Decisive Point Podcast

This article provides background and context for regional trends and historic agreements focused on the Nile River Basin, offers a comprehensive assessment of security challenges, and presents focus areas for future investment and cooperation. The policy recommendations will serve American interests better and improve agricultural practices in the region. Without a marked alteration of existing aid from Western countries, the water scarcity situation will continue without producing the required infrastructure improvements.Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss1/8/Keywords: Egypt, water management, diplomatic history, sub-Saharan Africa, Nile River BasinEpisode TranscriptStephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1 Gerald J. Krieger)(Host)Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Gerald J. Krieger, author of “Water Wars of the Future: Myth or Reality?,” featured in Parameters’ Spring 2022 issue. Krieger works at US Army Forces Command. Previously, he served as an associate dean of strategic studies at the National Defense University of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He has published several articles on wide-ranging topics and is primarily interested in international relations, with a focus on the greater Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and the South China Sea and US foreign policy in these regions.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.First, I really just want to thank you for joining me today. I’m glad you’re here, and I’m excited to talk about your article, “Water Wars of the Future: Myth or Reality?” It dials in on the Nile River basin and the security challenges there. It offers policy recommendations that will serve American interests better and improve agricultural practices in that region. Can you lay the groundwork for us? How do things like population growth and climate change affect this topic?(Krieger)​Well, when most people think of the Nile River basin, or NRB, water scarcity is not something that comes to mind. It almost seems counterintuitive that there would be areas . . . and water is going to be an issue in the basin because it’s the second-longest river in the world. However, that’s not quite true.Egypt, for example, is one of the most arid countries. And some around the region get very little—up to 10 millimeters a year—of rainfall. So, climate change is exacerbating water access issues in already-arid regions. In addition, population growth around the planet is going to approach nine billion by 2050, based on UN estimates. That Nile River basin is expected to double and approach nearly one billion people in that region alone. Egypt’s population, with 100 million people, is expected by 2030 to hit 128 million.So all of these things are contributing factors. Just seven years ago, for instance, in sub-Sahara (sub-Saharan) Africa, not necessarily just the Nile River basin, there were 783 million people without access to clean drinking water, which adds to health and nutrition issues and things like that. And climate change, irregular rainfall patterns, can cause floods, which, obviously—loss of life and devastating consequences.So then droughts, multiyear droughts in particular, in the Nile River basin alone, there’s 300 million people living on less than a dollar a day. So, they’re on that cusp of existence, you know, where little things kind of add up and make a huge difference over time. And, in particular, if you look at climate change and projected patterns and different models, temperature in Egypt . . . expected to increase about two degrees Celsius over the next century.So there are patterns where people are living right now that it’s going to be more challenging in the future. And then, millions of tons of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere only contribute to these patterns, making things less predictable, impacting the level of the Nile River. These variability water levels impact the livelihoods of people. People up and down the river for generations have relied on fishing, for instance, and that’s gone away. If you look just from a holistic standpoint, there are rivers that are drying up.And Africa, as things are changing . . . we’re talking about dams in this. And that’s one thing that impacts the water levels—sediment, things like that. We’ll talk about that. But these annual cycles and, you know, rainfall patterns that originate in Ethiopian Highlands—they generate about 80 percent of the Nile’s total flow.The White Nile originates in Lake Victoria, and the Blue Nile, in Ethiopia. And both meet in Khartoum. And 97 to 98 percent of Egypt’s water supplies come from the Nile. And we haven’t done enough studies about the silt that has come down for centuries that have kind of provided some fertilizers and things for some of the farming areas that’s been changed, right, because there are a number of dams.(Host)So there are some other things that kind of come into play here, maybe some historic agreements that play a part and shape what’s going on in the Nile River basin. Can you walk us through the most relevant of those?(Krieger)In 1929, they guaranteed a certain amount of water from the Nile for Egypt to use for cotton because cotton was a huge industry when the British controlled the region, and they fed the textile mills in London.So the Nile water agreement of 1929, British-Egyptian treaty, stipulated no project would take water away from the Nile to prejudice the interests or reduce the quantity of water arriving into Egypt. And that’s key. However, when Sudan gained independence in 1956, it was concerned that Egypt’s second dam, the Aswan High Dam, wouldn’t abide by the agreement. So tensions between Egypt and Sudan escalated. In 1959, they resolved it, signing a full utilization of the Nile agreement, and they specified that Egypt would receive 5.5 billion cubic meters a year, and Sudan, 18.5.More recently, in 1999, all of the riparian communities came together—Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (the Congo), Egypt, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya—and they created a Nile Basin Initiative to promote constructive dialogue, training, education for farmers, sustainable water practices, and they wanted to cooperate. But this is built on trust, and this broke down very quickly.Egypt and Sudan never signed the agreement because they wanted a special veto to make sure international law was enforced. They want that veto power because they’re trying to protect their historic rights and things like that. So, they’re not going to sign. Although they still participate. But the key in all of this is trust. And I think that underpins both the NBI and then the use of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam.Sustainable practices impact the entire community. It’s not just one country. So the community does recognize that. They just get bogged down in some of these details and control. They do recognize the need for better water agricultural practices, but I think if we push the NBI, getting that foundation or springboard—and, again, Egypt and Sudan are kind of key—it can help us as we negotiate with Ethiopia. Sudan is kind of caught in the middle, but between Ethiopia and Egypt on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam about coordinating discharges during droughts because there are multiple dams.And then, once you recover from a drought, obviously, you’ve got to fill, so you’re going to have to retain some of those waters, which is going to impact everyone else downstream.(Host)So you’ve mentioned the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam a couple times now. Explain it to us.(Krieger)The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, was completed in July of 2020. It is significant for a couple reasons. It’s the tenth-largest dam in the world. Thirteen turbines can produce five gigawatts of electricity, which is 2.5 times larger than the US Hoover Dam, just by scale.It’s a big project, it’s got a big impact. Egypt currently operates the Aswan Dam and the High Aswan Dam, and Sudan has six other dams on the Nile River basin. By far, obviously, this one is the largest. And one question that keeps coming up is: Will Ethiopia be willing to release enough water downstream to mitigate droughts in long term?But on the other side of it, it’s going to be when they’re recovering after a multiyear drought, and they’ve got to get their water levels back up in the dams to produce electricity and things. You know, who’s going to have priority, and how is that process going to go? They’ve got to coordinate this, and now is the time to get the agreement before it’s too late, because it’s going to cause friction.(Host)The future and regional, strategic implications here: Is there anything else significant that we need to address about that?(Krieger)There are probably three key areas that could be instrumental for the next century. The first is the effective use of dams to control water during floods and provide electricity, but, more importantly, serve as an insurance policy against drought in times of climatic stress. The second is better agricultural practices. And the last includes stewardship policies and infrastructure to manage water as a resource.Along with these changes, the US can encourage the riparian states to sign the Nile Basin Initiative to work on better use of, and management of, the water in the future. This can provide a springboard of trust between Egypt and Ethiopia that can help get an agreement between the GERD and, you know, establish a framework that can be used in the future.Dams can provide water and security for people in the Nile River basin. It’s clean. We don’t have to worry about contributing to the environmental impact. Two hundred fifty-seven million people in 2016 didn’t have access to electricity, you know, and it’s going to grow to 650 million by 2030. Ninety percent of these are going to be in sub-Sahara (Sub-Saharan) Africa. So, we’ve got opportunities for green solutions. And I do think dams can be one way that they do that, but it’s just got to be part of a comprehensive system, coordinated among everyone impacted, which, in the Nile River basin, there are a number of countries.(Host)Do you have any final thoughts to wrap this up?(Krieger)I think that Africa has got so much land that’s not being utilized. They require rain, you know, to sustain so many of their crops. If we just flip that—I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I think probably 80 to 90 percent of their agriculture is all rain-fed, and if we can switch that and get some irrigation systems, I think we can get their yields up.Once you have the yields up, you can produce more. But they have more land, agricultural land, that’s untapped, and it just could provide a number of countries with food sources. And you do know that there are different regions and countries, you know, you’ve got the (United Arab Emirates or) UAE and Saudi Arabia that are getting crops imported from there. But we’ve just got to look at the overall practice and make sure that we don’t use water-intensive crops in regions that can’t, where it’s not sustainable long-term. So, when we look at whatever we’re introducing, we’ve got to look at the next 10 to 20 years down the road as we introduce different agricultural products.(Host)We just really scratched the surface of such a broad and important topic. Thank you again for your time. Thanks for your contribution to Parameters. Listeners, if this topic interests you, I encourage you to check out the article.(Krieger)Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.(Host)If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or any other major podcasting platform.

