and wonderful life mary oliver poem. >> first day at the end it says tell me what it is you plan to do with your one wild and precious life. >> i didn't read about that in national inquire so i don't know -- >> poetry. national inquire -- well sometimes they do in the cross words just kidding. >> i don't read national inquire. thank you. >> the book is out in october. thanks for being here. thanks so much. that was fun we had a blast. booktv it 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. good morning, welcome to the heritage foundation and our douglas and sarah auditorium thank you for those joining us

on the website and c-span tv for those in house we would ask that courtesy that our mobile devices have been silenced or turned off for those watching online or in the future, you're welcome to sending questions or comments simply e-mailing, speaker at heritage.org and, of course, we will post today's program on the heritage home page for everyone's future reference as well. leading our discussion today is daniel coaches, and danielle is our policy analyst and european affair and margaret thatcher center for freedom and focuses on transare atlantic security issue and writings featured in real clear world fox news.com and breitbart.com and provided expert analysis in over 100 regular and radio and television appearances. he's also served as a imaginist at the transatlantic in belgium and provided parliamentary evidence to the united kingdom house of lord select committee on the arctic. prior to joining us here at heritage and thatcher center he

ed at a nonprofit in washington, d.c. as analyst as well as on advisory board company as beth a research associate and a associate director. please join me in welcoming danielle coaches. danielle. [applause] >> thank you john and good morning everybody on this beautiful here in washington. we're honored today to be joined by mark moyer who's book oppose any foe the rises of america special operations forces was described by national review as invaluable and highly readable overview of special operation forces history not just those for those qhor newly joining its ranks but also for anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces. our author mark is director of the center for military and diplomating history here in washington, d.c. he's served as professor at u.s. marine corps. university and senior fellow of the joint spernl special operation

university and senior leadership of u.s. military commands as well he holds b.a. law from harvard ph.d. from cambridge and in addition to book that we're talking about today he is also written a number of other works includes aid for elites, building partner nations and ending poverty for human capital that i believe that i read in grad school, strategic failure how is president obama's drone warfare defense cuts and military -- military amateurism have in america and question of command can that from civil war to iraq -- triumph fore saken vietnam war 1954 to 1965. and phoenix and birds of prey and in counterterrorism in vietnam. and with that i look forward to the discussion and turn it over to you dr. moore. [applause] great. thank you very much danielle for

that kind introduction thanks john for inviting me here. great to be back at the heritage foundation. i'm going to talk about the book a little bit can't cover the whole thing in this presentation. but i'm going to hit on some of the highlights. and we'll have some time for question and answer at the end. just to -- with to provide a little bit of background the reason i wrote this book was that -- while i was at the joingt special operations university, we started a course on the history of special operations and -- discovered that there was not a single volume that we could really look to give you a history from the origins in world war ii up through the present and most of what, i think, special operations forces understood about their history is episodic and certain bits and piece but haven't been something to pull it altogether and i was reading this too special operations have become huge part of -- our overseas engagement and there's not --

i think enough understanding among the policy world about what actually they do and start off with a little bit had of intro. even in the policy world there's not too many people who i think understand what the different parts especially operations forces are so i want to talk about that for a minute. but the top there you have special operations commands u.s. socom umbrella organization for special operation forced in tampa talk about that how that came into existence. below it are the component commands within the special operations world and all of the services have them you'll up there and also jay sock second are from the right there. join special operations command which is -- comprised of operators from multiple services and again we'll get into how that is important how it came into being. and there's also a lot of confusion about what special

operations forces themselves are and a lot of it has to do with the fact that they sound like special force os. special forces are part of the army so they fall into that bucket on the left. they special operations forces of the umbrella term for everything so if you can remember special operation forces are the not same thing as special forces if. so let's -- let's start off talking about world war ii because world war ii provides the first special operation os forces and it also pave way for future force and it can trace roots back to sol degree to world war ii so special operations get going first on the u.k. side with winston churchill you know after the fall of france, the british are faced with another war against

