Welcome to everyone and welcome to the virtual Merchant Center for International Security Studies. I'm Professor Pete Monsoor, one of the leads in the American Foreign and Military Policy Cluster. And on behalf of my fellow cluster leaders and the leadership of the Merchant Center, we're delighted to have with us today Seth Jones. Seth is Senior Vice President, the Harold...
Brownshare and Director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has worked in numerous positions in the U.S. government, including his work as an advisor to the Commanding General of U.S. Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan, and on a 2014 congressional panel that reviewed the FBI's implementation of counterterrorism recommendations from the 9-11 Commission report. He holds a PhD from the University of Chicago, and he is the author of numerous books on international security, terrorism, insurgency, and other topics.
His most recent book and the focus of his talk today is Three Dangerous Men, Russia, China, Iran, and the Rise of Irregular Warfare, published last year by W.W. Norton. So, Seth, welcome.
virtual floor is yours and I will drop off as you present your slides and then I will re-emerge when you're done with your talk and we'll I will host the Q&A session if you have a question for Seth while he's talking just go ahead and put use the Q&A function on the bottom of your screen and put your question in there and that's how we'll we'll take the questions in the as they come up. So, Seth, it's all yours. Well, thank you for the kind introduction, Peter, and thanks, everybody, for joining us today.
I should say, as someone who got my PhD at the University of Chicago, it is an honor to be part of that Midwest Consortium of Graduate Schools, so I enjoyed my time working on my dissertation at Chicago. studied as a realist, though have an appreciation for all forms of support in the international politics arena. What I'm talking about today, though, is actually the subject of the last book that's got direct relevance in many ways to what we're seeing in Russia and Ukraine. And it's on how states, I'm focused particularly today on the Chinese, the Russians, and the Iranians.
are using irregular warfare. So what I'll do is I'll walk through kind of why this subject is important and then what I mean by it, and then I'd like to give some examples in each of these arenas. Hopefully we'll have enough time to talk about the Iranians. I'll at least spend some time talking about the Chinese and the Russians.
So the primary focus, frankly, in writing the book, and this really gets to the main question that I asked in the book, is how are these states, they've been identified by both the current U.S. administration and the last one, and even the one before that in many respects, as competitors, adversaries. You can choose your word. The question really was, how do they view competition? And so what's important here is a couple of things.
One is there's this interesting story. And Littleheart, B.H. Littleheart, the British military theorist, tells the story of the Irish statesman John Wilson Croker walking with the first Duke of Wellington. And.
On their walk through the English countryside, they're trying to guess what is on the other side of each hill as they're walking through the country. And Croker expresses some surprise, actually, shock, that Wellington is able to explain what is going on, what kinds of trees and shrubs and plants are on the other side of the hill. And Wellington, in response, says, well, I've spent my entire life in trying to guess what was at the other side of the hill.
And then he proceeds to explain that really the definition of a competent, even an imaginative general, is one that is trying to guess, understand what is happening, quote, at the other side of the hill, behind the opposing. front lines and in the mind and thoughts of the opponent. So that is what is kind of at the source of this.
And actually, just while I'm on that, the primary focus of the book then in kind of raising that question is to look at two things. One is a significant amount of literature. statements, policy statements, strategic documents, inspirational texts from leaders that I'll talk about in a moment, from Iran, so they're in Persian, or China, so they're in Mandarin, or in Russian, translated into English. So thousands of documents that were translated from those three languages into English. And then in...
particular to also focus on influential individuals in each of those countries. And we're really talking about military issues here. So focused on individuals, which I'll lay out in a moment.
So that's what, when I talk about the other side of the hill, I mean, based on large numbers and actually quite expensive translations of a significant number of documents. And as part of that, a focus on several key individuals that were influential in outlining competition. The challenge, and this was sort of the puzzle in some ways, was the primary focus, this is particularly true in the U.S. with competition, and it's especially true with the Chinese and the Russians.
I would say more broadly on international politics, the international politics I grew up on, the influential works of Ken Waltz and John Mearsheimer and Steve Waltz and a range of others do focus on conventional war. I mean, John Mearsheimer's influential book that got him tenure at Chicago was on conventional deterrence or nuclear-related issues. So on the left side of the screen, we have One of the more interesting studies, this was done by Rand on the Russian invasion of the Baltic states, obviously a hypothetical invasion. And that was where I participated in countless war games along these lines of a conventional Russian invasion.
In some cases, those war games escalate to the nuclear level. And since the Baltic states are NATO countries, Article 5 is invoked. and the U.S. engages in a direct conventional, and in some cases, nuclear war with the Russians, including the technical use of nukes.
Same thing on the Taiwan Straits, where most of the war games, even the classified ones, a number of them I've participated in, involve less of the ground fighting that we see with the Russia-Baltic scenario and much more of the scenario that we see here. It's really an air-sea battle. So use of Virginia-class, Columbia-class nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, stealth fighters, F-35s, all the air defense systems in China, missiles being lobbed at Taiwan or at U.S. aircraft or maritime vessels.
But both of these sort of harken back to fights over the last 75 years or so, there's some resemblances, frankly, to the Fulda Gap preparations made during the Cold War between the Warsaw Pact and NATO countries with the Baltic scenario. There's a little bit of a flavor looking at the Taiwan scenarios to sort of the Battle of Midway, big, in this case, navies and aircraft fighting each other, not unlike what the what and how the U.S. clashed with the Japanese around Midway Island in the Second World War. The challenge, though, and if we look at some of the even more recent academic writings on the nuclear revolution, the challenge here is what those war games and what analysis strongly indicates is that the cost of conventional nuclear war is likely to be staggering. Staggering both from an economic standpoint, what it does to the gross domestic products of...
countries that engage in them, what it does to combat and civilian deaths, and particularly with countries that have nuclear weapons, it risks escalation to nuclear war. So you're talking about tens, if not hundreds of thousands of potential dead individuals, as those war games indicate, with nuclear powers. So really the question here is, we don't have any real historical cases of major conventional or nuclear war between nuclear powers. So how likely is it that we're going to get a major conventional or nuclear war between the US and the Russians or the US and the Chinese?
