Future of War Part II: On Their Own

Hi, I'm Borquil Ligado, the director of the Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellows Program. And I'm Guido Torres, the IWI Executive Director. Today we're excited to announce the application window for the 2026 IWI Non-Resident Fellows Program has opened. Each year, IWI brings together 20 to 25 exceptional Irregular Warfare professionals to drive public dialogue on international security issues, engage with senior national security leaders in small group environments, and to build the Irregular Warfare Community. The fellowship is all about building community and we're excited to receive applications from Irregular Warfare practitioners, interagency stakeholders, members of the research space, and others from the United States and around the world. The deadline for applications is November 6, 2025. To apply, go to the follow-up tab at www.irregularwarfare.org. Again, that is www.irregularwarfare.org. And I think it reflects some of our thinking ahead. There is again, as I mentioned, this sort of, you know, persistent surveillance. So the moment that an American arrives in country on these missions, there's a good chance that the adversary is going to know they're there. And if they don't, they may in time, you know, pick them up and be able to track and kind of model and predict, you know, write what they're doing. Before thinking a lot of terms, you know, kinetics and that kind of stuff. But now there's so many other forms of contact. It's almost hard to see a scenario in which you are not being surveilled in some way if someone is interested in you. And that's probably the thing that is absolutely alive and well here out in the Indo-Pacific and everywhere, particularly to actors who have access to mass amounts of data and are leaning really hard into the AI and the compute to be able to make sense of that data. Welcome to the Regular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host Ben Jeb joined by my co-host Katherine Michelson. Today we continue with part two of our Future of War series with another useful fiction story from author and futurist August Cole. This episode features a short story entitled On Their Own, which imagines a near future mission in Thailand. In the story, US Special Forces soldiers quietly advise a new Thai commando unit as it faces Chinese backproxies, high-tech surveillance, and organized crime. The vignette explores how trust, innovation, and partner-led missions could shape the future of conflict when US forces cannot always operate openly. To discuss these themes, we're joined by Major General Jeffrey Van Antwerp, commanding General Special Operations Command Pacific, and author August Cole. Together, we'll explore what August's fictional scenarios reveal about technology, partnerships, capabilities, integration, and the evolving role of Special Operations forces in the end of the Pacific. After the conclusion of our conversation together, we'll play a narrated clip from the short story On Their Own. You are listening to the Regular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict project on the modern war institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of a regular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Major General Jeff Van Antwerp and August Cole. Major General Jeff Van Antwerp, August Cole, thanks for joining us on the Regular Warfare Podcast today. It's great to have you. Great to be here. Great to be here, Ben. Thank you. August, similar to part one of the series, we'll play the vignette you wrote at the end of the episode for our audience. But could you just briefly summarize the story and explain why you and Peter Singer settled on this specific storyline? Like why a proxy war, why Southeast Asia, and why Thailand? So this story On Their Own is set in a five-story anthology we did for US Army Special Operations Command. And in particular, each of these is aligned with the different enduring capabilities of USISOC in 2030. So when we were pulling back and looking at this one aspect, which is innovation to really road the capabilities of adversaries and empower allies and partners, it felt natural to set a story like this in the Indo-Pacific, where China has myriad tools and means and methods to be able to influence strategically, to be able to shape countries, paths that are often indirect, and particularly using non-state actors. So here we're following in the decade from now, kind of mid 2030s, an Army Special Operations mission in an allied country in Thailand, where they're helping a new local SOF unit called Unit 38, and in particular, helping them come up with their local developed like robotics and data analysis type systems versus say like a template approach. And that aspect I thought was really important because it speaks to the human but also technology dimensions that are in this story, which I think is at the core of this kind of advisory type mission. And so, you know, these Special Forces soldiers, Civil Affairs soldiers are working with this unit, they're stuck on base because there's so much persistent Chinese surveillance in the area where they are, that they're really quite limited in how when they go forward to, you know, support the unit, what they can actually do. So it's not even a question of like rules of engagement or politics, so to speak, it's really