germany, and churchill like a lot of brits does not want to fight another world war i style war where whole generation of young men are decimated so he tries to come up with some ways to get around this. one thing he tries to do is get russians to do fighting which works out pretty well. then he has this strategy of raiding germany on the periphery with this -- new organization called the commandos and lightly equipped part of that is because they lost most of their equipment behind when they took off. and -- so this is a way to kind of be doing something without getting involved in this huge slug fest on the continent. so -- once the u.s. comes in, the roosevelt administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the u.k. and one of the first opportunities that comes along is to work with these commandos had this an organization called army ranger to set up under

william orlando darby, and so they start working with commando training with the commandos, and one of the first missions that some of rangers go on is the raid at french coast which turns out to be complete disaster that germans wipe out most of the landing force and as a result of this -- disaster the allies move away from idea of raiding on the coast a it is not working that well and not doing much to hurt the access powers by doing this. so by the time rangers are really getting up to speed they're going to take part in the big campaigns of the war first in north africa. and subsequently italy and france. give you a little bit from italy and take part in the landings this this sicily and antio. initially some of their --

special training comes in handy with am amphibious landing but conventional infantry. not a lot of opportunities to sneak around the germans as there have been with some the less capable italian and french forces in north africa. when they get to antio, they are part of an early attempt to move inland which leads to the battle of sisterna where two of the ranger battalions are sent to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a german division which -- wipes them out of troops only six of them escape from that disaster and so -- this shows pretty clearly that rangers are not really capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment and so we will see them mostly get phased out over

time. and the marine corps. side we have formation of the marine corps. ratedders in january of 2042 and here president roosevelt is directly involved and he forms raiders based on advice of his advice of his son enamored of this guy evan carlson and he has a sort of romanticized view of commando and imril las running around causing problems for the japanese and marine corps. thinks it is a crazy idea and sayst there's no way we should do this but president takes advice of his son so the marine raider battalions are formed, and as with rangers they have initial successes but when -- the war becomes increasingly conventional, they endure a number of setbacks including this one in the new georgia campaign which again will lead to fazing out those units.

on navy side the frog men are created to mainly clear obstacle for am amphibious landings where the marine landing craft ran obstacles and had had their bottoms torn out. these units would go in set demolition to break away the charges and generally considered successful had many doing so. then we have the oss has its own special operations forces this is the head of the oss. and he trying to find places to put forces a lot of regional commanders don't want his people there. but he does find willing partners in the china burma india theater because there's not a lot of american forces there. and so he organized what is called attachment 101. and it was given that number

because they didn't want the enemy to know that they only had had had one unit as originally just detachment one. so they partner with the ka chen forces after treel and error actually with a lot of their initial attempts don't go well they're just not local partners they can work with. people betray them. but in -- detachment 101 does find a leader who is extremely capable and they form what's called american -- rangers, who work against japanese and scout ising breeding highly effective force. in europe oss forms units which are small three man teams that parachute in -- into the german rear to work with resistance organizations after d-day. locally they have a lot of success i think i argue we tend

to i think overestimate their effect iiveness on scale there's 222 jetburgs that go in which is much smaller than operational groups which another oss entity and small or than 15,074 in british sas and when you about this what really caused trouble l for the germans resistance is not high on the list that deception campaign that was done to mislead the germans was i think most important in terms of slowing german response and strategic bombing came in second. so thrftion some impact we overestimate the strategic impact but a lot of reverence for what we have now and a program today. so at the end of world war ii lmg all of the special organizations are disband sod

not as effective as hoped and troughing man who retains their strength because they were perceived as being especially effective. now the book has a chapter on korea which i will not cover in the interest of time but interesting stuff happens there too including army special forces but i'm going to touch on kennedy period which is next really krit are call moment on kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. and hic has a romanticized view of how much they can actually accomplish but you'll see when he comes in there's 2,000 he orders increase to 10,500 which seems great but when you're one of the problems you have with the unit is if you start to build them up rapidly you can't be quite so e elite so when had he comes in 90% of the people who try to qualify fail out.