In this podcast, COL Maximilian K. Bremer and Dr. Kelly A. Grieco apply concepts from their 2021 article “Air Littoral: Another Look” to current events in Russia and Ukraine.Read the original article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/7/Keywords: air littoral, zone of transition, democratized technology, Ukraine IADS, COL Maximilian K. Bremer, Dr. Kelly A. Grieco, Decisive Point PodcastEpisode TranscriptStephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter 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.Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Maximilian K. Bremer and Dr. Kelly A. Grieco, authors of “The Air Littoral: Another Look,” featured in the winter 2021–22 issue of Parameters. Bremer is the director of the Special Programs Division at Air Mobility Command. He’s a 1997 distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy. He has an (master of public policy or) MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an (master of applied arts and sciences or) MAAS from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Grieco is a resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, which focuses on challenging the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy and seeks to develop effective solutions that preserve US security and prosperity. She received her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1: Maximilian K. Bremer)(Guest 2: Kelly A. Grieco)(Host)Welcome back, Max and Kelly. The last time you were here, we talked about your 2021 article “The Air Littoral: Another Look.” For our listeners who maybe haven’t heard that episode or read the article, please just give us a brief recap on that piece.(Bremer)OK, Stephanie, thanks. And thanks for having us back for this follow-up. We’re both very excited to have this chat and really appreciate you and Parameters reaching out to us.Our original Parameters article talked about the area between the ground and the blue skies, and we refer to that as the air littoral—this region of transition that could be accessed from, and give access to, both the ground and the blue skies. It discussed what we saw as a progressively contested zone of transition, with this contestation coming from the increasingly democratized technology which allows improved access, persistence, and lethality in and through the air littoral.We then went on to ask what that meant for the future Joint Force.(Grieco)I think the important thing here is that this article was really about the changing character of conflict and identifying that this convergence of threats, new threats to air superiority in the air littoral, meant that we need to update doctrinal concepts.So, in the past, air superiority was either won or lost in what we’re calling “the blue skies.” And the blue skies are really where high-end fighters and bombers typically operate. And if you won air control—you won that battle for the blue skies—it typically conferred control at all altitudes. But what we’re seeing increasingly is that even if you win in the blue skies, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to actually have control of lower-altitude airspace.And as a result, we really need to update doctrinal concepts around air control and not just think of it in terms of being localized in time and lateral space, but also think about vertical control as well. And that’s really important, I think, for both the Air Force and the Army to be thinking about—to conceptualize this air-control challenge as a vertical dimension—and will actually be more challenging, I think, for the Army and Air Force, than some of the traditional air superiority challenges because it’s going to be in a space that both Air Force and Army are going to be increasingly operating in and therefore interacting and need to have a common concept of operations.(Host)Let’s look at this through the context of current world events in April 2022. Russia and Ukraine: What are the takeaways here for the US military as it relates to your article?(Bremer)Well, failure is an excellent instructor. And I personally prefer to learn from the failure of others rather than from my own failures and experience.So I think what we should be learning from is what failures we’ve seen—and, specifically, the Russian experience and the failures that they’ve seen as a result of the changes in the character of warfare, not necessarily the failures that we’re attributing to organizational or technological problems.In other words, we have to learn the right lessons from this. And I think there’s a few key ideas related to the air littoral that are worth fleshing out.First, the dominant narrative is that Russia’s early ground failures grew out of Russia’s failure to control the blue skies and take out Ukraine’s IADS, their integrated air defense system. And it’s true they didn’t follow the Western model and achieve traditional air superiority. But we don’t think that their problems would have been solved by doing so.Even if they had essentially unfettered access to the blue skies, they’d still have to address Ukrainian doctrinal innovations in the air littoral. Russian forces would still be coming under attack from . . . specifically, drones, but other things within the air littoral.The technologies allowing access to and persistence in the air littoral and the increasing spread of these technologies have changed the character of war by uncoupling littoral supremacy from the technologies that allow access to and persistence in the air littoral. And the increasing spread of those technologies has changed the character of war by uncoupling territorial superiority from the status of the airspace above, whether or not there’s air superiority above the air littoral.(Grieco)To echo what Max is saying, I think this war is really showing a smart actor, the Ukrainians, who are really innovative and smart about how they’re using the air littoral. And one of the things that I would just emphasize is a lot of the Western media coverage of the air war over Ukraine is very much focused on the blue skies and Russia’s failure to achieve air superiority in the blue skies.But if we imagine Russia had gained blue-skies air superiority, as Max was just saying a moment ago, there would still be a tremendous amount of competition in this air littoral which would be posing a threat to Russian Ground Forces. And so that’s really important because they still would not be able to deliver effective close-air support to protect their forces on the ground.There’s really, I think, two ways that we’re seeing the Ukrainians, in particular, maximize their competitive advantage in the air littoral. And the first is that they’re using their long-range, surface-to-air missile systems to essentially pose a constant threat in the blue skies. And so, it’s forcing Russian aircraft to fly lower into the air littoral to avoid that threat. But as soon as they fly into the air littoral, then they’re presented with a multitude of threats from the air littoral—particularly, these (man-portable air defense systems or) MANPADS, these shoulder-fired missiles. And they’re actually luring the Russians into that air littoral so they can take out aircraft.I think the second way that we’re also seeing it is it’s not just that they’re denying airspace, right? You know, Russians are flying a very small number, but about 200, sorties per day in open source. And most of those sorties are being flown, as a result, outside of Ukrainian territory, which is quite interesting. It’s not just that they’re denying airspace to the Russians; the Ukrainians are actively exploiting that littoral as well.They’ve been using these Turkish-made (Bayraktar) TB2 drones to really wreak havoc on Russian forces, using them to attack the Russian convoys and Russian ground troops. And we’ve seen, as we predicted a bit in the article, that detecting that drone threat is really hard; the Russians are really struggling with it. They can’t seem to detect these drones. And, as a result—this is something that I find particularly interesting—because they’re having so much trouble finding these, it’s another reason Russian aircraft are sometimes flying low. Those TB2 drones are almost luring them in.(Bremer)I completely agree. It’s fascinating that they’re sort of forcing Russian high-end fighters—the very expensive, exquisite capability that’s not easy to replace—down into a range where they can be addressed with relatively cheap weapons.And they’re doing it, as you point out, in two ways. First, they’re forcing them down to avoid the threat, the S-300s that are still kicking around out there. But they’re also luring them down there to find the TB2s and other things that they can’t see either from the ground or from the blue skies. So they have to go down there in order to support the ground forces.(Grieco)And I would just also note that these air littoral threats, they’re having so much trouble finding these mobile S-300s. Imagine the challenge of trying to find these MANPADS, these stingers that the United States and other countries are sending. These air littoral threats are even harder to sort of detect and be able to destroy in terms of trying to gain air superiority at those lower altitudes.(Host)It’s so interesting to me to hear the excitement in your voices at being able to apply all your theories and research to a real-world, although definitely tragic, event. Any final thoughts before we go?(Bremer)I think it’s important that we understand that just because the air littoral and the blue skies are becoming somewhat decoupled does not mean that they’re not interdependent. Air littoral control and blue-skies control must be addressed in different ways, and one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other. But they’re both of critical importance. We’re not arguing that we should drop the idea of air superiority in the blue skies—but rather, think about how that will interact with the air littoral.(Grieco)I think Max said that really well. And the only thing I would add is, just echoing you, Stephanie: This is a really tragic war.I think one caution, though, I would offer is that it’s easy right now, just given how badly the Russians have performed, to think that everything is about Russian failure and that there aren’t necessarily any lessons here.And I think it’s going to be challenging moving ahead because their performance has been so bad, but we want to really look at it and discern what are things that may be attributable to Russian organization problems, and what actually might be about a more fundamental change in the character of war. This is what Max and I are really trying to argue about the air littoral.(Host)Great point. Thank you both. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you.(Grieco)Thank you.(Bremer)Thanks, Stephanie.(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.

In this podcast, Tor Bukkvoll revisits his 2016 Parameters, article and examines Russian Special Forces and their potential use in Ukraine today.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol46/iss2/4/Keywords: Ukraine, Crimea, Russian Special Forces, DonbasEpisode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed on this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.[Decisive Point] welcomes Dr. Tor Bukkvoll, author of “Russian Special Operations Forces in Crimea and Donbas,” featured in Parameters’ 2016 summer issue. Bukkvoll is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. He’s a specialist on Russia and Ukraine, particularly in the areas of defense and security policy.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1: Tor Bukkvoll)(Host)Thank you so much for joining me, Tor. I’m really glad you’re here. We’re here to talk about your 2016 article, which opens with this sentence: “This article investigates the roles special operations forces (SOF) have fulfilled in Russian warfare against Ukraine—both in Crimea and in Donbas.” Please give us some background. Russian Special Operations Forces in Ukraine in the past—what do we need to understand here?(Bukkvoll)So what we need to understand, in terms of the role these forces have played in Russian policy towards Ukraine, is that they played a major—maybe the most important—role in the annexation of Crimea. And then, secondly, they played an important (but not so important) role in the warfare in Donbas. There may have been Russian Special Operations Forces in Ukraine, also, prior to the events of 2014. But I think it makes sense to start with the annexation of Crimea, because these forces played such an important role there. And that was, first of all, in terms of the so-called SSO, which in Russian stands for Sil Spetsial’nykh Operatsiy. This is a relatively new Russian special operations force that was firmly established in 2013 but had been built up for a number of years before that.What you should know is that in Soviet times, special operations forces tended to be more like what in the West would be called light elite infantry. So, the famous Spetsnaz forces that we heard so much about, they are more like the US (Army) Rangers than the US special operations forces like (First US Special Forces Operational Detachment) Delta and the (US Navy) SEALs and so on. But this new force, SSO, was particularly built on the example—or was supposed to be—the Russian “Delta Force.” Specifically, the Russian military referred to “Delta” when they talked about SSO.And in Crimea, this SSO force, they started their annexation by taking over the buildings or the parliament and the government in Crimea. And then they occupied those buildings for 24 hours—basically, it seems to me, from the sources I’ve seen, to check out what the Ukrainians would do at that time. Would they try to stop the annexation, or would they not? And the Ukrainians, for a number of reasons, did nothing or very little. And that became the first step in the annexation of the whole peninsula.And the SSO continue to play a big role here in cooperation with Spetsnaz GRU, which is the special operations forces of the Russian military intelligence. These are the “Rangers” forces I talked about before that then worked in tandem with the SSO to take over most of the Ukrainian military infrastructure on that peninsula. So this operation, taking place on 27th of February 2014, is today one of the most important operations that Russian Special Operations Forces have ever done. And President (Vladimir) Putin even named the 27th of February as the day of special operations forces in Russia for the years to come.That’s a relatively long answer on the role they played in the annexation of Crimea. Then later, special operations forces also played a significant role in the warfare in Donbas. So the warfare in Donbas from 2014 and onwards was partly a local initiative, but also very much a Russian government and Russian military initiative.In the warfare in Donbas that took place up until the current war, special operations forces did basically two things. They trained and fought together with the local forces. That’s the one thing.And then they also had the more special tasks. The empirical data for these is a little bit uncertain, but it seems that the special operations forces of the GRU also had as their job to liquidate commanders of the different units of the anti-Kiev opposition that the Russians did not like anymore. So, in the beginning, there were a lot of local commanders in Donbas that were kind of marionettes for the Russians. But then, gradually, these commanders became more and more dissatisfied with the line coming from Moscow. Russia just needed to get rid of them and put in other commanders of the rebellion, and that seems also to have been a job of the Spetsnaz GRU.So that’s broadly what they did both in Crimea and later in Donbas.(Host)How might Russian special forces be playing a role in what’s happening in Ukraine now?(Bukkvoll)Yeah, so it’s early to say. I mean, the empirical data we have so far are very scattered, scarce—and you don’t know really what to believe. Russia has closed down everything that consisted of independent reporting. Ukraine has much more of that. But at the same time, Ukraine is a party to the conflict, so you can’t really trust those sources either. The first answer will be that we don’t know much.But we know a couple of things. For example, we do know that the initial Russian aggression against Ukraine was supposed to happen very fast and with little use of kinetic force and that Russia expected Ukraine to fall, basically, in just a matter of days.The most important operation in all of this was the plan to take the airfield in Hostomel, north of Kiev, to bring Russian airborne forces to that airfield, and then to use that airfield as a springboard to go into the very center of Kiev and capture or even take out the political leadership of the country. And this was done by the airborne forces—or this was attempted by the airborne forces—and especially with the airborne forces’ own 45th Spetsnaz special operations forces brigade. So what they tried to do in Hostomel was to bring in Spetsnaz from the 45th brigade with helicopters to the airfield, take control of the airfield. Then the rest of the airborne forces or other parts of the airborne forces would follow on and land bigger troops with planes on the airfield. And then they would take Kiev from there.And it’s quite interesting. I found an article from one of the progovernment newspapers in Russia that actually described the whole operation and presented it as a victory. Obviously, that article had been written before the operation took place, assuming that everything would be OK. But then it wasn’t. Because the Spetsnaz that took the airfield, they lost the airfield; the airborne forces couldn’t land. And from there on, everything seems to have gone a bit south for the Russians.So that’s an important part of special operations forces used in this war. We know that they tried something similar also with other airports. And we should also mention that this attempt to take Kiev through the airport at Hostomel—that operation is very similar to, for example, how the Soviet Union took over control of Prague in Czechoslovakia back in 1968, and also somewhat similar to what the Russians did in Pristina, in Kosovo, in 1999.But I think, apart from that operation, the Spetsnaz in this war have basically been working in what in Ukrainian is called “DRGs”; that’s diversionary and intelligence-gathering groups. So they dress in civilian clothes and enter the different Ukrainian cities to do sabotage missions there and to bring intelligence back to the main forces.I think that’s more or less what we know about the role of Russian Special Operations Forces in this war at the moment.