I would argue that that probability is actually quite low. Now, of course, any military has to plan even for low probability, but high impact events like this. So the comment here is not that you shouldn't build a conventional force or build nuclear weapons, but that these are highly unlikely situations.
And yet competition, I would argue, is likely to be significant. If we look at the systems here, we've got on the one hand with the US and the West, a fairly open democratic capitalist. systems that do support freedom of the press, freedom of religion.
What we see with most of those competitors in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran are countries that do not support democracy. They're not democratic. They do not generally support freedom of the press.
In fact, they've got generally state-run media and control it significantly. They also control the access to the Internet in their countries. And even the Chinese will intimidate diaspora populations overseas.
So they're very different systems. And while I'm not saying cooperation is impossible, it's not. And there are certainly lots of avenues for cooperation on issues from climate change.
potentially to counter drug operations, certainly trade, that competition still, based on the political economic systems, is to some degree inevitable. Again, you can, this is not to say war is the kind of de facto norm, but competition is likely to be significant over the next several years based on just antithetical systems. So what kind of form will that competition then take? And one of the things that's interesting as I spent some time looking during the Cold War at the way competition started to evolve, once it became pretty clear in Moscow and Washington that the costs of nuclear war and conventional war were extraordinary. And we've seen similar dynamics, say, between the Indians and Pakistan when both got nuclear weapons.
That certainly was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the U.S. and the Soviets did come close to conventional war, at least prepared for that possibility and prepared for conventional war. But what we see is that the vast majority then of the competition between the U.S. and the Soviets actually took place at what I would call the... irregular level, which is below the threshold of conventional war.
And the components of irregular warfare include items like information campaigns, public diplomacy, psychological warfare, information and disinformation campaigns. It's generally support to state and non-state partners so that you're not actually fighting your major nuclear armed adversary. directly.
You're doing it through proxies and or partners. Use of intelligence services to conduct covert action. That may include cyber, offensive cyber operations, espionage. And then finally, the use of economic coercion.
So you might ask why this term irregular warfare. Two things that I wanted to highlight. One is that in many ways, there are very notable similarities to how I'm using this term to what you will often hear as well. Political warfare, particularly as defined by George Kennan, or gray zone activities, or asymmetric conflict there are similarities irregular warfare is the u.s doctrinal term for this um one could call one could call it unconventional warfare but that actually has a very specific meaning in u.s uh department of defense lexicon unconventional warfare is actually support to guerrillas uh uh counter um essentially insurgency operations so Irregular warfare is generally the deity terminology for this, and I felt it actually was probably as good as any in capturing. But I felt pretty strongly that warfare actually was important to include, because even during the period where I was submitting the manuscript to a range of people for comments, there was a debate about whether you call this warfare.
And I think what's important here. This is the second point, is that, as we'll see, the Chinese, the Iranians, and to some degree, the Russians actually call these kinds of things warfare. And so warfare in this context is actually a lot less like Clausewitz and a little bit more like Sun Tzu. So achieving objectives without fighting. So this definition of warfare does not include solely kinetic operations.
When we look at the terminology that a range of these particular countries, and just to be crystal clear, happy to talk about Western countries'use of irregular warfare because they do it too, just for this purpose today, just focusing on Russian, Chinese, and Iranian activity. Russians have typically called this active measures. They've got various terminology that are part of this, including maskarovka, the denial and deception.
The Iranians have different terms for this. One of the more interesting one is is jung-i-narm. It's not entirely unlike the soft power definition that we've seen in the in the U.S.
The challenge here, though, is for the Iranians, it is an aspect of warfare. So it's influence operations, information operations broadcast into multiple language of Iranian state-run media and general influence activities. But again, it's not soft power.
The Iranian term is soft war. And then when we look at how the Chinese have defined this term, you know, one, there are various components of it, including the three warfares, all three components of the three warfares, media or public relations warfare. The second is lawfare.
So the use of law as an instrument of influence. And then finally. psychological operations, which is more kind of denial and deception, particularly in support of military activity.
None of those three components involve the use of kinetic operations. So what we do see is that countries use slightly different terms for irregular warfare, but there is a key part of competition that involves... aspects well below that threshold of war. So what I'd like to do is spend a little time actually talking about the individuals I looked at and how they then used irregular warfare to compete with the U.S.
So on the left, we have Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the army staff. In the middle, we have Zheng Yuzhou, the vice chairman of the CMC, China's primary military body. And then on the right. we have now deceased Qasem Soleimani, but also looked pretty carefully at his.
successor Ismail Hani as well, who was his deputy for the Quds Force. Now, as you can see, the reason that I went back and forth with the publisher about the title is all of these individuals, A, they're men, but ironically, none of them, none of these countries in their militaries really have senior, major senior female. military officers anyway, at least in major leadership positions.
And it says actually quite something about somewhat misogynistic societies. Nevertheless, they're influential in each of their countries. And so part of what I did on the research side was essentially translate virtually everything that Gerasimov wrote.
all of the you know all the major texts he he actually read quite a bit of historic Russian military theory so I tracked down all of the main texts that he read same thing with Jung and then the same thing with Qasem Soleimani including getting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force and the guards more broadly uh uh histories for example of the Iran-Iraq war Qasem Soleimani's role in them so to really try to get an important understanding of how they thought about competition from an individual perspective. So if we think of this almost in a Waltzian perspective and images, we've got kind of the image here of the leader, but certainly also considered the structural level as well as the state level and how the governments actually operate. established policies to compete with the U.S.
So if we go to Gerasimov, we'll start with the Russians and sort of want to walk through what competition has looked like over the past couple of years. One of the things that struck me most in tracking Russian thought, including Gerasimov, is how closely they studied U.S., in particular, successes and and failures. They studied, Grasmoff studied very closely U.S. use of irregular operations in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban government back in 2001. The Russians studied very closely the U.S., French, British use of largely irregular operations to overthrow the Libyan regime in 2011. Again, that was mostly intelligence and special operations forces on the ground.
That was the maneuver element, leveraging Libyan militias. And there was obviously some air support from NATO fixed-wing aircraft, as well as some maritime support from vessels in the Mediterranean. And so as the Russians move into the early 2000s, we see Gerasimov begin to focus not just on building a conventional and a nuclear military, but also heavily focus on building a special operations capability.