but failing out 30% of people so you see a certain degradation of quality. you have on the navy side navy pushes for creation of the sea air, and land team seals as we know them today which started out as counterinsurgency a force. in terms of vietnam it's a mixed record of success and of some of the programs are workout pretty well and none of them are decisive becomes it does become a war by 1965. but the c.i.d.g. program which was a program working with local forces is the largest program they've ever done in pretty effective in mobilizing tribe against the enemy. so what happens next? the 70s -- there's a surge in hijacking and terrorism which

creates a lot of -- conser nation and looking for things to do looks like there could be a role for special operations to play. so -- the first thing that happenings in 1974 the rangers are brought back to life as elite counterterrorist force. but then seeing not quite elite enough so in 1977 we have delta force which is -- a army unit most elite army unit and then 1980 seal team six which is the navy's attempt to produce equivalent to delta force. so initially these are all focused on hostage rescue. the first big mission operation eagle claw in 19 l 80 delta force sent to rescue iran hostages. but they -- they send helicopters to a base called

desert one move from there, and because of mechanical problem they don't get enough helicopters there to complete the mission so they have to scratch it and when they're trying to move there's a crash between the helicopter and aircraft as a fire and eight americans are caught in the fire killed and they're not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave. so huge, huge setback. but it does lead to some reforms that are of great value to special operations forces. so the first one one of the problems identified in eagle claw was that you had an at hawk command structure it was thrown together late in the day and was not officially coordinated so this will lead to creation of jay salk who join special operations command. there's also a problem with the aircraft i mentioned aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle they brought together pilots and aircraft that wrnght familiar. so to deal request this problem

they create the night stalkers 160th special operations aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capable. and then next few years there's further reform efforts which culminate in the creation of so calm special operation os command and this is with the amendment of 1986 as a result of special operations advocates, and supporters in congress pushing for legislation. so first thing they get special operation os command as i mentioned earlier a four-star head quarters in tampa. second thing is assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict, and this gives special operation os a presence inside the pentagon where budget battle and other things go on where it is useful to have a player at

that level. and msp11 major force program 11 which is a separate funding line that special operation torps that felt like they were not getting their share of resources forthly they get a set of nine missions that are said to be special operations and specialty. so it seems coming out of this like special operations have finally gotten what they need. they've got great things going for them. but not as rosy as one might hope. click this by the way the guy on the right in that picture is not clark griswald that is the haircut but that is senator nun. is here question go. went too far. so we get to desert storm 1990, and the commander of central command which is one of the regional imt and commands and on

the right we have charl steiner who is commander of so come and he did not give the actual authority over presidents forces that are deploy sod that authority resides with the regional commander in this case general schwartz, so it's up to socom to make the case that these forces are actually valuable and so steiner goes to him and pleads with him to give his forces opportunity to attack part in the operation but not known for particularly liking special operations forces and eppedz up not giveing them many important missions and so the -- guys are stuck on the bench with support units not getting to do a lot of cool stuff they were hopeing to do. so the next event for special operations is 9/11.

important for all americans but perhaps for no one more important than for america's special operations forces. we have shortly after the attack president bush is trying to figure out a way to get back at the taliban. so he sends in the c.i.a. and army special forces to work with the northern alliance that rebel group fighting against the taliban on this is -- this picture is some of the special forces who go in on horseback and rides around with northern alliance people. and the americans actually are not at all prepared for afghanistan. they have -- special operators a siphon this mission are all fliewngt in arabic and french because they thought middle east missions but they have one skill that turns out to be really crucial that's the ability to guide emissions so they help northern alliance over quickly overcome taliban resistance defeat the taliban,

and throw them out chase al qaeda out. and this is -- seen i think rightly as the host single most strategically important role that special operations forces have played. now not too long after we have another regime to take down in iraq and there's initially some talk that we're going to -- use something similar to afghanistan a very soft, heavy force of elite units moving around blowing things up with laser -- precision guided missiles. but they figured out that it is actually not a big resistance movement that disam has more forces and comes mainly from southeast from kuwait but does it play a significant role in diversion their operations in the west they set up a -- a tank unit that is designed to make it look like there's a lot more tanks coming in a north soft

support kurds which forces had him to move to the west and north and away from the defensive baghdad. so works out pretty well for soft here too. now, as we all know the difficult part in iraq and afghanistan was not taking regime down but figuring out what happened afterwards and immediate afterhat of iraq we saw chaos and insurgency that is fueled by saddam hussein baath party and so special operations are called many to do man hunting and specifically to find and his sons they do eventually track down both of them here's sue dam after he's captured by the special operators and hoped initially that sort of decapitation strike is going to put a lid on the uncertainty that it is going to fall apart now that saddam is gone.

