Speaker 1: Welcome to mid Rats with sal from Commander Salamander, an
Speaker 1: Eagle one from Eagle Speak at Seer Shore your home
Speaker 1: for a discussion of national security issues and all things maritime.
Speaker 1: Welcome a board to another edition of mid Rats. We
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Speaker 1: for a time of your convenience. And today let's go
Speaker 1: ahead and dive into our topic. We got a returning
Speaker 1: guest and a new guest, which is always lots of fun.
Speaker 1: We have Craig Whiteside and Ian Rice on board with
Speaker 1: their new book that they've written together. It's coming out
Speaker 1: this month titled Non State Special Operations, Capabilities and Effects.
Speaker 1: And what we're going to talk about today is something
Speaker 1: that a lot of times, well, that's just a terrorist
Speaker 1: act or this isis terrorist did this. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more to it than that. There's a longer history to that,
Speaker 1: and as we'll talk about in the course of the
Speaker 1: next hour, I think in understanding not just the history,
Speaker 1: but the different goals, in the different aspects to why
Speaker 1: non state actors act in similar ways to state actors
Speaker 1: in some ways is an important way to understand the
Speaker 1: challenges that we're looking at and the responses and we
Speaker 1: may want to take at it. Craig he is a
Speaker 1: professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War
Speaker 1: College and he's also in the resident program at the
Speaker 1: Naval Postgraduate School in wonderful Monterey, California, and that's how
Speaker 1: he gets to spend quality time with Ian Rice, who
Speaker 1: is an adjunct senior lecturer in the Department of Defense
Speaker 1: Analysis at the Naval post Graduate School. Ian and Craig,
Speaker 1: Welcome to.
Speaker 2: Midrats great, great to be here. So, as they say,
Speaker 2: a longtime listener, third time contributors, though thanks for having
Speaker 2: me back.
Speaker 3: Thank you sal for inviting us.
Speaker 1: Really appreciate and I don't know an hour justifvies it.
Speaker 1: First of all, congratulations on the book. Is I think
Speaker 1: I didn't do the count, but I'll just make a
Speaker 1: little thumb mark if people are looking at getting a
Speaker 1: quick read when you take out the footnotes, and you
Speaker 1: could spend a few months just looking at the footnotes
Speaker 1: if you wanted to, and open in the beginning. It's
Speaker 1: probably a nice digestible, one hundred and seventy page book
Speaker 1: covering a real broad spectrum of what a lot of
Speaker 1: us I think we've just been experiencing in the last
Speaker 1: few decades. But it actually has a lot more meat
Speaker 1: to it. But before we get to that, and Ian,
Speaker 1: because you're the new kid on the block here, I
Speaker 1: thought I'll roll the opening question to you and then
Speaker 1: Craig can follow on as well. Is you know, talk
Speaker 1: a little bit how the genesis of this book came
Speaker 1: into being and you and Craig got together. It was like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's a question that needs to be addressed. Let's go
Speaker 1: dive into wells. I first started collaborating with Craig. I
Speaker 1: think it was about twenty fourteen where we met at
Speaker 1: a Islamic State intelligence focus talk and we noticed we're
Speaker 1: seeing a lot of the same stuff. And we had
Speaker 1: not realized that we had served in parallel on a
Speaker 1: Command in General Staff College together at Levenworth, so we
Speaker 1: were really very similar interests. So in about I think
Speaker 1: it was twenty eighteen, Craig came up to me and said, hey,
Speaker 1: I want to show you this video of what's called
Speaker 1: the Hiditha raid by the Islamic State. It looks really
Speaker 1: different from a lot of the other tacks the Islamic
Speaker 1: State does.
Speaker 4: And so he shows it to me, and it was
Speaker 4: very well documented. They show rehearsals, they show planning. They
Speaker 4: even have one of those montage maps where you follow
Speaker 4: like the arrow as they're conducting the operation. And I said, Craig,
Speaker 4: this looks just this looks like the Islamic States version
Speaker 4: of the newsreel of the nineteen forty two Dolittle raid.
Speaker 4: And I said, this looks like a special operation to me.
Speaker 4: I said, it has all the all like the key
Speaker 4: characteristics of what we would see from something that's generating
Speaker 4: a larger effect than just the tactical action. So that's
Speaker 4: how it started.
Speaker 5: Anything else, Craig, Well, let me let me throw a
Speaker 5: question out there, which is, let's talk about what does
Speaker 5: what makes and you've covered this in the book. Let's
Speaker 5: talk about what makes something a special operation that's different
Speaker 5: than other kinds of operations. That makes sense.
Speaker 4: You want to take this one first, greg Or, Okay,
Speaker 4: I'll take that, well, Mark, So, special operations are we
Speaker 4: have a chicken and egg thing with special operations. In
Speaker 4: the US military, we have special operations forces and we
Speaker 4: have special operations. The actual actions and a lot of
Speaker 4: times we get these get convoluted and we use the
Speaker 4: terms interchangeably. But really what we're talking about when we're
Speaker 4: looking at the idea of a special operation is a
Speaker 4: tactical action that has, by design, uses increased resources with
Speaker 4: special training, maybe special people, to achieve a premeditated, outsized effect,
Speaker 4: in other words, an effect that's larger than the tactical
Speaker 4: action itself, something that can have an effect on a
Speaker 4: campaign or end a crisis. That's typically we have forces
Speaker 4: that are designed to conduct these actions, but it's not
Speaker 4: necessarily the case. If say an actor, like a non
Speaker 4: state actor, like a militant group, doesn't have a standing
Speaker 4: capability to conduct these actions, they might have to use
Speaker 4: an ad hoc force. And actually that's what the Doual
Speaker 4: Little Rate is in nineteen forty two is an ad
Speaker 4: hoc force that uses a very unique capability stripped down
Speaker 4: B twenty five Mitchell bombers launching off of the USS Hornet.
Speaker 4: And you don't get much more special than the one
Speaker 4: way bombing of mainland Japan than that in terms of
Speaker 4: the global informational effect that that raid had. Even though
Speaker 4: the damage was nominal, the morale effect, both positive for
Speaker 4: the Allies and negative for the Japanese, was.
Speaker 3: Lasting.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of how we define those.
Speaker 1: I first started diving into this, and the first flush
Speaker 1: that I had in my mind, I was like, we're gonna, like,
Speaker 1: you know, dig into some of the history of non
Speaker 1: state actors doing special operations. Hey, let's look at Munich
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two. That was the first thing that
Speaker 1: came to mind. But that what I thought was going back,
Speaker 1: that's just a small sliver of what y'all put together
Speaker 1: and y'all put some wonderful examples about how there's actually
Speaker 1: a substantial history, and one that until I got to
Speaker 1: this section, I was like, dumb man, why don't you
Speaker 1: think of this? But you know, you can go back
Speaker 1: to the late Bronze Age Siege of Troy and the
Speaker 1: Trojan Horse everybody knows about. That meets a lot of
Speaker 1: the criteria that y'all put in there, but also there
Speaker 1: is and y'all had an extended quote from everybody's favorite
Speaker 1: British officer of World War One, Lawrence of Arabia, and
Speaker 1: some of his comments about working with the Bedouin armies
Speaker 1: and what he was actually trying to accomplish. So when
Speaker 1: you are diving into this, it's not just about what
Speaker 1: we know since the events of nine to eleven. There
Speaker 1: actually is a substantial At every conflict we've been in,
Speaker 1: there is a substantial line that you can draw through history,
Speaker 1: as other people have tried to not just use, but
Speaker 1: to understand why other forces, are state and nonstate, are
Speaker 1: diving into this. And you do have to, like I
Speaker 1: described with the genesis of this book, you've got to
Speaker 1: give a nod of respect to these you know, terrorist organizations, whatever,
Speaker 1: their ideology may be contrary to what we perceive as correct. Uh,
Speaker 1: they have learned from history and can be very professional
Speaker 1: in what they do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's that's one of the things that
Speaker 2: that we were that we were trying to do. We
Speaker 2: were trying to make make some sense of why these
Speaker 2: actors would would try to do these out outsized create
Speaker 2: these outsized effects, and we dug into it. Obviously, there's
Speaker 2: there's plenty of h of history of non state actors
Speaker 2: doing this to state actors, and UH, certainly you know
Speaker 2: transcends the global warrant terror and our more recent experiences.