(Host)You made several points at the end of your article. There’s two of them that I was hoping we could talk about today. The first one is that we don’t want Russia to export its SOF model to other countries. What are your thoughts on that?(Bukkvoll)I wouldn’t say that Russia has done this a lot. Actually, the SOF model to some extent is—at least in the beginning and especially with the SSO—they tried to imitate your model. But they did help Ethiopia establish special operations forces in 2002 and 2003. That was probably more of a somewhat commercial endeavor; basically, the Ethiopians were ready to pay for this, and that was money that the Russians could use.But I think a more somber and problematic example is the cooperation between the SSO—the Sil Spetsial’nykh Operatsiy, this Russian “Delta Force”—and the Tiger division of (Bashar al-)Assad in Syria. Again, it’s hard to get details, but it does seem like the SSO has had a special responsibility for training, and also fighting with, Assad’s Tiger division in Syria. And that Tiger division seems to have been one of the most brutal of the Assad forces in that war.So I think this is something really to look into, if it’s possible to find more data on that. And I’m also thinking here, in this respect, that one thing is that Russia is using special operations forces to train forces like Assad’s Tiger division, but there you may also have the effect that the extreme brutality we’ve seen in the civil war in Syria—especially with this Tiger division—may also have a kind of an influence back on the Russians. I wouldn’t be surprised if Russian Special Operations Forces, as a result of what they have done in Syria, come back home, let’s say, more brutal and less disciplined than when they left. We don’t know this for certain, of course, but it is imaginable that will happen.I think those are the two main examples: the Ethiopia mission, which was more commercial, and then the Syria mission, which has been much more important and also sinister in a way.(Host)I’d like to bring up another point here. Unless there’s regime change, Russia’s relationships with many countries look like they will be be challenging for years to come. What are your thoughts here?(Bukkvoll)It depends on whether we have a regime change in Russia or not. But even if we have a regime change in Russia, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a Russia that is more easy to deal with than the one we have at present. So I am fearing a very difficult period for both the West and many other countries in how to deal with Russia. This is especially in terms of willingness to challenge both the West and to challenge other countries, which is obviously very strong at the moment. And I think we’re going into a different world than the one we had before the 24th of February this year.But another side of this is that they are not doing a good job in Ukraine. They are losing a lot of military capability. They may continue to lose a lot of conventional military capability simply because if they continue the war—and if the Ukrainians continue to fight as well as they have done so far, and we continue to provide them with weapons—we might actually grind down their Russian military capability to a significant degree. And also, if the sanctions continue after this war is over, it’s going to be difficult for Russia to have the money to rebuild that military capability quickly.So in terms of your question, I think that we should be very concerned, on the political side, in terms of Russian willingness to challenge the West. It will be very difficult for us. On the other side, the war in Ukraine may actually make Russia somewhat of a weaker military power then it used to be before the war in Ukraine started.(Host)I appreciate your time and your thoughtful analysis on this topic. Thanks, Tor.(Bukkvoll)Thank you.(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.

In this podcast, Pfaff argues understanding the ethical logic available to one’s adversaries will allow US leaders and planners to leverage China’s behavior and optimally shape US policies and actions.Keywords: US leaders and planners, US policies and actions, People’s Liberation Army (PLA)Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss1/7/Episode Transcript: Chinese and Western Ways of War and Their EthicsStephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1 Anthony Pfaff)(Host)Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Anthony Pfaff, author of “Chinese and Western Ways of War and Their Ethics,” featured in Parameters Spring 2022 issue. Dr. Pfaff is the research professor for strategy, the military profession, and ethics at the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College and a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council. 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.Welcome, Dr. Pfaff. I’m glad you’re here. Let’s talk about China and the West, war, and ethics. Your thesis for this piece posits how one fights shapes how one governs that fighting. The article relies on traditional and contemporary scholarship from both East and West to describe differences in how each views the practical and ethical aspects of war and how they can interact. Understanding the ethical logic available to one’s adversaries allows one to better understand their behavior as well as how to better shape one’s own actions and policies to avoid misunderstanding. Some people think China is unethical. Let’s just start there. In fact, you note that in December of 2020, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe claimed the Chinese government has “no ethical boundaries” in their pursuit of power. Please expand on that.(Pfaff)Yeah. Sure. This is a common refrain. A big theme in it is that the other side—they’re unethical. And I wanted to write this because it’s not true. Now, they may be doing some things which by our own lights are unethical; they may be doing some things that are unethical by their own lights. What I’m not doing in this paper is adjudicating. And I’m not saying that there is a moral equivalency between the kinds of things China does and the kinds of things the United States does. I’m not saying there’s a moral equivalency between the kind of aims that the United States has and China has. I think we can make arguments that a lot of what the Chinese do is in fact unethical.However, it is wrong to say they aren’t considering it. There is a fairly rich conversation even in their own People’s Liberation Army (PLA) journals and think tanks and conferences, and all that, where they do raise these kinds of concerns. So what I wanted to do is kind of map out: How do these concerns arise, and what shapes how they get expressed in Chinese policy in Chinese thinking as well as our own? And I thought it was important to contrast it with how we do it so a reader can understand, “Oh, this is sort of a natural process that all security communities, states—however you want to define it—do.” These are almost unavoidable categories but do affect not how we just think about fighting, but how we think about the norms governing that fighting. To say the other side just doesn’t have any is to oversimplify and to miss a lot. It risks misinterpreting what in fact the other side actually thinks it’s doing and thinks it’s responding to.(Host)Let’s talk about the ways and ethics of war. What do you mean by this, and how are the Western and Eastern ways of war different?(Pfaff)In terms of what I’m talking about here, in terms of what a way of war is and how it relates to the ethics of war, I’m basically employing the idea the way Colin Gray and Martin Shaw kind of articulated. We’re just really talking about how we organize the fight. In this case, that way of war is how you organize to fight against what you think is your most serious adversary. Again, it doesn’t mean to have a way of war that’s aimed at a peer competitor doesn’t mean that you don’t use your military for other things.But what it does mean is that you think that—the way I characterize the Western view—if you think that defeating an adversary requires imposing your will on that adversary, then that’s your logic of your way of war. And it’s going to have a grammar to it, borrowing from Clausewitz. And so how do you impose your will? Well, you eliminate the other side’s ability to resist. And once you achieve the military objective, which is eliminating that resistance, you pretty much achieved your political objective, which is to defeat the adversary.There’s another way of thinking about it, and I think this characterizes the Chinese way. And this is explicit in a very old book, very famous, written by two Chinese colonels (now one’s a general) called Unrestricted Warfare. I think they really do capture . . . they’re kind of explicitly comparing Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. And they’re saying, hey, where the Americans want to impose will, we have to do something else because we can’t really resist it. They’re writing right after the Gulf War, and they’re saying, “Hey, we’ve got to figure out something else.” The way they describe their logic is, “We’ve got to get them to accept our interests because we’re not going to be able to impose our will.” Rather than eliminating resistance, you’ve got to change minds. And changing minds is a lot more complicated because now there’s no necessary connection between the force you use and the outcome you get. Because now the target of your coercive efforts gets to decide how much punishment they will take.So you can’t know in advance. It’s a little bit more complicated, but you can now see where the ethics comes in, right? If I’m imposing will and I’m eliminating resistance, I’m going to assume a just cause—so that gives me already a moral imperative to win. So that eliminating resistance comes as its own imperative. But I have other imperatives too: (a) to avoid harming those things that are not necessary to eliminating resistance. We have rules about not harming noncombatants, avoiding destruction of monuments, historical sites, etc. Any civilian infrastructure that’s not directly related to warfighting generally is off limits because it’s not central to the logic of warfighting, which is eliminating that resistance in order to impose your will.The other way of thinking about it, it works a little differently. You end up getting a different kind of ethics. Because it’s more complicated, the cultural references that I mention in the paper include Sun Tzu, but, also, a lot of Confucian thinkers who were thinking about military policy and what we would consider national security. What they were thinking of—just from a practical perspective, there is an emphasis on precision and avoiding destruction.And in some sense that’s just simply instrumental because you want to assimilate the other side and be able to use what they have. But it’s also a sense that what warfighting is about is really—we would use the language of aligning interests, but, in the text, they use the words like “harmony”—they want to harmonize. And it’s not that I need to eliminate the other side; I need to harmonize the other side.This was certainly the way during the Warring States period that I talk about. It was very formative in Chinese versions of just-war theory that this was sort of really what was going on. It ended up being about consolidating power, but as a way of aligning everybody’s interest so they were all focused more or less in the same direction, often using words like harmony to describe what they were doing. But that doesn’t mean these wars weren’t very brutal, and they were certainly wars of conquest. But it’s interesting that in a lot of literature, those get condemned, and the ones that were less destructive—and the ones that were more about aligning interests and not just seizing territory—get kind of lifted up as “this is just,” where This other way is just brutal takeover.So I kind of zero in on Sun Tzu’s articulation of this because he’s got this great passage where he talks about, you know, it’s better not to destroy the city; it’s better not to destroy the army. The less destruction you commit in order to get your goal, the better off you are. So what does that do? Well, it opens up other ways of going about things. And, so, what’s very effective? Things like deception, trickery, and so on. Even things that we would look at and go, “Oh, that’s treachery” become a way of minimizing the actual damage you have to inflict in order to align your interests.Their expressions obviously get more complicated than that, but what you end up with is something that on the outside can look kind of utilitarian. And by utilitarian, I mean that’s a way of thinking about ethics where you maximize a certain set of consequences that are good. So generic utility theory might say what the right thing to do is to maximize happiness. The problem with theories like that is that they become very ”Means justifies the ends.” So, if you’re running a group of people, and you want to maximize happiness of the group, and six people in the group of 10 are unhappy, how do you make them happier? Well, you could make the six people happier, or you could just kill them. Either way, now you have 100 percent of people in your group, once they’re gone, are happy. You win, right? So we use utility theory here sort of as “You need more than that in order to come up with a full, robust ethic.” So the Chinese appear like that sometimes, particularly because of the Marxist-Leninist influences. The good of the party is what matters. And it’s not that that doesn’t give you an ethic; it actually motivates a lot of sacrifice and does shape the kinds of things that you do and don’t do in order to maximize the good of the party. But, as we’ve seen throughout history, it also enables a lot of things we would think of as pretty horrible.So again, I’m not trying to argue some kind of moral equivalency. But, on the other hand, as you look through the literature, there’s this idea that . . . the Confucian literature and even pre-Confucian literature, they talk about the mandate of heaven. And the mandate of heaven is, basically, that’s your legitimacy to rule. It depends on the ruler embodying the virtues of justice and benevolence. That can get a little circular in practice, but you can kind of see how that’s going to impact decision making. So I might be like a Sun Tzu who is motivated to limit destruction just because he wants to use it later on, but it’s still going to shape the kinds of reasons one uses to go to war, the kinds of adversaries one takes on, and the kinds of ways you go about fighting it. But it’s not going to look as principle-based as the way we tend to go about it. It’s going to be more found in the character of decisions made and the character of how decisions are made regarding who to fight and how to go about changing their minds while still ensuring that one maintains the character of doing this in a just and benevolent way. And that might mean deception if the alternative is destruction.(Host)Your article offer s a discussion of ideals within two rich and complex traditions. Please, pull it all together for us. What are your conclusions?(Pfaff)Really, the whole point of the article, in a lot of ways, was just to introduce audiences on both sides, really, to “Hey, regardless of how we actually behave and how well we measure up to our own ethics—or anybody’s ethics for that matter—both sides, if we want to look at it that way, are having these conversations. And they’re having these conversations in roughly the same way: They’re doing it through journals and conferences, arguments, debates, op-eds. I think, to wrap it up, I would say both sides are having these conversations. It’s useful to get to know what the terms are and the resources they use. These aren’t final conclusions. Ways of war evolve. So do ethics of war. And that’s also part of the debate. What I hope to do is show the relationship so you can kind of map out how those do occur and can evolve.(Host)Thanks for joining me today. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or any other major podcasting platform.

