send us your summer reading list by a twitter at book tv or instagram at bookótv or posted to our facebook page, facebook.com/book tv. tv on c-span2: television for serious readers. >> good morning, welcome to the heritage foundation and the douglas and sarah allison auditorium. welcome to those joining us on our heritage.org website and on c-span tv. for those and ask how we would ask our mobile devices have been silenced or turned off. for those wanting online or in the future you are welcome tosend questions or comments , see simply emailing speaker@heritage.org. we will host a program on the heritage home page for everyone to reference. leading our discussion is daniel curtis, danielle is

our policy analyst in european affairs and the margaret thatcher center for freedom, he focuses on transatlantic security issues. his writings featured in real clear world, foxnews.com, breitbart .com and he's provided analysis in over 100 radio and television appearances. he has also served as a panelist at the transatlantic think tank conference in brussels belgium and provided parliamentary evidence to the uk house of lords select committee on the arctic. prior to joining us at the batter center he worked at a nonprofit in washington dc as a policy analyst as well as on the advisory board of a company as both a research associate and associate director. join me in welcoming daniel coaches. [applause] >> thank you john and good morning everybody on this beautiful wednesday in washington. we are honored to be joined by mark moyar whose book "oppose any foe: the rise of america's special operations

forces" was described by national review as an invaluable and highly readable overview of special operations forces history, not just for those who are newly joining its ranks but also for anyone who seeks to know more about these glamorous and little understood forces.our author mark moyar is director for the center of military and diplomatic history in washington dc. he has served as professor at the us marine corps university and a senior fellow at the joint special operations university. he is advised the senior leadership of several us military commands as well he holds a ba , loud from harvard and phd from hamburg. in addition to the book we are talking about today he has also written a number of other works including 84

elites, building partner nation and ending poverty through human capital which i read in grad school. tragic failure, how president obama's drone warfare defense cuts and military amateurism had imperiled america. a question of command: after insurgency from the civil war to iraq. trial or second, the vietnam war 1964 to 1965 in phoenix and the birds of prey: counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in vietnam and with that i look forward to your discussion and i will turn it over to you doctor moyer . [applause] >> great. thank you very much daniel for that kind introduction, thank you john for inviting me here. 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 will have time for question and answer at the end. i just would provide a little background. the reason i wrote this book

was as a joint special operations university, we started on the history special operations and discovered that the engagement. and there's not enough understanding among the policy world of what actually they do. i'm going to start off by a little bit of intro. even in the policy world there's not too many people who i think understand what the different parts of special operations forces are so i want to talk about that for a minute.

at the top you have special operations command, us so, and that is the umbrella organization for special operations forces located in tampa and i will talk about how that came into existence. although it are the component commands within the special operations world and all the services have them, you will see them up there and there's also jsoc, joint special operations command which is comprised of multiple services and we will get into how that is important and how it came into being. and there's also a lot of confusion about what special operations forces themselves are. and a lot of this has to do with the fact that they sound like special forces. special forces are part of the army so they fall into that bucket on the left. special operations forces is the umbrella term for everything. one thing from the thought, remember special operations

forces are not the same as special forces. so let's start off talking about world war ii because world war ii provides the impetus for special operations forces and it also paves the way for future forces because most of what we see today can trace its roots back to some degree to world war ii. the special operations get going first on the uk side with winston churchill. after the fall of france, the british are faced with another war against germany. churchill like a lot of rich does not want to fight the world war i style war where a whole generation of young men are decimated. he tries to come up with ways to get around this. one thing you guys is to try to get the russians to do a

lot of fighting which ends up working well but he had this energy of rating germany on the periphery with this new organization called the commandos and they are lightly. >> ,part of that is because they left both of their equipment behind in dunkirk when they took off. so this is a way to kind of be doing something without getting involved in this huge lovefest on the continent. once the us comes in, the roosevelt administration decides it wants to try to get more involved with the uk and one of the first opportunities that comes along is to work with these commandos in an organization called the army rangers is set up underwilliam orlando darby . and they start working with commandos, they are training with commandos and one of the first missions the rangers go on is the raid on the french coast which turns out to be a complete disaster. the germans wipe out most of thelanding force . as a result of this disaster,

