’m really glad you’re here. Wuraola Oyewusi Thank you, Stephanie. I’m glad I’m here too. Host Your chapter explores medical resilience as a component of critical infrastructure as well as using low-resourced health systems to build resilience. Will you please briefly expand on that? Oyewusi The work on this chapter focuses on a low-resourced health system (that) has managed to build a resilience against a disruption—this time around, a pandemic—uh, specifically, (coronavirus disease 2019 or) COVID-19. We explored Nigeria as a system that . . . it’s definitely not high resourced. The health-delivery system is not high resourced. And we explored some of the things that were done during the COVID-19 pandemic. Host Let’s talk about that in a little bit more detail. Like you said, your case study focused on Nigeria and COVID-19. How did Nigeria handle COVID-19? Oyewusi So, I’m going to give a bit of context. The first COVID-19 case—recorded one, I think we should emphasize that—was in February . . . February 27, 2020. Right when the whole world was finding out, that was when we found out about that in Nigeria, too. Another clear context that we should have as we go into our discussion is that Nigeria’s epidemic response is carried out in the context of a fragile and underresourced, existent health-delivery system. That means that, even before the pandemic, the system was overstretched, there was a lot of people. There were challenging fault lines already, and then we now had the disruption like COVID-19. So to help you understand this use case, one of the indexes that was used to gauge a country’s preparedness during the pandemic was the number of (intensive-care unit or) ICU beds to the population. Germany had about 29 beds to 100,000 people. The US had about 34 to 35 ICU beds to 100,000 people. Turkey had 48 beds to 100,000 people. But in Nigeria, we had about 0.07 beds to 100,000 people. So, I think that would lay down a context for why we are discussing this and how a disruption to critical infrastructure, like a pandemic, was done in Nigeria. Host What are some key lessons learned from Nigeria on managing pandemics? Oyewusi I’m going to discuss that on the three key items. The first one: There was leveraged experience and infrastructure. The second one: There was civilians, data analysis, and public data sharing. And the third one, which is probably one of the most interesting, are the nonpharmacological interventions. We have established that the system is overstressed. And, given the proportion of ICU to 100,000 people, the country knows; the people know. We had a vague idea of what we were in for, and, you know, it is one of the most interesting things that we did. One of the experiences that help us as a country—despite this fragile health system, this low-resourced health system—was we have some experience managing pandemics (for example, the Ebola of 2014 [Ebola outbreak of 2014–16]). So, the preparedness wasn’t just from the side of the health system professionals. The country had an idea. We have experienced with Lassa fever. We have experienced with cholera. So, one of the key things that happened there: There was a coordinated national effort by the national center for disease control, the Federal Ministry of Health, and the state ministry of health. And then, for example, for data collection and analysis, there was a software that was used during Ebola called SORMAS—SORMAS is Surveillance Outbreak Response Management (and Analysis System). A very interconnected system that was used to collect data from smaller places to bigger places and tracked preparedness for things like, you know, we had anticipated that there would probably be no light. There is usually a lot of outages. There is a lot of issues like that. But this system had been tested during Ebola, so it was like the country spun it up again now that we have another pandemic. The third one is nonpharmacological intervention. For example, there were things like hand washing and face mask. Even though I know it’s global, people had hand sanitizers. There was lockdown. There was restrictive public gathering. There was social culture communication. You know, for example, more than 500 languages are spoken. That means that in villages and religious houses, people were talking about COVID-19, “We think we should wear your mask,” through those channels. In public places, you could wash your hands outside. That means if you are going to the bank—it might not be the prettiest setup—but every public place, public parks, there was “You need for you to wash your hands.” And then, like I said, people remembered from Ebola. That means that there was general knowledge about it and (people knew) to prepare hand sanitizers. “We think there is something dangerous out there. We have heard about it and, you know, just like the other times, we should wash our hands often. We should wear our mask.” You know, there were makeshift masks because a mask (availability) hasn’t happened yet, and, you know, some were made from fabric. Some of them were not the prettiest, but people were wearing their mask in many places. The bulk would put a makeshift bucket. You know, in some public places, it would just be a makeshift bucket with a tap, some soap to wash our hands. But this scaled across the country because they were easy to deploy. And then, information through radio. People were hearing about COVID-19. I remember, in the textbook, I put some examples of the flyers that went around that “This is dangerous.” “We are not always confident that you have the support that you need in the health system, but if you can try those things, if you can stay at home more . . .” Of course, there was the economic downside of people staying at home, but if you don’t have to be out . . . Some states were running, “We’re not closing finally, but can you be home by six?” “Clubbing.” “No parties.” Uh . . . “No big church gatherings.” “No big religious gatherings.” “Can you just pray at home?” This may be for people who could read, but then there was the daily updates by the disease control center. You know, you would know the number of people that died, the number of people that were diagnosed. “What should you do if someone is infected?” “If you suspect there is . . .” It was in public places. “Someone has been coughing, sneezing . . .” “We think this person may have this . . .” The nearest health center. So those are some of the nonpharmacological solutions that kind of worked well for us. Host Do you have any final thoughts that you want to share about this before we go? Oyewusi I have experienced working in a low-resourced health system. You know, I have gone on to other things. But I have always been a believer of, uh, in every pandemic—in every disruption, especially—learning from the experience of where we already know that this is low. It’s not bad because there was pandemic; that was all happened . . . Also, there are usually the low-hanging fruits; countries should embrace them. There is also NATO. NATO should embrace them. Tell people on the radio. Help everybody in their language. I understand that—even in countries where people speak the same language—there are regional nuisances. You know, for example, in Nigeria, local leaders were telling their communities about these. I’m not saying that, “Oh, everyone did that,” but it was common . . . So it’s common knowledge that we should do that. In pandemics, everyone is as confused. It’s not like everyone knows what to do. But for every disruption, one of the key learnings from a low-resourced system like that is that there are the low-hanging fruits, and they should be embraced. Host Thank you for being here today and sharing your ideas and your insights. Oyewusi Nice to be here. Host Listeners, find out more about managing pandemics at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/957. Read about it in chapter six. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the author: Wuraola Oyewusi is a Nigerian pharmacist and data scientist with expertise in clinical health care and the application of data-science methods. Her research spans a range of use cases from natural language processing (NLP) to health care and data curation. She lives in the United Kingdom and is the recipient of the Global Talent Visa in AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science. show less
The remarkable life of early-twentieth-century British adventurer Gertrude Bell has been well documented through her biographies and numerous travel books. Bell’s role as a grand strategist for the British government in the Middle East during World War I and the postwar period, however, is surprisingly understudied. Investigating Gertrude Bell as both a military strategist and a grand strategist offers important insights into how Great Britain devised its military strategy in the Middle... read more
The remarkable life of early-twentieth-century British adventurer Gertrude Bell has been well documented through her biographies and numerous travel books. Bell’s role as a grand strategist for the British government in the Middle East during World War I and the postwar period, however, is surprisingly understudied. Investigating Gertrude Bell as both a military strategist and a grand strategist offers important insights into how Great Britain devised its military strategy in the Middle East during World War I—particularly, Britain’s efforts to work through saboteurs and secret societies to undermine the Ottoman Empire during the war and the country’s attempts to stabilize the region after the war through the creation of the modern state of Iraq. As importantly, studying the life and work of Bell offers a glimpse into how this unique woman was able to become one of the principal architects of British strategy at this time and the extraordinary set of skills and perspectives she brought to these efforts—particularly, her ability to make and maintain relationships with key individuals. Bell’s life and work offer insights into the roles women have played and continue to play as influencers of grand strategy. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/950/">Read the monograph here.</a> Episode Transcript: On The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes doctors Heather Gregg and Jim Scudieri. Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security and the author of The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq. Scudieri is the senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute. He’s an associate professor and historian at the US Army War College. He analyzes historical insights for today’s strategic issues. Heather, Jim, thanks so much for being. Here I’m really excited to talk to you today. Dr. Heather S. Gregg It’s great to be here. Thank you so much. Dr. James D. Scudieri Likewise, thank you for taking the time to meet with us. Host What did the Middle East look like in the lead up to World War I? Who were the major players in the region? Gregg Unlike the Western Front, the war was very different in the Middle East. And I would say this was a big game of influence. And you had major European powers. You had a declining Ottoman Empire. You had the rise of Arab nationalism. And all of this kind of came into a very interesting confluence of events during World War I. Scudieri And complicating that amongst major players are … the British don’t have a unified position, so if you look at stakeholders, you need to distinguish between the British leaders in London, those in Cairo, and those in India. Gregg That’s a huge point that there is a great power struggle between these three entities over who should be controlling the Middle East and why. And this becomes important for the story of Gertrude Bell. Host The manuscript is divided into three periods—during World War I, the period of British military occupation of Mesopotamia, and Britain’s creation of the State of Iraq during the mandate era. Let’s discuss British military and grand strategy in each period. What was British military strategy in the Middle East during World War I? Scudieri So, there’s still a lot of historical debate on exactly what the strategy was. Some would say there wasn’t much of a strategy, but part of that is strategic games changed as the war progressed, and the war was not going well for the Allies in the early years. And even through 1917 there was a concern that they might lose. So those strategic objectives in the Middle East change as they determine that they will not lose. And not only that, but if you win, what do you want the post-war world to look like? Gregg So yeah, I would add to this that there were some really interesting constraints on Britain and other actors. They didn’t have the manpower to put into the Middle East because it was all being dedicated to the Western Front—or most of it was. They weren’t entirely sure, I would echo Jim’s comments here, about what the strategy should be, just that they wanted to frustrate and try to undermine Ottoman authority in the region. They devised a strategy that worked with and through the Arab population to try to undermine Ottoman authority. So, this is what we would call an unconventional warfare strategy today. But that was supposed to be cheaper and require less manpower than actually deploying British troops, and this is particularly true after what happened at Gallipoli, (which was) for all intents and purposes, a pretty colossal failure. Host So, this whole podcast is built on your monograph about Gertrude Bell. Let’s talk about her a little bit. How did Gertrude Bell contribute to the unconventional warfare strategy Britain created? Gregg Gertrude Bell is a fascinating individual. She was a British national. She was one of the first women to go to university at Oxford University. She got a First Class in modern history. She spoke languages. She traveled throughout the region. And she was hired first by the British Admiralty but then became part of a small group in Cairo called the Arab Bureau. And their job was to devise some sort of strategy to undermine Ottoman authority. And there she worked with someone we all know—T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. And together, with a small team of between 7 to 15 people, they helped devise this unconventional warfare strategy of working by, with, and through local Arab leaders to try to undermine Ottoman authority. Scudieri She’s a fascinating character because it reminds historians that you cannot predict the future. You cannot predict it with regard to strategy; you also can’t predict it, with regard to some individuals’ career paths. Host Why did the initial plan not succeed? How did they adjust it? Gregg So, there was this effort to work through the Sharif of Mecca. This was a family that was in charge of the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina. The father’s name was Hussein, and he had two sons that were very active in trying to foment an uprising within the Ottoman military with Arab officers. Hussein promised that there were hundreds and hundreds of Arab officers that were part of secret societies that he could encourage to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. And it ended up that this just wasn’t true. He over promised what he could achieve. The strategy was largely unsuccessful, this initial strategy. Scudieri This experience highlights how nothing is easy, and things are hard. Host So true. Scudieri The ability to have British support brings not only weapons and equipment, but it brings lots of money. Gregg And with that, the potential for corruption, making promises to get money to get weapons. And Britain promised, in a series of correspondence between McMahon and Hussein that he would have his own independent Arab state after the war in exchange for this uprising, which, in about a year’s time, did not succeed. So, the second approach was T. E. Lawrence and Hussein’s son decided to engage in basically sabotage against lines of communication, particularly railway lines. And this is what the famous movie Lawrence of Arabia captures. And this was more successful in combination with other things that were dragging down the Ottoman Empire. Scudieri The success of the strategy underlines how sometimes a better approach is counterintuitive because by focusing on the sabotage, they wanted to starve the Turkish forces in the area of resupply versus the more traditional trying to focus on annihilating the enemy army, which they did not have the power to do. Gregg A really interesting observation. And a lesson that still holds today. Host The British military successfully captured Baghdad in March of 1917, along with Basra, which it captured in 1914. It put two of the three Ottoman vilayets of Mesopotamia under its control. How did Belle help shape British military strategy to address this reality? Gregg So, I would like to echo back Jim’s point that, fascinatingly enough, it seemed that Britain had not devised a strategy for military occupation, even though this became their goal—to take Baghdad. And then they already had Basra. And so, Bell, together with someone named Percy Cox, had to very quickly devise a strategy of, essentially, occupation. And this also didn’t go necessarily well, and I think it forced them (until the mandate era) to really try to keep things in line rather than make things prosper. I don’t know, Jim, what your thoughts are on that. Scudieri So, mine would be very similar. It’s interesting in some of the primary sources we can see how relatively rapidly the British put together an occupation plan and also tried to pool available talent. And they get by in the course of the war. But the challenges associated with long-term occupation and that transition to mandate, and then some missteps, really blow up after the war. Host What were some of the challenges and opportunities in this period? Gregg I would say some of the really interesting challenges were also opportunities that might have been missed. So, there was some local leadership and local talent that I think could have been very useful had the British reached out and engaged some of that leadership. From my read of Gertrude Bell, she was rather suspicious of the Shia population and Shia leaders. So, there were some missed opportunities to try to engage the Shia population, which was a good chunk of the population that they controlled. And so, for me, both the big challenge and the missed opportunity was what to do with the local population (and) how to engage the local population and harness local leadership. Scudieri There’s also some confusion associated with thinking in terms of Arab kingdoms because there’s no unitary Arab nationalism right now. The Kingdoms of British support in the post-war period are really Hashemite. And that doesn’t take account of a very conflicting sense of loyalty to various different tribes and ethnicities, and so on and so forth. And perhaps the biggest one is a difference between the Hashemites and the House of Saud. Gregg Just to build on this, and this is an excellent point . . . this was a really interesting decision that Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence actually made, which was to engage Faisal, who was the son of Hussein. And to promote him to be the first king of Iraq. And as Jim just mentioned, he was a Hashemite. He had never actually been to Iraq and was given this leadership position. The British gave him that, and this ended up being a really difficult thing . . . so bypassing local leadership and choosing to engage the leaders they knew as opposed to the leaders, the local people knew. Scudieri The British also confronted a major problem in the post-war discussions, and that was as they now win the war, and they’re trying to come up with these friendly kingdoms, they have big issues with what are those borders going to look like with France. Their long wartime ally is now going to be a post-war if not adversary, there’s some major post-war disagreements, and you can see that by looking at the documents that talk about (1) The Mosul vilayet, which had unclear borders. At first it wasn’t even clear if that area would be part of Iraq, and if so, where the border would end. And likewise with the borders with Palestine. Gregg This is a really excellent point because then you had the birth of the Republic of Turkey and Atatürk, who also made claim to Mosul. So, you add a really interesting scramble over borders. Over territory. Overlapping claims and rights to it. This was a huge mess that took, in many cases, decades to sort out. Some would argue some of this is still being sorted out. Scudieri A good example of what kind of a wicked problem all of this became was most folks will talk about the Treaty of Versailles, but it took five treaties to end the First World War and it took two with Turkey because Turkey refused to sign the first one. Gregg I think this is a fascinating story, too, that you had the collapse of four empires in World War One, right? The Ottoman Empire was just one that collapsed. You had the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian, the Hapsburg, and the Prussian empires all collapsed as a result of World War I. And Europe was left trying to sort out what to do with all these lands and their colonies. And it was a huge challenge. Scudieri And some of the Allied discussions included Russia, and Russia is now off the table because of the Bolshevik revolution. Host Let’s talk about the third period from the monograph. The war ends in 1918 and the 1919 Paris Conference and Versailles Accords created the mandate system, which required European powers to transition most former colonies and territories of the Ottoman Empire into self-ruled states. How did Gertrude Bell help shape Britain’s vision for transitioning Mesopotamia into the state of Iraq? Scudieri I would suggest that using the term vision might be a bit premature given how quickly events change from trying not to lose the war to figuring out how to win the war and then trying to sort out what the post-war world would look like. But Gertrude Bell is an especially fascinating individual case study because she immersed herself in the culture, in the local conditions, and tried to translate that into the strategic vision for Iraq, which was a very unclear path, in large measure, because of the disagreements between the French and the British, and what that post-war world would look like in the region. Gregg I think for me, the thing that was so puzzling about what Gertrude did in this period was, I believe she cared deeply about the people and the region. And you know, she ends up dying in Iraq. She’s buried there to this day. And I believe she cared about the people in the region. However, some of the decisions she made in this period just seem very counterintuitive to me. And the biggest one was creating a Kingdom and putting a foreign individual on the throne as the king. And this was against many Shia leaders wishes. There was an individual named Sayyid Talib (al Naqib). He was deported to Ceylon, which is Sri Lanka today. They got rid of him because he didn’t agree with this decision, and I think, at the end of the day, Gertrude Bell had to weigh, on the one hand, what it meant to be a British national and serve British interests, and, on the other, what was in Iraq’s interest. And I think being a British national was what won in the end. Scudieri And for us to understand that I think we should avoid a clear black-and-white dichotomy because it was a lot more complicated than that. And I would return to the post-war competition between Britain and France because that Arab Kingdom was supposed to be in Syria. But the French dug their heels in. Gregg They actually were able to create a kingdom, but it lasted less than a year in Damascus. And then Faisal was deposed by the French and then the British. And it’s, I think, this is a big question of debate, but the British then embraced him to be the king of Iraq. Host What were the priorities? What was at stake. Gregg So there’s a big debate on this, too, a big, hot debate on this, that I’ve learned. In the primary source documents, I identified two or three big things at stake. The first is military bases. Britain wanted a seaport, but also wanted air bases. The British Air Force was created in 1918. The first Air Force. They needed a land route in which to get from the Middle East to India, and the bases in Iraq seemed to matter a lot. This came up a lot in discussions. The second thing I would add, and this is the controversial thing, is that I believe oil was a big concern. Britain converted its naval fleet from coal to oil before World War I, and they were coal rich but had no oil. So, the pursuit of oil and securing oil mattered. Everyone was fighting over Mosul because they suspected there was oil. There and that proved to be true. But oil became a major concern. There’s a third argument, which is that markets mattered and being able to have yet more people that could be markets for the British Empire seem to matter. Last, but not least, and I think this is the one piece, hopefully, maybe Jim and I will agree on, is that Britain was an empire and it managed to survive World War I, and it wanted influence in that region. A lot was at stake for Britain, just as an empire, and its ability to wield influence. Scudieri Heather’s made some interesting points there, because those RAF bases are part of having a system that goes hand-in-hand with friendly regimes because the mandate system aren’t going to become long-term colonies. They did understand that at the time. Oil is another interesting point about how priorities change. In 1914, oil wasn’t such a big deal, but the British already did have interest with the Anglo Persian oil company. But war sometimes accelerates change, and the First World War accelerated the importance of oil because the prewar British conversion of the Royal Navy to oil had barely begun . . . about 100 ships, none of the battleships in 1914, are fired on oil in the new class that will come in in 1915 and later will be the first ones that are oil-fired. But the explosion and the demands of oil because of not, just the Royal Navy conversion, but the motorization from horse transport, means oil will have a far more central role in the post war world than it did in the prewar. And even during the war. Host So let’s Fast forward a little bit. How did it unfold? Gregg Well, it didn’t go great. I think it’s fair to say, and, I think for me, this was a very humbling story about you can have good intentions, you can have experts, but this is extremely difficult to do. And obviously, as an American, in the back of my mind is always what happened between 2003 and 2011 and beyond and our efforts to try to stabilize Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. But you end up having a major uprising in Iraq that was actually put down by the persisting presence of the Royal Air Force. You have challenges to Faisal’s leadership. You end up, by 1958, the entire royal family is murdered, and Iraq becomes a Republic. You have lingering political instability and ethnic tensions that I think were not a done deal but got exacerbated. By a lot of the decisions made during this period. Scudieri All of this turmoil is on top of the turmoil going on in the rest of the world. Most people don’t realize how much fighting around the world continued after 1918. There’s still a lot of instability and unreconciled issues around the world. The US has gone largely isolationist. The French, who though determined that they would stay in Syria, if not Lebanon, are really focused on European security because they do not want to allow Germany to rise again. So that’s your primary concern—just trying to contemplate the sheer losses of the war and what came from it. And I’m not sure to what extent they could have forecast in that region, how Arab would be fighting Arab, such as between the Saudis and the kingdoms of Transjordan and/or Iraq. Host What are the takeaways? What can we learn from Bell and the British military and grand strategy during this period? Gregg I think there’s a lot of really, really valuable lessons here. Some of the positive things . . . I go back to the Arab Bureau; I appreciate that the British military was not afraid to bring in civilians and get a civilian voice. They built a really agile, small, and diverse team. They would bring experts in for certain questions and then send them home and bring other experts in. I think there’s a really interesting story there about team building and problem solving. I think that there are a lot of other very humbling lessons to learn. For me, an eerie similarity to, perhaps what the United States did, was not including the population enough in the stabilization process and in the postwar peace, I think that really undermined British efforts. And needing to work by with them through the population, not just during the war but after is deeply important. Scudieri I would echo Heather’s comments as well as the fact that Gertrude Bell is a fascinating case study in talent management. She had no specialization or training in terms of Mesopotamia, per se. She was brought in as an outsider based on some of her educational background that she might be able to help think through the problem set, and then she winds up becoming a subject matter expert on Iraq. Gregg Although I would add a little caveat to that, which is that she had traveled through the Middle East in 1911-12 time frame, and she had mapped the human terrain. This is something that we also tried to do in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, she had gained attention because she had made this trip. That doesn’t make her an expert, I agree. But she had some on-the-ground knowledge of the population’s tribal dynamics that no one else seemed to have. And then that was a great starting point from which then she built her expertise. Scudieri So that’s an interesting learning point on how, in the midst of war, you can still pull talent management to try to get the biggest bang for the buck and save some effort. Gregg That’s a great point. I love that. Host Absolutely. I’m just going to plug the monograph right here. You can download it at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs. Thank you both so much. What a treat. I’m sorry we had so little time to cover such an expansive and interesting topic. Gregg Thank you so much for this opportunity. It was, it’s great to be with you both. Thank you, Jim for a wonderful conversation. Scudieri Well, Many thanks for the ability to share this time together. Host If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on. Any major podcast platform. About the authors: Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security and the author of The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq. Gregg earned a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in Islam from Harvard Divinity School, and a bachelor’s degree (with honors) in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020), “Religiously Motivated Violence” (Oxford University Press, 2018), Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), and The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and coeditor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac Books, 2010). Scudieri is the senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute. He’s an associate professor and historian at the US Army War College. He analyzes historical insights for today’s strategic issues. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Saint Peter’s College, now University (1978); a Master of Arts degree in History from Hunter College, City University of New York (1980); a Master of Military Art and Science degree from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (1995); and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in History from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York (1993). show less
Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO... read more
Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO Allies can transform and maintain their advantage despite new threats for the next two decades. The topics are rooted in NATO’s Seven Baseline requirements, which set the standard for enhancing resilience in every aspect of critical infrastructure and civil society. As terrorists hone their skills to operate lethal drones, use biometric data to target innocents, and take advantage of the chaos left by pandemics and natural disasters for nefarious purposes, NATO forces must be prepared to respond and prevent terrorist events before they happen. Big-data analytics provides potential for NATO states to receive early warning to prevent pandemics, cyberattacks, and kinetic attacks. NATO is perfecting drone operations through interoperability exercises, and space is being exploited by adversaries. Hypersonic weapons are actively being used on the battlefield, and satellites have been targeted to take down wind farms and control navigation. This handbook is a guide for the future, providing actionable information and recommendations to keep our democracies safe today and in the years to come. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/957/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/countering-terrorism-on-tomorrows-battlefield/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode Transcript: “Space Critical Infrastructure” from Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 2) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army, War College, or any other agency of the US government. I’m here with Frank Kuzminski, today, US Army officer and strategist, and author of “NATO Space Critical Infrastructure” from Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. Thanks for making time for this today, Frank. Frank Kuzminski Thank you for having me. Host Space is a relatively new operational domain. Since 2019, you note in your chapter. Through the lens of those core missions of deterrence and defense, what do our listeners need to know about space? Kuzminski Space is relatively new in terms of the overall history of the alliance. And that really stems from the NATO ministerial meeting in December 2019, where they declared space as an operational domain. And then, more importantly, in June 2021, NATO issued a communique after the NATO summit that the mutual defense provisions of Article 5, which treats an attack on one as an attack against all, would apply to the space domain as well. And they specifically mentioned that any attack to, from, or within space could be as harmful as a conventional attack, and therefore warrant an Article 5 response. And that’s important because space really touches nearly every aspect of daily life in modern society, (including) commercial activities, economic activity, information, communications, and especially national security and defense. And so today, more than ever, NATO as an alliance, depends more than ever on space-critical infrastructure for its core missions of deterrence and defense. Host Let’s talk a little bit more about space critical infrastructure. Can you give us an overview? Kuzminski So, space critical infrastructure comprises the physical systems, the orbital platforms, and the data transmission networks and the people that work across the four segments of a space system to provide the space domain capabilities that we rely on. There is this space segment, which consists of the satellites, spacecraft, and technical payloads that occupy the different orbits. There’s a user segment, which refers to any user or person or system that relies on satellite information or satellite signals to function. This includes military forces as well as ordinary people—businesses, organizations, countries, people who use smartphones, etc., or the Internet. There’s the ground segment, which includes the physical elements of space infrastructure on Earth, everything from launch facilities to Mission Control centers, to tracking stations around the world. And then finally, there’s the link segment. And this is the data transmission networks that connect the other segments together and through which we derive the systems. And so the space domain operations and space-based capabilities require all four segments of space critical infrastructure to provide the core functions and capabilities that the alliance and that the world relies on. Host You talked about in your article, these five core capabilities. Let’s walk through them. Let’s start with secure communication. Kuzminski Satellite communications, or SATCOM for short, is vital for the effective command and control of military forces today across large areas, regardless of terrain. It really helps overcome the line-of-sight problem, but also facilitates the use of remote weapon systems such as drones. It’s also important to note that secure communications is where the space and cyber domains intersect because the data transmissions on the link segment that we talked about that provide this space capability by transmitting data utilize the communications protocols that have been derived from the cyber domain and the Internet. And so the vulnerabilities that exist in the cyber domain are also inherent to the space domain for that reason. Host Positioning, navigation, timing, and velocity. What do we need to know? Kuzminski So simply speaking, this is GPS. We know it as plugging an address into our phone and letting it direct us to our destination. But for military forces who rely on PNT for short for targeting and precision strike, advanced conventional munitions rely on GPS to precisely strike a target. Military forces also rely on time reference from GPS satellites for encryption purposes. It’s also important to note that GPS (Global Positioning System) is an American military system that the Department of Defense provides for everyone’s use. There are other systems out there that other countries operate, for example, the European Union has a global navigation satellite system called Galileo. The Russians use a system called GLONASS, and the Chinese recently have deployed a system called Baidu, and they all generally provide similar functions, but it’s important to note who kind of manages these constellations. Host The next step is integrated tactical warning and threat assessment. Kuzminski Space systems are important for detecting missile launches and, therefore, providing the earliest possible warning of a missile attack. We’re talking about strategic nuclear attack, intercontinental ballistic missiles—the kind of broad early warning networks that were common during the Cold War but are still very important today to deterrence and defense today. These space systems are a really integral part of that and help provide ballistic trajectories and provide the decision space for senior leaders. Host How does environmental monitoring fit into the picture? Kuzminski This is commonly known as weather forecasting, but space systems enabled meteorological operations and the kind of weather forecasting that’s important because weather, of course, can affect military operations on land, sea, and in the air. Accurate environmental forecasting also can help reveal longer-term climate trends that might affect agriculture or food supplies in different parts of the world, which may have security implications for NATO and the alliance. Host Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Kuzminski ISR for short. Space-based ISR, we think about satellite imagery. So again there are commercially available options such as Google Earth, but this goes back to the earliest days of the space age when the United States and the Soviet Union deployed a variety of satellite intelligence platforms and photo reconnaissance platforms to not only provide detailed mission planning and help forces understand the effects of terrain on land-based operations but also to provide indications and warnings of potentially threatening behavior. I mean, one of the reasons the alliance in the United States were able to anticipate Russian aggression in Ukraine last year was because they were able to monitor force movements through the use of space-based ISR. Host What are some examples of threats and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed? Kuzminski Space systems are especially vulnerable to both kinetic and non-kinetic threats. So in the chapter we talk about how terrorists and hackers might possess some of these capabilities that could affect one or more of the space segments. But the overall impacts to a terrorist attack on space critical infrastructure would be pretty low. The real threat here is state actors, specifically, the great powers, who both possess the kinetic and non-kinetic destructive capabilities and the capacity that could seriously damage space critical infrastructure. In terms of non-kinetic threats, we talked about the intersection of the space and cyber domains. And so many of the vulnerabilities, cyber vulnerabilities, that an adversary could exploit through hacking or other malicious software or malware could also be deployed against this space system and disrupt a particular satellite capability. In terms of the kinetic capabilities, the most obvious ones are direct-assent anti-satellite weapons or ASATS. And this is, effectively, a missile that’s launched from the Earth that would be targeting a satellite in orbit, destroy that satellite and then render a large debris field that could pose risks to other space systems. As of today, there are only four countries that have demonstrated an actual ASAT capability. That’s the United States, China, India, and Russia. There are also orbital intercept and satellite capture technologies out there through what we call rendezvous and proximity operations, or RPO for short. The nature of orbital mechanics makes it that satellite trajectories are predictable, and, therefore, targetable. There is also the technology