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Lessons Learned (and Unlearned) from the GWOT · Net Assessment

• 0:07
  Melanie Marlowe: Hello, and welcome to Net Assessment, where we debate the hard choices facing America's national security and foreign policy communities. Today we're going to talk about Afghanistan, 25 years after 9/11 and five years after the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, what lessons have we learned about warfare? Does our experience in Afghanistan, and now in Iran, demonstrate that the American military has an outsized fixation on lethality? And to better prepare for future conflicts, how should strategists think about how adversary human networks behave? I'm Melanie Marlowe of CSIS, here with Chris Preble of the Stimson Center and Zack Cooper of the American Enterprise Institute. How are you?
• 0:45
  Chris Preble: Hello again.
• 0:47
  Zack Cooper: Welcome back, Chris.
• 0:49
  Chris Preble: I am so good. Not really.
• 0:52
  Melanie Marlowe: You look tanned, ready, rested.
• 0:54
  Chris Preble: I'm tanned. I'm rested. I'm ready. I'm back in Ashburn, which means I'm no longer in Hilton Head, so…
• 1:01
  Melanie Marlowe: Wah, wah, wah.
• 1:03
  Chris Preble: I'm sad. Wah, wah.
• 1:05
  Melanie Marlowe: I just want you to know, I was looking at plane tickets to South Carolina next January, and the flights I was looking for were $1,400. And it's all because of people like you-
• 1:19
  Chris Preble: Yeah, that's true. It's my fault.
• 1:21
  Melanie Marlowe: ... the elite from Washington that head down there on weekends and raise the rates for the rest of us.
• 1:27
  Chris Preble: Yeah. Just the jet set. Yeah, it was a nine-hour drive in my Kia, okay? So, you know.
• 1:32
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh, okay.
• 1:33
  Chris Preble: I was not flying a Learjet, okay? To the private airport, just for the record. So, yeah.
• 1:38
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, yeah. Zack, how are you?
• 1:41
  Zack Cooper: You know, ready for September to kick off. We've got a lot going on this month. We've got the UN General Assembly, 25th anniversary of 9/11. We've got a Xi-Trump summit again. It's going to be busy.
• 1:54
  Chris Preble: Busy.
• 1:54
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, it is. Lots to look forward to, or maybe be terrified of, in the coming weeks.
• 2:01
  Zack Cooper: Yes.
• 2:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, Chris, you have the floor. What are we talking about?
• 2:05
  Chris Preble: So, today we're talking about an article by Jonathan Schroden in War on the Rocks entitled "What Have We Learned from the 9/11 Wars?" Answer, "Not nearly enough." That's what Jonathan Schroden says. Jonathan is the author of the forthcoming book entitled “U.S. Counterterrorism Operations in Afghanistan: Jackpots, Dry Holes, and Collateral Damage.” Part of this article is derived from that book. I've known Jonathan now for a number of years, and I really respect him as an analyst, especially of the war in Afghanistan and the war on terror more generally, well, mostly focused on the war in Afghanistan, and that's where he uses as a sort of jumping-off point for his article. Before we get into this, I think we should frame this the way that the title of the article is framed, "What have we learned from the 9/11 wars?" And I put it to both of you, what have we as a country, what have you learned? What do you think is the most important lesson to take away? It's 25 years now. This episode will drop right before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and then the war in Afghanistan started just a few weeks after that. So, we do have now 25 years of history of fighting the wars associated with the global war on terror. And I guess part of what motivated, I think, Jonathan to write this article was his sense that we're now in the middle of a war that we are, again, losing, a war of choice in Iran, and so that's why he says that we have not learned enough. But I put it to both of you, what do you think we have learned, or we should have learned? And what is the most important lesson that we've missed?
• 3:40
  Zack Cooper: So, I have two interrelated lessons. They're a bit general. I know we're going to get more deeply into the specific lessons that Jonathan talks about in this piece. But my first lesson is: American service members have been incredibly effective and brave for 25 years, fighting a spate of conflicts that, in most cases, haven't gone particularly well, and yet where American service members have acquitted themselves amazingly. Which, oh, by the way, is basically the same story, I think, we could talk about right now in the Iran war, an institution in the U.S. military which has accepted substantial risk… Where I just was spending time today with a neighbor of mine who has been dramatically affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there are thousands and thousands of Americans who have suffered, many who have died. So, you know, I think one lesson is, the military has been pretty remarkable in fighting these conflicts, doing what the American people and their elected leaders have directed them to do. The second lesson for me is, I think we're going to look back at 9/11 as basically the high-water mark of the United States, at least in the early portion of our lifetimes. And I think we're going to see this as the beginning of a series of strategic mistakes. And it's not the first strategic mistake the United States made, right? But strategic choices that led to a much diminished United States that struggled to make strategic choices when it needed to. And this mix of tactical success and strategic failure, I think that's the big lesson of the last 25 years.
