Decisive Point Podcast

In the fifth installment of the SRAD Director’s Corner, “Afghanistan: The Logic of Failing, Fast and Slow,” George Shatzer focuses on the failure of the US-led war and reconstruction campaign in Afghanistan. He reviews The Forty-year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali and The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman. He brings personal experience to bear in his review, painting a picture of why the United States failed in Afghanistan and posing these failures as lessons that must be learned before the next war. The books also provide insights for strategists attempting to plan for security in the region.Keywords: NATO, policy, strategy, Afghanistan, logicRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/4/Episode transcript: “Afghanistan: The Logic of Thinking Fast and Slow”Stephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point.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.In your SRAD Director’s Corner series you review books of possible interest to contemporary military strategists, especially those serving in US Army and Joint positions. The spring issue contains the fifth installment of this series, and the focus is on Afghanistan. Thanks for joining us again.Colonel George ShatzerThanks as always for having me. I enjoy discussing these important issues.(Host)Each of you articles in the series include a personal component. You have had direct experience in dealing with the issues and strategies discussed in the books you review. That’s true again with the topic of the US war in Afghanistan.ShatzerYes, very true. I don’t claim to be an expert on Afghanistan but that country and the US war there have factored significantly in my Army career. The terror attacks of 9/11, emanating partly from Afghanistan, inspired my interest in national security and strategy and were a big part of the reason I chose to become an Army strategist in 2005. As a much younger officer then, I felt strongly that the so-called Global War on Terror should have remained centered on Afghanistan and the terror groups operating there. My views on that have changed some over the years, but the issue of our commitment to campaigning in Afghanistan remained the vital question all the way to the collapse of the campaign in 2021. And, I know we’ll take more about that later. I was also a student at the Army’s Command and General Staff College in ’05 and decided to write my master’s thesis on proxy warfare which led to me to research and write a lengthy case study on the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980’s and the subsequent Afghan civil war that led to the development of the foreign terrorist base there. And while I would continue to follow events in Afghanistan closely, it would be another nine years before I actually served there in country. The experience was probably the most difficult of my entire career. That tour challenged me the most intellectually and was personally and professionally very trying.HostSo, an easy question then – why did the US war in Afghanistan fail?ShatzerOh boy. Joe Collins’s article in the same edition of Parameters does a great job at answering this. I offer many reasons why in my article as well. The reality is that the array of problems in Afghanistan is vast and their nature is so complex as to almost be alien to us as Americans. But if I had to select the one issue that set up the US campaign for failure it would be the mismatch in the aims of US political leaders and those of the US military.For the Department of Defense, and especially the Army as the lead service in the campaign, there was a deep-seated reluctance to fully commit to a war in Afghanistan. Even years before 9/11, the DoD and the Army actually did a fair job of examining the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan and concluding that operating there was a dead end – a graveyard of empires as the phrase goes. So many books like the Bear Went Over the Mountain by Les Grau, The Bear Trap by Mohammed Yousef, and post 9/11 works like Soldiers of God by Robert Kaplan were very popular and all played on the same theme: that powerful militaries go into Afghanistan and cannot deal with the terrain, the culture, and myriad other issues, and only end up wasting years and precious resources. So, DoD and the Army planned what amounted to a very large-scale raid of Afghanistan beginning in October 2001 to punish and oust the Taliban and to capture and kill as many Al-Qaeda and other terrorists as possible – and, critically, to not become so decisively engaged with a large footprint of conventional forces that would only lead to a long-term and aimless campaign vulnerable to failure.But US civilian leadership had a different view. While they recognized what history had to say about major powers entering Afghanistan, they were rightly aggrieved by the Taliban’s treatment of its people, especially women and children and the internal violence that had gripped the country since at least the mid-1970’s. To US political leaders, 9/11 was proof that a deep commitment to and investment in Afghanistan was needed to end the decades of conflict there and eliminate so-called “ungoverned spaces” – the underdeveloped and seemingly chaotic hinterlands of Afghanistan that gave bad actors like terrorist groups free range to operate. So, while DoD and the Army were thinking “in and out with some training to get the new Afghan security forces up and running so they could quickly take over,” the US civilian authority was thinking, “nation-building, democratization, remaking Afghan society and bringing it into the modern era.” This fundamental misalignment of views set the stage for what followed – a never-resolved tension between a “realist” view (held mostly by the military) and an “idealist” view (held mostly by civilian authority. The military, imbued with a can-do mission first attitude, dutifully followed orders but never fully committed to Afghanistan because it assessed the country as beyond help. The civilian reconstruction mission was deeply committed to the future vision of Afghanistan but failed to be cleared-eyed about the profound difficulties there. Unfortunately, this created a tendency by both camps to overstate progress year after year.This disconnect in views, aims, and assessments created a dynamic that badly undercut the campaign and made it much less able to deal with the whole host of other problems in Afghanistan that it faced.HostSo, from a very high-level view there were serious issues. During your tour in Afghanistan you experienced how that played out day-to-day. Describe that.ShatzerSure. Expanding on what I mention in the article, what I experienced even preparing for deployment to Afghanistan demonstrated the limits of our commitment. I should say that I deployed to Afghanistan as an individual augmentee to the mission, not as part of a deploying unit. The Army’s individual augmentee deployment preparation was geared almost exclusively toward training service members for personal self-protection while in country and refreshing on basic tactical soldier tasks. To the extent that there was training on Afghan culture or on the US campaign, it was barely more than what you might find on Wikipedia. Even as a senior lieutenant colonel who had done serious study on Afghanistan in the past, and did another round of my own professional study before deploying, I felt grossly unprepared to deal with the tough operational and strategic issues facing the plans team that I joined at NATO headquarters.On top of that, as I mention in the article, the turnover in personnel in the NATO headquarters was tremendously disruptive. Most personnel were on six-month long tours with a small minority assigned for a year. In my year-long tour, the plans section had four US colonels serve as the chief of plans. Two different British brigadiers would serve as the plans director. It seemed every month there was an officer either joining the section, leaving the section or going on R&R leave. This contributed to a pervasive sense that many were just putting in their time – doing their reports, delivering briefings, engaging with Afghans – but at the same time detached from it all as they anticipated the next drawdown or going home. For most of my tour, LTG John Campbell commanded the mission and he recognized this short-timer attitude and approach. He tried to combat it. He frequently said, “Make the days count, don’t count the days.” Too many individuals were just counting the days. Institutionally, the Army was doing much the same.HostThat’s a major point that Elliot Ackerman makes in his book, The Fifth Act.ShatzerYes, he does. He relates how after nearly a decade in Afghanistan that the US Combined Joint Special Operations Task force headquarters was still made from plywood – a fact noted by our Afghan partners in the observation that “wars are not won with plywood.” Ackerman extends this point into a metaphor. The Afghan army was a plywood army, effective for some things but foundationally unsound in so many ways for trying to win an actual war. His point of course, is that our short-timer, always partly-preparing-to-leave approach undercut the effectiveness of everything we tried to do. We were always dealing with expedients, trying this and that for “quick wins,” but frequently shifting means and methods when priorities invariably shifted as people passed through the mission.Ackerman recounts how he, like many other veterans of Afghanistan, tried in August 2021 to coordinate the evacuation of former Afghan allies as the Taliban completed taking control of the country once again. He describes doing this while on a family vacation to Italy, making frantic phone calls and direct messaging with people to try to arrange passage for Afghans through the chaos swirling around Kabul’s airport to get these people on flights out of the country. As a story-telling device, Ackerman doing this while on vacation is a great illustration of how we treated the entire mission in Afghanistan – doing what we could, constantly at the spur of the moment, while trying to get back to what we would rather be doing.What seems so strange to me is the lack of concern or attention the failure in Afghanistan seems to garner from the American public. One really has the sense that after nearly 25,000 US deaths and causalities in Afghanistan, 20 years and over $2 trillion spent, that no one seems to care much. One would think the American people would be demanding more in terms of examining our actions in the war and holding people to account. But it seems we’re just not interested. On one level, this isn’t surprising. Most Americans were never invested in the war. It was something a small group of volunteers were dealing with in faraway backwards country. Americans went about with their daily lives. Perhaps they knew somebody that deployed or was hurt in the war, but probably not. On another level, Ackerman worries that the American character has weakened and we’re unwilling to hold ourselves to account. He attributes these to a number of mostly partisan and societal factors that he sees as threatening the very integrity of the United States.What worries me more immediately is that the Army itself also seems uninterested in studying its conduct of the war. We used to pride ourselves as a learning organization, deeply committed to the after-action review process and to professional study. So far as I know, the Army is not conducting any major study of the war. In my list of other books to consider, I include a two-volume study that the Army published that looks at the war through 2014. The Army really needs to write volume three through 2021. I worry that the Army’s unwillingness to learn from Afghanistan is a sign of something lost professionally within the service.HostWhat does Tariq Ali’s book, The Forty-Year War in Afghanistan add?ShatzerWell, like Ackerman’s book, Ali publishes this collection of his writings very soon after the fall of Kabul in late summer 2021. The collection pulls together some of his writings since 1980 on the conflicts in Afghanistan. The subtitle of his book is “A Chronicle Foretold.” And his writings since the beginnings of the Soviet invasion do indeed seem to hit the mark across the decades in nearly every instance. Ali, a Pakistani-British political activist, clearly has an anti-American bias, but it’s hard to fault his conclusions about the results of foreign intervention in Afghanistan since they all unfold much as he predicts.Oddly, the thing that’s remarkable about Ali’s book is that it really says nothing new about the failures in Afghanistan that many others, including Ackerman, haven’t already said. That’s the point – here is yet another work, written over the course of four decades that arrived at the same conclusions as those coming to the subject thirty or forty years later. It speaks to a fundamental lack of understanding about what Afghanistan is and what we were doing. This is beautifully illustrated in a reprinted series of letters from 2003 between Ali and the UK minister for trade, investment, and foreign affairs. In the letters, Ali is hypercritical of what he sees as abject US and NATO failures even in year one essentially. The UK minister takes him to task noting there has been positive progress made. Ali counters that the Soviets claimed the same things while ignoring just how bad the situation truly was.This links back to my earlier point about the split between realists and idealists. Both camps turned a blind eye to the true difficulties. The realists were numb to them, expected them and so didn’t take any new actions. The idealists would minimize these issues, trying to convince themselves and others that the Afghans were improving their ability to deal with them when they really weren’t. Either way, the US never substantially altered its strategy or campaign in twenty years.HostYou make very brief reference to two other books at the end of your article.ShatzerYes, The Logic of Failure by Dietrich Dörner and Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. Dorner makes a very convincing case that failure is not accidental. That there are real, substantive shortcomings in logic and attitudes that cause us to make bad decisions when dealing with complex problems. Similarly, Kahneman’s work explains the different logical processes (especially in deliberate and instinctive thinking) that we use in decision-making and how that often leads us to have too much confidence in our judgment. Neither book is about Afghanistan. But, for my money, both books nail the logical failures that to campaign failure in Afghanistan. The point is we have to make deliberate study of our logic in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. And, again, I don’t see us doing this with respect to our conduct of the war in Afghanistan.The DoD and US Army are understandably very concerned about building the capability to deter, and if necessary, win a future war with powerful nation-states like China. But, that can’t come at the expense of being ready for wars like we experienced in Afghanistan. Failure to learn from them today will set us up for failure again.HostIt’s always a pleasure working with you. Thanks so much for making time for this today.ShatzerI appreciated the opportunity to discuss this today.HostListeners, if you want to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.About the author: Colonel George Shatzer is the chairman of the Strategic Research and Analysis Department in the Strategic Studies Institute at the US Army War College.