either exists or might soon exist for some kind of directed energy or laser weapons on orbital platforms. Now, we haven’t seen evidence of an active system as of yet, but this goes back to the 1980s in the Strategic Defense Initiative that envisioned the constellation of orbital lasers to shoot down incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. So, it’s not a new idea, it’s just something that people are talking about. I’d also like to mention the problem of orbital debris, or space junk. This is more of a space safety issue than a space security issue, but it’s very real and it is a pernicious problem that affects everybody indiscriminately. There are over 30,000 pieces of space junk ranging from the size of a softball to larger than a school bus. Basically, anything that gets thrown up into orbit kind of stays there and decays over years—decays in orbit. The reality is that there just hasn’t been enough of a problem to really warrant any kind of multilateral action. And so ,it’s one of those problems that we’ll just wait and see what happens. Host I’m glad you mentioned Ukraine a little bit earlier because you used Russia as a case study in your paper, and I would love to hear more about that. Kuzminski We already talked about our state actors are the biggest threat, and Russia really has been the most active and threatening actor in this space domain in recent years. For the current war in Ukraine, there was a very specific example. In February of last year leading up to the attack, Russian hackers disrupted the commercial ViaSat satellite communications network, which is a commercial satellite communications provider that the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian government was contracting for their communication purposes. It was part of a coordinated effort to disrupt Ukrainian command and control and defensive operations leading up to the Russian attack. There are two other examples that are worth mentioning. In November of 2021, Russia conducted an ASAT test that we talked about, and it targeted one of its derelict satellites in orbit. But this event created a substantial debris field that threatened the International Space Station to the point where NASA actually had to wake up the astronauts and tell them to get into their emergency escape capsules in the event that there was some sort of catastrophic collision. Thankfully nothing happened, but this reveals the kind of potentially nefarious effects of an ASAT—even if it’s not targeted against an opponent system. And then lastly, I just wanted to mention that in 2018 the French government accused Russia of spying on one of their military communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which is the farthest out orbit. The French space agency had observed what they called a Russian “inspector satellite” that had maneuvered and changed its orbits to within a few 100 meters to drops of communications. Geosynchronous orbit is a stationary orbit. So the fact that these satellites had maneuvered into place was really indicative of some sort of potentially hostile behavior. And this is an example of these rendezvous and proximity operations that we spoke about earlier. Host Lots of scenarios here, lots of threats, potential vulnerabilities. Kuzminski We talked about how states such as Russia and China remain the greatest threat to space critical infrastructure. Increasing resilience across all the space segments is probably the best way to enhance deterrence by denial. And what I mean by that is ensuring that the specific capabilities that we discussed have enough redundancy in systems, whether in orbit or on the ground through different pathways and through different partners, not just American systems. But partnering with our allies and also through commercial operators is the best way to ensure that these critical functions will remain online in the event of an attack. There’s also an opportunity for some degree of international partnership or multilateral initiative to help prevent the rampant weaponization of space or some sort of new arms race. This was a problem in the 80s because the reality is that the only space treaty that’s been ratified in the international community is the Outer Space Treaty, which was signed in 1967. And although that prohibits the deployment of nuclear weapons in space and on the moon, it hasn’t really been updated to reflect some of the more current threats that we talked about. There have been a few ongoing efforts to limit weapons proliferation in space under the auspices of the United Nations, but they’ve been problematic and generally weak. True progress will really require commitment and leadership by the great powers, not only the US and its European partners, but also Russia and China. And the current situation right now doesn’t look like there’s any prospect for that. Host Give us your final thoughts before we go. Kuzminski I think it’s important to remember that space critical infrastructure, like all critical infrastructure, is something that we all tend to take for granted. We don’t really think about it. It’s just kind of there and we just use it. But we already talked about how vulnerable it is. And it’s important to remember that it wouldn’t take a whole lot for an adversary or some sort of malicious actor to disrupt the capabilities that we rely on on a daily basis. This isn’t specifically for military forces, but also just for everyday people and large segments of modern society. I think it’s worth thinking about how someone might react if their smart board stops working or the credit card stops working or the Internet stops working or the planes stop flying, not only for individuals but also for states. But I don’t want to be super pessimistic. I do think that the future is exciting and offers a lot of potential for the benefit of mankind because the threshold for access to space and space-based capabilities is being lowered every day, especially through the growth of commercial operators and service providers. And I really think that the more access to these capabilities that exist and the more people that have access to these capabilities, it just helps level the playing field, not only in the security dimension, but also in economic and societal and commercial spheres. And I think that translates to better economic opportunities, especially for the developing world. And generally, a higher quality of life for most people. And I think that’s a good thing. I think there’s definitely a lot of things to be optimistic about when it. Comes to space this. Host This a very full chapter about critical infrastructure, security and resiliency. Listeners, if you’re interested, you can download it at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/957. Thanks for sharing your insights with us today, Frank. Kuzminski Thank you for having me. Host If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the author: Frank J. Kuzminski is a US Army officer and strategist. A native of Poland, he emigrated to the United States in 1990. He graduated from the United States Military Academy in 2004 with a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and was commissioned as an Infantry officer. After serving in multiple operational assignments worldwide, Kuzminski was assigned to the Army Staff at the Pentagon, and he later served as a strategic plans officer with I Corps at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. He is currently a doctoral candidate in international studies at the University of Washington. He holds a master of public administration degree from Harvard University. He is married with two children and speaks Polish and French. show less
Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO... read more
Every day, malicious actors target emerging technologies and medical resilience or seek to wreak havoc in the wake of disasters brought on by climate change, energy insecurity, and supply-chain disruptions. Countering Terrorism on Tomorrow’s Battlefield is a handbook on how to strengthen critical infrastructure resilience in an era of emerging threats. The counterterrorism research produced for this volume is in alignment with NATO’s Warfighting Capstone Concept, which details how NATO Allies can transform and maintain their advantage despite new threats for the next two decades. The topics are rooted in NATO’s Seven Baseline requirements, which set the standard for enhancing resilience in every aspect of critical infrastructure and civil society. As terrorists hone their skills to operate lethal drones, use biometric data to target innocents, and take advantage of the chaos left by pandemics and natural disasters for nefarious purposes, NATO forces must be prepared to respond and prevent terrorist events before they happen. Big-data analytics provides potential for NATO states to receive early warning to prevent pandemics, cyberattacks, and kinetic attacks. NATO is perfecting drone operations through interoperability exercises, and space is being exploited by adversaries. Hypersonic weapons are actively being used on the battlefield, and satellites have been targeted to take down wind farms and control navigation. This handbook is a guide for the future, providing actionable information and recommendations to keep our democracies safe today and in the years to come. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/957/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/countering-terrorism-on-tomorrows-battlefield/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> show less
For over a quarter century the United States and the European Union have been diligently planning and implementing policies and procedures to protect the critical infrastructure sectors that are vital to the prosperity and security the majority of their citizens enjoy. Given the evolving nature of threats against critical infrastructure, recent US and EU efforts have focused on enhancing collective critical infrastructure security and resilience (CISR) posture. The core objective of these... read more
For over a quarter century the United States and the European Union have been diligently planning and implementing policies and procedures to protect the critical infrastructure sectors that are vital to the prosperity and security the majority of their citizens enjoy. Given the evolving nature of threats against critical infrastructure, recent US and EU efforts have focused on enhancing collective critical infrastructure security and resilience (CISR) posture. The core objective of these CISR initiatives is to strengthen their ability to deter, prevent, reduce the consequences of, respond to, and recover from a broad array of vulnerabilities, hazards, and threats to critical infrastructure. Any such disruptions to or destruction of these critical infrastructure systems and assets can have damaging impacts on individual nations, the transatlantic economy and security environment, and the ability of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to fulfill its core tasks. This podcast is based on Chapter 10 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1). The goal of this chapter ultimately is to help Allies and partners better understand these two frameworks and apply their key principles and tenets to enhance the CISR posture in their respective countries. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/enabling-natos-collective-defense-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resiliency-nato-coe-dat-handbook-1/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode Transcript: “Comparing Policy Frameworks: CISR in the United States and the European Union” Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Alessandro Lazari, coauthor of “Comparing Policy Frameworks: CISR in the United States and the European Union.” Lazari’s been working as a specialist in critical infrastructure protection, resilience, and cybersecurity since 2004. He is currently a senior key account manager at 24 AG (F24 AG), focused on incident and crisis management in Europe. Alessandro, welcome to Conversations on Strategy. I’m glad you’re here. Alessandro Lazari Thank you very much indeed for inviting me over. It’s a pleasure to be here. Host You recently contributed to the book Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. The chapter you worked on compares policy frameworks of critical infrastructure security and resiliency in the US and the EU. The US (critical infrastructure security and resilience or) CISR framework: What do we need to know? Lazari I mean, thanks for asking about this. This has been part of my PhD studies—to go on deep between the lines about everything that the US has built in the past decades—and I have to say that this is really considerable. If you think that the (Presidential Decision Directive 63 or) PDD-63, just to give an example . . . presidential directive signed by (Bill) Clinton in May ’98 still stands as one of the brightest examples of CISR policies for a while—if you look at it nowadays, after so many years, you see how very well defined is the problem, how very well defined the mechanism to tackle it and to, you know, deal with it and to improve the overall posture of US against the threat of, you know, any potential attack to national critical infrastructure. I mean, there is many examples in . . . in the US policies of things that really worked. I can tell that they constitute a milestone to which many, many countries are looking at because of the comprehensiveness. Because I can tell also that due to its particular system, (the) US has experienced a wide range of events that span across all the potential threats of critical infrastructure in the 50 states and as a federal system, so they’ve really wanted to organize something that is really very, very big. Last but not least, the US has also considerable experience in maintaining the infrastructure. One of the greatest examples is the renovation that the US government did in the old railroad . . . you know, riverways in the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s is one . . . also a considerable milestone of the experience in the US. So, it’s very much worth looking at it because there is many countries that are now in the condition of tackling those challenges nowadays. So really, throughout the entire lifespan, you know, a lot of things that are really, you know, in use nowadays that really can provide example to the way the countries should deal with CISR nowadays. Host Let’s go into a little bit more detail. What currently guides the US CISR policy? Lazari One of the latest milestones in . . . in the US CISR policy is (Presidential Policy Directive 21 or) PPD-21, signed by Barack Obama in 2013. I mean, that can be considered one of the examples of the maturity of the policy in the US. You know, in announcing all the functional relationships among the very stakeholders involved in the life cycle of critical infrastructure security and resilience, there’s so many from both public and private side. From the public side, you have (the Department of Homeland Security or) DHS and all the departments that are involved, all the agencies, and from the other side, all the operators and the critical nodes within the country and so on and so forth. So, there is a considerable amount of stakeholders that need to talk to each other to be really aligned to do better. And here, we come to the second pillar that is information sharing. Once you have identified all the functional relationship nodes, you absolutely need to cut short the distance between them. So they need to become closer and closer because they need to talk to each other, and in a country like (the) US, it’s very difficult because it’s a very big country with a big number of stakeholders involved. So for sure, this is also a challenge. And last but not least, after you have enabled, you know, the recognition of the functional relationship and the improvement of the information sharing, you then need to enable one very important pillar that is always mentioned in PPD-21: that is analysis of incident threats and emerging risk. Because you do not only deal with today, you also deal with the future. So you need to understand with . . . how, you know, uh, risks are evolving, so the emerging one . . . and you need to analyze all the incidents and threats constantly because the threats evolve as much as the society because, you know, we have new enemies, new ways to attack the systems, and history evolves; we all know that. So once you put together really this critical mass of activities and knowledge, you can say you are really structuring well all your policy on . . . on CISR. Host Tell me about the EU framework: European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection. Lazari The EU, it’s based on the membership of the member states that are part of the EU. There were 28, and, after the Brexit, now it’s 27. You know, every time, the negotiation of each steps of the policy is something that really seeks for the involvement of them all on proposal from the European Commission that is normally proposing new pieces of policy and regulation in this field. But this entails every time that member states are involved because they have a stake, they take a joint decision. But the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection is really the very first milestone. As much as it is for PDD-63 in the case of US, it is really the very first piece of joint policy on critical infrastructure protection on the European side. And this really comes immediately after the September 11 attacks to, you know, London and Madrid in 2004, 2005. It really starts from an all-hazard approach with a clear intent of fighting against terrorism. So, financing of terrorism, all aspects of dealing with terrorism and the impact of terrorism, terrorism of critical infrastructure. Then, immediately, the EU recognized within the program that the all-hazard approach really needs to be developed because it’s not only terrorism that can threaten the continuity, you know, and the existence itself of critical infrastructure, but there is many other threats that can really disrupt or create issues. So, the European program has really put together the member states for the first time ever in discussing the critical infrastructure protection. This is still, nowadays, mainly the international level. The first thing you need: competency. It still relies on the member states that are part of the EU, but the program has, really, the 27 in the condition to discuss together all the challenges, all the state of play of each one of them. So to set new goals that are not overambitious for some of them, because you have to imagine when, in 2008, the European program was launched, there were five or six member states that really had a national framework for critical infrastructure protection, and many others that didn’t have one, or, you know, they really needed to amend it heavily because it was obsolete or not taken care of on all aspects. It can be said that the European program has really created that first spark that has enabled the EU to be in the state of play it is nowadays because, for the first time, it has really asked the member states to discuss national security outside of their own border, but in a joint, coordinated manner. Host So, there were some significant changes to the program in 2016 and 2020. I would love to hear about them. Lazari After a very long journey between 2008 and 2016, the EU in, um, 2016 has decided to move a little bit to focus not only on the critical, physical aspect of critical infrastructure but also on the cyber dimension. Of course, the member states were already dealing with that, but the real pro of the EU is that there is a harmonization effort going on. In 2016, we had the promulgation of the so-called Network and Information Security Directive. This really adds an important layer now on top of the CISR policy, which is very focused on cybersecurity or what we call “operator of essential services.” This new term that is different from critical infrastructure has been introduced to identify all of those services that are delivered through the mean of the network and information system. So, really, to narrow down the focus on the cyber dimension, of course, completely integrated together with the physical aspect, because these are absolutely complimentary. We cannot deal with one or just the other. You need to deal with all of them. And it is very important to notice that even though this first NIS—Network and Information Security—Directive was promulgated back in 2020, on the 16th of December, 2020, the European Commission proposed already an amendment of this directive to launch the second directive, the so-called (Network and Information Security 2 or) NIS 2. You can see that, here, the policy life cycle has been shortened because, normally, there is a very long policy cycle between one policy and another. You have an average of eight to nine years, even 10 sometimes. Here, you see that between 2016 and 2020, you have the promulgation of the first directive, already, in 2020, the proposal. And it’s very likely that in early 2023, this will alter its course, partially substituting the first one, but adding a lot more efforts and a lot more sectors. They go from 19 to 35, so there is a huge recognition and an improvement in the terms of sector. There is also the intent to differentiate between coverage of an essential service and important service. So to create also sort of criticality assessment between the two lists of designated operators. So, I think this is very important. There is also the announcement of the cooperation among the countries, the announcement of the functioning of the EU Computer Security Incident Response Teams—so, better sharing of information regarding the incident and some support. Last but not least, also, I can tell that, uh, 16th of December 2020 can be remembered as one of the really landmark of the EU CISR because on the very same day, apart from the proposal on the NIS 2 directive, same European Commission, sending a very strong message, published the proposal also for the . . . for the so-called Critical Entities Resilience Directive. Also, here, you see a new terminology, critical entity and resilience, that goes . . . it’s very far from critical infrastructure protection. So not only we move, like, the focus is really on resilience, so in being able to withstand, to bounce back after something has gone wrong, but, also, the commission introduced the term “entity.” This is also a clear message that the type of infrastructure that we can designate is not only old style, like we only operate private operator, but entity has been used also to identify offices, departments of the public administration and the government that are really pivotal for the functioning member states and the new institution and so on, so forth. So you see that we move from operator to entities and from protection to resilience. So I think this really be remembered what . . . of the days in which really the EU has recalled the importance of the complementarity of the physical and cyber protection and resilience and the importance, also, of the states and the public administration and the governments in securing national security, EU security, and the international security because, of course, this go beyond that. Host Going forward, what does critical infrastructure security and resilience look like for the US and the EU? Lazari Even though we have this really great example of the European program for critical infrastructure protection, the PDD-63, all the executive orders, you know, every one of them in the US are very comprehensive in, you know, tackling the problem in the way it should be tackled and with all the effects that they have on the European Union, on the allied countries in NATO and so on, so forth. I think that there is some things that . . . on which we . . . we really need to improve. One of these is hybrid threats because we often talk about physical and cybersecurity, but we do not consider the hybrid threats that are all these actions below the threshold of warfare that are still to the entity or to the state or to the operator that is targeted. There is no clarity which is who’s behind these actions. It . . . these actions are also coordinated. So, there could be a state or nonstate actor that has decided to put under pressure certain systems, certain layers of our modern society, and it can be done with a combination of conventional and unconventional types of plot. And this is, for sure, one of the hot topics. The European Union has already recognized the importance of hybrid threats in 2016, and, in 2020, there is two specific documents that are being released on the point they’re working out in creating a framework for governments and public administration to try and recognize some key indicators that there is hybrid threats, that you are subject to hybrid threats, because you have to . . . to imagine this extremely complex type of environment. It’s a number of events that are not correlated because they’re happening here and there. Therefore, you don’t have control on all of them, and, therefore, you cannot really see through the fog what’s going on. You just see the vertical events, but you don’t see the horizontal plot. Social tension, fake news propaganda—they are all part of this big element. Another thing that I think is part of the hybrid threat but is not properly dealt everywhere is that nonfinancial side. We know that all these operators of critical infrastructure, the way you want to call them, or critical entities or operators of essential services—they are companies. They may be on . . . on regulated market, on the stock exchange, on support. Therefore, someone may acquire them, part of them, part of the ownership. To me, the way we scrutinize a certain operation on national critical infrastructure is not yet clear because certain strategic infrastructure should remain of national property. I don’t mean it should be public. I mean that it should have national shareholders with minimum shareholders from abroad because they are strategic infrastructure on which, first of all, speculation shouldn’t take place, but, also, you have to imagine that once you see someone in the, you know, in the board of directors, everything is discussed there, immediately goes as to where as soon as the meeting is over. This shouldn’t really happen. And this is not only happening at the scrutiny, it’s already taking place for big infrastructure. For example, Italy has procedures for that. It’s very advanced, but the . . . the way the . . . the law is tuned on very big operations leaves every small operation outside. Here, we fall into another problem: third parties. It’s not only about critical infrastructure. Critical infrastructure relies on a constellation of third parties. Sometimes, they are also very small companies. They are very important in the supply chain. We don’t know who owns them. There is a little bit of scrutiny the company does on those other companies, third parties, but it’s not enough. So, the vetting procedure, the scrutiny procedure, they should really improve because we need to be sure that we are relying on the right people—that when something is going wrong, will help us out of the mud instead of leaving us in there. To identify friend or foe, as the . . . the military would say. So, this is, to me, among the hybrid threats, the financial aspect—also, the financial or third party. So, trustworthiness of the third party. Third-party risk assessment, to me, is fundamental. Host Do you have any final thoughts before we go? Lazari One last thing that is taking place anyway because of our footprint on planet Earth is climate change. To me, we need to work on the sustainability of critical infrastructure, and we need to do climate change risk assessments. This is something that already the Critical Entities Resilience Directive will ask to critical entities that will be designated under this directive in the future to do. So, to assess what is the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure, you have to imagine that the weather, among other things, is considerably changing. Fifteen years ago, no one could hear about, you know, medicane—that is, the . . . this Mediterranean hurricane, for example, in the Mediterranean. I come from the south of Italy, I’ve never heard about. We never heard “hurricane,” but, all of a sudden, in the last five years, we have initial glimpse of what it could look like, hurricanes. Of course, the proper hurricane, the one that you are experiencing in the US, you know, are much, much different, and their force of devastation is much higher. But, still, I can tell that these medicanes are already threatening our critical infrastructure because they have not been designed to withstand this type of event. Even though some of those that are designed for withstanding certain types of very severe weather events, they can be still disrupted, but ours are not designed at all. So, you can imagine the impact of if these hurricanes keep coming, and they keep increasing in . . . in their strength, the way they . . . we see them behave in other countries that are severely hit by hurricanes, this could really pose a threat to our critical infrastructure. So, for sure, the climate change has to be assessed. We will find ourselves with operators that have been used, like, operating extreme cold and in heat wave and the other way around. Operators used to work in extreme hot having cold wave, and, therefore, the reliabilities of these infrastructures may change, may be really threatened because they are not designed to operate in different condition or in very severe warm or cold. So yeah, that’s another thing that I would definitely take into account that will challenge critical infrastructure in the future. Host Thank you for your time. Thanks for your contribution. This was a real treat to talk with you. Lazari Thank you very much indeed, once again, for inviting, and, uh, all the best. Host Learn more about the CISR frameworks of the United States and the European Union at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. Author information: Alessandro Lazari has been working as a specialist in critical infrastructure protection, resilience, and cyber security since 2004. He is currently a senior key account manager at 24 AG, focused on incident and crisis management in Europe. From 2010–19, he provided policy support to two key initiatives at the European Commission: the European Programme for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Strengthening Europe’s Cyber Resilience. Lazari is a fellow in legal informatics at the University of Lecce’s School of Law (Italy) and a lecturer at COE-DAT’s Protecting Critical Infrastructure Against Terrorist Attacks course. He is the author of European Critical Infrastructure Protection, published in 2014 by Springer Inc. He holds a master’s degree in law and a PhD in computer engineering, multimedia, and telecommunications. show less
In most urbanized societies, water is taken for granted and little thought is given to how fragile the supply of this vital resource can be. A water emergency, however, such as a treatment plant outage, a water source contamination event, or natural disaster has the potential for significant disruption to society and the infrastructure that depends on water to function. Most other sectors of critical infrastructure, as well as activities of daily living, are highly dependent on the water... read more
In most urbanized societies, water is taken for granted and little thought is given to how fragile the supply of this vital resource can be. A water emergency, however, such as a treatment plant outage, a water source contamination event, or natural disaster has the potential for significant disruption to society and the infrastructure that depends on water to function. Most other sectors of critical infrastructure, as well as activities of daily living, are highly dependent on the water sector. As a result, consequences of a water emergency can be significant and may occur immediately without notice depending on the nature of the event. Thus, the security and resilience of the water sector is a key component of a nation’s civil preparedness that can have military and international implications as well. Terrorist threats to water delivery or contamination of water sources as a terrorist act can impact a nation’s ability to move and sustain its military forces and project military power when required. From the perspective of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), threats to the water sector in one member state could have ripple effects that limit or diminish NATO’s military mobility and force projection in support of its essential core tasks. Therefore, it is important to understand water sector risks and find ways to effectively mitigate them. While this chapter focuses on the US water sector and uses a case study from one of its most important metropolitan areas, the chapter provides a helpful framework for other Allies and partners to understand, adapt, and employ to their specific circumstances. This podcast based on Chapter 8 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) provides a foundation from which to better understand the criticality of water sector resilience. While this chapter focuses on the US water sector and uses a case study from one of its most important metropolitan areas, the chapter provides a helpful framework for other Allies and partners to understand, adapt, and employ to their specific circumstances. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/enabling-natos-collective-defense-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resiliency-nato-coe-dat-handbook-1/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode transcript “Water Sector Resilience in the Metropolitan Washington Case” from Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on strategy welcomes Steve Bieber, author of “Water Sector Resilience in the Metropolitan Washington Case.” Bieber has more than 30 years of experience in leading development and reform and water security, public policy, and environmental regulation. He’s currently the water resources program director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, Steve. Thanks for joining me today. You recently contributed to the book Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. Your chapter is about water sector resilience. Give us an overview of the water sector, please. Steve Bieber Sure, so thanks for having me on. You know, water includes both water you drink and (water) you use for bathing and cooking and so on. But obviously when you’re done doing all of that stuff, it has to go somewhere—which is down the drain and to a wastewater treatment plant. But probably the other part that folks don’t think about a whole lot is the source of the water in the first place. When you think of the water system and working with water utilities, usually the three biggest components are the source of it, collection and treatment of that, distributing it, and then treatment at the end when you’re done using the water. Just to give folks a little bit of perspective, here in the Metro Washington region, the average daily demand for drinking water (and it goes up and down depending on the time of year) is close to 500 million gallons a day. We’ve got over 14, 500 miles of water mains (so that’s more than the miles of roads we have in the region) and almost 120,000 fire hydrants. So if you ever think about the challenge of maintaining something like that … you know, and over 1,000,000 metered accounts and a little more than 5 million people who are served by public water and sewer. Host Talk to me about the risks and threats of the water sector. Bieber You know, I’m sure people have seen in the news lately—especially with what happened in North Carolina (electrical substation attack in Moore County on December 3, 2022)—you know, a lot of terrorism and Black Sky events are in the news. Those things can be a threat to the water sector as well. So there’s physical security threats like that but also things like climate change, rising sea level, aging infrastructure, you know. We have some infrastructure here in the Metro Washington region that dates back to the 1800s, and there are instances that sometimes they find pipes made out of wood when they’re doing main break repair. You can imagine trying to keep up with operations maintenance. And just repairing things like that over such a vast network is pretty hard. And so, from the utility perspective, you’re dealing with all sorts of threats. You know, natural threats, man-made threats, accidents that happen (whether it’s a contractor striking a pipe and breaking it or an oil spill in your source water, all sorts of things) and you have to be prepared to deal with all of it. Host Speaking of dealing with it, what are the key steps in resiliency planning? Bieber Sure, so I’ll start out maybe by saying a little bit about what resiliency is. So for the water sector, broadly, you can define it as the ability for a water utility to maintain their operations despite a challenge like, say, a water main break, and recover from the event as soon as possible. And we already talked about the stressors. Whether it’s weather, accidents, or some kind of intentional act, the idea is to be able to bounce back as quickly as you can. The other thing to be mindful of is resilience extends beyond just the utility and encompasses dependent and interdependent sectors, so things like the energy sector, health care. A big one in our region here is data centers, which are very dependent on water for cooling. All those local and regional assets are connected. And sometimes seemingly distant threats to resilience in another region can affect utilities here. So, for example, a spill in West Virginia could affect our water supply here in Metro DC, just as one example. And a lot of times these cross-sector dependencies are deep and complex, so it’s really important to think about those when you’re looking at doing resiliency planning. So here in the Metro Washington region, we actually do studies routinely to look at things like adequacy of our water and wastewater infrastructure to meet demand. So say we’re forecasting out to 2050. Do we have enough treatment? Enough distribution? Enough collection system to meet growing population and employment and all of that? We’ve historically looked at things like drought, which we know happens from time to time. And we do studies on that every five years to see do we have adequate infrastructure in place to be resilient against the drought of record. But one thing we decided to do a few years ago is expand that and take more of a system resiliency approach to look at other threats and hazards, not just drought, and see where we maybe have vulnerabilities and also see where we could make investments to buy down the risk from certain threats. So we got some federal grant money to do that. And let’s say you could kind of break down the steps into five phases. So, the first one was data collection and establishing system capabilities. So that was working with all the water utilities in our region. We held a series of workshops and determined, sort of, what do you have in terms of water treatment? Where do you get your source water from? How much distribution capacity do you have? Collect that all into one database, so we have a good baseline of what’s the capability that we have now. And then the second step was establishing a risk framework and defining a level of service. So basically, thinking about different failures events, how likely are they to happen, and what level of service do we want to have in the event that those things did happen? That’s really an important driver because I’ve seen utilities that use as their level of service in an emergency one gallon per person per day. I’ve seen others that have planned around 20 percent of your average daily demand. So as an example, if the average household uses 100 gallons a day, being able to provide 20 gallons a day, well, that’s 20 times more than one gallon. We used here, for our planning purposes, Average Winter Day demand, which would be even more than that. So as you can imagine, when things are changing by 20 times or 30 times, you’re planning assumption the capability you need to have to meet that demand is going to be vastly different, too. So once you’ve defined, you know kind of your level of service, the different failure events or scenarios you’re planning around (whether it’s intentional events, accidental events, weather events), you need to look at all of those and define what would the consequence be if those different things happen. For our purposes, we measured as how many days would people be out of water, and we called it people outage days. So it’s a combination of how many customers are affected? How many days would they be out before you could restore the water? And you can also use that to figure out an economic impact using some figures that FEMA and others put out. What would the cost to the region be under those different scenarios? So you can put a dollar amount on it. There’s other ways that you could quantify consequence. It could be things like, is there some critical mission in your region that if this happened you wouldn’t be able to fulfill? So say like for a military installation or something, or a nationally significant piece of critical infrastructure, and if the water was out it would impact that nationally significant infrastructure. So there’s other ways to measure it, but that’s the way we went about it. Once we had the scenarios we’re planning around, the likelihood of those things happening, and the impact, basically, if they happened, we identified different improvements you