actually about the environment itself. And I think that's a really important thread to start pulling when you're thinking about the operating environment the next decade. And so when Unit 38 gets a mission to go do some closer reconnaissance on a shipment of weapons and that includes drones and other capabilities, they are supporting from afar. And so the mission itself goes awry. And this organized crime group known as Red Sunrise, you know, is clearly trying to do much more than just smuggle weapons or some strategic stakes that the story reveals, I won't spoil it. And as American soldiers have to figure out without being alongside shoulder to shoulder, you know, how do they best support Unit 38? And that includes everything from helping them revise things like algorithms and software, but also like getting them access to data that they might otherwise have. And so, you know, there's this, you know, kind of overall, like holistic, I think, understanding of what these traditional, say, special forces or even civil affairs missions look like, that, you know, technology is going to be central to it. And it doesn't have to actually be like an either war or replacement, but rather it can help almost like enrich or strengthen some of those ties in part, when it's done on the terms of our local partners who are working with. So to give more of a prelude to the story that we'll hear at the end, we're dealing with a situation where the PRC is trying to influence and coerce its neighbors through information operations and proxy forces. Strategy is often employed by aggressive great powers. Jeff, I'm not sure if August geopolitical vision matches what you're seeing, but could you describe your operational environment and the range of threats you have to think about in your AOR? Sure. I think probably the first thing I'd say is August, like Thailand's a great choice for this. This is a 70 plus year ally of ours. There's just a ton of third party activity going on in Thailand. I was actually there just three weeks ago for an irregular warfare symposium. We had almost 30 different countries, mostly soft partners that were there meeting together. And because it's a very open country, it is actively trying to generate a robust tourism industry. There's also a lot of opportunity for other activities, activities that may be maligned in some way. So while maybe not seeing this exact scenario yet, as August has said in a 2030 type timeframe, yeah, we're absolutely seeing efforts from multiple parties to include the PRC, trying to influence populations. We in soft take a very population-centric approach, so we're very attuned to that, very sensitive to that. And I think the use of proxies and surrogates, that's not a new activity. We see that globally. We've seen that for many decades. I think that kind of what August gets at here is the avenues by which you can influence populations and you can leverage other proxies and surrogates. Those continue to increase and diversify as technology continues to flatten and speed communications in some ways and just makes a lot of those populations and people more accessible, whether they know they're actually working for you or not, or the PRC or not, which is probably a whole other kind of subject. I think the how is definitely changing the game a lot. The technology in particular, we see that with just mass cyber infiltration of critical infrastructure. We see it in increased surveillance, which I'm sure we'll talk about here as August does a really good job of laying out some ways in which surveillance becoming more and more ubiquitous. That's not just a kind of along a flop thing, as we kind of used to think about it, something in the overhead, but just the multiple ways we can be surveilled and the multiple ways people can gain access to our data and what that means overall for us in terms of risk. So, yeah, absolutely. A lot of this kind of rang true and was helpful to sort of envision how a future could unfold. So, another interesting facet of this story is that the SF team on the ground in Thailand is actually working with their partners to help pave the way for the US Army's first multi-domain task force, which is set to deploy to Asia on a deterrence mission. Jeff, could you discuss SOC PAC's value to the joint force? Like, how are you all setting the conditions for larger, more conventional units to operate in the Indo-Pacific? Yeah, sure. We're supporting element out here. I think in some other theater, SOC has taken a pretty prominent role and been in some cases, you know, from a CT perspective, even sort of a supported command in some ways. Right here, we're absolutely supporting to the joint force. So, we wake up every day. That's really what we're thinking about is how can we support the joint force? There's probably three main things that we think about in terms of joint force support. The first is support to crisis response. That's kind of an enduring priority for us. And that's not just pertaining to any specific adversary. If you look at anything in the Indo-Pacific, you've been out here at all, you know that we are subject to many different types of crisis, both manmade and natural, with large typhoons, earthquakes, and we respond to those, you know, multiple times a year. We'll have crisis response activities and where we play a key role in supporting the joint force. The