Policy initiatives in the Trump administration and the Biden-Harris administration significantly accelerated the Taliban victory in Afghanistan. This podcast supports the conclusion that the major factors in this defeat were the historical difficulty in governing Afghanistan, the Afghan republic’s two inefficient and corrupt governments, an ineffective US strategy, operational shortcomings by US forces, an ineffective Afghan military, Pakistan’s duplicitous policy, and the strength and determination of the Taliban. This podcast rejects the claim that the United States nation-building effort was a major factor in its defeat and concludes with a discussion of lessons encountered.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/3/Keywords:  Taliban, Afghanistan, US forces, Afghan military, PakistanEpisode transcript: “Defeat in Afghanistan: An Autopsy”Stephanie Crider (Host)The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.You’re listening to Decisive Point.I’m talking with Joseph J Collins today, a retired Army Colonel and civil servant whose service has included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs, and OSD Collins is the author of defeat in Afghanistan and autopsy. And in the spring, 2023 issue of Parameters. Welcome, Joe.Joseph J. CollinsThanks, Stephanie. With everything going on in Ukraine and worries about Taiwan, I’m glad that we can dive back into it for a bit here today.HostLet’s jump right in, you noted at the beginning of your article, and I’m quoting you here, “the United States failed to accomplish its objectives, whether judged in terms of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, or nation building.This outcome represents a significant unforced error in American National security policy.” What prices did Afghanistan and America pay In this venture?CollinsYou’re correct. I think we failed in all of our major tests in Afghanistan. We failed overall, but in each of those tasks you mentioned, we failed in varying degrees. In counterterrorism, we finally did get bin Laden, and afterward, his successor, Ayman Zawahiri. We did prevent further attacks on our nation. But we left behind in Afghanistan a significant ISIS problem, as well as, perhaps, as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters who remain closely associated with the Taliban, Pakistan, and al Qaeda’s best friend, Saraj Haqqani. A US- and UN-designated terrorist, is now the old powerful interior minister in Kabul.In the main counterinsurgency effort, US forces held their own but never decisively defeated the Taliban. We passed the baton to the Afghanistan Army in 2014, but, in the end, they lost ground, could not succeed and, finally, sensing Western abandonment or what they thought would be Western abandonment, they quit the field and nation building. We did much great work, but we were inefficient. We fostered corruptions, and our failures there were costly in the main, though I don’t see nation building and the nation building effort as a significant source or cause of our defeat. There, we talked about costs. We paid a steep price—nearly 2,500 US deaths, 1,200 allied deaths, and over 25,000 wounded over a two-decade period. We spent $2 trillion on this effort when all things are considered. But with all of that, Afghans suffered much more—66,000 dead soldiers, airmen, and police officers (and) 50,000 civilians perished. Most of them at the hands of the Taliban, which is a horrible toll for a nation of not much more than 35 million people. As a result of our defeat, Afghans lost civil rights and personal freedom. The country’s economy is in worse shape than ever. The clock in healthcare, education, and economic opportunity has been turned back to the terrible days of the 1990s. The women of Afghanistan are essentially under house arrest. That’s a steep price for that country.HostHow did the Bush and Obama presidencies shape the war?CollinsThis is a 20-year experience for the United States. Bush and Obama each managed the war effort for eight years. Neither was able to put together a winning effort, but neither was willing to give up altogether. Both Bush and Obama, in varying degrees, were distracted by the war in Iraq. Team Bush came in country in 2001 looking to avenge 9/11. Their initial objective was to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and remove the Taliban from power.President Bush quickly added nation building to the mission, knowing that if we failed to stabilize Afghanistan, extremists would just take over again. The first few years under Bush were quiet, but Iraq took first priority, even as the Taliban regained strength. By 2008, the last year of the Bush administration, team Bush realized that the Afghanistan effort needed help, and so did team Obama.Obama campaigned on Afghanistan as the “good” war and argued that it would be first priority. As we were beginning to leave Iraq after an agonizing set of meetings over a few months, President Obama decided to surge in Afghanistan, raising our troop strength for the second time. This time to nearly 100,000, with the Allies adding troops as well. Afghan forces were reinforced, and an army of over 300,000 cops and soldiers was in the field. It was a promising start, but President Obama was true to his word. He gradually turned off the surge, beginning at the 18th month. By the end of his term, a few years later, U.S. forces were down to about 8,400 personnel. In summary, Bush and Obama muddled through, presiding over a deteriorating battlefield situation, but at the same time keeping faith with our allies.HostAnd Trump and Biden? How did they impact the effort in Afghanistan?CollinsIn contrast to their predecessors, presidents Trump and Biden worked for a total troop withdrawal. In the end, they broke faith with our Afghan allies, demoralized Afghan forces in the field, and opened the door to the final Taliban offensive. While our failure in Afghanistan really was 20 years in the making, presidents Trump and Biden bear special responsibility for the defeat. Trump came into office as a skeptic of the war effort. But encouraged by his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster and the theater Commander General Mick Nicholson, he stepped up efforts and made a modest trooper reinforcement. About a year later, he entered into direct negotiations with the Taliban without our allies at the table. In February 2020, his envoy signed the Doha Accords, promising a full US withdrawal by spring of 2021. Trump did not insist on a ceasefire or force the Taliban to come to the table with the Kabul government. Trump lowered our troop strength to 35,00 personnel. The bare minimum contractors at that time declined from nearly 10,000 to about 6,000. That’s after the Doha Accord up to the beginning of the Biden administration.For their part, the Taliban made a series of promises, but the only one they kept was not to kill American advisers until the withdrawal was complete. Team Biden came in intent on a full withdrawal. They slid the withdrawal date to August, but they failed to read the situation. Their withdrawal plan, (was) marked by the embassy closure, the recall of our last and highly respected commander General Scott Miller, and the abandonment of our central base at Bagram Airfield. All of these things together drowned out our pledges of lasting support. For the Kabul regime, the Afghan army, who had sacrificed 66,000 dead to the war, lost the will to fight, and by the time we executed a single-point evacuation from Kabul Airport, the adjacent neighborhoods were under Taliban control. One hundred twenty thousand people, mostly Afghan, were withdrawn, but 70,000 of our allies in the special visa pool were left behind. As General Milley noted in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, the withdrawal was a logistical success and a strategic failure.HostYou note that the major factors that brought about the victory of the Taliban over Afghanistan and its partners are complex, but few. Please expand on that.CollinsDecisive factors (in my mind), and this is certainly subject to argument—and indeed in the more than 50 things in the few books that I’ve written about Afghanistan, I’ve realized that the truth has been elusive and that perceptions matter. This is my arrangement of the decisive factors, and I hope your listeners and the readers of Parameters will come back and tell me where I went wrong and what their list is.The first thing that I always mentioned is the difficulty of governing Afghanistan. This was not a showstopper, but it provided a very difficult context. Our leaders and modern Afghan leaders had to deal with a nation, Afghanistan, that was at war since 1978. Institutions were completely destroyed—public and private. Extreme poverty and underdevelopment was a given. Ethnic rivalries between the major groups (Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazara) were a major part of Afghan history, and they continued to be a real problem for the government. There were also religious rivalries, (not only a Shia–Sunni divide, with the Sunnis being in the great majority) but there was also a difference in those who believed in the most primitive and fundamentalist aspects of Islam and those who had a more modern approach in the 20th century.In Afghanistan, most leaders were deposed, exiled or executed in office. The only really good time of significant peace in Afghanistan was from the mid (19)30s up until 1978, which were dominated by the monarchy. But Afghanistan in 2021 was not a lost cause. Other factors carried more weight in determining our defeat. Clearly, the Karzai and Ghani governments left a lot to be desired. They seldom rose above ineffectiveness and corruption. The lack of modern institutions compounded this problem. The US also failed to develop and execute an effective strategy that you would unite all coalition efforts and chart a course to success. The Iraq effort compounded this problem. From 2003 to 2008, the time when Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan was spiraling downward, conditions in Iraq were often much worse.It wasn’t just a question of material resources. It was, more importantly, I think, a question of the imagination and the decision-making time of Americans, senior officers and civilian officials. Throughout all this, the United States armed forces also bears a share of the blame for how the war was fought. Our armed forces showed brilliance in logistics and tactics, but much less skill and operational and strategic planning. We never achieved unity of command and never harmonized our counterterrorist and counter insurgency efforts. We built up the Afghan army and police, but we made them in our mold. They were large, slow, bureaucratic. They were also a complete shareholder in Afghan corruption.The Afghan Air Force was slow rolled in the beginning and it never caught up. Only Afghan commando units, advised by coalition special operators, were predictably good and reliable in the field. A major factor also can be found in Pakistani policy. They played the United States like a fiddle. They exploited their status as an ally, essential to our logistical effort, while at the same time effectively supporting and providing a safe haven for the Taliban. One finally one has to give credit to the Taliban themselves. They fought valiantly and consistently. Again, this is part of an old irregular warfare pattern. The insurgents had more motivation and constancy than the forces of the national government.HostWhat lessons learned can we carry forward?CollinsWe did a book at the National Defense University called Lessons Encountered: Learning from the Long War. It was about Afghanistan and Iraq, published in 2015. We preferred (the title) Lessons Encountered to Lessons Learned because quite often when we found that we have learned the same lessons many times before and just not absorb them. It’s always a tough question. “Lessons encountered” is a more neutral term and one full of hope that people will study examples of this war. And again, this is something that I put forward to start the discussion, certainly not as the last word. The first and foremost, and what my army buddies used to call a BFO (blinding flash of the obvious), the United States of America should avoid being a third party in an insurgency where the insurgents have safe havens and strong foreign support, particularly from adjacent nations. That was a factor in Vietnam. It was a factor here in Afghanistan. You have to deal with that foreign support, or you’re making counterinsurgency almost impossible when you have a motivated enemy, as you did here in this case. Secondly, we have to remember (that) neither Iraq nor Afghanistan began as an insurgency. We have to be careful to keep our eye on the changing character of a conflict where we’re preparing for great-power conflict. That’s the first priority. But irregular warfare may not be far away, and we have to be able to make those assessments. And to change both in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were probably slower than we might have been to adapt to counterinsurgency.Some of our earlier commanding generals, I would remind you here that a number of people in the Pentagon were not eager at all, particularly in the beginning, to bill Afghanistan as an insurgency at all, A third lesson: long, irregular wars (even if they are small wars) by some description will be expensive. Policy inertia and some costs will tend to keep us deployed for long durations. Large land deployments will be costly. The key decision I think, and this is another lesson, is when to commit to it and how to commit to them? It’s hard to break contact once you’re in a fight, but while raiding and air strikes have their place, they seldom create lasting results. By, with, and through is a useful technique, but there will be many cases where the presence of our forces on the ground will be necessary. Finally, it’s hard to avoid nation building as part of a long-term commitment. It would be nice if we could match a troop presence with simple counterterrorist operations. That was our hope at the beginning, but while it’s an attractive notion, it’s not practical. You have to help your allies out as we found in President Bush’s terms.HostCare to share your final thoughts before we go?CollinsThe wiser sleuths among the readers of the Parameters article will be able, between the lines, perhaps, to see some emotional reactions. I’ve been writing on the war in Afghanistan since November 1980, and it’s the end of Afghanistan in 2021. The way it ended was clearly a