What Determines Success in Guerrilla Warfare?

We talk about professionalization of the insurgents, the professionalization of the counterinsurgents. You have got to get your act together and it's much harder than it seems and it starts at policy level and it goes down to the lowest individual and it takes a lot more prep, a lot more focus and training than we want to pretend it does. Well perhaps a weapon of the week, Grilla Warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable and the things that help you to organize in the first place, so ideology, religious and social ties, actually don't necessarily help organizations to fight well and actually can impair that military development. Welcome to Episode 143 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host Kyle Atwell and I'm joined today by my co-host Alisa Loffer. Today's episode examines what determines success in Grilla Warfare. Our guests explore why ideological cohesion, societal ties and resources alone are insufficient for insurgents to implement effective guerrilla strategies. Drawing on historical examples and a deep dive into the Taliban's evolution in Afghanistan, they argue that success hinges on the professionalization of the force, particularly the selection and empowerment of skilled, small unit combat leaders who drive planning, realistic training and task-based cohesion. John McChrystal is a retired U.S. Army four-star general and former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command and the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. He is the founder of the McChrystal Group, an author of multiple books on leadership. Dr. Alec Worsnop is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a non-resident fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. His research focuses on insurgent military effectiveness and this episode is based on his recent book titled Rebels in the Field, Cadracing the Development of Insurgent Military Power. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the empirical studies of conflict project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of Irregular Warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with General Stan McChrystal and Dr. Alec Worsnop. And then the crystal, Alec Worsnop, welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We're very excited to have you today. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me, Kyle. So Alec as a scholar, you have published both an article and a book on the topic of what leads guerrilla forces to be successful in the battlefield. That is a lot of time to commit to a topic. What motivated you to focus so much time on this topic? So we have this conventional wisdom that guerrilla warfare is the weapon of the weak, right? That's how much less powerful insurgents can defeat or stymie much stronger fighting forces, protracted and costly conflict, degrades the political will. I'm kind of insurgent, but there's a lot less understanding of how and why some organizations have the military capability to actually implement these strategies. Now there's don't. And so that's kind of the core motivation that a lot of my work. And that comes from this idea that I think a lot of our go-to explanations for understanding insurgencies writ large don't do a very good job of explaining their military components. And so my broader research, my book that you just meant to mention delves into this bigger question of how to conceptualize and explain kind of the full spectrum of insurgent military power. This piece that we're talking about today focuses on this one iconic idea of guerrilla warfare. So how can some organizations fight this way while others cannot? I think we can start at the macro level. Stan, you spent decades in the military at all levels of leadership. How prominent a role did guerrilla forces in guerrilla warfare play during your career? And do you think this will continue to be a prominent issue given future national security challenges? The backdrop of the Cold War defined my career and so we always talked about war on the planes of Europe or nuclear war. But we never fought that when I was young and I entered West Point Vietnam was just ending and then we all expected that we would pivot to conventional warfare elsewhere with the exception of the first Gulf War. The reality is my experience was almost all some form of a regular warfare and so you think about one you plan for one you equip for one you end up fighting the other. Do you think that we're seeing a replay of those dynamics today where people think a regular warfare guerrilla warfare proxy warfare are going to be less relevant in the new era of a focus on strategic competition or do you think that we are sufficiently addressing these concerns? Well I think there's an automatic focus on high-run warfare because those are people who can defeat you at a national level and so we do all the preparation for that but then savvy opponents watch what we're good at and they prepare to do something different and often much less resource opponents do that as well. So I don't think it's a change I think it's a continuation but we are falling into the same trap of thinking okay we're through that era now we're going to get back to World War II like combat and so we got a good Arlois for that. Just to kind of build on what Stan said I mean I think the fundamental lessons we are learning about how these groups fight not only will apply to future regular warfare but are quite important and central to understanding the dynamics of the foes who are facing now whether that be understanding you kind of Ukrainian forces successes as well too as well as understanding the shortfalls of Russian forces or others. This is a fundamental picture of