the allies move away from this idea of rating on the coast because it's not working that well and be, they're not doing much to hurt the axis powers by doing this. so by the time the rangers are really getting up to speed they are going to take part in the big campaigns of the war, first in north africa and subsequently italy and france. to give you a little bit from italy, in italy they take part in the major landings in sicily and then salerno and anzio. initially some of their special training comes in handy the activity plantings but once they get ashore, they end up fighting primarily as intentional infantry. there's not a lot of opportunity to sneak around germans as there had been with some of the less capable italian and french forces they dealt with in north africa. when they get to anzio, they are part of an early attempt to move inland which leads to

the battle of sizer not on january 30, 1944 where two of the ranger battalions are said to take this town and they run unexpectedly into a german division which completely wiped them out. out of 767 troops only six of them escape from that disaster. so this shows pretty clearly that the rangers are not really capable of fighting this conventional war based on their equipment. we will see them mostly get phase out over time. and the marine corps side we have the formation of the marine corps raiders. in january 1942 and here at president roosevelt is directly involved and the forms these raters based on the advice of his son, james who is a union marine officer. who is enamored of this guy

carlson was shown in the other picture with miles a tongue and he has this sort of romanticized view of commandos and gorillasrunning around solving problems with the japanese. the marine corps commandant , when he hears of this thinks it's a crazy idea and said there no way we should do this . but the president take the advice of his son so marine rater battalions are formed. and as with the 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 ultimately to phasing out those units. on the navy side, the fraud men are created. >> to mainly get a clear obstacle for amphibious landings, there's a fossil where marine landing craft into obstacles and had their bottom sport out. and this would go in, set demolition us to break away the charges and we were

generally considered successful in doing so. then we also have within world war ii the oss has its own special operations forces. this is william j donovan, the head of the oss . he trying to find places to put forth a lot of the regional commanders don't want his there but he does find willing partners in the china burma india theater, partly because there's not a lot of american forces there. so he organizes what's called the detachment 101. >> and it was given that number because they didn't want the enemy to know that they only had one unit, it was just detachment one so they partner with the kitchen forces after some trial and error, there's a lot of their initial attempts don't go well. there's not local partners they can work with. people betray them but in detachment 101 does find a

chin who is extremely capable and they found the american kitchen rangers who work together with more conventional units against the japanese scouting and breathing highly effective forces. >> in europe the oss forms gender units which are small three-man teams that their huge into the german rear to work with the resistance. the organizations after the game.the locally they had a lot of success. i argue there that i think they overestimate their effectiveness on strategic scale. if you look at this short, there's only 222 genders that go in. it's much smaller than the operational groups, that's another oss entity and most of those are smaller than the

1574 in the british sas. and when you think about what really caused trouble for the germans, the resistance is not high on the list. the deception campaign done to mislead the germans was i think the most important in terms of lowering the german response and strategic bombing came in second. there was some impact but i think we can to overestimate the strategic impact but there's still only a lot of reverence for this divergence that we now have a program today. the end of world war ii, almost all of the special operations forces are disbanded and a lot of this has to do with the fact that they didn't turn out as effectively has been hoped. only the frogman retained some of their strength, because they were perceived as being especially effective. now the book goes into a whole chapter on korea which i'm not going to cover just in the interest of time a lot of interesting stuff happens there including the formation of the army special forces

but i'm going to touch on the kennedy. because this is the next critical. kennedy is a huge fan of the special forces. the i think as a romanticized view of how much they can accomplish. when he comes in there's 2000, the orders and increase to 10,500. which seems great but one of the problems you have with allegiances is if you start to build them up rapidly you can't be quite so elite so when he comes in, 90 percent of the people who try to qualify out. but in order to reach the expansion they are only failing out 30 percent of the people so you do see acertain degradation of quality . you have on the navy side, kennedy pushes for the creation of the sierra land teams or seals as we know them todaywhich originally started out as a counterinsurgency , marine counterinsurgency force.

in terms of vietnam, it's a mixed record of success and failure. some of the programs worked out pretty well but none of them are strategically decisive because it does become a conventional war by 1965 but the cibc program in particular which was a program working with local forces is the largest program they ever done and effective in mobilizing tribes against the enemy. so what happens next, in the 70s, there's a surgeon hijacking and terrorism. which creates a lot of consternation and as the military is coming out of vietnam and looking for things to do, this is something it seems will like where there could be a role in special operations to play. so the first thing that happens, in 1974 the rangers are brought back to life, the meat counter terrorist force.