He established a KSO, a special operations headquarters, gave significant power influence and taskings to the main intelligence directorate, GRU, as well as the SVR, Foreign Intelligence Agency. And so we see a shift from what Gerasimov called the traditional now to the non-traditional use of force. So a heavy focus on irregular action.
So what does that mean in practice as we look at Russian operations? So we'll start on the left side. So interesting context for today.
One is the taking of Crimea. So the annexation of Crimea. Crimea when the Russians took Crimea was largely an irregular operation. This was the first Russian major use of the, quote, little green men.
This was a heavy utilization of special operations forces. Essentially, the Russians didn't even fire a shot in taking Crimea. They used special operations forces, intelligence. They used heavy information disinformation campaign, sabotage, subversion.
and broader political efforts to retake territory. Shortly thereafter, then they wanted to do the same to Ukraine. And so the Russian military's general approach was, again, a heavily irregular approach, not a conventional invasion, but to leverage, build, essentially, insurgents, Russian-backed insurgents in eastern Ukraine, in Luhansk Oblast, in Donetsk. and then to provide them training, weapons, and other assistance so that the Russians wouldn't have to fight a conventional war with Russian tanks and armored personnel carriers, excuse me, that they could actually have the Russian-backed rebels do it. And then so 2014, 2015, even up through 2022, we've seen the majority of the fighting in Ukraine being irregular units, including some Russian private military companies.
We'll come back to that in a second. In the case of Syria, another interesting context. Syria, when the Russians directly entered the war in 2015, it was again largely irregular. The maneuver elements in Syria included Syrian high-end forces, including Tiger units.
They also included Lebanese Hezbollah. U.S. designated terrorist organization, militia elements from the Hashd al-Shaabi, the Iraqi Shia militia forces, militia forces that were recruited from Palestinian territory, and then various and sundry militia that the Quds Force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force from Iran recruited, trained, advised, assisted from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and a few other places. So the maneuver element to retake territory with the Russians providing some air support and combat air support and some strikes, including for maritime vessels, was a regular maneuver campaign that leveraged, again, leveraged largely Lebanese Hezbollah.
and other forces along those lines. So Russians decided, unlike, say, Afghanistan in the 1980s, they were not going to invade. In addition, as part of the Ukraine campaign, we also saw the Russians heavily focus on offensive cyber operations as an important irregular component to warfare.
Black energy, Indestroyer, gray energy, boy, the startlingly destructive NotPetya that not only impacted critical infrastructure in Ukraine itself, but also much more broadly impacted corporations, even governments in the U.S. and other Western countries. So a heavy focus on Russian cyber robberies. Of course, we see that today.
We've seen Russian-backed groups or Russians, SVR or GRU also conduct direct offensive. cyber operations against the US, against Grilly Beef, SVR attack. The Colonial Pipeline was kind of an interesting irregular campaign because that was Russian hackers based in part on Russian territory conducting the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline. So again, all of these are really below the threshold of conventional and nuclear war, but are an important part of the competition landscape. We don't see a lot of Russian deployment of conventional forces, but what we do see is over three dozen countries where the Russians have deployed private military companies, such as the Wagner Group, to Libya, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and a number of others.
And these private military companies have worked. very closely with Russia's GRU, again, the main intelligence directorate and the SVR, in conducting these kinds of site security. Libya, they've been involved in combat operations.
Mali, we've seen as the French have withdrawn their combat forces, the Russians have moved in, but not with conventional forces, with private military companies. I mean, what's interesting to note on these private military companies like Wagner, is that the main stakeholder in Wagner, Yevgeny Prokhorin, is a very close friend of not just the Kremlin. but of Vladimir Putin. So we see a strategic relationship and a funding one directly between the Russian government and the private military companies. And, you know, obviously, this is a kind of a deniable way of expanding power and influence in multiple locations, or at least quasi-deniable through private military companies.
I do want to touch briefly on what we're seeing today in Ukraine. We certainly see the possibility of... a conventional invasion. The vast majority of the fighting we've seen is irregular.
But what's important to understand here is once it became very clear that the United States and other NATO countries were not going to engage directly in Ukraine, that they were not going to deploy their forces, then what we don't have is direct US versus Russian engagement. So there is not that risk of escalation to the conventional realm because Ukraine, as we all know, got rid of its nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. So I'm not saying the argument here isn't that we can't see conventional war. It's just it's unlikely to see conventional war directly between major nuclear powers. So we've been keeping I'm happy to.
talk about any of this. We've been keeping track. This is our own satellite inventory of recent Russian operations that people are interested in talking about. Let me just move to the Chinese and then briefly touch on the Iranians.
Chinese objectives and policy, I mean, the Chinese have written some of the most influential irregular textbooks from On Guerrilla Warfare Now, which I use in my classes at Johns Hopkins, to Sun Tzu's The Art of War, which has a heavy irregular. component to it. One of the more interesting uses of irregular activity by the Chinese is how they have essentially scoped and strategized the Belt and Road Initiative.
On the surface, the Belt and Road Initiative, with its Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road, is a lot about infrastructure development, trade across multiple regions. But what is what is what is also an important component of Belt and Road is the use of money here and investment and infrastructure then for political leverage. So we have seen countless examples of the Chinese then using that economic foothold and trade leverage to push in many cases actually quite aggressively for countries that are receiving this. to then generally adhere to key policy preferences of the Chinese government on issues that may be controversial on the status of Hong Kong or the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province, or Tibet, or Taiwan, and the one versus two China debate. So this is as I think as the evidence strongly indicates, Belt and Road is an economic issue as well as utilization of economic coercion.
And so I think in that sense, this fits squarely into the realm of irregular warfare. Again, not warfare in a Clausewitzian sense, but much more in a Sun Tzu sense of achieving objectives. without actually having to fight. And frankly, as we see in some of the areas here, what the Chinese have also done under the guise of Belt and Road is built dual-use bases. For example, Djibouti is not just a port anymore.
It is also a military base, both naval as well as an air base. The Chinese, as there were multiple reports, ports. And as senior Department of Defense officials noted a couple of months ago, the Chinese have been pushing for a military base under the auspices of the Belt and Road Initiative in the United Arab Emirates.