Speaker 2: As you pointed out right, Uh, we use Lawrence's example,
Speaker 2: but but try to recharacterize it in a different way
Speaker 2: than people have remembered it. Many people have all they
Speaker 2: understand Lawrence as an early special operator type. They don't
Speaker 2: really think of his actions always as a special operation.
Speaker 2: But when you look at how he integrated his campaign
Speaker 2: UH to take Acoba using Araba regulars as part of
Speaker 2: a larger conventional battle, you know, that's what That's what
Speaker 2: interested us in in how different actors use UH or
Speaker 2: develop a capability to using non state actors, whether it's
Speaker 2: states using non state actors or militant groups like ISIS
Speaker 2: or al Qaeda doing it on on their own. So
Speaker 2: so one one thing we're trying to do is use
Speaker 2: history to to to show that, you know, show examples,
Speaker 2: but also to show that it's it's been around for
Speaker 2: a while, but are our kind of hypothesis is that
Speaker 2: with technology and it's the democratization of technology, uh throughout
Speaker 2: the globe today thanks to globalization and many other factors,
Speaker 2: is that you probably, uh, it's going to see an
Speaker 2: increase and a trend in non state actors, you know,
Speaker 2: using special operations to humiliate state opponents.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I was interested in the fact that in order
Speaker 5: to do the work that you've done this in this book,
Speaker 5: you first had to create a system for analyzing, uh,
Speaker 5: the actors, their motives and the extent of their success
Speaker 5: or what their intentions were. Talk a little bit about
Speaker 5: how you you developed the grid that's in the book,
Speaker 5: because I know this is uh, you know, this is
Speaker 5: more my my social scientist background coming to the forehier.
Speaker 5: But talk a little bit how you how you structure
Speaker 5: your work so that you can analyze the various cases
Speaker 5: you looked at and sort of sort the weight from
Speaker 5: the chaff, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll let Ian take a crack at this. I
Speaker 2: just wanted to say that, you know, we started with
Speaker 2: these long state example that Ian you know described earlier,
Speaker 2: which was really part of a project. You know. The
Speaker 2: cool thing about being here at Naval post Graduate School
Speaker 2: and you know, being being a war college guy here
Speaker 2: is that you know, there's a lot of collaboration. And
Speaker 2: Ian was working on a state centric special operations project
Speaker 2: at the time, and I was I was, you know,
Speaker 2: asking this stupid question like, hey, do the non states
Speaker 2: do this thing? And and that's you know, as Ian
Speaker 2: told the rest of that story. You know that that's uh,
Speaker 2: that's kind of how that happened. But you know, Ian
Speaker 2: pushed me to say, Okay, well then do other types
Speaker 2: of groups beyond militant groups like the one that you
Speaker 2: study ice is do you and and He's like, theoretically
Speaker 2: the answer should be yes. I'll let I'll let Ian
Speaker 2: talk to the rest of the of how that typology
Speaker 2: gets developed.
Speaker 4: So in developing the typology, it all goes back to
Speaker 4: their and again it's all research, so you're always there's
Speaker 4: an ri in front of search. That's how I like
Speaker 4: to think of it, so we're always refining it. So
Speaker 4: where the initial stuff with the Islamic state was Okay,
Speaker 4: let's just demonstrate this one case with these few examples,
Speaker 4: that this one this one actor has the ability to
Speaker 4: generate this kind of outsized effect. We started to look
Speaker 4: at it in terms of, okay, if we're really looking
Speaker 4: at what a premeditated In other words, the leadership of
Speaker 4: the group is like, okay, how do we see if
Speaker 4: it's got a premeditated outsized effect.
Speaker 3: So we're the two.
Speaker 4: By two kind of schematic of organizing the different types
Speaker 4: of actors that would do that. We looked at, okay,
Speaker 4: why would these actors do it? And and that's really
Speaker 4: kind of comes down to like what their goals are,
Speaker 4: whether they have a general ideological goal or do they
Speaker 4: have like a self interest or profit based goal. And
Speaker 4: so this tells us, Okay, maybe this is why they're
Speaker 4: trying to execute something that's larger than just a single effect,
Speaker 4: like an assassination like El Choppa's Sineloa. The Chopo Disco
Speaker 4: assassination back in the nineties is a great example of
Speaker 4: power consolidation, right, So that was like one of the
Speaker 4: dimensions we're looking at okay, so if they're either ideological
Speaker 4: or self interested, and then we're like, hey, maybe actors
Speaker 4: don't always do things for themselves. And this also goes
Speaker 4: to who wants it done? So then we looked at
Speaker 4: general like this concept of agency. Do they do it
Speaker 4: for themselves an independent group like the Islamic state, or
Speaker 4: do they have some kind of boss or sponsor like
Speaker 4: a proxy or a patron or an employe. So we
Speaker 4: started to we did this to try to put these
Speaker 4: different types of groups into bins. And you know, Craig
Speaker 4: and I have experience h during the recent unpleasantness in
Speaker 4: uh in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a lot of the
Speaker 4: groups were clumped together and so but what.
Speaker 3: Wasn't but out over time.
Speaker 4: As the US led coalition in both cases did they
Speaker 4: were trying to disaggregate what these what types of violence
Speaker 4: these groups used, And that's really was kind of the
Speaker 4: genesis for the two by two kind of organization of
Speaker 4: the group type. Now they're not like completely discreet, there's
Speaker 4: always going to be bleed over as you saw in
Speaker 4: the book, But that's where it came from.
Speaker 1: I wanted to just do a follow on of that
Speaker 1: grid and you know, for the listeners, I'll put a
Speaker 1: link to the to the book on on the on
Speaker 1: the show page, and I might, even with the author's permission,
Speaker 1: do a screenshot of this grid and add it to
Speaker 1: the show page after the show. But I think what
Speaker 1: was really useful about it, and it's it's one of
Speaker 1: those things that I offer to people who are trying
Speaker 1: to get their head around is like, you know, control control, pee,
Speaker 1: print it off, cut it off, put it up on
Speaker 1: your on your corkboard there, because I know when the
Speaker 1: when the Ahuiti attacks originally were going off, people would say,
Speaker 1: you know, yiminy militants, and you can see in this
Speaker 1: grid the fact that okay, well you're not really looking
Speaker 1: at it right, because I really see they're they're ideological,
Speaker 1: but they're also proxy clients. But if they are self
Speaker 1: interested proxy clients. Another thing that's been broken above the
Speaker 1: background noise in the last few years was a Wagner group.