significant downbeat for me. I worry about our veterans who fought so hard there. And so many like General Campbell, General Nicholson, Scott Miller. Those who had so many multiple tours—people, particularly in the special operations community—who had spent so many different tours there. I feel for them even more. I feel for the people in Afghanistan. Their immediate future is bleak.Some good news for us, but not for the Taliban, is that the nation, the country that the Taliban conquered, is not the same one that they conquered 1996. Half the Afghan population is under 25 and did not know the old Taliban. The Taliban, of course, despite their protestations, appears to be about as dumb as they were in 1996. It’s just an amazing combination of ignorance and arrogance. They will turn around and put all of their policy issues to a religious test. There’s no system of government and no religion that tells you that life is a suicide pact, and that’s in some ways where they are.Women are now not just forbidden to attend high school and college, but they’re also forbidden to work independently for foreign humanitarian, nongovernmental organizations. Most of them had large-scale female staff because they were dealing with infants and children and healthcare and education. And Afghan women tend to dominate there. Mixing Afghan men and women is difficult, so the NGO’s wisely turned toward the female population in Afghanistan, which is so underutilized already.We have unrest. In some of the non-Pashtun areas of the countryside there remains, of course, huge problems with ISIS. We have to keep an eye on ISIS and al Qaeda elements that are in the country. Sadly, I think this validates Clausewitz’s observation that. The results of war are never final. Afghan is an area of such strife that the export of conflict from conditions inside of Afghanistan is likely. At the same time, the Taliban today is much better armed and supported because of their victory against the Afghan army than they’ve ever been before. And so, when you look inside your own crystal ball for the immediate future of (Afghanistan), it looks bleak. And undoubtedly, as bleak as it was in 1996 when the original Taliban leadership took over.HostThanks for your insights on this topic, Joe. And I echo your desire for feedback. I’ll make sure we have an e-mail address in the show notes.Email usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or on the genesis article.CollinsThanks for paying attention to this, Stephanie.HostListeners, if you want to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 53, issue 1.About the Author:Joseph J. Collins is a retired Army colonel and civil servant. His 46 years of service included tours in the Army and Joint Staffs and OSD (Policy). From 2001–04, he served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations. He has taught at the United States Military Academy, the National War College, and Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program. Collins holds a doctorate from Columbia University and is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

In this episode, Parameters acting editor-in-chief offers a preview of the upcoming Parameters Spring demi-issue and touches on what the full Spring issue will include.Read the 2023 Spring issue of Parameters: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol53/iss1/Keywords: climate change, Afghanistan, gender and conflictEpisode transcript: Parameters Spring 2023 PreviewStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a U.S. Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.I’m here with Parameters acting editor-in-chief and Strategic Studies Institute historian and researcher, Dr. Conrad Crane. Thank you for being here today, Con.Dr. Conrad CraneOh, always glad to talk to you, Stephanie.HostLet’s talk about the spring demi-issue of Parameters that’s due out in the next few weeks. This issue includes a substantial piece by Afghanistan expert Joseph Collins. I hope to talk with him in detail later, but I’m curious . . . from your perspective, what does Collins bring to the Afghanistan conversation?CraneI’ve known Joe for a lot of years. We are at West Point together, teaching in different departments. He’s a long-serving Army officer. He’s been a deputy assistant secretary of defense, he’s watched Afghanistan for decades. He’s written three books on it and about 40 articles. There are a few people I trust more to really analyze what went wrong in Afghanistan than Joe Collins.HostWhy are you focusing this demi-issue on Afghanistan?CraneWhen I got my first assignment in the Strategic Studies Institute over 20 years ago, one of my first research projects was to look at the Army’s response to losing in Vietnam. And I ended up doing a monograph entitled Avoiding Vietnam: The US Army’s Response to Defeat in Southeast Asia, which can actually be downloaded from the SSI publications website. What I found was that, basically, the Army as an institution ran away from Vietnam. They really didn’t do any systematic institutional study of the defeat. They immediately focused on the Yom Kippur War and large-scale combat operations. And what significant discussion analysis did occur in an Army venue occurred in the pages of Parameters. That’s about the only place you could find it. Right now, it kind of looks like deja vu all over again. We have the service that is not doing any systematic studies that I know of of why we failed in Afghanistan. I feel that Parameters needs to step up again and become the forum for discussion about that. The service really needs to analyze what went wrong in Afghanistan, because we have never been able to never do this again. Again, we are focused on major combat operations, large-scale combat operations looking at Ukraine. But we can’t just forget about Afghanistan. We need to really take a hard look at what went wrong there and get what lessons and insights we can for the future.HostSo continuing the Afghanistan theme, for SRAD Directors Corner, Colonel George Shatzer plans to review and comment on two books—The Fifth Act, America’s End in Afghanistan by Elliot Ackerman and The 40-Year War in Afghanistan: A Chronicle Foretold by Tariq Ali. These really round out the issue. Care to comment?CraneLet me talk about all three of the items that are going to be in this demi-issue. We’ll start with Joe. You know, Joe Collins is looking at the long-term focus on what went wrong in Afghanistan. He’s going to focus on the historical difficulties in governing there the Afghan republics two inefficient corrupt governments, ineffective American strategy, operational shortcomings by American forces, an ineffective Afghan military, Pakistan’s duplicitous policies, and the strength and determination of the Taliban. So he’s looking at it with a very broad scope but basically from an American perspective. The two books that Colonel Shatzer is going to analyze come at it from a little different direction. You’ve got one book, the Ackerman book, that really looks at the end game and focuses on the actions by particularly the Trump and Biden administrations and how those impacted on the debacle of the closeout. Tariq Ali also, like Joe Collins, he’s looking at a long-term analysis and in fact Lee goes back 40 years and he’s looking at it from a little more of an outside perspective. Not purely American. And a lot of other different dynamics involved in Afghanistan. So between Joe and then George’s analysis of these other two books, it’s going to give readers a lot to think about about what went wrong in Afghanistan.HostSo the Demi issue usually offers a taste of what readers can look forward to in the next full issue, which is due out at the beginning of March. What are some of the topics covered in the full issue?CraneThere’ll be more in Afghanistan. John Nagl’s piece “Why America’s Army Can’t Win America’s Wars” has got a lot of response, as we intended it to. And we are going to print two of the more eloquent ones, along with John’s replies, in the issue to continue this discussion of how America’s Army can be more effective in these kinds of conflicts. There’s some really provocative ideas on both sides in those discussions. You’re also going to get to taste of some other items as well. We’re going to look at the role of civilians and gender and influencing policy; enhancing global competitiveness through women, peace and security; mitigating civilian harm by factoring gender and kinetic operations. (It’s) a little different perspective on how gender can influence future operations. We’re also looking at some strategic issues looking at responding to climate change and also looking at the conflict in Syria. Again, some different ways to look at these strategic problems. We are going to look at some of the aspects of the future force. Should there be an army stability professional and also you know we’ve seen a lot about the use of drones and robots and combat and we’ve got a nice piece on the future of manned and unmanned teaming and how that will influence the future battlefield. So it’s going to be, yes, a heavy focus on Afghanistan, but also some other topics out there that kind of will expand the interest of the volume and hopefully appeal to our devoted set of readers out there. Also, we’ve got quite a backlog of book reviews, and so we’re also going to try to get a lot of those book reviews out. We’ve had a lot of very dedicated reviewers for us give us a lot of very useful commentary and a lot of important publications, and we could also expand our book review section a bit, too. So there’s going to be a lot in there for readers to find.HostWell, that’s fantastic to hear. Thank you so much for making time for this. It’s always a treat to talk with you.CraneStephanie, it’s always a joy, thanks.HostListeners keep an eye out for our publication announcements on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Or check out our website at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.About the Authors: Dr. Conrad Crane is the acting editor-in-chief for Parameters, the US Army War College Press quarterly journal. He is a retired Army Colonel and a researcher and historian at the Strategic Studies Institute.

In this episode, the authors argue senior officers may fail in character because their rate of character development throughout their careers typically decreases as environmental stressors rise. They conceptualize character as an open system with both gains and leaks over time and integrate existing scholarship on personality and ethical development to create the Leaky Character Reservoir framework and then explain how it applies to Army officers’ careers. Military leaders will gain a new understanding of character and find specific actions officers, units, and the US Army can undertake to strengthen the character of its senior officers.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/15/Keywords: ethics, personality, character, conditioning history, adult development, moral developmentEpisode transcript: Why Do Senior Officers Sometimes Fail in Character? The Leaky Character ReservoirStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point welcomes Colonels Everett S.P. Spain, Katie Matthews, and Andrew L. Hagemaster, authors of “Why Do Senior Officers Sometimes Fail in Character? The Leaky Character Reservoir.” Spain is the head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy. Matthew is an Academy professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy. Hagemaster is a clinical aeromedical and operational psychologist in the Army.Thank you for joining me today. I’m really excited to talk to you. Your article argues senior officers may fail in character because their rate of character development throughout their careers typically decreases as environmental stressors rise. Give us some background and maybe an example or two of failed character.Everett SpainThanks, Stephanie. This is Everett Spain. So, this started when I was helping with the Battalion Commander Assessment Program at Fort Knox a few years ago—maybe three years ago—and a friend and colleague of mine from the surge in Iraq from 2007–08 days was Major General Matt McFarland. At the time of the conversation (he) was commander of 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, and he invited me to lunch. After we caught up a little bit personally, he said, “Hey, there’s something I’ve been wondering (that) I’d like your thoughts on.”I said, “What’s that, sir?”He said, “Well, I’ve noticed that back in World War I and World War Two, a lot of senior officers were getting relieved due to lack of battlefield competence directly related to leadership or their tactical abilities.”He said, “But now all the reliefs I see of senior officers is due to character. Do you know what’s going on?”And so we talked about it back and forth a little bit. And we flowed some hypotheses. But in the end, I said, “Hey, sir. Let me look at this a little bit and see if I can engage some of my teammates and circle back to you with a more thoughtful perspective.”So when I got back to West Point, I queried my faculty for anyone who was interested in diving into this with me. Colonel Katie Matthew raised her hand. I think her quote was “put me in coach.” And Col. Andrew Hagemaster volunteered, as he always does, as a great teammate. And so, over the last few years, we looked into this from a variety of perspectives. And what we kind of discovered is a new way to look at character, for all of us—since we’re probably considered senior officers as well—is that character is not a permanent gain. When you have character, there are losses as well. And the bottom line that we’ll talk about a little bit more throughout this podcast is that we’d better increase our rate of character inputs faster than our rate of character losses is going. And that’s the leaky character reservoir. And the theory behind it is to build up our character faster than it’s leaking.HostWhat are the four drivers of potential character?Andrew HagemasterThis is Andrew Hagemaster. We identified four drivers of potential character. The first is heredity and experiences growing up. The second is the Army’s deliberate character development. The third is the environmental influences of Army life, and the fourth is ethical fading or erosion.The first driver of character is heredity and experiences growing up. Our character and personality are the results of the combination of our genetics and the experiences we have growing up, particularly across early childhood development. A lot of us have seen this in our own children—raised in