We've seen a range of other bases in other areas of the world here under the guise of purely economic ports, but where they have also constructed military bases. Crimea is the Russian example of irregular warfare and seizing territory than the Chinese version of it. is the Spratly Islands.
So what's interesting here is these were, as I think everybody knows, these were atolls or reefs. And over the course of using a range of dredgers several years ago, not battleships, not generally military equipment, the Chinese turned Hughes Reef, Mischief Reef, this is Fiery Cross Reef, into military bases where, and we've collected a lot of this under the CSIS AMTI satellite imagery portfolio, identified signals intelligence platforms, electronic warfare, missiles and missile batteries, air defense systems, strike aircraft on a range of these ATOLs. Now, when the...
when the Chinese first built a range of these, I'm going to call them bases, they were done under the guise of helping build islands so that it would help native fishermen, including Chinese fishermen that were active in the Spratlys. And that was the essential development of these islands. They're contested, obviously, as well.
But in effect, what they ended up doing is without having to resort to... any kind of a conventional or certainly nuclear invasion of the atolls and the construction of islands. This was an irregular annexation of territory. And as we saw, as we've seen, a number of countries in the South China Sea took the Chinese to court.
And the Philippines, for example, won a major decision in The Hague. And this is where the three warfares come into play as well. that generally the Chinese response to an adverse ruling from the Hague was to argue that they didn't even recognize the judicial legitimacy of the Hague. So they debated the international order in that context. They debated, argued that there was no jurisdiction that the Hague actually had over this or over China at all.
So this is where we see. lawfare come into play. We also see a range of offensive cyber operations that the Chinese have been involved in. And where this becomes important, frankly, is on issues of what is being prepared for.
And this goes to some of the implications. The vast majority of war games, the O-plans or operational plans that the Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense uses, to prepare for the future operations and possibilities, conflicts. The vast majority of those O-plans are those early examples that I gave, things like the air-sea battle in the Taiwan Straits, a major conventional war in the Baltics following a Russian conventional invasion.
There has been very little look at, for example, how China could conduct a irregular or gray zone war without really leveraging an invasion force, but doing it through sabotage, subversion, Chinese PLA special operations, intelligence services, maritime militia, and undermining the legitimacy of the Taiwanese government through irregular means. So the point here is, again, this is not an either or. It's not zero sum.
But any of the efforts, I think, to think through these issues have to include irregular components. So just briefly, and then I'll hand this back in a moment to Peter, is Iran. I mean, Iran is probably the textbook case of irregular operations, in part because if we look at the conventional forces of the Iranians, they still use. U.S. military equipment in some cases that was provided to them under the shawl. So pre-1979 revolution, some of their tanks, aircraft, they've got a very weak conventional military.
They don't have nuclear weapons, but what they do have is now essentially a range of partners and proxies in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and in Lebanon. which is where they have conducted the vast majority of their efforts. In addition, they've built a pretty sophisticated standoff capability.
But let me just talk in terms of irregular warfare. Let me just talk for a moment about one of the Iranians'chief enemies, which is Saudi Arabia. We could say the same thing of the Israelis, could even say the same thing for the U.S. in this area.
There's been sort of a constant war over the past several years between the Saudis and the Iranians. The form it is generally taken, though, is an irregular one, which is the Iranians have provided, instead of conducting with one notable minor exception, this is the attacks against Abqaiq and Quraish, which did involve Iranian land attack cruise missiles, which likely were shot from Iranian territory, as well as some drones, UAVs that were shot. probably from Iraqi territory, or at least partly from Iraqi territory.
The Iranians have generally not engaged directly the Saudi military and the Saudi government. Instead, what they've done is provided technology, training, advice, assistance, money, including deployed both Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force operatives, as well as Lebanese Hezbollah into Yemen and provided the land attack cruise missile capability, ballistic missile capability, and drone capability, including delta wing drones, to the Houthis, who have then assembled it. And we've been tracking some of the routes where and how Iran has disassembled some of the missiles and missile parts and through various combinations of maritime. and land routes gotten them into Yemen. They've been then reassembled with help from Hezbollah and from the Quds Force.
And then the Houthis have then struck hundreds, actually thousands of targets in Saudi Arabia. Also, more recently, we've seen attacks against the Emirates, including also Abu Dhabi. We've seen targets and attacks against maritime vessels in the Red Sea, in the Gulf.
And again, this is not direct Iranian attacks against Saudi Arabia. This is indirect. This fits squarely into that definition of irregular warfare. This is below the threshold of direct Iranian warfare, conventional or nuclear, with the Saudis. And again, we see a lot of countries operating.
So the argument here is that Sure, we'll see a lot of competition, including between countries like the U.S., the Chinese, the Russians, and even the Iranians. But A, it'll likely be global. And B, it will likely have a significant amount of irregular components to it. And so that is what I will argue will be a very significant part of the future of state-based.
competition between major powers, especially nuclear powers, unlikely to see major conventional war, at least very often, or to see conventional nuclear war. Instead, we'll see competition attempts to expand power and influence through largely irregular means. I'm happy to talk in a little bit as well about some steps, but let me just to conclude say that the U.S. is terribly positioned to compete at this level.
Now, if there's a silver lining here, it's that the Russians and the Chinese in particular have spent considerable time learning from U.S. irregular operations. Again, I mentioned at the beginning of this, Afghanistan 2001, Libya 2011, and other examples. The Russians have strongly believed that the color revolutions even the Arab Spring for that matter, were orchestrated by the U.S. military and intelligence services. They've made that same argument about the collapse of the Soviet Union. They were essentially irregular operations that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Warsaw Pact states that then switched sides from the Soviet Union and Moscow, obviously to NATO and also the European Union.
So the point here is that I think we'll see that competition really in this irregular sphere. And going back to the kinds of... Examples I gave earlier, expect to see that in the sense of economic coercion, support to state and non-state partners so we don't see direct conflict, particularly conventional between the major powers.
Offensive cyber operations, espionage used to gain advantages, and other aspects of what we call irregular warfare. That is likely to be the future. And really, the U.S. is woefully prepared.