Speaker 1: They were you know, quasi national, but they were they
Speaker 1: were mercenaries and professional military companies like that, and it
Speaker 1: reminded me of you know, one of my podcasts I
Speaker 1: listened to is History of the Germans podcast, and when
Speaker 1: they were talking about the Holy Roman Empires wars in
Speaker 1: Northern Italy. There's a story of the Mercenary Companies where
Speaker 1: it literally in the middle of the battle that they
Speaker 1: knew these people are not ideological, it's all self interest
Speaker 1: and their client over here is paying them twenty thousand
Speaker 1: du cats. Well, I want to pay them forty five
Speaker 1: thousand do cats if after my starboard wing moves forward,
Speaker 1: they switch sides? And they would. So if you had
Speaker 1: decision makers and our planners who are looking at you,
Speaker 1: how do you counter an organization like the Hoothies or
Speaker 1: Wagner or pick whoever's out there. If you misidentify a
Speaker 1: proxy as a militant or a militant as a proxy,
Speaker 1: the actions and effects you would try to create to
Speaker 1: counter them could if not only be ineffective, but could
Speaker 1: be counterproductive. So this intellectual exercise, it does really form
Speaker 1: a foundation for how we respond to these types of
Speaker 1: nonstate violent acts that take place, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: because words mean things, and another thing I really appreciated
Speaker 1: academically is y'all have kind of created a word acronym.
Speaker 1: Usually I make fun of acronyms, but I think this
Speaker 1: works out really well. Part of I think our problem
Speaker 1: with addressing the issues is we don't define things well,
Speaker 1: like you know, the war on terror. Terror is the technique.
Speaker 1: You can't really declare war on terror, that's the old cliche.
Speaker 1: But you know, terror acts. I like the violent nonstate
Speaker 1: actor defined because that lets you go, okay, this is
Speaker 1: a violent non state actor, what flavor of it is it?
Speaker 1: So going back to kind of my question if there
Speaker 1: is one in my monologue here and I'll go ahead
Speaker 1: throw it at in is you know, do you see
Speaker 1: circumstances where there have been significant error simply because decision
Speaker 1: makers and planners didn't quite know what type of adversary
Speaker 1: they were looking at in this particle.
Speaker 4: Definitely say that is a as a fantastic question, and
Speaker 4: that actually led us to kind of disaggregate the groups
Speaker 4: this way.
Speaker 3: Across different periods.
Speaker 4: In Iraq, attacks would be have certain associated characteristics that
Speaker 4: could be associated with certain types of groups, such as
Speaker 4: suicide attacks were more prevalent around Sunni groups in Iraq,
Speaker 4: and so especially working with the Iraqi partners, they would
Speaker 4: ask questions of who did we know that was at
Speaker 4: the attack site? What was the means used? They would
Speaker 4: ask these things because they're in terms they're also trying
Speaker 4: to figure out how it came to how the who
Speaker 4: was sponsoring the attack, and why might they have done it.
Speaker 4: In others, they're already thinking in terms of was this
Speaker 4: just a normal disruption attack or was there somebody there
Speaker 4: important that might have been the target. And so, yeah,
Speaker 4: I think when we think think about one of the
Speaker 4: key points of this study was as a mirror for
Speaker 4: our own state sponsored special operation. Well, two things. One,
Speaker 4: can we see non state actors campaign when we see
Speaker 4: these unique events, and we'll talk I think a little
Speaker 4: later about how we separate like a typical attack from
Speaker 4: a special attack or a special tactical action as we
Speaker 4: call them. We have the opportunity to see our opponent's campaign,
Speaker 4: and then in turn, we can also use this study
Speaker 4: as a mirror to look at ourselves to say, hey,
Speaker 4: are what we are calling special operations really special operations
Speaker 4: or are we just using special operations forces to perform
Speaker 4: actions that just have a tactical effect. So this is
Speaker 4: heavily laden with decision making criteria, both as we analyze
Speaker 4: our opponents and as we look at ourselves.
Speaker 3: Over Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 2: I was going to add that's right, Mark, Yeah, you
Speaker 2: know that's Sale's got a great point about like the
Speaker 2: who these are they militant group or are they proxies
Speaker 2: and that's it's not And he also brought up Wagner,
Speaker 2: which you know, they're a mercenary group obviously, but they
Speaker 2: sometimes can be confused as a proxy for state actor conducting,
Speaker 2: you know, the policy that that the director that that
Speaker 2: actor is is directing. And so we've got some really
Speaker 2: good questions as as we've as we've worked on the
Speaker 2: concept for this book on you know, well, how do
Speaker 2: you deal with this actor or that actor and which
Speaker 2: actor are they? Which box are they in in this
Speaker 2: particular time and place, And you know, our point is
Speaker 2: that having a typology helps us think about just those
Speaker 2: main questions about why these actors are doing it or
Speaker 2: why has Ian just talked about how why are they
Speaker 2: integrating it into you know, larger What it helps us
Speaker 2: understand is variations in the type. And we focused so
Speaker 2: for example, on the like trying to suss out whether
Speaker 2: it's a militant group or a proxy group or a
Speaker 2: group that's frequently confused for both. Is in this particular operation,
Speaker 2: who told who what to do? And if the Iranians
Speaker 2: are telling one of their many proxies to execute an
Speaker 2: attack on their behalf, whether or not that whatever other
Speaker 2: motive that group has for we consider that a proxy.
Speaker 2: And what it does is it allows you to find
Speaker 2: variation because for let's say, proxy groups, they can harness
Speaker 2: the power of a state like Iran with or other
Speaker 2: kind of capabilities that will really fast track a special
Speaker 2: operation for non states because they're getting a lot of
Speaker 2: outside assistances, they're getting a lot of resourcing and money,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden, something you didn't see a
Speaker 2: militant group having the capability of doing it as a proxy,
Speaker 2: all of a sudden, they can fast track a special
Speaker 2: operation and create a lot of uh, you know, destruction
Speaker 2: and humiliation in the process.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I was fascinated by the way you screen the
Speaker 5: need first, the need to screen uh some of these
Speaker 5: non state UH actors actions from their normal routine. So
Speaker 5: you you you set up three criteria and you know
Speaker 5: not it's not in the regular line of work, not
Speaker 5: the djure. You know, we're just we usually blow up
Speaker 5: cars next to buildings, but this time we did something different.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 5: There was as you just said, the specialized tactical action
Speaker 5: and then then the outsized effect. And I looked, I
Speaker 5: was confused until I kind of got to the to
Speaker 5: the TET offensive and there's this this actually pre TET
Speaker 5: offensive when there was an attack on the US embassy,
Speaker 5: but it was part of a much larger action, uh,
Speaker 5: in the whole TET business. So kind of kind of
Speaker 5: discuss how that how you sort out in the middle
Speaker 5: of all this other stuff, how you take that attack
Speaker 5: on the US mb and embassy and say this is
Speaker 5: a non state actor engaged in a special effort.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things we want to do
Speaker 2: is start these kind of discussions with a vignette, And
Speaker 2: the vignette for TET actually has my dad and my
Speaker 2: dad's My dad at the time was a division commander's
Speaker 2: aide in Vietnam, and he told me this story and
Speaker 2: it really it really resonated. So I reinterviewed him for
Speaker 2: this particular chapter looking at militant groups, specifically the TET
Speaker 2: offense at which he was in, and he told me
Speaker 2: a story about how he's taken the coret He's taken
Speaker 2: his division commander to go see the core commander. The
Speaker 2: core commander headquarters is almost wiped out by a Vietcong
Speaker 2: attack that happens, you know, all night long. These attacks
Speaker 2: are happening across the entire country. Tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: militants are leading this offensive, and in the middle of
Speaker 2: this carnage, you know, the general's are all sitting there
Speaker 2: talking and all they can talk about is the Vietcong
Speaker 2: sapper attack on the on the US embassy that earlier
Speaker 2: that morning, and how they the rumors were that the
Speaker 2: embassy had been sacked and that this was huge and
Speaker 2: you know that just that discrepancy between uh, you know,
Speaker 2: a large scale offensive across the board, but all the
Speaker 2: focuses on a special operation and then you know the
Speaker 2: consequences of that Viet Kong special operation and trying to
Speaker 2: breach the embassy, you know, really has outsized political strategic
Speaker 2: impacts as far as you know, people not believing, uh,
Speaker 2: you know Westmoreland's ideas about you know, the victories around
Speaker 2: the corner, but also you know the effect on Lyndon
Speaker 2: Johnson's presidential campaign shortly thereafter. So uh, you know, we
Speaker 2: we try to use that this one event within a larger,
Speaker 2: you know, countrywide offense to highlight this point of what
Speaker 2: a special operation, is right, it's a specialized tactic action. Yes,
Speaker 2: it's different than what is going on everywhere else for
Speaker 2: this particular group, but also it has this deliberate, predesigned
Speaker 2: outside impact. And so we thought that vignette and the
Speaker 2: larger story kind of tells that Ian, Did you have
Speaker 2: anything you want to add to that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's you know, just to in nerd speak, and
Speaker 4: we're researching this stuff. We're trying to generate variation, you know,
Speaker 4: with different what we call in case variation. So for
Speaker 4: any given group, we've got to kind of disaggregate what
Speaker 4: they typically do from these more unique events. And they're
Speaker 4: very expensive and they're rare events. And these groups aren't
Speaker 4: exactly like advertising this stuff. It's they have to operate secretly.