second is strategic competition. You know, we are always looking to provide avenues to compete, to influence, to provide options to the joint force. And then we are always preparing for potential of contingency or conflict. And a lot of that is just about capability development. What do we soft provide to the joint force? A lot of times that's in terms of asymmetric capability, but it is also in terms of how do we make joint force capability more survivable, more lethal. And when it all comes down to it, look at what is the thing about soft because we're small, you know, we're small, we're not in the lead. But what we do have is really, really strong relationships kind of across the board. And even where we've got small numbers, those small numbers can provide sort of an outsized return on investment, just because of the ability to leverage partners. And our partners, many of those partnerships are somewhat generational, you know, they go back years and years, I can't go to a country like I went to Thailand the other week and people are hitting me up before I go there. Because one of the guys I'm going to meet with General Sadat was a Q-course classmate of General Braga. And so General Fenton, once we go dig up dirt on General Braga, I wish I did, there was plenty, make no mistake. So that's just the kind of thing. And that type of relationship, you know, that's the kind of thing like you can't manufacture that on kind of, you know, before a crisis or something happens, you know, that kind of trust and credibility is earned over time. I was going to pull a thread that you just were bringing up, Jeff, and it's that I think you'd mentioned the 70 years, like seven decades of history and those relationships being something that evolves, you know, in the strategic context, but also in the technological and it's, you know, when we're writing these narratives, these stories, you know, we're trying to make them character first, right? Because fundamentally, you know, good stories about the people. And I think that's analogous somewhat to this special forces mission itself and even at large, there are continuities, right, in that. And yet technology also enters the conversations, you know, and I think being able to kind of portray that as both a realistic expression where there's friction at times, but also a new way to kind of redefine what that looks like. And so I think in terms of thinking through the future of the value and the relationship with the larger joint force, that is part of where that may manifest in those kind of deeper relationships and helping kind of create almost formative or ground level, you know, when a moment when technologies are iterating and changing, you know, on a quarterly basis, six months, things like that. And so being able to kind of stay and help a partner keep writing that wave to use the metaphor, I think is actually something that with that in theater presence is going to be really impactful in the next decade. Yeah. One thing I liked about the vignette that you wrote there was it captured some of the interpersonal relationship, the joking around the degree of camaraderie and develop with a partner. And certainly that can get deeper over time. But I don't want to necessarily over romanticize what a partner relationship entails is there is absolutely a transactional portion. There's always sort of the Venn diagram of where your interest overlap and then where they don't. And it's the artist really finding out where is that overlap in that Venn diagram where we have shared interests and we're going to cooperate and coordinate in pseudo shared interests. And in that, even with close partners, you've known for a long time, there's that transactional portion because they have a mission, you have a mission. And so you feel that need to deliver on your part. And so do they. And that's how a good relationship works is there's transaction, but there's also relationships of that when there's there may tend to be suspicion at times because, you know, you're maybe not getting everything you want out of the relationship and they're not either. You can iron that out without drama that tends to poison a relationship. August, we'd actually like to dig a little deeper on the character of the relationships that you presented in the story, because something notable about the story was the level of restraint demonstrated by your characters. Like the American forces impulse was to assist their partners directly, but they ended up adding value by providing technical expertise and long range capabilities from the space and cyber domains. Why did you focus on this indirect approach instead of having the ties and Americans fighting side by side, buddy cop style and a gunfight? Yeah, right. That would be an easier story to write to, you know, that's a great question. And I think it reflects some of our thinking ahead. There is again, as I mentioned, this sort of, you know, persistent surveillance. So the moment that an American arrives in country on these missions, there's a good chance that the adversary is going to know they're there. And if they don't, they may in time, you know, pick them up and be able to track and kind of model and predict, you know, right what they're doing. You know, that element of a relationship getting closer without being shoulder to shoulder is a really interesting one. You know, we're