It is focused primarily on building big conventional militaries, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and Army to conduct these conventional wars. That's where the acquisition focus is on aircraft carriers, F-35s, Columbia and Virginia-class nuclear submarines. That's where the services are primarily focused. There is still paltry funding for U.S.
State Department public diplomacy during the Cold War. The U.S. had a U.S. information agency. The budget, even during the Reagan administration, doubled for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty.
And we see just no serious efforts to fund and resource anything in the information sphere, really, or anything or much in the irregular arena. So I think the U.S. has a lot of catching up to do and a lot of really grasping what competition is likely to mean. But happy to take questions and comments. But, Peter, with that, I think I'm going to stop. We've gone for about 45 minutes and turn it back to you.
Well, thanks very much, Seth, for that. Interesting analysis. I'll lead off with the first question. What do you make of the massive deployment of Russian conventional military forces on the border with Ukraine?
It doesn't seem to fit in with this hybrid proxy war or irregular warfare that they've used in Crimea or Donbass. Well, two things. One, as I said earlier, the focus on irregular warfare is between the major powers. So in this case, there is a possibility of the use of conventional war. The fact that the U.S. has committed, as of NATO, not to engage in deploying forces to Ukraine means that the Russians could resort to conventional war if they felt it would achieve objectives.
Again, the primary focus has largely been... irregular. Even today, we're seeing shelling between Russian irregular units and Ukrainian government. So leveraging still largely irregular units on the ground.
But this thing could go into a conventional war. We've been tracking possible Russian invasion options. But again, the reason conventional war is even an option right now. is because the U.S. has committed not to deploy forces to Ukraine. I'm not saying it should.
I'm just saying irregular war is the primary way that you fight your other great powers. You don't think the Russians will deploy forces to the Baltic states because that means conventional war. with the United States under Article 5. The U.S. will have to do that.
So Ukraine's cardinal sin was giving up its nuclear weapons. Yeah. So the implication here was that there were two problems here. One was nuclear weapons, which, you know, interestingly, when I go back to some of the international relations predictions at the end of the Cold War, it was my dissertation advisor, John Mearsheimer, who argued that the Ukrainians would never.
give up nuclear weapons because it was not in their interest. Well, they did. They probably regret that, but yes, that's one.
The second is that they never got into NATO because had they gotten into NATO, and I know Zelensky, Poroshenko both wanted in to NATO, that we would probably not be in this position. PEDRO DA COSTA All right. We'll go to the audience questions. Jane Miller has two. The first is, why do you use the term competition in a warfare?
arena rather than as the term used in a traditional economic arena. So just some definitional issues there. And her second question, which of the three countries is the most dangerous in using irregular warfare and why?
I would suspect she means most dangerous to the United States, but you could, I guess, extrapolate and say most dangerous to the region as well. So I'm generally using competition here as synonymous with warfare. I mean, that's the definition.
That's why irregular warfare. The book actually. entirely uses warfare.
I've gone back and forth here, but if you want me to be consistent, happy to just say warfare. It just gets a little tedious to use the same word, but I'm using them synonymously here. To be clear, what I mean by that is steps that weaken your adversary and strengthen... you to tip essentially the balance of power in your favor. So in terms of the three countries, I mean, I'll just set the Iranians aside because they're probably more of a nuisance, and they certainly have neither the economy nor the military might to present a major mid to long-term threat.
And I view China and Russia as actually in slightly different categories. I think what we see with the Russians is a lot more aggressive action, but they pose a probably slightly smaller mid to long-term threat. They do lack both the broader economic power and economic might, and they also lack the potential military might that the Chinese do, including when you start adding various types of military technology.
progress that the Chinese have made on stealth technology and fifth generation aircraft, the amount of focus the Chinese are spending on offensive cyber operations, the money the Chinese are spending in particular on Belt and Road Initiative to influence a range of populations overseas. The Chinese are a much more significant, in my view, threat. because they have much greater economic military might and a much broader than global expanse that they can use that and compete across the globe. And it's striking when you look at those Belt and Road maps that they extend through Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and even in part in Latin America.
The Russians, though, tend to be much more. aggressive in their use of offensive cyber operations. We've seen Chinese PLA cyber operations as stealing and conducting espionage, planting malware, but they haven't done what the Russians have done in Ukraine, which is actually blackouts, taking down critical infrastructure. We haven't seen them do what they've done in the US, which is using at least hackers that have taken down pipelines. So in that sense, the Russians'assassinations overseas as part of their regular campaign against defectors, Chinese have intimidated but generally not assassinated overseas the way we've seen, say, Russian assassinations or attempted assassinations in the UK.
So, again, just to put this into context, the Chinese I see as the more significant longer term threat. The Russians are. less of a threat, but at the moment, anyway, much more of an aggressive power and how they wield it. More likely versus the more dangerous power.
Okay. Zhao Dong Zhang says, do you see a possible synergy among the three countries or are there self-interests such that they would never create one? Well, I do think that every country at its core has is motivated by self-interest.
The question then is to what degree do we see some overlapping common interests? Do we see a Venn diagram? Do we see some opportunities for that?
And I think we do see some cooperation between actually all three of them. If we take the Syria example, where the Russians decided not to engage in conventional operations. They decided to essentially leverage Lebanese Hezbollah.
and they decided to leverage Palestinian, Iraqi, and other militias. The Joint Operations Center was run by the Iranians. So the Russians occasionally would drop bombs from fixed-wing aircraft. The Iranians would, they ran the maneuver element on the ground.
So we saw strategic level planning. Soleimani actually flew to Moscow. despite u.s sanctions in the summer of 2015 sat down with shoigu putin and others to map out the strategic plan uh flew back and then when the war began in 2015 when the russian direct involvement in the war began the iranians then ran the maneuver element so it's strategic planning we had operational and tactical level coordination so that you could uh you you could time your and and target your bomb drops with a maneuver element of Hezbollah, for example, moving into a neighborhood in Aleppo just after those bombs had dropped. So that's a really a good example of strategic operational and tactical level cooperation between the Russians and the Iranians in the prosecution of a military campaign. And, you know, we've seen other examples of these countries in the face of the possible economic sanctions or economic coercion, probably another element of irregular warfare.