but unfortunately there are others who are are ready and willing to take up the charge and so we then find ourselves in a prolonged incampaign and around this timing we have mcchrystal coming in as a jay saw commander, and task force 714 is the -- task purse set new iraq and at the time it was not a particularly active and there's still a lot of people that thought elite forces should not be daily operations and focus only on big target. mcchrystal decides that -- we can't do that. saddam shown that will not work so he -- looks for ways to ramp up their operation and does so effectively and only ten operation os per month when he comes in 2004. it goes up to 300 in 2006.

this is made possible in communication technology and also bit fact that iraqis are using cell phone and computers without a lot to the fact that they're getting intercepted so quite impressive and people think this scale we can, in fact, destroy the insurgency. we also a have -- on the white soft side and this another term that will people sometimes get confused about but white soft are bairvegly the operators who are not part of jay soft so mainly special forces and navy s.e.a.l.es at this time. but they also decide that they want to do this surgical strike precision ride go out and haul down bad guys in the middle of the night and this is a move away from their traditional, more traditional role of working with local force local populations. and we'll come under fire from a number within the community for taking them away from that.

so what we think of typically of working with local forces to secure the population is wail done mainly by conventional forces and we'll see over time there is better collaboration between special operations and general purpose forces or o gpf as we call them because initially -- a lot of soft are running arranged doing stuff by themselves and thinking this wassing going to win the war and pissed off conventional comangders who have to go in the next morning to explain to the population what had happened. and clean up the mess -- over time they learned to actually work together and that what they did could be mutually reenforcing and a myth that you don't immediate to actually capture to kill the enemy i think that's false but you have sort of a division of labor where the special operators would go in and do cast and killing of a leadership target while the conventional forces

would do more population security they go in and stir up who hornet nest and reveal target so only through that combination 2007, 2008 that you actually suppress. so after that happens we move our military center of gravity to afghanistan and special operations continue to do the targeted killing and capture missions but they also decided to time to do more of the traditional working with populations type mission. and so they coming up with village stability operations in which a lot of the soft units go out o and live in swirl is lags and they work with these so-called afghan local police which are locally recruited policeman who -- are extended to keep the taliban

out and free to look online, but to sum that up briefly it was -- it was relatively effective depending a lot on the local afghan by it was never of a scale of big muff to fundamentally tilt the scale of the war not like the sons of iraq gulls because it was not done in enough -- villages. now another thing that what is is bin laden gets killed by navy s.e.a.l.s. from jay sock and seems to be, you know -- obviously very gratifying for americans to get rid of this guy. but there are turns out didn't work as well strategically as we hoped but a big backlash which results in whole bunch of special operators getting kicked out of pakistan in areas where we wanted them to target -- they shutdown our drone base there.

and bin laden has produced enough liewngts and spread them out that the organization can survive. it also promotes for a time that administration will count aspect and creates idea that we can win strategically with these raids we don't need the big counterinsurgency mission or other type of things so this then leads to what is known as the light footprint strategy where we pull out our convention forces in rk iraq and afghanistan and i argue both cases result for catastrophic. ..

for the rest of the presentation but i will cover these. these are the big takeaways from the book that are relevant to today and we have a new administration which like most does not have particularly good understanding of the subject. we are fortunate that it does have several senior military people who do understand these issues quite well. the first of the four main that the book covers question of presidential leadership and the first i want to make on that is

as presidents oftentimes are very interested but usually don't know very much and when they don't know much they oftentimes expect too much or expect the wrong things. there are other presidents that have come to office without an interest but in our world actually they are oftentimes situations extended to special operations may be the only option. carter had hostages worse than no -- if clinton had hostages. we also see presidents can lose interest very quickly especially if they have these unrealistic expectations and then they go and find out things didn't work out as well as planned. somalia is an example where clinton thought we could take out the ied quickly and once that didn't work either loses interest in special operations. the other point i would mention is that soft offers the

president to do partisan political purposes. you can hide what you are doing more easily than other instruments and so for example in vietnam we use them hit the enemy quietly because it was an election year and he didn't want yet non-to attract too much attention and so i think that's something we need to be very careful of. the second of the scenes in the book are roles and missions of special operations forces. the book traces over time how these have evolved oftentimes ending up doing things that they were not at all prepared for the even with the creation of socom they still have to show they are relevant to the policymakers in the regional commanders so they have to keep reinventing themselves. we also find when we get two wars oftentimes there are new things that have to be done that