Speaker 4: They're small, they typically are militarily weak comparatively, so it's
Speaker 4: a lot of private information that we're dealing with, and
Speaker 4: unfortunately you typically only see it after the fact. So
Speaker 4: in terms of like kind of separating the stuff, just
Speaker 4: think of it as, uh, you know, we're looking at
Speaker 4: a stack of needles and we're hoping to sift through
Speaker 4: there and find the ones that release copper or gold
Speaker 4: colored and those are the ones we really want to
Speaker 4: examine because they're gonna qualitatively look different than what we
Speaker 4: typically see. And the other key thing that that Craig
Speaker 4: brings up, and this is really where people have scratched
Speaker 4: their heads and we've talked to them about this, is
Speaker 4: they're like, well, what about this group? What about that?
Speaker 4: We're like, well, it's unique per group, and that's and
Speaker 4: that's why this is important. You just can't say, well,
Speaker 4: overall militants do this and this would be a special operation.
Speaker 4: You have to look at the group individually and see
Speaker 4: when do they make when do they make the decision
Speaker 4: to commit these resources to do something qualitatively different than
Speaker 4: what they typically do, and this could happen. And we
Speaker 4: also use the word dajure specifically because we expect groups
Speaker 4: that are militarily weak to adapt during conflict or over
Speaker 4: the course of a terror campaign or an insurgency. We
Speaker 4: expect that, so we expect their tactics day to day
Speaker 4: to change because they're just trying to keep their you know,
Speaker 4: they're playing Tom and Jerry uh with with their opponents.
Speaker 4: So that's kind of how we organized that.
Speaker 1: One thing that kept coming to mind to me Craig
Speaker 1: is is I y'all brought up more examples and more
Speaker 1: examples that made me. I kept saying to myself, Man,
Speaker 1: I really hope that people in charge of this are
Speaker 1: are know their history and make appropriate actions, because there
Speaker 1: are certain regardless of you know, where on the grid
Speaker 1: somebody is, there are certain actions that you see throughout history,
Speaker 1: different locations, different places that as you know, you and
Speaker 1: Ian have mentioned a couple of times during the course
Speaker 1: of the hour, outsize impact for their effects, and one
Speaker 1: of those areas that we see is prison breakouts. Prison breakouts,
Speaker 1: you know, whether you're going to the Palestini mandate in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, to our failed efforts in Vietnam or
Speaker 1: most recently that we had during the Iraq conflict is
Speaker 1: and you know, we we probably don't put our enough
Speaker 1: are our best people in these detention facilities. But a
Speaker 1: this is a very common tactics it's used that has
Speaker 1: big effects, not just at the tactical operational, but at
Speaker 1: the strategic level. Something is as basic as a properly
Speaker 1: secured prison, if it's vulnerable to a breakout, can have
Speaker 1: huge second and third order effects.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's you know again, having a typology helps us
Speaker 2: understand variations, and we saw that now. Now criminal groups
Speaker 2: are also interested in prison breakouts occasionally, so we did
Speaker 2: have across group example of Chappo's infamous tunneling out of
Speaker 2: a maximum security Mexican prison. But you know, the militant groups,
Speaker 2: going back to Ian's comment about how this helps us
Speaker 2: understand how nonstate actors campaign if you think about it
Speaker 2: from the from the leadership of a militant group like
Speaker 2: isis at the time, but it could be any of
Speaker 2: the as you mentioned, many many groups have done this
Speaker 2: prison breakout, to include the Urgun in the Palestinian Palestine
Speaker 2: mandate in nineteen forty seven is a pretty spectacular well
Speaker 2: executed special operation for that goes back, you know, obviously decades.
Speaker 2: But you know, from a campaign perspective, these military groups,
Speaker 2: particularly the ones with long term political objectives, they need
Speaker 2: manpower and they need experienced manpower, and that experienced manpower
Speaker 2: is sitting there in prisons often, as you pointed out,
Speaker 2: poorly guarded. It's not your best people that you're putting
Speaker 2: on on that detail. And you know they're they're really
Speaker 2: motivated to getting these guys out, and when they're successful,
Speaker 2: and we've seen again from a trend perspective, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq,
Speaker 2: pretty recently, all throughout Africa. By the way, Nigeria there's
Speaker 2: there's a big as long as state inspired one in
Speaker 2: Nigeria that's really fueling the conflict there. And the ability
Speaker 2: to get your mid level leaders, your high level leaders,
Speaker 2: this human capital that's just sitting there in prison to
Speaker 2: get them back out into the fight, you know, more
Speaker 2: network more. You know, they're sitting there training themselves in
Speaker 2: prison for another opportunity, and and when they get out,
Speaker 2: it's just mayhem after that.
Speaker 5: So yeah, uh, you know, I was fascinated by the
Speaker 5: by your your grid, where you you put the under
Speaker 5: self interest, you put the criminal, criminals and the cults together,
Speaker 5: kind of talk about what why, why that's done that way,
Speaker 5: and what they're what the what what you look for
Speaker 5: to separate or to distinguish what these cults and the
Speaker 5: criminal elements they're doing that makes them do special operations stuff.
Speaker 4: Mark the when we were trying to separate the that
Speaker 4: little quadrant out, we're trying to figure out who does
Speaker 4: things in because the mercenary group is really the one
Speaker 4: that was like, okay, they're probably the ones that are
Speaker 4: most self interested, but they may not have because we're
Speaker 4: really looking at that professional military corporation angle.
Speaker 3: Uh and Wagner, of course, uh.