then they are seen as not being early enough so in 1977 we have delta force which is an army unit, the most elite are unit and in 1980 we see field team six which is the navy's attempt to produce an equivalent to delta force. initially these are all focused on hostage rescue. the first big mission, operation eagle fall in 1980 with delta force is set to rescue the iran hostages. >> they said helicopters to a baseball desert one, they're supposed to move from there to iran but the mechanical problems and other problems, they don't get enough helicopters there. to complete the mission so they have to scratch it and they try to move in there's a crash between the helicopter and aircraft. there suppliers and eight americans are caught in the

fire, killed and they are not able to retrieve their bodies before they have to leave so it's a 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 eagleclaw was that you had an ad hoc command structure . which was thrown together late in the day and was not sufficiently coordinated so this will lead to the creation of aesop, joint special operations command. there's also a problem with the aircraft, aircraft failure is pivotal in this debacle. they brought together pilots and aircraft that were familiar so to deal with this problem they create the next offers, the hundred 50th navy special operations aviation battalion to give them a dedicated air capability. >> and the next few years there's further reform efforts which culminate in the creation of so calm, special operations command. this is with the non-: amendment of 1986. it's the result of special

operations advocates. and their supporters in congress pushing for legislation. so the first thing that they get is socom special operations command which is a four star headquarters in. they have the second thing they get is soul which is assistant secretary of defense for special operations low intensity conflict. and this gives national operations a presence inside the pentagon where budget battles and other things go on. which are useful to have. >> an employer at that level. the first thing is nfpa 11, major force program 11 which is a separate funding line or special operators that they were not getting their share of resources. fourthly they get a set of nine missions that are said to be special operations specialties. so it seems coming out of this like special operations

have finally what they need, they got all these great things going for them. but it turns out it's not quite as rosy as one might hope. >> i was going to say, the guy on the right, it's not what griswold, he has the clark griswold haircut but that is senator nunn. so here we go. >> so okay. you get to desert storm, 1990. general sports cop is on the left, the commander of central command which is one of the regional combatant commands and on the right you have general carl steiner who is the commander of so calm. one of the things not going to do was give so calm actual authority over the forces that are deployed. authority still resides with regional commander, in this case general schwarzkopf so so calm, that makes a case to

schwarzkopf that these forces are actually valuable. so steiner goes to schwarzkopf, pleads with him to give his forces the opportunity to take part in operation schwarzkopf. >> not known for particularly liking special operations forces, he ends up not getting any important missions so the summer, guys feel like this at the end, kind of stuff on the bench with support units, not getting to do a lot of cool stuff they were hoping to do. so the next seminal event for special operations is 911. important for all americans but for absolutely no one more important than for america's special operations forces. he has shortly after the attack, president bush is trying to figure out a way to get back at the man. so he says in the cia and army forces to work with the northern alliance. >> a group fighting against

the taliban. this is this picture, some of the special forces who go in on horseback and ride around with the alliance. >> the americans actually are not at all prepared for afghanistan. they have the special operators assigned to this mission are all fluent in arabic and french because they thought they were going to be on middle east missions but they do have one skill that's really crucial and that the ability to guide the missions. so they help the northern alliance over quickly overcome the talent and resistance. to defeat the taliban. and throw them out, chase out by now and this is seen i think rightly as the most single most strategically important role that special operations forces have played. >> and not too long thereafter we got another regime we want to take down in a rack and there's initially some talk that we are going to use something similar to afghanistan, very

soft and heavy force of the elite units moving around. blowing things up with lasers , precision guided missiles but they figure out that it's not a big resistance movement, they saddam hussein has a lot more voices so it is a large conventional offensive and it becomes mainly from the southeast, from kuwait , but soft does play a significant role in diversionary operations in the west, they set up a tank unit that is designed to make it look like there'sa lot more tanks coming . and in the north, they support the kurds which forces saddam to move some of his forces to the west ,north , away from the defense of baghdad so it works out pretty well for soft too. as we all know, the difficulty in iraq and afghanistan was not taking the regime down but figuring out what happenedafterwards and in the immediate aftermath of iraq , but chaos

and there's this rise of an insurgency that is fueled by saddam hussein's baptist party. so socom are called into man hunting and specifically to five saddam and his son. they do track down most of them. there's saddam after he is captured by the special operators. and it's hope initially that this sort of decapitation strike is going to put a lid on the insurgency that is going to fall apart now that saddam is gone but unfortunately there are others who are ready and willing to take up the charge so we find ourselves in a prolonged insurgency campaign . and around this time we have general stanley mcchrystal coming in is as a jsoc commander, task force 714 is the task force he sets up in iraq.