they were prepared for to maintain a degree of flexibility counterinsurgency is one of the more controversial areas in terms of what soft can and should be doing. there are a lot of people that say it's a thing of the past. we didn't like it in iraq and afghanistan but we find as a nation we are oftentimes fighting wars we didn't plan on. also a lot of the counter in insurgency operations can be used in supporting an insurgency is which is something we argue right now in countries and lastly the question of capacity building or training and assisting partners is something i think clearly it will continue to do peer their size and appetite to have other people do difficult things rather than sending our people to do it themselves. the third theme is effectiveness

a lot of controversy about it especially when you get to the strategic level which is less clear and it's easy to tell whether you capture a target or whatever but when you get to the strategy there's a lot more leeway for interpretation. one point i would make is local actors and most of these conflicts play a huge role which sometimes we think the americans are the ones who will decide things but usually depends mainly on the local people and if we can support and help certain people but if you don't have a strong allies to begin with you are going to get very far. also when you think about effectiveness to think about whatever cost to your conventional forces when you move when you move them to the special operations forces. their plan makes a strategic impact is going to be limited

usually by scale. you simply can't produce enough special operations forces to have an impact on their own and this is worth remembering because there's a tendency to think special operations can be strategically effective we think we usually try to reach too far. a last point one theme of the book is the relationship between special operations forces in the conventional military forces and this has been a problem from the very beginning. part of it is simply human nature. when you have one organization that is touted as being special and it goes around deploying people from various places you will create resentment in the rest of your station. but it's also not just simply a matter of jealousy. there is a valid argument to be made and it's often made by

special forces that a few police forces out of employer talent out of one party organization and focus them here that the rest of the organization is going to suffer. you are going to have the leaders or the ngo's you might need and so that's something that's worth bearing in mind as we think about the way forward. conventional forces may not be in high demand now but there's a good chance we may need them for something, otherwise we probably would still have them so we have got to take a long-term approach. if you think about expanding it continues to be a temptation to expand soft. there were 38,002,001 that we are now 70,000 and i think we need to be careful. we have so deluded art talent pool and some of the services that it's not a wise idea to move them any further. the last point i would make in general soft conventional forces

are most effective when they work in tandem together and this is something that depends on leadership on both sides and that is one of the points i hope to get across in the book so thank you very much for your attention and i will not take some questions. >> thank you so much for that very thorough and intriguing discussion. he would like to take some q&a. if you would please state your name in any institutional affiliation and please wait for the microphone when you are called upon and if i could as the first question mark, you talked about president clinton getting disenchanted with special operations after with somalia. i'd be curious to region that's becoming hotter in the current sphere. what was the role of special

operations in the balkans in the u.s. and nato involvement there? thank you. >> yes, a great question. we are called upon to work with communities in the balkans trying to maintain the peace and they could also use some of the targeted raids and there weren't killings going on at the time. a big point they took away from the balkans experience was to help them develop their ability to work with local communities. something seen as a strength of special operations they seem to get away from an iraq when there were so much focus on the precision strike that this has been something when you get back to your stability operations program in 2010 a lot of that experience in the balkans is something that helps them develop their skills to go into

an unfamiliar environment to understand the population how to identify some of the four roland informal leaders and to work with us. >> i am greg formerly of usaid five years iraq, congo etc.. looking forward and thinking about the challenges that we will face particularly in the war on terror, how do you view the role of the special operations and special forces in dealing with the outcome of the conflict? nadia chad low has a great new book on that. you've probably seen or heard or read her talk about it. one of the things that's lacking in the way we planned and

executed our wars is that we haven't given enough attention to managing it for a successful total outcome among the population and in the countries affected by the war. as a former usaid guy and having served close to the special forces and other operations on the military side how do you view the potential and the opportunity and risk of dealing with what happens after the war from a special forces perspective and from the perspective of a possible relationship between the special forces, usaid or state or other aspects of the civilian government? thank you. >> yes, a great question. nadia is a very good friend. she was instrumental in setting up the center for military diplomatic and now she's writing national security strategy at the white house.

