facebook.com/booktv. booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. >> c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] >> yeah, please don't. >> the brain goes. if the clicker goes -- >> they're all connected. >> good afternoon. welcome to the heritage foundation and our lewis lehrman auditorium.

we, of course, welcome those who will join us on c-span booktv in the future. for those watching online, you're welcome to send questions or comments simply e-mailing us at speaker@heritage.org and, of course, we will post the program on our heritage home page for your future reference as well. welcoming our guest today and leading our program is dakota woods, senior research fellow in our center for national defense. mr. woods served in the u.s. marine corps as well as in an assignment in the office of net assessment. upon retirement, he helped organize the national bio surveillance integration system. for five years he served as senior fellow at the center for strategic and budget tear

assessments -- budgetary assessments. please join me in welcoming dakota wood. dakota? [applause] >> thank you, jon. it's a real pleasure to have you all here, but to have dr. crane all the way down from carlisle where he took the hyperloop, was that it? the fastest run he's ever made to d.c., so we're glad that travel wasn't interrupted. normally you try to do something artful with an introduction, but i couldn't do anything better than draw from pure biographical information and take a moment of his time to really go over his background. it's remarkable. currently serves as chief of the historical services at the army heritage and education center up in carlisle barracks, was director of the u.s. military institute. he was with the war college from

2000-2003 where he held the general douglas macarthur chair of research. it's really interesting to have both an expert historian on land power and air power and being able to talk about the intersection of both. all of this followed a 26-year career in the u.s. army, concluded with nine years as a professor of history at the u.s. military academy. holds bachelor's degrees from the military academy and his masters and doctorate from stanford university, the u.s. army war college. by my count, he's authored 11 books or monographs since the or year 2000. i don't know whether they're hobbies you might have -- >> monographs are short. >> okay. we've got at least 11 of them. civil war, world war ii, world war ii, korea, vietnam, and his most recent work on reprising a lot of historical stuff and putting it in modern context and the environments in which that

folds here in the modern-day context. was name one of "newsweek"'s people to watch in 2007 for his leading work in leading the team that authored -- [inaudible] on counterinsurgency. i think it also has an army title to it, but i ignore that as a former marine, retired marine. november, 2008, named the archivist of the year, and just recently here in 2016 selected to receive samuel elliot morrison prize for lifetime contributions to the field of military history, so it's a real pleasure to have dr. crane with us. look forward to your insights on kind of not only where we've been, where we're at, possibly where we're doing in counterinsurgency and stability operations. [applause] >> thank you very much. you know, fasten your seat belts, i've got about 30 slides i want to go through, and i want to leave time for questions. what i'm trying to do is titillate, not satisfy.

[laughter] so you'll want to go out and buy copies of the book. it's a lot cheaper out there than i can get it. if you're interested, it's a really good deal out there. this is a image of the book. the other picture is outside the embassy in baghdad. that sign struck me as fairly interesting and kind of gave a sense of some of the atmosphere over there. i often wonderedded who was walking into the embassy drinking while they were armed. how i got into this, the term cassandra in oz, most of you are aware that cassandra was a figure from greek mythology who was cursed to tell truth the power and never get hurt. and i got involved in a number of things in the early years of this millenium. the red one on the right i talked about the army's response to vietnam which was not to learn how to fight these wars better, but to avoid these wars.

and i closed in 2002 with a plea that we needed to revisit counterinsurgency doctrine. i was put in charge of a team to rebuild iraq for the mayor of baghdad in late 2002 when the army thought they were going to be in charge of reconstruction. the day we finished the was the day that secretary rumsfeld created the office of humanitarian affairs under general garner, and nobody was interested in our study anymore. we actually sent it to the planners in cue bait, and they used it -- in kuwait, and they used it to help develop their plan, but we all know how that came out. we became much more famous for being ignored. but because of that, when the time came to rewrite counterinsurgency doctrine, my west point classmate, dave petraeus, asked me to be in charge of the team to do that. what general petraeus was trying

to do -- and general mattis also for the marine corps. we're really fortunate at this time in the history of those two services that they could pull two combat leaders out of the war and put them in positions where they could revise the training to bring them into the 21st century. and general petraeus' model, this is what he called his engine of change which is a, you know, the idea is that you send people out to the field, you get your lessons as fast as you can, and you bring them back into the training system. you get them to collective training, leader development and doctrine. i used to tell people you can see my position in the engine of change. i used to tell people i was one tooth on one cog in dave petraeus' engine of change. i can call him dave, he was a classmate. we had a number of arguments during the promulgation and development of the doctrine. i won a few but not as many as he did. again, this whole idea that

we're going to create a learning organization for modern warfare. both he and general mattis were doing that for the army and the marine corps. it was a very atypical process to develop this doctrine. we did it in less than a year which is light speed. a lot of it is because general petraeus as a champion, we went around a lot of the normal bureaucratic avenues to get it done. we also had a big tent. we had a number of contributors from all over the world involved in this. it was a joint army/marine effort, a true effort. each chapter had an army and marine corps author for it. we had sarah sewall as one of the initial sponsors, she contributed to the manual as well, people from the human rights community, academia, the media. when we had our major vetting conference, jim fowler was there, tom ricks was involved

many some of the early stuff. we tried to get a lot of people involve in giving us their ideas on how to better fight these kinds of wars. a lot of help from think tanks, rand, a number of others like that who also gave us their input. but in the end, it was going to be the army and the ma reap corps authors -- marine corps authors who really formatted this. general petraeus was really -- he read every word. i massaged everything. he was the last guy to look at it before it went out for general view to the forces. still have ptsd over what i call petraeus pronouns. if any of you are writing papers and he used the phrase this is or it is, i still have precedent and antecedent nightmares. he said, oh, i'm not that hard an editor.