In this podcast, strategist David Katz argues American military strategists must incorporate multidimensional power projection into their planning processes to counter adversarial actions by gray-zone actors. By developing a more complete concept of power projection, the United States can apply its resources more effectively.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol48/iss4/5/Keywords: American military strategy, multidimensional power projection, Unrestricted Warfare, informationalized warfare, PLA Air ForceEpisode Transcript: Multidimensionality: Rethinking Power Projection for the 21st CenturyStephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1 David Katz)(Host)Decisive Point welcomes David Katz, author of “MultiDimensionality: Rethinking Power Projection for the 21st Century,” featured in Parameters’ Winter 2018–2019 issue. Katz works as a senior analyst at US Special Operations Command, J35 Transnational Threats Division, Counterthreat Finance. A West Point graduate, he served in the US Army as an infantry officer and Green Beret captain. He also worked as an institutional investor and advisor before founding his own firm that provided advanced analytics on more than $3 billion dollars of clients’ private equity investments.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.Your 2018 Parameters article argues that American military strategists must incorporate multidimensional power projection into their planning processes to counter adversarial actions by gray-zone actors. Let’s start there. Please briefly walk us through the basic concept of your article.(Katz)Well, when you stand on the shoulders of giants—in this case, two senior (People’s Liberation Army Air Force or) PLA Air Force political officers who wrote Unrestricted Warfare: (Two Air Force Senior Colonels on Scenarios for War and the Operational Art in an Era of Globalization), I think we should start with that, which was published in 1999.I think it opened up an entire, new range of military operations. In this case, it was unrestricted—hence the title, Unrestricted Warfare. So that’s where I start from in order to develop multidimensionality. I think that as a critique, the US strategy community has tended to gravitate from unrestricted warfare into what they call “informationalized warfare,” where it’s really the principal child, as they see it, of unrestricted warfare.But philosophically, I think there’s a profound question to consider. And that is, “What is warfare if it’s unrestricted?” What isn’t warfare? In fact, let me restate that. If warfare is unrestricted, as the PLA Air Force political officers, Colonel Qiao Liang (pronounced “Crow”) and Colonel Wang (Wang Xiangsui) wrote in 1999, if warfare is unrestricted, what isn’t warfare? We need to consider that, which led me down a path to multidimensionality.Now, two questions I typically get are: “What’s the difference between multidimensionality and multiple-domain operations, or MDO?” And, “What’s the difference between multidimensionality and concepts like (diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement or) DIMEFIL?” And we’ll get there. But I think let’s just go down sort of the nuts and bolts of multidimensionality.Multidimensionality is really just a strategic framework where we, as US strategists, consider every available dimension of power projection or engagement, and we pick those from that available universe where we possess a usable advantage, whether it’s strategic or tactical, whether it’s persistent or transitory.For example, a single instance of power projection can range from a scaled, macro power projection, like multiple nuclear strikes, to the most micro and granular, which could be a single instance of a single person conducting a single credit card transaction or making a single phone call. That counts as power projection as well.So, the instance of power projection that we’re looking at, through the dimension we select, may be bilateral, that source to target, which is the way we typically consider power projection. But it can also be indirect, or perhaps even intermediated: intermediated projection, like his power projection traversing through a network with multiple intermediate entities.So, the bottom line is that we must expand our concept of power projection and campaign planning to both encompass all of the operational advantages that we possess and to integrate them coherently and comprehensively into the actions that we take. So that’s kind of the nuts and bolts of multidimensionality.The next question I typically get is, “How do you do it? What are the mechanics of multidimensionality?” Well, so the obvious question is: “Why do we even have mechanics in multidimensionality?” And so, the question then becomes when warfare is unrestricted.In the 19th century, definitions become unmoored. Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security—we need a precise means to describe what we intend to do and how we intend to do it.Let’s get down to the brass tacks. Power is something that you apply to a target in order to bring about a desired change in its state. Power is described, I think, by its behavior against the target, and it could be grouped into classes. In other words, class defines the behavior of power against the target state. For instance, “kinetic” is a class of behavior with multiple subclasses that can range from lobbing artillery rounds to tackling somebody.So power has a behavior. That behavior is classified. And power must come from someplace, so, consequently, it must have a source, and it must deliver something that acts against the target. So, you have a payload. Power projection is really the process of delivering an instance or instances of power within a single dimension. And the means of delivery, the path of delivery, is called a vector. So, at its bottom, the mechanics of multidimensionality is projecting power is really described through four essential elements: the class or behavior; the source where it comes from; the payload that it delivers; and the vector or path that it utilizes to deliver that payload, from where it came from to where it’s going. And that, in a nutshell, are the mechanics of multidimensionality.(Host)So, your piece addresses multidimensionality in the South China Sea and in the Middle East. Let’s apply it to Russia in the Ukraine.(Katz)That is a great question. One of the things we should consider regarding Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to nonkinetically extend the tactical, kinetic Ukrainian battlespace into strategic areas where we hold structural advantages. We have structural advantages in strategic maneuver. We have a blue-water navy, we have a blue-water coast guard. We have a permanent presence along Russia’s perimeter. We also have structural advantages in the political economy. As the world’s largest developed economy, we exert a geo-economic gravity that skews the world political economies into our orbit. We are the largest and most lucrative market for anyone to sell into. The US shepherds the global maritime commons, which is a globally scaled, integrated system of shipborne freight distribution, economic trade, and financial risk management whose physical passage is guaranteed under US stewardship.But the US shepherds other systems of international diplomacy and commerce and law that arose from the wreckage World War II that have facilitated worldwide economic growth. In short, the USA currently is the world sysadmin or systems administrator.Now the interesting thing about systems is that, once created, they tend towards stability as a means of preserving the benefits that they deliver to their participants or constituents. And they can react against changes that pose a risk to their purpose in their transformative processes, just like an immune system reacts to a viral infection.So, consequently, the US, I believe, can harness systems of international commerce, diplomacy, and law and their tendency to maintain a present state for our advantage. So, specifically: How about a nonkinetic, maritime exclusion zone exercise in the Bering Straits (Bering Strait) as an example? It would integrate law enforcement through the Coast Guard with United States and Canadian special operation forces, perhaps, and perhaps US Navy assets. It would demonstrate capability, capacity, and strategic depth by extending the Ukrainian battlespace thousands of miles and beyond Russia’s capability and capacity to respond quickly. It would demonstrate localized US escalatory dominance.But most importantly, nonkinetically, it threatens core Russian and Chinese economic interests because it threatens the Northern Sea Route. For folks that are not familiar with the Northern Sea Route, it goes from Murmansk all the way over into the Arctic Oceans (Arctic Ocean), down the Bering Straits (Bering Strait), and goes from there to Dalian and Shanghai and all of the factories on China’s coast. So by threatening the North Sea route (Northern Sea Route), just demonstrating the capability to conduct a chokepoint operation in the Bering Straits (Bering Strait), we could force Russia to use alternative routes like a land route and the use of the Suez Canal, which could add 10 or more days to transit to whatever it is they want to move to market. This threatens Russia’s commercialization of its vast mineral and oil wealth in its far north. It threatens Russian and Chinese energy and commodity trading shipping routes. To right now, Russia wants to develop the billions of dollars of mineral wealth stuck in their Murmansk peninsula (Kola Peninsula) and sell it and ship it to Chinese factories on the Chinese eastern seaboard. And in order for that to happen, it has to transit the Bering Straits (Bering Strait). So that’s a quick and dirty example of how you would use multidimensionality to extend a battlespace and to force your adversaries to respond in dimensions where they are not expecting it.(Host)Here’s a quote from your conclusion in 2018: “In an era of coercive gradualism, nuclear provocation, and gray zone competition that purposefully occupies the space between war and peace, dimensionality might offer a better, more innovative, and imaginative way to respond to some of the world’s worst actors, while reducing risk and promoting peace.” Final thoughts?(Katz)The rule in warfare is to never telegraph your moves. Never come where your enemy or adversary is expecting you. By expanding the dimensions through which we project power, we can come at our adversaries in ways and with means that they are not expecting at all. So when you face the salami slicing that China is doing in the South China Sea, they set it up specifically so that if you engage them, and it did mention that they want you to engage them, which is physical kinetic action, they already have an escalatory dominance against whatever you can do. It’s a lose-lose proposition for the United States. But we can bypass all of China’s missiles and fleets and submarines by phoning in a purchase order to the headwaters of a supply chain inside China. Buying out an entire production cycle worth of a critical component. Warehousing it. The next company on that supply chain would have to scramble for parts at higher prices and a latency that would cascade down that supply chain, growing like a snowball going downhill into an avalanche. And then you wait for the next production cycle and dump those same critical components into the supply chain at below cost. So you’re creating a bullwhip effect where everyone on the supply chain doesn’t know what price it is, they don’t know what the supply is, and they don’t know what the duration of what they’re doing. Eventually, that supply chain falls apart. You can do that all nonkinetically. And that’s just a one-dimensional approach that could augment the 7th Fleet going into the South China Sea or could be done to the exception of the 7th Fleet driving their boats around the South China Sea. So, we need to be a lot more inventive on what we’re doing. And as both a strategist, a campaign designer, and an operator, I get to practice some of these tools and techniques. So, it’s like Yogi Berra’s old quote that in theory, theory works in practice, and practice, not so much. I get to do both. So I may have an unfair advantage against other strategists and can campaign designers on it. But we cannot fight a twenty-first-century war with nineteenth-century definitions. We need to expand what we consider to be warfare. The Chinese brought it up first. It’s unrestricted. We need to play in that ball game.(Host)Thank you, David, for sharing your insight on this topic.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or any other major podcasting platform.