now in this era, like you can have pretty strong virtual connections. I mean, this would be great for Jeff to weigh in on, you can have a training exercise with someone and stay in touch over social media, you know, all the other kind of, you know, tools that we have to do so, so that like when you are back shoulder to shoulder, so to speak, years later, maybe that's a richer, easier and quicker connection. And this story particularly, we also want to realistically portray was the frustration, you know, of wanting to be able to go and be shoulder to shoulder because that is real too, as best as I was able to kind of ascertain, right. And I think that's natural, you know, you want to be alongside the people that you're really committing to supporting. And so figuring out how to portray that in a way that was realistic. And you can, you know, see that in the way the characters kind of talk about wanting to go. But also the partner saying, hey, you know, this major, and when he's like, I need to do this on our terms, you can help us do that. And it's not a contested relationship at all. But it has to have that level of respect where if the partner says pause, you know, we're going to do this, and you're going to help that, you know, the special forces and civil affairs holders like, okay, we got it, and we're going to support you on your terms. And that notion of like on their terms felt also really important from what we were trying to communicate, because, you know, that allows innovation really to kind of flourish in a maybe more natural way than people trying to do something and fit it into a box that we're giving them and saying, hey, you know, take your good idea and put it inside this thing. Jeff, in a similar fashion, are you seeing differences in how we work with and train our partners in Asia? Or do you anticipate changes in the future? Like in other words, is it feasible to expect deployed soft teams to advise and work with partners from a distance? Yeah, I think August touched on what is like one of the central issues and difficulties for anybody enabling a partner. And it's that it's our inherent desire to want to be able to share risk. And particularly when the risk becomes life threatening, we're not new to the game of having to advise a partner at distance. You know, we've done this in many theaters, you know, even through the height of the GWAT, you were always attempting, at least at higher levels, you're attempting to sort of work yourself, you know, back from the X, work yourself out of a job, put the partners in the front. And partners totally get that, they understand that. In fact, many of our partners knew that was key to continuing the support was the ability to limit the risk to U.S. forces. They knew it as certain conflicts went on, we became more sensitive to casualties. And so they knew that the ability to continue to support was to be able to bear the brunt of that risk. That said, there is a certain credibility that comes from being able to share risk. And there's sort of a skin in the game type quality to that. And so I think that's sort of central to how do you preserve that element where the partner knows if I could, I would I would be there next to you. I feel like that's something that you have to absolutely know that and feel that like if you could take the physical risk, you would, but you just can't because your ROE or your current authorities don't allow you to. And in many places, just like August is kind of outlined there, they don't want you to, you just want to know that you would if you could. As far as the ability to, and what we're seeing out here, the ability to enable a partner and to do that at distance, that is absolutely becoming more and more important and more and more important to understand like what does that enabling look like. And I think the type of enabling that August outlines here, which a lot of is enabling understanding and situational awareness, not just enabling with, hey, I'm going to strike the next position in front of you, which is we've done a lot of both over the years, but a lot of our enabling has been much more on the lethal side, where a lot of the enabling we do out here, because we're not in a hot shoot and war at the moment, it's on the understanding side in the vast majority of that, because in many cases, we don't have great, you know, super deep Intel sharing agreements, it's leveraging the commercial data that is available, which is immense, the ability to correlate that kind of data together and create an accurate picture of what's going on in the maritime domain or across multiple domains is super important to our partner, could then can go and take the action, you know, they don't necessarily need you on the X doing the thing for them. But the understanding is where the real power is. We've talked a lot about humans and partnerships and relationships and all that heartwarming stuff. But I'd like to do a full 180 and talk more about gears and metal. August, you present a lot of futuristic tech in the story, things like his glasses, biomemetic Chinese surveillance spots that mimic rats and snakes and shapeshifting crawler robots. How did you settle on these examples? You know, a lot of the times when we're thinking about a given technology, we're always trying to restrain or anchor what we're conceiving in the tech that's here