how we understand how military organizations fight. Alek you talked a little bit about looking at variation across different guerrilla groups and trying to understand what explains their success so could you more specifically define the actual puzzle that you were thinking about when you first drafted this piece and introduce the theory that you have for how to resolve it. I think I've motivated in terms of this idea that insurgents face two separate challenges so first given the asymmetric context of civil wars right they are a lot weaker than counter insurgent foes they have to try really hard to form survive and consolidate they have to convince individuals to take up arms against a much stronger foe without any particularly high chance of short term success right a lot of short term cause so they have this challenge of in some ways existing in the context of a very asymmetric environment. The second piece though and I think this is where some of my perspective adds on to the way we think about this is that the conduct guerrilla warfare you have to fight well right so well perhaps a weapon of the weak guerrilla warfare is not a weapon of the tactically incapable and the things that help you to organize in the first place so ideology religious and social ties actually don't necessarily help organizations to fight well and actually can impair that military development. So I argue that to fight this way insurgents like any other military actor need capable small units that can fire a maneuver without suffering extensive losses and to do this I draw in research into conventional militaries and I think that the key linchpin that I hone in on is the role of skilled small unit combat leaders and we'll talk about the details later in the context of the Taliban and groups in Afghanistan but kind of in short when facing much stronger foes I think that creative small unit combat leaders can punch above their weight so not only do they lead effective operations in the present but lay the groundwork for military adaptation and military resilience from the bottom up as a conflict persists right these are long conflicts the require slow change in adaptation and staying in the fight for a long time yeah there's a lot to unpack there so I'm gonna start at the top the strategic logic for why you would do guerrilla warfare is because you are weaker than the other side as the guerrilla and you need to essentially wear down the counter insurgents over time is that correct and stand is that resonate with the experiences you've seen working the context of guerrilla warfare over time yeah Kyle it is correct I think Alex nailed it it's like judo what you are trying to do is get this larger hopefully less skilled opponent to use their own force against themselves so a very competent guerrilla force becomes a problem typically the response is to field a large number of counterinsurgeons there are a lot of equations that say 10 to 1 ratios which means they are likely to be less well trained maybe less motivated and so they're going to go out and they are going to create a lot of negative effects in the cities in the neighborhoods and so the people will get frustrated with the counterinsurgeons stomping the crops and doing all the things that they do and they will start to hold them responsible for the negative parts of this as opposed to holding it to the insurgents and the insurgents a key point that I think Alex article captures perfectly insurgents will fight if they are confident if they believe they're not going to be killed every time they go out and so it's really key to have a level of effectiveness where they can go out and feel like I can defeat part of the counterinsurgency force if I think about it if I ambush well if I do those things I mean that's a theory of it Alec it does academic research support that this actually works as a strategy or is this theoretical that a lot of evidence to show that gorilla warfare is an effective strategy yeah I mean I think the academic record has demonstrated the increasing success of these gorilla type strategies that we see this kind of monotonic pattern of using these gorilla tactics leads to more effective outcomes so we have insurgencies it was much less common for insurgents to win in the 18th and 19th century becomes much more common in the 20th century and of course I think we have this proliferation and a lot of work after Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan identifying the logic and how that logic collects connects to the actual outcomes we've seen on the ground so in short I think yes there's a pretty strong academic record demonstrating the utility the success of these gorilla strategies so building on that question a bit Alec you just said that the academic literature generally finds these strategies to be successful but as you were saying earlier obviously not all gorilla tactics are so you're introducing a new theory what was kind of the explanation before you introduced this new theory and how does this can burst with that yeah I think that's a really good way of thinking about it that we have this general idea that this strategy works it's a good approach we haven't thought very much about why some can carry this out and others can't right there's this obvious connection between tactics and operations and strategic outcomes you can have the best strategic approach in the world if you don't implement it well you're not going to succeed so what does it look like for groups to implement it well well at the baseline to answer that question I joined other scholars of military power military effectiveness and think about military power in terms of the tasks the military tasks that a military organization can carry out so what do they need