and at the time, it was not particularly active and there's still a lot of people who thought that elite forces should not be doing daily operations. they should focus only on the big targets. mcchrystal decided that we can't do that and saddam has shown it's not going to work so he looks for ways to ramp up their operations and does so very effectively. there are originally 10 operations per month and when he comes in 2004 goes up to 302,000 in 2006 and this is made possible by advances in communications technology. also by the fact the iraqis are using cell phones and computers without a lot of thought as to the fact that they are getting intercepted quite impressive and a lot of people think atthis scale we can in fact destroy the insurgency . we also have on the right side, this is another term that people get confused

about but there's white sox are the operators were not part of jsoc so is mainly special forces, navy seals at this time. they also decide that they want to do this searchable strike precision raid, go out and call down bad guys in the middle of the night and this is to move away from their traditional role of working with local forces, local population and it will come under fire from a number of the community or taking them away from that. the, so what we think of counterinsurgency typically of working with local forces to secure the population is done mainly by national forces. we will see over time , there is better collaboration between vessel operations and general-purpose forces, or

gps as we call them because initially, a lot ofthe software running around doing things by themselves, thinking this was going to win the war . they pissed off a lot of the conventional commanders were the ones who had to go in the next morning and explained to the population what had happened. clean up the mess. but over time they learned to worktogether . and what they did could be mutually reinforcing. and there's a myth and counterinsurgency that you don't need to actuallycapture or kill the enemy and i think that's false but you had a division of labor , and special operators would go in and do the capturing and killing of leadership targets while the conventional forces would do more population security. they go in and stir up a hornets nest and revealed targets. and it's only really through that combination in 2007, 2008 that you depress the insurgency. >> so after that happens, we move our military center of gravity to afghanistan. and special operations continues to do the targeted

killing and capture missions. but they also decide it's time to do more of the traditional working with populations type missions. and so they come up with village state ability operations in which a lot of the soft unit go out and live in villages and work with these so-called afghan local police which are locally recruited policemen who are basically intending to secure their villages and keep the town out. and i read a whole separate study on this which you are free to look at online but some of that design that briefly, it was relatively effective, although again, it depended a lot on the local afghans but it was never a scale that was big enough to fundamentally kill the scale of the war. it was not like the sons of iraq just because it was not done in enough villages. >> another thing that happens

while all this is going on is bin laden gets killed by a navy seal, socom. and it seems to be obviously very gratifying for americans to get rid of this guy but there are it turns out it didn't quite work as well strategically as we hope. there's a big backlash in pakistan for the violation of their airspace which results in a whole bunch of special operators getting kicked out of pakistan from areas where there's insurgents, we wanted them to target. they shut down a drum base there. >> and al qaeda continues on. bin laden by this time has produced enough lieutenants and spread them out that the organization can survive. and it also promotes for a time, in the administration, it counts the positive aspects and creates this idea that we can win strategically with these rates, we don't need the big counterinsurgencymissions or

other type of things . so this then leads to what is known as the light footprint strategy. where we pull out our conventional forces in iraq and afghanistan and i argue in both cases the results were catastrophic. iraqi saw the rise of isis, and in afghanistan we saw large amounts of territory that we had previously helped take in libya, our unwillingness to commit forces there leads to benghazi and civil war and lots of other things. in yemen our surgical strike results in the upc taking over and wiping out our whole intelligence special operations apparatus there. the last few slides here don't have any cool pictures and a little bit more of the policy conclusions, a little bit drier. i put them at the end you

were awake for the rest of the presentation but i will cover these. these are some of the big takeaways from the book that are relevant to today. we have a new administration which like most i think does not have such a good understanding of the subject although we are fortunate that it does have several senior military people who do understand these issues quite well. the first of the four main issues that the book covers is a question of presidential leadership. and the first point i want to make on that is that presidents often times are very interested but usually don't know very much and when they don't know very much, they oftentimes spec you much more expect the wrong things. there's other presidents that have come to office without that same interest but in our world, they are oftentimes situations being as extended as we are, where special operations may be the only option so you ran hostages, clinton with ammonia.