today or is, you know, just at our fingertips or right around the corner. And so all of those, you know, different permutations are certainly feasible already. And ultimately, it's about a technology not for its own sake, but to solve a problem. I'm kind of like agnostic to some extent for any one of those, you know, which is the coolest or the most useful, but rather trying to think of through if I was the adversary and trying to do something like create better situational awareness around a target, how would I do it? Similarly for, you know, this unit 38, what are the tools that they're going to be able to develop themselves? Where are the gaps in capability? You know, say, is it refining an autonomy algorithm? Or, you know, are there other questions too about, do they in this advised unit understand what's going on around them, not just in the kind of soda straw sense from having a thing that can crawl under a car or a door, because it can break itself apart and or split apart, I should say. But rather like, do we need to pull back, you know, as this team does and say, you know, what's the big picture? And also having that, you know, a solution coming from these, you know, special operations soldiers to be able to say, hey, we've also developed some avenues for that through relationships that in this case, the civil affairs sergeants done by linking with the data broker. You know, I'm always also just thinking about the technology, but like permission and authorities. And so this soldier in this futuristic story using some crypto funds to be able to acquire data from a local broker. And, you know, that gives a totally different perspective because it's a like a nano sat a small sat, you know, constellation that the Thai force doesn't have. And so being able to again, think about the technology in a practical sense and not being too into the stuff itself and thinking about the way that then that changes the course of the story is also important too, because if you introduce technology for its own sake, and the story kind of stalls out, you want every injection of that to be able to say, okay, that then gets either people closer together for the report that maybe advances the plot. So there's a nice overlay as well with the kind of narrative challenge that goes with building these. August, I know you said you were technology agnostic, but I'd take a biometric robot to wash my kids while I podcast for Jeff. What technological trends are you currently seeing in the Indo-Pacific and what keeps you up at night when you contemplate emerging technology in Asia? Either in the Indo-Pacific, we're watching the same conflicts that everybody's watching. You know, we're watching Israelis in Gaza, we're watching Ukraine, Russia, watching really closely to see how is warfare evolving. So those things are certainly of great interest to us. Talk about robotics and autonomy. We are very interested, as is every partner, we deal with. You won't go to a partner who doesn't want to do an unmanned systems exchange, talking UAS and counter UAS. That's just ubiquitous across the board. Everybody's very interested in that. That said, I think the thing that probably most concerns me at the moment is probably the principal topic that came out, that is vignette, you know, probably the most influential technology in the vignette was just the ability to surveil, the ability to gather data. And there's obviously lots of little tactical robots and everything in here. But I think the thing that probably is most interesting or concerning to me, and I think that things are evolving the fastest, is the ability to leverage data sources that are already out there. So not necessarily introduced by us, you know, the tactical actors in some sort of tactical employment of an ISR asset, you know, whether that's in any kind of domain, but it's the data that's already available and the ability to get access to that data, whether people are trying to protect it or not, and then to take mass of that data and apply algorithm to it and learn from it to determine vulnerabilities. The reason we think about it so much is because our job, you know, my job specifically is all about risk, about understanding risk, managing risk, mitigating risk where possible, then ultimately accepting risk because you're never going to mitigate all of it. And when you think about that type of risk, you know, we've always thought mostly about the risk of I go all the way to the last covered concealed position, you know, basically where contacts not likely are expected for us persons, thinking contact in terms of how we get shot or struck, for thinking a lot of terms, you know, kinetics and that kind of stuff. But now there's so many other forms of contact. And if you start to think about, all right, are we operating in a manner which is making us vulnerable? It's almost hard to see a scenario in which you are not being surveilled in some way if someone is interested in you. And that's probably the thing that is absolutely alive and well here out in the Indo Pacific and everywhere, particularly to actors who have access to mass amounts of data and are leading really hard into the AI and the compute to be able to make sense of that data. Data, robots, high tech, these things can all seem so opposite and separated from humans. But really behind a lot of it are human teams with specialized