the same household but often have different personalities. The interaction of heredity and experiences also help explain differences in personality traits, including extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But when we consider character, additional personality traits come into play, including resilience, judgement, perseverance, and integrity.The second driver of character is the Army’s deliberate character development found across Officer Education School, starting with our commissioning sources and continuing through the Officer Basic Course, Career Course, and Senior Service College. We looked at deliberate character development in terms of hours of education where character is the primary learning objective and the curriculum is testable through papers, exams, or exercises. We were really stringent in this criteria as some schools incorporate character as a secondary learning objective that is woven throughout the curriculum. The same can be said of the core psychology and leadership course that I taught at West Point. Even though our determined goal is to produce leaders of character through each lesson, not all lessons met that strict criteria as having character as primary learning objectives. And, generally, we found in our research that the trend is that officers receive less character education over time throughout an officer’s career.The third driver of character is Army life’s environmental influences. We talked earlier about how our personality is formed during our childhood while our environment continues to influence us as adults, particularly with character-related behaviors, and that we’ve all been part of organizations that encourage us to be better each day, and some that led us to just focus on surviving. Environmental influences include the climate of the organization set by the supervisors, peers, and even subordinates.The fourth driver of character is ethical fading or erosion. Our ethical standards may drift over time. Small deviations from our ethical azimuth can go unnoticed by officers, especially during times of stress. And so that’s why we need supervisors and peers that know our baseline and can challenge us to be our best.HostEverett mentioned something a few minutes ago about the leaky character reservoir. I’d like to circle back to that. What is the leaky character reservoir?Katie MatthewHi Stephanie, Katie Matthew here. So the leaky character reservoir stems from our idea that if character can have gains, it can, in theory, have losses. In our paper, we actually diagram this out (on page 130). It’s a metaphorical reservoir that you build up and basically store up through your personal experiences and growth, through training, through your experience in communities both in and out of the Army. But they’re stored up for future use when needed. Hence why our officer education system is structured the way it is to build up early on. But as a reservoir, leaks are going to be present. That’s just something to accept about life. And the potential to lose some of that character exists for all of us through some of those drivers that Andrew mentioned, that ethical fading, erosion, and then the stresses can all potentially drain on those resources.So if at any time the level in the reservoir dips below the demand signal to do the right thing, we expect that is when a failure in character and/or unethical behavior will occur due to that gap or shortage. In simple terms, it’s not having enough in the tank when you need it.Those drivers that Andrew was talking about work both ways. Some add to our reservoirs, and others don’t. Some are deliberate character development, both personally and through organizations in our units. And much of our experiences, both with our units and communities, can bolster that reservoir or start to let some of that fade out. The leaks are present, and our argument is that the goal should be to maintain our character as we do our physical readiness. And for the Army, that’s daily, deliberate, and an investment by the individual and the organization to continue to keep that level in the reservoir up above the needs.HostYou recommend in your article some mechanisms to increase deliberate character conditioning and mitigate character losses. What are they?HagemasterOne of the mechanisms to increase deliberate character conditioning and to mitigate character loss is requiring mid-grade and senior officers to engage in deliberate self-reflection. This deliberate self-reflection is designed to examine our character strengths, vulnerabilities, and risk. This is currently happening as part of the four-day selection process with the Command Assessment Program, where candidates for battalion and brigade command are encouraged to engage in deliberate self-reflection. And this is built into the Command Assessment Program assigned by the Army Talent Management Task Force. Candidates take their self-reflection notes over several days, and they meet with an operational psychologist at the end. They both discuss the candidate’s personality, self-awareness, empathy, self-regulation, and potential areas of unproductive leadership behaviors. It’s not just about the candidate as an officer, it’s also about how the candidate is gonna influence others as a leader and the next level of the organization.And what I like about this is that specific, actionable items can come out of these discussions that encourage officers to build on their strengths and mitigate their character leaks. The outcome of this deliberate self-reflection is that we’ll have officers who are more aware of their strengths, vulnerabilities, and areas of risk. And this awareness and purposeful conversation can help senior leaders to withstand ethical stressors.I met with many leaders during the feedback process at the Command Assessment Program. And for many, it was the first time they’d even heard of some of their vulnerabilities. Other leaders that came from organizations that engaged in this deliberate self-reflection that we’re talking about were already aware of their strengths and vulnerabilities, and they were able to discuss in-depth how they’re mitigating their character leaks as a regular process. These conversations can also happen at the brigade level. Brigade commanders can have their brigade psychologists meet with their battalion and company commanders to help them engage in deliberate self-reflection that’s designed to identify their character strengths, vulnerabilities, and strategies to become more aware and an effective leader.MatthewOne of the other things that we recommended is these peer accountability groups. And this is going off of those same things that you learn about your strengths and weaknesses at BCAP and CCAP. As a battalion commander, I was in a stand-alone assignment and was fortunate enough to unofficially have a peer accountability partner—a fellow logistician in another unit where we could just sit and relax, have meals together, and watch each other’s backs, keep those checks and balances and be able to have that honest conversation that isn’t related to the fact that we’re in the same unit. Taking that experience and what we’re seeing happening already through those assessment programs that Andrew was discussing, we’d like to see that made more official, where those partners and those groups are built during those assessment programs so that you have long-term accountability partners throughout your career and command as a senior officer. Someone who can tell when you’re starting to fade, when things are not quite right with you, and can call you out on it. We also suggest that those groups not only have those regular forced conversations, but that there’s a coach, an actual Army coach, associated with those groups so that they can continue to build each other up, but also catch each other when there’s a potential for failure on that one, rather than waiting for that tank to dip below the need.SpainI’ve got one to add from the perspective of the character driver Army life and the environment that officers kind of live and operate in. When battalion commanders are selected for command and they complete their command, they go into a series of years of what a couple of my friends call “the five years of pain.” And I said, “what do you mean? Say more.”They said, “Well, Everett, the problem is, you could have three or four one-year PCS (permanent change of station) moves following battalion command. And, also, you’re restricted to a series of jobs that are usually pretty intense called ‘former battalion commander jobs,’ so you have a little less say in where you’re going as well.”One of those years might be a war college, but you don’t know which one, and you don’t find out until three or four months before you get assigned there. And this is all happening at the same time you have high school-age children that it’s a little more sensitive to have some stability for and spouses that oftentimes have non-transferable certifications for their profession. So, it’s really just a challenging time in an Army officer’s life, and in their family’s lives, specifically. And they have the most unpredictability then. So, one way to reduce environmental stressors would be for principal selects at battalion command after the Battalion Command Assessment Program. For all of them, let them lock in at least three of their next four or five years. Let them pick their war college date and location. Let them pick their follow-on assignment. Maybe we line up all the ROTC battalions as possibilities. Of course, some of them enjoy the dynamic process of a different assignment every year or two, but most leaders I know would like to lock that stuff in early, thereby reducing the stress on their families. So, that’s one way to reduce the environmental stressors on these officers and make some of those leaks of character a little less during this time.HostAny final thoughts?HagemasterPresident Truman said, “To be able to lead others, a man must be willing to go forward alone.” And while we know that leadership can be lonely, it doesn’t have to be. I regularly talk with senior leaders about mentorship, and I’ve had several senior officers tell me that while they engage in mentoring others, they themselves don’t have a mentor anymore as a senior leader. It was surprising at first because we always can benefit from having a mentor and being a mentor to others. So, I encourage everyone to seek mentorship, regardless of how senior you are as an officer, and develop peer relationships that help fill your character reservoir, and minimize our character leaks.Thank you.MatthewJust off of that is not only just the not going it alone but actually investing in each other in our units at the get-go. But more importantly, as senior leaders, we tend to really focus down. We want to set them up for success and recognize that it’s looking to our left and right and continuing to set each other up for success. Because we didn’t get to that position without the help of each other. And sometimes that help is calling each other out. Sometimes that help is just saying, “hey, what a great job you’re doing.”SpainOne last perspective to kind of summarize all of this is a friend of mine; when I shared this on social media (the article), one of them wrote, “I know why senior officers are occasionally failing in character. It’s because they’re human.”And Katie and Andrew and I couldn’t agree more. The concept of being human is reflected in the open system of the character reservoir. Our argument is “hey, let’s make sure we’re putting in more deliberately than is leaking out, because if we don’t tend to that then we might not have what we need when we need it.”My son Josiah, is a Second Lieutenant. He was commissioned recently, and when he read a draft of the article, he said, “Hey, Dad, that’s simple. Your whole paper should be about one page.”I was like, “Why is that?”He said, “Well, inputs have to be greater than outputs or leaks. That’s it. That’s it with character. It’s simple.I said, “Thanks, son. Couldn’t agree more.”HostI love it.SpainI’d add just, Stephanie, thank you for interviewing us today. Thank you to listeners for caring about character development—for caring about our Army. And let’s work on this together. Myself and Katie and Andrew would all argue none of us have perfect character, and we all have situations where we need each other’s help. So, let’s organizationally and interpersonally work on this together. And thank you all for investing in my character as well.HostThank you all so much. This is such a treat to talk with you, especially on such an interesting topic.To learn more about why officers fail and the leaky character reservoir, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52 issue 4. The authors are interested in your feedback.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.About the Authors:Colonel Everett S. P. Spain, US Army, is the head of the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy. He has served with the 82nd Airborne Division, US Army Europe, and US Army Special Operations Command. He holds a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy and a DBA from Harvard University.Colonel Katie E. Matthew, US Army, is an academy professor in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at the United States Military Academy. She has served as a logistician at home and on deployment with the 1st Theater Sustainment Command, 1st Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne Division, and Joint Special Operations Command, and most recently commanded the Brigade Special Troops Battalion and Camp Buehring, US Army Central. She holds a bachelor of science degree from the United States Military Academy, a master of business administration degree from Kansas State University, and a PhD in sociology from George Mason University.Colonel Andrew L. Hagemaster, US Army, is a clinical, aeromedical, and operational psychologist in the Army. He is a consultant for senior military leaders on behavioral health and leader development. At the United States Military Academy, he served as the director of the General Psychology for Leaders Course in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, installation director of psychological health, and residency director of training. He has served with the 25th Infantry Division, the 1st Infantry Division, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and multinational force and observers. He holds a master of arts degree from Reformed Theological Seminary and a PhD from Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences.