could make to mitigate those risks. So, it could be anything from interconnections between the different water systems and improving those to building more storage so you’re not dependent, say on just one water source, but you have storage, say in our case, like we use the Potomac River as a major source of our drinking water, having more storage off the Potomac River so if for some reason it wasn’t available, you’ve got an alternate source you can go to for a long period of time or a longer period of time. And then we used some simulation modeling to figure out which combinations of improvements (so whether it’s storage, interconnections, other types of improvements), which ones actually buy down the risk the most? Are there combinations of things you could do that buy it down even more? And you can basically put things into what I would call different buckets of combinations of scenarios, compare the benefits of one to the other, you can also see if there’s synergies of doing things in a particular sequence. And then you can find out which one basically has the best benefit-cost ratio. And once you have that information, you can come up with a plan for improvements of how you want to make your infrastructure more resilient. We kind of put ours into three categories. One was what we called “no regrets” improvements. So those would be things that the benefit-cost ratio is very high. It’s probably something you could get done quickly, and there’s an operational benefit to it. So even if the scenario you were planning around, say, a spill event or some kind of an attack, never happened the benefits to it still make it worth doing anyway. And then we had some that were more short-term—so things that had a high benefit-cost ratio and could be accomplished pretty quickly just because either the cost was low or there’s just not a long lead time to plan it and execute the improvement. And then there were other things that were sort of longer-term. If you’re looking at, say, building a new reservoir or something like that. That’s a major capital project. It’s not going to happen quickly, and you have to build that into your risk modeling. If it’s going to take 10 years to build something, you’re carrying the risk for that 10-year period until it’s built. And so you have to factor that in in determining which things you’re going to pursue. But we ended up with a mix of things that could happen quickly, kind of medium-term and longer-term. Host Your chapter uses Washington DC as a case study. I would love to hear more about this. Bieber You know the Metro Washington region, I think we’re the 6th largest metro region in the country, and, of course, on top of that, the home of our nation’s capital, a lot of the federal agencies, and we have a number of military installations in the region, too, and some nationally significant critical infrastructure. And we also have a long history of cooperating among the water and wastewater utilities here. We have agreements that go back several decades, cooperative water supply, cooperative wastewater treatment—different things like that. So we’re used to working together in the water sector to solve big problems. Especially since 9/11, everyone’s had more of a focus on security. But I would say in the last five or so years, that’s really shifted to not just security but security and resilience. And so that’s why we wanted to work together to look at what opportunities are there, not just at one utility alone but as a system in the region to collaborate and make improvements so that the system that serves the whole region is more resilient as a whole. And so that’s what drove us to take the systemresilience approach I talked about a moment ago—looking at things that are cross-cutting across the region, and that we could collaborate on together, which complements the individual utility vulnerability assessments and planning they’ve each done on their own. So, it was kind of another layer on top of that to identify things that are more regional system-wide, and bigger impact. And things that also, you know, you could work with your neighbor, maybe, to buy down the risk and be more resilient. More so than doing something on your own. Host You talked about simulations and planning and resiliency. How do you test for this? Do you have to wait for an event to happen? Is there a way to do a test run? Bieber Yeah, that’s a really good question. So no, you don’t have to wait for an event to happen. Most risk-based approaches, whether it’s the one we used, or there’s some slightly different ones that are used in other sectors, but they have a lot of things in common. And one of those things is getting a group of subject matter experts together. In this case, it was our utility companies together, talk about scenarios of events they’re concerned about. In some cases, this is things that have actually happened before. So, say, like an oil spill or a water main break or a failure of equipment—like a pump failure or something like that. And they have a pretty good idea of how often does that happen? How likely is it to happen? If it happens, what are the consequences of it happening? And so those are real events that we have data on, and we can put a pretty good number to it. But then there’s other things that you also want to look at that are more hypothetical. So how likely is it that a rail car could fall in the Potomac River? Or how likely is it that you’d have a terrorist attack? You know you can go down the list (not an endless list of scenarios, but of scenarios that are things that maybe keep utilities up at night). You know it could happen and it would be, even though it’s a low probability, a very high impact event. And using this same group of subject matter experts, kind of put a number to each of those. So, in our case, we kind of had bins of things of like, “it happens once every 10 years,” “it happens once every 30 years,” “It happens once every 100 years.” Or maybe it’s less than one every 100 years, but you can get an idea of sort of how you would figure out how likely is it to happen. And then you can combine that with your estimate of if event A happened, how many people would be out of water? How long do we think it would be before we’d be back on our feet, and we’d restore water service? And then you can combine those things. So, the likelihood of it happening, the consequence of it happening. And you can get a sense of between those two things how worried are we about that and begin to come up with a list of which things are the most concerning, which things are the least concerning, and a bunch of stuff in between. And you can also put costs to all of that, which allows you to get to the benefit-cost of here’s how much it would cost. Here’s how likely it is to happen, (and) the impact of it, and you can calculate a benefit-cost ratio that. We used a pretty sophisticated modeling approach, but my point of bringing this up is if you’re a smaller utility or you just don’t have the resources to do that right away, it’s not like you need to throw up your hands and go, “Oh well, I can’t do anything.” Because you can get a group of your own employees together and just use your best professional judgment on which things are we most worried about? How likely do we think they are to happen one relative to the other? What would the impact be if it happened? How much would it cost us to bounce back from it, or to mitigate it? And what’s the cost to our customers, even if it’s just how long they would be out of service? And you can use that to come up with a pretty good list of priorities that’s probably going to be very close to what you would come up with if you used the more sophisticated modeling approach. And at least it gets you started. Host What are your recommendations for water security and resilience? Bieber I’m a big proponent of data-driven decision making and using a risk-based approach. In the water sector— all public utilities—they’ve all been required already to do a vulnerability assessment to come up with security plans, different things like that. So, you already will have a lot of the data you need to get started, but, of course, the landscape is dynamic. It’s always changing. You know you may have the vulnerability assessment you did a year ago. Maybe it was five years ago. But it at least gives you a starting point. And then I would say take that, get a group of subject matter experts together, and just start going on developing a risk-based approach to planning. And there are a lot of good resources available online. American Water Works Association actually has standards for the J 100 standard for doing this kind of planning. So that’s one standard that’s widely followed in the water industry, but there’s also tools that are available for free. So, if you go search US EPA and water resilience, you’ll find a couple of tools they have online that you can get started with today. It will ask you questions. You fill it in as you go along, and you’ll get some recommendations out at the end. They have one that’s specific to climate change and building in resilience to that and another that’s more generic and more geared toward the types of events like we’re talking about, you know, whether it’s intentional or accidental events. Yeah, you do a little poking around online, you’ll find more tools, too. Another good resource that a lot of the utilities here in our region have taken advantage of, and if you’re in the US is available to you for free, is connecting with your protective security advisor. So, the DHS cyber and Infrastructure Security Administration they have protective security advisors in every state. In our case here in the DC metro region, we actually have three. They will come out and do a risk and resilience assessment of your infrastructure at no cost. And they can cover all sorts of things from physical security, other types of events like spill events, or other things like that. They can even come out and do a cyber assessment if you’re more worried about cyber risk and how to mitigate that. They’re free. It’s a good way to get started, rather than waiting and not doing anything. Whether it’s online, someone coming out for free, hiring a contractor, getting started with your own employees, there’s lots of ways to get going and take a risk-based approach and see where the opportunity is to make yourself more resilient. You know, buy down the risk on things you think are either most impactful or most likely to happen. Host What a great list of resources. Thank you for sharing that. Also, thank you for your time today. Bieber Yeah, I appreciate having the chance to talk today and look forward to working on more of this in the future. Host Learn more about water sector resilience at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. Author information: Steve Bieber has more than 30 years of experience in leading development and reform in water security, public policy, and environmental regulation. He is currently the water resources program director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MWCOG) and is responsible for managing its water resources programs, including the regional Anacostia Restoration Partnership, water security programs, drinking water and wastewater planning, drought management, urban stream restoration, and other related environmental programs for local governments and water utilities in the Washington, DC, area. Bieber holds a bachelor of science degree in zoology from Michigan State University, a master of science degree in oceanography from Old Dominion University, and a master of public administration degree from the University of Baltimore. show less
Communications form the critical backbone of the modern world, connecting more people and more devices more completely than ever before. The benefits of this hyper-connected society drive ever-increasing reliance on secure, reliable, and resilient communications. Potential adversaries to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization certainly understand the importance of communications—those they seek to target and those they use themselves—so it is critical to fully understand the sector, the... read more
Communications form the critical backbone of the modern world, connecting more people and more devices more completely than ever before. The benefits of this hyper-connected society drive ever-increasing reliance on secure, reliable, and resilient communications. Potential adversaries to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization certainly understand the importance of communications—those they seek to target and those they use themselves—so it is critical to fully understand the sector, the risks it faces, and the best ways to mitigate those risks. This podcast based on Chapter 9 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) provides a foundation from which to better understand the criticality of communications for national security and emergency preparedness and common important characteristics of the sector and their implications for security and resilience. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/enabling-natos-collective-defense-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resiliency-nato-coe-dat-handbook-1/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode transcript “Communications Resilience” from Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Chris Anderson, author of “Communications Resilience.” Anderson’s, an incident management and infrastructure protection expert with three decades of government, military, and private-sector experience. He’s currently the principal advisor for national security and emergency preparedness at Lumen. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, Chris. I’m glad you’re here. Chris Anderson Thanks for having me. Host You recently contributed a chapter to Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. Your chapter talks about communications resilience, the backbone of the modern world, in your words. Give us an overview of the communication sector, please. Anderson It’s really hard to overstate how important commercial communications is to government and military communications of all kinds. So, sort of the traditional national security kinds of things—command-and-control networks, intelligence sharing. Even highly classified information typically travels over commercial networks for a big part of its lifespan. But then as you start thinking even in more detail, things like civil preparedness, police, fire, EMS discussions, how you issue civil defense alerts to the civilian population, et cetera. On top of all that, communications is critical to economies and the citizenry in general. In the US, we’ve started this concept called national critical functions, which sort of distinguishes the inherently governmental functions from the other things the nation needs to be able to do in order to have a vibrant economy and support the government and keep citizens safe, et cetera. And comms is really central to a lot of those national critical functions. The sector itself is incredibly diverse. So when we talk about communications, and in the book chapter I talk about sort of the breadth of communications as encompassing sort of the traditional wireline services. You know, twisted pair copper and fiber optic cables that make up the old, you know, Bell telephone kind of networks that have now become the broadband connections that we all use in homes and businesses throughout the world. It also includes wireless communications. So wireless, you know, everyone thinks of 4G point-to-point5G cellular communications, but wireless also includes things like point-to-point, microwave and other uses of the radio frequency spectrum. There’s the cable business, which is in some ways very similar to wireline. I like to stress cable in particular because I think there used to be a civil defense perspective of like, well, that’s not really critical infrastructure. You know, if somebody can’t watch Game of Thrones for a day or two, that’s not a big deal. But increasingly, the cable companies provide the same sort of broadband backhaul, for example, that enables wireless communications. So they’re really critical too. Similarly, with broadcast. Broadcast TV and radio, not just about entertainment, but in some ways that is the most survivable, giving you that one-to-many communications capability to reach a large number of people. One of the things I like to say is, you know, “you can hand crank a radio. And so a citizen on their own, with nothing more than a radio with a hand—crank you can communicate with that person in a pinch.” And then, of course, satellite networks which are themselves undergoing a massive transformation right now. Across all five of those segments, though, there are a couple of things that I think are important to keep in mind as we think about communication resilience. Probably the biggest one is really over the last 20 years, the massive transition of communications technology from primarily analog to primarily digital. So the transition to Internet Protocol packets for voice, for video. Almost everything that’s pumped over radio frequency is now packetized, digitized, and then reassembled on the other end. That meshed and packetized network is, by its nature, resilient. The packets can travel multiple paths, and, in fact, that’s the whole design of the Internet. It was designed to be resilient, and if that path is no longer available, now I’ll go this path, and I’ll still get the packets there in time. The market itself is highly competitive the different carriers and cross modes and within modes are fiercely competitive with each other. But at the same time, the nature of the business requires that we work closely together as well. So it’s this strange sort of coopertition (cooperation + competition) model that makes it all work. You know, for example in interconnection, the whole point of communication networks are to be able to communicate with whomever you want. And so that means we have to exchange traffic with each other from carrier to carrier, from mode to mode, in order to get those packets where they need to go. And that interconnection implies a couple of really critical things. One is the importance of international standards so that things will work across these vast and disparate networks, (for example) the need for very big companies to work seamlessly with very small companies who have very different perspectives on how to operate their networks. And it also means that we’re generally interconnected with potential adversaries. So the network of networks that is the Internet has a lot of players on there and not all of them have our best interests at heart. The last thing I think is important to understand about communications is just how tightly integrated we are with other critical infrastructures. Pretty much every other critical infrastructure relies on comms for it to be able to function in its normal capacity. And comms is itself reliant on other critical infrastructures—in particular, heavily reliant on commercial electric power. And where commercial electric power is either out because of a temporary disturbance or is simply not available, then the continued availability of liquid fuels for on-site generation becomes really, really important. Host Let’s talk about threats to communications. What are the ways in which the integrity, availability, or confidentiality of communication systems might be degraded or compromised? Anderson In the book, I talked through the “Big Three” set of things that can impact communications infrastructure. The first one is natural disaster and there’s physical attack. And I’ll lump in there industrial mishap kinds of accidental damages. And then same thing on the cyber front. There is cyberattack and cyber misconfiguration mistake kind of issues. There are some similarities across those three and some differences to tease out among them. So in terms of natural disaster, you know, sort of the gamut of bad things Mother Nature can throw at us also damage information systems and communication networks. So that’s storms, hurricanes and tornadoes, and derechos and you name it. Those can variously cause different types of physical damage either to key facilities (central offices, Internet exchange points, or to conduits, either underground cabling or aerial fiber. Stuff that’s not aerial, tends to be more susceptible to things like flooding or even to things like train derailments, or things that can damage the conduits—earthquakes for example). The other thing that natural disasters tend to do is impact the availability of commercial electricity. So if commercial electricity isn’t available then access to alternate fuel sources becomes really important. There’s also Mother Earth’s environment. So there’s geomagnetic storms and space weather that can impact satellites and can impact, depending on the frequency bands, radio frequency spectrum to varying degrees. Transitioning more to sort of the man-made attacks. Physical attacks. Either attacks or mishaps. As I mentioned, that sort of meshed packetized network makes these harder to be impactful, but there are still areas of concern around, for example, choke points. So things like undersea cable routes often have either one viable path (the cheapest shortest path where you’ll see a lot of cable stacked up) or they’ll be natural choke points. You know, for example, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, there is a pretty tight choke point just off the coast of Egypt. A bunch of undersea cables run through there and then run down through the Red Sea on their way to wherever they are. They also have other concentration points like Internet exchange points and sort of massive data centers, which all by themselves can be huge and massive and important assets, but they often cluster together. Thinking about physical attacks, bombs and cutting of the cables, there’s also the less-nefarious accidents that can accomplish the same thing. Whether that’s, you know, construction facilities and a backhoe tearing through your fiber optic cable. And then finally, there’s, in the radio frequency world, spectrum-based attacks, so spoofing and jamming are also ways that you can physically, I’m doing air quotes here that you can’t see because it’s a podcast, but it’s a similar kind of attack vector. And then finally there’s cyberattack vector. So comms is an interesting character in this realm because we’re both a conduit for those attacks. But we’re also a target. And so those targets, in turn, target exactly as you teed up the confidentiality, the integrity, the availability of networks and data through a range of methods. I mean from an availability perspective, there are distributed denial-of-service attacks, where you flood the target system with so many requests for service that the system just can’t answer all those requests and it becomes unavailable to legitimate use. There’s ransomware where you’re able to, you know, get the ransomware on a system (and) shut it down so now it’s unavailable for its normal uses. Or disruptive malware. In terms of confidentiality, you have, you know some of those same players . . . ransomware, destructive malware, also routing attacks that target the ability to how packets determine where they move and the path that they take to get from the originating server to the destination server. If you can hijack that route, you can put a man in the middle and either listen in on those packets as they transit or potentially reroute them to somewhere else. And then finally, there’s integrity attacks on communications. Again, ransomware, advanced persistent threats. And I think integrity, in particular, with the book’s focus on critical infrastructure with respect to terrorist attacks, thinking through the potential complex attack scenarios where adversaries may seek to harm the integrity of communications so that they can control messaging. So that’s attacks on broadcast networks, on social media, on the places people will go for “reliable” sources of news that if the adversaries are able to track the integrity of those, they can amplify the effects of, say, a physical attack that’s coupled with, you know, social media and misinformation/disinformation. Host What are your suggestions for improving communications resilience against terrorist attacks or other threats? Anderson Well, I think in the interest of time, I’m going to limit it to sort of three things that I would talk about in terms of lessons learned. The first one is blue Sky relationship building. If you think back to even the way that I described how communication systems work, comm providers need to work with other comm providers who need to work with first responders who need to work with national security and national defense experts. And those relationships can’t just happen after “Boom” has happened. And now you need to figure out how to work together. It’s really important under blue-sky scenarios. To establish those relationships, work through how are you going to coordinate flow of information? Flow of request? What’s the disaster reporting process so people know in advance here’s what kind of information the government is going to need. And here’s the format I’m going to give it to them. And oh, by the way, what’s the definition for this one esoteric thing that actually means something different and different contexts. It builds those cross-sector relationships. Not just from comm provider to comm provider but making sure that we’re working with other infrastructure providers, especially energy, but not only energy. And then exercising and testing how all that stuff will work. So when the black-sky day comes, you have mechanisms that you’ve built out that you’ve practiced. That you know how to use. With people you’re used to talking to. You just can’t overstate enough how important that is in this public-private partnership. The second suggestion I would have is, you know, really methodically, look to identify and mitigate risk. So I talked earlier about those sort of choke points and concentration points. Make sure if you have mission-critical communications that you understand what that path diversity is. That it’s not just logical path diversity, but it’s physical path diversity, depending on your resilience needs. It doesn’t maybe necessarily buy you all that much to have two redundant circuits if they both go through the same central office or over the same undersea cable, et cetera. And then using, on the cyber front, you know, whatever baseline practices are most appropriate to your communications network, know them and use them. In the US, we use the NIST cybersecurity framework. The sector itself has done a huge amount of work to tailor what the NIST framework means to the different subsets of communication. But really, those cyber best practices are the really important resilience builders upfront. And then the third thing is to think through what will be the likely post-incident resilience enablers? How do you get comms back up and on its feet quickly so that the impacts of any disaster or any attack are minimized? And the big three that always come up, whether it’s an attack whether it’s a natural disaster are access, fuel, and security. So access. How are first responders or the military or whomever going to control who gets in and gets out to the disaster area. And making sure that commercial providers understand where they are in that hierarchy (and) what they need to do in order to be properly credentialed to get in at the point at which it’s appropriate and safe for them to do so. The second one is fuel, so it’s not just, “Hey, how do we prioritize commercial power.” But in a disaster where commercial power has been significantly impacted, suddenly the demand for those alternate fuel sources is going to be huge. And thinking through how that prioritization is going to work, which doesn’t even necessarily mean comms should be at the front of the line because there are going to be hard decisions to make. Does the hospital get that truckload of fuel? Does the state Emergency Operations center get it? Does the central office facility that’s routing everyone’s communications get it? But you need to think through those things in advance because that’s gonna be a critical decision point, a critical resilience enabler for post-disaster preparedness. And then the last one is security. After a big, particularly a broad (in terms of geography) disaster or attack, security is going to be an issue. So communication providers are going to be very concerned about putting personnel in harm’s way where it may or may not be safe. They’re going to be nervous about putting expensive equipment out in a field somewhere if they can’t secure it. And certainly, in this sort of a post-disaster environment, we’ve unfortunately seen that generators are pretty high-value commodities. And a generator that’s sitting on its own in a field next to a cell tower is a pretty tempting target. So thinking through how our government and industry going to work together to identify what’s safe. What’s appropriately safe for communications providers to put people and equipment out in the field, and then what are the ways that we can work together to make sure those are kept safe over the course of their response? Those are the big three—blue-sky relationship building, identify and methodically mitigating the risks that you see, and then thinking through what post-incident resilience enablers are and how you’re going to function them. And if you can do those three things, you’ll go a long way towards building communications resilience for your nation. Host So much food for thought here. Thank you so much for your time and for spending it with us today. Anderson Great, thanks for having me. Host Learn more about enabling NATO’s collective defense and communications resilience at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. Author information: Chris Anderson is an incident management and infrastructure protection expert with three decades of government, military, and private-sector experience. He is currently the principal adviser for national security and emergency preparedness at Lumen, a US-based global network provider and tech company. He previously held various senior leadership positions in emergency management and national security at the US Federal Communications Commission and US Department of Homeland Security. Anderson began his career as a US Navy helicopter pilot, completing 24 years of active and reserve service. He holds master’s degrees in national security strategy from the National War College and in management information systems from Bowie State University, and he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia. show less
Released 6 January 2023
This podcast based on Chapter 1 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1 answers the questions: What is critical infrastructure? Why is it important? What is the difference between critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and critical infrastructure security and resilience (CISR)? What are some of the key terms defined in national CISR policy? What are the core areas of activity or work... read more
Released 6 January 2023 This podcast based on Chapter 1 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1 answers the questions: What is critical infrastructure? Why is it important? What is the difference between critical infrastructure protection (CIP) and critical infrastructure security and resilience (CISR)? What are some of the key terms defined in national CISR policy? What are the core areas of activity or work streams involved in implementing CISR policy in and across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations? The answers to these specific questions provide the contextual basis for understanding why CISR is a quintessential societal task for maintaining national security, economic vitality, and public health and safety in a world filled with increasing levels of risk. For NATO member states, building and enhancing CISR at the national level is necessary to safeguard societies, people, and shared values and also provide the foundation for credible deterrence and defense and the Alliance’s ability to fulfill its core tasks of collective defense, crisis management, and cooperative security. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/enabling-natos-collective-defense-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resiliency-nato-coe-dat-handbook-1/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode transcript “Understanding Critical Infrastructure” from Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Ronald Bearse, author of “Understanding Critical Infrastructure,” featured in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure and Resiliency. Bearse is an expert in critical infrastructure protection and national preparedness, with more than 23 years of experience in the US Department of Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury. Ron, welcome to Conversations on Strategy. You recently contributed to a book, Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. I’m looking forward to hearing about your chapter, but first, thank you for being here. Ronald Bearse Well thanks Steph. Yeah, I’m happy to discuss that with you today. Host What is critical infrastructure? Bearse Although there’s no real global or standard or universal definition of critical infrastructure, most, if not all, European and NATO nations, which have a national CIP or CISR policy or national plan, define critical infrastructure as those physical and cyber systems, facilities, and assets that are so vital that their incapacity or their destruction would have a debilitating impact on a nation’s national security, economic security, or national public health and safety. We kind of understand them (and most people do) as those facilities and services that are so vital to the basic operations of a given society 9like the one we live in) or those without which the functioning of a given society would be greatly impaired. In our book, for example, we talk about critical infrastructure sectors. Here in the United States, for example, we have 16 critical infrastructure sectors where assets and systems and networks, whether they’re physical or virtual, are considered so vital to the United States that their incapacitation or destruction would have a debilitating effect on our national economic security or public health and safety. Those sectors include, here in the United States, and for most Western nations, the same types and same sectors, such as the chemical sector or the dam sector, commercial facilities. Communications sector. Critical manufacturing. The defense industrial base. Emergency services obviously is one. Energy. Financial services sector, food, agriculture, government facilities, healthcare and public healthcare sector. Information. Information and technology. Nuclear reactors, materials and waste sector. The transportation infrastructure sector is huge as well. As well as water and wastewater systems. So there are a number of economic areas, and we call them sectors, that have critical infrastructure, the loss of which would really be a problem. Within NATO, Allied Command Operations defines critical infrastructure as a nation’s infrastructure, assets, facilities, systems, networks, and processes that support the military, economic, political, and/or social life on which a nation and/or NATO depends. NATO mission readiness depends on the assured availability of critical infrastructure. Let there be no mistake about that. Critical infrastructure, which I should mention is mostly owned by the private sector. For example, during large NATO operations for exercises, about 90 percent, and that’s nine zero percent, of military transport, relies on civilian ships and civilian railways or civilian aircraft. Host Why is critical infrastructure important? Bearse Critical infrastructure is vital because it enables a nation’s productivity and quality of life and economic progression by driving economic growth and creating jobs and improving efficiency. It also provides essential services, such as energy and water, electricity, and transportation. It also connects communities via transport and communications networks, which enables the flow of goods and information—not just across the country but between countries and across the world. Another reason why it’s vital has to do with the fact that it’s highly interconnected today, Stephanie, meaning that critical infrastructure systems often depend on other areas or other critical infrastructure to operate. If it is severely disrupted or destroyed, it can cause severe catastrophic consequences, locally, regionally, nationally, and even globally. And also, if it happens in one sector, you can have cascading events that can cross over into other sectors as well. An increasing number of nations depend on critical infrastructure located in another country, or worse, controlled or operated or owned directly or indirectly by a foreign adversary. And yet another reason is that millions of critical infrastructure systems and the gazillions of devices which connect to them are connected to the Internet. And because of that, you know, we see that there is that vast increase of vulnerability attached with those devices. We’ve all witnessed how COVID-19 and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine have impacted critical infrastructure. The critical infrastructure of NATO and partner nations—those nations face a rising, unprecedented wave of malicious cyber activities and destabilizing and devastating consequences—and public and private entities that are indispensable to the functioning and well-being and cohesion of allied societies (such as energy providers and telecommunications operators and banks and hospitals). And we’re certainly aware of the current situation, hybrid warfare and real actual warfare at the conventional level. And Europe and Ukraine and seeing how critical infrastructure is being targeted that way. Host In the context of keeping critical infrastructure safe and functioning, what’s the difference between critical infrastructure protection and critical infrastructure security and resilience? Bearse Humankind has been protecting critical infrastructure for thousands of years, Stephanie. It goes back a long time. In the Peloponnesian Wars, infrastructure then that nations fought over included ships and grain and ports and brick walls around the cities, if you will. And wells where water was. And you know, 1,000 years later you had the fall of Rome. And with the fall of Rome, you had the contribution of the aqueducts falling apart for a variety of reasons. But again, critical infrastructure in the Roman Empire. The shift that has happened over the last 20 years alone is due to the fact that stakeholders have learned that it’s almost impossible to protect critical infrastructure from all the growing risk factors that they face—where we are moving from the protection of critical infrastructure to securing it and making it more resilient against threats. For example, when we talk about security. Security in the CISR, the S, if you will, means reducing the likelihood of successful attacks against critical infrastructure with the effects of natural or man-made disasters through the application of physical means or defensive cybersecurity measures. And resilience is the ability of critical infrastructure to resist, absorb, recover from, or successfully adapt to changing conditions, including attacks. The concept of critical infrastructure security and resilience is particularly useful to inform policies that mitigate the consequences of such events and speak to the vital need, again, for nations to develop and implement a comprehensive risk-management strategy. Karen McDowell, who 10 years ago was an information security analyst at the University of Virginia, said something that still haunts me and should actually haunt everybody listening in today. I believe she said, “public opinion isn’t going to lead the push to better protection of critical infrastructure since most people aren’t aware of the security issues and don’t even know that they are at risk, let alone understand the risks to critical infrastructure.” Host What are the core areas of activity or workstreams involved in implementing CISR policy in and across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nations? Bearse There are really three essential tasks—assess the risk, improve security, enhance resilience, right? It’s all in those three. That’s the basic process. But the process of accomplishing those three tasks can be extraordinarily complex and a continuing challenge because it requires numerous what I call “streams of work” to be performed by a number of stakeholders—such as government agencies, (whether they’re federal, state, regional, other types of government agencies), the owners and operators in the private sector themselves of critical infrastructure, academicians, people who do research, subject matter experts, international organizations, technology vendors, people that run the ISACS (information sharing and analysis centers). I mean, there’s just many, many, many stakeholders out there. But what’s really, really important is that the major work streams basically include the following. All these are discussed in the book and how they are applied at different levels and case studies and whatnot. But we need to establish very clear roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders. That’s a major workstream just doing that—identifying and determining the criticality of a nation’s infrastructure. The protection of critical infrastructure is a national responsibility. NATO doesn’t go out and identify what’s critical for other nations. It’s up to that nation to do that. It’s up to that nation to figure out what they’re going to do. NATO can certainly help them. The nations help each other as well, and we certainly want to help our partner nations. So another big workstream here is mapping critical infrastructure dependencies and interdependencies. Determining critical infrastructure vulnerabilities . . . I can’t say enough about that as a workstream. Using applicable risk management, risk analysis, and risk management tools, if you will. Risk assessment tools and approaches. A lot of different critical infrastructure sectors have defined some very good tools to use to do risk-based assessments. They are available to NATO and NATO partner nations. Establishing crisis management capabilities is important. Another key workstream is establishing public-private partnerships between government and private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure Establishing and implementing collaboration and information-sharing mechanisms between government and the owners and operators is also important. Developing and exercising continuity of operations and information technology, disaster recovery plans, and providing physical and cyber security and resilience measures is a big workstream, if you will. Ensuring the integrity and security and continuity of critical infrastructure supply chains is huge. Expanding opportunities to deliver CISR education and training. Another key workstream, this one it’s dear to my heart, is implementing a robust (and when I say robust, I mean thorough) test training and exercise program to determine the extent to which a nation’s current CISR policy or legislation or plans, procedure, systems, research and development efforts, you name it, are either meeting, falling below, or exceeding prescribed requirements and established standards. Another key part of the workstream that’s vital to this is fostering the local, regional, national, and international cooperation, collaboration, coordination, communication, and concentration that is required to produce results. So, one of the reasons why this book was actually published is because more nations need to be developing and implementing a national CISR policy. There are many reasons, again, why countries haven’t started down this road, Steph. Let me just share with you the top five really quick. The top three basically, and I believe these are in the correct order, are money, money, and money. The fourth reason is that most countries have been protecting things that they deem important or critical the same way for many years. The military protects W and X. The minister of interior protects Y. And the Department of beta protects Z. And rarely do they coordinate their efforts due to turf, territory, and tradition. And the fifth reason revolves around the realization that CISR is complex, and it is one of the most difficult things a country can do. Even if it had the money and resources to do it. The good news in this, Steph, is that the book that we are discussing today and it’s follow-on book provides several lessons to be learned as I call them. Good practices. Case studies, methods, tools, (and) approaches and experiences that are designed to promote the security and resilience of all NATO populations and strengthen their ability to function in a way that most people want them to during crisis management and to support collective defense or external operations. Failing to achieve CISR goals or objectives is going to reduce NATO’s mission capability and adversely impact member states’ collective societies because critical infrastructure is the foundation on which vital society and economic functions depend. Host Thank you so much for your time today, I really appreciate it. Bearse Thanks, Steph. It’s been a pleasure talking to you and your listening audience. And again, it’s a hot topic. It always will be. And it’s a great way for nations to strengthen their capabilities and for the avid reader in national security, if he really or she really wants to, wrap their head around why things are happening in today’s world and how we could get a better grip on preventing some of those bad things from happening, these books also represent good reads, so with that take care. Host Same to you, thank you. Learn more about critical infrastructure, why it matters, and how to protect it in the monograph visit press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. Author information: Ronald Bearse is an expert in critical infrastructure protection and national security preparedness, with more than 23 years of experience in the US Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Treasury. He is an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and an adviser to NATO’s Centre of Excellence for the Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT), where he teaches in COE-DAT’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks training program. Bearse earned an undergraduate degree in political science and Soviet studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a master of public administration degree from George Washington University. He is a distinguished graduate of the US National Defense University and a former senior fellow at George Mason University’s Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security show less