This article delivers a novel economic analysis of US dependence on China for rare-earth elements and sheds light on how Western nations may exploit the limitations of limit pricing to break China’s global monopoly in rare-earth element production and refinement. This analytical framework, supported by a comprehensive literature review, the application of microeconomic and industrial organization concepts, and two case-study scenarios, provides several policy recommendations to address the most important foreign policy challenge the United States has faced since the end of the Cold War.Keywords: United States, China, foreign policy, rare-earth elements, microeconomic, industrial organizationRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss1/6/Episode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1 Gustavo Ferreira)(Guest 2 Jamie Critelli)(Host)Decisive Point welcomes Captain Gustavo Ferreira and Major Jamie Critelli, authors of “China’s Global Monopoly on Rare Earth Elements,” featured in the Parameters Spring 2022 issue.Ferreira holds a PhD in agricultural economics from Louisiana State University. He’s a senior agricultural economist with the US Department of Agriculture and serves as an agricultural officer at the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, US Army Reserves. Critelli is a civil affairs officer serving in the 353rd Civil Affairs Command, US Army Reserves. He’s an independent farm business owner and has worked globally in agriculture supply-chain rules on five continents. He holds a master of business administration and supply chain management from ETH Zurich. 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.Gustavo [and] Jamie, thanks for joining me. Let’s jump right in. Your article sheds light on how Western nations may exploit the limitations of limit pricing to break China’s global monopoly on rare-earth element production and refinement. What’s the working definition of “rare earth elements” here?(Ferreira)Good morning, Stephanie. Thank you for having us. So rare-earth elements are a set of 17 different metallic elements that fall into two different categories. You have the heavy and the light based on the separation process (once they get mined and get processed), which tends to be rather complex. And contrary to what the title suggests, rare-earth elements are abundant in the Earth crust. They have their rarity status coming from being typically highly scattered and mixed together with other minerals, and they’re rarely found in concentrations that make it profitable to extract. Oftentimes, they are a byproduct of other mining activities.It’s important to understand rare-earth element reserves tend to be geographically more concentrated than other natural resources, such as oil and gas, but they’re also in line with other key mineral resources, such as copper, where they’re concentrated in one or two countries at the global scale.In terms of uses, it’s important to highlight they’re desired because they have unique characteristics, such as magnetic strength, and, consequently, they’re used in a wide range of ubiquitous consumer goods, such as flat-screen TVs and cell phones. Other important industrial applications include wind turbines and electrical vehicles. And one that’s typically a very visible application of this resource is in the military space. These minerals are key inputs for many weapons systems, such as jet fighter engines, missile guidance systems, satellites, ammunition, and so on. It’s always good to put a number on it to emphasize the current demand for these inputs. An F135 fighter jet (engine) requires about 920 pounds of rare-earth minerals—just to put it into perspective.Also, looking forward, as the global economy continues to transition to lower-carbon, renewable energies, analysts estimate that the demand for these minerals will continue to grow at a very rapid pace. That is because cleaner energy technologies such as electrical vehicles, electrical batteries, generators, and wind turbines will consume close to half of all the rare-earth element production. They are going to be a major driver for these resources.And lastly, one thing that must be emphasized is the heavy environmental cost that goes along with producing these minerals. They produce an enormous environmental footprint, and that’s the reason why it’s concentrated in certain countries, such as China. They generate waste gas, acid-containing sewage water, radioactive wastes, and so on. It’s a pretty high environmental cost.(Host)Thanks, Gustavo. How did we get here, and what is the state of rare-earth elements?(Ferreira)To truly understand how this industry has evolved to what we see today, we must understand the paths that China and the United States have followed for the past three or four decades regarding rare-earth elements. In the case of the United States, this country was once self-reliant and the world’s leading producer. From the 1960s to the 1980s there was a mine, the Mountain Pass mine, located in California. It was the world’s primary source of rare-earth elements. However, following decades of neglect, underinvestment by the US government, and a lack of interest by the academic community in this field, we had a gradual loss of know-how and the skilled labor force that’s required for this industry. Altogether, this led to a slow decline of this industry in the United States. This trend culminated in the shutdown of that Mountain Pass mine in 2002, following some regulatory issues and an environmental incident that involved a pipeline spill carrying contaminated water. So, there was kind of the nail in the coffin for that particular operation. It confirmed the decline of this industry in the United States.Because of that, we lost nearly all our rare-earth production capacity, and we became gradually a net importer of these minerals—with, now, China becoming the main supplier, accounting for 80 percent of our imports.Which is a good segue to how China was able to fill that gap. This didn’t happen overnight. This was a long-term effort by the Chinese government. It was a concerted effort that involved high-profile investments in national programs, the development of teams, and labs that will exclusively focus on studying production of rare-earth elements. And this long-term focus definitely yielded significant results and set the conditions for China to expand its production from the 1970s and 1980s. As the US started to decline, China picked up that slack. Then, China also made the decision to declare these minerals a strategic resource. So, they kind of set the political tone. They recognized the importance of this going forward, and they even were able to endure and accept the environmental degradation that would entail. They were willing to take that cost, given the national strategic importance of this resource. As a consequence, they started producing and exporting more and more throughout the 1990s and 2000s. That expansion of production had an impact on global markets in the sense that they flooded the market with large amounts of rare-earth minerals. They plunged the global prices, which resulted in many Western producers no longer being able to compete at those low costs and filing for bankruptcy, further reducing production in the West.Another key shift in China was once they secured production and became the global powerhouse, they started shifting towards developing a more integrated supply chain. What I mean by this is they no longer were just simple raw-material producers, but they started investing in processing. And so, they could control the entire supply-chain process from mining all the way to the final products, such as magnets or oxides that are used by the final end users in the West. So, they created a whole supply chain, to include all value-added products, and now they control about 80–90 percent of that value-added refinement capacity. Even the United States or other Western countries that still mine rare-earth minerals—they have to export them to China in order to be refined there and processed to the way it could be used by the final end users.(Host)That leads right into my next question. China dominates the rare-earth element global market. How can we overcome that? Or maybe I should be asking you: Can we overcome that?(Critelli)Well, the short answer is “yes.” Thank you again for having us, Stephanie.China did not arrive at a point of rare-earth element market leadership overnight. Once they realized how valuable these materials were, they set a decades-long course to arrive at the position they’re at today. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on market forces alone to correct this. In the short term, we only have two levers. We either become better at recycling or repurposing existing rare-earth elements or we stockpile these items, regardless of price, so we’re not supply-constrained by a foreign power.So, in terms of recycling or repurposing, this of course is hampered by the limit-pricing efforts done by the Chinese and by the complete lack of a domestic rare-earth element recycling stream. We just don’t have it. We would have to build it up. And as Gustavo mentioned, there’s quite a bit of waste involved with this that we would need to address as well. As far as stockpiling, those efforts are a good strategy, but they would also be hampered by limit pricing. A lengthy discussion on the stockpile framework is also needed. What portion is for military use versus domestic use? How large of a stockpile? What mechanism would there be to extract an item from the stockpile? Because it can’t just be cost alone. And this would be to prevent inequities and to promote the national defense.But if we were looking at a longer time horizon, say five to 10 years, then we do have many more options. First and foremost, we can build out the rare-earth element smelting, refining, and processing industry. Basically, build it back. This would be to process domestic and foreign sources of (rare-earth element or) REE concentrates. Most likely, it would have to be vertically integrated though to attract the capital investment needed to build and sustain it. And it quite possibly would have to be carved out as a legal monopoly.Another option is to have continued Department of Defense collaboration with our allies and their businesses by employing mechanisms such as reciprocal defense procurement for the security of supply arrangements.More (research and development or) R&D is an option you hear all the time, but here there’s a couple of different avenues. One is more R&D investment to improve the processing yield on turning those concentrates into final products or to minimize the waste stream. And this is akin to how fracking revolutionized the gas-drilling industry. If you could figure out a way to get a better yield with less input, it’s cheaper.Continued focus on recycling: As I mentioned earlier, I believe we could leverage American ingenuity to recycle the world’s REEs. Problem solved.And then, finally, there should be a change in procurement strategies domestically—and this would be to cement the fix—focusing less on costs and focusing more on balancing cost with supply disruptions. Perhaps there could be local content rules considered for key items such as REEs, much like Brazil has put into place.You know, I’m left thinking that we bail out many other industries, but one that is at the heart of so many other critical industries hasn’t seen the investment required by government to address the issue. This is an industry that is marginally profitable and requires substantial capital investment. And, therefore, America needs to front the investment to help realize our national security and assist with the collective global security as well.(Host)Gentlemen, if you could pull it all together for us, what are your conclusions on this topic?(Critelli)As we sit with you today, Stephanie, the world is pulling itself out of (coronavirus disease 2019 or) COVID. And it is watching itself, in dismay, become involved with the unfolding situation in Ukraine. These are not dissimilar issues, though. Both events stood or stand to impact our supply chains on an unprecedented scale. Both COVID and the Russian invasion disrupt the availability of key products and commodities. Both continue to have second- and third-order impacts we didn’t plan for—and, unfortunately, these impacts could have been averted to a degree with more preparedness.I’m encouraged in our post-COVID world. People now talk about decoupling Chinese and American supply chains for the first time in a generation. I wonder what conclusions people will come to when they contemplate ongoing scarcity events, well in the future, involving tiny amounts of key elements that the mighty US military-industrial complex can no longer obtain—or the reality that it will now take several decades to get ourselves back onto a sound footing. The question will be whether we have the political will now to address this challenge head on, much as China has done over the past few decades.Sun Tzu is attributed the following statement: “take advantage of the enemy’s unpreparedness; travel by unprepared routes and strike him where he has taken no precautions.” Thank you for letting us speak with you today.(Ferreira)And I would like to add, just as a concluding remark, that, perhaps, we have a window of opportunity to overcome this dependency. It’s all because while in the past China was capable of flooding the market with cheap supplies and flushing out all competitors, they got to the point that, now, they are such large consumers themselves of those resources that they no longer can afford to apply those same tactics. They’re constrained on their end, which presents an opportunity for us to reinforce our industry and support the development of our domestic processing industry.And the political will is there. There has been a series of executive orders that have been recently approved, which signal the political support going forward, which is key. These are 10- to 20-year-long investments, and we’re going to need that to continue in the political arena so this project can materialize and we can soften our dependency.Because at the end of the day, the Chinese do think this is a critical issue. So, our political class should think the same as well as our military. So again, thank you for having us here. It was great having this conversation with you.(Host)I’m delighted to have you.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or any other major podcasting platform.