Leaders who have personally experienced the aftermath of a suicide-related event can provide important lessons and recommendations for military leadership and policymakers. This podcast executes a thematic analysis of interviews with leaders, chaplains, and behavioral health providers who responded to garrison suicide-related events and explores leader decision-making related to memorials, investigations, and readinessKeywords: garrison, chaplain, behavioral, military leader, suicide postvention, health providerRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/14/Episode Transcript: Leader Perspectives on Managing Suicide-related Events in GarrisonStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point Welcomes Major Thomas H. Nassif and Captain George a Mesias, co-authors of “Leader Perspectives on Managing Suicide-related Events in Garrison” with Dr. Amy Adler. This article was featured in the Parameters Winter 2022–23 edition.Nassif, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), serves as the Institute’s lead on mindfulness training research efforts with the US Army War College and the US Army Training and Doctrine Command. He’s also the principal investigator on a military suicide research grant funded by the congressionally directed medical research programs.Mesias is a licensed clinical social worker and researcher at WRAIR. He’s advised commands and planned behavioral health operations across the Korean theater of operation and served as behavioral health officer for a Stryker Brigade. He is an Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training master trainer and a graduate of the Army Social Work Child and Family Fellowship Program.Dr. Amy B. Adler is a clinical research psychologist and senior scientist at the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience at WRAIR. She’s had numerous randomized trials with Army units, published more than 180 journal articles and chapters, and served as lead editor of Deployment Psychology and Anger at Work, both published by the American Psychological Association.Your article opens with, “In the last decade, suicide has become a leading cause of death for service members, claiming more lives than combat and transportation accidents.” This is a hard topic to ease into. What else do we need to know about service members and suicide for this article?MAJ Thomas H. NassifSuicide is a difficult topic for a number of reasons. And many, if not all of us have been touched by it in some way, and the ripple effects across the unit and community when there’s a suicide-related event. It’s a really important topic, and there are many initiatives that the Army is engaged in that address risk factors and prevention.Our paper tackles a different part of the problem. you probably heard of prevention. What we’re going to talk about today is postvention, in other words, what leaders do in the aftermath of a suicide-related event.First some terminology. So we define a suicide-related event as death by suicide, suicide attempt, or suicide intent. And by leader, we’re referring to chaplains, behavior health providers, and unit leaders. And the leaders that we focused on in the article were chaplains, behavior health providers, and unit leaders.Although postvention has been studied in a deployed setting, we focused on garrison settings, which run the risk of being overlooked.CPT George A. MesiasThis is Captain Mesias. I’m a licensed clinical social worker. As a social worker, I’ve served as a therapist for soldiers, and I’ve served as a behavioral health officer for a Brigade combat team. Suicide is an often-discussed topic due to ACE training requirements that everybody has every year, but I’ve seen how different it is to be exposed to suicide directly. Experiences with suicide leave a lasting impression, and I’ve spoken to many people who’ve shared as much. And I’ve felt that way, as well. So, I was happy to be part of this manuscript because I feel like those experiences often aren’t shared enough.HostYour piece reports some results from a thematic analysis of interviews with leaders, chaplains, and behavioral health providers, and you touched on several points. I’d like to walk through them briefly, please.NassifWe interviewed more than a dozen chaplains, behavioral health providers, and unit leaders. And each of them had dealt with a suicide-related event in the previous five years. These were individual, semi-structured interviews. And we wanted to hear from these leaders what the experience was like for them—where they struggled, and what advice they had for others. We were not only interested in what leaders did in the aftermath of a suicide-related event, but also how it affected them. Our article also sought to illustrate real-world experiences that might be useful for leaders who may have to manage a suicide-related event in their unit.HostLet’s just start with one of the first things listed in the article. Confronting personal emotions about suicide—what do we need to know?NassifWell, by recognizing rather than avoiding personal emotions in response to a suicide-related event, leaders appear better able to respond effectively. And additionally, leaders in our study reported that engaging in productive coping strategies, such as connecting with family for support or partaking in enjoyable activities outside of work, were useful.HostWhat do we need to know about managing stress around blame?MesiasWell, a lot of leaders discussed this. Whether it’s being blamed by family members for the death of a loved one or experiencing the strain of required investigations, and important ones as well. I mean, investigations are administratively just part of the process. But leaders often find themselves juggling blame attribution as an additional source of stress during a difficult time. Furthermore, while those affected by suicide may seek answers as to why it occurred, it’s not always possible to identify a root cause. Very often not. It’s a lot of factors and just . . . there’s no easy answers.HostOne of your other themes was caring for individual soldiers and sustaining unit readiness.NassifWell, the health of an organization’s climate and culture begins with the leader’s commitment to being visible to, open with, and compassionate toward soldiers. So, by striking a balance between empathy and discipline, leaders can both support the needs of individual soldiers and maintain unit morale. Striking this balance was difficult for leaders, as they remarked in the interviews, but many felt this was an essential aspect of successful leadership.HostYou also addressed leveraging communication channels.MesiasWell, this is important because the leader can’t be everywhere at once. Chaplains and behavioral health providers can support leaders’ efforts in fostering open communication channels before, and definitely following, a suicide. In addition, empowering subordinate leaders to monitor their soldiers and keep an eye on them for potential behavioral health concerns or just life problems that can pose a challenge. This can help leaders identify unit members in need of additional support both before and, definitely after, a suicide-related event. There’s also risk reduction tools to help identify and support soldiers, but keeping dialogue open and relationships is key.HostYou also talked about planning the postvention response. Would you address that for us?NassifSo, through the interviews, leaders reflected on their past experiences with postvention. And they offered a number of actionable strategies that could be provided during the postvention process, such as normalizing help-seeking behavior, offering a variety of behavioral health services, coordinating suicide awareness, and prevention training events. And collectively, these actions were aimed at reducing the risk of additional suicide-related events and also establishing a culture that proactively supports the behavioral health of unit members.HostYou also addressed building a supportive climate to reintegrate at-risk soldiers.NassifDetermining what actions to take to support our soldiers can be very difficult, and leaders may find certain tools helpful to assess risk factors in their unit. One example that we talked about in the article was the Leader’s Suicide Risk Assessment Tool. By assessing risk factors, leaders can monitor their units viable health, foster a sense of unit connection, strengthen camaraderie, and take proactive actions to build a safe and supportive climate. And in some (cases), these actions can help leaders successfully reintegrate the soldiers in their unit.HostHonoring the life of the soldier, not the suicidal act.MesiasSo, leaders talked about wanting to be careful in planning memorial ceremonies to recognize the life and the service of the soldier rather than focus on the suicidal act. And this is so that memorial services can support unit members, family, and friends in the coping process . . . provide a sense of closure for those affected by the suicide, but also discourage future suicide-related events.HostHow can leaders put this information to good use?NassifLeaders, chaplains, and behavioral health providers should build strong relationships and frequently interact with each other. They should also prepare for worst-case scenarios by discussing how would they respond to a suicide-related event and work as a team. Also leader training on suicide postvention could incorporate frank discussions on personal feelings and biases regarding suicide, including how much time is needed to mourn, when should military training resume, how do we handle memorial services, and how can we best manage attitudes about blame and ways to engage in self-care? And this includes subordinate leaders and just up and down the chain of command. Another recommendation would be to prepare leaders to be adaptive, tuned, and responsive to unit members and foster a nonjudgmental culture in the aftermath of a suicide. Related event.MesiasWe also discussed how leaders may benefit from having mentorship support from senior leaders who’ve been through this themselves. Mentors can help validate the challenges of postvention and provide practical guidance to leaders following a suicide in their unit. They can also provide a level of understanding and emotional support. So many gray areas exist in the suicide postvention decision-making process, and leaders can choose from a number of strategies to mitigate potentially negative impact on themselves, their unit, and the wider community. Not every suicide is the same. So we’re trying to explore some of those gray areas and the challenges that leaders may face that they hadn’t expected.HostGive us your your. Final thoughts on the topic please.NassifOur goal is to provide leaders, useful perspectives and support so that they can respond appropriately and work through the psychological challenges (that come with suicide-related events). And, you know, there are toolkits available to further support leaders through the postvention process. One of them is the Defense Suicide Prevention Office toolkit, the Postvention Toolkit. It’s really valuable. This resource provides additional perspective on postvention with guidance and recommendations.One thing that struck us from the interviews was the way in which leaders were able to take tactical pause to assess the situation and adapt with novel responses to help guide their unit through postvention.I’ll share a few examples from our article.One leader realized that timing was critical in the aftermath of a suicide, but moving from a period of mourning to refocusing on training had to be carefully timed. So this particular leader decided to shift training a week later to build an additional time for mourning, which ended up helping unit morale. And by reengaging unit tasks, he was still able to maintain unit discipline.Other leaders came up with creative ways to work within the constraints of chaplain confidentiality to keep communication channels open. One leader asked their chaplain to provide weekly anonymous stats to the command on the overall health of the unit, such as marital problems, suicidal ideations. By reporting the number of suicidal ideations each month, this provided the leader a useful way of highlighting the overall risk facing the unit while also maintaining confidentiality.And in one last example, another leader responded to a suicide in his unit by generating positive messaging up and down the chain of command to normalize help-seeking behavior as an act of strength and courage rather than a sign of weakness. And it was a way to not only emphasize the physical health but also mental wellness to soldiers in the unit.And I just wanted to close by saying that we’re really grateful for those who participated in the interviews and spoke so candidly with us. This is still an evolving topic, and we’re learning more about it all the time. Suicide-related events have ripple effects. We hope that our paper offers some support to leaders moving forward. We’d like to thank the Military Operational Medicine Research Program for funding this study, Dr. Amy Adler, our senior science consultant and author on the manuscript, for conceptualizing this qualitative study on postvention, and CPT Mesias for his expertise as a licensed care social worker for providing that expertise. We’d like to think WRAIR. We want to also thank the Army War College for taking an interest in our article and also giving us the opportunity to speak on this podcast.HostWhat a pleasure to have you and to have you included in Parameters. We’re glad to provide a platform for this conversation. Thank you so much, both of you for sharing your insight on this important topic today.MesiasThank you.HostThank you if you’re interested in learning more about this topic, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 4. If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.Author information: Major Thomas H. Nassif, a research psychologist at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR), serves as the WRAIR lead on mindfulness training research efforts with the US Army War College and the US Army Training and Doctrine Command. He is also principal investigator on a military suicide research grant funded by the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.Captain George A. Mesias is a licensed clinical social worker and researcher at WRAIR. He has advised commands and planned behavioral health operations across the Korean theater of operation and served as a behavioral health officer for a Stryker brigade. He is an Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training master trainer and a graduate of the Army Social Work Child and Family Fellowship Program.Dr. Amy B. Adler is a clinical research psychologist and senior scientist at the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience at WRAIR. She has led numerous randomized trials with Army units, published more than 180 journal articles and chapters, and served as lead editor of Deployment Psychology and Anger at Work, both published by the American Psychological Association.