to do to do the things they want to be able to do and in this context like begin this thinking by defining what exactly does it mean if you employ force in the gorilla strategy what do you have to be able to do I call this gorilla force employment and I think of these as a task you need to support a gorilla strategy so though the specific tactics are going to vary from conflict phone to conflict zone I think and it's core successfully implemented gorilla operations rest on competing a set of kind of clear tasks so first is fire maneuver second is the use of terrain and camouflage along and the third is the ability to have coordinated withdrawals none of this is novel for most of the folks listening right because these are the same tasks that are foundation of both to counter insurgency but also to larger scale conventional warfare I think where when we define these things though the kind of added value by approach brings is that the stuff we often focus on when considering insurgent groups so their political ideological and social unity don't help them to complete these tasks that are fundamental to fighting this way when leaders are selected based on their political standing their social ties their religious cachet this does not contribute to the development of military capacity yeah obviously I agree with that I think the interesting thing about it is typically early in an insurgency there is that emotion that starts the insurgents out and you get people who aren't very well trained and they go out and they typically get defeated and that causes overconfidence in the counter insurgency they tend to describe them as bandits or hula gins or something like that and it's only when that organizations starts to use a term professionalize they start to get good in some cases you've killed off the incompetent ones those survivors start to learn they start to get effective and then you start to see a change in the fight and then suddenly the counter insurgency gets stung they get surprised with either raids or ambushes things like that that cause them to have to change their tactics they have to put more people out in security they have to garrison more locations which makes them inherently less efficient because they eat up so many of their capabilities by doing those kinds of things so I think that the professionalization is the term I'll use and I think with the approach of increasing technology what you're going to see is of course 200 years ago it was harder to be an insurgent in many ways because you couldn't cause that much damage nowadays counter insurgents have tremendous capability to find you and destroy you but you have disproportionate capability as well you can bring down aircraft you can do things that small groups just didn't have in their capability in the past yeah I'll just add to that so I think this is exactly right and this kind of back and forth relationship between increasingly capable insurgents and counter insurgents is a fundamental piece of what we experienced I think in Iraq and Afghanistan and just to add to that one of the pieces of evidence that used thinking through the development of the Taliban's capabilities is looking at after action reports of U.S. service members who deployed multiple times and the kind of change in their understanding their surprise at the intensity of operations at the tactical capabilities of the Taliban they're engaging with they compare this to four or five years before if they were deployed to the same area or to different areas and it's just this game change is step change that we are in a different war than we were in before and I think this is a really helpful perspective at least for me for thinking about the kind of back and forth that comes from this counter insurgent insurgent interaction. Hey jump on there at the policy level because I think what happened is you had the 1980s when the Mojah had in groups and I just met with one of the leaders this week who still surviving they got pretty good at surviving Soviet attacks and then eventually winning and then we had the fall of the Taliban so rapidly in the fall of as one and I think over a confidence in the part of American policy makers and we sort of thought it was all over we thought the Taliban had gone home and quit or any number of things and so for several years that in fact was the experience to the initial forces largely not completely but largely in Afghanistan so when the Taliban started to show real proficiency later it was sort of DNA that had already been established a generation before but people weren't ready for it. Policy makers deployed forces in a way that assumed we weren't fighting that kind of a foe in fact when I took over in Afghanistan in 2009 that was eight years into it but the reality is we were still underestimating the capability of the enemy in a pretty significant way and to our cost. Then use the term professionalization which I'm having read Alex piece really resonates and I think just a drilling with the core argument is which is really important for practitioners and policy makers which is guerrillas may have ideological alignment they may agree that they hate whoever the occupier is or the government is or whatever they may have a lot of passion as you said they may also have a lot of resources but if I understand correctly Alec your argument is that is not enough to actually be a successful guerrilla those things are helpful but they are not sufficient to make you win against a government or a counterinsurgeon Alec is is that true and can you dig a little bit more into that? Yeah absolutely that's exactly how I would characterize this and in fact I think one of the pieces I get on in this article in the book is in fact these things can kind