Speaker 4: Kind of came to light that we don't talk about
Speaker 4: them in the same as conducting these operations, but for
Speaker 4: criminal group. And then that led us to say, okay, well,
Speaker 4: a criminal group. They we have evidence from the cartels
Speaker 4: in Mexico that groups like Lozadas are made up of
Speaker 4: Mexican former special operations people from from their military and
Speaker 4: and they do conduct daring feats uh to demonstrate their
Speaker 4: their acumen as they're trying to uh, you know, consolidate
Speaker 4: market share.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: But cults, on the other hand, and this is the
Speaker 4: one that Craig research. I'm going to turn it over
Speaker 4: to him. But but cults are also this weird group
Speaker 4: that may want to jump start something as part of
Speaker 4: their belief system. So it's it's kind of uh, yes,
Speaker 4: it may be ideological. But I'm gonna turn over to
Speaker 4: Craig for for his specifics on the cult choice, because
Speaker 4: this was a debate we had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was originally we were we had made a
Speaker 2: profit oriented instead of self interested, and you know, all
Speaker 2: groups are self interested, but we're talking about the primary
Speaker 2: motive of this particular group. But cults tend to, you know,
Speaker 2: they're very self interested. They're they're very much about divorcing
Speaker 2: themselves sometimes from the rest of societies they can live
Speaker 2: in UH in the way that they want to. They're
Speaker 2: often criminal groups as well, right, they're doing extortion or
Speaker 2: just criminal activity to fund their kind of you know,
Speaker 2: creation of a utopian lifestyle. But we have we had
Speaker 2: we saw a lot of you know, in the research,
Speaker 2: we saw a lot of examples of cults to say
Speaker 2: ontrem Rico in Tokyo that that conducts a huge terror attack. Obviously,
Speaker 2: they're apocalyptic in nature. They believe they're going to jump
Speaker 2: start some kind of you know, large societal collapse. Some
Speaker 2: people call them accelerationists, these types of groups. But we focused,
Speaker 2: we we we said, what what makes them similar to
Speaker 2: criminal groups, other than the criminal activities they often are
Speaker 2: frequently doing, UH, is that they're very self interested. They're
Speaker 2: just they're they're more for for the criminal groups and
Speaker 2: cartels that are interested in just profit and not necessarily
Speaker 2: you know, mandating political you know, you have to live
Speaker 2: in this type of way, some kind of ideological or
Speaker 2: political goals. Not to say that they aren't political actors, right,
Speaker 2: but that that's not their motive. Their motive is to
Speaker 2: make money, and for cults, it's really just to perpetuate
Speaker 2: the lifestyle that they're living and whatever it is. So
Speaker 2: we have examples in the book of you know, very
Speaker 2: violent cults that try to and in an in Rock
Speaker 2: example is try to do a leadership decapitation of the
Speaker 2: entire Shia religious staffablishments. It would be like the equivalent
Speaker 2: of killing the pope and then pretty much benefiting off
Speaker 2: of the civil war that would follow. The irony is
Speaker 2: that there's a massive civil war in the Rock between
Speaker 2: She and Sunny at the time, and it's just almost
Speaker 2: unimaginable what might have happened. And that did berail, you know,
Speaker 2: a civil war slash insurgency that's that's quite robust in
Speaker 2: two thousand and seven and going sideways for the United States,
Speaker 2: probably lucky that that one did not happen.
Speaker 1: In Craig they you know, kind of circling back to
Speaker 1: one of my opening questions, you know, words mean things
Speaker 1: is and I had never really considered anything else because
Speaker 1: it's almost become a verbal tick for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Is not Everything that we would normally define as a
Speaker 1: terrorist attack probably was one or should be looked at
Speaker 1: as simply being one. And an example, y'all use is
Speaker 1: identified that there's a problem. The famous Bete airport bombing
Speaker 1: is called an active terror a terror attack. Is that
Speaker 1: actually a little more complicated than that when you look
Speaker 1: at these types of operations inside the frame work that
Speaker 1: you and I and developed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a that's a good point. I mean a
Speaker 2: lot of these things are terror attack and special operations
Speaker 2: at the same time. When we were and that was
Speaker 2: one of the hard parts of researching this, It's like, well,
Speaker 2: because then you know, we'd have friends who'd be like,
Speaker 2: well what about this? What about this? And a lot
Speaker 2: of them are just terror attacked. And sometimes terrorism operates
Speaker 2: off of a similar logic to special operations in the
Speaker 2: sense that they might not be specialized tacked to action.
Speaker 2: Usually they're not different from the normal du jour, you know,
Speaker 2: suicide bombing. So let's say isis that's their pretty normal operation.
Speaker 2: So a lot of those terrorist attacks, they're they're terror
Speaker 2: attacks that they don't meet the criteria of a special operation.
Speaker 2: And the three kind of tests that we developed to
Speaker 2: to you know, to kind of identify what's this US
Speaker 2: operation versus what is other things? But the bay root
Speaker 2: by bombing, you know, it's uh, the target is a
Speaker 2: military target, but it's there. It's being conducted by a
Speaker 2: shadowy group that becomes HESBLA but is not quite HESBLA yet,
Speaker 2: And so they have that advantage. There's no djor there's
Speaker 2: there's no pattern of activity for them, so they can
Speaker 2: come out with what we called an opening gambit and
Speaker 2: just come out and punch you right in the nose.
Speaker 2: Even though they had already bombed an embassy beforehand, and
Speaker 2: you know they had they had done some activities, they
Speaker 2: were still far enough off the radar for for the
Speaker 2: US and and others, even the others in the region,
Speaker 2: even the Israelis were surprised by, uh, by this particular
Speaker 2: group before it you know, became what we know today
Speaker 2: is HESBLA. So yeah, I mean that generally these kings
Speaker 2: can be you know, terror attacks, but at the same time,
Speaker 2: you know, if they if they meet the other criteria. Uh,
Speaker 2: that one in particular, we argued as this was a
Speaker 2: specialized tactical action because of the sophistication of the bomb,
Speaker 2: which the I think the CIA or the FBI later
Speaker 2: said not only was it the largest non nuclear detonation
Speaker 2: on the history of the planet, but that it was
Speaker 2: sufficient enough that it probably would have destroyed the embassy
Speaker 2: even if it hadn't, even if the guards had stopped
Speaker 2: it short of entering the entry control points, still would
Speaker 2: have devastated that building and probably caused similar casualties. So
Speaker 2: that's you know, that's pretty much not only did they
Speaker 2: they brought their a game on on the type of
Speaker 2: of UH, on the type of mission that that was
Speaker 2: in addition to having this outside effect of having the
Speaker 2: US say this is we're not sure exactly what just happened,
Speaker 2: but we are not going to stick around.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love your vignettes. I had never before, even
Speaker 5: though I looked in California for a long time, I
Speaker 5: had never before heard of the the Art of choke
Speaker 5: King of King of the Art where we called him
Speaker 5: that the mobster running the Art of choke job in
Speaker 5: New York City. Talk a little bit about how that
Speaker 5: fell into your into yours. I know it's a criminal thing,
Speaker 5: but talk about how that fell into your into your.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll start, but I'll let I'll let Ian Ian's
Speaker 2: the one who pushed means. I think Ian pushed us
Speaker 2: a lot on, you know, trying to find different violent
Speaker 2: nonstate actors that do special operations. And I'll tell you
Speaker 2: when I started doing the he was like, but you
Speaker 2: got to do the criminal groups and the and the cult.