• 5:35
  Melanie Marlowe: Zack, I am glad you mentioned both parts of what you just said. I said to somebody else today that, of all the podcasts that we've done in the last eight years, look, there's a lot that I've had to study for, there's a lot where I didn't know a lot about a topic, and I really needed to prep, but I don't know if there's any that has felt to me as personally daunting as this. In a way that, as you mentioned, our service members do what they are asked to do, and they do it well, and they do it honorably, and, as you said, at high risk. There are immediate family members of mine that have served in Afghanistan. I work with many, many people that served in Afghanistan and Iraq, and whose children have served in those places, and whose children serve now in Iran. And I think that this is going to be a not-super-cheery podcast where we're going to talk about where things have gone seriously wrong. And I don't want any of that to be attributed to the people who've gone out and done the things that they have signed up to do for our country because they love this country. And I know that many of them have different feelings about this. They had different motivations to go and have gone through processes that come out on different conclusions. And so, everybody is different, so I don't want to be making assumptions about anybody else's feelings or service or anything like that. But as you said, for me, the most important lesson to come out of this is that war is a very serious business, and it is one that should be attended to with great deliberation and care. And we don't do that. And we're going to talk about how technology has changed war and how America fights war, but it also has changed how America deals with war. And we used to have a little bit, I would say, republican distance, "republican" in the small r, where our policymakers could make some choices and make hard decisions without having to be, or wanting to be, immediately responsive to the public about what was going on. Where you knew that a battle midway was happening, but you didn't know exactly what was going on, and nobody was rushing out to blame the other people for failures at that moment. Where members of Congress weren't going on their own podcasts in the moment to praise or blame or whatever. And I worry that, even with Iran, just the constant back and forth about every single thing, it makes it difficult for our policymakers to… And just because it's difficult, it doesn't excuse them. But they don't want to go on the record. They don't want to seriously commit to a course of action, whether that is to fight a war or to get out of a war. I think that technology has changed that way as well. And the other thing is, strategic drift is a real thing, and it can be a disaster. And we got to many points in the years between 2001 and 2021 where people tried to put the brakes on different projects, where our ambitions got out of whack with what we were willing to resource them for, or where there was, you know, a lack of honesty about what was going on. And that, again, oversight and process are very important to making sure that our objectives are aligned with what our real interests are and with what we're doing to achieve those objectives.
• 9:04
  Chris Preble: Yeah, thank you to both of you. I mostly want to focus on what Jonathan has to say in this article, but I will say this, I think I agree completely with Melanie, that small-r republicanism has taken a hit in the last 25 years, and we see it manifest in the partisanship and polarization and the lack of a sort of sense of civic responsibility, where various elected officials on both sides of the aisle are mostly focused on blaming the other side for failures as opposed to putting the interests of the country first, I would say. And I do think that's a problem that's been exacerbated over these last 25 years. For Jonathan, I think there's one thing that he emphasizes that both of you said and which I also agree with, which is, these last 25 years have demonstrated how incredibly skillful the U.S. military is and how capable it is in innovation and adaptation. In fact, he says this a number of times in this article, that is one of the lessons that he stresses that he's learned. Second is this fixation of the military on these aspects of tactical capabilities binds it. He writes, "to approaches centered on lethality that were derived from theories of physical systems." And third, such approaches blind the United States to the limitations of these approaches when applied to resilient human networks. Later in the article, he talks about the importance of the fusion of intelligence and operations and the targeting cycle that is now known as find, fix, finish, exploit, analyze, and disseminate. But "find, fix, finish" is the one that is the simplest element of this. And Schroden explains that find, fix, and finish, as applied against Al-Qaeda's core elements, in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, was largely successful at substantially diminishing the group's size and influence. Against the Taliban, however, the combined results of U.S. forces employing similar approaches were decidedly lackluster. He notes that U.S. forces killed thousands of Taliban commanders and perhaps 10,000 or more of the group's fighters, and yet the group's strength grew almost continuously in proportion to the length of the war, in direct defiance of lethal actions against it, unquote. And again, as I hinted at, why does this happen? It's because this fixation on lethality, Schroden writes, is grounded in achieving destruction of physical systems, but human networks operate differently. He concludes that the lesson U.S. leaders should learn from our experience of the past 25 years is that dogged pursuit of overwhelming attrition is not a reliable pathway to success, and blind faith in lethality is strategic folly. And yet the lesson they seem to have actually learned is to employ every technological means available to destroy things and kill people at an even faster pace, in the belief that war is little more than fighting to win. And I will say that this is also somewhat personal for me, in the sense that Michael Cohen and I wrote for the Stimson Center about a little over a year ago, a paper entitled “The Perils of Lethality,” which emphasized a lot of these same elements. But I want to put it to you, what do you think? The advocates of lethality say, "Look, this must be the focus in wartime. You have to simply…" I mean, at its most basic level, this is, sort of, elemental to warfare for as long as human history. It's to kill or otherwise immobilize the other guy before he does the same thing to you. And so, to concern yourself with anything from minimizing civilian harm to adhering to some sort of norms of behavior, law of armed conflict, whatever, is a distraction. It is dangerous. It undermines our ability to achieve success. I'm, sort of, curious, both how you respond to the way Schroden framed this, but more generally, this notion that lethality is what we're missing and doing more of it will deliver success in ways that the war in Afghanistan did not.