In 2014 NATO’s Centre of Excellence-Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) launched the inaugural course on “Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks.” As this course garnered increased attendance and interest, the core lecturer team felt the need to update the course in critical infrastructure (CI) taking into account the shift from an emphasis on “protection” of CI assets to “security and resiliency.” What was lacking in the fields of academe, emergency... read more
In 2014 NATO’s Centre of Excellence-Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) launched the inaugural course on “Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks.” As this course garnered increased attendance and interest, the core lecturer team felt the need to update the course in critical infrastructure (CI) taking into account the shift from an emphasis on “protection” of CI assets to “security and resiliency.” What was lacking in the fields of academe, emergency management, and the industry practitioner community was a handbook that leveraged the collective subject matter expertise of the core lecturer team, a handbook that could serve to educate government leaders, state and private-sector owners and operators of critical infrastructure, academicians, and policymakers in NATO and partner countries. Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency is the culmination of such an effort, the first major collaborative research project under a Memorandum of Understanding between the US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), and NATO COE-DAT. The research project began in October 2020 with a series of four workshops hosted by SSI. The draft chapters for the book were completed in late January 2022. Little did the research team envision the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February this year. The Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant, successive missile attacks against Ukraine’s electric generation and distribution facilities, rail transport, and cyberattacks against almost every sector of the country’s critical infrastructure have been on world display. Russian use of its gas supplies as a means of economic warfare against Europe—designed to undermine NATO unity and support for Ukraine—is another timely example of why adversaries, nation-states, and terrorists alike target critical infrastructure. Hence, the need for public-private sector partnerships to secure that infrastructure and build the resiliency to sustain it when attacked. Ukraine also highlights the need for NATO allies to understand where vulnerabilities exist in host nation infrastructure that will undermine collective defense and give more urgency to redressing and mitigating those fissures. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/">Click here to read the book.</a> <a href="https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/2022/european-security/nato-transatlantic-relations/enabling-natos-collective-defense-critical-infrastructure-security-and-resiliency-nato-coe-dat-handbook-1/">Click here to watch the webinar.</a> Episode Transcript: Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) Stephanie Crider (Host) You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Carol V. Evans, editor of Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Infrastructure Security and Resiliency, which was published by the US Army War College Press in November 2022. Evans is the director of the Strategic Studies Institute and the US Army War College Press. She brings 30 years of expertise in the areas of mission assurance, crisis and consequence management, asymmetric warfare, terrorism, maritime security, and homeland security. Since 2014, Evans has been a lecturer at the NATO Center of Excellence for the Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches its Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks training program. She holds a Master of Science degree and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the London School of Economics. Thanks so much for joining me. I’m really excited to talk with you today. You recently edited a book for NATO, Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience. Why this book? Why now? Dr. Carol Evans Well, let me take a step back and that is explain to our audience why NATO? The SSI (Strategic Studies Institute) has had and enjoyed a very strong relationship with the NATO Center of Excellence (for the) Defense Against Terrorism in Ankara, Turkey. This book is the result of a joint research project between the two organizations. COE-DAT (it’s acronym) really focused on looking at critical infrastructure because terrorist attacks against that infrastructure have been increasing in time. And so, when we think about critical infrastructure and why now, we also need to examine the fact that infrastructure is being increasingly targeted; you just need to take a look at the news, for example, of the Russian attacks against the Ukraine infrastructure. Or if you look at, within Europe, strategic penetration by the PRC and some of their economic investments in telecommunications, in real estate, and even in the port infrastructure. All of this portends of two things. One, using critical infrastructure as a weapon of war, weaponizing that infrastructure. And so, we really need to understand critical infrastructure and the future of warfare. It’s going to be a tool for our adversaries. So, the timing was perfect for us in this book. It took about a year and a half in the making, but it is really so current and so relevant, given what we’re seeing happening right now on the battlefield. Host What can readers expect from this work? Can you give us an overview, please? Evans Sure, it’s a lengthy book, it’s I think, coming in at around 400 pages. First of all, I brought together a team of incredible international experts in critical infrastructure. Some of the authors come from high levels of government. Some of them are industry practitioners. Some of them come from academe. And some are from, you know, some of the most important government labs and other actual NATO centers of excellence. So, with this huge intellectual capability, we broke the book into four sections. The first one looks at the evolution of threats to critical infrastructure, and we start with the basic question “What is critical infrastructure?” Luckily, both European and US definitions are in agreement, but we need to understand why infrastructure is so important and why it is being targeted and how has that threat to infrastructure evolved over time. So that first section looks at (the) beginning with the kinetic threats to infrastructure. This is very much apropos of, sort of, terrorist means to target infrastructure, as we’ve also seen with Russia. I’m not saying they’re the same. I’m just simply saying we have states using kinetic attacks against infrastructure as well as terrorists. And then it has morphed; I guess about 10 years ago we saw increasing cyberattacks against that infrastructure, globally, and then hybrid warfare (where you have a mixture of both cyber and kinetic). So that’s sort of the first section. Host What does the second section cover? Evans Looking at what we call the lifeline sector. So, we wanted to provide case studies from each of the lifeline sectors, namely the energy sector, transportation sectors—so we have a chapter both on threats to civil aviation that has been often targeted, as you know, (not just airplanes but also airports). And also mass rail transit. You can harken back to Spain or the attacks against London and the underground. Following transportation, we also look at telecommunications, and this is really important, as well as water. A lot of people don’t think about the water infrastructure, but it’s really really vital for many other infrastructures. And that’s why we call them lifeline(s)—because they’re so key to the quality of our life. And if you think about ,particularly, energy—all of the other infrastructures rely on energy, so there is massive interdependencies between these infrastructures. So each of the authors in those chapters really give some good case studies of both cyber and kinetic threats to that infrastructure and also discuss some of the measures, maybe to try and build that resiliency in our book, as you referenced, Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. So both, how do we protect that infrastructure? But we know it’s going to go down at a certain point. Therefore, how do we build the resiliency back? Host What does the latter part of the book bring to the conversation? Evans It’s the tools and measures to build security and resiliency. What’s nice about this book is it’s not a US perspective. It is not a European perspective. We have authors from around the globe. And so they’re bringing their different backgrounds and subject matter expertise to help owners and operators or governments that have an infrastructure responsibility to think about what those tools might be. So, we first start with looking at both US and European frameworks—critical infrastructure, security resiliency frameworks—and what are then, sort of, the key policies. What are some of our key organizations? For example, here in the United States, it’s the Department of Homeland Security (and) CISA is the key organization. And then what are some other types of best practices that we can use, such as information and intelligence sharing? So, policies, practices, organizations, and how those frameworks have really helped incentivize both the government and private sector to work together to build security and resiliency. Some other tools are modeling and analysis of critical infrastructure interdependencies. As I mentioned before, you know, energy, water—all of those sectors are very interrelated and interdependent. And so we need to understand if you’re going to lose, say, one part of your grid, what are the cascading impacts? You need to have a good sense of that situational awareness because dollars are scarce. So where can, if you’re an owner of infrastructure, or if you’re a government that needs to incentivize private owners, where are you going to put those dollars? So you have to understand where the risks are greatest to that infrastructure failing. And that, the whole subject of risk, is another category that we look at in terms of the tools. How do you conduct security risk assessment(s)? How do you develop a risk management approach? And that particular chapter provides people, government, and industry with some of those best practices to develop their own risk programs. And then, finally, of course, you have to talk about infrastructure and protecting it from cyber risk. So, cybersecurity is a big chapter, and that chapter focuses on the need for really good cybersecurity hygiene when it comes to industrial control systems, also known as SCADA systems. Here, the author does a really great job of explaining why SCADA is subject to such vulnerabilities. Often companies or infrastructure are using their business enterprise networks and are connecting those to their operational side where the SCADA exists. So that opens up vulnerabilities for penetration and attack. So threats, you know, lifeline sectors and then the tools to build security and resilience is really what the book is all about. Host You touched on this a little bit earlier. In addition to editing this work, you contributed a chapter as well: “Hybrid Threats to US and NATO Critical Infrastructure.” I’d love to hear more about it. Evans My chapter really focused the reader on why should NATO, or why should the Department of Defense, care about infrastructure. And so my chapter really goes pretty much in-depth, looking at three potential hybrid threat vectors to critical infrastructure. And the first area that I look at in my chapter is . . . I examine how Russian penetration, as well as some of our other adversaries, have been very active in our electric grid. And as a consequence, that infrastructure can be compromised. And this is especially important when we think about particularly from US installations and bases. We are reliant on the private sector to provide our power. That was not always the case. You know, back in the 50s, a lot of our bases had our own water supply systems, our own power-generation capacity. But over time, we have privatized most of those services, and so hence, we’re now reliant on the private sector to provide those goods and services. But how well is their cyber security? So as I mentioned, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has cited Russia inside our grids. If we were to think about, for example, suddenly needing to deploy to support NATO, (if) we needed force projection into the European theater. If our bases go down, that’s going to interfere with our troop movement. Or if we’re along our rail systems. Or if we’re in ports where we know that those can be compromised, how will we successfully sustain a force-projection movement of some particular size and scope? So, I show how that’s a key vulnerability for us. The second area that I look at is how our adversaries are targeting the logistical infrastructure within NATO itself. We’ve seen in Russia how logistics have played such a crucial role in their inability to successfully invade Ukraine. We’re sort of on the back foot as well, equally, because of the penetration of some of the key infrastructure sectors within Europe. Our ability to sustain ourselves, and to mobilize within the theater can be very much compromised. So I go into quite a bit of detail there. And then the final area that I look at is the strategic investment by the People’s Republic of China into the European Defense industrial base. Chinese companies are now owning big swaths of many of the ports in Europe. There’s a lot of Chinese investment and ownership, particularly in the southern part of Europe, in their electric grids. But also, when we think about supply chain resiliency, the Chinese company Huawei has been very active in terms of trying to sell telecommunications within Europe. All of this portends, then, to when we need to fight a war with NATO in Europe, is that infrastructure going to be there when it’s largely owned and controlled by foreign adversaries? So I think this is a really important wake-up call, particularly for a number of countries that haven’t been as attentive to the strategic penetration by the Chinese in their own infrastructure. I then conclude my chapter by looking at some of the measures NATO has been doing to address some of these issues—building capacities such as NATO Center of Excellence Defense against terrorism and leading the charge there. But building other centers of excellence, for example. More recently, again, in Turkey, we have the establishment of the MARSEC (maritime security), and they, too, are looking at the protection of maritime infrastructure. So, a lot of organizational capacity, ongoing, as well as the European Union, taking a harder look and passing not so much regulation but guidance to their member countries to review purchases of their infrastructure much more carefully and with great consideration. Host You have an upcoming launch event for this book. How can readers participate or even watch it after the launch? Evans We’ve organized some of our key authors to provide short overviews of their chapters. We will be taking questions. I’ll be actually serving as the moderator, so we hope to have a very good discussion. Mr. Ron Pierce has written a lot on the policy frameworks. Mr. Chris Anderson is going to talk about his communications chapter. Theresa Sabonis-Helf is an expert in energy, and she’s going to be talking about the Ukraine case. And Steve Bieber is an expert on waters. So, it’s going to be a dynamic and engaging panel. And I would look forward to everyone being able to download and watch it. Host I’d like to interject listeners. You can find the webinar at ssi.armywarcollege.edu. There’s also a link to it in the show notes. There’s a lot to unpack in this book. Thanks so much for sharing it with us. Evans I appreciate the opportunity. Host If you’d like to learn more about NATO’s infrastructure security and resilience, download the monograph at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. Carol V. Evans is director of the Strategic Studies Institute and US Army War College Press at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The Strategic Studies Institute is the US Army’s leading think tank for geostrategic and national security research and analysis. She brings 30 years of expertise in the areas of mission assurance, crisis and consequence management, asymmetric warfare, terrorism, maritime security, and homeland security. Since 2014, Evans has been a lecturer at NATO’s Centre of Excellence for the Defence Against Terrorism (COE-DAT) in Ankara, Turkey, where she teaches in COE-DAT’s Critical Infrastructure Protection Against Terrorist Attacks training program. She holds a master of science degree and a doctor of philosophy degree from the London School of Economics. show less
21st Century Warfare, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, collapse, Doha Accord, Grand Strategy, international relations, Military Change and Transformation, Military Strategy and Policy, Pakistan, Security force assistance, Statecraft, strategy, Strategy and Policy, Taliban, Ukraine, War and Society
Episode Transcript: “Urban Warfare”
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press... read more
21st Century Warfare, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, collapse, Doha Accord, Grand Strategy, international relations, Military Change and Transformation, Military Strategy and Policy, Pakistan, Security force assistance, Statecraft, strategy, Strategy and Policy, Taliban, Ukraine, War and Society Episode Transcript: “Urban Warfare” Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes John Spencer. Spencer currently serves as the chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of the Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast. He served over 25 years in the US Army as an infantry soldier, having held the ranks from private to sergeant first class and second lieutenant to major. He also currently serves as a colonel in the California State Guard, assigned to the 40th Infantry Division, California Army National Guard, as the director of urban warfare training. His research focuses on military operations in dense urban areas, megacities, urban, and subterranean warfare. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, John. I’m glad you’re here. (John Spencer) Thanks for having me. Host Let’s talk about urban warfare. The US Army War College Press has published several pieces on this topic over the years. On a recent Urban Warfare Project podcast, you note urban warfare is the hardest. Can you elaborate on that? (Spencer) Sure. So I’m pretty adamant out of all the places you could ask military units to try to achieve strategic objectives, the urban operating environment is the hardest. Because, one, the physical terrain, right, which is complicated and hard in all areas—high elevation, you know, deep jungles—but the actual element of the urban physical terrain, the three-dimensional, the surface, subsurface, rooftops, the canalizing effect of the buildings, and the architecture of the city that reduce our military’s or any military’s ability to do what they want to do, right? So to do maneuver warfare, to use (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance or) ISR and long-range strike capabilities—it doesn’t get negated; it gets degraded in the urban environment. So I think it is the hardest because of that complexity of that physical terrain. But, by definition, “urban” means there’s people present. By our definition, the US military’s definition, “urban” means that there’s man-made terrain on top of natural terrain. There’s a population, and then there’s infrastructure to support that population. So with the presence of civilians in the operating environment in which militaries will be told to achieve objectives, the presence of civilians means that there will be a limit on the use of force. Because of the law of war, the international humanitarian law, (law of armed conflict or) LOAC, the different names that we use for it—since World War II and even all the way before World War II—most people think that in urban fights, like Stalingrad and, for us, Manila and Seoul—that was just a free range. There’s always a limit on the use of force. So going into it, it’s going to be harder for the military to use their form of warfighting because there’s gonna be limits on the use of force. Of course, there’s the three-block war, where soldiers and commanders will have to be fighting a peer competitor, at the same time dealing with humanitarian approaches and trying to get civilians out of the battle area, trying to save infrastructure. General (Charles) Krulak called it “the three-block war.” And then, of course, we often, when we envision urban warfare in massive operating environments that are urban, we think the civilians are just a hurdle or a concern to protect them. But, you know, modern warfare and old warfare—I mean, the population can be either a challenge, they can be supportive of the military’s objective and actually take part. Of course, they lose their civilian status to become combatants at that point but . . . or they can be completely nonsupportive and be going against what you’re trying to do. And that just complicates it, makes it harder. Right? Next—and I think it’s hard to put, like, which one of these is really the hardest—but the information domain. I call this “the First Battle of Fallujah effect,” although—yeah, that was 2004. The level of the information domain in the application of military power in urban environments is the hardest. The fight for the truth, the ability to hide—it becomes, literally . . . like, one of the primal warfighting functions is to fight in this information domain, as no military unit in the operating environments is gonna be very challenged to hide. All actions will be viewed because every civilian is a camera, an uplink to the global community. There’s so many sensors, and we’ve seen this on the modern battlefield . . . is I can watch live combat as we speak. I can tune in to most cities in Ukraine, and I can actually watch. In war, we talk about these three populations, right: the military, the political apparatus, and the populations. Well, in the urban terrain, those all collide into what we call a “tactical compression,” where the strategic and tactical become one because of the information domain. I could go on for a while because this is my thing. I think the complexity of the urban terrain . . . unlike other areas like mountainous or Arctic warfare, when we asked militaries to conduct operations in urban environments, the complexity, as in the cause and effect of our actions . . . in the urban terrain, just presenting a military force changes the environment in unknown ways. There’s very few cities—and there are some, and there’s been some great writings . . . every city is different. And that’s the challenge of understanding urban environments. The commanders and the political leaders have to understand the risk in second-order effects of the operations. Well, in the urban train, sometimes that’s near impossible. That’s literally the definition of complexity, is “I can’t tell the second- and third-order effects of touching the system on the global supply chain, on the global economic factors, on the regional factors.” Those are just some of the highlights. I know that it’s a podcast and you want me to be brief, but I honestly believe that it’s the hardest place on Earth you could ask militaries to try to achieve political objectives. Host We’re obviously not the only people thinking about urban warfare. How do other countries like England and Israel look at and train for urban warfare? (Spencer) Sure. So I’ve actually spent a lot of time in England with the British Army, and, of course, I just got back from the NATO Headquarters (Allied) Rapid Reaction Corps conference on urban warfare. So there’re not really a lot of differences between the US and the (United Kingdom or) UK model. But I think, interestingly, what the UK or England has done is that they have embraced that this should be a primary area of training focus and preparations. So they actually put out a mandate saying, “We used to do 80-percent rural and 20-percent urban preparations.” Now they put out a mandate that states all units in the British Army will do 50-percent urban, 50 percent rural. You know, sometimes, that’s just words, but that’s actually translating into budget priorities and how they spend their time. So for me, that was really important. They’ve made major changes at their major training areas like Copehill Downs (Copehill Down), major investments in synthetic and physical training and distributed training. I think it’s really translating. There’s not a different way they approach it. They know combined arms maneuver is the most powerful form of maneuver. But in the urban terrain, you have to prioritize preparing for this hardest environment. Now the Israeli model—there are a lot of differences, just because it’s a different army. It’s not an expeditionary military like, uh, NATO members—you know, NATO partners. So that does actually cause changes in the approach. Plus, they know their likely environments they’re going to deploy into. But spending a lot of time with the Israeli military and security forces, there are differences on how—even their equipment. Because they actually, in their urban warfare experience, will then make immediate changes. And that’s kind of their power of their ability to adapt their technologies. So when they go into a contested urban environment, they will come in with a much more armorized force: a bulldozer in the lead, infantry compartment in their tank so the infantry can get inside of it, an active protection system on all their tanks. And not saying that we don’t have these things, but they’re very deliberate in their approach to going into a completely nonpermissive urban environment. Because that’s their assumption if they’re going in, again, because they have different—whether it’s (doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leadership and education, personnel, and facilities or) DOTMLPF or what of their force design—they can do things like have heavier equipment, have purpose-driven units designed for underground warfare, things like that. So there’s definitely some differences in both models, but there’s also some similarities. Host Would any of their methods or theories be useful for American forces? (Spencer) So, absolutely. One of the challenges with urban warfare for us—especially the US military—is we don’t view it as a special task. We train offense/defense in all other military tasks, and we say the environment is a condition, and we’ll make minor changes. But look where we spend our time. We spend our time in the desert, in the woods, and that does translate into military capability. So absolutely, as, especially, the UK really pushes the envelope on “Fifty percent of my time is gonna be spent preparing for the urban environment. I’m gonna change doctrine—really, the whole DOTMLPF spectrum.” They’re on the forefront, in my opinion. And those lessons will translate to the US military. There is a lot of synergy going on between the two. But they’re really pushing. And then in the Israeli model—I think, absolutely, based on their mission sets and their environments, when they adapt to it, I would say, they’re probably at the forefront of the world in the use of information operations when it’s a known urban operating environment. So they have units that are established to do that, their acceptability of risk fighting in the information domain. The problem we get into, especially at the strategic and operational level, is that we think that we’re going to control information when we have to view it as a high a priority as actual fighting. Because we are fighting in the information domain. When Israel goes into the urban environments and does an urban operation, it’s at the top of their priorities for the commander is the fighting in that information domain—and, especially, in things like (Operation) Guardian of the Walls in 2021, where they really showed how they’re advancing the ball on that. Host Ukraine and urban warfare: What are the important takeaways so far? (Spencer) Oh, man. So there’s so much that’s going to be learned. I just got back myself from Kyiv, trying to understand the battle of Kyiv, which was . . . we have to take that, as a military, as the most decisive battle in modern era. Russia invaded Ukraine with the intent, the strategic objective of overthrowing the Ukraine political apparatus and taking the whole country. They had to penetrate the capital city. That’s nothing new, right? Like us in Baghdad, Kabul, you name it. But they were stopped by a much smaller military armed by understanding their urban environment better than the opponent. There’s so many lessons that we’re gonna take from just that one battle, when Russia, the second biggest military, was stopped by literally a brigade, and then 10s of thousands of civilians. It wasn’t that the Russians weren’t prepared to fight in urban terrain; they weren’t prepared to understand the requirements of doing large-scale combat operations on force projection, logistical needs that the urban environment puts to a test. So that’s the interesting aspect of Ukraine is that urban warfare will put your operational concepts; your doctrine; your ideals of ends, ways, and means to the ultimate test. It really does. But each one of these urban battles out of Ukraine are different, right? So Kyiv was a different fight than the battle of Mariupol, where time is important to militaries, and a small force . . . again, using the urban terrain features, all elements from information domain to the infrastructure already present were able to hold off 20,000 Russians for 80 days. Operationally and strategically, when you have a political objective you’re trying to achieve, if you can grind your opponent to a halt like that using the urban terrain, that’s powerful. This is evolving, so there’s so many lessons. And, like, Syeverodonets’k, and what urban terrain is most important? Of course, the capital city—that’s a strategic operation that has to be studied. But in my words—and Ukraine shows it—is that all roads lead to urban. “The main goal in warfare is to destroy your enemy’s military” is not true. And modern war puts that to the test. The battles of Ukraine are context, of course, but all roads lead to urban. The idea that you’re going to enter an operating environment and not at least have to secure your logistical lines through urban terrain—it’s just not reality. There’s a long list. I’ve taken a lot. The guy I went to Ukraine with, we’ll have a report on the battle of Kyiv, specifically. Which really does put to question ideals at the strategic level about, like, total defense, where your civilian population is going to rise up. But how do you do that? How do you resource it? What are the legal considerations when you turn civilians into combatants? And there’s a lot of lessons here. Host Looking forward to hearing more about those once you get it all put together. So you mentioned your trip to Ukraine and the battle of Kyiv a couple of times. You want to share any highlights of your trip with us? (Spencer) Sure. So I think if you lay down Russia’s objective, its strategic objective, and then lay down its operational plan . . . which can be argued that they spread themselves too thin. They didn’t adhere to the elements of operational art. You know, they didn’t mass on the critical objective, which was Kyiv. But they did come hard. They did implement a joint forcible-entry objective, inserting paratroopers into an airfield that were then not backed up by enough forces, and they were defeated. They ran into not complications in fighting another military; they ran into complications of things like mobility and countermobility in the urban terrain. The battle of Kyiv didn’t happen, really, in the urban areas that people think about when they think about urban terrain. It happened in the peri-urban. Because Ukraine immediately blew 300 bridges. So we talk about, you know, wet-gap crossings. But if you have 300 wet-gap crossings to do, that’s gonna have strategic implications for your military power if you’re not able to do that. So there’s a lot of lessons here in, like, ancient siege warfare. Kyiv had to just close the castle gates. They dropped all the bridges. They flooded rivers, which was very interesting. They flooded three major rivers to take away all the avenues of approach that Russia wanted to have, right? That’s what we do, right? We have a primary massive avenue of approach, and we have other ones. And they were coming hard, but Kyiv was able, through years of planning, to understand their city to where they could make it really hard to get into the city. Because it wasn’t about destroying the Russian military; they’re never going to do that. They had to buy time. They had to prioritize strategic capabilities like TB2 drones and the limited artillery they had as they fought seven different city fights. But there’s also elements of . . . again, this is about terrain denial. Ukraine was on the defense. And they showed that . . . (Carl von) Clausewitz said that defense is the strongest form of war. Now, it’s not your politically strongest form. But I think there is lessons in Ukraine, especially the battle of Kyiv, when you have to be prepared for defensive operations. We, as in the West, can’t always be the attacker. All warfare includes both offense and defense, and some of that’s the large-scale combat operational defenses. Like the city of Chernihiv. If the city of Chernihiv in Ukraine had not held, Kyiv might have fallen because they would not have been able to fight the way they were fighting because there’s another major axis of advance. But the first Ukrainian guard division (1st Division of the National Guard of Ukraine) held all Russians from advancing south of Chernihiv. I know that the war college and other people will study this in depth. But I think we can’t wait. Some of these lessons are almost immediate to translation to the way we think about massive theater operations. You’re not going to avoid and bypass urban areas. Maybe a few, but it’s going to have implications on strategic capabilities. Host Before we go, give me your final thoughts. (Spencer) So my final thoughts is that when I ask military people about urban terrain, they think about clearing buildings. Urban warfare is not an infantry fight. It will put joint combined arms maneuver to the test. And it is the people that can bring it all together at the point of need that can succeed. But we need to think about urban warfare like it is defined: the actual city, the people in the city, and the infrastructure and how that incorporates into our joint combined arms fights. Host Thank you so much. I appreciate your time, your insight, all of it. This was really good. (Spencer) No—thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform. show less
The rapid collapse of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in August 2021 was widely anticipated and due to its structural constraints and qualitative decline from 2018–21. This article provides a targeted analysis of ANDSF operational liabilities and qualitative limitations, referencing often overlooked statements by US and Afghan political and military officials, data from official US government reports, and prescient NGO field analyses. The painful ANDSF experience... read more