Security force assistance brigades can enable multi-domain convergence in competition in the US Indo-Pacific Command. Rather than focusing on conventional Joint force capabilities, this podcast analyzes recent US Army operational experience in security force assistance and security cooperation in US Indo-Pacific Command and identifies capability gaps and opportunities for competition. Finally, military leadership and policymakers will find recommendations on how US Army security force assistance and security cooperation can shape environments and deter conflict in the US Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility.Read the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/11/Keywords: deterrence, competition, SFAB, multi-domain, USINDOPACOMEpisode transcript: Security Force Assistance Brigades and US Indo-Pacific Command Multi-domain CompetitionStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point welcomes Major John T Pelham IV, author of “Security Force Assistance Brigades and US Indo-Pacific Command Multi-domain Competition,” which was featured in the winter 2022–23 issue of Parameters.Pelham is an armor officer currently serving as Deputy Chief 5 for the First Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. His Master of Military Arts and Science thesis, “Examining the Security Force Assistance Brigade’s Role in Future Army Strategic Deterrence,” was published by the Institute of Land Warfare in September 2021. His article “Examining Capability Gaps in the SFAB Cavalry Squadron” was published in the July 2021 issue of the Cavalry and Armor Journal.Welcome to Decisive Point. I’m really glad you’re here.Major John T. Pelham IVWell, thank you for having me.HostYou take a step back in your article from Joint force capabilities and focus instead on analyzing recent US Army operational experience and security force assistance and security cooperation in US Indo-Pacific commands. What problem in the Indo-Pacific does your article address?PelhamI think it’s a couple of problems ma’am. First of all, I think it’s how do we compete with the pacing threat as outlined in the interim National Security Strategy and the recently published National Security Strategy in terms of how do we compete with China and other adversaries in Indo-Pacific Theater—preferably below the level of armed conflict? Moreover, how do we as an army contribute to the Joint force in a theater that is roundly dominated by the air and maritime domains?This project actually came about from a conversation with Brigadier General Lombardo of Army G 3 5 7 Training. When I was writing my SAMS monograph, I had written my Master of Military Arts and Science thesis on the role of the SFAB and future Army strategic deterrence. And from that conversation, he said, “You know what I would be interested to know is what is the Army’s contribution to multi-domain competition, particularly in the Pacific theater?”And that stems also from a conversation I had with the Chief of Armor, in a Q&A session with him. I said, “You know, hey, sir, what do you feel is the armor branch’s role in the Indo-Pacific given the physical constraints of that domain for land force, particularly heavy mechanized forces?”And he said something to the effect of, well, most of our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific Theater, they have armies, and most of those armies have a competent mechanized component. That is where the armor branch can make its contribution because even if it’s not our armor that is serving as a flexible deterrent or enabling competition in the theater below the level of armed conflict, we can leverage our expertise and our ability to work by, with, and through those allies and partners. And that’s what got me thinking as an SFAB advisor, then what contribution might the SFAB offer in helping the Army do that beyond mechanized forces or land forces—but really, for the entire Joint force across all domains?HostYou suggest the US Army reexamine its role in the region. What would that look like?PelhamI think this is a question that the Army has really been analyzing, especially in-depth ever since the “Pacific pivot” between 2012 and 2014 under the Obama administration with Secretary of State Clinton, in which the strategic focus of United States was beginning to shift from the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and CENTCOM, in which the Army was the supported force, to a completely different theater with a completely different threat, in which the Army, (under most circumstances) would act as the supporting force as opposed to the supported force.And now, obviously, the Army has some enduring and very clear contributions and responsibilities in terms of sustainment via Army support to other services via its executive agent responsibilities. Obviously, the Army fires enterprise figures prominently into the Joint Fires capabilities that the INDOPACOM commander can bring to bear in the theater and also contributions with theater, air, and missile defense—and then also the conventional, regionally aligned forces that we provide to the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere. But what these advisor forces allow us to do is really bring to bear the full multi-domain capabilities that already exist there in the region that are inherent in the allies and partners. Which, again,it optimizes what the Army can do for the Joint force in that theater, in which more often than not, they are going to be the supporting arm as opposed to the supported service.HostPull it all together for us. How can the Army make full use of Security Force Assistance Brigade capabilities?PelhamI think, ma’am, they need to expand the paradigm beyond just simply using the SFABs as a tactical-level advising force to allied and partnered land components. I know that the images are popular of SFAB advisers conducting live-fire training with allies and partners with enabling joint multinational exercises. And these things are all vitally important, both in terms of demonstrating our commitment to allies and partners but also in demonstrating our resolve to our adversaries. But I think that they have so much more potential to offer in terms of operational-level and even strategic-level outcomes, as well, because they’ve got the ability to embed with allies and partners in a way that creates an enduring presence within enemy A2/AD networks that negates the need to penetrate those networks in a conventional fashion oftentimes. But they serve, again, as the hub that connects those multinational partners to the overall joint force to allow command and control beyond just the formal command-and-control hierarchy, whether that be a lead nation. Whether it be a parallel coalition structure, what have you, but also to integrate the multi-domain capabilities that those allies and partners have as well. Because they don’t just have to be embedded with the land component. They could be augmented and embedded with allied partners’ cyber capabilities. They could be embedded with air component, maritime component. Because they don’t necessarily have to be subject matter experts in that, as long as they’re properly augmented, but either way, due to the fact that they are natural and doctrinally trained LNOs, they still serve as the connective tissue, or that hub, that can tie those capabilities and those organizations back to the Joint force commander.HostGive us your final thoughts on it.PelhamI am not offering up this thesis as a cure all or a one-size fits all solution. I’m just merely offering these thoughts as a suggestion to the Army at the institutional level, and really, the Joint force overall as a way to really maximize the Army’s contribution to multi domain competition. And in the Indo Pacific theater, ma’am.HostThank you.PelhamThank you ma’am.HostIf you enjoyed this topic and would like to learn more, read the article at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 4.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.About the author: Major John T. Pelham IV is an Armor officer currently serving as deputy G5 for the 1st Cavalry Division, Fort Hood, Texas. His master of military arts and science thesis, “Examining the Security Force Assistance Brigade’s Role in Future Army Strategic Deterrence,” was published by the Institute of Land Warfare in September 2021. His article “Examining Capability Gaps in the SFAB Cavalry Squadron” was published in the July 2021 edition of the Cavalry and Armor Journal.

A concept of positive strategic shock would benefit the US Department of Defense’s planning processes. Some US doctrine demonstrates awareness of the need to plan for negative strategic shocks but lacks consideration of positive strategic shock—any shock with a non-zero-sum outcome—which could create a situation where the Department of Defense misses opportunities. This podcast clarifies the term “positive strategic shock,” provides a brief review of where and how planning for any sort of strategic shock currently occurs, and makes recommendations based on three methods for thinking about strategic shock.Keywords: planning, shock, doctrine, positive, non-zero-sumRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/12/Episode transcript: Planning for Positive Strategic Shock in the Department of DefenseStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Benjamin W Buchholz, author of “Planning for Positive Strategic Shock in the Department of Defense,” which was featured in the winter 2022–23 issue of Parameters. Buchholz is a foreign area officer and recent Army War College distinguished graduate. He’s published four books—The Tightening Dark, Sirens of Manhattan, One Hundred and One Knights, and Private Soldiers, as well as numerous articles and shorter works.Thanks for joining me today, Colonel Buchholz. I’m glad you’re here.Col. Benjamin W. BuchholzThank you, I appreciate it.HostYou talked about positive strategic shock in your article. Please expand on that concept.BuchholzPositive strategic shock is not a new term, but it is a term that I’m using in a different way than has been used previously. In the planning literature that’s out there right now, there is a thing called positive strategic shock, but it’s used to identify the delta between when a negative shock occurs and then an organization catches back up to status quo or to a median level of performance. And that delta is called, sometimes, positive strategic shock. In my opinion, that’s not actually positive, that’s just making up for a negative. So I wanted to look at the case where something truly positive happens in an environment, and so I define that as an incident that is non-zero-sum—something that’s good for all parties—a win win situation.HostCan you give me some examples of negative and positive strategic shock?BuchholzI think it’s important to mention, you know, that this paper is about strategic shocks. So, we can all think of a lot of tactical- and operational-level shocks which are more on the weapons systems and that sort of thing, but for something to be really strategic it needs to change doctrine, change the way cultures think about things, change the world order in a way. So, we’re talking about real igh-level stuff. The paper goes into a lot of detail on that. Maybe an unfortunate amount of detail.Probably the more interesting portion of this is what’s the difference between negative and positive, and that can be kind of a subjective answer. So, in order to make it an objective answer, the way I define it is that negative is zero-sum thinking, whereas positive is a non-zero-sum. And that’s a complex way to say a win-win situation. Where all parties benefit. Where rising water, you know, floats all boats. There are lots of ways to say that sort of thing.I think in DoD we overly fixate, and for good reason, on negative shocks. So, the adversary has developed some new system, some new methodology, some new culture, even, that we saw in the Cold War with communism. Whereas, what I’m really trying to say in this paper is that there’s an opposite end of this spectrum that sometimes things happen in the culture that are positive in a non-zero-sum way. Examples of that would be things like, even though it’s sort of a political football right now . . . vaccines, I think you can really say across the board, have had a positive strategic shock. Another good example is refrigeration. I think that’s a really good one. You know, who has not benefited from having the ability to have food be refrigerated? You know there’s really no a lot of losers in that. The last one would probably be the Internet. That’s been pretty much a positive across the board. And where this really goes is if the DoD is not postured to gain from positive strategic shocks, it could be to the detriment of the organization and America, as a whole if, we’re really not thinking about that and how to ride those wave tops.HostGive us a brief overview, please, of where and how planning for any sort of shock currently occurs.BuchholzWell, strangely enough, as I dug into this topic, it turns out the DoD doesn’t do a lot of planning against strategic shock. We plan against all kinds of different scenarios. The planning apparatus in DoD is very strong—branches and sequels everywhere and all kinds of plans on the shelf and contingency planning. However, we’re most comfortable planning against what Donald Rumsfeld and strategic planners before him called the “known unknown,” which is basically this safe middle area of things that we can plan against because it’s not too speculative.However, those things are not actually where most of the growth and change in the world comes from, at least according to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote The Black Swan (and who I rely on pretty heavily in some of the arguments in this paper). Most of the growth happens on the speculative ends of shock. Either negative shock that no one sees coming or positive shock, and he talks about both of those. And that is really more of an unknown unknown. And generally, planners look at the unknown unknown as too wildly speculative to want to plan against it. And I totally agree with that. I think you can’t expend limited planning resources and budget and stuff against speculation. However, Taleb and other scholars have techniques for planning against both of those ends—the negative end and the positive end. And I think we do OK against the negative end because those techniques are to have a organization that’s robust against shock, and that means that it has redundant systems and that those systems are survivable. And because the Army and the DoD, as a whole, has dealt with negative strategic shock throughout its history, it’s become good at those things. However, on the positive side, redundancy and survivability and having a conservative mindset, an organizationally conservative mindset doesn’t actually do any good because if everybody leaps ahead and the organization is designed to pull back towards a status quo, we actually lose a little bit of the benefit of the positivity.So, what Nassim Taleb argues for is that we really need to be exposed to positive shock. We need to have lots of little feelers and sensors out there and then let those feelers and sensors matriculate upwards some of the benefits that they’re experiencing when something happens in the environment.HostWhat are your recommendations for thinking about strategic shock?BuchholzOne organization that we do have within the military is the Center for Army lessons learned. They do something like this where elements out in the field can trickle up good ideas, and then as those ideas take root they can be propagated across the domains in DoD. One particular recommendation is to replicate that structure more broadly. Another thing that is an easy win-win is to just include both in the