• 13:05
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Look, I think that lethality is important when you want to fight a war, so I'm not going to say it's not. But along with that, I think that risk is important, and I think that our risk tolerance, for example, may not match up with what our aims when it comes to lethality are. We're very far into the Iran war, and I don't want to make this podcast about the Iran war, because it's not. But as we've mentioned, we have lost 18 service members, and hundreds have been injured in the Iran war. If we really wanted to inflict the, kind of, damage that we said we were going to do at the very beginning, we may have needed to be willing to lose a lot more, and not just try to be operating with standoff weapons and so forth to the degree that we have been. So, I do think that lethality is important. When you want to go into a fight, you need to be prepared to do a lot of damage. But that said, it depends on the circumstances, what you're doing. Maybe we shouldn't have focused so much on killing the Taliban for all those decades, you know? Because we should have tried to have some kind of a diplomatic solution much sooner than we did, when, by the time we, you know, they knew we were going to head for the exits, and we'd lost a lot of our leverage with them. That said, I really believe in the law of armed conflict, and I believe that we have to do our best to minimize civilian casualties. That doesn't mean that there will never be civilian casualties. It doesn't mean that there will never be an errant bomb. It doesn't mean that there will never be GPS jamming that means things are going to fall where we don't intend them to fall. But I take that seriously, and I don't like that we have disbanded the teams that try to monitor that and help us to be more careful and be better about that. We still claim that we don't know who hit that girls' school in the first day or two of the war. Pretty sure that we do. There have been other press reports, you know, that have been fairly conclusive about this. Why don't we want to admit it? Because it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the United States, and it's not a good thing when you're trying to demonstrate to the populations where we're operating that we're not hostile to them, that it's their regime or their government that we're trying to persuade to take a different course. And so, I also think that those are important things, because I want our allies to know those are important, that the way that the administration has talked about that has prevented some of our allies from being willing to work with us in Iran and in other places. And I want, when our military operators are in other places, maybe Iran's not going to be super sympathetic to those things, but I want other governments to know that we respect those ideals and that they will respect them for us as well.
• 15:38
  Zack Cooper: Yeah, I broadly agree with that. I guess I would just add that ultimately, lethality, again, tactically, may be really important, but the job of civilian political leaders or of senior military leaders is not to maximize lethality, it's to accomplish the political aims in a conflict. And I don't think we've done that effectively in several of the conflicts over the last 25 years. Now, let's be honest, the initial aim in Afghanistan was probably to prevent another 9/11 from happening. And you know what? We didn't have another 9/11 in the last 25 years, thank goodness, right? We had lots of very bad terrorist attacks all over the world, but nothing nearly as bad, from an American standpoint, as 9/11. And I think it's hard for us to sit here and run the counterfactual of what would have happened if we didn't put pressure on Al-Qaeda for that period of time, right? I mean, we could have had something much worse. Like, we could have had a chemical or biological attack that could have killed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, or millions of people. That didn't happen. Is that because we put real pressure on these terrorist groups and they were not able to do the kind of research and preparation that they would have needed to do for those kinds of attacks? Maybe. But we don't know. So, what we're left with is the remnants of wars, especially the one in Afghanistan, which, you know, I think most Americans broadly were pretty supportive of. But you look back and, you know, the fact that the Taliban is in control of Afghanistan 25 years after the war began suggests that ultimately that political objective was not achieved. But, you know, I think for those of us that remember watching President Bush stand atop the wreckage of the towers and make pretty darn clear that the U.S. was going to get whoever did this, we did that part, right? Not perfectly, but we did that. So, I don't want to suggest that the entire conflict was a loss, but I think Schroden's right that ultimately this focus on lethality, it's not always strategic. And I think at the moment, it's particularly not strategic.
• 18:04
  Chris Preble: Yeah, I would say that, without conceding, because, as you admit, Zack, we can't rerun the counterfactual. We only know that there was not another 9/11-scale attack or anything close to it after September 11, 2001. And it is reasonable to surmise that one of the explanations for why that is, is because Al-Qaeda was put under extreme pressure, not just in Afghanistan, but globally. And so, I'd be the first to concede that that is a reasonable hypothesis as to why that didn't happen, why we didn't have another 9/11. What to me is harder to sustain, and especially in light of what has happened over the last five years, is the extent to which the war in Afghanistan was focused not primarily on Al-Qaeda, especially in the latter half of the war, but on preventing the return of the Taliban, which clearly failed. I think Schroden is in a particularly strong position to argue this, and I can't wait to read the book. But I think one thing that was left out of the story, and I think there are some parallels to both the war in Iraq and perhaps the war in Iran, which is when we Americans see what, to us, is so demonstrably evil, not just Al-Qaeda, but also the Taliban themselves and their treatment of women and girls and religious and ethnic minorities and things like that, it is so utterly monstrous that we just presume that the alternative to them must be better. And in fact, we now know that in Afghanistan, that is not how all Afghans saw it. They saw that many of the individuals who were allied with the Kabul government that we were supporting, and therefore that we were supporting, were as bad as the Taliban, as far as many Afghans were concerned. And again, we can argue that they shouldn't have felt that way, but they did. And I think that that's the element that I think Schroden is trying to make in this focus on, how physical things react to being bombed is they are destroyed. But human networks do not behave that way. And I think there is a fundamental, sort of, breakdown in the way we look at warfare, and credit to Schroden for putting it this way, is that we are not thinking clearly about how human beings react to attacks by outside powers on their country.