The Chinese and the Russians have supported the Iranians and the Iranian economy. It appears to be the case that part of the discussion between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin last week when Putin flew to China was. to get Chinese help in sanctions relief if that's the direction the conflict moved in in Ukraine.
So yeah, we do see avenues of cooperation. We've seen joint military drills, but at the end of the day, they're still going to be self-interested. Robert R. Muhammad Hilal asks, how do you define coercion in an economic sense? He wants to know where you draw the line between diplomacy and economic statecraft and irregular warfare. He's unconvinced that, for instance, Chinese efforts to establish an economic foothold or to expand their economic presence, such as the Belt and Road Initiative, counts as economic coercion, even if that economic presence is unused to influence the policies of other countries.
So prove him wrong, I guess. So as we know, deterrence. is, whether it's deterrence by denial or deterrence by punishment, is to get a state to not do something that it otherwise would. And either you're deterring it from doing it through denying it the ability, or you're raising the cost for punishment. Coercion then would be getting a state to do something that that that it might not otherwise do.
So we have countless examples. One of my colleagues, John Hilsman, has a book out recently looking at some coercive aspects of Belt and Road Initiative. The issue here is when economic trade is used then to influence the policy decisions of a state that they might not otherwise do, when there is a threat then to remove the trade, stop the trade, stop the investment, unless you are taking action and voting at the UN Security Council or within your own parliaments or executive legislative branches on issues then that may deal with Taiwan.
with Hong Kong, with Tibet, with Xinjiang, and that includes policy positions in the UN Security Council or the UN. That's coercion. And again, the issue here is not that the Chinese and the Belt and Road Initiative are the only ones that are using economic coercion.
Most states do. Every state probably does to some degree, at least they can afford it. It's just it is a tool for getting a state to do something that it otherwise would not do.
Instead of pointing a gun to its head, it's giving it money or threatening to take it away. So I think in that sense, it absolutely counts as coercive if you are essentially taking action coercively using economic economic instrument as leverage. So in the early 1980s, the head of the Russian general staff posited that.
The weapons of the Revolution in Military Affairs, the guided munitions and a robust intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance complex could substitute for nuclear weapons. It would be conventional weapons with nuclear effects. And Matthew Clark asks about those nuclear war games or the war games in which, I guess, nuclear weapons, the threshold was breached. Did they account for guided munitions in ISR? I'm assuming they did.
But his question is, why did the people in the war games see the need to broach the nuclear threshold when they had access to the weapons of the revolution and military affairs? Yeah, it's a good question. Um, the the issue here was that and they were generally tactical nuclear weapons in most games that I ever played. I can't think of a single game I ever used them as playing either red or blue side.
So This is not me making any decisions. For the audience, the red side would be the Russians and the blue is always the friendly power. It's just.
Yes. Or or the red could be the Chinese, depending on which war game you are participating. Red is the enemy.
Red, red is the enemy. Right. Red is the enemy.
Blue is the good people are the you know, your your your team. So so the I mean, if if we think both of the Baltics and the Taiwan cases. Both of those war games take place essentially right on the borders of those respective countries.
So in the Baltic case, you're conducting warfare. U.S. and other NATO countries are fighting on essentially Russian territory or right next to Russian territory, including Kaliningrad, for example. In the Taiwan Straits, you're fighting essentially on or right next to Chinese territory. And so the way some games have gone is that as part of the combat, as part of the combat, the U.S. or other allied or partner forces take out like missile defense systems on the Chinese mainland because they're using them. They're using missiles to target U.S. ships in the Taiwan Straits.
So the way to. relieve the pressure is to take out the missile systems. Well, the challenge in some of these war games, and the same thing on the Russian side, the challenge in these war games is states have not always been able to tell whether then the states that are targeting their homelands have alternative motives.
If you're striking targets on the homeland, then are you going to push in your armor forces into their territory to take it. So if you start to succeed in the Baltic States, do you keep going into Russia? Do you take Kaliningrad? Because now you're targeting missile sites, command and control structures in Russia or in China. That's where we've seen occasionally the use of tactical nuclear weapons is to send an unambiguous message to stop striking targets.
in our homeland because we view it now as not just a war, but as a threat to our survival. And so that's where tactical nuclear weapons have occasionally been used, is when the red side, in particular, believes that its survival is now at stake and needs to send a message. And it's not sending a message by destroying the other side's cities.
but destroying, using a tactical nuclear weapon to destroy key military targets. So those are the contexts. Yes, there has been an advancement in different kinds of precision guided munitions and strikes and satellite capabilities.
But the survival issue and the message that a nuclear weapon would send, don't do this anymore, is where we've seen it. used at least in a war game, if that helps. It does.
It's really interesting. I'm going to read you two questions because they're linked. They both address the same thing. So take good notes. Mohammed Halal writes, having read your book, my principal concern is that the vast majority of cases and stories you provide, especially in your discussion of Russia and Iran, are examples of kinetic operations, which are conducted through non-state actors, proxies, or irregular forces that allow for plausible deniability.
I wonder whether that weakens the robustness. of the concept of regular warfare, especially as compared to George Kennan's concept of political warfare, which emphasizes the element of operations short of war. In short, indirect warfare is still warfare. It's still kinetic operations, albeit through proxies.
So that's question one. And Alex Thompson in our political science department says, interesting talk, Seth, for most of the examples you gave. of irregular warfare, it was conducted alongside fairly conventional means. For example, in Crimea, we also have Russian troops, warships, and armored vehicles. And in Syria, Russia is also dropping bombs.
And although China's activities in the Spratly Islands are irregular, they are done with the help of the Chinese Navy. Can you talk about how the irregular means you emphasize interact with or are conducted in the shadow of more conventional warfare or military capabilities? can irregular means be effective on their own?
Wow, great questions. So let me start off with Mohammad Halal's question. And I would just say that there are a number of examples in each of the main sections of the use of non-kinetic operations to weaken the adversary. So, you know, one where both Professor Thompson and I went to school at the University of Chicago, and I actually don't know where this is at Ohio State, we had a Confucius Center. There had been, they have become controversial in the U.S., in part because they were funded by the, have been funded by the Chinese government, generally do not allow debate on any of the controversial issues in the classroom, which is why Chicago closed its Confucius Institutes down.