The rapid collapse of Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF) in August 2021 was widely anticipated and due to its structural constraints and qualitative decline from 2018–21. This article provides a targeted analysis of ANDSF operational liabilities and qualitative limitations, referencing often overlooked statements by US and Afghan political and military officials, data from official US government reports, and prescient NGO field analyses. The painful ANDSF experience illuminates several principles that must be considered as US policymakers turn toward security force assistance for proxy and surrogate military forces in conflict with the partners of America’s emerging great-power geostrategic competitors—China and Russia. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss3/6/">Click here to read the review and reply to the article.</a> Episode Transcript: “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces” Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Thomas F. Lynch III, Dr. Conrad C. Crane, and Dr. Todd Greentree. Lynch is the author of “Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” (“Deconstructing the Collapse of Afghanistan National Security and Defense Forces”), which was featured in the autumn 2022 issue of Parameters. Lynch is a distinguished research fellow in the Institute of National Strategic Studies (Institute for National Strategic Studies) of the National Defense University. A retired Army colonel with Afghanistan tours, Lynch publishes frequently on Afghanistan. Crane is currently a research historian in the Strategic Studies Institute of the (US) Army War College. A retired Army officer, Crane holds a PhD from Stanford University Greentree is a former US foreign service officer. Currently, he is a member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University, and he teaches at the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Thanks so much for making time for this today. Tom, would you please just give us a brief synopsis of your article? (Thomas F. Lynch III) Yeah, hi, Stephanie. Thanks for having me here, and great to be with, uh, Con and Todd. I thought it was a good time to publish something that reviewed the history of why it was not surprising that the Afghan national military wound up where it is. And so my article kind of goes into that, focusing in three substantive areas. First, it’s to define the fact that the Afghan military was never designed by the US and its partners to stand alone. There were critical capabilities that it would have required to stand alone against an autonomous insurgency with external patrons that were never present and could not have been expected to be present. Second, I thought it important to chronicle the fact that the important linkages between the Afghan military and, particularly, American support military structures—these were already pulling apart as early as 2018—not in the last year, not subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement) of February 2020, but have been pulling apart pretty visibly for those that were paying attention, starting at least in 2018. So I kind of go through what those were as well. And then, finally, I offer here this notion that it is a myth that the Afghan national military fell apart unexpectedly at the end. There were a number of government organizations, government agencies, military leaders, as well as nongovernment agencies on the ground that were reporting flaws, particularly in the morale that were very, very visible starting in 2018 and became acute subsequent to the Doha Accord (Doha Agreement)—that was an accord between the United States government and the Afghan Taliban. The government of Afghanistan was not a party to that. And, indeed, the accord that we signed in February of 2020 really committed the United States to withdraw and committed the Afghan government to negotiate with its enemy, the Afghan Taliban. And the Afghan Taliban, in response to that, gave several promises. They made a formal promise not to attack American and coalition forces, but not to stop attacking Afghan government or Afghan military forces. And indeed, this put the Afghan military forces formally in a place where they had been—at least, informally, since 2018—as the monkey in the middle without the organic, qualitative ability to fight a qualified and capable Afghan Taliban insurgency, but with the knowledge that the United States had a clock ticking, and we were going to get out, and they were going to be left alone. And therefore, it made great sense that they were already bartering and bantering behind the scenes to cut the best deal they could for them and their families and, therefore, to collapse rather quickly once the United States military was fully out of the country and the Afghan Taliban had not politically reconciled with the government of Afghanistan. Host Con, you say our approach to security assistance in Afghanistan was flawed in the very beginning by a problem with advising and assisting. Will you expand on that, please? (Conrad C. Crane) Sure, glad to. My point is this: Since World War II, the United States has made a common mistake in its attempts to advise and assist as we always try to create indigenous security forces that are modeled like us. So we end up with a force that is heavily dependent on firepower, requires extensive sustainment that they really cannot do, which is one of the points that Tom brings up. We create forces that can’t really be maintained or sustained if we’re not there. A new twist in the model has been also an overreliance on elite units. Sir William Slim, in his excellent memoir on World War II, Defeat into Victory (Defeat into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942–1945), has a part where he really criticizes the creation of elite units because they take the best troops out of conventional forces and dilute the quality of those conventional forces. In Afghanistan, we did the same thing. We quickly created an Afghanistan special forces and took the best troops out of the conventional forces, which were much more important than the special forces group we set up. We also had a similar problem with the air force. We gave them the right aircraft, the Super Tucanos, which are much more appropriate and much easier to maintain than sophisticated jets. But at the same time, we set them up as a separate air force. I actually did some consulting with the leadership on trying to fix the problems of the air force, and the air force may have been configured to support the ground forces, but they wanted to fly independent missions like they had B-52s. And also it became the bailiwick at the Afghan elites. So between this idea they were gonna be an independent air force and the elite attitudes, it made any kind of joint operations almost impossible. I mean, a better model would have been US Marine Corps instead of US Air Force . . . have a Air Force was tightly tied to ground forces that independent. But you had the same thing in Vietnam. We tend to repeat these same problems with the way we structure these indigenous security forces. Host Tom, what are your thoughts here? (Lynch) First, as Con notes, there’s this issue we have post-World War II of trying to make ‘em look like us. But when we don’t make ‘em look like us—and there are many instances where we didn’t, to include going back with the South Korean forces prior to the North Korean attack in 1950—we tend to limit things where we think we have innate ability and where we want to constrain that side from having that ability for fear that they have a different political agenda. So in the case back in the 1940s, early 1950s with the South Koreans, we were concerned that South Korean leader Syngman Rhee would use souped-up artillery and American-style aircraft to go attack the North, which we didn’t want to happen unt il after the North attacked first. We also—early on, in South Vietnam—limited the design and things we provided them because we didn’t want them ranging north and going after the Chinese, for example, and provoking a war there. Here is a highlight in the article. There are two other things that influence the design of the Afghan military forces to, as Con says, look like us, but not all the way to the high end, which is back to my point about them not being able to just stand alone to provide their own security against neighbors in a dangerous neighborhood. The first of those is our concern over costs. We’re concerned that if we give them too much high-end stuff, it’s gonna be too expensive, too difficult. And so, as Con mentions, sometimes, we look beyond that, but other times, we find ourselves constrained by that. And I argue here that’s what we were with the Afghan national security forces, particularly in the 2000s—and we were back and forth and back and forth about “Give ‘em more.” “No, give ‘em less.” “No, we can’t afford it. So let’s us use our equipment that allows for these things that we don’t want them necessarily to have: long-range aircraft that could range into Pakistan, for example, or long-range artillery that could be threatening to other neighbors or lots of long-haul logistics aircraft. But the second piece of that has to go with the regional geopolitics, and that is the limitations imposed by the fact the United States was also conducting the Global War on Terror (war on terrorism) with Pakistan as a vital, non-NATO partner. And the Pakistanis had their own regional concerns. The Pakistanis would work with us when we were going after certain kinds of global terrorists, but, in their mind, there were other kinds of people that we call “terrorists” which they saw as indigenous quasimilitary groups that were important to their existential fight against India, the country that they see as their most worrisome security threat and a country that they felt, for decades, was always trying to find a back door through Afghanistan to produce at least mischief, if not try to topple the Pakistani government. And so it was in an appreciation of our other partner Pakistan’s interests—the fact that Pakistan not only feared India, but also kind of saw the Afghan Taliban as one of those trustworthy militant groups that would stand against Indian nefarious activity in Afghanistan. This also circumscribed the design of the Afghan military forces so they didn’t have long-range strike aircraft. They didn’t have long-range artillery. They didn’t have the kind of logistics that would allow them to campaign because not only do we not want to pay for it, but the Pakistanis didn’t want that on their doorstep, unmanaged by the Americans. So there were those limitations that were always there. Meaning you were either gonna get an Afghan government that was gonna succeed and topple the Taliban insurgency, which we really never got close to when you look, in large measure, because the Pakistanis weren’t with us in causing that to happen. They found a gray-zone area and acted like they weren’t supporting the Afghan Taliban. But, in reality, they were supporting them as a hedge against India. When push came to shove and the Taliban were still resilient and there were no clear political negotiations happening between the (Ashraf) Ghani government and the Afghan Taliban, now, the Afghan military and security forces are truly the monkey in the middle. They’re looking at a US government that said, “We’re getting out.” And they’re saying, “We can’t stand alone against this resurging group of insurgents. As a matter of fact, these insurgents are attacking us now proportionally far higher than they’re attacking the American, the coalition forces, separating us further, splitting us apart, and we can’t manage that because we’re not designed for that.” So there are two parts of this that I try to highlight in the article. There’s our own internal fiscal considerations, constraints, and ideation where we think we’re better to provide these high-end capacity things ourselves to limit the cost of building this Afghan security force modeled like us versus the Pakistani security concerns, which do not want to see those independent characteristics in the Afghan force more willing to trust us as counterterrorism partners with these high insecurities—but, in the process, making it so the Afghan military cannot stand or hope to stand against a lively, vibrant Afghan Taliban insurgency with safe haven in Pakistan when push comes to shove in 2020 and 2021. Host Back to you, Con. (Crane) All excellent points. I mean the dilemma, I guess, is the fact that we were always going to leave, and that the question is for those of us involved in the security assistance, trying to create these structures, it’s nice to have an idea when that’s gonna be so you can structure the horses to do that. And, oh, I’m sure I’ll get into this later, and that’s did we really have to leave? We stuck around in Korea for 30 years waiting for democracy to appear and fought a very nasty, low-intensity conflict there in the 60s and 70s. But we still stuck around. You know, Tom’s right. We had a lot of structures there that only we could provide. Again, the question is “Should we have done a better job planning for the for the exit strategy Host Todd, we haven’t heard from you on this yet. (Todd Greentree) What I have to say is based on experience and things that occurred to me at the time when I was in Afghanistan. I think that both Tom and Con, also, because they were involved, are not dealing from a rearview mirror perspective. I love the monkey-in-the-middle analogy because there are so many dimensions or ways to unpack that idea and see how it applies. The US-Pakistan enormously fraught, complex relationship with lots of history, and the Pakistanis with enormous history. One of the reasons that we never really got a handle on that relationship is because we were not aware enough of our own history with the Pakistanis. So another dimension of their early involvement in Afghanistan has to do with Pas̲h̲tĹŤnistÄn, and this is the idea that there’s this Durand Line that the Brits drew that crossed across the Pashtun population where the Taliban insurgency came from. And Afghanistan had always tried to take advantage of that with Pakistan by stirring up cross-border sentiments. This was the reason that Pakistan started supporting early Islamic militants in Afghanistan in the early 1970s—to oppose them. But the Pakistanis sent their first Pashtun groups to create problems. Where? Into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1948. They go way back on this issue. Going back to the security force assistance issue, which I think is a critical piece of putting together the whole strategic picture of what went wrong in Afghanistan: Adding on to Con’s comments about American way of war clashing with Afghan way of war—we also have a huge problem, which is from the very beginning, what was it that the US was focused on? It was focused on counterterrorism—basically, fighting a war. And as we got more and more involved in Afghanistan, that combat role retained its importance. So as we would expect with American way of war, combat forces—elite and not—receive priority. That left security force assistance distinctly in a second-ranked place. A couple of quick ideas from experience: One—first commander I worked for: great guy by the name of Scott Spellman. Scott Spellman is currently commander of the Army Corps of Engineers. And I realized for the first time, working with him: “Hey! Engineers make great counterinsurgents.” Because they build things in difficult circumstances, and he got that. There was, in that same command, a young (military police or) MP who was a National Guard MP who came out of state police force. He brought something to working with police forces that I hadn’t seen before. He wasn’t involved in combat, but his role was extremely important. And then, of course, the negative example which I think everybody saw a lot of: US majors who were assigned as mentors to Afghan general officers. Question for Tom: Given that the intent of the US negotiations with the Taliban was exit and not peace, would it have been possible to somehow or other preserve the integrity of Afghan security forces and maintain the role of the US as a source of stability rather than instability? (Lynch) Yeah. Excellent question, Todd. In the article, I intentionally pick up in the summer of 2018 on that point because the way in which we do start finally negotiating with the Afghan Taliban, I would argue—as I do in this article and in some previous writings—does prejudge the outcome. And in this case, the outcome was that we were not gonna have a future military-to-military role or relationship absent something directly happening, which would have been the Afghan Taliban finding a political accommodation with the democratic government of Afghanistan—or, I should say, the government of Ashraf Ghani at that time. And even if that were to happen, as I mentioned in the article, then you would have had to do some kind of combination between current constructed Afghan military forces and Taliban forces to bring those together to do some kind of disarmament, demobilization, disaggregation, stand them in position, and yet here you would be bringing together a insurgent guerrilla force with a counterinsurgent national force. And even there, it was gonna be extremely difficult to do that. The history of governments trying to make that happen is very sketchy in terms of how well it works, how well it doesn’t work, and whether it holds together politically. The bottom line here was so long as the Afghan Taliban was not defeated or neutralized, then two things were vital to understand: Either the Afghan government and its military would have to have continuing outside assistance (the United States, principally, with its coalition partners) militarily as well as to support its economics and government status or the Afghan military would have to stand alone against the Taliban, which was favored by the Pakistanis as a better alternative to a government in Afghanistan that might get too cozy with India in the absence of Big Brother America sitting over the top of everything. So you had this kind of a perfect storm here, so that once you made a decision to depart, when the Afghan Taliban was not out of the picture, you were gonna come up with two very awkward outcomes either trying to piece together a combined military of these two other militaries that were very much opposed to each other—or you’re gonna have an Afghan military that couldn’t stand alone against a well-enabled and well-motivated Afghan Taliban military arm. Once, in 2018 the Trump administration makes the decision to independently negotiate with the Taliban, the writing is on the wall. Informally, at that point, the Taliban and, I would argue, their handlers in Pakistan (meaning the intelligence services in Pakistan)—they got this, and, starting in mid-2018, when the administration signaled they were gonna move in the direction of negotiating America getting out, we see an informal drop that’s noteworthy in the number of Afghan Taliban-claimed attacks against American military or coalition military forces and, also, coalition political and diplomatic support forces. It’s palpable, starting in mid-18, as the Trump administration shifts into this negotiating phase from what had been kind of a miniature surge that was approved by the Trump administration in late 2017 to kind of go and put the Taliban on their heels. By mid-2018, the Trump administration has given up on that, and they’re announcing that they’re gonna start negotiations. And, indeed, by that fall, September of 2018, they announced Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, a former ambassador to Afghanistan and expat Afghan, to go and start these negotiations. From that point forward, as I chronicle in the article, you see the Afghan Taliban taking an informal, calculated step to not attack Americans but continue to put the pressure on the Afghan military. And this starts to, I argue, pull psychologically apart what had been a very close and necessarily close relationship between those two. And then, in February of 2020, you get the Doha Agreement signed between America and the Afghan Taliban. And now, it’s formally laid out. The Afghan Taliban agree, “We’re not attacking you Americans. We’re not attacking the coalition. But we’re not making any promises about anybody else.” And we went back to them, and General Scott Miller and others got a special, classified annex—which we know is there, but we can’t know for sure it was in there—but, basically saying, “Well, wait a minute now. If you guys start vigorously attacking the Afghans, then we’re gonna have the right to defend them.” We know, in retrospect, the Taliban never really agreed that that was legitimate. They just tried to step around it enough so they could continue the military campaign while they waited for America to continue to get out. And so I mentioned that because this pulling apart of a military that had to have these support structures—without a concurrent drawdown of the military capacity of the Afghan Taliban in large measure, but not solely, because the Pakistani military intelligence services didn’t wanna see the Afghan Taliban vanish, you were at the point where it was always a matter of how quickly the Afghan military forces were gonna collapse when you pulled out, as we finally did a year ago. Host Con, I’d love to hear your answer to this as well. (Crane) For me, the big problem in Afghanistan is we don’t really decide to come up with a counterinsurgency strategy until we’ve been there almost a decade. And by then, it’s just too late. I mean, we have so many lost opportunities early on to try to do it right, and we just don’t. (Carl von) Clausewitz talks about “recognize the nature of the warrior,” and we never quite figure out the great game in that area or what our real purpose is until it’s really too late. (Lynch) Yeah, Stephanie, on this point, I think it’s clear that we didn’t devise a workable counterinsurgency strategy. But I think there’s some caveats that matter here. First and foremost, in the mid-2000s, as we were focused on counterterrorism, we treated the Afghan Taliban as a defeated insurgent group. And we, particularly in the Bush administration of the 2000s, accepted the word of our counterterrorism partner, the Pakistanis, that, quote, “They got the Taliban.” They would take care of the Taliban. So that set in place a framework where, as Todd says, we kind of misunderstood the history there. We thought “take care of” meant “take out.” What (Pervez) Musharraf said and what he meant were two different things as we heard it. He didn’t mean “We’re gonna take them out.” He meant “We’re gonna take care of ‘em.” And, in his mind, it was “take care of ‘em as long as you guys are over there are doing counterterrorism stuff and until you leave us alone because we don’t trust that the Indians aren’t gonna come backdoor on us, and we think the Afghan Taliban—as difficult as they are because of Pas̲h̲tĹŤnistÄn and other things that Todd mentioned—they’re a better choice than a lot of the other choices that could be in Afghanistan.” And the Pakistanis stick to that all the way through. And I have always referred to our efforts at surging in Afghanistan, as we did in ‘04 and ‘05; as we did again in the Obama administration; and as we did again to counter (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or) ISIS in 2014–15—I refer to all of those as, at least in some measure, an effort to test the hypothesis that if we put enough military force into Afghanistan and showed kind of a counterinsurgency blanket of Americans that somehow, the Pakistanis would change their security framework enough to say, “OK, we don’t need the Afghan Taliban or people like that. We’re OK with you guys.” And the bottom line is the Pakistanis never made that step. They couldn’t. They found their challenges with India still too dominant and too worrisome, and they didn’t trust that we’d stay there. And, in the latter point, they’re probably right. Whether they’re right about nefarious Indian activity, no matter what, unless the Afghan Taliban are in the mix for them, I don’t know that that’s true or not, but that’s their perspective. Basically, if you count our initial invasion, we took four cracks at changing that security paradigm. It didn’t change. And so, when you talk about inevitability: Were we able to ever win a counterinsurgency in Afghanistan? My answer is not without a change in the Pakistani security narrative about India and Afghanistan backdoor mistrust. And that didn’t happen, and we tested it two or three time. And as a consequence of that, we could never win an insurgency in Afghanistan. But we could succeed in both deterring and then, potentially, defeating a global terrorist network that would take advantage of the Afghan Taliban to plan, plot, and then launch credible international terror against America and our allies. The jury is not still fully in because bad things can still happen in Afghanistan. But if you look objectively at the 20 years we were involved there, you will see that we had measurable success in preventing global catastrophic terror from emanating out of Afghanistan. We have examples, multiples, of exchanges of information between us, the Afghans, even the Pakistani intelligence services allowing us to disrupt plots, plans, and activities either at the source—that is, arresting or killing those on the battlefield, we’re making those plans—or even arresting things that were about to happen, like plots against bridges in Baltimore and other things, plots against American forces in Germany, where we intercepted a guy who was an operative for al-Qaeda before that all happened. So I mentioned all that just to say Todd makes an excellent point that Con falls in on: counterterrorism versus counterinsurgency—it’s fair to say we never got that right. But it’s important to know that Pakistan played heavily in that. But it’s also true to say that if you look at the terrorist side of the ledger, arguably—you know, we can debate whether the cost was too much—but, arguably, we did achieve that particular outcome over the course of 20 years. Host Todd, do you have any comments on that? (Greentree) Yeah, like, maybe we should have a whole another opportunity to continue the discussion and just fall in on that costs of counterterrorism, its effectiveness, versus becoming accidental counterinsurgents because that’s what we were. Of course, Dave Kilcullen has that book that he wrote, The Accidental Guerrilla (The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One), in which the central idea is that “Hey, the Taliban are fighting us in Afghanistan because we happen to be in their space. And that’s who they are. They’re Islamic warriors who fight against foreign infidels.” We were accidental counterinsurgents by the same token. The only reason we ended up fighting the Taliban was because they helped al-Qaeda, which got into our space on 9/11—that whole trigger of contingency dragged us into this long, long war that ended up a failure. I’d like to swing back just for a minute and go back to the idea of war termination where we were talking about the problem of “Could the negotiating process have worked out in a way that ended up keeping the Afghan security forces intact and the US having a stabilizing role rather than a destabilizing one?” Start with Pakistan again. I don’t want to make this about Pakistan. But, in some ways, Carlotta Gall came up with a great title for a book about Afghanistan by calling it The Wrong Enemy (The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014). And, in that sense, the Pakistanis really were the key to getting a handle on this. And because we failed with the Pakistanis, we failed in Afghanistan. Quick point related to that: This was the second time that the US failed with war termination in Afghanistan. The first time was when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, and we were entirely unprepared to play a constructive role, although there was an effort in actually resolving that conflict. And, again, the Pakistanis were in the middle of that. So the point to me on the second failed effort at war termination is we weren’t really trying to end the war. We were just trying to negotiate an exit. That’s what it was. And if anybody thinks that we were actually involved in war termination or peace negotiations, I think they’re fooling themselves, and we were fooling ourselves at the same time. Host Todd, you brought up some really good questions in our prepodcast discussion, and I’m just gonna throw these out here. And we have about five minutes. Was Afghanistan ever winnable? What should the aims have been? What conditions and time frame might have produced success? Tom, if you wanna start, you can just dig in and start. (Lynch) In terms of a counterinsurgency, Afghanistan was not winnable. And the monkey in the middle of the Afghan security forces is just a data point of evidence that that was not gonna happen. And a lot of the reason for that is the dimensions of the Indo-Pakistani security dilemma and how we could never find our way through that Gordian knot. We had tried. We hoped that Musharraf would take care of it in the early 2000s. We hoped that a big surge in ‘09 and ‘10 would show our determination and whack the Taliban so hard that they would have to be abandoned as this go-to insurgency inside of Afghanistan. But the Pakistanis looked at that and didn’t take parallel action. They didn’t have any better alternatives, and they still thought we were gonna get out, and they were right. We wound up trying to get out. And then we tried one more time in 2014–15 as ISIS started to appear there and as the Afghan, uh, military, you know, seemed to lose track of al-Qaeda types, and even that didn’t change the Pakistan security [unintelligible word]. So my answer previously applies here. I don’t think that the counterinsurgency was ever winnable. Now, what about the counterterrorism aim? The original aim, the dominant one, the thing that brought us there in the first point: to prevent Afghanistan or, by extension, the Afghanistan-Pakistani border from becoming yet again, as it had on 9/11 and before that with other plans and plots by al-Qaeda or global terrorists, from being a point of successful planning, plotting, training, and then execution of global, catastrophic terrorism events on the United States and our allies and partners. There, I think the record is, at least debatably, positive. That is, we succeeded. We didn’t win, OK? We’re not done yet. Al-Qaeda is not gone. ISIS is not gone. Salafi-jihadi terrorism is not gone. But it’s been on its heels for the last 20 years, and we’ve not seen successful execution of catastrophic terror against America and its allies since 9/11 emanating from that part of the world. So I would argue that we can and did achieve success in the counterterrorism mission as defined. We could not have and did not have the ability to win the counterinsurgency. Now the fruitful debate in the future was was it worth the cost of trying to manage both a counterinsurgency and a counterterrorism effort for 20 years to get there? And I think that’s a different and legitimate question that perhaps we can address another time. Thank you. Host Con, we haven’t heard from you in a while. What do you think? (Crane) I just hope people are listening to this podcast and read Tom’s article because one of my favorite sayings is “We have never been able to never do this again.” So we’ll be talking about this again. I guess I just think there was so many lost opportunities early on. Victory in counterinsurgency is very hard to define. There’s a lot of times the result is a very messy one that can be interpreted either way. It usually ends up in some kind of political compromise where everybody gets something. You know, the problem is the whole campaign in Afghanistan—they were only planning about 72 hours ahead. I mean, we criticize going into Iraq in 2003 for having an incomplete plan for what happens after major conflict ended. In Afghanistan, we had none. And so we were a blind man to start with, roaming around in the dark. Again, we staggered around a decade, and I think there were so many lost opportunities. I’ve been on a couple of panels with . . . with General (David) Petraeus since, and we’ve discussed about could some kind of an American presence have created a more stable result—some kind of a different outcome? Again, victory’s very hard to define. Tom’s talked very well about the impact of when we decide we’re gonna leave, and everybody knows we’re gonna leave. So the question is “Would some kind of a longer-term presence made much of a difference?” I don’t know. Pakistan’s not gonna change. Situation’s not gonna change. I read the press reports every day about what’s going on in Afghanistan right now, and it’s so tragic. Just, is there some way that we could have moderated some of that? I just don’t know enough about if we could or not. Host Todd? (Grentree) Yeah. Well, I do have an opinion about that. It requires some counterfactual thinking and arguing, but it’s based in, uh, an option that actually existed at the time. And if I can mention, uh, my own article for Parameters in the winter issue: “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?” It’s really the central point of it. So I thought that one of the things that Tom captured accurately in his article was that as the negotiations picked up steam, by the time the end game came on, the fighting was not what mattered in the Afghan security forces disintegrating. Rather, it was the negotiations that were taking place—not between the Americans and the Taliban, because those were done, but between the Taliban and the Afghan forces directly. Forget the Afghan government. And a lot of those negotiations were being brokered by local elders to get people who are gonna walk away from the army and the police and fold back into their communities or move back, move out entirely. And those negotiations work pretty well because that was one of the things that enabled the Taliban to take over so fast without a lot of residual fight. My argument is that in December of 2001—I gotta go back two decades—those conditions were reversed. The US leading coalition with, you know, the famous, CIA-supported operation with Afghan militia had just overthrown the Taliban emirate. They were done. And the Taliban at that time, in accordance with Afghan way of war, were flowing in to swear fealty to the new Afghan government, which had just been named at this conference in Bonn, Germany, with, uh, Hamid Karzai as the interim president. Local elders were complying with that as well. And very much this is the Afghan way of war. It’s basically common to tribal warfare everywhere that people who are involved in fighting are figuring not their membership in, uh, national institutions or the oath they take to a national government but where their survival is going to exist the best for them and their group, their clan of people. I got to learn very closely when I was in with the command group with 10th Mountain Division in Kandahar at the height of the Obama surge. We were very involved in the areas of traditional Pashtun strength that was both that where the Karzais and sort of the ruling Pashtun aristocracy and the government and the Taliban had their origins. Same exact place. And what the people in the Afghan government were saying—of course, this is many years after the fact—was “Wow, you should have listened to us in 2001 and 2002 because we wanted to disperse the Taliban. They were coming in. They wanted to go back to their villages. We were gonna let ‘em keep their AK-47s but nothing else. Key to this, we wanted to break the relationships with Pakistan, particularly by bringing their families back across the border and back where they had been for many years and back into their communities.” That was an option that was put to the US government during the course of the Bonn Conference. This idea of involving Taliban in negotiations, not necessarily to achieve a share of national power but just to be recognized as a part of the Afghan political process. And that was explicitly vetoed. That option was explicitly vetoed, of course, with Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld calling the shots that “No, we’re nt dealing with the Taliban.” And that in my assessment on this regard—that really is what led us down this path. The enemy was al-Qaeda. They were the ones who had attacked us. They were the focus, and we essentially confused the Taliban with al-Qaeda. Host In a few sentences, final thoughts from each of you. Con, why don’t you start? (Crane) I just hope people (are) listening to this podcast and reading these articles because we have never been able to never do this again and all these issues that could come up again. And we just can’t make the same mistakes. We eventually gotta learn from all this. Host Todd? (Greentree) So several years ago I wrote an article about the three movies that help us understand Afghanistan. And, really, they’re about ourselves. But the movies are, of course, The Godfather, Chinatown, and the third one is Groundhog Day. And the point of Groundhog Day is not just that you keep reliving the same day over and over again—because that’s what we’ve been doing on this, as Con says. But because in Groundhog Day, the idea is that you learn from repeating each today over and over, and you advance on that. And that’s where I think that the importance of Tom’s article lies and the three principles, the three conditions that he brings in there at the end: These are things to pay attention to. Otherwise, we’re gonna be stuck in that cycle without ever getting out of it because this is going to happen again. Host Tom, will you wrap this up for us? (Lynch) Yeah, thanks. I think that’s a perfect setup, and thanks again to Con and Todd for joining in today because that’s where I wanna kind of end as well. It is one thing to go back and say “Yeah, you could see this slow-motion train wreck happening. You could see how we had set the conditions for it in terms of the (Afghan National Defense and Security Forces or) ANDSF and its challenges at the end of the day.” But the question is “To what effect do we go forward from here?” And the first thing I tried to address at the end of the article is that, as Con has said and as Todd alludes to, we’re gonna be here again. We’re gonna be at a point where we have to look at advising allies and partners in the pursuit of our national interests in a region or an area where there are conflicting, competing, or challenging political and security dynamics that don’t necessarily perfectly align with ours. And so the question is “How do you pursue those?” At the level of military forces, you know, my recommendations in the article are that we should make sure that we’re tailoring our support packages for the countries in question if they’re gonna be countries that are working with us or for groups in question if they’re going to be nonstate actors in accordance with what they can do and what they can accomplish—not build them beyond that, not build them so that they’re platinum outcomes, but do that in a way that allows that to be tailored to what they can accomplish in their area, not US-centric forces or combinations. Second is morale of fighting forces that are our partners is not just an afterthought. We have to consider that. Especially, we have to consider that at a time when maybe our political interests and theirs are diverging, right? In Afghanistan, clearly, the divergence was as we decided “We’re going to get out, and we’re going to negotiate independently.” But let’s take, for example, what’s going on right now, perhaps, in Ukraine. Right now, there’s a commonality and alignment of purpose in Ukraine, basically, as the partner/surrogate force standing against the great-power Russia’s viewpoint of domination of its periphery and, you know, establishing who is and who is not in its sphere of influence. Right now, we’re aligned, but that doesn’t mean we’re gonna be aligned necessarily going forward. So how do we plan for that so that we do not come to the unhappy event where we wind up either dislocating a partner, abandoning a partner, or setting the conditions for us to come out worse than we went in? And, finally, there’s this inherent principle agent arrangement any time you’re engaged with assisting partners, whether they be state militaries or surrogate partners that are nonstate. And so you gotta have a plan in place for what happens when you now have divergent interests or divergent ideations where they may want to go one way—i.e., maybe want to go and start, you know, attacking a great-power rival of ours and we like don’t want that because we don’t want the nuclear specter, right? What’s our plan for that and how do we implement it, understanding that sometimes you gotta have these plans quietly because saying the obvious thing out loud also can have very debilitating consequences? In Afghanistan, saying the debilitating thing would have been saying in the middle of the summer last year, 2021, that “Yeah, the government of Afghanistan is not gonna stand. Its military can’t stand. And so we’re just getting our people out of here.” Well, the problem then for the US government was to say that would almost be like assuring the outcome. And that’s what they were hearing from President Ghani and his interlocutors here in America: “No, no. Don’t start withdrawing more people fast. Don’t start taking folks out that have been helping us for 20 years to get ‘em out of the way of the Taliban. Because if you do that, we’re gonna collapse.” Now he wound up collapsing anyway. But, nonetheless, that’s kind of what happens when the principal agent dynamic diverges. And my only point in the article is, as Con says, so we don’t wind up doing this again and doing it badly, think about that going in. So thanks so much for the time, and I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss this. Host Thank you to all three of you. If you’re interested in learning more about the collapse of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces, you can download the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 3. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platform. show less
Released 8 August, 2022
How does the war in Georgia in 2008 relate to the war in Ukraine in 2022? Join Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton for an in-depth discussion, using their 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, as a launching point.