• 20:37
  Zack Cooper: Can I make one point on this, Chris? So, I think right now we talk a lot about lethality. Lethality is talked about a lot in this piece, and the implication is that the, sort of, courageous thing for U.S. leaders to do is to take the gloves off, be more lethal, don't restrain U.S. forces. I think there's a story to be told which is, sort of, the exact opposite, which is the really hard thing for political leaders is actually to restrain lethality when you know it's not strategically effective. And I say this having spent a year at the White House at the end of the Bush administration, doing counterterrorism stuff, where the problem we had was, I at least felt pretty sure that when the United States took an action in the Af-Pak border region, that it was unlikely that this was going to, in the long term, ensure the safety of Americans, right? Because we knew that many of these actions were just going to generate more dislike among a population that eventually was going to attempt to hit the U.S. But the really hard thing, the thing that would have taken a tremendous amount of courage by very senior political leaders, would have been to go to the President of the United States and say, "Look, we see people doing things which we know are problematic, and we are not going to act in the short term. We are going to take risk in the short term of Americans being killed, because in the long term, we think that will lead to a better outcome." And I will just say, like, think in the post‑9/11 world, that was not possible. The American people wanted… First of all, they wanted vengeance right at the beginning. But then after that, they wanted to make sure that their political leaders were doing everything possible every day to prevent another attack. So, I think part of the question for political leaders is, like, is courage just letting people do as many strikes as you can possibly fathom? Or is it actually restraining them to seek a more important ultimate objective? And I fall down towards the second one. But you know, it's easy to say that 25 years after 9/11.
• 22:53
  Melanie Marlowe: And that's what I mean when I'm talking about the techno… Like, everybody knows what's going on, or thinks that they know what is going on, all the time. And as you mentioned, the people just wanted revenge, or if it wasn't that, then they wanted to feel like they were going to be secure in the future. And how do you be secure in the future? No one was going out and making a case and saying, "Well, this is our plan, X, Y, and Z." Or, you know, "We need to be more thoughtful…" Not nobody, but people who are actually making the most of the decisions weren't doing that kind of a thing. So, whether or not because they didn't believe it, or because, whatever else. But it is very courageous to use restraint, but it can also be very helpful later on when you, you know, husband that vengeance or that lethality for when it will be the most effective.
• 23:38
  Chris Preble: Yeah. I'm reminded of Stanley McChrystal's guidance was called "heroic restraint," right? I mean, this was the guidance when he took over in Afghanistan. But as a practical matter, if you're a platoon sergeant or a second lieutenant that is responsible for actually executing "heroic restraint," that is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do. And I have to say, I think one of the best representations of this is in a movie that is somewhat, sort of, tongue‑in‑cheek, is the movie War Machine, which is based on the Rolling Stone article. But it demonstrates what it means to exercise heroic restraint at a time when you are being shot at, how do you actually execute this? It is extremely difficult. And I do think, without making any excuses, I think some of the folks that have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Pete Hegseth is one of them, their interpretation of that, the challenge of exercising heroic restraint, is to not do it, is to just take the gloves off and to not be subjected to that kind of restriction. All right. I want to pivot just slightly, because one thing that Schroden says in the article, I'm, sort of, curious if you would agree, he says that the United States is in the midst of a national crisis, given that we are once again losing a war of our choosing. Let's start there. Do you think that in this particular moment, actually, I was going to cut you off, Zack, because you said, in the post‑9/11 environment, it was extremely difficult to say to the President, or for a President or a senior leader to not be seen as doing everything possible to prevent. But we're now 25 years into the post‑9/11 environment. And so, is the distance, the separation of time, does it give more space for political leaders to be more restrained? That's a question. Because from Schroden's perspective, right now we're not being more restrained. We are in the middle of a war that we chose, that we initiated, and it is not going well. Then he says, so this reflects a lack of learning, and the lessons unlearned, and things like that. I'm, sort of, curious, just does this go too far? Are we in the midst of a national crisis because of this war that we're… Actually, the Vice President claims it's not a war. You know, others claiming it's not a war. What do you say to that?
• 25:57
  Zack Cooper: We're six months into a war that was, I think, supposed to last, what? A couple weeks? Is what various Trump administration leaders said. So, hard to argue that we're winning. And oh, by the way, we've done basically nothing in this conflict to impede the Iranian nuclear program. And we just had a senior administration official say that they don't think there's going to be any sort of nuclear deal anytime soon. So, I think this is a pretty good example of losing a war, not by losing tactical engagements, because actually American service members have done pretty remarkable things under continued pressure. And if you need more proof of that, just look at what's going on at airbases across the region and at sea, right? But ultimately, it's not even clear what our political objectives are anymore. Like, the political objective now is to reopen a strait that was open before the war started. So, if that's not losing, I don't know what is.
• 27:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Oh my gosh. Look, I'm just going to say up front, I don't know where we're going to be in a month, or in a year, or in three years. And maybe in some general sense we will be better off. Maybe all the Iranian proxies will be gone. Maybe, you know, Israel will take care of Hezbollah. And maybe some other government will come into being in Iran that will be better in the next several years. Maybe the pipelines will be built, and for some reason drones won't be trying to hit them, so everything will be better, and we won't need that part of the world. Look, I don't know. What I do know is, I am not going to tolerate it from the people, as Zack said, who are now saying, "Well, some oil's getting through, so it's fine," and, you know, "We're going to eventually open this, so it's fine." And the cheerleaders who accuse everybody else who just is raising questions and wants to have a discussion about this as being on the other side and wanting Iran to win. My question is, even if the Strait opens back up, the missile program is dissolved, all of that, my question is going to be, at what cost? You know, the numbers I'm hearing about how many destroyers we're going to have to have there for how many years, the numbers that I know about munitions. And people just blowing this off. And people who claim to be hawks about other things and think that the United States has been in vulnerable positions, who now act like, six months later, another month… People who proclaimed how much they cared about the Iranian people, and now they're cheering on that their economy's going to be demolished. And then what are we going to do? Are we going to take care of the refugees? Are we going to rebuild their economy? Again, I am someone, maybe at variance with you two, who I am worried about Iran having a nuclear program. I do want a bigger defense budget. I am not the usual naysayer on this stuff. Again, I'm not predicting how all of this is going to turn out, but right now it is not looking good. And I just will not have it from people who think that it is.