of detract from your ability to fight well by distracting you from the core military needs that you have and so I focus in particular on the role of small unit combat leaders so I think they are the kind of key linchpin that allow you to harness a lot of this stuff and turn it into military capacity and this is not going to sound different to a lot of folks that think about conventional militaries as well too and so the first thing for me I think it's important brush clearing is just saying what I mean by these small unit combat leaders I mean military leaders are selected based on tactical potential or performance rather than their political commitment or personal relationships and the other piece of this that kind of focus on is that beyond being selected for the right reasons these small unit leaders must be empowered to do their jobs so the leaders of organizations have to decentralize initiative and allow small unit combat leaders to have flexibility in the combat environment in the article in the book more broadly I argue that small unit combat leaders activates three interrelated mechanisms or processes that help you right to take advantage of these endowments and those stuff you're coming into the conflict with so the first is that they plan operations planning is crucial and all military ventures and the asymmetry of insurgency makes it just as pressing the second is they have to prepare their fighters to conduct those operations by leading consistent and realistic training these small unit combat leaders even more so in the most military organizations are the main point of contact for nearly all new recruits and they have to get them ready to fight sometimes under really asymmetric and pressing and challenging circumstances they usually can't rely on kind of well set up training camps so they have to train these folks to do the stuff they actually doing combat one viet con cadre said in a archival document I found hard field training saved blooding combat this would sound familiar I think a lot of us service members personnel that would talk about this way and then finally the synthesis of good planning and effective preparation fosters what military sociologists would refer to as task based cohesion where in fighters value competence competence and build confidence from effective engagements they trust their fellows and their officers because they are capable of conducting the task necessary to conduct the operations they are doing day in and day out over a long period of time so that trust comes from their confidence in their fellows not from the social standing in which they come from or from their ideological distaste or hatred of whoever their foe is. Alex let me ask you a question because I think that's all absolutely compelling if you have an organization in which those people who are militarily focused and competent arise how does that change the movement because you start a revolution with an ideological purity you start with enthusiasm and over time you get sort of I don't want to overstate this but the hard bit in cynics survive they turn out to be effective leaders and then when you win it's a different group of people now assuming power how does that change the dynamic yeah I mean this to me is a fundamental question that comes out of thinking about the question this way that we assume that all stuff that's good for insurgences good for all things insurgences do right so just assume if they're succeeding it's going to be good but this is a fundamental question and so a lot of my work now thinks about insurgen civil military relations for this exact reason how do we balance the needs of a perhaps increasingly effective or increasingly powerful military elements in an organization versus the underlying kind of political side of what a counter uninsurgency is and the short answer is like us they had a lot of trouble doing this and there's one example I can bring up in particular that I think will feel quite resonant for a lot of folks that thought about Afghanistan is that the Taliban had these pretty intense internal debates about the use of pressure plate i.e.s right versus remote or kind of more specifically targeted i.e.s and the military elements wanted to use pressure plate i.e.s they wanted to use i.e.s where the targets set the idea off without any intervention from their fighters that's safer you don't have to loiter around the location right you don't have to fear being targeted by a drone or other kind of us power the political leader fib did not like this because obviously it's much more indiscriminate form of warfare and these dynamics were ongoing and as the military elements of the Taliban became more powerful and more successful they started winning these discussions much more often and the way in which they approached the population the way which they approached warfare ended up as you are exactly alluding to moving away from the kind of insurgency or guerrilla type motivation that perhaps we have in our mind the dishearistic of what's going on here i would argue that the same happens on the counterinsurgency side exactly you start to figure out what works but sometimes that's it odds with what your overall outcome you want it to be yeah and just to build on this point i think you're exactly right i think that social science research will say that in terms of have it easier that they can make more mistakes in terms of targeting civilians because they are not seen as the arbiter of power at the national level so they can be messier with how they're doing this and their decisions well meaningful and they can damage the legitimacy of the movement i think are a lot less costly at least in the short term than those same adaptations that counterinsurgent military