Speaker 2: And I found it much more interesting once we we
Speaker 2: put cults into this group. But originally I was very
Speaker 2: very suspect about, you know, or circumspect about, like two
Speaker 2: criminal groups do special operations? Like what's a special operation?
Speaker 2: Look like criminal groups? I mean, they're they're very much
Speaker 2: interested in making money. I thought the leadership targeting, you know,
Speaker 2: that's a common that's a common special operation for non
Speaker 2: state groups across the spectrum, right taking out your rival's leadership,
Speaker 2: you know, can apply to any kind of violent group,
Speaker 2: for sure, if it's sophisticated enough and meets the other
Speaker 2: tiest the one that someone else said, you know, what's
Speaker 2: your case selection is like, and like, well, a lot
Speaker 2: of this is just stuff that we know because Ian
Speaker 2: teaches the history special operations at MPs, and you know,
Speaker 2: I do the research into a group that's been very
Speaker 2: prolific or whatever, but one that's really local to US
Speaker 2: is the Artichoke Wars which happened here in the Central
Speaker 2: Coast one hundred years ago. They still talk about it.
Speaker 2: There's still Italian farms that run out here that were
Speaker 2: victimized by the mafia and the Artichoke Wars. When when
Speaker 2: I stumbled upon it, trying to understand, like what would
Speaker 2: a criminal special operation look like other than leadership to capitation,
Speaker 2: and it was the establishment of a monopoly over you know,
Speaker 2: listid or illicit goods, but in this case artichokes. And
Speaker 2: you know, these Italian early Italian monsters from what becomes
Speaker 2: one of the Five Families of New York creates a
Speaker 2: monopoly chain from their own grocery stores that they used
Speaker 2: really as a money laundering front in New York City.
Speaker 2: But they they were they kind of cornered the artichoke
Speaker 2: market which were growing on the West Coast in California
Speaker 2: by Italian farmers and you know, bought by Italians in
Speaker 2: New York City, Italian Americans in New York City, and
Speaker 2: they monopolized every aspect of the trade from growing to
Speaker 2: transportation to you know, selling it in the grocery stores
Speaker 2: in New York City. And they were making ninety five
Speaker 2: percent profit on artichokes of all things, which which kind
Speaker 2: of reminds you of you know, avocados from Mexico nowadays
Speaker 2: with the cartels. But the cartels had nothing on the
Speaker 2: you know, the mafia and their ability to really control
Speaker 2: every aspect of the trade, to the point where if
Speaker 2: farmers in California realized they were getting fleeced, you know,
Speaker 2: they could make a lot more money selling the other
Speaker 2: growth other sellers, and the mafia would send guys out
Speaker 2: here at night in the in the fog of coastal
Speaker 2: California and you know, cut down people's artichokes or even
Speaker 2: firebomb artichoke fields. And you know, I think two or
Speaker 2: three years into it there there was an an acknowledgement
Speaker 2: that ninety five percent of artichokes sold here in California
Speaker 2: were to this turn Nova mafia family, which is it's
Speaker 2: just an incredible kind of thing for a group like
Speaker 2: that to establish that kind of monopoly in a country
Speaker 2: like the United States. Of course it's one hundred years ago,
Speaker 2: but it takes the Nasan FBI and the Mayor of
Speaker 2: the Gordia to to kind of shut down this monopoly.
Speaker 2: But that's what it took.
Speaker 1: You know I and it's easy sometimes when you read
Speaker 1: all these vignettes too. And there have been some people,
Speaker 1: and we had some of them that I worked with
Speaker 1: in Afghanistan who they get the mindset special operations all
Speaker 1: the time everywhere for everything, and that's not always true.
Speaker 1: And an interesting note, and I have an unread volume
Speaker 1: of this in my library. I've been kind of incentivized
Speaker 1: to go grab. It is the memoir of a British
Speaker 1: Field Marshall Williams Slim, and he had under him Major
Speaker 1: General wind Gate in his special operations and I definitely
Speaker 1: need to dig it out and read it in first person.
Speaker 1: But you outline where William Slim he was not that
Speaker 1: big of a fan of the special operations that they
Speaker 1: were doing, because there is an opportunity cost whether you
Speaker 1: are a state actor like the British Army is, or
Speaker 1: you are a non state actor. I just want to
Speaker 1: do a little bit of a quote here from the book.
Speaker 1: Let's see here here we go. Quote. Slim argued that
Speaker 1: win Gate's passion for special operations as a game changer
Speaker 1: might have worked in Palestine or East Africa, but not
Speaker 1: in Burma. Special operations must be integrated into ca campaigns
Speaker 1: in a way that it achieves operational strategic effects, or
Speaker 1: it is a waste of resources that states waging large
Speaker 1: scale conventional operations cannot afford. And two paragraphs down opening sentence,
Speaker 1: quote militant groups for the most part self fund their
Speaker 1: activities without the benefit of proxy groups, mercenaries and criminal
Speaker 1: groups and either external support or expertise, and focus on
Speaker 1: resource extraction from population unquote. So these these operations, they
Speaker 1: are they are small, small units, big effects, but they
Speaker 1: do come with a big opportunity cost. And I definitely
Speaker 1: appreciated Field Marshall Slim's comment about how you and we've
Speaker 1: seen this in our own recent history that when you
Speaker 1: have too much of your quote special forces unquote, it
Speaker 1: leaves your regular forces without its top players that you
Speaker 1: really need for the general operation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's sorry about that.
Speaker 4: A plane is going overhead sound of Freedom, Yeah, Freedom
Speaker 4: and the Monterey Airport. But that is uh, this is
Speaker 4: actually a big that's that's a very nice springboard too.
Speaker 4: What's going on right now in the US Department of
Speaker 4: Defense and how the special operations community is ensuring they're
Speaker 4: reoriented appropriately to support what we perceive as large scale
Speaker 4: combat operations. Against near peer adversaries. And because there there
Speaker 4: is this I would say misperception, but just say a
Speaker 4: perception that the campaigns during the recent unpleasantness uh in
Speaker 4: Iraq and Afghanistan were predominantly executed by special operations forces.
Speaker 3: The reality is they weren't.
Speaker 4: Just some of the most prominent operations were, and so
Speaker 4: the vast majority of those operations were conducted by conventional
Speaker 4: forces conducting what we call counterinsurgency. So when General Slim
Speaker 4: is talking about, hey, I I don't need the chindits
Speaker 4: are a valuable asset, I I don't know if I
Speaker 4: can afford them.
Speaker 3: I can't.
Speaker 4: I can't afford the manpower, and I can't afford not
Speaker 4: controlling the effects on the ground. That's like a two
Speaker 4: pronged issue, right, the fact that you might have a
Speaker 4: resource constraint, but also you don't know if you can
Speaker 4: con if the effects are going to be if you're
Speaker 4: going to be able to control the effects of these
Speaker 4: long range penetration groups. So that that is that's something
Speaker 4: that is being debated right now in terms of how
Speaker 4: soft can be reimagined to support large scale combat operations.
Speaker 4: Uh So, it's a it's a real thing it's a
Speaker 4: because special operations forces, uh, not the operations themselves, it's
Speaker 4: a it's an issue of haves and have nots for
Speaker 4: a lot of actors. Because they are resourced better per person,
Speaker 4: they're generally considered elite in terms of not better, but
Speaker 4: privileged and how do things or things travel with privilege
Speaker 4: such as more money per person, more training, better selection criteria,
Speaker 4: different pays. So yeah, it's when you're looking at hey,
Speaker 4: how do I win this larger campaign? And am I
Speaker 4: putting too much into this one specialized unit? What are
Speaker 4: the what are the costs that I'm sinking into that?