Click here to read the review and reply to the monograph.
Episode Transcript:
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy—a US Army War College Press... read more
Released 8 August, 2022 How does the war in Georgia in 2008 relate to the war in Ukraine in 2022? Join Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton for an in-depth discussion, using their 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, as a launching point. Click here to read the review and reply to the monograph. Episode Transcript: Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy—a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dr. Robert Hamilton, authors of The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, published by the US Army War College Press in 2011. Dr. Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations). He’s a recognized authority on international security and energy policy and leading expert in Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. For more than 20 years, Dr. Cohen served as a senior research fellow on Russian and Eurasian studies and international energy policy at the Heritage Foundation. Dr. Robert E. Hamilton is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, specializing in strategic competition and rivalry. Hamilton is a retired US Army Eurasian foreign area officer whose assignments included US advisor to the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, the chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in (the US Embassy in) Georgia, (Department of Defense or) DoD Russia policy advisor to the International Syria Support Group in Geneva, the chief of assessments for the NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan, and the chief of the Russian De-Confliction Cell at Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. In your 2011 monograph, The Russian Military and the Georgia War: Lessons and Implications, you cover the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia. The war demonstrated Russia’s military needed significant reforms, and it indicated which of those reforms were being implemented. I look forward to hearing about this—but first, thank you both for joining me today. (Ariel Cohen) It’s a pleasure. This is Ariel Cohen. Host Ariel, please start us off and give us some background on the Georgia war of 2008. (Cohen) Let’s start with the causes of the Georgian war. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a large part of the military security and intellectual establishment of the Soviet Union did not accept the outcome of the Cold War. They did not accept that, in fact, the Soviet Union failed in that competition. They also did not accept the fact that the Soviet empire, the incarnation of the Russian empire that predated the Soviet Union, collapsed, and they wanted to rebuild it. I saw the writing on the wall when I was traveling to Moscow in 1990s. There was a whole body of people who said that (Boris) Yeltsin; the last Soviet foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze—well, he was one before last, before (Alexander) Bessmertnykh; and Alexander Yakovlev, who led the anti-Stalin campaign—they considered these people traitors, as they did Mikhail Gorbachev, and the idea of reassembling the Soviet and Russian empire of the primarily Russian-speaking territories (but not only) . . . it percolated initially in the 90s and then got a much stronger impetus in the (Vladimir) Putin era. And I think when the alarm really should have sounded for the West was the Putin speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. We also saw such initiatives as then-President Dmitry Medvedev idea of new European security . . . I think this was already after the Georgian war. But in the run-up to the war, we saw the Russians implanting their people, ethnic Russians and people from the security services in South Ossetia that was de facto secessionists from Georgia, and the government in Moscow supported it. In Abkhazia and also the government in Moscow supported it and was developing the military infrastructure, including (what was very clear to me that there’s going to be a war) rebuilding a railroad in the months leading to the hostility that broke out on August 7th. In my analysis, the Russians were preparing for the war. There were programs. There were plans. The 58th Army was concentrated in North Caucasus, and then it had to pour down into South Ossetia and other elements that were mobilized to fight. When I was reviewing the monograph, that I think withstood the test of time extremely well, I found the mention of the rocket cruiser Moskva that was the flagship of the Black Sea. And that’s one of the fundamental differences between the Georgia war that went very badly for the Georgians: The Georgian military essentially sued for capitulation after losing 100 to 200 soldiers. What a difference between the Georgians and the Ukrainians that now we’re reporting it after 100 days of fears, warfare. But I think this is a very good segue way to what Colonel Hamilton is going to be talking about. (Robert Hamilton) Thank you, Ariel. What I’d like to do is sort of break it down into a couple of areas: those areas in which our monograph was fairly complimentary toward Russia or at least acknowledge some Russian successes, and then the areas in which we pointed out Russian shortcomings or failures. We believe that Russia was fairly successful in linking of the political and military objectives of its strategy. This war didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a long period of sort of geopolitical, geostrategic preparation in the Kremlin for the reestablishment of Russian hegemony or control over many of the lands of the former Soviet Union, and this was the first military step in that process. But we did find that the Russian government was fairly effective in linking the political and military objectives in its strategy. It was also effective in finding and exploiting a gap between strategic objectives of the West and strategic objectives of Georgia in the war, with the West sort of, in the run-up to the war, consistently counseling the Georgians, “Don’t allow yourself to be provoked. If you get yourselves into a war with the Russian Federation, we could not and would not assist you, and it’s a war you can’t win,” and the Georgian government saying consistently, “What’s happening is a process of creeping annexation that will eventually end in Russia being in control whether or not we react.” The Russians understood that the West and Georgia had very different strategic pictures. They found and exploited that gap. We found that they resourced the strategy and their operational plan fairly well. Again, as Ariel said, there was a long period of preparation in the Kremlin and in Russian General Staff and the 58th Army for this war. But, as the war started on the night of 7th of August, the Russians had already positioned enough forces to have that three-to-one advantage, attacker to defender, that all militaries strive for if you’re the attacker—preferably in every major system, not just in personnel. So the Russians did have that in this war, and they had a massive advantage in airpower and artillery which came into play and really was decisive in the war. We also found that performance of the ground maneuver forces, especially the airborne and special forces, was a relative Russian strength in this war. Areas that we were more critical: the personnel system—especially, the use of conscripted soldiers in war, despite the fact that it was illegal under Russian law. The Russians used a large number of conscripts; at least 30 percent of the forces in the war were conscripts in 2008. Amazing that we’re having the same discussions about the war in Ukraine in 2022. We were critical of the maintenance and logistical system of the Russian Armed Forces. We were critical of their inability to really conduct joint air ground operations. And we were especially critical of the air force operations, particularly in three areas: what we call “SEAD” or suppression of enemy air defenses—we found that the Russian Air Force was unable to suppress even the fairly tiny and rudimentary Georgian air defense network; we found that they were lacking in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; and they were lacking in strategic attack. So these are areas where we found the Russian Air Force really underperformed, and, after 2008, you’ll see a massive Russian rearmament program that initially focuses on the air force and focuses largely on these areas. And then, when we get into 2022, we can ask how they performed in those areas. Host You note that aggression against Georgia also sent a strong signal to Ukraine and to the European states along Russia’s border; also, that the short war fought between Russia and Georgia in August 2008 had implications reaching far beyond where it was fought. Please speak to the current situation in Ukraine from your monograph’s perspective. (Cohen) As we say repeatedly in the monograph, the Georgians, including some of the key decisionmakers that I interviewed for the monograph, went to the Europeans and to the Americans repeatedly saying that the Russian war is coming, the Russian invasion is being prepared. And in the meantime, one of the three brigades that Georgia had was in Iraq. It wasn’t even in Georgia. So Georgia was only a two-third of the little strength that they had, and, as my coauthor points out, the training of the Georgian armed forces by the Americans was in counterinsurgency and not in territorial defense, not in strategic operations—none of them. Moreover, after the war, we saw that the Obama administration refused to provide any kind of lethal weapons to Georgia and, later on, to Ukraine. The supply of Javelins to Ukraine that the Ukrainians were lobbying for very intensely didn’t start ’til 2017, and I think we saw now that antitank weapons played a key role in stopping the initial Russian mechanics. I would put a blame on the doorstep of both the European decisionmakers and Washington, and I would apportion that blame probably 70 percent to the Europeans and 30 percent to Washington. Why this inequality of apportioning the blame? And that’s a blame both for allowing the Georgia war to happen and the Ukrainian war to happen in 2014 and, later on, in 2022. Because, number one, if you do a mental exercise and imagine Georgia and Ukraine in NATO as the Bush administration asked back in 2008, you probably would have avoided both wars—or at least one of them, Ukraine. We warned in the monograph that Ukraine is the next target. We said it many times that the Crimea, in particular, where the Russians are giving out Russian citizenship like candy. The Donbas. There’s also areas outside of Ukraine, such as K’rts’anisi and Moldova—these are the candidates for Russian expansion and, possibly, annexation, as we saw in the Crimea and in Donbas. The West did not do anything about it—especially Germany, Italy, and France . . . typically resisted any kind of US attempts supported by Poland, Baltic states, and others to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Also, we saw a bit of wishy-washy assessment of the Georgia war written by one of the EU officials. We saw (Nicolas) Sarkozy going to Moscow, begging Putin to stop the war, and tabling plans (Sarkozy) that Russia later on ignored. And we also see, at the same time, Putin’s threats, including the threat to dismember Ukraine if Ukraine joins NATO. So there’s a lot of consistency in Russian policy since 2008 until 2014. Leading to 2014, Russia got wind in its sail after the perceived success of the Georgian war. They said, “Yeah, there were shortcomings,” as Bob outlined, “but we focused on strategic objectives, and we pretty much achieved them.” The Russians were encouraged by President (Mikheil) Saakashvili losing power in 2012. I’m saying in the monograph regime change, or at least significant weakening of Saakashvili, was the goal, and it was accomplished. And we saw that Ukraine is looking at the Georgia war and not doing anything since 2010, when President (Viktor) Yanukovych was elected and embarked on a policy of weakening Ukrainian military, which led to unsuccessful overall resistance; in 2014, losing to Crimea, pretty much without firing a shot; and losing parts of Donbas—losing, what, probably 15,000 people on each side. And that indecisive outcome of Donbas led to the war in 2022 and to continuation of Russian claims to rebalance the European security. And as I repeatedly said and wrote, the war in Ukraine in 2022 is not about Ukraine. It’s about pushing NATO out of Eastern Europe, going back to NATO preexpansion (1997) and pushing the United States out of Europe and thus changing the global balance of power. And my question to my esteemed coauthor, Bob, is “Does the Russian performance in Ukraine suggest that they can accomplish the larger strategic goals of United States and our allies agreeing to exorbitant Russian demands to pull out of Europe for NATO—at least from Eastern Europe; to limit our deployments, our long-range weapons around Russian borders; to remove tactical nuclear weapons from Europe; et cetera, et cetera? I do not see that performance justifying these very inflated goals. (Hamilton) Thanks Ariel. So, short answer, I . . . I agree. No, Russia’s military performance in the war so far would not allow them to achieve the geostrategic or geopolitical goals that you just outlined. I would caution, though, that it is still early . . . uh . . . that Russia has clearly switched tactics, has switched objectives, and is now fighting in a way that it’s more comfortable with. But let me go back a little bit to the four areas that we identified as specific military weaknesses in 2008 and then talk about how they’re performing so far in those areas in Ukraine in 2022. The first was the personnel system. We talked about the use of conscripts in a combat role, despite the fact that it’s illegal under Russian law. We’re seeing the exact same thing happening in 2022. The interesting thing about that is, allegedly, Russia had undertaken a number of reforms of the military personnel system, getting rid of the cadre units, which are units that are really only staffed with the leadership, and then soldiers are supposed to fill in as they plus these units up in wartime; going to the battalion tactical group system . . . so all of these fundamental reforms in the personnel system. Yet, we fast forward 16—no, 14 years—sorry—from 2008 to 2022, and you’re seeing the exact same thing. So this personnel system is at least one area in which the reforms have not taken root. Maintenance and logistical system for ground forces—again, we pointed that out as a weakness in 2008. It is a massive weakness in Ukraine. We are seeing the exact same things. A quote from the book that I pulled out was broken vehicles “jammed a single road into South Ossetia and hampered the movement of Russian equipment into the area of operations. Indeed, the Russian maintenance problem is evident even to the Georgians, with the senior Georgian official claiming that over the course of the war, 60–70 percent of Russian tanks and armored vehicles broke down.” We’re seeing—and I don’t know what the percentages are in Ukraine, but—you know, the pictures of abandoned Russian vehicles, broken Russian vehicles, strewn along the sides of Ukrainian roads is exactly the same type of picture that we saw in . . . (Cohen) How . . . however, the Ukrainians are using antitank missiles much more effectively. The Georgians just didn’t have enough and didn’t have enough training. (Hamilton) Right—the Georgians of 2008 did not have any of the types of antitank guided missiles the Ukrainians are using now. They didn’t have anything that could reliably defeat a tank—or, at least, in large numbers. Joint air ground operations were another thing that we pointed out as a weakness, and I would just say that in 2022, we’re seeing the same thing. We’re seeing many, many instances where the Russians are just unable . . . and it’s not only joint operations, which are famously difficult for militaries to conduct, right? Among the domains of conflict—ground, air, maritime—we’re even seeing the Russians having problems doing what we call just combined arms maneuver. Integrating ground maneuver forces with indirect—with ground artillery, with ground reconnaissance. We’re seeing them have serious problems—or, at least, we did in the beginning of the conflict—in just combined arms maneuver, not even to speak of joint operation. Then, finally, air force operations. We identified the suppression of enemy air defenses as a serious problem. It shocked me, to be honest, at the beginning of this war in 2022, that there was no what we call a SEAD campaign—suppression of enemy air defense campaign. In most Western militaries, the preliminary phase of a conflict is designed to cripple the enemy’s air force and air defenses so that when ground forces do move into a decisive phase, they don’t always have to be looking up in fear. They’re confident that their air forces have command of the air. The Russians moved in without so much as a SEAD campaign, and they’ve been unable . . . unwilling or unable, I think mostly unable, to conduct one since. So, Russian forces now—well over 100 days into the war—they’re still losing forces to Ukrainian unmanned aerial vehicles. They’re losing forces to the Ukrainian Air Force, which still continues to fly. Yes, it’s certainly taken losses, but the Ukrainian air defense system and the air force still continue to have an effect. It’s sort of stunning to me that there was no SEAD campaign, that there’s not been an effective SEAD campaign, especially since the air force was one of the priority areas of development—the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces were—for all of this military modernization and reform that has taken place since 2008. Now I’d like to sort of sum up by asking, “Why is this? Why are we seeing Russia having problems in the same areas it was having by 2008?” I think there’s several possibilities. First of all, as I mentioned or alluded to earlier, the comparison—Georgia, Ukraine, and Ariel, you mentioned this as well—not only is it not exact, it’s not even a fair comparison, right? Ukraine is almost 10 times the size in terms of area and more than 10 times the population of Georgia. Georgia is a very small country which has a very small military. It’s a largely a professional military and was as well in 2008, but there’s no way Georgian armed forces could stand up to the Russians. The next is it appears to me this time there was more direct Kremlin—probably when I say “Kremlin,” I should say “Putin”—influence on the military plan. I refuse to believe if you locked the Russian General Staff in a room and said, “Write a plan for an invasion of Ukraine,” this was the best they could come up with. And so I do believe there was a large influence of the Kremlin, the security services, and Putin personally on the military plan. And I would add that Putin 2022 and Putin 2008 are different actors. They’re different people, different entities. He’s older, he’s much more isolated, I believe that the authoritarianism in Russia has grown to the point where you have that problem that all authoritarian regimes have where no one wants to tell Putin an uncomfortable truth. And so it’s very likely that in the run-up to the war in Ukraine, he was told that everything would be fine. He was told that this was a wonderful plan, and he was probably surprised at how poorly it went in the early phase. Next thing I would say: corruption, corruption, corruption, right? We’re seeing it. We’re seeing the effects of it throughout the Russian Armed Forces, the Russian defense industry, the Russian defense enterprise. It’s clear that a lot of the resources that were dedicated to reform were misused or stolen. It’s clear that a lot of resources that were supposed to be dedicated to the upkeep of platformed vehicles and aircraft were misused or stolen. We’re seeing that, I think, contribute to the logistical maintenance problems they’re having. Finally, I would say Georgia obscured many of the Russian flaws that Ukraine has exposed. For example, the war ended in 2008 after only five days, before the Russian logistical shortcomings could play a decisive role. Ariel and I identified logistics as a problem, but my sense is that it’s always been. Had that war gone on for weeks or months . . . the Russians stopped at a little place called Igoet’i, which is just outside of Gori on the road to Tbilisi. I’ve thought since the time, they stopped not out of any magnanimity or any desire not to topple the Saakashvili regime. They stopped largely because they probably had reached the end of their logistical lines of communications and couldn’t go much further. And Ukraine has exposed all those flaws. Ukraine was always going to be a war of logistics for the Russians because of its physical size—just the amount of terrain the Russian Army had to cover to conquer the country—and the size of its military, meaning the Russians were going to have to expend a lot more ammunition than they did in Georgia. So I’ll leave it there. And I think the reasons . . . So, what we found looking at this war is that many of the same Russian flaws that we pointed out in 2008 are still there and, in fact, in some ways, are more serious. And the reasons are, again, political, Kremlin influence on the plan, I think; corruption; and the fact that these are just very different wars that the Russians are fighting. I would finally say we should guard against overcorrection. Not only are Georgia and Ukraine different wars, but the type of operation Russia conducted in the first phase of this war required capabilities that are weaknesses. Combined armed maneuver, joint operations, agile commanding control, dynamic targeting—all these things that . . . that the Russians aren’t good at. They’ve now rediscovered the concept of mass in the way they’re fighting in Ukraine. They’ve massed their forces in eastern Ukraine. They’re using massed artillery to pummel Ukrainian forces, hoping to use mass maneuver forces to create a breakthrough. So, they’re now fighting in a way that they’re more comfortable with. The Russian Army fights best when it fights as an engine of indiscriminate destruction, and that’s essentially what it’s doing in eastern Ukraine. Host Our time is running out. I don’t know if you can . . . in 30 seconds or so, going forward, what do we need to consider? (Cohen) We need to consider the political will. We need to consider that we ignored the warning signs of Russian imperial ambition that was translated into war, almost like we saw it in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century, and the pushback that needed to be done before and during . . . after Georgia war needs to be done now in terms of support of Ukraine, supply of the arms, and bringing Ukraine war to the point where Russia learns the lesson that aggression and expansion against its neighbors—and against Europe, in particular—is no longer tolerable for Russia. We need to incur the irreparable damage to that regime so that either the regime learns the lessons for the foreseeable future or there is a regime change in Russia going forward because they screwed up so badly. Kind of, you can say, like the Russians lost the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. Is this going to happen? I do not know. At this point, it looks like it may end along the lines of the Winter War in 1939–1940, where Finland lost some territory but preserved independence. But, as Bob said, there’s a fog of war. It’s too early to tell. We’re in the early stages. But the threat of Russian militarized imperialism is there for all to see. (Hamilton) And, if I could add from the military perspective, I think we need to search as we assess the Russian military’s performance in this war. And what does it mean for us? We need to search for what the Russians call the zolotaya seredina, right? The golden middle. Guard against the prewar assessment of the Russian military: 10 feet tall and bulletproof that’s going to roll through Ukraine like a knife through hot butter, right? To be fair, that was not the assessment of everybody, but many analysts of the Russian military sort of tended toward that assessment. And now, I think we’ve, in many cases, overcorrected, and we shrug our shoulders and say, “Well, clearly, the Russians are no military threat to anybody.” I would say, in the right context and used properly, the Russian military is still a formidable military instrument, so we need to find that golden middle, and we need to approach Russia’s military capabilities that way and not as either an existential threat in all context or not something we have to deal with at all. Host Thank you both so much. I’m sorry we don’t have more time. (Cohen) Thanks a lot—appreciate it. (Hamilton) Thank you, Stephanie. Host Thank you. If you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. About the authors: Dr. Ariel Cohen is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Eurasia Center and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (Council on Foreign Relations). He’s a recognized authority on international security and energy policy and leading expert in Russia, Eurasia, and the Middle East. For more than 20 years, Dr. Cohen served as a senior research fellow on Russian and Eurasian studies and international energy policy at the Heritage Foundation. Dr. Robert E. Hamilton is a research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College, specializing in strategic competition and rivalry. Hamilton is a retired US Army Eurasian foreign area officer whose assignments included US advisor to the Ministry of Defence of Georgia, the chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation in Georgia, (Department of Defense or) DoD Russia policy advisor to the International Syria Support Group in Geneva, the chief of assessments for the NATO Special Operations Component Command – Afghanistan, and the chief of the Russian De-Confliction Cell at Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. show less
Released 3 June 2022
In this podcast, Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski discuss the article “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray,” which was published in the Winter 2021-22 issue of Parameters.
Click here to read the review and reply to the original article.
Episode Transcript
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore... read more
Released 3 June 2022 In this podcast, Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski discuss the article “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray,” which was published in the Winter 2021-22 issue of Parameters. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss2/17/">Click here to read the review and reply to the original article.</a> Episode Transcript Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Lukas Milevski) (Guest 2: Phillip Dolitsky) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Mr. Phillip Dolitsky and Dr. Lukas Milevski for a review and reply of “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray” by Dr. Lukas Milevksi, featured in the winter 2021–22 issue of Parameters. Dolitksy’s thoughts on the piece appeared in the summer 2022 issue of Parameters. Milevski is an assistant professor at the Institute of History (Institute for History) at Leiden University. He is the author of The West’s East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective, published in 2018, and The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought, published in 2016. Dolitsky is a master’s student at the School of International Service at American University. Welcome to Conversations on Strategy. Lukas, it’s a pleasure to see you again. Your article appeared in the winter 2021–22 issue of Parameters. Phillip wrote in to share his thoughts on it. Lukas, please start us off with a recap of the original article. (Milevski) The article engages intellectually with Colin Gray’s grand strategic thought—a grand strategy being one of those concepts which he employed quite frequently, but he never really explored in a dedicated work. So I engaged with this thinking along a number of fronts, starting with a few basic, and sometimes mutually contradictory, definitions which he had used over the course of his career; then, certain casual conceptual overlaps—notably, among grand strategy, geopolitics, and strategic culture as well as, later in the article, also policy; and, finally and crucially, the inclusion of nonmilitary forms of power in grand strategy and the fungibility of these various forms of power, which related closely to certain problems of complexity in war. And war, of course, gets more complex once you’re trying to coordinate various forms of nonmilitary power alongside military power as well. So in exploring Gray’s grand strategic thought, the sense that I got is that for him, it represented what I called in the article the “agential context”: the context of what the rest of one’s government or one side was doing to contribute to achieving success in war around the military effort because, ultimately, Gray’s focus was usually military strategy, and his most prominent nonmilitary strategic theme was geopolitics. But he never really dedicated himself to exploring grand strategy. But, nonetheless, he did recognize its importance, and he was always conscientious in continually reminding his readers of the fact that it still mattered for them, whether in academic thinking and study or in actual strategic practice. And I’ll end with that. (Host) Great. Thank you for the recap. Phillip, in your reply to Milevski’s article, you noted two critical areas of Gray’s thought that you feel like he left out. The first one was classical realism and Clausewitz. Can you speak to that for us? (Dolitsky) Sure. First of all, pleasure to be here, and just want to thank the professor for engaging in a little master’s student from across the pond . . . is a testament to the type of scholar that he is. So I appreciate that. The first part that I raise in what was otherwise a really sweeping analysis was that I think that in order to understand Gray’s definition of grand strategy, which he really associated as being almost synonymous with statecraft, I think you needed to understand what his view in the international system was. And in this regard, Gray differed from quote unquote “mainstream (international relations or) IR” and the way that it’s taught nowadays as a split between (Kenneth) Waltz and (Alexander) Wendt, constructivism and neorealism. Instead, Gray really held to the primacy of the great giants of IR. So, starting all the way back from Thucydides, Lao Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Morgenthau, Kissinger, Raymond Aron—he had a particular affinity to. So understanding Gray had a great love for these people and that he thought that they truly can calculate a world politics gives you a different understanding of what grand strategy will become if you think that the world is this really anarchic place where power really matters. And I thought that highlighting that basis upon which his theory of grand strategy essentially rests on—I thought was a necessary component in what was an otherwise really great analysis. (Host) Lukas, what do you have to say to this? (Milevski) Phillip’s comments are very much premised on what I feel is the most incongruent interpretation of grand strategy by Gray: that it is the theory of statecraft itself. And I think incongruent because I don’t feel like statecraft obeys the general theory of strategy fundamentally, and Gray was very adamant that grand strategy was still strategy. And the reason that statecraft doesn’t do so, that it doesn’t obey the general theory, is because war and peace simply as contexts in which people act are simply too fundamentally different. Strategic thinking is a wartime phenomenon, whereas there are other forms of thinking for peacetime. That’s the basis of my contention with Phillip’s critiques. But it is true, of course, that Gray referred to himself on occasion as a classical realist. I would suggest that this has mostly to do with him translating himself to IR audiences because from a strategic studies perspective, IR, and especially the grand IR theories like realism and liberalism and etcetera, are somewhat irrelevant. They’re kind of meaningless and even kind of valueless because regardless of the content of those theories, what we see in strategic history is that realists, liberals, Marxists, fascists, etcetera, everyone—they all have to think about strategy practically, and they all have practiced strategy and history—I one exception being absolute pacifists who don’t actually practice strategy. Moreover, and I only very briefly allude to this in my written response, Gray’s conception of grand strategy as coordinating all forms of national power for political purpose, which I think is the most fundamentally useful interpretation of grand strategy, albeit also the least studied, is somewhat rendered meaningless if put into the context of IR’s grand theories because, for the most part, those grand theories each predetermined for themselves their relevant forms of power. Realists focus on military power, liberals on institutions and institutional power, and so on and so forth. But this predetermination sinks the very concept of grand strategy as encompassing all forms of power. That very degree of encompassing all power is inherently IR-agnostic, if not even IR-atheistic. So not only do I feel like this critique is a bit misguided, but, in relying on these IR labels, it is in a sense even outright destructive to the very concept of grand strategy itself—at least to Gray’s understanding of grand strategy, to grand strategy as all the instruments. And hence, just to make a point that I just thought of, this is probably why American interpretations of grand strategy are what they are—because the older school of grand strategic thought just doesn’t fit with American IR, so they turned grand strategy into something which was compatible with their way of thinking about the world. (Host) Phillip, you also mentioned Colin’s book, The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order, and why it wasn’t included in Lukas’s original work. What are you thinking here? (Dolitsky) First of all, thank you for that response. There’s a lot of food for thought there. The one work seemingly that Gray wrote on grand strategy—The Sheriff: America’s Defense of the New World Order—wasn’t mentioned in Professor Milevsky’s article and, to me, that was just kind of, “Why not?” You know, this is seemingly one of his most thought-out expressions of grand strategy. Obviously he has—and I mentioned in footnote—I think he has some other essays peppered throughout his, you know, his gamut of whatever his pen touched. He has a couple of essays, but he has an entire book here which dictates American grand strategy, which I think highlights some of those original concepts that I mentioned in my first critique: a distrust of global governance and of institutions, which he wrote about at length in another bloody century, but I think stems from his IR theory that I mentioned before, and that was really encapsulated in that article “Clausewitz Rules.” So I thought that that one salient point of “Why is Gray’s only book on grand strategy missing from an otherwise sweeping analysis of Gray’s grand strategic thought”—I thought was a point that ought to be raised. (Host) Over to you, Lukas. (Milevski) I don’t really consider The Sheriff to be a book of grand strategy or of statecraft. As a brief aside, I’m one of the people who separates the two concepts: grand strategy for war, statecraft for peace. But nonetheless, I don’t consider it either grand strategy or statecraft. Because, inherently, going by what I considered the most useful definition of either, which is encompassing all the instruments of power—The Sheriff doesn’t do that. The Sheriff does not discuss all instruments of America’s power in the book. Rather, he’s very much talking about and focusing on military strategy, to some degree on defense planning, to some degree on defense policy. All of that combined with a vision of America’s role in the world—the titular sheriff’s role. Now, granted, the vision thing: that’s very much American grand strategy concept, whereas the rest of it is basically military strategy and topics related to military strategy. So it’s just a thin slice of the breadth of grand strategy. So in this sense, I don’t think that Gray provided a grand strategic theory of success or theory of that for action in The Sheriff because it doesn’t encompass the full breadth of what grand strategy or statecraft are. It’s just, you know, a thin slice of that. (Host) Phillip, final thoughts? (Dolitsky) I really appreciate that reply. (Milevski) No worries. (Host) What are your final thoughts, Lukas? (Milevski) My belief is that, ultimately, Gray simply didn’t engage with nonmilitary forms of power to the degree sufficient actually to write about grand strategy or to write to a grand strategic theory of success or grand strategic theory for action. And this isn’t a criticism of Gray because hardly anyone has done so throughout history. Liddell Hart famously referred to grand strategy as terra incognita. And today, it still remains so because people aren’t studying this aspect of grand strategy. I am one of the only ones who has done so, and I’m not going to pretend that I’m anywhere near being an expert on anything which isn’t the military. But this is also perhaps why we in the West tend to find grand strategy so difficult to do because we’re not thinking about the actual coordination of these various forms of power. We don’t know how to do it, and probably this is also why we were so surprised when, back in 2014, a long time ago now, it seemed like Russia did it so apparently well. We found that surprising because we’ve had a lot of trouble doing that, and then they seem to do it well. Whether that’s necessarily the case is a different question, of course, but, nonetheless, it’s just reflective of the study of grand strategy that people don’t engage with the full breadth—which because that is admittedly pretty damn hard. (Host) I’m afraid we have to end it here, gentlemen. Thanks so much for your time and your insight. Listeners, you can read more about what our guests have to say about “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray” at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 2. If you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, look for us on any of the major podcast platforms. Author Information: Phillip Dolitsky is a master’s student at the School of International Service at American University. Dr. Lukas Milevski is an assistant professor at the Institute of History at Leiden University. He is the author of The West’s East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018) and The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016). show less
Released 8 April 2022.