forces are making it's a really hard dilemma stand if i can jump in here i do you want to ask a follow up to you based on Alex argument about the importance of these small unit leaders alkenics of coherent and convincing argument about how influential they can be in the professionalization of a guerrilla group i'm curious if in your experience you think that you know the u.s. government and everything within it the whole apparatus intelligence analysts operators on the ground policy makers understand that and agree with that or do you think we have more of a bias to look higher up in the organization that more of the top levels of leadership and trying to understand the effectiveness and the direction they're headed on the battlefield yeah at least i think we understand it and we choose to ignore it because it doesn't fit our force generation model it doesn't fit how we assign people to areas of warfare and whatnot and we assume that every soldier is essentially interchangeable every squad is interchangeable there's a certain level of expertise and that's not true and of course what we find is particularly for a familiarity with a particular area cultural acuity language understanding we send our people there blind deaf and dumb and even if they've had multiple tours in a place like Afghanistan if they haven't been taught the language if they're not in the same location that sort of thing it's almost like coming back again and so we assume that competences generic that you can train it for binning and a squad that can fire and maneuver there will be effective in board act province and that's not my experience my experience is almost like go watch one of these old cavalry movies we've got an old Indian scout that really is able to help you know the cavalry because he knows what he sees and feels we don't value that we pretend to we say we do but we don't in any of our systemic processes it it sounds like we understand it but practically and bureaucratically it would be really really difficult to build a strategy that acknowledges that well let me vent a little bit in 2009 2008 general Scotty Miller and I he was a one-star independent gun and we came up with this idea to create the Afghan hands and that was going to be a group of people who were trained in language for a full year then they were sent to Afghanistan for a couple of years then they were going to come back to the US working an Afghan related staff job and then go back to Afghanistan hopefully the same place almost like the state department or the CIA would do that and the secretary defense approved it the chairman approved it they both supported it and all of the services slow-rolled it all of them said we don't want to put our best in brightest because that will disrupt their career path and I said well we exist to fight wars this is a war but the system rejected it a few good people winning and did it and we do that on a constant scale and I would argue we still do that and that's just one example of a place where I think we hinder ourselves I think maybe one of the most salient takeaways I took from Alex work is the amount of nuance and how you need to understand a insurgency or gorilla force is often much more than our intelligence apparatus or command decision makers can process it seems like we're often trying to find bad guys if you find a bad guy which is a task in its own your goals to remove them from the battlefield but I think what Alex research would suggest is that just because you find a gorilla fighter it doesn't mean you necessarily should immediately remove them from the battlefield because there's all kinds of internal bureaucratic and organizational politics you may be actually be removing the one guy in the organization who's the dumbest leader who everybody wants to move but they can't remove them because he's somebody's son or whatever and then you actually end up removing the wrong person. Yeah definitely I mean I think this is a fundamental point that one of the side effects of the US leadership targeting campaign was I think to help the Taliban with some of its kind of road blocks are reform but to kind of understand how this happens I think we have to start at 2001 right that the Taliban is and I think we have to emphasize this this is a fundamental thing to remember now we they have won and it's 20 years later they marched on Kabul understanding the extent to which they were and Jordan talked about this earlier the extent to which they were decimated after 2001 that they were their command structure was broken their leadership head was either killed or it fled to Pakistan this was a broken organization now unlike the rest of Afghan society which was also relatively devastated the Taliban did have the tools to reorganize as an organization I think more quickly they did have access to these pretty dense tribal social and religious networks evidence by their ability to restructure around the Kwareta Shura in the south and around Malau Omar in particular so they had this core if I think religious and social ties to to draw upon the problem for them in my argument is that these ties and motivations had disastrous battlefield implications while the Taliban were cohesive they didn't fragment on the battlefield and this was shocking I think to a lot of outside observers suffered really heavy losses and were pretty limited in terms of what they could do kinetically so to me you're saying that they were they were ideologically cohesive and strong but tactically they were actually unable to make advances on the battlefield exactly and more than night not make advances they were suffering totally untenable losses for the kind of early period of the conflict I mean losses at an enormous scale and to me I think