Speaker 4: Are they worth? Are they going to be worth the outcome?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I would just add that, you know, non state actors
Speaker 2: feel this more than conventional actors because they're so resource
Speaker 2: challenge And I think the best examples in the book
Speaker 2: are of these kind of you know, really well thought
Speaker 2: out special operations is that their economy of forces that
Speaker 2: there have in on the peripheral of a conventional campaign,
Speaker 2: much like Lawrence is an Akaba example where they make
Speaker 2: a large but also in Iraq early on with US
Speaker 2: special forces pairing up with Kurds to tie down ten
Speaker 2: Iraqi divisions, or whatever it was like that those any
Speaker 2: any kind of proxy or our use of partner forces
Speaker 2: to to really uh impact a conventional campaign is ideal
Speaker 2: for for the for an idea of special or concept
Speaker 2: of special operations, Let's.
Speaker 5: Talk a little bit about the mercenaries engaged in these,
Speaker 5: either either coups or preventing government changes. We've got, we've got,
Speaker 5: You've got a couple of examples in the book mercenaries.
Speaker 5: I guess if you put them through your grid, there
Speaker 5: are only certain operations there engaged in that would be
Speaker 5: special operations, particularly like the coups in the in the
Speaker 5: was it Comoros, tomorrows wherever that country's name is?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so the specialize. So this goes right to Seal's
Speaker 4: question before, and it actually ties nicely together. Mercenaries come
Speaker 4: ready made. Unlike the other groups the mercenaries are. They
Speaker 4: have a lower opportunity cost for an employer because the
Speaker 4: expectation is that they're hired to perform a task, even
Speaker 4: though that task may appear comical or rudimentary and execution.
Speaker 4: The expectation is, yeah, I'm going to hire a group
Speaker 4: of men or fighters to perform something I don't have
Speaker 4: the capability of So when you look at it in
Speaker 4: terms of our theoretical construct, the djore is literally the
Speaker 4: absence of any military capability in the case of the Camorras,
Speaker 4: the coup attempt in the Camorras and uh Or it's
Speaker 4: actually a successful coup. But incidentally, the interesting thing about
Speaker 4: that coup is it is built off of a blueprint
Speaker 4: from a fictional book called The Dogs of War, where
Speaker 4: Bob Denard, the mercenary leader, conducts the operation pretty much
Speaker 4: step by step as Frederick Forsyth describes in his fictional
Speaker 4: book about seizing Ace a small African country, so that
Speaker 4: parallels are are pretty obvious. Uh but but yeah, a
Speaker 4: lot of mercenary groups, that's what they're That's why we
Speaker 4: put them in there, because we also wanted to examine
Speaker 4: this new phenomenon about whether groups like Wagner are really
Speaker 4: conducting special operations. Now we don't have a lot of
Speaker 4: evidence yet on whether they're military assistance activities during resource
Speaker 4: extraction are actually destabilizing areas, but that's probably of the
Speaker 4: next step in this research.
Speaker 1: Y'all kind of kicked off the book with one of
Speaker 1: my favorite stories and for two army guys, I'll give
Speaker 1: you credit, you know, the naval, the naval part of
Speaker 1: the Naval War College and the Naval postgraduate schools. We're
Speaker 1: an off with you a little bit. This is good
Speaker 1: to see, but it's it's the mindset that.
Speaker 3: People.
Speaker 1: People are people, and whether you're a non state actor
Speaker 1: or you're a state actor, it's a mindset. It's how
Speaker 1: you look at a challenge. You know, where is there
Speaker 1: a problem, how can we address that? Having the mindset
Speaker 1: of that you have with the special operators, it can
Speaker 1: really create even in a large established traditional or maybe
Speaker 1: two traditional sometimes militaries, really impactful events. And one thing
Speaker 1: you'll started off with was Operation Chariot the Campbellton who
Speaker 1: took out the dry dock in Nazir in France, which
Speaker 1: I can't pronounce so but that's close enough to begin
Speaker 1: with an end and ends with the Z sound. But
Speaker 1: it's one of those high profile but also high sacrifice
Speaker 1: we look at sometimes with these quote terrorists, non state actors,
Speaker 1: how are you going to refer to them? Well, they
Speaker 1: did this operation, but all but two of them were killed.
Speaker 1: Even traditional forces who want to do these high impact,
Speaker 1: high sacrifices also have a when you look at a
Speaker 1: casualty rate, just something that's that's really hard to understand
Speaker 1: from just traditionally trained people. A lot of the sailors
Speaker 1: were you talk a little bit about about that decision
Speaker 1: Craig that y'all made. Hey, let's start off with telling
Speaker 1: a naval story to kind of outline some of the
Speaker 1: larger foundation topics that we want to address.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I appreciate it. You know, been a teaching naval
Speaker 2: work hallge for Tivia, So I think a lot of
Speaker 2: my a lot of you Navy. You guys are rubbed
Speaker 2: off on me, So we have many many you know,
Speaker 2: the Midway U the Doolittle raid, you know, off of
Speaker 2: the Hornet is obviously another example of that. But I'll
Speaker 2: let uh, I'll let Ian Ian teaches this as a
Speaker 2: case study here at NPS. Uh about the Campbellton I was.
Speaker 2: I was actually just in Scotland last week and I
Speaker 2: was not far from Cambelton. Uh So, but I'll let
Speaker 2: I'll let Ian talk a little bit about that, and
Speaker 2: then I'll jump in to the rest of your question,
Speaker 2: which is a good one.
Speaker 3: So we're looking.
Speaker 4: What we want to do is set the stage for
Speaker 4: for the reader to say, what is a specialt can
Speaker 4: we really see these outsized effects? And there are three
Speaker 4: from World War two, Operation Chariot being the one that
Speaker 4: sant is there that hit all these criterias where it's
Speaker 4: really obvious so the reader can see it easily.
Speaker 3: And yeah, it's it's a state sponsor to that.
Speaker 4: It is the British Commando Force under Lord Louis Mountbatten
Speaker 4: who devises this scheme to ram a lend lease by
Speaker 4: the way US lend lease World War One destroyer into
Speaker 4: a dry dock, basically turning it into a ship boarn
Speaker 4: ied to defeat this dry dock. And the whole reason
Speaker 4: they want to defeat this dry dock is if they
Speaker 4: can prevent the Turpets, the German fast moving pocket battleship
Speaker 4: from a returning to Saint Nazir to be refitted, it's
Speaker 4: basically going to keep it out of the war. And
Speaker 4: at that stage in nineteen forty two, German U boat
Speaker 4: wolf packs are dominating and basically pushing Britain to starve.
Speaker 4: So this raid was instrumental with a strategic impact of
Speaker 4: preventing the Germans to maintain that pressure on US or
Speaker 4: Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic and the cost. The cost
Speaker 4: is two thirds casualties is really about a six hundred
Speaker 4: man force. Two thirds are either wounded, killed, or captured,
Speaker 4: only about one hundred, but only about two but only
Speaker 4: about two hundred and fifty actually returned to Britain. So
Speaker 4: what we really wanted to do there is show the
Speaker 4: differences as to what really makes action a special operation.