planning processes and in any DoD-chartered analysis (like out through Rand Corporation or others who do thought work) a requirement to consider positive and negative strategic shock in planning rather than just plan against known trend lines against that known unknown space. So, looking at the far ends where the growth in the change occurs would be a good thing to mandate.And then the third recommendation that comes out of the paper is really to incorporate a concept of strategic shock in various levels of education in JPME-type courses. There is an interesting way, as well, to identify when an environment is ripe for disruption, for shock, and, you know, several different things identified by researchers that can point you in a direction to look in that direction for or that environment for strategic shock to emerge. And those characteristics are trust within scientific communities, the emergence of scientific anomolies, the development of new instrumentation, increases in ineffective communication, and the presence of a political and economic culture that values science research. So those criteria, I think, could be woven into an approach that is taught, that is mandated into planning processes, and that is mandated into contracts for organizations who are doing planning on behalf of the DoD.HostHave any final thoughts before we go?BuchholzOne thing that was really interesting to me in this work was just trying to define what positive is and look at positivity through a DoD lens because we’re not necessarily an organization that’s geared to do that. We’re geared to look at worst-case scenarios. To be prepared for contingencies. Emergencies. For war. But I think that there is a benefit to looking at the positive and cases where a non-zero-sum event like vaccines, refrigeration, the Internet lifts everybody up around us and make sure that DoD as an organization doesn’t miss important benefits when something like that happens.HostI do have one more question, if you’ll entertain it. I’m curious what inspired this article. Why did you decide to write it?BuchholzWell, that’s a good question. I think I was really interested in looking at DoD culturally. This question of DoD as a conservative organization, which it should be because it’s designed to protect and be robust and survivable. But how does that interface in an environment where society could take, you know, a very positive leap forward, as an inherently conservative organization well-poised to enjoy the benefits of something like that? Or does it become a drag on that situation? And this was one way to get into that overall larger theoretical idea.HostWell, thank you so much. There’s definitely a lot to think about here, and I really appreciate you sharing your insights on the topic.BuchholzThank you, ma’am. I appreciate you having me on the podcast.HostIf you’d like to dig deeper into the topic of planning for positive strategic shock in the DoD, visit press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters, look for volume 52, issue 4.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

To buttress stability in the Indo-Pacific, the United States must understand how India sees the region and the world. The theories and ideas of Kautilya, a leading but little-studied Indian philosopher, provide significant insight into Indian perspectives on strategic partnerships and silent war. India has lived out Kautilyan perspectives in its recent foreign policy; therefore, a US understanding of the Indian perspective could advance the national security interests of both countries, clarify recent Indian security responses around the world, and provide a basis for a mutually beneficial pursuit of a free and open Indo-Pacific.Keywords: realism, Quad, Indo-Pacific, Kautilya, US-India partnershipRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/10/Episode transcript: Indian Perspectives: Insights for the Indo-American PartnershipHostYou’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Tyrell O. Mayfield, author of “Indian Perspectives: Insights for the Indo-American Partnership,” which was published in the Winter 2022–23 issue of Parameters. Mayfield is the deputy foreign policy advisor to the chief of staff of the US Air Force. He holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Oklahoma and master’s degrees from the Naval Postgraduate School and the US Army War College. He’s the co-editor of Redefining the Modern Military: The Intersection of Profession and Ethics, published in 2018.Your article discusses Indian philosopher Kautilya. I look forward to hearing about this. But first, thanks for being here, Ty.COL Tyrell MayfieldThank you, Stephanie. It’s my pleasure, and I’m glad to join you. I just want to open by making sure, it’s clear that our conversation here today reflects my own thoughts and not the policy or position of the Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the government. But I’m very happy to be here, and I look forward to talking with you.HostWe’re glad to have you. Let’s just jump right in and get started. Please briefly explain Kautilya’s perspectives.MayfieldSure, so the writings of Kautilya . . . first of all, he’s a leading Indian philosopher, and I find them a useful lens for understanding India’s pursuit of national interests. Kautilya was an Indian statesman and a political advisor who emerged around 300 BCE and provided a realist outlook on geopolitics through his foundational work. Importantly, Kautilyan theory provides a culturally and historically informed construct for thinking about Indian behavior and Indian interests and Indian foreign policy. And his logic continues to influence strategic thought today. And I think it’s manifest in some of India’s national security interests in its assessment of its geography and its international relations, which I hope we get to talk a little about.HostYou assert in your article that the United States needs to understand how India sees the region and the world. And you suggest that the theories and ideas of Kautilya might lend some insight here. Give us some context. What’s the situation in the Indo-Pacific right now as it applies to this topic.MayfieldSure, well, the United States is clearly identified the PRC, China, as its pacing challenge. And the US has been trying desperately for a number of years, maybe a decade now, to pivot away from Southwest Asia, pivot away from Europe, and to focus on the Pacific with an eye on controlling, or at least shaping and influencing the rise of the PRC. India is central to advancing American interests in that region. It’s an enormous state and a huge player in the area. But it’s been a difficult partner for the United States to approach. This concept of kind of strategic autonomy and independence—it’s deeply embedded in Indian culture—has made it a difficult partner to approach.But I think it’s worth noting that India has like three core national security interests that I’ve identified in this article, and that they align with US interests in the Pacific. So, I think the first one there important to note is that Indians are interested in sustaining the international system, which has helped give rise to their power and influence. And sustaining this international system—something that the West and the United States is very interested in—allows India to continue to develop economically and address its societal development and economic development. And those are the things have given rise to Indian power. And the second interest is deterring Pakistan, clearly, and trying to avoid that conflict from reigniting. But this links Pakistan and China, these are two state actors whose futures and interests in the area have become deeply intertwined, which also leads us to a third national interest for India, which is maintaining hegemony and its traditional sphere of influence. Chinese encroachment into the Indian Ocean region is a complex issue. It’s something a lot of states are dealing with, and it’s something that the United States is trying to help those states address and control. And so I think these are the three areas where US interests are definitely aligned with Indian interests.HostLet’s talk about the mandala theory. You use this to address strategic partnerships and silent war. Will you expand on that for us?MayfieldSo, the mandala theory is just really how Kautilya envisions the geography around him and neighboring kingdoms and how he saw it and how he thought about it. And so just trying to maintain their influence in that region, Kautylia described this kind of as emanating from the subcontinent, which we think of as India today west through what was then Persia (today, modern-day Iran), north to what is modern-day Afghanistan, and then east to kind of the Bay of Bengal. That region. Thdose basically comprise the eight member nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation. That geography really hasn’t changed for India, though I think now they’re looking much further South right into the Indian Ocean, where maritime competition has certainly become a more modern aspect of the situation.And the mandala theory, basically, it’s adjoining states become kingdoms or states which need to be addressed or controlled. And Kautilya was a little bit of a realist, or actually very much a realist, and so those adjoining states either have to . . . He is a classical realist in his assertion that states have to, you know, either seek or suffer conquest. So India sees itself in realist terms relative to Pakistan and China and then those states which are adjacent to them—kind of if you think of it as like a checkerboard or concentric circles would be another way to think of it—are states which India can find alignment with and support to pursue its national interests. So that’s where these ideas of strategic partnerships come in, which are really just a Cold War relic. Something of the Soviet Union began, and it allowed the Soviet Union to work bilaterally, kind of outside of the international system—the construct to bilateral agreements. And I think the example that I used in the paper here is India’s strategic partnership agreements with Afghanistan, which they’ve had two of them. But because they’re an alignment tool, they are nonbinding, and they don’t force India to act militarily in any way. And when they no longer served the purpose or weren’t useful, India was able to abandon them.HostDid you want to talk about silent war?MayfieldYeah, so I think this concept of silent war is really just a way for states to . . . perhaps competition is the best word for this, right? For states to compete short of conflict. When Kautilya, would think of an adjoining Kingdom that was a strong kingdom or a dominant kingdom, a dominant power adjacent, when direct confrontation isn’t the tool then it’s just a long-term campaign of kind of in Kautilyan parlance to be harassment and weakening. But I think today we talked about that in terms of competition. And I think that alignment, again, plays a huge role here versus alliances, and so I think the Quad is an interesting kind of a lens to view Indian alignment through. And so the Quad has kind of been revitalized here in the last few years. It had two in-person meetings and has fielded this new maritime Domain Awareness Initiative, which is a great construct and really shows Indian interest in aligning with other powers in the region to help balance against China, which is obviously what a lot of the states in the Indo Pacific are trying to do right now.HostI’m glad you brought up China. What are your recommendations for how the US can gain Indian partnership and address US National Security interests of managing a rising China?MayfieldPersuading India into a full security partnership with the United States is probably unlikely. It certainly wouldn’t be easy. I also don’t believe that it is necessary. India’s use of these bilateral strategic partnership agreements is consistent with Kautilyan foreign policy and the logic, and so I think if you think of it that way, then it’s not necessarily surprising that the Quad rests, kind of at the center of India’s foreign policy under Prime Minister Modi. Kautilyan logic drives India to avoid alliances and seek alignment, and so I think the United States, we have to exercise a certain amount of strategic empathy here and just understand India and how India sees the world. And if alignment is the tool which they display a preference for, then I think addressing that with them and finding places where we can seek alignment and our interests are aligned.So one of those is at the National Security Council. I’m sorry the United Nations Security Council. Obviously, there’s a lot in play right now. There has been some talk for reform at the United Nations Security Council. And India is one of the states which is very much interested in seeking a permanent seat at the UN on the Security Council there. And so an interesting kind of aspect in their strategic partnership agreements that they sign is that when they sign these with other states, one of the bylines in there is that they will support India’s pursuit of a permanent seat at the Security Council. So Security Council change or change to the UN Charter would take a very long time. But I think it’s something that the United States could put forward or at least begin to have the conversation. And even if it didn’t go anywhere, it would highlight India and kind of give a nod to their power and influence and their importance on the international stage.And then lastly, I think I’ll come back to the Quad, and I think it’s important to understand the Quad is a diplomatic tool and alignment of diplomatic and information and, in some instances, an economic instrument of national power. And I think it’s really important that the United States be very deliberate in not militarizing the Quad because I think once that does that, then the Quad would take on an aspect or kind of a tone or tenor, which the Indians would be very much disinclined to participate in because what they don’t want to do is antagonize China militarily. And so I think we, as the United States have to be disciplined in letting the Quad be what it is; it’s a very powerful diplomatic and information tool, and it shows a great deal of alignment.So I just think as it pertains to the Indo-Pacific, South Asia, and American foreign policy, the United States, we have to be patient here. And we have to break our reactive approach to foreign policy there and just be purposeful about our engagement with India and work hard on securing a partnership that demonstrates alignment and is beneficial to both states.HostDo you have any final thoughts?MayfieldYou know this is an interesting area, obviously . . . an area of foreign policy that’s of interest to the United States, and I think that it’s important and useful to look at it through the lens of another state that we want alignment with that we want to partner with. And a lot of times, I think India is misunderstood, and that is in some ways understandable. And they can be a difficult partner to approach, but this idea of strategic autonomy and independence that India has always maintained doesn’t mean that they can’t be partnered with. And it doesn’t mean that we can’t find areas of alignment, and I think the first step to that is understanding India. Understanding how India sees the world and then just rethinking our approach to that.HostThanks so much for sharing your insights on this topic. Very interesting.MayfieldYeah no, I appreciate it, and I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much.HostLearn more about Kautilya, his perspectives, and what they might mean for the Indo American partnership at press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters. Look for volume 52, issue 4.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.