>> second of the themes of the book

is the rules and missions of special operations forces and traces over time have these evolved often times and things that they were not prepared for and even with the creation of silicon, they still have to show that they are relevant to policymakers, original commanders and have to keep reinventing themselves from a healthy process. when we get to wars, often times there's new things that have to be done that they weren't prepared for. you have to maintain a degree of flexibility. counterinsurgency is one of the most controversial areas in terms of what can and should be doing. there's a lot of people who say things we didn't like in iraq and afghanistan, but we find as a nation we are often times fighting wars we didn't plan.

a lot of the countersurgency capabilities you want -- can also be used in supporting insurgencies which is something we are doing right now in countries. lastly, the question is capacity building or training and assistant partners is something clearly will continue to do because other people do difficult things rather than sending our people to do it. third theme is effectiveness. a lot of controversy about how effective specially when you get to strategic level where it's less clear and tell whether you captured target or destroyed whatever. when you get to strategy there's a lot more leeway. one point i would make is that the local actors in most of these conflicts play a huge role and we sometimes think americans

are the ones who decide things but dependent on the local people and we can support help certain people but if you don't have strong ally to begin with, you're probably not going to get very far. you also when you think act effectiveness you have to think about what does it cost to forces when you move resources to the special forces, special operation forces. the third point i make is strategic impact is going to be limited usually by scale, you simply can't produce enough special operations forces in most cases to have a decisive impact on their own and then we keep seeing there's a tendency to think special operation can be strategically effective and when we think that, we usually try to reach too far. then the last point, last theme of the book is the relationship between the special operations

forces and conventional military force and this has been a problem from the very beginning and part of it is human nature when you have one organization that's counted as being special and goes around pulling back from various places, you will create resentment in the rest of the organization. it's not

the last point i would make in general that soft and conventional forces are usually more effective when they work in tandem together and this is something that prepares on leadership on both sides and that's one of the points i hope to get across in the book. thank you very much for your attention and i will now take some questions. >> well, thank you, thank you so much for that very thorough and intriguing discussion and we

would like to take some q&a. if you could please state your name or any institutional affiliation and wait for the microphones when you're called upon and if i could ask the first question, mark, you talked about president clinton getting disenchanted with special operations with somalia, it would be curious a region that's becoming hotter, i think, in the current sphere, what was the role of special operations in the balkans, un and nato involvement in the late 90's? >> great question. software called upon to work with communities in the balkans and tried to maintain the peace and they did targeted rates but there wasn't going killing. the big lesson they took away

from the balkans experience it helped develop ability to work with local communities. seen as strength of special operations, one that they seem to get away from in iraq when there's so much focus on the precision strike. this is something when you get in the program in 2010. a lot of them say the experience in the balkans is something that helped them develop their skill to go into an unfamiliar environment and understand population, how to identify who the formal, informal leaders are and to work with them. [inaudible]

>> iraq, congo, et cetera. looking forward and thinking about the challenges that will face particularly in the war on terror, how do you view special operation forces in dealing with the outcome of the conflict. nadia has a great book on that that you have probably seen and read and heard her talk about but one of the things last lacking in the way we plan and competent -- executed our wars we haven't given it enough attention to manage it for a successful total swrowt come among the population and in the countries affected by the war. as a former usaid guy and served in the special forces on the military side, how do you view the potential and risk in

dealing with that, what happens after the war from the special forces perspective and from the perspective from the possible relationship between the special forces usaid or state or other aspects to have civilian environment in. >> yeah, great question. nadia is a good friend. i fully gee with her book, we do in general tend to underestimate the challenges that we are going to run into and part of it is traditionally dod is expected the civilians to do it but we don't really have the civilian capacity to do it but i spoke about heritage, i wanted detail on this.

one of the big problems we have encountered is that we don't take a holistic view of stability in these countries and the big three sectors that we focus on are security, governance and development. if you look at it at a governance security, dod has the development it's been usaid and the governance gets lost and we don't really have agency focused on that. that's a big area we need to improve. i think military has a big role to play there. special operations can play a certain role, issue of scale. there's so much else that they have to do that their ability to work in nonsecurity field is somewhat limited. what i argue in terms of long-term capacity what special operations have made the most difference is where they have taken a role in long-term

leadership development and worked with central training institutions of those countries and that's how you develop leaders over the long term but you have to do it when they're in military academy or command staff because that's when you can actually really affect culture which is a critical ingredient and you go out and go train people on the shotgun or on the rifle range which we do a lot of, long-term value that i don't see as being -- i certainly think we need to take more strategically more in the long term because as you point out, it's a lot easier to change a regime and establish something in its place and we are going to be in that business for a long

time but -- and there's certainly temptation too where special operations are just going in and killing terrorists in the failed and failing states and we have seen that you can do that over and over but unlikely you will solve the problem that way. you have to come up with problems to develop govern ands and the security and then at the same time you need development development part of it so that we are are not on the ten forever. >> national association of army. can you comment about the integration of soft and gpf general purpose forces so they can achieve the lasting