yeah, dave, you are. the intent was to be applicable to counterinsurgencies anywhere anytime. but 2006 version especially ended up being shaped very much by iraq. not just because general petraeus knew he was going to iraq, because most of the inputs we got from the critics from the soldiers and marines out in the field giving us their ideas were shape very much by iraq. so the 2006 version of the doctrine, this is very much a manual that is aimed at iraq. a lot of details, most of you may be aware of these. how it was different from normal focus on combat, it was very population-centric. you had to protect the population first, and eventually people needed to accept the government as legitimate. your main goal is legitimacy. you've still got to kill and capture people. but you've got to be careful how you apply it in a mosaic war that differs from village to

village, valley to valley,, city to city. as dave petraeus used to say, you can't kill yourself to victory in these kind of wars. it takes a team effort not only with your own interagencies, but also with the home -- the host nation has got to win a lot of its own war as well. intelligence gathering is more cultural anthropology many these kind of wars. you've got to understand how the societies work, how politics work, gender roles. it's a very different kind of intelligence process. and you've got to think on campaign design. i'll illustrate in a second, when i came into the early in the '70s, i knew who the enemy was. the enemy was the next soviet motorized regiment coming over the hill. basically, the way you fought the war in the '70s was you beat the first echelon, the soviets, the second echelon came, and you nuked them. you knew who the enemy was going to be.

in modern wars, you don't. your first step is the figure out what's my problem set. it's a much different warfare. you have this process call campaign design which we introduced and which is now involved in all our doctrine. you've got to -- you're fighting a set of enemies, not an enemy. so you have to disaggregate your enmies and deal with each one differently. perceptions are more important hand reality in these kinds of wars. what people think you do is more important than what you do in many cases. you've got to manage communication. the dominant theme was learn and adapt faster than your enemy did. the dominant approach was clear, hold, build. i'll talk about that in a little bit. it's expensive, it's time-consuming, but it's very effective, and also things called lines of effort. and, again, a point i'll make again later, counterinsurgency is really just modern warfare. as much as we may not like it,

it's not going away because modern warfare's not going away. this is modern warfare in a diagram what you've got is you've got a whole set of operations going on. it's not just combat operations, it's also developing host nation security forces, developing -- restoring essential services, developing good governance and also economic development. this is all a part of what it takes to be victorious in these kind of wars because you're trying to to change people's attitudes. you trying to get more people to support the government than don't. now, this is not hearts and minds coin. hearts and minds often gets -- hearts and minds is very much a social science approach that somehow you make everybody love you. we realized when we were doing the doctrine that there are other parts of the anatomy you have to grab sometimes to get people to do what you want them to do. so there's a bunch of coercive as well as -- you use carrots and sticks both. the bottom line is you want to

get the public to support, most of the people to support the governing authority. and everything is wrapped in information operations. everything you do has an information reaction. and you've got to deal with that as well. so this is, again, this is modern warfare in a simple diagram. what it looks like on the ground, this is general mattis' plan in anbar province when he came in with the marines early in the iraq campaign. and he went out and identified his problem set as three different enemies, three different insurgencies. i never -- when we were doing the doctrine, we were never quite sure whether we were talking about insurgency or insurgencies. in anbar there was the tribal, there was a baathist insurgency from all those people we threw out with the debaathification edict the in 2003, and then there was a group from al-qaeda. the foreign fighters. and the idea was it had to deal

with each of those separately. the sunni tribes wanted to get back into society, so they were going to be attracted with jobs. the baathists could be attracted with some kind of political compromise. the foreign fighters, they'd have to be kill or captured. and eventually, we get the sunni tribes to kill the al-qaeda guys. they turn. we turn the tribes to come over to our side, and they help us take out the foreign fighters. that's the way these kind of wars tend to go. now, we had a number of battles within -- we had internal battles as well as external battles to try to get doctrine done. one of them was just numbering the manual. the initial numbering was fm3 fm3.07-22 which meant it was the 22nd category. i showed up and i said this is -- among the team we talked

about it, and we said counterinsurgency differs because of the level of violation involved, and we felt it needed its own category. so i said i want to change the number on the manual. and it was like a monk had said to the pope i want to rearrange the old testament. [laughter] they said, oh, the whole doctrine system will collapse. two weeks later, general petraeus had the same idea, and i guess they had thought about it for two weeks, because when he made the suggestion, it was a great idea. [laughter] so the number changed. we also, this is the only manual you'll find in the u.s. government inventory that has a referenced bibliography of civilian works, recommended readings, as we were ld told we couldn't do that because that implied government endorsement of civilian, privately-published works. again, the lawyers told us thatting, but when general petraeus asked, they gave him a different answer.

