Conversations on Strategy Podcast

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.Click here to read the review and reply to the article.Keywords: Taliban, collapse, security force assistance, Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), Doha AccordEpisode 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 UniversityGreentree 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 IIIYeah, 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.HostCon, 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. CraneSure, 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.HostTom, what are your thoughts here?LynchFirst, 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.HostBack to you, Con.CraneAll 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 strategyHostTodd, we haven’t heard from you on this yet.Todd GreentreeWhat 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 Pas̲h̲tūnistān, 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?LynchYeah. 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.HostCon, I’d love to hear your answer to this as well.CraneFor 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.LynchYeah, 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 Pas̲h̲tūnistān 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.HostTodd, do you have any comments on that?GreentreeYeah, 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.HostTodd, 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.LynchIn 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.HostCon, we haven’t heard from you in a while. What do you think?CraneI 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.HostTodd?GreentreeYeah. 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.HostIn a few sentences, final thoughts from each of you. Con, why don’t you start?CraneI 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.HostTodd?GreentreeSo 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.HostTom, will you wrap this up for us?LynchYeah, 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.HostThank 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.

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: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/576/Keywords: Russia, Ukraine, Statecraft, Military Strategy and Policy, War and Society, Military Change and TransformationEpisode 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 CohenIt’s a pleasure. This is Ariel Cohen.HostAriel, please start us off and give us some background on the Georgia war of 2008.CohenLet’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 HamiltonThank 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.HostYou 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.CohenAs 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.HamiltonThanks 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 . . .CohenHow . . . however, the Ukrainians are using antitank missiles much more effectively. The Georgians just didn’t have enough and didn’t have enough training.HamiltonRight—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.HostOur time is running out. I don’t know if you can . . . in 30 seconds or so, going forward, what do we need to consider?CohenWe 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.HamiltonAnd, 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.HostThank you both so much. I’m sorry we don’t have more time.CohenThanks a lot—appreciate it.HamiltonThank you, Stephanie.HostThank 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.

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.Keywords: international relations, 21st Century Warfare, Military Strategy and Policy, War and Society, Military Change and TransformationEpisode TranscriptStephanie 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 DolitskyHostConversations 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.MilevskiThe 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.HostGreat. 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.HostLukas, what do you have to say to this?MilevskiPhillip’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.HostPhillip, 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?DolitskyFirst 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.HostOver to you, Lukas.MilevskiI 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.HostPhillip, final thoughts?DolitskyI really appreciate that reply.MilevskiNo worries.HostWhat are your final thoughts, Lukas?MilevskiMy 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.HostI’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).

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.Keywords: 21st Century Warfare, Europe and Russia, War and Society, Russia, UkraineClick here to read the article.Episode Transcript:Stephanie Crider HostDecisive 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)HostConversations 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.RenzI 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.HostHere’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?RenzRussia, 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.HostOne 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?RenzWell, 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.HostThanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic and for making time for us today.RenzThank 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.

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.Click here to read the compendium.​Keywords: urban terrain, NATO, Ukraine, US Army, civil-military relations, Military Strategy and Policy, US military doctrineEpisode Transcript: Soldiers In CitiesEpisode Transcript: Soldiers In CitiesStephanie 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.HostConversations 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.Michael C. DeschMy pleasure.HostMilitary Operations on Urban Terrain: Please briefly walk us through the basic concepts of this monograph.DeschMilitary 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.HostLet’s talk about military operations on urban terrain today. What did the monograph get right?DeschWell, 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.HostYou 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?DeschI 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.HostThis was a lot of fun and very informative. Thank you again for your time. I really enjoyed myself.DeschMy pleasure. Thanks for your questions.HostIf you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

​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, USAEpisode 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.CliffConversations 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.HostThe 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?”CliffSo 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.HostWe 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?CliffIn 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.HostThanks for laying the groundwork for this conversation. So what I would like to hear from you is how would you analyze these arguments?CliffYeah, 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.HostWhere do you fall on this topic? Do you favor one perspective over the other?CliffWell, 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.HostSo what would you recommend?CliffMcKinney 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.HostRoger, you’ve really added an extra layer of insight into this topic.CliffMy pleasure, it’s a very interesting and provocative article, and it’s an important topic that deserves debate, discussion, and analysis.HostIf you enjoyed this episode of Conversations on Strategy and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

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/Keywords: Broken Nest, China, Taiwan, PRC, CCPEpisode Transcript:Stephanie Crider HostDecisive 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)HostToday 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.McKinneyThanks 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.HostWonderful, 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?ChanHello 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.HostThank 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.HarrisThanks 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.ChanOkay, 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.HarrisYou 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?ChanPeter, 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.McKinneyIf 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.ChanThanks 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.McKinneyIf 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.ChanThanks 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.HarrisEric, 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.ChanOn 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.McKinneyI 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.ChanSo 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.HostI’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.