This commentary responds to Matthew Valasik and Shannon E. Reid’s article “The Alt-Right Movement and US National Security” published in the Autumn 2021 issue of Parameters (vol. 51, no. 3).Keywords: US National Security, Alt-Right Movement, white-power/far-right, Criminal Justice and CriminologyRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss1/16/Episode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.The guests in speaking order on this episode are:(Guest 1 Dr. Shannon Reid) (Host)Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Shannon Reid, coauthor of “The Alt-Right Movement and National Security” by Dr. Reid and Dr. Matthew Valasik, featured in Parameters’ Autumn (Fall) 2021 issue. Retired US Air Force Major General Charles J. Dunlop replied, disagreeing with Reid and Valasik’s articles. His thoughts as well as Reid and Valasik’s reply are in the Parameters Spring 2022 issue.Reid is an associate professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She is the lead author of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White. Valasik is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Louisiana State University. He’s the coauthor of Alt-Right Gangs: A Hazy Shade of White. Dunlap retired from the Air Force in 2010, after more than 34 years of service. He currently teaches at Duke Law School and is the executive director of its Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security. His 1992 essay “The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012” was selected for Parameters’ 40th Anniversary Edition. 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.Shannon, thanks for joining us. I’m glad you’re here. Your article talks about the white-power movement and its history with the military from the Civil War to today. What was the overarching goal of your original article? (Reid)So the overarching goal of the main article is to really bring attention to the fact that we have a white-power/far-right issue in the military, and it’s not a new problem. As you mentioned, we go back all the way to the Civil War. But it is an area of focus that needs attention and cannot continue to be pushed out of the way as something we don’t want to focus on.(Host)Military-affiliated citizens supporting DVEs (that’s domestic violent extremists)—how bad is it?(Reid)Part of the problem is we really don’t have any idea. The issue with not studying something is that we only have anecdotes and guesses. While Major General Dunlap said we’re overestimating, the truth of the matter is we really don’t know if it’s an overestimation or underestimation because all we’re seeing is when somebody either commits a violent crime or gets in trouble for supporting white-power messaging and is removed from the military. So all we are seeing is a very tail end of what the problem is. But if we continue to say either (a) we don’t want to look at this because we feel like it does a disservice to the image of the troops or (b) assuming that we’re overestimating, because it’s only a proportion of the individuals who are part of these groups really does not allow us to tackle the actual problem, but rather allows it to continue fairly unfettered. Because they know that no one is really interested in looking into it in a more in-depth way. (Host)Dunlap, in his reply to you, gave an example illustrating how, he says, the numbers are small. And he also notes that exaggerating the problem beyond what data shows dangerously erodes public confidence in the armed forces. It diminishes the propensity of minorities to join, and it gives succor to America’s enemies around the world. You say your position is concentrated on the need for the US military to finally confront this problem head on. What would that look like? (Reid)It’s sort of a multistage process. As you look at people who have talked about their involvement, either in the white-power movement generally or in the intersection of the military and the white-power movement, a lot of it has to do with personal, individual, and group vulnerability. The same way we talk a lot about gang membership or mental health risk, (posttraumatic stress disorder or) PTSD, and suicide—just because it’s potentially a small portion of the population doesn’t mean that there are people who are not at risk for long-term consequences from this action. So when we think about “OK, what would studying this really look like,” a lot of people are bringing these ideologies or beliefs in with them, and it continues once they’re there. Or are they sort of becoming—and I use the word “indoctrinated” very loosely—but, you know, sort of becoming wrapped up in this movement while in the military because of either what they’re seeing or what they’re being exposed to? Because that really impacts how we intervene and how we move to prevent further polarization or further extremism.But the bottom line is we don’t know. So if we can get surveys or research done as people are coming in or coming back from deployment—so, figuring out those points of inflection where risk is the highest—then we are able to develop prevention programs the same way we do for others. Again, probably small numbers, but large impacts.So we don’t dismiss suicide risk amongst the military because it’s only going to be a small proportion, right? We take that seriously, or we hope people take that seriously. We tried to take PTSD seriously. We take veteran homelessness seriously. And, so, dismissing something simply because it’s a small number, potentially, is to give the people who are at risk for this behavior no support and put them on a path that leads to a lot of risky behavior and can really change their lives in a negative way. (Host)There was some commonality in your views, and Dunlap does agree. In fact, I’ll quote here. He says, “Let’s be clear about something. The military, like American society in general, needs to stamp out racism and white supremacy. In this respect, I believe, Valasik and Reid have some ideas worth pondering.”Do you have any final thoughts? (Reid)Because they are the military—similar to the police, where we’ve seen this issue in law enforcement generally—we are giving them extra skills and assets and a belief system that the far right is trying to exploit. They bring something to the table that potentially an average citizen doesn’t. And, so, it becomes more imperative to really root out this problem. Because it’s more than just racism. It’s beyond, you know, “I don’t like so-and-so.” And I know he talks about, you know, “We don’t want to cause distrust in the military.” But the problem is that distrust exists because these people are showing up on the news and are being seen at things like the Capitol riot or Unite the Right or Portland protests. I think it erodes trust more not to be doing anything about it than it does to try to expose a problem and say, “We’re going to move forward to deal with this in an efficient and effective manner.” (Host)Thanks for joining me today, Shannon, and for sharing your thoughts on this topic.(Reid)Thank you.(Host)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.

Assessing threats to the air littoral, the airspace between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers, requires a paradigm change in American military thinking about verticality. This article explores the consequences of domain convergence, specifically for the Army and Air Force’s different concepts of control. It will assist US military and policy practitioners in conceptualizing the air littoral and in thinking more vertically about the air and land domains and the challenges of domain convergence.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/7/Keywords: air littoral, paradigm change, American military thinking, verticality, US military and policy practitionersEpisode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production, featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Maximillian K. Bremer and Dr. Kelly A. Grieco, authors of “Air Littoral: Another Look.” Colonel Bremer is the director of the Special Programs Division at Air Mobility Command. He is a 1997 distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy, he has an MPP from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and an MAAS from the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies.Dr. Grieco is an assistant professor of military and security studies in the Department of International Security at the Air Command and Staff College. She received her PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Max. Kelly. Thanks for joining me today. I’m really glad you’re here. Your research looks at air littoral, which is the space between ground forces and high-end fighters and bombers, and how the US military thinks about its verticality. What has changed in recent decades that makes this a priority?Colonel Maximilian K. BremerWell, Stephanie, first, thanks for having us on. And thanks to Parameters for publishing this paper. It’s really a privilege. So you’re asking what’s changed? Well, in a nutshell, democratization and technological advancement have led to increased access and persistence in the space that we’re calling the air littoral. Basically, more users with more technology are driving innovation both in the military and civilian realms. Changing the way that we access and persist in any domain will alter the way we contest that domain–the way we seek dominance. The air littoral, until recently, was mostly a realm of transit to and from the blue skies. Persistent access within the air littoral was just not tenable. But it is now, and that drives a change in how we utilize the domain. Before, we could think about airspace as layered flat maps, and now we have to understand the interaction vertically and persistently from the ground all the way to the edge of space.Dr. Kelly A. GriecoAs Colonel Bremer suggests, what has changed is increased access and persistence to the air littoral. Russia in eastern Ukraine, for example, has been able to access the airspace and deny it to the Ukrainian Air Force mainly using not manned aircraft but a combination of air defense and electronic warfare systems. And they have then been able to exploit this airspace using multiple drones flying simultaneously at different altitudes over target areas to spot for artillery rockets.This example illustrates two important changes in my mind. First, manned aircraft are no longer essential for accessing or exploiting the airspace, or at least parts of the airspace. And second, increasingly, both nonstate actors and strategic competitors will use small unarmed systems–things like drones, low flying missiles, and loitering munitions to gain persistent access to the air littoral and then exploit it.HostWhat is the working definition of air superiority? And where does the United States fall on this topic? Do we still rule the skies?GriecoNo. At least not the same way we did 10 or even five years ago. In joint doctrine, air control exists on a spectrum based on the degree to which an adversary can interfere with friendly military operations. On that spectrum, air superiority refers to a level of air control in which friendly forces are able to operate at a given time and place without prohibitive interference by the opposing force.Air supremacy goes even further than that. It refers to a degree of dominance in which the opposing force is incapable of even effective interference. And that’s anywhere in the entire theater of operations. I would argue, and many others, that based on those definitions, for the last 30 years, the United States has had air superiority, if not air supremacy in all its major conflicts. Today, however, that’s no longer a given and in fairness, both the Air Force and the Army have increasingly recognized this in recent years. To emphasize that point, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Brown, has said on numerous occasions that air dominance is not an American birthright. But attempts to maintain or regain that air superiority have mainly centered on developing and acquiring sixth-generation fighters and bombers. So those aircraft that operate in the blue skies. As we point out in our article, this focus on the blue skies runs the risk of missing that adversaries are increasingly able to access the airspace between the ground and the blue skies, that is the air littoral.BremerSo to address this new reality, we have to recognize that air control exists in a volume rather than a flat bounded plane. In the past, control the air was won or lost in the blue skies. If you obtained air superiority over a theater of operations, it was generally imparted to control over all altitudes, but that assumption no longer holds. Control of the air littoral is rapidly decoupling from that of the blue skies, which means our concept of air control has to evolve. It must account for a third dimension—that of vertical space.Critically, conceptualizing air control as a volume calls attention to key differences between the blue skies in the air littoral. Compared to blue skies, the air littoral is becoming much more highly dynamic, threat-intensive in a more important environment. In Iraq, as General Raymond Thomas noted, the adversary was able to operate, quote – right overhead and underneath our air superiority – unquote.If the enemy is in the air above us, do we actually have air superiority?HostHere’s a quote from your article. Most worrying for the United States is the potential curtailing of the military’s ability to provide effective support to US, Allied, and partner ground forces from the skies above. Can you expand on US adversaries contesting control of the air littoral and your answer to it?BremerIn the US military, the services are aligned with the physical domains, the mediums through which they primarily operate. They’re charged with the duty to organize, train, and equip forces to be experts in and dominate those domains to the benefit of the joint force. Yet the fuzzy border between physical domains creates a seam. And this seam is where services contest with each other for authorities and funding. Our adversaries are watching, and they could potentially exploit that seam. What is the airspace? Who has responsibility for control of the airspace, and what does control mean? These are some fundamental challenges that the democratization of the air littoral creates. For example, you know, a bullet fired from an M-4 is traveling through the air. Is