a core part of this was that they were recruiting and promoting based on those political and religious ties that had helped them to reorganize a lot of these leaders were unskilled and actually actively opposed doing what was necessary to fight well as many of the original Taliban commanders in the south were resistant to implementing guerrilla tactics they thought this is a cowardly way of fighting and they were also actively opposed to training because they believe they were already warriors now a key shift and this is what kind of stand alluded to earlier as there were parts of the movement that did have this legacy from the night so in particular folks in the east and this came around the Peshawar Shura and the Hakani network that had a very different understanding of who should be promoted and why should they should be promoted as they gain more cash in the movement right they introduce this core reform which was a set of low level military cadre they called these Nizami Masu-Leen and these guys led the development of a new training regime in place to heavy emphasis on planning sound operations and so while the rollout was slow it happened a lot faster in the east than the south we see that in general UF after action reports start noting a real uptick in the kind of Taliban capabilities and what these leaders are capable of and to get back to what Stan said a lot of Taliban experts refer to this air this time as a professionalization of the group when they developed a real ispry to core a real fighting motivation and a major test of this comes in the surge and so I'm going to to be very clear and that I said this in the article two the Taliban did not make military gains during the surge the increased U.S military pressure meant that ISAF engaged them kinetically at a much larger geographic and with much greater intensity they weren't making gains but what they did do after losing real territory is that their ability to support these tasks the support that kind of are fundamental to grill a force employment remained fairly consistent they regenerated force in response to attrition and they also were able to continue imposing high levels of costs right there were plenty of areas in southern east afghanistan where if you left a base your under fire almost right away your subject to complex ambushes day after day and they had to keep surviving to fight this way they did they kept surviving they kept fighting this way despite the high level of costs and so to get back to kyle i think where you started with this i think a really interesting dynamic that's worth bringing up in terms of the surge and the lead up to it is the role of this leadership targeting campaign the Taliban didn't start fighting well until they overcame their pre-existing ties promoting and training people based on their military acumen not their societal and religious standings but as you alluded to this wasn't easy these guys were often pretty central figures in the movement with tons of religious and social cachet and getting rid of them was really hard and the reformers would struggle to do this it was a political set of discussions to get rid of these folks that were kind of standing in the way of this move towards military reform and so in some ways the u.s leadership targeting campaign helped these reformers out it got rid of a lot of blocks of reform by removing them from the command structure so one Taliban expert said that this campaign made space for the Taliban to introduce an entirely new set of military cadre that changed the movements dna from within i think this is a really important piece of the picture because the scale at which the Taliban leadership role over happened was large and it was a vacuum that ended up being filled by a set of reformers that had actually started to focus on the importance of military components in in promotion and recruitment decisions yeah if i could jump on that Alec because i think you're saying something that we didn't really understand because i was in it i can speak with some authority we at the tactical level didn't completely appreciate it at the the uh policy level we absolutely didn't because again people remember what they saw in 2001 they saw the Taliban collapse and then they saw the first few years after that and i was still in special operations in 2007 and eight but we were operating in afghanistan and our experience changed dramatically we had been there trying to look for remnants of al-Qaeda and suddenly the Taliban in 2007 and 2008 were the real deal and we were going into fights with 200 and more of them who were standing and fighting and i don't think that american military forces particularly with the one-year rotations you have a unit that comes in and the situation's very different from what it was when they were there three years before but they've still got the impression that okay this is afghanistan 2004 it's afghanistan down in helmin or sangin or something like that 2007 and eight that's a different ballgame policy makers were even slower to get that because we had focused in afghanistan and won that war then we went to a rack and we had the bitter fight then we focused back on afghanistan and people were not expecting that to be a bitter fight they were expecting that to be just finished cleaning up what had been done earlier and so our forces all the things you talk about our mindset our focus was less than i think and our understanding was less than it needed to be and just to draw in a thing that kyle brought out this is a complex dynamic that these organizations are internally complicated just as the u.s military is internally complicated and so i agree that the challenge of understanding the full scope of this problem particularly particularly