i fully agree with her book. we do in general tend to underestimate the challenges that we are going to run into. part of it is traditionally you expect civilians to do it but we don't really have civilian capacity to do it. the book i wrote before this which i spoke about at heritage i went into more detail on this. one of the big problems we encounter is that we don't get a holistic view of stability in these countries and the big factors we focus on our security , governance and development. when we look at it as a government, security, development has been usaid and the governance kind of gets lost in the shuffle because we don't really have a focus on out so that is a big area where i think we need to improve and i think

the military has a role to play there. i think civil affairs can do a lot their third special operations can play a certain role but i think there's an issue of scale. there's so much that they have to do that their ability to work in nonsecurity fields is somewhat limited. what i argue it is in terms of long-term capacity where special operations have made the most difference is where they have taken the role of long-term leadership and development, columbia being the prime example where special operations when then and works with the central training and education institutions of those countries and that's how you develop a cadre of leaders over the long-term. you have got to do it when they are in the military academy because that's when you can really affect culture which i think is a critical degree. you go out and some guy can train people on the shotgun for

the rifle range which we do a lot of the long-term value of that is big so i certainly think we need to think more strategically, more in the long term because as you point out it's a lot easier to change a regime than to establish something in its place and given where things stand in the middle east we are going to be a nap business for a long time. there is certainly a temptation to continue the whack-a-mole approach where operations are going in and killing terrorists and failing states but i think we have seen we can do that over and over but it's very unlikely you are going to solve a the problem that way. you do have to come up with ways to develop the governance and the security and at the same time you need the development part of it which will ultimately allow those countries to fund

their own government security so we are not there forever. >> dan roper association united states army. could you comment a little bit more mark on the integration of soft general purpose forces so they can achieve that lasting stability because everywhere we look we see the whack-a-mole extension. we focus on a problem and we think everything is perfect and we leave it in the problem comes back because the underlying causes have not been addressed. at the political level and that the military level and integration of diplomacy defense and development we don't have our eyes focused on that long ball. the integration and balance between what the specialists guys think only soft can do or can do better and what

conventional forces are that line seems to be blurred and there's recognition that there's something wrong but i don't see anybody actually acting to fix that or raise that issue so anything you could say on that would be appreciated. >> that question of the overlapping of missions has been there from the beginning and they tried to serve dla with this. we are bringing in special operations in the set of missions. that's what they do. everybody else does something else but in reality it's never quite played out that way partly because of circumstances. the conventional military didn't want to do counterinsurgency particularly, certainly the army but when you get to iraq or afghanistan this scale, those guys have to start doing things that we thought software going to do and the soft may do things that you could argue conventional forces could do. certainly when it went into iraq it was not well thought through how this was all going to come

together and special operators were a lot of times doing their own thing. and any organization people tend to not want to follow someone else's lead. they would rather do what they like to do but we have seen, we have learned counterinsurgency, unity of command is really important. you have people going into an area arresting people are shooting people at may just erupts once and the commander in that area is trying to accomplish. i think we have learned, we have gained awareness of that in the latter years of iraq and afghanistan. there was a lot better cooperation between the soft element and the conventional elements. there is an attempt which i go through in the book, socom's special operations command has sometimes wanted to gain independence from the original combatant commanders and actually rumsfeld pushed this

early on and try to get socom to essentially become independent man hunting command and socom at the time punted some of that to jsoc so jsoc to a degree took that on. you had other socom commanders come in particularly at roma craven who wanted to actually get to that point of having seccombe independent or having more independence and deciding where to put his forces and that ended up generating resentment among the combatant commanders and congress and it ultimately failed. there is an enduring problem. you could search by argue that there is value to having forces that transcend all the regional commands which is the argument mcraven is making. al-qaeda crosses combatant commander boundaries and we have

heard talk about possibly changed where we won't have the regional commands. i think the regional command in general make sense in terms of maintaining that unity of command. in terms of integrating better i think that is certainly something that needs to be further explored. just a couple weeks ago general thomas was a congress saying how his special operators are getting burned out because their 8000 who are actually doing most of the operational missions and to keep sending the same people over and over while at the same time a lot of our conventional forces -- we are getting to see a shift on this. syria and somalia we are sending conventional forces there and i would argue conventional forces can do most of these things. soft tries to claim them as their exclusive purview but there's an interest into what