that in the airspace? What about a mortar that travels up to 1,500 feet and then comes back down? Or HIMARS? Or what about a small loitering drone that doesn’t go above 400 feet but sticks around for several hours?GRIECOAnd currently, the focus is really on counter-system ideas–counter UAS, counter mortar, counter cruise missiles, counter aircraft. But these all operate in the same physical realm and only vary by propulsion, systems speed, persistence, and range. And those characteristics, especially speed, persistence, and range are converging. And our adversaries are very aware of this and responding to these developments. And as they innovate their capabilities and operational concepts, the Air Force is increasingly at risk of failing in his primary job—winning in the air to allow the army to occupy and win the ground.HostHow does vertical reciprocity play into this?GriecoThe air littoral, like the maritime littoral, is fundamentally a trans domain environment. This requires vertical reciprocity between air and ground forces. It also means more interactions and interdependencies between the air and ground. And the Army, for example, plans to exploit this vertical space with joint all-domain operations, emphasizing presenting the enemy with multiple dilemmas. The Army has an emerging vision of simultaneously, both horizontally and vertically, enveloping the enemy. Of course, US adversaries also seek the same advantages.BremerYes, but bringing the air war close to the ground will also lay bare the differences in the army in the Air Force’s concept of control. Control of the land domain has traditionally been a function of the persistent occupation of territory. Armies, as Clausewitz said, can stand fast, as it were, rooted to the ground. In contrast, the Air Force concept of control in the air domain centers on responsive presence, not persistent occupation. Air Forces may occupy airspace for a time but it’s ephemeral. What it offers instead is a rapid but not necessarily persistent presence, the ability to quickly mass and deliver fires. The growing mission overlap will cause a clash of these air-centric and land-centric concepts of control. Closing this seam is critical to the future success of the joint force. The Air Force will need to address control the air literal from the blue skies just as the army will have to address it from the ground. Each service is going to have to support the other in this evolving trans domain environment.HostIn conclusion, is it technology that’s going to be the answer here?BremerNo, I don’t think technology is going to be the answer, not in the general way that we use the term. The artifacts, the things that we create, are simply part of the environment. But the art and craft of understanding how to employ those things, which is the original Greek meaning of the term technology, that will play a significant role. The democratization and innovation that created access and persistence in the air littoral is also driving a significant maturation of the domain. We have to adapt to this new environment by understanding it differently–no longer as planar maps stacked one atop another statically, but rather as a fluid with temporal, vertical, and horizontal dimensions. Then we can apply technology, the craft of employing our tools, to the contestation and dominance of the air literal.GriecoI agree wholeheartedly. And I would just add that the answer is really doctrinal innovation. The technology is hardware, but doctrine is the software. It’s that application piece. And as we argue in our article, gaining a competitive advantage in the air littoral requires the joint force to develop a new conceptual framework, and it’s one that needs to be grounded in both horizontal and vertical spaces. And if we don’t, America might not just lose this technological advantage, but its operational edge.HostThis has been great. It was very enlightening.GriecoThank you for having us. And it was a pleasure to do this.BremerThanks, Stephanie.HostIf you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple podcast, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platforms.

Critics of the Afghan war have claimed it was always unwinnable. This article argues the war was unwinnable the way it was fought and posits an alternative based on the Afghan way of war and the US approach to counterinsurgency in El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. Respecting the political and military dictates of strategy could have made America’s longest foreign war unnecessary and is a warning for the wars we will fight in the future.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/3/Keywords: counterinsurgency, Cold War, El Salvador, Regional Command East, General Mark Milley, Afghanistan warEpisode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Welcome to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production featuring distinguished authors and contributors who get to the heart of the matter in national security affairs.Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Todd Greentree, a former US Foreign Service officer who served as a political military officer in five conflicts, including El Salvador and Afghanistan. He’s a member of the Changing Character of War Center at Oxford University and teaches in the Global and National Security Policy Institute at the University of New Mexico. Greentree is the author of “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021-2022 issue.Welcome, Todd. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s talk about your article. Some people would argue the Afghan war was unwinnable. You assert it was unwinnable the way it was fought. What do you mean by that?Dr. Todd GreentreeThank you, Stephanie. Great to be here. The idea that it was unwinnable the way it was fought is really tied to the purpose, sort of the reason why I was writing it, which is not just about what went wrong in Afghanistan, what lessons can be derived about counterinsurgency. This is really an article about US strategic behavior. Afghanistan was my fifth war. And I like to write what I know. So really, the origin of the article is from my own story.I got the idea that we were maybe not doing this right, sort of when I stepped off the helicopter at Bagram in 2008. My first war had been El Salvador in the early 1980s. And so everything I learned were all from guys who had been in Vietnam. There’s more about that in the article. For the next four years, though, I served with people who were…most of the people were from the 9/11 generation, and I was a political adviser to combat units out in the field and was super impressed with the astuteness that everybody was showing. So first, I was in Regional Command East, where General Mark Milley was the deputy commander for operations. But there was a problem with the entire effort in Afghanistan. We were on economy of force. But that economy of force was not being exercised for a strategic purpose, just to minimize the cost, because Iraq had sucked up all the attention and the bulk of the resources.Then I moved to Regional Command South into Taliban home country, and they had been raging there since 2006. It took three years for the US to adapt. I came back to Kandahar in 2010, at the height of the surge, with the 10th Mountain Division. They were in command of Regional Command South. And this was the main effort at the height of the surge. It was a strong coalition team. They knew what to do, how to partner with the Afghan army. They took it seriously. They were serious about aligning political and military strategies, which was my part of this. The overall strategy of the US, by 2009, was coming into focus, we’d had Stan McChrystal’s math, the idea, here’s our most experienced Special Operations commander who had come to the realization, as had many of the SOF guys, that attrition generates more insurgents. This led to a shift in the understanding of focus on the population rather than exercising firepower.General Petraeus, following McChrystal with Field Manual 3-24 and counterinsurgency doctrine and all of that. The problem was that when Obama announced the surge, he time-limited at the same time, which was a strategically incorrect thing to do because, for the Taliban, all they had to do was wait it out. And for them, jihad was forever.But by 2011, when the surge was peaking and then over, that was 10 years into the war. It was just way too long to be fighting and to get it right.My big point is that military operational excellence was essentially what we were exercising–a series of operations in a context of strategic incoherence. So, there was warfighting, but it was associated with this wildly ambitious nation-building that was very well-intentioned and made a lot of progress, but it was far too complex for the United States to sustain at that level. We certainly can’t blame the Afghans. In the end, I arrived at the same conclusion that Bob Komer did in 1973, when he, as the head of counterinsurgency in Vietnam, wrote this incredible paper called “Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: US Performance in Vietnam.”That conclusion was: if you find yourself doing Big COIN, it’s too late.HostLet’s talk about accidental guerrillas and accidental counterinsurgents. How did this happen in relation to Afghanistan?GreentreeAccidental Guerrillas was this great book that Dave Kilcullen wrote–one of his first books. And he had this idea that the Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban, were fighting us because we were in their space. My idea with accidental counterinsurgents is merely to hold up a mirror on that idea and say, “well, that’s right.”And the only reason that we were fighting the Taliban was because they helped al-Qaeda, who got into our space by attacking us on 9/11. The strategic problem with this was that we confused the two. The Taliban were insurgents. They were not international terrorists. They didn’t like the Arabs in al-Qaeda very much, most of them. And they weren’t threatening the US in any way. So, in the end, we were hunting these extreme conservative Islamists, on their home ground, who were fighting jihad against us, the foreign troops who were in combat in the middle of their own people. So you had this incredible conflict, incredible clash, between two warrior cultures–one on their home ground and one on the sort of the “away team” that really didn’t understand this dynamic very well.HostLet’s circle back for a minute to your comment about if you’re doing big COIN, it’s already too late. Was there really any other option? What were they going to do? Small COIN?GreentreeIn El Salvador, small COIN was the model because the Vietnam War had ended less than a decade earlier. So early 1980s. Saigon was evacuated in 1975, so there was no way that the US military or the American public would support involvement in major counterinsurgency. So there was a political imperative that limited the presence of US forces on the ground. But there was more to it than that.It was also part of the policy to balance political and military strategy. They were in sync with each other. To take that lesson away, keep foreign troops–keep ourselves–out of direct conflict, out of direct combat. Focus on training, assisting, and advising.And one way to put it is to change one word in Article 15, of the famous article by Thomas Edward Lawrence, T. E. Lawrence of Arabia, the article was titled “27 Articles,” and it was about supporting and fighting with the Arabs in World War I in 1917. Article 15, with one word change (changing Arabs to Afghans) reads, “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Afghans do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them. Not to win it for them. Actually, also under the very odd conditions of Afghanistan, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is.”I think that just applies 100% to what was going on in Afghanistan. To take that a step further, is, rather than taking the war over, we should have been doing all along what we were doing at the end, which was keeping the size of our forces small and focusing on training, assisting, and advising rather than combat itself.The second part of this looking at options and alternatives, though, is equally if not more important. We should have listened to the Afghans. We often treated them and thought of them as our proxies, but we were fighting in their country. They weren’t proxies. They were really joint venture partners in which both sides, both participants, shared strengths and shared risks and shared costs. Just building on that, there’s a lot of blame to go around. That was a culminating point of victory. And we should have entered war termination with them, even while we continued counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda.The reason I’m talking about this as an option, as an alternative, was because a new President Karzai, and his fellow Pashtuns and government, had a strategy that was in accord with the Afghan way of war. The Taliban were streaming in to recognize the new winner and swear fealty to President Karzai. The government side was ready to disperse them back to their communities in southern Afghanistan and separate out those leaders who led the Pakistan from the Taliban, but at the same time to bring Taliban representatives, who had sworn fealty and were willing to reconcile, and include them at the table at the Bonn conference, where the new government was being formed.It was all thought out. The Afghans seemed to know what they were doing. They proposed this, and the Bush administration, principally Secretary defense, Rumsfeld said “no way, we’re not having anything to do with these Taliban people.”And so we ended up taking over the war with our own set of Afghan warlords, conducting counterterrorist methods by hunting the Taliban, capturing them, killing them, sending them to Guantanamo, and searching around for combat to continue combat–conducting the American way of war. By bringing up this option, it suggests that it may have been possible for the Afghan war to have been entirely unnecessary.HostWe packed a lot into a few short minutes. Thank you so much, Todd for doing this with me. I enjoyed all of it.GreentreeOkay, my pleasure, Stephanie.HostIf you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, look for us on Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple podcast, Stitcher, and any other major podcast platforms.