with one-year rotations something that your work seems to imply beyond the actual combat context of counterinsurgency is that in terms of security forces assistance beyond the examples you discuss in your paper perhaps in paratis and support partners delivering either material or training alone is not as useful as delivering those two elements in tandem that those two things really work together because training those unit leaders so that they can then you know teach tactics and and cohesion in their own organizations is a critical piece of the puzzle would you agree with that implication for you know folks thinking about security forces assistance yeah i can jump in i think that's absolutely the case that this is a much more complicated task than one expects and so i know one of your previous podcaster multiple time podcast guests ex jenshella thinks about this a lot in the context of security forces assistance in Ukraine that this looked like a much more cohesive and large-scale effort that's focused on exactly as you're saying combining resources with actual tactical training and leadership development it's a hard thing to do and it requires time we think sometimes we can train forces but we don't understand the context of what they're operating and so we can train them on certain generic things but think of the israelis and gaza or the ukrainians trying to do their counteroffensive and we're telling them that well this is how we would do it at the national training center and they're trying to communicate that's not the situation here that won't work here and so i think that was true in vietnam i think it's true in most cases so how do you get enough on the ground understanding so that you can take the professionalism that our force may have and the technical skills and make them effectively communicated into that context and that takes time one of the things that really stood out from this research that you did alic is i think there's a reckoning happening within the u.s government and the defense space about the fact that so much material support was provided to the afghan and arachy security forces and yet despite that after u.s withdrawal particularly in afghanistan a lot of those forces unfortunately collapsed your idea is pretty simple it's that ideological ties for a force material contributions aren't enough you also need to have really effective small unit leaders but you know the thing that really stuck out to me is that you know there's a lot of reasons why we might have had a challenge in afghanistan in other places but you know one of the reasons is is just because you gave materials doesn't mean that you actually lean to competent tactical level units across the entire of a security force and alic i'd be curious if that resonates with what your research showed yeah i think this is exactly right and i think this is something that's worth pulling out as well too is that in some ways i make the Taliban sound like this unified force in terms of its fighting capabilities as it reforms that's not the case right and this is apparent and so something that jumps out to me in particular is as we see the development of the red units these so-called Taliban special forces after 2015 2016 a lot of these people say hey this is their soft they're taking back the night that's not what they were they were baseline capable infantry they were not special forces but they looked so much different than our expectation the stand pointed out that we treat them this way and so they were the best the Taliban had to offer and they could fight fine but that's what they were and a lot of the rest of the organizations kind of pulled out of the fight after 2015 or 2016 and the same is true i talk about some cases in Vietnam and we see dramatic variation within the vietcong despite seeing them as this kind of monolithic force the parts of the organization that train consistently that promoted people consistently had the space to do that fought a lot better than the parts of the organization that didn't and this is of course true in Afghanistan when we look at the difference between the capabilities of some of the afghan soft units versus like afghan army writ large that i think this draws on your point afghan soft had access to a lot of stuff the same way a lot of afghan units did the difference was that afghan soft had a very different approach to combining that stuff with the tactical training and the leaderfit principles meant to use it over time and then really challenging circumstances yeah i like there was one bit of your argument that also really stuck out to me because i think it's important for this discussion about sfa and training partner forces you discussed how one of the important facets of these small unit leaders in creating success is that they're empowered by their own organizations to make often split second decisions that can put a force on a trajectory to success or the opposite and that's something that no matter how much an external partner trains a force that is inherent to that organization is that correct yeah i mean i think this is a right and more importantly there are all sorts of incentives to not give those people the initiative right that you don't want to decentralize your power away from the center of an insurgent group maybe you're happy to get your power from the tribal ties are religious ties that you're based on that's what gives you longstanding power you gives you ability to get money and other resources and so you have incentives potentially to not empower these folks and no amount of external assistance is going to change that political will and it's going to change that desire to hold on to your social and religious standing to remain a key actor in a