the general purpose forces doing more of this stuff because if you look at a lot of these people have more than 10 deployments have mental health robinson divorce, and suicide are increasing. so is general thomas says it's not sustainable. the administration hopefully we'll figure out a better way to spread some of the burdens of these low intensity wars across the area. >> you commented recently on the village stability operations and local police. as i recall you said it was viewed as something that was rather successful. my experience was that really led nicely into the office of transition initiatives from the regular aib programs looking at

the whole territory you are trying to mpac. what likelihood do you think there is that those models of vso and alp would he viewed as important tools and be expanded because back? >> yeah it's a great question. we just had a usaid administrator mark gren which with a very exciting development of a pinky in particular recognizes the value of programs like this and that they do cost the security and government development nexus. my sense is he will be quite interested but i think there's a general perception among this administration that we have tried too much to treat development in isolation and we need to type her closely to our broader object gives, to our national interests.

i think certainly within the special operations community there is quite a bit of interest in the general concept of village stability operations in the afghan local police and at the same time there is also this pressure to keep doing these surgical strike type operations. i think it's going to depend on high-level leadership and the frustration and how much they want to do this. there are countervailing forces right now better arguing against anything that sounds like nation-building. my own view is we are are ready and mashed in nation building in many places and we'll be doing it to some extent, we can do it more smartly in certain respects the other thing you have to keep in mind is, i was doing work with socom in the aftermath of vso and alp and there are lots

of than special operations who wanted to take that model to other countries but they ran into a lot of trouble first from the state department which didn't necessarily like bringing military people into some of these areas. i think some of that was undue suspicion of the military. there are a lot of people who believe that the military can worsen problems of governance and security which i think is actually not at all the case. in many countries the military has been at the forefront of improvements in columbia and el salvador great examples of that. the afghan army was the best institution they had. you have that and then you also had some local governments some that don't want to let you in to do that. i think we are also getting our state department set up at the

moment but i'm guessing they will be more receptive to expanding and areas of this type of war. >> a final question. >> if i could ask a final question. can you talk about the role that technology has played in the development of special forces and whether or not strategic adversaries and special forces gain increased technology and how that has changed the u.s. effectiveness of our forces? >> technology was critical in the first decade of this century. first would be precision munitions. that really enables special forces to defeat the taliban in a way that few people thought possible and a small number of our troops with the precision's munitions capabilities.

the northern alliance with four years have been able to make any headway on it and it's also critical when you get to iraq and afghanistan counterinsurgency where you would never have been able to do these massive industrial scale raids under earlier technology. in vietnam we tried to do things like this but the reality was you couldn't, you just couldn't get information quickly enough to get people where they needed to be in by the time he you actually got there the enemy would be gone. when you suddenly have cell phones and laptop computers proliferating in iraq and people are all using those and have the ability to use that to find people, so things could have been very different in iraq without that. i think more recently it seems like, certainly we saw that to some extent in places like syria

but our enemies do seem to be catching on and they have become more careful in using and kirk chen and other means to hide what they are doing. we used to have drones and some of our enemies are using drones against us. smaller adversaries are getting better at cyber warfare too so i think their edge has eroded. i think in terms of what special operations forces do it's hard to say because we don't know what the next conflict will be. you are talking about conventional war we could easily with north korea or i ran or possibly china. those forces will have different types of technologies that we probably didn't anticipate. i think the brushfire wars in the middle east we will probably be using an edge but it seems

like we are not going to necessarily solve any of these problems direct technological superiority. >> thank you dr. moyer and thank you to the heritage foundation. this is posted on our web page within 24 hours in their copies available of doctors moyar's but in the lobby and i'm sure he'd be happy to sign those for anyone who would like to after the program. if you can please join me in a round of applause for doctors moyar in that first discussion. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> would the's on your bookshelf right now? >> i read a lot about the future of the economy as you talk about and frankly i am doing more of my reading unfortunately just because the cybermoment we are at. i'm reading a lot of intelligence products but at home one of the things we are doing is my wife has become obsessed with totalitarianism in the last year. start with north korea and anxiety. she started reading a whole bunch of other things about north korea and started reading them to our kids. shane whitling o