A titan of modern strategic studies, Colin S. Gray distinguished himself from other scholars in the field with his belief that grand strategy is indispensable, complex, and inherently agential. This article identifies key themes, continuities, conceptual relationships, and potential discontinuities from his decades of grand strategic thought. Gray’s statement that “all strategy is grand strategy” remains highly relevant today, emphasizing the importance of agential context in military environments—a point often neglected in strategic practice.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/8/Keywords: strategic studies, grand strategy, military environments, Colin S. GrayEpisode Transcript:Stephanie Crider (Host)Decisive Point welcomes Dr. Lukas Milevski, an assistant professor at the Institute of History at Leiden University. He’s published The West’s East: Contemporary Baltic Defense in Strategic Perspective (2018) and The Evolution of Modern Grand Strategic Thought (2016). He is the author of “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S. Gray,” featured in Parameters Winter 2021-22 issue.I’m glad you’re here, Lukas. Thanks for joining me today. Let’s talk about your article. “The Grand Strategic Thought of Colin S Gray.”Colin Gray, a Titan of modern Strategic Studies, often referred to grand strategy as equivalent to statecraft. War is more than a simple military contest, it inherently involves nonmilitary forms of power. Gray’s, conception of grand strategy contradicts the mainstream interpretation, particularly favored in the United States, in which grand strategy is identified as the Master of Policy. Walk us through Gray’s basic views on grand strategy.Dr. Lukas MilevskiOK, well first of all, thank you for inviting me. Now there are four key features of Colin’s basic understanding of grand strategy which are worth emphasizing.First grand strategy was in some ways a compromise, particularly between strategic studies characterized by the study of strategy, understood fairly strictly as military strategy, and security studies, which encompass security beyond military security— economic, environmental, human, etc.So grand strategy, therefore, was a compromise between the necessity to focus on war in strategic studies and the recognition that war, and indeed security, is more than just warfare as waged by militaries.Second, his personal definition of grand strategy is, and I’ll quote here. “The direction and use made of any or all among the total assets of a security community and support of its policy goals as decided by politics.”Which he followed up by asserting that the theory and practice of grand strategy is the theory and practice of statecraft itself.So, for Colin, grand strategy was clearly rather enormous concept in both theory and in practice, and one which did actually go beyond war itself. Given that he stated that grand strategy and statecraft are essentially synonymous.Third, grand strategy will still be strategy despite its enormity, means that it could be, had to be, and was understandable via the general theory of strategy, which he, throughout his career, sought to clarify ever further.This means, among other things, that as much as military strategy needs to be conducted, performed, or whatever word you prefer. So too does grand strategy. So there’s performance and economic or financial sanctions. For example, just as much as , if quite different from, that found in military strategy.That said, Colin didn’t really ever actually delve into how and nonmilitary power performed in application.Fourth, and finally, grand strategy is indispensable. Any military strategic judgment is inherently a grand strategic judgment. And often judgments needs to be made which are grand strategic rather than narrowly military strategic. You know, not every threat or every policy problem is necessarily solvable with armed force. Or even if it is, that task may be more easily done in combination with other instruments.HostGray noted grand strategy undoubtedly is so close to policy that the two can seem indistinguishable. Can you clarify? What is the difference between the two?MilevskiI’ll try, certainly.So the first thing to note about the distinction between grand strategy and policy, or even more broadly between strategy and policy, is that conceptual distinctions are rarely born out in organizational structure.And this in turn means that organizational structure should not and cannot be used as an argument for or against particular conceptual distinctions. Otherwise, we can’t share concepts with other analogous organizations like within that the DoD or with other European ministries of defense, or even with our own past or our probable future and our organizations in those time periods.So there is value in conceptual clarity, even if we also acknowledge that practice is liable to be messier. Because then we can develop theory, which both maintains clarity and is still useful in messy situations.So, for example we can develop theory which embraces the ideal. That strategy should serve policy while acknowledging and incorporating the fact that often strategy can shape policy, and that this is, to some degree inevitable and not even necessarily bad. Or even that some might attempt to practice strategy in a policy vacuum and why those attempts are a bad idea.So real-world might messiness can actually be very useful in developing and annunciating theoretical clarity.So then coming back to the distinction between grand strategy and policy, Clausewitz observed that at higher levels, strategy slowly transforms into policy. Quoting from the Howard and Paret translation, “. . . the conduct of war in its great outlines is therefore policy itself, which takes up the sword in place of the pen.’And he noted elsewhere that there’s no such thing as purely military advice, even though that sort of notion is quite attractive to military professionals.Then we might add in the context of grand strategy, there’s similarly no such thing as purely economic, financial, diplomatic, or whatever, advice either.This means that in considering and employing the instrumental value of these forms of power, policy is always present because these instruments are used to achieve policy.So, policy may arguably be felt less in tactics than strategy, and even that’s not necessarily true, but fundamentally still present in one way or another. So the question is then, what does this mean for the distinction between grand strategy or even strategy in general, and policy, if policy permeates the whole conduct of war?So the difference in conception, I would say between grand strategy and policy, is that the former does not set political goals to be achieved, whereas in the latter does.Moreover, it is through policy that politicians demonstrate a political preference for particular instruments to be used, but it is up to grand strategy to determine first the details of that use in as much as that use is tactically viable and politically acceptable.And second, ultimately, determining whether it is possible to fulfill the desired political goals using the instruments preferred by policy–or not–as the case may be.Ultimately, theory needs to recognize that there is a dialogue, even if it is unequal, between grand strategy and policy.The difference in practice, of course, is that organizations are not necessarily structured in ways which reflect these sorts of conceptual distinctions.So when you look at practice, I would suggest that the main difference is really based on degrees of engagement with the particular responsibilities of grand strategy or policy. That is, the more one engages in deciding political direction and political preferences concerning the conduct of war, the more one is engaging with policy.Conversely, the more one engages with reconciling tactical details in whatever field whether that’s military, economic, financial, whatever, with given political limitations, with imagining the political meaning of actions and in providing feedback from real practice back to policy as necessary, then one is doing grand strategy. And, of course, a single individual or single set of individuals can be doing all of this together.But that’s not really a problem, because they can still be conceptually distinct.So sort of to sum it up, grand strategy is still a relational. It’s still relates tactical actions and the details of the many forms of power to policy and political consequence.Policy, on the other hand, is the director and to say it quite inelegantly, the “related to,” as it were.HostLet’s end with this quote from your article Grays's interpretation of grand strategy contains much potential conceptual depth yet to be explored, but which may further develop grand strategy as an idea. Can you give us an example?MilevskiSure. So one example is the orchestration and combination of military and nonmilitary forms of power together into a single grand strategic effort.What does it look like?How do we do it?Here in the West, we don’t really have that many good ideas on this issue. Now, this is something Colin didn’t explore in his writings, as I mentioned my article. And in fairness, it’s partly because it’s incredibly difficult to do so effectively. It requires understanding, even if not necessarily mastering, all the various forms of power–military, economic, financial, diplomatic, disinformation, etc. And then on top of that, imagining how they can fit together.And this is an issue which has actually plagued grand strategy as a concept for more than a century. So this is not something which is unique to Gray’s thinking about grand strategy, although it’s certainly a part of it.We can go back to the British maritime strategic theorist Julian Corbett or the British military thinker Basil Little Heart–both of whom emphasized the importance of multiple forms of power. But both of these men also did not explore how they actually work together.And the grands strategic literature since their day has consistently, I think, avoided the topic even while invoking it as core to the very concept of grand strategy. And, indeed, we see this, you know, this expansive dimension appear even in numerous definitions of strategy per se, let alone grand strategy.But we are not good at thinking about it, and therefore we’re not good at doing it. And both of these are demonstrated by our repeated reinvention of grand strategy to suit particular contexts.So first, a couple decades ago, we reinvented grand strategy as the comprehensive approach in this specific context of counterinsurgency.And then arguably failed to do it effectively. And then we reinvented it again in 2014 as hybrid warfare, when it turned out that the Russians had a pretty solid idea of how it worked and a pretty solid idea of how to do it. And they did it pretty well in Crimea. And in the process. They quite surprised us.We know and can do combined arms.We know why it’s a good thing to do. We know how to do it, etc. Similarly, if we take one step up, we know and can do joint warfare. We know why it’s a good thing to do. We know how to do it.But when we take another step up to grand strategy and combining multiple forms of power rather than multiple forms of purely military power, we’re kind of lost. We have the sense of why it’s good in principle.But we have little idea of how to do it. In part because we, at this stage, have little idea of how to think about it.Because we have no real theory on how to combine these quite dissimilar forms of power together into a single effort. So this is something which both deserves and requires a good deal more attention than it has gotten in the past more than a century now.HostI enjoyed our time today. Thank you for chatting with me.