reading level, army doctrine is written normally at an eighth grade reading level not because soldiers are stupid, but because the idea is it's going to be read and absorbed quickly. the argument i made was that this is being written more battalion staffs and above, college graduates, they can read a harder text. and so it is -- the reading is up maybe 10th or 12th, i think is where it ended up. it's so good, it has been used as a college textbook at a number of universities. i had a number of professors complain to me when the manual got revised in 2014 that they were losing their best textbook, they didn't want us to change it. this is the time of abu ghraib, that was a big debate that eventually got resolved because, you know, the mccain-feingold, i think it was -- bottom line was congress passed the regulation, the rules for it. another army manual became the standard for it, so we didn't have to deal with it, which it was a real finish it was a tough nut to deal with.

we had a big debate on that when we wrote the manual and eventually decidedded we would not allow any gray areas in any the morality, no torture, no waterboarding. the the manual took a hard line on that. the air power appendix, i decided we needed an appendix on air power because ground guys needed to understand the air role. marines didn't want to do it. i kind of forced it down people's throats. we wanted to get the air force involved -- the air force didn't care until we started to get publicity, then they jumped right in and proposed their own p appendix. the first thing they talk about was the air force controlling all air power. you want to get hama leans crawling off the -- marines crawling off the ceiling, tell them you're taking their airplanes away. we probably end up doing more harm than good with that because the air force still -- i'm kind of an antichrist for putting

them in the appendix. they're lucky they got that. it did get the air force interested in this, and they've done some pretty good stuff since. the army intelligence center was very ununeasy, eventually we got them to come on board, but it delayed the manual by two months, and because of that, ralph peters had a chance to write a nasty editorial. petraeus approach, bring the dissidents out, draw them into the mix, they had a big debate between ralph peters and john nagl. we changed seven sentences in the manual. seven sentences. but that was good enough so when the manual came out in december, really peters called in the most -- ralph peters called in the most improved government resource -- [laughter] at the time it came out, he actually supported it. and the last one was the paradox. this was my idea to put in the manual which actually is a nato manual as it's continued through

doctrine. the idea was to get people to realize this is a different kind of war, you've got to think about it different, and there are some possible dilemmas you've got to face in how you use force and how you conduct it. you know, the first one, sometimes less security maybe. you can't lock yourself in your forward operating base. you have got to get out and patrol. you've got to take some risks. you've got to provide the people security, and they've got to see you out there, you know? sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is. it doesn't pay to kill five insurgents if the backlash creates 50 more. you've got to be very careful how you do that. sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. if a tactic works this week, it might not work next week. if it works in this province, it might not work in the next. why not? what is your enemy doing? they're learning and adapting too, the bastards. they're continuing to change.

so you've got to understand that if something works now, it might not work in the nexting village. when the enemy finds a good tactic in iraq, it shows up in afghanistan a month later. the enemy's communicating as well. it's a learning and adapting kind of war you've got to be in. the last one, many important decisions were not made -- are not made by generals, was initially written as most important decisions are not made by generals. guess who has the last say this the development of any doctrine? the generals. so they changed that. but at least they kept it in, and they changed most to many. i'll get to another point later that, you know, my revision, my thoughts about process after watching the doctor in action, that's really not right either. most important decisions are not made by any kind of soldier at all. criticism, a lot of people didn't like the doctrine. only -- [inaudible]

calls it military malpractice, says the only way to do counterinsurgency is the way the nazis did against the russians, make the people fear you more than they do the insr. gents -- insurgents. bing west also is a big push for you've got to kill the -- very enemy-centric as is ralph peters. i was really surprised, i got invited to do a presentation at nyu, and i walked into the conference, and they didn't tell me the name of the conference. the conference is counterinsur general city -- counterinsurgency, the new imperialism. i didn't realize we were doing that, to be honest. but there are some that see this as brutal. steve little and others -- biddle and others have argued there are some similarities and there are similar kind of wars. some said there was too much mao in the doctrine. mao is dead. even al-qaeda in their own

doctrine uses maoist terminology. mao is not -- is dead, but he's noter relevant. the united states can't do coin because it always takes too long, and we don't have the patience. our political culture can't think beyond four years, our society loses,s has an attention span of 30 seconds, and the army doesn't want to do these kinds of wars. that's the record argument. the dangerous argument is really john fields' argument which is that if we focus too much on coin, we're going to lose the conventional skills that are much more important, and we're going to also make our leaders much too overor confidented to do coin -- overconfident. finish and that argument has really won out in washington where the defense planning guidance now says we will not do any kind of large scale counterinsurgency ops in the future. we can hope.