Speaker 2: Over to you, Craig, Yeah, I'm just getting to Sala's
Speaker 2: point about mindset. You know, if if we can put
Speaker 2: ourselves in our opponents, you know, being violent on state
Speaker 2: actors often but you know they have the same kind
Speaker 2: of strategic dilemmas that that Ian just described, and sometimes
Speaker 2: even more daunting from there, you know, from the asymmetry
Speaker 2: between them taken on states. And so you know, we're
Speaker 2: trying to use the logic of these kind of ad
Speaker 2: hoc special operations that were executed by you know, large
Speaker 2: states in uh in large scale you know, conventional warfare,
Speaker 2: and then and then kind of show how nonstate you know,
Speaker 2: operational planners would would also use special operations to kind
Speaker 2: of to surmount these these same challenges.
Speaker 5: Ask before we let you guys go, how do you
Speaker 5: see this this book being used by by the intended audience.
Speaker 2: And you want to talk this about the flip side,
Speaker 2: about how we can see our own.
Speaker 4: Yeah, sure, Uh, you know, it's kind of funny. We
Speaker 4: we've had a very long set of campaigns in the
Speaker 4: Middle East that did prominently use a lot of special
Speaker 4: operations forces, and but we're a lot of those operations
Speaker 4: and tactical actions across those two decades of unpleasantness? Were
Speaker 4: they Were they really special operations just because special operations
Speaker 4: forces conducted them well? From personal experience on doing it,
Speaker 4: a few times I'd say no, And that's because we
Speaker 4: weren't really thinking about the premeditated effects of certain tactical
Speaker 4: actions and whether they're actually part of a larger campaign.
Speaker 4: Very few events were. And and so if anything, our
Speaker 4: hope is is this book is an appetite suppressant for
Speaker 4: seeing ourselves and understanding, Hey, if we've created these standing forces,
Speaker 4: are we are we using them in ways that isn't
Speaker 4: just going to protect them. They're not a toy that
Speaker 4: we're setting on the shelf. But when we use them,
Speaker 4: we have to be prepared to lose them, and when
Speaker 4: we do. When we do use them, we need to
Speaker 4: make sure that we're achieving these outsized effects. I mean,
Speaker 4: that's really what Operation Chariot is all about. Uh, That's
Speaker 4: what the dual Little Rate is all about. Uh, in
Speaker 4: terms of, hey, we are sending a very we are
Speaker 4: making a very deliberate choice to commit these resources.
Speaker 3: So you've want to follow up on that.
Speaker 2: Craig, Yeah, I think you know the other half. In addition,
Speaker 2: you know, this is not just about us, although I
Speaker 2: think you know, Ian's point is obviously something that that
Speaker 2: animated the book as well as you know, some other
Speaker 2: questions that we had we talked about earlier. But just
Speaker 2: you know, these not these violent non state actors are
Speaker 2: still going to be part of our you know, strategic environment.
Speaker 2: The technology is really enabling them to do more sophisticated stuff.
Speaker 2: But what we saw in October seventh, we call it
Speaker 2: a special operation within you know, the larger offense or
Speaker 2: or murders rampage, right that happens on October seventh, But
Speaker 2: it's it's it's facilitated by what we would consider a
Speaker 2: special operation as far as breaching a highly technical wall.
Speaker 2: And so these are things that we have to look
Speaker 2: out for, you know, in the future, these these very
Speaker 2: what's what's a special operation by non state actors is
Speaker 2: going to look like in the cyber domain, that's not
Speaker 2: just hacking, it's you know, something more kin to like
Speaker 2: stucks neet or space, which we have you know, lots
Speaker 2: of violent non state actors. I mean, we have lots
Speaker 2: of non state actors in space right now. Space X
Speaker 2: is a non state actor, right But what is a
Speaker 2: violent non state actor that activities or special operations in
Speaker 2: space domain? What? What? What? What might that look like
Speaker 2: and how that impact the military capabilities we rely on
Speaker 2: in space. But for me, it's it's about you know,
Speaker 2: continuing or trying to defeat this continuum, this kind of
Speaker 2: habit we have of underestimating violent non state actors and
Speaker 2: not just how dedicated they are, but but how clever
Speaker 2: they can be.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: The I think the IRA kind of messed it up
Speaker 2: because the IRA came up with this famous phrase that
Speaker 2: terrorism studies folks really love, which is uh, you know,
Speaker 2: I think when they missed Margaret Thatcher once, it's like, well,
Speaker 2: you you know, you guys have to be good all
Speaker 2: the time. We just have to be lucky once. And
Speaker 2: that's and that's that's almost a paradigm for how we
Speaker 2: see violent non state actors and both terrorist acts and
Speaker 2: also special operations, is like, oh, it's luck or you know,
Speaker 2: they got lucky, or we weren't paying attention and this happened,
Speaker 2: and you know we're we show that. Look, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of planning that went into this, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of preparation, there's a lot of resourcing, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of risk taking, and all of this is not luck. Right,
Speaker 2: that's it's a fallacy to think that they got lucky.
Speaker 2: They just need to get lucky once, as the IRA said,
Speaker 2: And that's that's another kind of agenda.
Speaker 1: I think if you will, I think, I think you
Speaker 1: and you and I and outline very well that a
Speaker 1: lot of these non state actors they're not lucky. They're
Speaker 1: good and they've learned all the lessons. And now now
Speaker 1: you've given me nightmares violent non state actors in space. Well,
Speaker 1: here's what you and Ian can do. Because y'all set
Speaker 1: it here on mid rats, when the inevitable happens one day,
Speaker 1: we're going to see that maybe in our lifetime, maybe not.
Speaker 1: You can come just like, hey, we coined that, we
Speaker 1: coined that concern. You can claim credit. It was on
Speaker 1: mid rats, but Craig and Ann really appreciate y'all taking
Speaker 1: time for the next hour to discuss this. And again,
Speaker 1: the book has just come out. You can find a
Speaker 1: link to it the listeners on the show page, and
Speaker 1: I wish you the best of luck with it. And
Speaker 1: it definitely was a fresh and informative look at a
Speaker 1: topic I think some of us have talked to superficially
Speaker 1: and maybe a little lazily about in the last twenty
Speaker 1: five years. So Bravo Zulu won that and I wish
Speaker 1: all the best of luck there in modern and the
Speaker 1: Newport I don't know, Craig, are you going to make
Speaker 1: it back to Newport? Are you trying to find a
Speaker 1: way to stay in the better weather in California?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: I love my students out here because we get a
Speaker 2: different mix out here than they do at Newport. And
Speaker 2: but you know, the Mothership's always calling me back for
Speaker 2: this and that, and I'll be there before you know it.
Speaker 2: And that's not a bad place to be either. So
Speaker 2: thanks for the Bravo Zulu. I know what that means.
Speaker 2: After twelve years.
Speaker 5: Thank you, thank you, Thank you gentlemen for joining us today.
Speaker 5: It's been very, very interesting and again wish you the
Speaker 5: best of luck on your on your book.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having us, Thank you again.
Speaker 1: For having us, welcome in. Thank you everybody for joining
Speaker 1: us for another edition in mid Rats until next time,
Speaker 1: hope you have a great Navy day.
Speaker 3: Cheers, pay.
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Speaker 6: for you being to blame more lovely love me silly
Speaker 6: faulting your the tame.
Speaker 7: It's a long way to Dipperary. It's a long way.
Speaker 7: It's a long way to Dipperary, to between.
Speaker 6: Gorb becdi farewell left dwell.
Speaker 7: It's a long long way to differate. But my life,
Speaker 7: my na