political or military organization yeah i really like that way of framing the framing the takeaway yeah to jump on that we go back to the term professionalization there are typically rules and norms and ethics in a profession and you can't be a warlord and be a professional and you can't make a ton of money on the side and be a professional so i think Alex point really is key so unfortunately we're short on time and we always finish the podcast with implications for policymakers practitioners and scholars i'll start with Alec what are the main implications of your research both for those on the side of the government but also maybe even for the ocean the side of guerrilla forces my big tie level takeaway the way i think about this is to take insurgent development really seriously these are real organizations that face real challenges and some show agency in resolving that and so while viewing the Taliban's victory as predetermined is really attractive right now they were going to succeed all along because of the social and religious ties they had access to that's not that's not the story it's not nowhere near that straight forward and we've addressed this theme a few times and about understanding the complexity of the power dynamics the internal goals of the various actors within groups using this as where they're going and one of the arguments i make in my book more broadly as we should treat insurgent tactical behavior as a much less noisy signal about what insurgents want to do than what they say what they train their forces to be able to conduct on the battlefield gives us a much better picture of what they are trying to achieve than trying to understand their underlying rhetoric and what they speak to along these lines too that i think and lisa kind of referred to this earlier i think this calls for us to think much more carefully about the intense trade-offs that these groups are are having between their political and military leadership i think we would learn a lot by applying the lessons we have struggled with in our civil military relations within the united states and approaching counterinsurgency understanding that those dynamics are at play in our foes as well too i think we gain a lot by having a more complete picture of what's going on here treating them as real organizations that face real organizational challenges and that come up in some cases with real innovative solutions as well too i think stan said this earlier not treating them as cookie cutters they're all the same they will all operate the same way across time at space stanna before we go to your closing comments does anything about the core argument alip gives particularly resonate with you or is there anything you'd want to push back on that that doesn't match your extensive experience in this area no it all resonates with me and it should be a cautionary tale for how we look at the future you have extensive experience decades of experience probably honestly more experience than most people in the u.s military dealing with guerrillas and insurgencies based on your experience what is the key takeaway you would like the community to learn from this field yeah really too and the first i'd make is we talk about professional realization of the insurgents the professionalization of the counter insurgents you have got to get your act together and it's much harder than it seems and it starts at policy level and it goes down to the lowest individual and it takes a lot more prep a lot more focus and training than we want to pretend it does that's a historic problem even more now the other part i'd say is technology and we talk about weaponry but information technology made al-Qaeda in Iraq completely different from their parent organization al-Qaeda they were faster they were able to do things that they couldn't have done before the prolific presence of all kinds of communications things nowadays that's even more if you think about it you know 100 years ago an insurgent group wouldn't know how to make a bomb because nobody in the group had ever made one before well online or with AI now they can get all of that kind of information instantaneously really effectively that changes many dynamics it takes many advantages away from the nation's states or counter insurgents that we used to have and so i would say that we got to go to school on how insurgent groups and capabilities are going to be empowered so that if you're in the counter insurgent mode you have a much better appreciation for the problem you're wrestling with there is a whole separate podcast we could have on the topic you just brought up but unfortunately we are out of time Stan McRistill, Alec Worsnop thank you so much for this great conversation and thank you for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. My honor thank you. Thanks a lot. Thanks again for listening to episode 143 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. In our next episode we speak with Rira Admiral Mark Schaper from Special Operations Command Self and Dr. August Kohl, futurist author of many articles and books to include Ghost Fleet and Burnin and what will be the third episode in iwi's Future of War series. Please be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast that you do not miss an episode. You can also engage with us on x, youtube, facebook, linkedin and across many other platforms. If you found value in today's conversation please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It really helps us reach new audiences. And one last thing, what you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, Princeton University, the Irregular Warfare Initiative or any agency of the US or any other government. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.