it's also one service who will remain unnamed who has argued there's not enough air power in the doctrine. [laughter] that's charlie dunlap with his writings. now, of course, petraeus takes this to iraq, and it's one of the shaping influences for the surge. you've got to understand that there's not just a surge, there are surges. there's a troop surge with petraeus and odierno used around baghdad. there's also a -- and this is actually what i got from general petraeus in february 07, he says i need a military surge, a surge in iraqi political will, american political will and a civilian surge. the announcement created a surge in iraqi political will. most of changes in anbar happened before the surge troops each get there. a lot of the people turned against al-qaeda. they said a lot of that happened because they knew we were coming and we were in for the long haul. the worst thing you can do is

announce a surge with a deadline because what that does, it takes away any incentive from the people you're trying to help to stay with you because you're telling them you're going to leave. and the bad guys, of course, aren't going to leave. so the surge and president bush's announcements of support reinforced the urge of a lot of iraqis to rise up against al-qaeda. also you got the richard to hannon and kenneth pollack piece in july which says the surge is working which changes the democratic political debates of how we're going to get out of iraq quick to how do we exploit the surge. even though i was knee aye at the time, doctrine itself was a major information weapon. it was sent to congress, it was sent out to all major leaders. it not only convinced the army we knew how to fight this kind of war with, it also convinced our enemies we did also. it turned out to be massive information weapon. and on a civilian surge, at a

tactical level we get that because petraeus gives the original reconstruction team toss brigade managers, you take care of them, which takes care of civil military corps of nation, but we never did get the agency help that he needed even though he and ambassador crocker tried the best they could to make do with the resources they had and really worked together. a really terrific team, petraeus and crocker. they could have used more help from the rest of the interagency. a lot of reasons for the success of the reawakening. sunnis realized they were losing, the competence of everybody, al-qaeda's ineptitude of insurgents. they basically antagonized the anbaris especially enough to rise up against them and, again, we lose it all when we pull out in 2011. the gains get lost. we were the grew of the mosaic peace. it wasn't just the military, it

was also diplomats. we pull out the diplomats as well. it breaks down this peace that was achieved by really by about 2009. quick with observations on iraq, this is my mandatory i know dave petraeus picture. [laughter] this is his palace in baghdad, i'm in the middle. that'sday on the left, and that's -- dave on the left and john martin on the right. john was they've's liaison with the embassy. this is on left there, that's ricky gibbs one of my students to at the army war college. he had a brigade with ten battalions and a occupation zone of 1.25 million iraqis. this is a colonel. that is a division-sized -- you had divisions that were corps and brigades that were divisions, massive occupation zones. in this case he's opening a hospital. in the middle is an iraqi

opening a hospital in south baghdad. that's general david -- [inaudible] next to him who was gown to be director of the army staff who was over on the trip with us. i was there in october, november of '07. but, and at night he was running combat patrols through the neighborhoods of south baghdad. one of the petraeus initiatives was joint outposts out in the ted field. small combat outpost. about 100 soldiers, company-size element. here i am -- the guy gesticulating is a guy i talk about in the book, john henry molts who's in charge of that particular or outpost and at the end of the table is the brigade. we're making a tour for general petraeus to see how the doctrine is operating. you end up with rise of the sons

of iraq, these militia groups rise up around the outpost to help fight against al-qaeda. the second person from the left there is sheikh sabbah. he shows up from tikrit, says i'm here to run the local mill saw. -- militia. he said he was an nco in the iraqi army. i don't think he was, but basically he became the organizer of the local militia. i'm actually outside the photo with captain molts taking this picture, and captain molts turned to me and said, you know, sir, i could swear those guys were shooting at me two months ago. [laughter] and i said, captain molts, welcome to counterinsurgency. that's the way these wars go. general -- [inaudible] is not a slippery character. this is the interior minister for the iraqi government. the interior ministry in iraq was one of big problems of corruption and sectarianism.

you had to learn to identify your friends as much as your enemies. we had bigger intelligence packets on our friends than our enemies. and breaking up sectarianism in the ministry of interior was one of our big problems in iraq. we did really good training the iraqi army until maliki took all the leaders away after we left. but i think that was a success. not so much on police. though we did better. this, actually, this is general hussein, a real hero for the americans. he's the guy who reforms the iraqi national police, fires most of their brigade and battaile oncommanders -- battalion commanders. the national police are a real asset when we left. and when maliki -- after we left in 2011 the first thing maliki did was put one of his cronies back in charge of the national police, replace -- put the old commanders back in, and the

national police went back to death squads and incompetence the way it was before we were there. we also did some interesting things at the coin behind the wire. at the intention camps -- detention camps. about 20,000 reconcilables, they were locked away in a part of the camp that was or very dangerous. but general stone, major general stone, a marine general who was one of the smartest guys i ran into among a lot of smart guys set up a program where what you'd do is you teach the moderate prisons you identify how to read, bring in a moderate imam to teach them to read the quran, give them job kills and eventually release them back to their tribes with a pledge that they'll stay loyal to the government. there's also some legal stuff involved in there as well, but the bottom line is when i was over there, they had sent

back -- they had released a little over 2,000 prisoners like that. two had come back. any prison in america would love a recidivism rate like that. but the process was working very well. and it was interesting, one of the people there said they were firing moderate missiles back into iraqi society. that was the purpose of the program. we also had to help change the whole iraqi legal system. iraqi legal system was basically based on coerced confessions. you'd beat somebody up until they confessed, and the trial was this person trying to prove that their confession wasn't true. we had to teach them how to do a more adversarial system. we had to set up a whole series of those over there to speed up the process so prisoners, once they got detain, they could actually get their cases heard and get them resolved in the right amount of time. one of the problems general stone found when he initially showed up was there were a lot of iraqis who had actually been