The use of Thousand Talents Program, the, so these are influence operations. In fact, I would sort of, the examples of the way the Chinese have attempted to influence Hollywood is an interesting case, I think, of non-Klausovitzian warfare being utilized. So, Mohamed, there are plenty of examples of that.
You know, one of the things for those basketball fans, when I spoke to the NBA commissioner about this, he said, as folks will remember, the. general manager for the Houston Rockets back in 2018, I think it was 2018, had tweeted something in support of Hong Kong. And the Chinese not only asked for retraction from the Houston Rockets, but they asked essentially the commissioner for retraction from the National Basketball Association.
And the NBA refused. They were then. The NBA was taken off the air, lost. Commissioner Silver told me he lost about half a billion dollars because of that issue.
So coercive. That's certainly a coercive example. I have spoken to several interesting producers and senior folks from movie studios in the U.S. and Hollywood. There definitely is a very significant concern about producing movies and television that have the Chinese as an enemy, in part because they have received significant pressure from the Chinese government.
They'll lose the economic revenue of showing that in China. Yet the irony here is that as I end the book, it's now the second most popular. book, the movie in Chinese history is Wolf Warrior 2. It's worth watching if you haven't.
It's not that good. And it almost feels like the special effects are 1980s. But it hits, this is a kind of a good example of the subject we're talking about. it is not Chinese conventional operations.
It's a fight between the US and the Chinese in Africa using essentially former special operations forces, not Chinese infantry, but a former Chinese special operations force. And so we see that is the second most watched movie in Chinese history. So kind of another interesting example. on the cultural side. So I would just say, to Muhammad's point, there's a lot of it also that gets into this kind of, these other aspects of it.
I mean, on Alex Thompson's question, Crimea, first of all, Crimea certainly, the conventional component of Crimea, which was very limited, was probably more of a deterrent. And so the actual use of uh force the soldiers used were generally spetsnaz special operations forces and again the focus there was not a conventional invasion not putting conventional boots on the ground but generally using uh irregular units and not wanting to even fire a shot but intense use of uh of heavy information operations heavy use of of um of denial and deception and what you might call one of the elements of the three warfare's psychological operations. So that those on Crimea just folded on the political government.
Where there's a little bit more of a hybrid, which I think is partly what you're getting at, Alex, is the Syria context. It is one of the cases where we see the Russians not engaged directly. in conventional warfare, at least on the maneuver end, but they do engage in dropping bombs from the air and shooting caliber cruise missiles.
So that is definitely more of a hybrid case. It's a decision that they're going to, and I think the reason this is kind of an important one too is because the main, one of the main reasons the Russians move into Syria is because they were concerned that... the U.S. was actually going to overthrow the government in the Assad government, much like they had done in Libya just four years before that. So they were assessing the U.S. was involved in irregular operations. John McCain, just before the Russians actually started dropping bombs in Syria, John McCain and Lindsey Graham had gone to Syria, crossed into the border and had argued in front of the U.S.
Congress after that. that the U.S. should significantly increase its weapons to the Syrian rebel groups, obviously not the Islamic State or any of the al-Qaeda-linked groups, but other Syrian rebel groups. So this was then viewed in sort of competition with the U.S.
And so that was what was partly at stake for Putin. We now know, and as I've interviewed senior Russian officials, that was what was at stake. But in terms of the use of force, there is in this case, a bit of a hybrid component, which is what I think you're getting at.
Now, mostly the Russians are not even adding that conventional component to their warfare. It's generally been private military companies, frankly, as I highlighted earlier. And the ground element is generally been leveraging other forces to do the vast majority of fighting.
It's been that way, obviously, up until... now in Ukraine as well. So I would say on the regular standpoint, that's the norm.
In a few cases, we've seen states, especially Russia, decide to add a conventional air or a maritime component, but hesitate when it comes to the conventional grounder or maneuver element, kind of an interesting one. I still think, you know, the kind of bottom line implication, it's also... interesting theoretical one is in this nuclear world, as we've turned away from a focus on counterterrorism over the last 20 years or so, it's kind of an interesting theoretical question, whether now conventional or nuclear war becomes more likely because we're in an era of state-based competition, or if I'm right, that we'll see warfare, it just will be below that threshold.
we'll see warfare between the great powers, just not. not direct conventional or nuclear war, that the stakes are too high. That's the prediction. If we see the U.S. fight the Russians directly or the Chinese directly, I'm wrong. So to clarify, we do not have a Confucius Institute on the campus of Ohio State.
So it's interesting that the Russians thought we were conducting irregular warfare against them in Syria since. you say we're so bad at it. And I have three questions regarding that. So one is from Kaisa Davis, she says, or he, they say, why do you believe the US has made the decision to not focus on irregular warfare compared to other nations? Why are we behind in your opinion?
Nathan Lackner says, in terms of the US being behind in the field of irregular warfare, Do you think there are ways to utilize the conventional war tools we built to conduct it? And John Mueller actually takes, opposes what you said about us being behind. He says, why do you think we're behind in irregular warfare?
It is, we have intervened in scores of elections, worked on subversive regime change frequently, spied everywhere, propagandized regularly, engaged in coercive economic sanctions, interfered in civil wars. and use cyber to inflict electronic and even physical damage on our opponents. So there you go. Can you just briefly remind me, I've got questions one and three.
I've got John's comment at three. Just say one more time, two. How can we use our conventional warfare tools that we've built up to conduct irregular warfare? Okay. So let me just start with one and three.
And I think I'm going to answer them essentially together. I mean, John is right that over its history, the U.S. has used some irregular tools. There's no question.
In fact, I think that the vast majority over the last two decades of the Cold War was fought through irregular means. And there certainly are cases over the past 30 years where the U.S. has as well. that here's the general argument, though, which is, let me start with the national defense strategy that came out under the Trump administration, which is the first major shift from counterterrorism in the national defense strategy, the first one we see that really shifts to state-based competition. So there, there is essentially no mention of irregular activity.
It is all It is all about essentially conventional warfare and building conventional capabilities. And not just that, but when the special operations community through the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and the U.S. Special Operations Command requested that there was an irregular warfare component, it was denied by John Rood, who was at the time the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. I mean, I know because I've... interviewed all the folks involved.