• 28:58
  Zack Cooper: Can I just make a point on this? Because I think it's important. So, part of the challenge that we started off by talking about was the question of what our objective was in Afghanistan. If the objective was to kill as many Al‑Qaeda or Al‑Qaeda‑related individuals as possible, we were very effective at that. If the objective was to set up a lasting democracy in Afghanistan, we were partially effective at that for a period of time, until we weren't. I think this is the same story that we could tell on Iran, in a way, which is, 15 months ago, the Trump administration had a pretty small set of objectives, to set the Iranian nuclear program back, and that operation was actually fairly effective. Six months ago, the administration set off on a much more expansive, much less defined set of objectives, which started by trying to kill as many of the Iranian leadership as they could, and then just see where the cards fell. On that, they have failed. And so, I think this, kind of, goes back to the core point that Schroden makes throughout the piece, which is, ultimately, this is about what your objectives are. And for some of those things, lethality may help you get there, right? If your objectives are killing Al‑Qaeda leaders, or, frankly, like setting back the Iranian nuclear program, you can do that with lethality in a way. If your objectives are political, lethality is usually only going to be a small part of the answer. And that's where I think we've gone wrong for a quarter of a century.
• 30:37
  Melanie Marlowe: I'll say on the lethality, if we were really going to stop Iran from having a nuclear program, the United States should have been willing to risk a lot more lives. That would have been worth it to me, to actually stop that. But I don't think that that was going to be in the cards. And Zack, again, I will say, yes, we were successful for a time at helping the Afghan government. But at what cost? Trillions of dollars, American lives, Afghan lives, American lives post‑war. The suicide rate among American vets in these wars is astronomical.
• 31:11
  Chris Preble: Higher than the number killed in the wars by a wide margin, actually. Yeah.
• 31:14
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah. Jonathan Schneider has numbers on this. And so, again, those might be things that are worth it to the United States, but we don't have a discussion about it. And going back to Iran, the President never gave a speech about this. He never asked for the United States to get on board with this. Everyone's been told to hop on and off board on all these different demands and priorities that continually change. And, you know, I guess we're back to the nuclear program maybe, but mostly it's focused on the Strait. And so, we are not clear in what we want. And we cannot, with every shifting event, with every targeting of non‑Iranian tankers, we can't suddenly change what our policy is going to be based on whatever happened that day. And that's a real problem.
• 32:05
  Chris Preble: What I hear from this conversation, and I think Schroden alludes to it a little bit in what he calls for as one of the solutions, is where does diplomacy factor in in the midst of a war? Even as you're fighting the war, what is the diplomatic path? My joke is that for many Americans, the diplomats are the ones who show up after the war is won and hand the surrender documents to the defeated enemy to sign their papers of surrender. That is not what diplomacy actually is. Diplomacy is about achieving durable ends, sometimes with the use of force or the threat of force, but also with some measure of concession. And I think that this is one of the areas where 9/11, sort of, broke our brain for a period of time, because the notion of negotiating, certainly with Al‑Qaeda, was completely anathema. And I think correctly so. But similarly, the notion of negotiating with the Taliban or any other elements that were once supportive of Al‑Qaeda, you know, the associated forces or whatnot, that was also just beyond the pale. You could not imagine a diplomatic pathway in the midst of this war. And I think that there's a similar thing going on here with respect to Iran. And Melanie, you said that the only solution to an Iranian nuclear program is military activity that destroys the… Because that's not the only path.
• 33:39
  Melanie Marlowe: No. I don't think that that's the only. But if the President has said, like, "They're about to get it, they won't talk to us anymore, we have to go get it." Like, you outline something like that, I will listen. I definitely want Marco Rubio to keep up all the conversations. And I wish we had in Ukraine, and today, I wish it were anybody besides Witkoff and Kushner. I care about diplomacy deeply. And Schroden talks about other ways that we could exercise diplomacy maybe better that we aren't doing anymore. And I think that we have failed in diplomacy in big ways, and it's not just a Republican thing and not just a Donald Trump thing in past years. But I will also say, after 9/11, the United States wanted another war of total victory, and they were not going to get it. And it's not that I loved the Taliban and that I thought that they would be great, and I'm sick about what's happening to women over there, although some of the other things haven't been as bad as we anticipated. But, as much as we killed them, as Schroden indicates, they were going to keep coming back. It would have been impossible, as Zack said, to sit down, I think politically impossible for the United States to make a deal with them right away in early 2002, or maybe even 2003. But maybe we should have first. I mean, I keep going back to the gladiator question, "Don't these people know when they're defeated? You know? Would you, Quintus? Would I?"
• 35:02
  Chris Preble: Oh, yeah. Which Gladiator question? Yes, exactly.
• 35:04
  Melanie Marlowe: And they just weren't going to be defeated. But Zack wants to jump in on this, so go ahead, Zack.