detained longer than -- they hadn't been to trial yet, but they had been detained longer than their sentence was if they were guilty because they hadn't gotten to trial yet. a lot of coercive things a lot of sectarian, a lot of the ethnic divides, sectarian divides in iraq we imposed for security. baghdad was a much more ethnicically diverse city before we got there, but we had to impose for security these barriers like this, and we put -- we must have used half of the world's concrete in iraq for security. it's all over the place. the iraqis actually painted this one. those wires above that, that's the iraqi power grid. interesting that top wires are the state electricity which is free. if you want to screw up an electric system, give people a free electricity. once that ran out, those wires, those other wires wrap around the pole will are all wires to local generator operators. and so baghdad was powered 24

hours a day, just a lot of time was by these local generator operators who were making money hand over fist but didn't consider that a real job. i asked them, what do you want from the government? i want a job. it's not a job unless the government gives it to you. that's what centralized economies, the mindset they impose on people. we also had to learn to accept local solutions. this was a place near basra, a meeting with the local council. the two in the front there, that's the sunni and the shiite, shia sheikhs from the local tribes. they're talking about how well they got along and how we had -- how they had reconcile themselveses and how everything was great and they wanted everybody to buy their oranges. but they did appreciate the fact that there was a british unit right nearby to help provide security. we had to learn to let the iraqis develop their own solutions. often times they were slower,

more complex, but it worked for them. much better than the imposed solutions we tried to put on them. again, we're talking about total withdrawal. one of points i want to make is if you're going to get success out of military intervention, it always takes a long time. it usually takes 20, 30 years. my big example is korea. it takes 30 years after 1953 for a really a what we would call a functional democracy to appear. we were the glue that held together local ceasefires. not just soldiers, diplomats as well. and actually, there was a reaction against it. the new administration came in in 2009, they told their ambassadors that crocker was too subservient to petraeus andwords need more independence which -- and ambassadors needed more independence. we know that the country is fractured, we know what's going on over there. i would argue that this is

failure of foreign policy, not counterinsurgency. because counterinsurgency was not allowed to be finished. again, it always takes a long time. how military intervention's supposed to work, military dose in with allies -- goes in with allies, and they eventually, this is the way people talk about it in washington, and eventually the civilian organizations hand over respondent to the indigenous organizations, and they return to the community of nations. that's the ideal situation. i'm an historian, we deal with realities. this is the way it really happens. the bottom line is you're a wish bone quarterback in the military, and you take the ball and turn around, there's nobody else to pitch the ball to, and you're stuck wit. when it works, it works because the military maintains the responsibility for major resources. the recent book art of governance illustrates it even better than i can with this chart. bottom line is the military, if

you're going to be successful, the military's going to have the responsibility for these interventions for many years. this is just a chart, i'll leave this with the heritage foundation, and they can post it somewhere. i would add i got this chart from an army agency. i would disagree with some of the numbers, but the bottom line it's trying to show is if we are going to consolidate gains, the military's going to be there for a long time. and you can -- the amount of success we have is directly proportional to how long the military stays there. now, we were not perfect. we got a number of things wrong when we did this new doctrine. the first one was the development process was upside down. you should start with a national security strategy that gives you the goals of the nation then a national military strategy to execute them, then joint doctrine and service doctrine how different services will approach the problem set. we did it upside down. the army and ma enlean corps got ahead of everybody -- marine corps got ahead of everybody. and in many ways, became a

substitute for national security strategy and filled a national security vacuum. it really never was designed to do that. this was an operational-level manual. coin is a way, it is not a strategy. and it got oversold. and that'sing with accurate. coin was oversold. coin is a way to achieve an end, and somebody else has to set up what the ends are. and as i say on here, the most important decisions in counterinsurgency are made by politicians and voters, not generals. they set the ends. the military had no say in iraq or afghanistan on the form of government or who was going to lead it. we also failed in the manual to provide alternatives to clear, hold and build. it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources. we needed to provide some lower-resource ways to successfully execute coin, and we did not. maybe the biggest mistake we made in the manual, we made an assumption that the goals of the host nation leaders we're supporting are the same as ours,

and we found both in iraq and afghanistan that is not true. often times we're working at cross-purposes. and it's always difficult to get the people we're supporting to do what we think they need to do, especially when that seems to threaten their power base. and that we got badly wrong in the 2006 version of the doctrine. now, i want to make some observations on modern war, and then we'll open it up to some questions. and these kind of wars, conflict termination become very, very complex. when you're fighting against a set of enemies with no one individual in control, it makes ending these conflicts very, very difficult. in some way, the best you can do is manage them. manage the level of violence somehow. but you're never going to kind of get everybody to agree to the same thing. we still have a continuing lack of interagency capability in the american government. i tell my students at the war college the u.s. government is like a giant fiddler crab. it's got one giant claw which is the department of defense.