Despite its desire to achieve cognitive dominance for multi-domain operations, the Army has yet to develop fully and adopt the concept of cognitive performance enhancement. This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the Army’s efforts in this area, explores increasing demands on soldier cognition, and compares the Army’s current approach to its adversaries. Its conclusions will help US military and policy practitioners establish the culture and behaviors that promote cognitive dominance and success across multiple domains.Keywords: resilience, cognitive performance, human performance, neuroethics, information overloadRead the article: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol52/iss4/13/Episode transcript: Cognitive Performance Enhancement for Multi-domain OperationsStephanie Crider (Host)You’re listening to Decisive Point, a US Army War College Press production focused on national security affairs.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.Decisive Point welcomes Colonel Dan Herlihy, author of “Cognitive Performance Enhancement for Multi -domain Operations,” which was published in the winter 2022–23 issue of Parameters. Herlihy commands the 20th Engineer Brigade at Fort Bragg, NC, and has a background in airborne and Special Operations engineering. He holds master’s degrees in civil engineering and strategic studies from Missouri S&T and the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies, respectively.Welcome to Decisive Point, Dan.Colonel Dan HerlihyHi Stephanie, thanks for having me.HostCognitive performance enhancement for multi-domain operations—where does the army currently stand on this?HerlihyThe army is somewhat quiet on cognitive performance, particularly cognitive performance enhancement, and does not address the topic directly in its warfighting doctrine. So, the new FM, 3-0, operations, our Army’s capstone doctrine, discusses the pursuit of decision dominance and briefly mentions cognitive effects, while describing defeat mechanisms later on in the text. But 3-0 does not touch on the cognitive domain in a deep or meaningful way.The Army research and medical community is much more in tune with the importance of cognitive performance enhancement. In fact, Army Futures Command, TRADOC, and the Army Resilience Directorate have a number of programs and initiatives aimed at exploring this concept. Many of these stakeholders played a part in the development and publication of FM 7-22, the Army’s Health and Holistic Fitness Manual. And that does a much better job describing the cognitive domain and introducing the topic of cognitive enhancement. Even so, 7-22 describes cognitive skill as one of five factors associated with mental readiness and features a far less prominent role in the writing than physical readiness does.HostYou say in your article that there are increasing demands on soldier cognition. Please explain.HerlihyAs we’ve seen warfare evolve and now bringing in the space domain and cyber domain, there are clearly more cognitive demands for our soldiers than there were in the past. Warfare has always been cognitively demanding, but as we add nearly limitless streams of information and data through the cyber and space domains—all the way to the soldier and leader level—this becomes more and more prominent. On top of that, we see the speed of combat increasing, so our leaders are expected to make decisions more quickly and without hesitation to exploit brief windows of convergence against our adversaries. With that, we also see more complex war fighting systems, as our technology continues to grow and become more capable. All that combined just puts more of a cognitive load on our soldiers.HostHow does the US’ approach compare to its adversaries?HerlihyI would say the US takes a less direct approach than our adversaries do. Particularly China and Russia. As we look at China, China has had several leaders in the PLA clearly described the domain of consciousness as one of the key operating spaces in the future. The Chinese, like a civil-military fusion approach towards exploiting the cognitive domain and trying to enhance the cognitive performance of their soldiers. The Chinese are not bound by ethical constraints that we in the West impose on ourselves. And what that means is the Chinese are much more willing to experiment with things such as gene editing to edit human embryos in ways that could enhance cognitive performance.Similarly, the Russians see the information domain and the cognitive domain as key in the future of warfare. And as we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russian disinformation is ubiquitous on the battlefield, and Russian leaders attempt to saturate the information space to confuse and slow the decision-making of their adversaries, which they do so with some success, as we’ve seen.HostWhat are your recommendations for the US Army?HerlihyMy recommendations are that we must continue to pursue revolutionary advances in neuroscience and technology that are ongoing, and we must continue to do that in an ethical manner and not be tempted to veer from that to try to keep pace with our adversaries. But at the same time, we must also capitalize on practical and near-term opportunities to improve individual soldier and cognitive performance. And that could be done through a number of ways that are outlined in the writing—indirect approaches that affect our cognition through things such as talent management, dietary intervention, sleep modification, exercise, pharmacology, and other resilience, training. Or direct approaches that more immediately target the structural and functional mechanisms underlying our perception, cognition, and emotion. So, we have to take an integrated approach to that across the .mil pf, and ultimately drive towards a culture of cognitive performance enhancement across the Army.That means we have to leave behind some myths about multitasking, some myths about operating on little to no sleep, and really take a look at what the science says and make some simple modifications to the way we do business that can help us achieve higher potential in the cognitive domain.HostGive us your final thoughts on the topic before we go.HerlihyI would just close with, you know, while there’s a lot of exciting research and technology emerging in the cognitive domain, we all have an opportunity to educate ourselves on the basics of brain function, how we think, how we decide, and in doing so capitalize on some quick wins that are already available for us with modest investment. And we can set conditions for even greater advances in the future. And the great part about that is we can do so while keeping our values intact and not stepping into any ethical gray space—and continue to serve the way that we have—and we’ll continue to do so in the future.HostI’m curious. You’re an engineer. What inspired you to write about this topic?HerlihyThat’s a great question. I think for me, I’ve just always been fascinated with the way our mind works, and I had some exposure in the special operations community with the early days of what’s now the health and holistic fitness program, and in that learned a little bit about cognitive performance. And to see the huge amount of untapped potential that’s there, as in the army, it’s easy to focus on the physical domain, and we can see results from exercise and nutrition in that domain with our very eyes. And we can see it because it’s easy to measure on PT tests and other assessments. But the cognitive domain often goes unmeasured or unnoticed. I just think there’s a lot of potential there, and I was excited to have the opportunity to do some research on that area and learn that we have a lot of really bright individuals in the army and across DoD that are taking a hard look at this for us. But in the end, it’s us as leaders that are going to have to take the next step to really change the culture of our army to embrace cognitive performance optimization in the same way we’ve embraced physical performance optimization.HostWell said. Thanks for taking that one on. And also, just thank you for sharing your time and your insights today on this topic.Learn more about cognitive performance enhancement for multi-domain operations at press.armywarcollege.edu. Look for volume 52, issue 4.If you enjoyed this episode of Decisive Point and would like to hear more, you can find us on any major podcast platform.Author Information: Colonel Dan Herlihy commands the 20th Engineer Brigade at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and has a background in airborne and special operations engineering. Herlihy holds masters’ degrees in civil engineering and strategic studies from Missouri S&T and the US Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), respectively.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has highlighted the long-term energy dependencies on Moscow that Europe will neither be able to resolve quickly nor without great sacrifice. Russia’s hybrid warfare—a combination of kinetic strikes against key infrastructure, information manipulation, malign finance, economic coercion, and cyber operations—has used Ukraine to target the heart of Europe’s energy security. This war has forced the Continent to consider how to realize its economic, environmental, and geostrategic energy goals on its own. This study found systemic dependencies and cyber vulnerabilities in critical energy infrastructure throughout the European continent could impact the Alliance’s political stability and threaten military effectiveness. Forward mobility and troop readiness are affected directly by energy shortfalls and increasing cyber vulnerabilities across NATO. The main findings related to cyber and malign influence provide a sobering view of the challenges of hybrid warfare on energy security in NATO nations.Keywords: NATO, Russia, Ukraine, hybrid warfare, Internet of Things, critical energy infrastructure Read the monograph: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/956/Episode transcript: What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid WarfareStephanie 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 podcast guests 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. Sarah J. Lohmann, editor and author of What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare, which was published by the US Army War College Press in 2022. Lohmann is an acting assistant professor in the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington and a visiting professor at the US Army War College. Her current teaching and research focus on cyber and energy security, counterterrorism, and emerging and disruptive technology. She received her PhD from the Universitat der Bundeswehr, her masters from American University, and her bachelors from Wheaton College.Hi Sarah, welcome to Decisive Point.Dr. Sarah J. LohmannThanks for having me.HostLet’s talk about What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare. How did you get involved in the research for this book?LohmannThanks for asking. That’s a great question. We, that is NPS based in Monterrey, and I, focused on this particular topic around energy security. We’ve both been doing research in our own areas. And then we went to NATO headquarters, and we launched a research map, inviting scholars from across NATO countries to brainstorm with us. This was about three years ago, and we launched it right there from NATO headquarters. NATO did bless the project, and then Army War College brought me on to work on this specific research.HostWhat were your main takeaways on what’s defined hybrid warfare during the Ukraine War, specifically as it pertains to energy security and critical infrastructure?LohmannSo, there are three main landmarks. It’s targeting the emerging tech environment. It’s using cyberattacks and kinetic attacks as two sides of the same sword. And it’s leveraging information operations and malign influence to create greater impact.So let me talk a little bit more about what that looks like in the energy security environment. What does it look like with emerging tech? Basically, this creates a lot of new vulnerabilities to the energy critical infrastructure environment during hybrid war because malicious cyber actors, whether nation states or cyber criminals, are taking advantage of the vulnerabilities created by the Internet of Things environment. When I say that I mean things like smart grids, renewable energy sources, and the IT and operational technology environment. They can be compromised remotely and that sometimes switches off the lights and the heat for an entire city or region. This landscape has been tested and attacked in the early months of the war in both the Ukraine as well as NATO member states.We’ve seen Russian-backed hacker groups who’ve targeted everything from satellites to wind turbines and technology for distribution of coal and thermal power plants. We saw in the years and months in the lead-up to the war that the Russian FSB have actually previously carried out malicious cyber intrusions into grids in places like the US and Germany. This is publicly known information, but this was just preparation for what’s happening now. Secondly, if we look at how it is targeting energy security through cyber means in tandem with kinetic attacks, we often see the timing happening pretty simultaneously—so within a 24-to-48-hour time range. Thirdly, as we look at information operations, there’s a lot of malign influence going on, and there’s a partnership with China. China has helped to soften the impact of sanctions. They’ve also helped Russia to track technology. So, for example, in Ukraine, the Ukrainians are using drones that have parts made by China. China has given Russia the means to track those drones on the battlefield. In addition, China has laid the foundation by controlling critical infrastructure and the supply chain in many NATO countries. This, in turn, is impacting food security and the supply chain across NATO as well as transportation and logistics. And, ultimately, it affects our national security.HostWhat solutions are there for cyber secure energy independence on military installations?LohmannWe looked at three different solutions. One we analyzed was small modular reactors. The second we looked at was micro gridding, and the third was cyber early warning.Small modular reactors have the ability to provide resilient, independent energy delivery to installations in the event that connections to an electrical grid are compromised. The great thing about SMRS are that they’re power plants based on these that require refueling only every three to seven years in comparison to between one and two years for conventional nuclear plants. There are some SMR’s out there that are designed to even operate for up to 30 years without refueling. But, of course, there are a lot of challenges, as well, in terms of security. You’re not going to want these anywhere close to the battlefield for obvious reasons because you’re dealing really with nuclear energy, so the transport can also be a challenge, and licensing. NATO is not super excited about this option right now just because of all the regulation and licensing that goes along with it, how long it’s going to take, and some of those security issues.On the other hand, this could be ready for deployment on US bases by 2026. So, because of the large amount of energy it could provide, it really could be a great independent energy solution that’s not vulnerable to cyberattack. The second thing we looked at was microgrids. Now I looked at a lot of different bases in terms of how successful microgrids are in islanding, so that they are cyber secure, but also in terms of providing that energy resilience needed during blackouts. It really depends on each base and their needs in terms of how successful these microgrids have been. Right now, the aim is to use renewables to power them, but what we found is the technology isn’t there yet. Basically, they remain fully resilient on fuel, but that can be a problem in forward positions near the battlefield because of the footprint that leads, and also, is often difficult to access fuel when you’re in a battlefield era. Secondly, only with the right kind of storage and batteries can this kind of micro gridding and islanding be successful. What we found is that in some of the islanding tests, the storage of the batteries actually caught on fire because the technology is not there yet. But it’s predicted to be there technologically within several years. SMR will likely get there faster, but both of these things are a political game, as well, in terms of what will be supported by NATO, what will be supported by the different countries. And then finally we looked at cyber early warning. Now what’s out there right now in terms of cyber early warning is basically anomaly detection. They’re looking to the past at what kind of attacks have already occurred. But in terms of the future and the environment in which you have Internet of Things and emerging technology, much of that is not taken into account when it’s looking at energy critical infrastructure.So, a colleague and I brainstormed about how we could make this better. One thing that we’re looking at is virtualization of energy critical infrastructure, for example, of a natural gas pipeline, and then combining that with machine learning to protect that critical infrastructure. The great thing is here you can also combine it with the machine learning so that it’s constantly learning from the new attacks. And it can use a sophisticated network of behavioral analysis models that can at the same time conduct network monitoring to ensure security .That then can be used to build a next-generation early warning system. So, we do believe this technology can soon be developed and soon be finished. We’re not quite there yet, but those tools will soon be available.HostWhy is this book so important for NATO and our commands in Europe?LohmannWe really do believe that the information we found and the general policy recommendations that we analyze are crucial for those commands because it provides actionable information. There’s not a lot of awareness out there about how the Internet of Things and the general emerging technology environment impact their military installations. Right now, it is making them more vulnerable because the cybersecurity does not yet exist for a lot of the energy critical infrastructure, so our hope is that this will make them aware of the vulnerabilities as well as make them aware of the innovation that’s being created and could be used very soon on military installations to help repel these kinds of cyberattacks.HostThank you so much for your time. This was a. Real pleasureLohmannI appreciate it, and thank you so much for your great questions.HostIf you’d like to learn more about What Ukraine Taught NATO about Hybrid Warfare, visit press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs.Author Information: Sarah J. Lohmann is a visiting research professor of security studies at the US Army War College, an assistant professor of international studies at the University of Washington, and a nonresident fellow with the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. She is a co-lead of the NATO Science and Technology project “Energy Security in an Era of Hybrid Warfare.” She holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and German from Wheaton College, a master’s of international service from American University, and a doctorate in political science from the Universität der Bundeswehr.