• 35:09
  Zack Cooper: Well, I just want to say briefly, I think some of this is also that, it's hard for us to remember what our emotions were like 25 years ago. But we'd come out of the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War. The United States was the dominant world power. And I think we felt really confident that if we actually tried to do something, we could do pretty much anything. And so, the idea that, like, the Taliban was going to be a seriously formidable opponent, I mean, we just won the Cold War ten years prior. So, I think some of this was emotional, right? I'm not sure that most of us thought after 9/11 that there was a world in which if we decided to commit ourselves, that we were going to spend 15 or 20 years fighting a bunch of insurgents and come out with a loss. I just don't think that's how policymakers expected this to go. I think now, and you hear this clearly when you hear Americans talk and when they're polled about things, Americans have a very different sense of our ability to affect the world than we had a quarter century ago.
• 36:23
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, I agree. Like, how we all felt 23, 24 years ago, is very different from how many people feel today. So, I agree that a lot of political leaders would have felt the way that you were describing. I also think there was a big… The longer that it went on, you know, the sunk costs and "We can't lose now, it would be humiliating to leave now." We don't want to betray the people who fought so valiantly and lost their lives. You know, the generals that… There are some that I think were just trying to get along so that they could move up the ladder. But there were a lot who really believed in what they were doing and wanting to make the best of what they were doing, and not betray, as they saw it, the people who they were serving. So, I'm sympathetic to all that. And this, kind of, goes back to some of the human networks again. But Jason Dempsey has written really well on this in a couple of articles, one that I'll for sure post in the show notes.
• 37:13
  Chris Preble: Yeah. Jason's fantastic. Both he and Gil Barndollar have written together articles that I've recommended before. Greg Jaffe has an article in The New York Times that I'll put in the show notes, that talks about the concerns about credibility and the sunk costs and the concern about, you know, when the U.S. military fights, it fights to win. And so, to walk away from a war that's not won is to lose, just by definition. And so, that was going to be a challenge. I want to just wrap up briefly with some wider thoughts. And again, this is mostly focused, and we've mostly talked about, the wars associated with the global war on terror. But we should also reflect on what it has meant here at home, and more generally, I think about public attitudes about U.S. foreign policy and the use of force. My colleague Evan Cooper has a piece at Stimson on, sort of, how 9/11 shaped the millennial generation's ideas about the U.S. role in the world, which I highly recommend. And I think we see in the historic unpopularity of the Iran war that, the notion of a rally‑around‑the‑flag effect that we took for granted after 9/11 simply doesn't exist. One explanation for that is partisanship and polarization. That's one explanation. But it's not the only explanation. And so, I think that in addition to the wars, I think something, I fear, perhaps permanent, has happened to us. It's changed us. I agree with Zack, that right now it looks like a high‑water mark, that on 9/11 we were riding high, and 25 years later we're not. So, I'm curious, kind of, how you two want to wrap things up, because I, Melanie, knew this was going to be a grim show, and it is. There's really nothing pleasant to talk about here, other than trying to learn as best we can to avoid making the same mistakes again.
• 39:02
  Melanie Marlowe: Look, 9/11 happened right after the impeachment of a president for the first time. It happened after a disputed election, which was the first time it had happened in a really long time. Then we had, kind of, a tech crash. We had 9/11. We had the financial crash. We had the arrival of Donald Trump. You know, Donald Trump came in saying he was going to end this war, so that was an important shift for the Republican Party. But those things, you know, that I mentioned between like 1998 and 2008, there were a lot of rough things shoved on the American public in that decade. And maybe 9/11 will have been the high‑water mark of America for a generation or two. I don't know. I hope not. I've spent a lot of time with our allies in the last ten days, and I had dinner with someone last week, and, you know, we were talking about the near‑term future and the long‑term future of the United States and our relationship. And he said, "You know, the United States right now is, kind of, like this roommate I had in college. He got really hooked on drugs." And I thought he was going to say that, you know, he met some massive demise. And he's like, "But you know what? It was about seven or eight years. Now he's married, he's got kids, he's got a great job. Everything is going well." And I thought, "Oh, okay. Well, I hope that that's-"
• 40:26
  Chris Preble: A redemption story. Melanie Marlowe: "... how things are with us right now." It's a redemption story. So, I don't know. Look, things are grim. I don't want to make it sound like nothing good happened in Afghanistan, and Iraq's doing better than it was before, even though I disagree that we should have gone there. That doesn't make it a success for the United States. But I'm worried right now. I'm really worried about where we are as a country, and where we're headed in the immediate future.
• 40:53
  Chris Preble: Zack, anything to add?
• 40:55
  Melanie Marlowe: Make me feel better. But I will say, I'm not counting us out. I think we have some rough years. But as my friend said, "You know, you guys always come back. You always come back." And maybe it just feels very daunting right now, because we're in the middle of what we feel like are some really rough years, and, you know, we're coming into a political season that I think is going to be rough no matter what side of the fence you're on. But I'm not counting us out.