and this little teeny claw that says the mythical interagency. you can still fit all the foreign service officers in the state department on one aircraft carrier, one fully-manned aircraft carrier. more people on that than there is fsos in the state department. because of this lack of capability, mission creep is always a self-inflicted wound. you're always going to do more than typical military tasks, you're always going to pick up other things to do especially in a violent situation. so the military's always got to expect to pick up more responsibilities in the nontraditional realm even though the defense planning guide says we won't. decapitation strategy's a two-edged sword. you've got to have -- there's a reason we don't bomb the emperor's palace in tokyo in world war ii, because we figure the emperor's going to have to be involved in the term nation of the war. -- termination of the war with. you don't want to kill them all.

and sometimes the decapitation makes more ebonies, so you've got to be -- enemies, so you've got to be careful how you do that. you've got to get public support, and up times that's got -- you can't do that with force. you can get people to start to change behaviors with force, but attitudes take a longer time and different approaches. again, i talk about disago aggregating friends as well as enemies. in the regular wars if you think you're winning, you might be. if you think you're losing, you definitely are. [laughter] this is a key one for those of us that like long-range, precision strike, who controls the ground controls the message. one of the biggest problems we have, actually, is not the air force with this, it's special operations forces. they'll go in and do a deep strike and leave, and the enemy gets to spin the way that information gets presented. who controls the ground controls the message. and, again, special forces, in my view, has succumbed too much

to the will of direct action. special forces used to be our counterinsurgents. now you get a conventional guy, you want to kill somebody, you get a potential forces guy. that's -- a special forces guy. that's completely reversed. i think we need a better balance. and security force assistance, this advise and assist role, is a really important mission but nobody really wants to do it. and we are still fighting one-year wars or four month or seven month wars, i've heard briefings for the army about 12 months is just as far as you can go. and these kind of wars longevity counts. you've got to have longer tours. i know there's some arguments about stress and some other things, but personal relationships are important, and you can't establish those in four months. precision is not always the answer. sometimes it's nice to hammer somebody. i love b-52s. sometimes they're useful.

not always. and there are two forms of warfare, asymmetric and stupid. h.r. mcmaster loves to use this quote. he usually gives me footnote, but not always. that's true. nobody's going to fight us exactly the way we fight. and to be honest, we are the most asymmetric of all. nobody can fight like us. and we've got to understand, and when you're talking about studying asymmetrical warfare, we're really studying the way the rest of the world fights. i'm not sure that's really the last term to use. last one, dilemmas of counterinjure seven i -- counterinsurgency. political leaders should be honest from the start. don't hold your breath. but we always say interventions are going to be short, and they're going to be effective, they never are. just because you can do counterinsurgency does not mean that you should. but just because you say you are doing counterinsurgency doesn't mean that you are. in my view, we have never done counterinurgency in afghanistan.

we have never committedded the resources to it. we don't develop the strategy to do it until 2009. we've been there for eight years. again, the most important decisions affecting coin are made by politicians and voters and not generals. great quote i got from the j3, one of the operations officers under general petraeus many iraq. i don't know -- and this was about iraq. i don't know if we have wrong form of government or the wrong people in it. describing our problems in iraq. you think about both of those, very complex problem sets. neither of them army's or the military's responsibility really. and, again, what we label as counterinsurgency is really just modern war amongst the people. and i've got to admit, i've gotten a whole lot of frequent flyer miles out of it. i'm involved with the nay poe project for peace -- nato project for peace, sending out to partnership for peace nations.

les a list of -- there's a list of 35 nations that will get it, and i've been told i will get first call being on the teaching teams to go to these places. i looked at the list of 35 nations, one of those are france or britain or places like that. they are not exactly garden spots. i've got to work on that. i have been to moldova, nigeria. there's a lot of people interested, but they've got some considerably big problems to work with, to deal with in their different situations. my last point that i'll make, and this is for dan roper sitting over here in the audience who was one of the guys who contributed near latter part of this counterinsurgency effort. we have never been able to never do this again. we have never been able to never do this again. right now the defense planning guidance says no long-term coin, no long-term stability ops. we said that before, we said it after vietnam. you know, one of the -- you know, i dedicate the book to a young man who was killed in

iraq, and one of the purposes of the book is to make sure that when we do this again, and we will do this again, that we do it better. so those are my, that finishes my prepare remarks, and i'll present the most useful thing i got from the marines from this whole process, this neat slide about questions. [laughter] with i actually got a lot of great ideas from marines, but they did give me this slide as well. i will open it to the audience for any questions you may have. thank you very much. >> we've got microphones because we're always broadcasting this, if you could say who you are and talk in the microphone. >> patted -- pat -- [inaudible] c, rs. we will do this again, we will do i wrong, and we won't stay long enough. are there lessons for how the army particularly, the other services, how they can design themselves to basically have a crumple zone built in? we're going to be, you know, those damn fools are going to

send us out again, and they're not going to let us finish it, and we'll do the best we can, and then they'll pull us out. are there ways the u.s. army could be designed to be damage-tolerant, so to speak, and do the best they could do given those practical constraints? >> i'll steal a term from steve biddle. we need an army of mediocrity. and the point there is the conventional power of the american military is it is the hammer that gives us our deterrent capability. we can't lose that conventional hammer and the fear that it engenders in an opponent. at the same time as one of my students observed as the war college this past semester, we have an army and a military that's design to win the nation's battle, not to win the nation's wars. to win the nation's wars, you've got to be able to do all this other stuff. so the question is, do we want to design a military that wins the nation's wars which means