stability, focus on a problem. we fix it and everything is perfect and we leave it and everything comes back because the roots haven't been addressed. from a political level to the military level and integration of diplomacy, defense, we don't have a focus on the long ball and integration and balance between what the specialist guys think only soft can do or can do better and what the conventional forces are, that line seems to be blurred and recognition that there's something wrong but i don't see anybody act to go fix that or raise that issue. anything you can say on that, i would appreciate it. >> yeah, overlapping of missions has been there from the beginning. they try to sort of do away with -- we are special operations, this set of missions, we know that's what they do. everybody else says something else.

in reality it's never quite played out that way probably because of circumstances. conventional insurgency and soft sometimes may do things that you could argue conventional forces could do and certainly when we went into iraq it was not well thought through how this was all going to come together and special operators were a lot of the times doing their own thing. in any organization, people tend to not want to follow someone else's authority, they would rather go do what they like to do and we've seen, we have learned counterinsurgency, unity of command is really important and if you have people going into an area and shooting people it may disrupt what the mannedder for what area is

trying to accomplish. there was a lot better cooperation between sof elements and conventional elements. special operations command has sometimes wanted to gain independence from the combative commanders, rumsfeld pushed this early on and tried to get sof to become independent main in command and so-called interested but punted some of that and so to a degree took that on, you had other commanders come in particularly admiral and

deciding where to put its forces, that ended up generating among the commanders and congress and ultimately failed but you do have -- enduring where you can argue that there's value to have and forces that transcend all of the regional commands and these guys, we heard talk about possibly change where we won't have commands. the original command and general makes sense in terms of maintaining that unity of command in terms of integrating better, it's something that need to be further explored. just a couple of weeks ago, general thomas was at congress saying how special operators are getting burned out because

there's 8,000 who are actually doing most of the operational missions and we keep sending the same people over and over while at the same time a lot of congressional forces aren't getting properly used. we are starting to see a shift on this. if you look at syria, somalia, we are sending conventional forces there and i would argue too again congressional forces can do these things but ultimately it's sof's best interest to let the general-purpose forces do more of this stuff because if you look at a lot of the guys had different deployments, mental health problems and divorce and suicide or increasing and as general thomas said it's not sustainable. this administration, i think, hopefully will figure out a better way to spread sort of the burdens of these low-intensity

wars across the broader military . >> you commented briefly on the stability operations in afghan and the local police and you thought it was viewed as something rather successful but couldn't take it to scale, my experience was that that really bled nicely into the office of transition initiatives in the regular iad programs looking at the whole territory you were trying to impact. what likelihood do you think there is that those models of bso and lp would be viewed as important roles and be expanded because of that? >> yes, great question. we just had a new administrator

nominated, mark, very exciting development and i think he in particular recognizes the value of programs like this that they do cross security development governance. i think my sense is he'll be quite interested. there's in general a perception among

massive industrial scale raids on earlier technologies. in vietnam we tried to do things like this but you couldn't -- you couldn't get information quickly enough to get people to where they needed to be.

by the time you actually got there the area would be gone. so when you suddenly have cell phones and laptop computers proliferating in iraq, people are using those and we have the capability to find people and so things have been very different in iraq without that. i think more recently it seems like -- places like syria, but our enemies do seem to be catching on and they've become more careful in using encryption, other means to hide what they're doing, now they are somewhat of our enemies are using drones against us, you know, from adversaries are getting better at cyber warfare too. i think our edge has eroded and in terms of what special operations forces do, it's --

it's hard to say too because we don't know what the next conflict -- if you're talking about conventional war, if you, we could easily see war with north korea, iran and possibly china and you will have certain technology that is we probably didn't anticipate. i think in the brush fire of the middle east we will probably maintain an edge but it seems like we are not going to necessarily solve any of these problems through our technological superiority. >> well, thank you, dr. moyar for coming to discussion today and thank you for the audience to coming to the heritage foundation. a reminder that this program was posted on our web page within 24 hours, there are also copies available of dr. moyar's book in the lobby and i'm sure that you will be happy to sign those for anyone who would like after the

program. if you can please join me in around of applause for dr. moyar and his discussion. [applause] >> thank you very much. [inaudible conversations] >> book tv recently visited capitol hill to ask members of congress what they're reading this summer. >> one that i'm currently reading and one that i'mea