• 41:21
  Zack Cooper: Okay. So, I guess I just want to make one broad point to summarize my view, which is, if you imagine the world without 9/11, which is impossible, because it changed so many things, right? I think on the issue sets that I work on, we hopefully would have been in a remarkably better position. The Bush administration, on September 10, released a strategy which basically said, we're going to shift focus to Asia and dealing with China, which 25 years later we still haven't been able to do. Instead, we've spent much of that time mired in conflicts in the Middle East, which ultimately haven't gone that well. And as you both noted, we've spent a huge amount of blood and treasure in those conflicts. And ultimately, I think we've also convinced a lot of the American people that the U.S. national security establishment doesn't actually know what it's doing. I would contest that argument. I think we're seeing right now just why the national security establishment is so important, and good advice from people that actually have lots of experience can be really useful. But I think when we look back, the two big things that probably will have been affected are the willingness of the American people, in the long term, to make major sacrifices on national security will have gone down, because of the skepticism. And we will have wasted at least 20 years of time focusing on the challenges that were, at the moment, of course, important post‑9/11, but I think in the big picture, much less critical. That's the story that we're all going to tell when we read the history books on our deathbeds.
• 43:10
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Grievances. Frank Costanza: "The tradition of Festivus begins with the airing of grievances. I got a lot of problems with you, people. And now, you’re going to hear about it!"
• 43:23
  Melanie Marlowe: Chris.
• 43:25
  Chris Preble: So, my grievance is, I'm going to yield the balance of my time to Melanie Marlowe, because she has so many grievances. My funny grievance is that I'm no longer on vacation at Hilton Head. And it's hard to come up with a grievance when I was sitting on the beach. But I guess my grievance is that I'm no longer sitting on the beach. So, there you have it.
• 43:43
  Melanie Marlowe: You don't have any grievances about Minnesota football or anything?
• 43:46
  Chris Preble: Well, not yet, because it hasn't started yet.
• 43:49
  Melanie Marlowe: Not official?
• 43:51
  Chris Preble: My grievance is the Baltimore Orioles have lost six straight games. So, that doesn't have me in a very good mood. So, on to the next season. The Volunteers won 56‑9 yesterday, so, you know, I have that to look forward to.
• 44:03
  Melanie Marlowe: Zack.
• 44:05
  Zack Cooper: All right. So, I'll have an atta in a minute for someone at the State Department, but now I've got a grievance for someone at the Department of Defense, which it still is until the NDAA passes. So, at the moment, we have a Secretary of War who has not fired the Secretary of the Army, but persuaded him to leave his job. And at the same time, has nominated someone, Hung Cao, who I think, all things considered, is probably way better than most of the other options, who's not actually qualified for the job of Secretary of the Navy, because he has served too recently. And so, the statute bars him from serving in this job. This is a mess. And honestly, you know, we just talked a lot about lethality, and I know that's where the Secretary of War is very focused. But where they need to focus right now is running the department. And Dan Driscoll, I think, was trying to do a pretty good job with the Army. And, the final part of this grievance is, the story that came out yesterday, which suggested that, who is it that's up for firing at the Defense Department? Deputy Secretary Feinberg, the one person who everyone in the Pentagon says is the most effective senior leader in the building.
• 45:28
  Melanie Marlowe: My hero.
• 45:29
  Zack Cooper: So, we could talk a lot more about General Donahue and others who've been let go, and people who've been put in their place, some of whom are highly questionable. But at the moment, we're in the middle of a war. It's not going well. And rather than getting our hands around that, we're fighting these absurd political battles, and putting 50 members of the Joint Staff on polygraphs. How about we actually focus on the job at hand, and get the Iran war right, rather than, you know, firing or replacing most of the senior leadership at the Pentagon?
• 46:04
  Melanie Marlowe: Okay. Well, my grievance goes to Argentine President Javier Milei, who I've given some attas to in the past, because he's done a pretty good job of bringing inflation down, but he's not super popular at home, and he wants to run for President again next year. Obviously, he's implemented some pretty tough economic measures that have achieved, as I said, some goals, but then, you know, people want different jobs and better jobs, and not all of the economic benefits people were hoping for have accrued so far. So, what is he doing now to deflect attention? He's saying, maybe Argentina would start another war, or at least try to come to some kind of consensus, about taking the Falklands from Britain. So, this is not going over well. To make matters worse, President Trump saying, "Yeah. Well, you know what? Would I help Britain? No, because they haven't helped us in the Iran war."
• 46:50
  Zack Cooper: Terrible.
• 46:50
  Melanie Marlowe: Now, I don't really think that the Argentine military is going to be taking on even the sparse British Navy at this point, but it isn't good, and it's not helpful. And I will say, as The Economist reports, in a referendum on sovereignty held in 2013, 1,513 of the 1,517 islanders who voted, which was 92% voted, chose to remain a British Overseas Territory. So, look, everybody likes to run to any port in a storm when you're not popular, and you want to shore up your election viability, but this is really unhelpful. And the American response is not super great either. Grievance. Okay, attas, Chris.
• 47:32
  Chris Preble: So, my atta goes to Dan Driscoll, for having the courage to resign. Now, I could argue that there are lots of other things that he could have resigned about, but I think it is notable, and genuinely, I'll say it, it's courageous to resign in protest of what he sees as the termination of and dismissal of qualified senior officers. And, that ultimately, it seems, was what pushed him to choose to resign. And I understand why people who are in those positions choose not to leave, because one of the concerns is, they will be replaced by somebody who is even less willing to speak truth to power. But sometimes that is the right recourse. I don't know the man, but I think that it sends an important message at a critical time, that the Secretary of the Army does not feel confident enough about the leadership in the Pentagon, so much so that he chooses to step down. So, it's a qualified atta, but I mean it in a heartfelt way.