these other capabilities which get beyond the conventional into governance and economic development, some of the other things. it obviously needs a robust, more robust interagency, it also needs an army that's more willing to go into these things. so, you know, when i talk about army mediocrity, it means we've got to have swiss army knives soldiers, they've got to be prepared to do a lot of different things. general petraeus gets into mosul, and he said to the commander you're now president of mosul university. you've got to reestablish that, and this artillery colonel's got to figure out how to do that. it's, i mean, in many ways -- and i've, you know, the army right now is in a big readiness kick. we've got to be ready for a lot of things, and i, the thing i would add to the readiness, and general miller's got a nice things that are important, but i think one that needs to be added is intellectual readiness. i think we need to train our leaders to be intellectually

agile, to change missions to do these sort of things and a mindset that's willing to do them. it's, you know, we're trying to set up these advise and assist brigades nowed to do that mission better. that it's a good idea, but again, we've only got so many force structure. and regional aligned forces we're setting up, the question is who does the second rotation? because these things always take a long time. so you've always got to force -- you've got to have a force that can do a lot of different things. again, it's a tough question to answer. i'd love to say more force structure, but we all know the budget problems with that and all the other problems we've got. so i think the only real viable answer is we've got to have an intellectually agile force that's able to train up for the missions they have and be prepared to learn and adapt. it's not a real good answer, but i think that's the one we've got to live with.

>> ari goldman from the washington -- [inaudible] institute. can you talk about operating in the native language both in the media, and you just mentioned about the swiss army soldiers teaching any of the ground troops, i guess in this case arabic. >> it's a dilemma. one of the things that came out of our work with human terrain teams, monty mcfaith, who was a key player in all our stuff, our cultural anthropologist generated this idea we need these teams to go out and help us understand the culture. and i, actually, ended up not a fan of those. i think we became focused too much on the anthropologists instead of anthropology. language, it's tricky. we talk about teaching people arabic. if you give some soldier a month or two in arabic, that's not enough to be useful. what you need are the real arabic speakers, and that's a much different process.

and that's -- i think of all the services, the army does the best at the foreign officer area program. there are never enough of them. i think we need to expand that program. obviously, the importance of cultural intelligence is understood better, but it goes back to my point about long jeffty. the best thing -- longevity. the best thing you can do is live with people a long time to really understand them. >> yeah. i know that israeli military i think for every infantry company, they send one person away for six months or so to work on arabic. >> yeah. the problem the american army has is middle east is only one theater of many. and i know there are attempts in the regionally-aligned units to pick up different language skills. but we're focus all over the world, you know? israel has the advantage of being focus on a much smaller area. it's ad good idea. i know we're trying to do more of that, but we've got a lot of missions in a lot of places and only so many people to deal with.

but those are good ideas though. >> dr. crane, tom spoor from the heritage town space. foundation. in your book and your remarks you talk about having a very big tent, and i remember in your book you mentioned not just a conference room, but actually like a meeting hall with over a hundred people from different organizations. did you or do you now have any regrets about size of the group that you had to deal with to produce this manual? >> no. in fact i would argue for anybody who wants to do a project, this is a great model for howed to do it. basically, what happens is i first sit down with general petraeus in november of 2005. he says i want a draft done by january. [laughter] i said, whoa. i managed to negotiate until february. and then i had to get to the marines, get everybody together. then he said, okay, we talked about it, and he said we want to bring in a smart group of 30 people to sit in a room and really rake it over the coals.

he said, okay, great idea. i want to pick who the 30 people are. so then he sent out invitations, and the people said we're going to assume that most of these people are going to say no. everybody he sent an invitation to said yes. so the 30 people ended up as 150, and we couldn't fit them in a room. so we ended up in a big auditorium at fort leavenworth. and then a lot of these groups say, well, deed them into finish we're going to divide them into working groups. and i said, no, we've got 150 smart people, we're all going to talk about this stuff together. and i've got to say it's the hardest intellectual thing i ever did, i felt like i was ringmaster to the stars here, trying to figure out, trying to tile this together. generally, what we did was we brought in each chapter author to do a brief on his chapter, i brought in somebody to critique it, then we opened it up to discussion among the audience.

and then at the close of it, we told the audience i know you've got more to send us, send us stuff by e-mail and through the mail. and we got deluged with stuff for the next month. so it generated stuff. steve metz from the war college was one of my -- he was sitting there on his cell phone texting me stuff for three days, for the whole period every thought that he had, he'd send me this text opposite. that's not really the design that i wanted. but the, but most people, i mean, sarah sewall brought in a bunch of human rights people, and they paid for them. they really generated a big debate over torture initially. and when they understood that we agreed with them, that opened opportunity conference to a great sense of openness. hey, everybody's going to be listened to here. and i got a big packet of stuff from them. we had a bunch of cia guys there that i called the smith brothers that a all sat in the back, and they gave out us a lot of great stuff. we got stuff from steve metz, other war colleges, stuff from the other services.