This podcast is inspired by Dr. Bettina Renz’s 2016 Parameters article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” Dr. Renz revisits her original work and shares her insights on the current situation in Ukraine.
Click here to read the article.
Episode Transcript:
Stephanie Crider (Host)
Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore... read more
Released 8 April 2022. This podcast is inspired by Dr. Bettina Renz’s 2016 Parameters article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” Dr. Renz revisits her original work and shares her insights on the current situation in Ukraine. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol46/iss2/5/">Click here to read the article.</a> Episode Transcript: Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Bettina Renz) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Bettina Renz, author of “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power,” published in Parameters’ summer 2016 issue. Renz is professor of international security at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. She obtained her (master of arts or) MA and (master of science or) MSc in Russian studies at the University of Edinburgh and completed her PhD at the Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Welcome, Dr. Renz. Thank you for sharing your time with us today. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s talk about your 2016 article “Why Russia Is Reviving Its Conventional Military Power.” In it, you note that this was about more than preparing for offensive action. Russia wants to be seen as a world power. Please lay the groundwork for our listeners and briefly walk us through your article. (Renz) I wrote this article in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. And pretty much what I’m calling for in the article is that we need to view what is going on in Russia at all times really within more historical context—and, in particular, the annexation of Crimea and what happened afterwards—not as a sudden turnaround or an unexpected event. Because I think we encounter this problem quite often in Western assessments of Russia again and again. I think we are again in danger of making the same mistakes. There’s a tendency to hyperbole when assessing Russian military capabilities and intentions. So, during the 1990s, there was very much the view in the West that Russia was finished as a global actor. It had a very weak conventional military. There was the assumption that Russia no longer had any ambitions in that respect, and it was only interested really in fighting small wars in its periphery and performed very badly there. Against this background and sort of lack of attention paid to Russia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 came as a surprise to many. And then, assessments of Russia and of the military capabilities and ambitions pretty much flipped to the other extreme almost overnight. So all of a sudden, there was the assumption that Russia pretty much now had almost surpassed the United States or the West when it comes to military capabilities; a lot of focus spent by analysts, and so on, on new technology that the Kremlin and (Vladimir) Putin were propagating, like the hypersonic weapons and so on; a lot of emphasis on hybrid warfare as a major danger to Russia and to its neighbors. And now in 2022, of course, we have a clear escalation of the war in Ukraine that in fact has been going on since 2014. This is clearly a very offensive and aggressive military operation that has a very serious danger of escalation beyond Ukraine. But the focus seems to be, by many analysts now, on how poorly the Russian armed forces are doing operationally—even talking about the Russian military as a paper tiger and so on. So these assessments are not useful, and I deal with that in the article. In the article, I show that conventional military power, in addition to nuclear deterrence of course, was actually always important to Russia. It was important for upholding the Soviet Union’s power during the Cold War. It was seen as important under (Boris) Yeltsin; even already in the 1993 military doctrine, very ambitious plans were laid out for conventional military capabilities that were only affordable at the time. And then, since 2000 also, President Putin immediately focused on conventional military power as important. And the military reforms that occurred in Russia then—especially, since 2008, military modernization—were conducted not only to fight wars more efficiently, but especially, really, to recreate a powerful military for Russia as a symbol of a great-power status. Because Russia—again, this is nothing recent—Russia always saw itself as a great power. Even during the 1990s where, when it came to military capabilities, it wasn’t really the case. So there is a challenge for the West, and this is what I pose in the article as well: How do we deal with this? How do we deal with Russian great-power ambitions and its preparedness also to use military force? The West and the United States and its allies and coalition partners have been used to being able to stand up to opponents, various dictators, and so on—intervene in various humanitarian situations—since the 1990s. But, of course, Russia is different from these opponents. And there’s only so much that we can do, that the West can do, about stopping or preventing Russia from using conventional military power because of the danger of nuclear escalation, as we also see now in the war in Ukraine. (Host) Here’s a quote from your piece: “Russia has used armed forces to pursue a variety of policy objectives throughout the post-Cold War years, including various ‘peace enforcement’ operations across the former Soviet region at the beginning of the late 1990s, the Chechen wars, the war with Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine started in 2014, and most recently in Syria.” And as you mentioned, the current situation—the continuation of that in Ukraine. Do you think Russia is just feeling emboldened as you predicted in your article, or is this something else? (Renz) Russia, of course, has been using military force to pursue various interests, objectives—and this is nothing new—since the early 1990s. And, again, this is something we have to bear in mind. So what Russia was dealing with there, especially in its neighborhood, were, yeah, various security concerns: concerns about destabilization and so on, extremist movements. But also very importantly, status concerns were always important to Russia, especially regionally; so what Russia, the Kremlin, has long called or sees as its sphere of influence in the former Soviet region. And they became involved in various armed conflicts, civil wars, and so on in the early 1990s. But they kept forces, Russian military units, in all of these areas— Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan—that they were involved in as so-called “peacekeepers” since 1992. And as such, really, then, the war in Ukraine is nothing new. Very much 2014, the annexation of Crimea, was also about regional status concerns first of all. So from the Kremlin point of view, and we see that in an extreme form now in 2022, they have been seeing an independent Ukraine that is pursuing its own independent foreign policy as a threat to Russian interests in this particular region in what Russia sees as its sphere of influence. So, the war has been ongoing since 2014, but of course escalated significantly since February 2022 all over Ukraine. But also, we shouldn’t disregard, then, the international status concerns. These are also important. And what is important here, from the point of view of the Kremlin, is to show that Russia is a force to be reckoned with, to show this to the West and to the United States. There has been a lot of talk over the last decade or more about multipolarity: the wish to, you know, have a multipolar system where Russia would play an important role. And the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, was just again talking about this with regard to what is going on now in Ukraine. There’s a lot of discussion in Russia—and criticism, really—of what they have been seeing as a US monopoly on the use of force; a tendency to portray humanitarian interventions then by NATO, and so on, throughout the years, going back especially to the Kosovo war (the Kosovo conflict), Operation Allied Force, in 1999 as an excuse of the West to expand power; dismissing that this is about humanitarian issues and so on. And this of course has been going on for two decades after the Cold War already. So the war in Ukraine now, in 2022, first of all is about Ukraine, about the Kremlin’s refusal to accept that Ukraine is a sovereign and independent state that can decide on its own politics internally and internationally. It’s about destroying Ukrainian national identity in the state. But it also is to show to the West—to the United States, in particular, and to NATO—that there are limitations on the use of force by the United States and by the West—more or less saying, well, we can do what we want in our sphere of influence, and you have to stand by, and you can’t do anything about it unless you want to risk nuclear war. And this is of course a very difficult situation. (Host) One of the implications you bring up is the possibility of a potential shift in the global power structure. Does that apply here? Or maybe I should be asking, how does that apply here? (Renz) Well, from the Kremlin’s point of view again, yes, this applies here—so, again, the Kremlin, the foreign minister, Lavrov, again just speaking about the dawn of a new multipolar era and so on. I see it at a little bit differently. The outcome of the war in Ukraine is not yet clear. What is clear, I think, is that the Putin regime, Russia as it exists now with its current political system, will not be able to survive this war in the long term. Because this war is simply strategically unwinnable for the Kremlin. I’m not talking here about the immediate military operations. I’m talking about the longer term. I don’t think there is any reason to expect a fast collapse, unfortunately, of Putin’s regime at the moment. The war in Ukraine in 2022 was a clear strategic miscalculation, not only regarding Russia’s ability to achieve their objectives in Ukraine immediately, but, also, miscalculation about how the West would react. So, while Russia got away relatively lightly with Crimea in 2014, the war in Georgia (conflict in South Ossetia) in 2008, and so on, this extreme and unprovoked war of aggression now against Ukraine will not be forgotten. There will be no return to normal on this occasion, no matter how the war pans out. And so, it will change Russia’s relationship with the West, and with the EU also, significantly and irrevocably, I would say. Of course, we have to bear in mind that not all states are against this war—or, at least, not as strongly. So there are other countries (China, India, Pakistan, and so on) that are not as unambiguously condemning Russian actions and human-rights abuses and war crimes. And some of those countries of course share the views, in particular, with Russia about the West and about the United States and the international order. But I already warned in the article in 2016 that Russia cannot and will not win another arms race against the West if it comes to it, just as the Soviet Union was unable to win this. As I mentioned before, President Putin prioritized military modernization and military reforms right from the outset of his presidency. But for quite a few years, it was unclear how far he would go with this—whether he would yet again, like was done in the Soviet Union, prioritize military power over all other instruments of statecraft at the expense of many other areas of the state and of development. But I think now it’s clear that Putin again failed to build a state in Russia that could truly compete internationally or have much to offer, really, in areas other than military power and military aggression, either politically or economically. So it’s clear there are some states around the world that have not yet joined the clear condemnation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. But these actions—and, especially, these extreme, worst excesses and human-rights violations—they will have an impact on Russia’s international image long-term. And I don’t think it will be seen as a reliable or predictable or desirable partner anywhere in the longer term. And also, from the point of view of affordability, of course, with the sanctions that will continue for a long time, putting everything into military power as well—Russia’s only instrument, really, to compete internationally—is not something that Russia will be able to survive in the long term. (Host) Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic and for making time for us today. (Renz) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Host) If you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. show less
Released 6 April 2022.
This podcast is based on a compendium that resulted from a conference on “Military Operations in an Urban Environment” cosponsored by the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in conjunction with the Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs, the U.S. Army War College, and the Association of the United States Army. At the time of the conference, the concept of homeland defense was emerging as an increasingly important mission for the U.S.... read more
Released 6 April 2022. This podcast is based on a compendium that resulted from a conference on “Military Operations in an Urban Environment” cosponsored by the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce in conjunction with the Kentucky Commission on Military Affairs, the U.S. Army War College, and the Association of the United States Army. At the time of the conference, the concept of homeland defense was emerging as an increasingly important mission for the U.S. military. <a href="https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/102/">Click here to read the compendium.</a> Episode Transcript: Soldiers In Cities Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1: Michael C. Desch) (Host) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Michael Desch, editor of Soldiers in Cities: Military Operations on Urban Terrain, published by the US Army War College in 2001. A graduate of Marquette University, he holds master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Chicago. I’m so glad you’re here, Michael. Thank you so much for taking time to go through this with me today. (Desch) My pleasure. (Host) Military Operations on Urban Terrain: Please briefly walk us through the basic concepts of this monograph. (Desch) Military operations in cities is not a new topic. But the period of time in which we put together this collection of papers saw a renaissance of interest in the topic. It really was connected with a series of high-profile, urban operations that sort of reminded us all that operating in urban areas presented great challenges—challenges much greater and unique to those of military operations on other sorts of terrain. You know, the big thing on the American side, of course, was the famous Battle of the Bakaara marketplace (Battle of Mogadishu), chronicled in Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down: (A Story of Modern War). But there was also the First Battle of Grozny, in which the Russian military tried to suppress the Chechen uprising and felt that they had to do so, in part, by assaulting the capital of Chechnya, Grozny. Neither of these operations was pretty. And neither of them, I think it’s safe to say, was fully satisfactory to the respective militaries involved. And so military operations on urban terrain became a hot topic. There was a lot of doctrinal attention to it. But also, at least in the United States, there was an effort to build or improve the infrastructure for (military operations on urban terrain or) MOUT training at various Army combat training centers and other Army facilities. I was at the University of Kentucky, in Lexington, Kentucky, at the time, and one of the US Army facilities that was investing in a significant upgrade of its MOUT training facilities was the (US Army) Armor School at Fort Knox in Kentucky. Why Kentucky and why MOUT? That was the reason that we undertook this study. (Host) Let’s talk about military operations on urban terrain today. What did the monograph get right? (Desch) Well, military operations on urban terrain have been a pretty much consistent part of military operations in recent conflicts. So, most famous, during Operation Iraqi Freedom, were the operations in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. Today, we’re seeing military operations in conjunction with the Russian special military operation in eastern Ukraine. And the Russian case is interesting both for instances in which the battle is taking place in urban areas, particularly in the southeast, in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol, but also where, at least so far, they’re not being undertaken, which is the capital city of Kiev or Kyiv, as the Ukrainians call it. And so, in looking back over the collection of papers in the volume, I’m pretty happy with a lot of things that we said. I think that they continue to read well. But what didn’t we get right; what would I rethink? I think is what you really want to know. I think there are at least three things that, on the basis of all that’s happened since then and reflecting on it, I would have done differently. First of all, in our discussion of technology and urban military operations, we talked hardly at all about drones. And of course, drones have been the most important military innovation since 9/11 (the September 11 attacks). And I think, as we’re seeing in Ukraine, airborne, unmanned vehicles continue to be an important weapon system and one that could have a lot of direct effect on military operations in urban terrain. So why we talked so little about drones in terms of the technologies that might shape or affect MOUT operations, I can’t really say. But certainly, if we were rewriting that paper today, drones would have a bigger place. Another time-bound element of the essays was military operations in American cities were an important, potential mission at the time the original volume came out and, sadly, are continuing to be a topic that has relevance, particularly to the National Guard. We talked about it very much in the wake of 9/11 and the anthrax attacks in terms of the role of the US military and, particularly, the various state National Guard units in terms of (weapon of mass destruction or) WMD consequence management. And that, thankfully, has not been a major issue. And frankly, I don’t think that, with the standpoint of 20 years, that particular urban threat is as pressing as it once seemed to us. Conversely, civil support to local authorities unfortunately is, it seems to me, a growth industry. And of course, in the racial justice protests and the associated violence after the George Floyd incident, you saw a lot of local law enforcement and other local civilian authorities somewhat overwhelmed and needing to call on the Guard and (US Army) Reserve for support. And I think that’s going to continue, for the foreseeable future, to be a big, domestic MOUT mission that we didn’t talk enough about. I guess the third and final thing that I would have thought about differently with 20 years’ hindsight is we sort of had this distinction between different levels of intensity of urban military operations, from all-out combat to (counterinsurgency or) COIN to stability-and-support operations. And I still think, as points on a spectrum, they make sense. But we didn’t treat it enough, in the volume, as a spectrum—and particularly appreciate the fact that urban counterinsurgency can easily go to all-out combat. This is sort of the lesson of Fallujah. And it should have been the lesson, for example, of the Israeli incursion in Beirut in 1982. So those are the three things sort of off the top of my head that I think if we didn’t get them right—but, certainly, the emphasis was not what I would give them today. (Host) You touched on this a little bit earlier when you were talking about Russia and Ukraine and how this applies to today’s world. Any final thoughts on how this piece of work is still relevant? (Desch) I think it’s relevant in two senses. Barry Posen from (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or) MIT wrote a really terrific wrap-up conclusion in the book that was characteristically incisive and thoughtful. And he talked about military operations in urban terrain in two particular contexts: the tactical context and the strategic context. And I think both of those elements are evident and will remain evident in terms of Russia’s special military operation in eastern Ukraine. At the tactical level, Russian military forces are fighting inside—or trying to fight inside—a number of cities. And I think that the basic message of the book, that urban operations heavily favor the defender, is being borne out at the tactical level in spades. But the other thing that’s interesting is what Posen called the strategic level. And by that, I think he meant whether you decide to go into urban areas or not. And there, I think, we’re going to see this play out in Ukraine as well in two ways. One is, in the northeast, Russia ran into pretty stiff resistance in Kharkiv and a couple of other towns close to the border. And after getting a bloody nose, Russian forces made the decision to bypass those urban areas. And the key question is: What were they thinking, aside from getting punched hard in the nose? And I think what they were thinking is there was some modification of the overall strategy in eastern Ukraine. I had thought then and still think now that the Russian military is pivoting toward a notion of trying to isolate and maybe reduce the Ukrainian forces that are engaged along the line of contact with the Donbas (Donets Basin) and Luhansk republics. So in a sense, the strategic decision was to avoid built-up areas and focus on a different strategy. So that’s one strategic decision. The second is, I think that the Russians made a strategic decision not to go into Kiev immediately. And part of that was probably based on tactical concerns or considerations that it would have been a pretty tough fight. But I think it also may have reflected a particular theory of how they wanted to wage the war. You know, you always want to try to strike at the enemy center of gravity. But on the other hand, if the center of gravity is an urban area, and, tactically, the defense is favored, then maybe what you want to do, by way of reducing the center of gravity, is surround and isolate it rather than trying to go in and reduce it by force. And that, I think, is a strategic decision. (Host) This was a lot of fun and very informative. Thank you again for your time. I really enjoyed myself. (Desch) My pleasure. Thanks for your questions. (Host) If you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. show less
This podcast analyzes the cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and explores the counter-arguments from Part 1 of this series.
Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/
Keywords: China, Taiwan, CCP, PRC, Broken Nest, USA
Episode Transcript:
Stephanie Crider (Host)
(Prerecorded Conversations on Strategy intro) Decisive Point introduces... read more
This podcast analyzes the cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and explores the counter-arguments from Part 1 of this series. Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/ Keywords: China, Taiwan, CCP, PRC, Broken Nest, USA Episode Transcript: Stephanie Crider (Host) (Prerecorded Conversations on Strategy intro) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast’s guest and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1 Dr. Roger Cliff) (Cliff) Conversations on Strategy welcomes Dr. Roger Cliff. Dr. Cliff is a research professor of Indo-Pacific Affairs in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College. His research focuses on China’s military strategy and capabilities and their implications for US strategy and policy. He’s previously worked for the Center for Naval Analyses, the Atlantic Council, the Project 2049 Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. (Host) The Parameters 2021-22 Winter Issue included an article titled, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan.” Authors Dr. Jared M. McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris laid out an unconventional approach to the China-Taiwan conundrum. Shortly after the article was published, Parameters heard from Eric Chan, who disagreed with them on many fronts. We’ve invited you here today, Roger, to provide some additional insight on the topic. Let’s jump right in and talk about “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan. What is the essence of Jared McKinney and Peter Harris’s article “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan?” (Cliff) So this article is an attempt to find an innovative solution to the Taiwan problem that has bedeviled the United States since 1950. In this particular case, the author’s goal is not to find a long-term, permanent solution of the problem, but simply to find a way to deter China from using force against Taiwan in the near term. Specifically, a way that doesn’t entail risking a military conflict between two nuclear-armed superpowers. Their proposed solution is a strategy of deterrence by punishment, whereby even a successful conquest of Taiwan would result in unacceptable economic, political, and strategic costs for Beijing. The premise of the article is that China’s military is now capable enough that it could conquer Taiwan, even if the United States intervened in Taiwan’s defense. The result, they argue, is that the long-standing US deterrence-by-denial strategy for deterring a Chinese use of force against Taiwan—in other words, by threating Beijing with the risk that a use of force against Taiwan would fail—is no longer credible. Unlike most strategies of deterrence by punishment, the strategy that McKinney and Harris proposed does not primarily rely on military attacks on China. Instead, the punishment comes in the form of imposing other costs on China for a successful use of force against Taiwan. This has several elements. One is the United States selling to Taiwan weapon systems that will be most cost-effective and defending against a Chinese invasion. This would make a successful invasion of Taiwan more difficult and, therefore, more costly for China. Related to this, they also recommend that Taiwan’s leaders prepare the island to fight a protracted insurgency, even after Taiwan’s conventional military forces have been defeated. The most important element of their strategy, however, consists of the United States and Taiwan laying plans for what they call “a targeted, scorched-earth strategy” that would render Taiwan not just unattractive, if ever seized by force, but positively costly to maintain. According to McKinney and Harris, this could be done most effectively by threatening to destroy facilities belonging to the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which they say is the most important computer chipmaker in the world. They would also encourage Taiwan to develop the means to target the mainland’s own microchip industry and by preparing to evacuate to the United States highly skilled Taiwanese working in its semiconductor industry. McKinney and Harris say that a punishment strategy should also include economic sanctions on China by the United States and its major allies, such as Japan. And possibly giving a green light to Japan, South Korea, and Australia to develop their own nuclear weapons. At the same time as threatening increased cost to China for using force against Taiwan, the authors also advocate decreasing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan. Specifically, they recommend that Washington reassure Beijing that the United States will not seek to promote Taiwan’s independence. (Host) We got some pretty strong pushback from Eric Chan. In fact, he wrote a reply to this article. Can you break that down for our listeners and explain the essence of Chan’s response to the article? (Cliff) In his response to McKinney and Harris’s article, Eric Chan of the US Air Force makes three main critiques. First, he questions their assertion that attempting to maintain deterrence by denial would result in an arms race between the United States and China, pointing out that China has already been engaged in a rapid buildup of its military capabilities for the past quarter century, even while the United States has been distracted by the war on terror and its counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, Chan finds McKinney and Harris’s recommendations for reducing the cost to Beijing of not using force against Taiwan to be unconvincing. In particular, he disagrees with their claim that Taiwan is moving farther away from mainland China, pointing out that polling in Taiwan has repeatedly found that the vast majority of people there favor a continuation of Taiwan’s current ambiguous status. Therefore, Chan implies, there is essentially no cost to Beijing for not using force against Taiwan as Taiwan is not moving farther in the direction of independence. Chan also points out that the reassurances that McKinney and Harris recommend that the United States offer to Beijing are in fact things that the US is already doing. Chan’s third critique is that the cost of China of the punishments that McKinney and Harris recommend compared to the costs that Beijing would already have to bear as a result of fighting a war of conquest over Taiwan are insufficient to provide any additional deterrent value. For example, he points out that the economic cost to China of destroying the Taiwanese and Chinese semiconductor industries would be minor compared to the enormous economic damage that any cross-strait war would inevitably cause to China. Similarly, he argues that the prospect of Taiwan fighting a protracted counterinsurgency campaign would be of little deterrent to a Chinese government that has decades of experience brutally crushing popular resistance. After critiquing this strategy recommended by McKinney and Harris, Chan asserts that the only way of deterring China is to demonstrate an ability to destroy a Chinese invasion force while systematically grinding the rest of China’s military to dust. (Host) Thanks for laying the groundwork for this conversation. So what I would like to hear from you is how would you analyze these arguments? (Cliff) Yeah, so to better understand both the McKinney and Harris article and the Chan critique of it, I think it’s useful to examine the decision-making model that is implicit in McKinney and Harris’s argument. Their analysis treats Beijing as a unitary, rational actor that is faced with a choice between two alternatives. It can either use force against Taiwan or it can continue not to. If it chooses not to use force, then Taiwan will continue in its current, unresolved state. In addition, however, McKinney and Harris argued that, over time, the likelihood of Taiwan voluntarily agreeing to unification with the mainland is diminishing—and, therefore, that the cost of Beijing of not using force against Taiwan is, in fact, gradually increasing over time. On the other hand, if Beijing chooses to use force against Taiwan, then there’s two possible outcomes. It could, of course, fail, in which case Beijing would be worse off than before because not only would Taiwan remain independent, but China would also have incurred the human and material costs of fighting and losing a war. If the use of force succeeded, however, then they assume Beijing would be better off because the benefits of conquering Taiwan would outweigh the costs of the war fought to achieve that. They argue that, up until now, Beijing has been deterred from using force against Taiwan because of the likelihood that the United States would intervene on Taiwan’s side and defeat China’s efforts. Thus, from Beijing’s point of view, the expected costs of using force against Taiwan have exceeded the costs of not using force. Since they do not believe it is feasible to restore the military balance in the favor of the United States and Taiwan so that a Chinese use of force against Taiwan would likely fail, they now propose a strategy to raise the cost of even a successful use of force against Taiwan, while reducing the cost of not using force against Taiwan, so that Beijing’s rational choice will continue to be to not use force against Taiwan. From the perspective of this model of China’s decision making, Chan’s critique is essentially that McKinney and Harris’s recommendations will not significantly increase the cost of Beijing of a use of force against Taiwan, nor will they reduce the cost of Beijing of not using force against Taiwan. His proposed alternative is to ensure that a use of force against Taiwan will fail and, simultaneously, to increase the cost of China’s ruling party of a use of force against Taiwan by threatening to destroy China’s military at the same time. (Host) Where do you fall on this topic? Do you favor one perspective over the other? (Cliff) Well, I partially agree with Chan’s critique, but I think he overlooks some important issues, and I think his proposed alternative is problematic. And although I don’t entirely agree with their recommended strategy, I think McKinney and Harris’s recommendations have some value. So let me start with the part of Chan’s critique that I agree with. The value of China’s exports to just two countries, the United States and Japan, is more than $600 billion a year. That’s nearly 5 percent of China’s total economy. If China went to war with the United States, and possibly Japan, over Taiwan, it is highly unlikely that the US and Japan would continue to trade with China. And other countries, such as those in the European Union, might impose trade embargoes on China as well. Regional war would also cause massive disruption to other countries’ trade with China as well as to investment and technology flows into China. Compared to all these costs, the additional cost of Beijing of efforts to specifically destroy Taiwan and mainland China semiconductors industries would seem to be relatively minor, and, therefore, I agree with Chan that this is unlikely to affect Beijing’s calculations in a dramatic way. I also agree with him that McKinney and Harris’s recommendations for reducing the cost to China of not using force against Taiwan are already US policies, and, therefore, nothing they propose would actually reduce Beijing’s perceived costs of not using force against Taiwan over what is currently being done. There are, however, two even more fundamental problems with McKinney and Harris’s analysis. The first one is implied by my depiction of it as a one based on a unitary, rational actor, and that is the idea of treating a country as a unitary, rational actor. Now this is a valid approach when looking at individual people, but countries and governments are collective actors, and collective actors behave in ways that would not be considered rational for an individual person. This has been proven at the theoretical level by the economist Kenneth Arrow, and even a cursory observation of the behavior of countries in the real world confirms that this is true. National leaders are constantly making decisions that are clearly not in the best overall interests of their nations. In this specific case of China, China’s leaders have repeatedly shown their willingness to do anything to maintain their hold on power, no matter how damaging those actions are for the Chinese nation as a whole. Nowadays, the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China and its top leader, Xi Jinping, rests on two pillars. One is ever-improving standards of living for the Chinese people, and the other is restoring China to what is seen as its rightful place, as one of the dominant civilizations of the world. Key to the second pillar is recovering those territories that China lost during its period of weakness during the nineteenth and early twentieth century—most especially, Taiwan. If the party or its top leader is seen as failing at either of these two tasks, then they are at risk of being pushed aside and replaced by someone who is believed can achieve them. And Xi and the rest of the communist party leadership are keenly aware of this reality. If something were to occur that signified the possibility of the permanent and irreversible loss of Taiwan, therefore, China’s leaders would be willing to pay almost any cost to prevent that from happening. And this gets to the second fundamental flaw with the unitary, rational actor approach to predicting China’s external behavior, which is that it assumes that the costs and benefits for national leaders are purely material and, therefore, can be objectively calculated by an external observer. But both of those assumptions are incorrect when it comes to China’s policy toward Taiwan. China already enjoys virtually all of the material benefits that unification with Taiwan would convey. People travel freely between Taiwan and mainland China, and trade and investment across the Taiwan Strait are virtually unrestricted. China is not currently able to base military forces on Taiwan, which creates something of a strategic disadvantage for it. But, in fact, in its promises regarding unification to Taiwan, Beijing has said that it would not station military forces in Taiwan so long as Taiwan voluntarily accepts unification. The value to Beijing of formal political unification with Taiwan, therefore, would be almost entirely symbolic. And whichever leader brought that about could be confident of going down in history as a hero of the Chinese nation. Under these circumstances, it is simply not possible to objectively calculate what material price Beijing would or wouldn’t be willing to pay in order to achieve the goal of unification. (Host) So what would you recommend? (Cliff) McKinney and Harris’ proposal, as I said, is not without merit. It should be taken seriously. Although Chan makes a number of arguments as to why it might not be practical, anything that raises the cost to Beijing and using force against Taiwan can only contribute to deterring it from doing so. It would be foolish, however, to rely solely on a strategy of punishment for deterring Chinese use of force against Taiwan. And that’s where I part company with them. I also disagree with their assessment, moreover, that China already possesses the capability to invade and conquer Taiwan. In an analysis I did for a book on the Chinese military published by the Cambridge University Press in 2015, I concluded that it would not be possible, in fact, in the near term, for China to do that. And I disagree that maintaining the US capability to prevent a successful invasion of Taiwan would require an all-out arms race with China. It would, however, require focused and determined efforts that concentrate on key capabilities and their enablers, not simply on fielding large numbers of ever more advanced ships, aircraft, and other military technologies. I should also say, though, that I disagree with Chan’s prescription for deterring China, which is to threaten to grind China’s military to dust. US military planning should be focused purely on deterrence by denial, being able to thwart any Chinese effort to use military force to compel Taiwan to unify with the mainland. To threaten the survival of the Chinese regime in response to an attack on Taiwan would be hugely escalatory and could bring about just the type of all-out war that McKinney and Harris’s strategy attempts to avoid. Moreover, I don’t think it’s necessary to deter Beijing, so long as we maintain the capability to prevent it from forcibly unifying with Taiwan. (Host) Roger, you’ve really added an extra layer of insight into this topic. (Cliff) My pleasure, it’s a very interesting and provocative article, and it’s an important topic that deserves debate, discussion, and analysis. (Host) If you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform. show less
Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast explores cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and offers counter-arguments as well. Read the original article:... read more
Deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan without recklessly threatening a great-power war is both possible and necessary through a tailored deterrence package that goes beyond either fighting over Taiwan or abandoning it. This podcast explores cutting-edge understandings of deterrence with empirical evidence of Chinese strategic thinking and culture to build such a strategy and offers counter-arguments as well. Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/4/ Episode Transcript: Stephanie Crider (Host) Decisive Point introduces Conversations on Strategy, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who explore timely issues in national security affairs. The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the podcast guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. The guests in speaking order on this episode are: (Guest 1 Jared M. McKinney) (Guest 2 Peter Harris) (Guest 3 Eric Chan) Host Today we welcome Dr. Jared McKinney and Dr. Peter Harris, authors of “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021–22 issue. We are also pleased to welcome Mr. Eric Chan. Dr. McKinney is the chair of the Department of Strategy and Security Studies at the eSchool of Graduate Professional Military Education—Air University, and reviews editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Dr. Harris is associate professor of political science at Colorado State University and Indo-Pacific perspectives editor of the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. Mr. Chan is the senior Korea/China/Taiwan strategist with the Headquarters (Department of the) Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate and a reviewer for the Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs. He also serves as an adjunct fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute. Welcome to the inaugural episode of Conversations on Strategy. Let’s talk about the China and Taiwan conundrum. Jared and Peter, your article, “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan,” proposes an unconventional approach to China’s relationship with Taiwan. The article garnered worldwide attention, including from the (Chinese Communist Party or) CCP, which condemned the strategy. Jared, Peter, please give us a brief recap of your article. (McKinney) Thanks for having us here today, Stephanie. The Taiwan conundrum is how to have great-power peace without abandoning Taiwan to Chinese domination and how to preserve Taiwan’s independence without a great-power war. Is there a way out of this conundrum? Peter and I have argued that there is, and we’ve termed this approach “the broken nest.” Chinese leaders, even pathological ones like Mao, have long understood that grand strategy is all about balancing different vital interests. We took some inspiration for the strategy from a 1975 meeting Henry Kissinger had with Mao Zedong, in which Taiwan was discussed. Kissinger asked Mao when Taiwan would return to the mainland. Mao said, “In 100 years.” Kissinger replied, “It won’t take 100 years. Much less,” and then Mao then responded, “It’s better for it to be in your hands, and if you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it because it is not wantable. There’s a huge bunch of counterrevolutionaries there.” This is the bottom line of the broken-nest strategy, to make Taiwan, given the (People’s Republic of China’s or) PRC’s broader interests, “unwantable.” The phrase “broken nest” comes from a Chinese proverb that asks, “Beneath a broken nest, how can there be any whole eggs?” We designed this approach according to what political scientists call “deterrence by punishment” and the literature on tailored deterrence, which asks analysts to try to match techniques to a specific adversary. We proposed a tailored deterrence package composed of four elements. We argued, first, that Taiwan should invest more money in weapons designed to make the island costlier to invade. Second, that Taiwan should threaten China with a preplanned resistance campaign to demonstrate to the mainland that subduing Taiwan would not be cheap, quick, or easy. Third, we called for a targeted scorched earth strategy, whereby Taiwan’s semiconductor industry would be destroyed in the event of a Chinese invasion. And, finally, we proposed that regional actors such as Japan and Australia threaten Beijing with massive military buildups in the event of force being used against Taiwan. While none of these elements can stand on their own, together, we suggest that they’re sufficient to make Taiwan “unwantable.” The bottom line is that we think this could be the beginning of a solution, at least for now, to the Taiwan conundrum—and, although one might proffer this or that objection, to our knowledge, there is no more realistic or credible option in the current marketplace of ideas. But if there’s a solid alternative, we want to hear about it, and so we’re looking forward to the conversation today. Host Wonderful, thank you. Shortly after we published your article, Parameters heard from Eric Chan from the US Air Force’s Checkmate Directorate, who took issue with some of the main points in the “Broken Nest: Deterring China from Invading Taiwan” article. What’s your perspective, Eric? (Chan) Hello Stephanie, thank you for having me. This is a very good discussion, and I’d like to thank the authors for making a very interesting point and a lot of very interesting ideas about how to do a tailored deterrence theory. However, the main issue that I have with this tailored theory is that it’s really designed to deter a pre-Xi Chinese Communist Party. This doesn’t really cover the aggressiveness of Xi Jinping and his ideological bent in terms of finishing what he calls a Taiwan problem. Because there’s such a focus on the ideological portion of this conflict, many of the proposed solutions to this deterrence theory fails against this newly aggressive China. For instance, scorched earth, especially targeting things like (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or) TSMC, fails primarily because the economic portion is not as important to Xi as it was to party leaders from a generation ago. And, moreover, this imposes significant political costs on Taiwan, on any Taiwanese political leadership that would advocate for such a strategy. And I think if we have learned any lessons from Afghanistan, that is that we shouldn’t be proposing military solutions that are disconnected from the political realities. So, when you talk about deterrence against Xi’s China, because deterring an aggressive power is really hard to do, especially when they’re bent on ideological confrontation with the United States, that means the US really has no other choice than to be able to threaten a great-power war against China, and especially because we’re looking at the party entering what we can deem as the most dangerous decade. This really means that the US needs to be able to propose realistic methods of deterrence that aren’t really limited by either economic deterrence or even by Taiwan being able to advocate for a bloody insurgency campaign. Economic deterrence alone isn’t enough to properly deter the party, nor is insurgency campaign raged by Taiwan; that would not be sufficient to deter the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, the US must be able to credibly threaten a massive, great-power war. Taiwan needs to be able to pose the tactical and operational problems to the party that makes the US threats even more credible. So, unfortunately, despite the very clever ways that we’re trying to tailor deterrence here, it is likely insufficient to properly deter the party of today. Host Thank you for your thoughts on that. Jared and Peter, back to you for a brief response before we dig a little bit deeper into this topic. (Harris) Thanks Stephanie, and thanks to you, Eric, for engaging with our argument. You make some very good points—points that we agree with, some points that we have honest disagreements about, and then some points that we look forward to exploring with you further today. The first thing I want to clarify, a point of agreement between the three of us, is that nothing in our article should suggest that we absolve Beijing of responsibility, the heightening tensions across the strait. We agree that China has become more aggressive. We agree that China has become more assertive, and it’s the root cause of the problem or the urgency that the problem now has. I’m in print elsewhere as arguing that China is responsible for worsening the security environment, for empowering hawks here in the United States, and that Beijing should take steps to reassure Taipei and Washington that it has no plans to invade. We take China’s increase in power and its increase in assertiveness as context where a challenge to be overcome. The second point I’d like to clarify is that we do not argue that China wants Taiwan so that it can control the island’s semiconductor industry. From your written response, I took that that’s what you understood our argument to be, and that’s been a common misperception in some of the other commentary that we’ve seen since our article’s publication. But we do not argue that China wants Taiwan to control its semiconductor industry. Rather, our argument is that China has become dependent on Taiwan’s semiconductors to a nontrivial degree, so that Beijing can now be threatened with the withholding of those technologies. To be clear, we are open to debate about how costly it would be to China to lose access to TSMC chips, but we need to see some logic and evidence to convince us that the threat of disablement would truly be water off a duck’s back. We think that even ideologically motivated leaders like Xi can be dissuaded from taking irrational choices, and we think that the threat of disabling those chip factories could constitute such a threat. We know The New York Times has reported that US intelligence officials have reported that Xi is in fact concerned about the security of access to Taiwanese manufacturing chips, and that is a component of his thinking when it comes to deciding a policy toward Taiwan. Right now, Taiwan’s chip industry already comprises a part of the island’s defense policy. We view it as a commitment device to keep the free world in. And, if you look at statements made by political and economic elites in Taiwan, it seems clear to me that the industry is treated as a commitment device to encourage an intervention on Taiwan’s behalf in the event of a Chinese invasion. What we’re proposing is that the industry be turned into a commitment device to keep China out, that the threat of the foundries’ disablement might be enough to stave off an invasion. If I could just conclude real quick, and I think there’s one question that would be useful for us all to clarify our answers to inform the discussion—that is, what would it take to deter China from invading Taiwan? What I gathered from your remarks and from your written response is that your position is the only thing that will deter China from invading Taiwan is the prospect of complete national annihilation at the hands of the United States. Is that correct framing of your position—that only complete annihilation at the hands of the United States—the prospect of that—is enough to deter an invasion, or is there something short of that that might be threatened that would succeed at upholding the status quo? I think if we can understand the answer to that question, we’ll understand each other a little better and we could have an informed discussion on that basis. (Chan) Okay, so to address the point here, I would say that national annihilation, of course, it’s a bit of a stretch. The PRC . . . one of the main issues that we have with deterring China today is that many of our leaders don’t really quite believe that the US is going to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons in a Taiwan contingency. So, the US does not necessarily need to threaten national annihilation to make credible deterrence against the party. Rather, all it has to do is to be able to threaten sufficient levels of disruption to where the party would feel that its grip on power would be threatened. In the case of a Taiwan invasion, the reason why I say that threatening TSMC by itself isn’t really much of a particular threat to Xi is because there’s so many other factors—economic factors even—that Xi needs to consider in terms of an invasion. Fuel and food—those two basic things much more important than semiconductors, especially given that the semiconductors that China uses, much of it is already largely homegrown because of the TMC foundries and also the Shanghai foundries that already exists on the mainland. And when you’re talking about Taiwan targeting that, that becomes a much more complex version of deterrence by punishment—one of the weaker areas that Taiwan has issues in being able to credibly deter the CCP with. I would argue that much of these economic costs are already baked into the calculus of the CCP. That’s one of the reasons why Taiwan hasn’t been invaded yet. Not only is there the high economic costs involved, but also Xi is just not sure whether or not he can complete the job of an invasion prior to a massive US response. I would argue here that yes, even when you’re talking about the defensive use or thinking around these semiconductors that Xi is afraid of the semiconductor supply disappearing, I would say that a good deal of it has already been baked in. They’re considering it as a threat, but not really to the extent that they really fear things like food and fuel, oil supplies being cut off in terms of a great-power war. (Harris) You say that national annihilation might be a stretch, but then, in your written response to the article, you did call for credibly demonstrating an inability to systematically grind the (People’s Liberation Army or) PLA to dust. So, when I read those words, it seems to me that you think to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, what the United States needs to do is threaten, essentially, World War III because the PRC would not respond to, you know, an effort to grind the PLA to dust without retaliating in kind. I guess we have a disagreement between Jared and I and you where we think there’s a package of deterrence that could be put in place, including economic threats, semiconductors, one—but, other, economic threats, the threat of armed insurgency on the island of Taiwan, etc., could be enough to deter an invasion, whereas it does seem that, for you, that the threat needs to be cataclysmic proportions to deter an invasion. I mean, I have some questions about that strategy if that’s truly where you think the United States needs to be to deter an invasion, but I just kind of want to clarify that there is dividing line between those, unless I’m misunderstanding in some way? (Chan) Peter, I would say, “Just somewhat.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say “national annihilation,” but, rather, sufficiently being able to threaten the ability to destroy large parts of, say, the PLA Navy, of being able to knock out much of the rocket force to the extent that the party has serious doubts about being able to continue a military operation to a useful degree against Taiwan; being able to threaten them with just being able to cut off these fuel supplies, food supplies. So, you’re not really talking about nuclear war here, but you’re talking about the ability to let the party know that if this war stretches out over into the long term, then this will get increasingly bad for the party, that this will start threatening a significant political instability. So yes, you’re talking about World War III, which is bad enough, but I just want to make clear that it’s not like I’m looking for, you know, a massive nuclear strike on China. (McKinney)If I could, I think it might be worth discussing the basis for the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy today. I mean, if you pick up yesterday’s copy of the People’s Daily or the day before’s copy, almost every day, a few issues are talked about, and they all center around China as a moderately prosperous society in 2021 and achieving the China Dream and becoming a modern, socialist, successful, democratic state by 2049. According to current Chinese discourse, these issues have essentially become the basis for the CCP’s legitimacy, and the party is saying we can deliver these things; in exchange, you should essentially legitimate us as the governing authority. The bottom line, I think, is if you can threaten these goals, then you have a perspectively effective strategy in order to deter a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Now it gets a bit tricky because one of the China Dream goals is, in fact, the reunification of the Chinese homeland. And so, then, this raises the question: Is that the only China Dream goal? It is not. And could that goal be accomplished without decisively failing on other performance metrics? My view is that Beijing would absolutely fail to achieve other metrics of the Chinese Dream were it to be cut off from the world semiconductor industry, to suffer massive casualties in the event of serious Taiwanese resistance to an invasion, to face the informational and publicity costs of a long-term and costly insurgency backed by nations of the world sanctioning Chinese goods and other US allies and partners in the region—South Korea, Australia, Japan, say—doubling their defense budgets and forming a strengthened coalition against Beijing. So that’s essentially what we proposed. And it’s really not clear to me how the party would be legitimate under these conditions according to the standards that they themselves have set out. (Chan) Thanks for bringing up those great points. How I would address this is that it’s very clear to me that Xi is willing to take a significant number of political risks and economic risks in the service of what you would consider a very severe ideological competition with the United States. There’s been a significant amount of economic damage that Xi has imposed on China all by himself in terms of being able to fund that ideological purity. When he did his crackdown on Hong Kong, he did it fully knowing that this would impose serious economic costs on China itself. Same thing with his crackdowns on the tech(nology) industry. Same thing with his crackdown on, say, the private education sector and all these regulations too regarding what can and cannot be done during this time of (coronavirus disease or) COVID as well. It’s clear that he’s willing to pay a significant economic cost, and he’s doing this because he feels like the party itself needs to be able to credibly demonstrate its power and to be able to make sure that the populace is ideologically unified along the party lines. So even this talk of legitimacy, this is the talk of, say, the 2009, 2010 era when the party itself was undergoing a massive crisis in legitimacy right before Xi himself came into power. And with Xi’s ascension now, a lot of these old legitimacy issues have been dealt with in a very harsh way by Xi. This is what I mean by the ability of the party to absorb fairly significant amount of economic damage in service of these political goals. And for any leader to be able to take Taiwan and, in so doing, being able to say that they’ve completed the job that Mao himself could not finish, the Chinese people would take a significant amount of economic pain to be able to credibly say this. By itself, threatening the China Dreams, economic goals itself, there is some level of deterrence. I would say it’s significantly less than where it was 10 years ago or 20 years ago when the level of prosperity and the level of economic, domestic economic growth within China was lower than it was today. Just to summarize here, I like to say that China—and, especially, Xi—views the unification of Taiwan—with Taiwan—as something that is absolutely crucial to his policies and his dreams that the communist party make a world safe for autocracy. They’re willing to take a significant amount of economic damage to do so, and they feel confident that the Chinese population would make that type of trade. (McKinney) If I could just bring a few things up. The first is that this strategy is not fully economic. In fact, there’s four different levers, and, for some reason, everyone focuses on the economic one as if it’s the only one, which is not really what we’ve argued. There are military aspects focused on Taiwan, informational aspects focused on how the world and America would respond to a Chinese invasion, diplomatic and military aspects directly relating to how regional states would respond. In terms of the economic aspects, you mentioned in your opening remarks just a bit ago that China produces most of its own semiconductors. That’s not true. According to the latest industry report, China accounts for one third of all global semiconductor demand, but Chinese suppliers only supply 10 percent of that command. Now it is true that some foreign companies have semiconductor manufacturing in China. These manufacturers, however, are dependent on the importation of parts and supplies from their home companies and countries, and also one of the military instruments of power that are part of the plan is that, as part of the disabling of TSMC and Taiwan’s semiconductor industry, there would be targeted strikes on the mainland against major production facilities in China, limited though they are. There is not a scenario in which a modern state can exist in the digital age without reliable access to semiconductors. China has the capability to produce semiconductors on its own—right now, up to 14 nanometers—but this is not the cutting edge of semiconductor design, and TSMC, Intel, and Samsung are generations ahead of China’s capabilities. Now, everything can be resolved, probably eventually, if you want to spend enough money on it, but this goes back to the fact that, you know, Mao said, “You fight your way, I fight my way.” I think in our strategy, what we’re saying is, “Yes, we will fight our way, and we’re going to fight in the ways in which we’re competitive. We’re gonna draw on our strengths, and, right now, our strengths are global, they’re economic, they’re not necessarily air superiority over the Taiwan Strait, they’re not missile superiority over the Taiwan Strait. The US has geographical disadvantages that make that prohibitively costly.” So, this is a way to really draw on American comparative advantages and impose really significant costs. (Chan) Thanks for bringing up those points. I think the reason why I focus most—and why most people focus most—on the economic portion of it is that, by itself, those represent the highest levels of deterrence mentioned in your tailored deterrence theory. The other measures of deterrence aren’t really all that strong. Being able to threaten an insurgency campaign on Taiwan? Well, the People’s Armed Police have had decades of experience in dealing with various levels of insurgencies within China itself, and you’re talking about a place that’s island nation. So, supplies easily cut off; very easy to be able to attack people, most people are located in huge population centers, which ironically make it easier for the party to target people; and also the Taiwan people itself you know, no real experience in being able to wage an insurgency. Right now, the Tsai government is looking at ways of being able to increase the strength of the Taiwanese populace. On that there’s new, all that mobilization agency, and there’s some resiliency camps run by Taiwanese Americans. But in terms being able to credibly threaten long, deadly guerrilla campaign, Taiwan is just not there, and it’s really not going to be very convincing against the strength of the People’s Armed Police, especially once the party feels that the war has already been won. Then it’ll just settle down to what would be optimistically termed as just a “pacification campaign.” So that’s not really much of a deterrent at all. And, regarding the idea of allies and partners, being able to arm up against China after a threat—well, it’s not really all that much different from what they’re already doing right now. Yes, they can certainly accelerate their defense spending and so forth. But if Taiwan is taken, this would be a huge blow against American credibility and a presence in the region. We’ve made so many unspoken promises to Taiwan over the years. It was an American ally some generations back, so China taking over Taiwan now would simply reorder the strategic environment for the US presence. Japan might still be on board, but Korea would probably start drifting a lot closer to the China orbit. There would be significant questions in the Philippines, and even Australia might be looking at a more independent policy if it was very clear that China had gotten ascendancy in the region. I would argue that, yeah, the economic portion of this and the semiconductor portion is probably the most deterrent portion against Xi, but, as I did argue earlier, that there are some significant other costs, more basic costs, that the party fears precisely because semiconductors aren’t all that fully developed within the PRC itself. In the end, legitimacy for the party will be based on their ability to provide food and fuel to the nation, and, in the case of any war, this would already be in question. Even the idea of blowing up, say, TSMC foundries—making that threat itself isn’t all that strong because in the war, it’s going to be really hard to make sure that those foundries aren’t blown up anyway, even if Taiwan isn’t targeting them deliberately. Shinto itself is literally seven miles away from one of the perspective party landing areas. So, if there’s any invasion there, the foundries, TSMC headquarters, all likely going to be hit, even if Taiwan isn’t targeting them deliberately. So the massive disruptions in the supply chains and the economic costs from any sort of war is already enormous, and the semiconductors would just be some more straw on top of that camel. By itself, I don’t think it’s that huge of a threat to the party as compared to other things like food and fuel. (Harris) Eric, I think you make some points that we agree with, and, there’s, like, areas of convergence here among the three of us. I think you’ve said a couple of times that the economic costs of war constitute a deterrent or one of several reasons that Taiwan has not been invaded today. The PRC fears economic costs of an invasion, among other things, and that’s one deterrent. What we’re saying is that those costs should be heightened as the credibility of US military reprisals decreases and we take seriously experts in the United States and, I’m sure you know, many of these people who argue that the credibility of US military reprisals has decreased over time. The economic costs should be emphasized and heightened and not just the chance of incidental damage to foundries, but the guaranteed disablement in the event of an invasion. We also agree that Taiwan is not ready today to fight a guerrilla campaign protracted insurgency against the PRC. We argue it should become ready. We agree that US allies and partners in the region are not quite there in terms of threatening credible punishments against China in the event of an invasion, but we argue they should get there, they should become ready, and that, together, these deterrents could constitute enough to maintain the status quo. What we’re interested in doing is taking US policy seriously. The US government is committed to upholding the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. One concern I have with your counterargument or suggestion is that it would come very close to constitute in a de facto alliance between the United States and Taiwan; that the United States would de facto guarantee the security of the island; it would extend the security umbrella across the island as existed in the 50s, and 60s, and the 70s; and that that would constitute not just a recalibration of deterrence aimed at upholding the status quo, but it would, in fact, be a radical change to the status quo. It would be a pretty radical departure in US policy if the United States was to unambiguously guarantee the security of Taiwan in the way that you suggest, talking about World War III, as you say. I think there’s some areas of convergence between us where we see areas where China could be dissuaded from invading Taiwan without threatening a great-power war, but there’s a big area of disagreement between us, I think, that this threat that you propose I think is far more radical than what we proposed, and I’m open to the suggestion that maybe what the current situation needs is a radical change in US policy. We didn’t tackle that in our article, however, but it seems to be what you’re suggesting. I don’t know if I got that right. (Chan) On the issue of strategic clarity, I certainly lean more toward the strategic clarity camp, especially because Xi himself has made a number of fairly radical changes both in the PRC legal military and gray zone of warfare against Taiwan itself. Yeah, I would argue that some format of some increased strategic clarity would certainly be useful. I wouldn’t view this as radical in any sense. One of the reasons is the party itself has baked in US coming to Taiwan’s aid anyway; that’s part of the uncertainty involved. The big issue that I wanna just say here, though, is that I think in terms of being able to deter the party, they certainly don’t view Taiwan itself as much of a deterrent threat anymore. This covers the whole gamut of things that Taiwan can do all by itself. Whether it’s, let’s say, targeting the TSMC foundries or being able to wage an insurgency campaign or whatnot, they would be able to fairly confidently say that they would eat those costs and be able to finish a campaign against Taiwan fairly quickly if Taiwan was fighting by itself. The main issue that the party has is whether or not it can do this and tackle the possibility of US intervention and deal with the international economic costs afterwards, and at the same time of any fighting. And I think that’s a big unknown and that’s part of the reason why Xi hasn’t acted. (McKinney) I think one of the points worth clarifying . . . so I actually really appreciate what you just emphasized, Eric—how, in your analysis, the PRC doesn’t really respect Taiwan’s deterrent anymore. I think that’s pretty much what you just said. And so that is a really serious problem, so it raises the question, “Why is Taiwan’s deterrent so weak, relatively speaking?” You know, as a percentage of (gross domestic product or) GDP, Taiwan spends less than Greece on its military. In terms of building the possibility of a resistance, this is well known how to do this, and deterrence is part of a resistance operating concept. If you look at the ideas being developed out of Joint Special Operations University and the US special operations community, there is huge amounts of knowledge on how to build a robust society to resist invasion, not just in the hope that someone will come rescue you, but also so that you can deter invasion in the first place. This is being practiced today in by Swedish special forces in Eastern Europe, and it really raises the question, to my mind, “Why isn’t a robust resistance operating concept being developed in Taiwan?” alongside “Why is defense spending so low as a percentage of GDP as part of the status quo?” and, even beyond that, “Why isn’t Taiwan really pushing these sort of deterrents and cost imposition strategies that have been recommended across multiple US administrations?” I’m afraid that all of this, this weak state of deterrence, would be exacerbated by the US saying, under all conditions, we would fight World War III over Taiwan. Burden sharing is well researched in the political science literature, and, empirically, the studies show that the clearer the defense commitment, the less burden sharing occurs. In the past, when US presidents have pushed allies and partners to do more with the threat of abandonment, they’ve listened: South Korea in the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany in the Cold War. In these cases, defense spending as a percentage of GDP—say, in the Nixon administration—could increase multiple points in Germany. That’s only possible, though, if there is something short of an absolute commitment. I think the sort of strategic clarity that you’re implying would eviscerate the possibility of a serious Taiwanese deterrent. (Chan) So that’s been an ongoing debate among Taiwan defense watchers for a long time now, and I have to say here that you can’t just look at this from the simple angle of defense spending alone, and I would also argue that this, by itself, the current situation that we see here, is also a product of Taiwan history as well as American history, all the way up until, say, the 2016 time period. It’s certainly true that the Taiwan military went through a period of atrophy during that period of engagement with the PRC. But, it’s also very clear that, in the last four or five years, especially under this Tsai administration, that this has undergone a significant level of change; that, with the threat of gray-zone warfare, that Taiwan has now looked at new ways of asymmetric defense and has looked at new ways of empowering their civilian population. But it’s also important to note that this is not just an issue of Taiwan anymore because Xi has made it very clear that Taiwan itself is simply just another subset of what he views as a ideological confrontation between the US and China in between, you know, the so-called “American view of democracy” and the PRC view of the commentary and society. The idea that we should be focused, above all things, on making sure that Taiwan is appropriately carrying its burdens as allies—yeah, there’s some importance there, but on the other hand, even if you imagine a world where Taiwan was spending, say, North Korean levels of defense spending, I don’t think you would really find too many observers who say that Taiwan would be able to credibly deter and be able to defend against an invasion all by itself. So, there’s some sort of middle ground to be had. We can certainly press upon Taiwan to do more, and they should do more for their own defense—but, also, doing this in the knowledge that China under Xi is making a significant number of moves to undermine Taiwan to undermine our democratic ideals. This is actually a part of the issue that I had with the broken nest piece, was simply because we talk about the idea that the CCP was having . . . the costs of restraint was becoming higher. I certainly completely disagree with that statement, especially because Taiwan has bent over backwards, and same with the US has bent over backwards to try to make it clear that you know independence simply isn’t on the table. Yes, I certainly agree that Taiwan should be spending more on its defense, but, on the other hand, I wouldn’t pooh-pooh the fact that they have done a significant amount over the last few years and that, given their trajectory, that they will do more. It’s also clear that no matter what it is that they do, it probably isn’t going to be sufficient without some level of very significant US and international cost opposition on the PRC. Host I’m afraid we have to end it there. It was wonderful hearing from all of you, and thank you for sharing your time with us and your expertise as well. show less