• 48:36
  Melanie Marlowe: Great. Okay, Zack.
• 48:38
  Zack Cooper: All right. So, my atta is for Christopher Landau, the Deputy Secretary of State, who quietly has gone on his third visit to the Pacific Islands since taking over the job. And I have complained a lot about the lack of attention to Asia that has happened, in my view, in this administration. And, you know, we could go through all the numbers of visits from the President and other senior leaders to the Middle East, to Europe, and then compare them to Asia, and it's not good. But Deputy Secretary Landau is, you know, making a concerted effort to be there in the Pacific, and in a place where showing up is at least half the battle, and where actually the first Trump administration did really well in the Pacific. They engaged more than any other administration in many years. I think it's been incredibly important that he is showing the flag, demonstrating that this is still a region that's important to the United States. So, I know he didn't get a lot of press out of his trip to the region, but I think this is good news, and we should encourage him and others to continue engaging there.
• 49:44
  Melanie Marlowe: Yeah, that was great. I saw pictures of him on X, and he looked very comfortable in his shirt, and I was wishing I could dress like that in Washington lately. It's been a sauna. Okay, we did not coordinate Zack's grievance and Chris's atta, but my atta is also for Dan Driscoll. And even though I had a big list of other attas that I could have mentioned, and I will mention one other, I'm going to still say mine because I was a Dan Driscoll skeptic. I thought that the only reason he came in was because he was J.D. Vance's buddy in law school when they were together at Yale. There was almost no information available about him. He'd run for Congress in North Carolina, and then he'd been, you know, in some investment firms. But there was almost nothing about him on the internet. People couldn't even find a recent picture of him. So, I didn't think that he was going to be great. And maybe he wasn't, like, the most prepared and ambitious Army Secretary that we've ever had. But you know what? He was a workhorse and not a showhorse. He developed a really strong relationship with General George, who was fired in April, and he learned a lot, and he jumped headfirst into the Army Transformation Strategy and really wanted to make important changes that he thought were going to benefit the service. And so, I really am sorry that he is gone now. And I mentioned a couple of months ago, maybe as an atta, that when General George was fired, Driscoll's family was on vacation, and on their way home, they stopped to visit General George and thank him. And, you know, that became public, and I'm sure that did not help his position with other people in the Pentagon. But he did the right thing, and I hope that he has a bright future ahead of him. Okay, what do you have coming up?
• 51:30
  Chris Preble: So, before our next show, I am participating in a discussion hosted by the Hellenic Centre in the UK, entitled “Power Politics: Thucydides to Trump. The Exercise of Power Internationally Through the Ages.” Really excited about this. I wish I could be there in person. Everyone else will be there in person. I will be dialing in remotely, but the panel includes, the other speakers are Mick Cox, Paul Cartledge, Polly Low, Valentina Arena, and Patrick Porter, and it's chaired by Margaret Mountford. So, I'm really looking forward to that. And then I'm going fishing. So, a couple of days in Minnesota. This is presuming that the Canadian authorities allow me into Canadian waters. I already have my fishing license issued by Ontario, so I'm hoping that they don't cut us off at the border, because the fishing's really good up there.
• 52:19
  Melanie Marlowe: That's very cool that you get to. There are a couple people on that list that I would love to meet in person, so sorry you're not going yourself. Zack?
• 52:27
  Zack Cooper: Again, back out to Asia, going to the Philippines for a conference tomorrow, and then heading over to India for another conference. So, it would be good to hear how folks out there are thinking about this moment. Bridge Colby was just out in Manila, and there've been a bunch of officials out in Delhi, so I am fascinated to hear the response from their trips.
• 52:51
  Melanie Marlowe: Well, I am doing none so exotic travel as that, but I am on the road right now, and I was able to hop home for a couple of days. I have an aunt who passed away a few weeks ago, and I wasn't able to come over for the funeral, but it'll be good to visit my dad and family. Since I'm here, and I'm happy that my mom and I get to go in the morning to breakfast at Sundance with my sister. And we have, kind of, a tradition in our family. When I was really young, we were building a house, and we had to move in before the house was completed. And the kids got the bright idea that we would go wake up my parents. My mom was great with child, like, she dropped a baby, I think, two weeks later. We went and woke her up really early in the morning so we could see the sunrise, and I'm sure all she wanted to do was sleep. And we had, the deck was finished. We had an amazing deck, so we went and watched the sunrise. A Labor Day tradition of people in our family to watch the sunrise. So, looking forward to that in the West. Okay. Well, thank you for listening to this episode of Net Assessment. If you enjoyed it, please rate us wherever you get your podcasts. We want to thank University FM for producing us, and the Stimson Center for hosting us. We hope everyone has had a great Labor Day, and that they have a very meaningful 9/11. Until next time, be well.
• 54:04
  Chris Preble: Hey, listeners. Just a quick note regarding our next show, the show that we'll post on Thursday, the 24th of September. Don't be alarmed if that show is a little bit later than usual showing up in your feed. We've had some scheduling challenges, and so we're going to be recording the show a little later than usual. And to give the University FM folks time to prepare the show, we're probably not going to post it until later in the day on the 24th of September. So, if you're accustomed to seeing the show appear first thing in the morning, don't be alarmed. It'll be there. It just might be a few hours late. Thanks.