we had about -- we had a number of other different countries, the buritz sent a -- buritz -- brits sense a big contention. foster who had the detemerity to write an article about how bad the americans were at counterinsurgency, and petraeus had him start off with his pitch. kind of like waving a red flag in front of a bull. he knew that was his role. he got up there and he took the shots and got things rolling. but the idea was to get people thinking, to generate thought. and i thought having 150 -- in this case having 150 people in the room, i think, worked fine. it was hard, i was completely exhausted at the ending of the two days, but i think we got great stuff out of it. again, i've gone to other conferences since where they take 150 smart people and break them up into work groups, and i think you lose the power of the dynamic. it was just neat having 150 people and having somebody yell

at somebody over here, different ideas. i wish we had a little more time for it. but because they had ability to vent afterwards and send us their stuff afterwards, it kept the dynamic, the intellectual flow going afterwards. that was a great, great event. >> hi, my name is mike -- [inaudible] at the heritage foundation. one of my questions, or my question is do you believe the united states will have capability to successfully institute counterinsurgency and, like, nation-building with our forces so spread out among almost every, you know, theater of war? will we ever have the resources or the ability to have, like, a long process of nation-building? >> no, tough question, always a difficult one. in the end, the host nation's got to come up with their final solution. so ideally, you want to have the host nation do a lot of their own stuff. i mean, in iraq with their oil money, there was the potential there for the iraqis to do a lot on their own. if we could have got them

focused better. afghanistan's a different problem. afghanistan resource wise, that's a real dilemma. and i think you blame a lot of the countries who said they would donate that did not. that's not just an american failure, that's a world failure, the afghanistan problem. bottom line is you've got to rely as much as you can on, hopefully, you've got an indigenous host nation, resources enough to pick up some of the slack. we can't, you know, it's a careful balance. if you try to do too much, then the host nation's never going to try to do anything. so how do you balance helping them with building their own capacity. that's why the one paradox is it's better if the host nation does something tolerably than you to it really well because you want to train the host nation to do it on their own. it's an interesting balance. you know, nation building is one of those very weighty terms, a lot of baggage with it. you definitely want to improve capacity.

the indigenous capacity. but i don't think -- i'm not sure if you can really build a nation. you can do state building. you can build state capacity and state institutions, but building a nation is, jeepers, that takes generations, i think. i'm just -- i don't like that term. >> squeeze in one more. >> there's one back here in the back corner. >> [inaudible] federalist society. you mentioned that the people on the ground control the the message. i was wondering, how do you determine that the american message has been solidified and accepted, and when our goals are achieved and whether that's a continual process and we need to continually add to in the future? thank you. >> good question. the information operations are a key aspect of all this. i talked about the fact that you've got to get -- people got to understand what you've done. the dilemma is you've got an

international audience, your own audience at home, the audience on the ground, your owned soldiers, the enemy soldiers, and you've got to get a message that's consistent among all those different elements. it's really hard to coordinate, and we don't have -- as a nation, we don't have a real good way to coordinate all those messages. we don't have a u.s. information agency or something hike that to coordinate all those. so it becomes very difficult for all elements of the u.s. government to control their messages. and it's hard. we have a problem with managing expectations. it's one of the -- and in the manual one of the core tenets is manage expectation. we show up in a backward village in afghanistan, and they want pavedded roads and running water and television and all kinds of stuff immediately. and we're americans, and they say you're americans, you put a man on the moon, you can do anything. [laughter] ..

so you has to be real careful. some of the problems, some of your safety will go a promise something with the contract and you and a military get stuck with the results if it doesn't get done. it's a physical problem. how do we coordinate these messages across all different levels and you have to be consistent. general petraeus used to talk about people, had a couple of tenets, never put lipstick on a pay, be honest, be first with the troops. we have to be up front with these things. one of the big problems who controls the ground controls the message is we will go out and

trade a special forces raid and if those in afghanistan up in the mountains and we have the raid and we withdraw them and they are gone. difficult to assess what happened and we drive in the next day and there's, you into jeep and joyce beatty with you and you drive into the village and a some parts of afghanistan weather main form of economics is payments, kind of an excuse for dempster we don't say we did anything wrong. we shall indisposed and afghanistan and nobody is lined up along the road with her arms in a sling because they all got wounded. they all have and margaret were buried in the backyard. you can't dig them up to check. immediate guy says your 4515 dead aunt margaret. that goes in the newspapers the taliban is a master, this is where the raid the next thing within an hour there something up on the screen that shows that babies and blown up mosque and

that sort of stuff. you have to be proactive. we got to think that information aspects of what we do before we do it. already have the information response prepared. the military, it's amazing the care we take on a lot of these operations. it's not the same to the u.s. government. we don't investigate things afterwards as well he should as fast as we should. that's a problem at every level, not just on the ground. the question is how to we the united states coordinate our message across the board of the international arena. okay? [applause] >> we do have some books for sale. i will be buying one and get, we have refreshments as well. thank you for attending and hope he's taken to other than sweat coming up on the calendar.

thank you very much. >> you won't find that cheap anywhere else. >> booktv is on twitter and facebook, and we want to hear from you. tweet us twitter.com/booktv or post a comment on our facebook page facebook.com/booktv. >> how is everyone doing? are you excited? this is amazing, right? andre dornier has read all his books, i hope, correct? so i'm professional troublemaker for those who don't know me, people that i worked with a few