And then they went around John to Secretary Mattis. So by this point, the National Defense Treaty had already been published. And then General Mattis, or Secretary Mattis at the time, agrees to an annex, which was an irregular warfare annex. So it comes out right at the end of the Trump administration, finally, essentially two and a half, three years after the...
national defense strategy. So it was a secondary thought. The current national defense strategy, which I have read, which has not been released publicly, is also almost entirely about conventional war.
The O plans that the U.S. Department of Defense has developed are almost entirely about conventional war. The war games, almost entirely about conventional war.
The 98 percent of the Defense Department's budget, including from DARPA, is all about conventional weapons systems like the F-35, the Virginia, and the Columbia class. So the argument here is not that there hasn't been some of this in the past. I mean, I think the argument is that there certainly has been. In fact, that's where I would argue the Cold War went.
But that is not where the U.S. government. is and certainly not where the Department of Defense is. There were massive antibodies have been over the last couple of years to adding an irregular component. And by the way, nothing in my argument should be taken as when I'm talking about irregular warfare that the U.S. conducts should be about overthrowing regimes, using illegal activity.
John didn't mention this per se, but the U.S. has a very sordid history of its own use of irregular warfare. warfare, mining harbors in Latin America, the School of the Americas. What I'm not suggesting is that we should have to relearn those lessons in human rights abuses or illegal activities. That's not what I'm suggesting.
But it is, you know, especially on the public diplomacy side, there are some steps that we can take. But I would still debate, John, on the fact that we are doing much of this. It is not a focus.
was never a focus of the last NDS. It is definitely not a focus of this one. And it is definitely not where any of the services are at right now.
They are all, they are 20, largely 24 seven on, you know, big battle of midway Baltic states that seem a lot like a full to gap scenarios. And then, then this question about the second one, I think was, was, are there ways that we can use conventional weapons for irregular means or systems and platforms? Well, there certainly are tools that one could use for both that can certainly be used for irregular means.
One can use cyber or space-based assets, both for conventional war and for irregular operations. So I think certainly the tool sets You can use a lot of UAVs or underwater surface vessels for conventional or irregular activity. But, you know, there's a lot of, I think when you're talking about a lot of irregular competition, it's just generally not very expensive. Two last points along these lines. One is the whole reason I think that...
that irregular warfare is a norm, is a normal activity of great powers with nuclear weapons, is because these powers are deterred by conventional and nuclear weapons. So the fact is that it's not that you can use your conventional or nuclear weapons for irregular means, it's that by having them, you're deterring conventional or nuclear action against you, and that will then essentially force those states to use irregular means against you. The last one is, this was a public discussion with the first sea lord yesterday, the British chief of navy, and he had an interesting comment to be about a good example of irregular warfare by the British over the last couple of weeks. As folks may remember, there were Russian ships off the coast of Ireland, very close to where the transatlantic fiber optic networks go underneath the ocean, and then they go deep, and then they pop up back in North America. There was a notable threat, NATO mentioned this, that the Russians were at least signaling they could cut these transatlantic fiber optic cables.
So what was the NATO response? This was deliberate. I mean, as the first sea lord said yesterday, they had Irish fishermen go out and scare off the Russian.
vessels. This was an example, I think, of the British using irregular means to push off what were essentially Russian combat ships off the coast of Ireland for that purpose. So it's kind of an interesting example of a recent Western tactic along these lines.
We're running out of time here. I would say that those of you who have recently put your names in the Q&A boxes need to put a question in there. I'm not going to call on you because there's no way for you to ask your question live.
Let me point out that the one example of where the United States seems to have done pretty well in using irregular warfare was in supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces in destroying the Islamic State. And then we screwed it up by allowing Turkey to invade their territory. I'm wondering if you could comment on that example and how our.
policy between administrations could not be consistent. How much time do we have left to answer that? We have four minutes. We may end on this one, by the way.
I don't know how to answer the question on consistency of administrations. That's a tough one. But I will say-This may be the base problem here. We can't-I think it is-We can't have consistent policy. I think that's true.
I also, I mean, I do think the decision by the U.S. in Syria- was to retake territory unlike Afghanistan, 100,000 plus forces, unlike Iraq, also 100,000 plus forces, but essentially to provide weapons training and assistance and mostly special operations forces to the Syrian Democratic Forces. So I think at its core, it looked a lot more like Afghanistan in 2001 than it did Iraq or Afghanistan sort of later on with. big conventional footprints.
So I do think that was an example. You know, the other thing on administrations, just briefly, is one of the things that we did see near the last couple of decades of the Cold War was much more interagency coordination in the irregular arena. The U.S. created interagency active measures. working group that included officials from the State Department, actually run by the State Department, individuals from a range of other organizations, Department of Defense, intelligence community, to coordinate irregular activity overseas.
And we don't have anything like that right now. So I think there's also an interagency in addition to an administration problem. that we're just not even set up like this.
And just the last comment, kind of going back to one of John Mueller's comments, was the area where I'm just really surprised that we're as far behind as we are is on the public diplomacy side. That's not about violence. It's not even about covert action or special operations forces or special activities, CIA forces. It's public diplomacy. We had a U.S. information agency that was well- structured to provide information globally.
It didn't have to make things up. And we have nothing like this. We're kind of competing with both hands tied behind our back right now.
The state is still extraordinarily poorly funded and resourced for this kind of a public diplomacy activity. And I think that's when I'll know we're really starting to take this seriously, is when we see those kinds of State Department... components of your regular activity really start to get adequately resourced and start to operate more effectively.
Okay. I'm afraid we're going to have to end it there. Seth, thank you for a wonderful talk and presentation. I know there's a ton of questions left and they're all on Ukraine.
So let me just say that to those of you in the... audience, if you want to know more about the Ukrainian situation on March 2nd from 3.30 to 5 at the virtual Merchant Center, Dr. Gerard Toll, who's a political geographer and a founding figure in the creation of critical geopolitics at Virginia Tech, will be speaking about the Ukrainian crisis and making sense of it. So we, you know... If you're interested, go ahead and register for that event and we'll see you there. Seth, thank you again.
It was a wonderful presentation. Good luck with the book launch. And we hope to have you back at some point.
Thank you.