skill sets and August something that was striking about the story was the diversity of skill sets of the deployed soft unit. You describe a team that has cyber and electronic warfare specialist, drone and robotic operators, soldiers with background in AI software and more. Why did you envision these skills as being paramount to the story? You know, the composition of the deployed, you know, special operations team in many ways reflects the threat environment that I envisioned with Peter, you know, for this narrative and that looking at how our partners are going to be trying to navigate it, I would suppose that each of the army, you know, soldiers offers up something that speaks to a given predicament, right, that that unit 38 is going to find itself in. So dealing with state level, EW, electromagnetic systems that are given to criminal gangs by the, you know, PLA or its proxies, that's one aspect of that team with that cyber capability. The civil affairs sergeant being able to what I think we described in the stories almost like an operational bubble, like the kind of zone of permission, if you will. So having relationships that help enable better information that help ensure there's a good relationship with the embassy because these stories have to exist in the real world. All those dynamics are going to come into play. And then similarly, you know, this importance of space, we're seeing I think across all the special operations narratives that, you know, we're talking about in this series. And that goes back again to something that used to sock has been pretty forward leaning on this notion of like a cyberspace triad, there's different kind of concepts for it. But whether it's sensing, whether it's communications, whether it's other kinds of capabilities that that is going to be more and more of a factor, and also being able to understand, you know, where are the terrestrial, you know, notes and implications of that growing role for space. And what I'd say also too is that, you know, there's almost a kind of a strategic sense making as well that happens towards the end of the story. And like I'll reveal a little more maybe, but you know, one of the kind of breakthroughs that the team has with their partner is that the local non state group red sunrise that's affiliated, you know, with the PLA has been casing back basically in a data sense, a 20,000 person prison and trying to identify the people that with the shipment of arms and drones, they might be able to use to destabilize this US ally. And that also felt like, you know, something important in terms of stakes, like, yes, this was about a mission to ensure stability ahead of a multi main task force, you know, being able to arrive and have a deterrent mission. And so, you know, what is red, what is the adversary going to do to create that instability. And so they've basically found something. I mean, you can almost imagine the follow on story, right. And so being able to kind of think through that in that team, which is a very small compliment, you know, do they have enough of the right skills. And I suppose that's probably going to be a question that people aren't going to get right every time that you can model these missions, you get more AI, you think about who knows whom and have those relationships, but you may show up without the right people or you may have big gaps. And then I think part of that creativity and special operations unit is figuring out, okay, how do I shore that up? You know, and Jeff, I guess similar question to you, what capabilities and skill sets do you think current and future soldiers in your AOR should master to effectively compete with our adversaries in Indo paycom? Yeah, thanks Ben. This was actually a big topic of conversation at that irregular warfare symposium a couple of weeks ago in Thailand with all of our partners. Historically, we've got really awesome proven assessment and selection methods, whatever brand of special operations force you are. And if you go to any of them, there's like a couple parts that are sort of common to all and you can guess what they are, you know, you got feats of strength, the obstacle courses, all of that. And a lot of that, I believe remains very necessary because you're trying to select for attributes, you're not necessarily selecting for specific skills in many of these courses, you're selecting for attributes where you want people who are ability to problem solve, ability to persevere when under heavy stress and load, you know, emotional, physical, mental. That said, increasingly, we can't ignore that the ability to understand not just the tech, but the application of the tech and how you incorporate that into an operation and do as you see in the people in the vignette here do, you know, it's not just I know how to use this thing, it's the ability to then improvise and be able to when they're under load, meaning, you know, not physically out even out kind of forward, but under load because they're trying to support a partner ability to kind of quickly iterate, combine technologies and understand where things where they may be able to provide, you know, opportunity or mitigate risk. And we are doing a lot on the overall special operations side, you know, kind of so come on down of reorganizing in some ways to account for the need for some of these technologies. You see that most in the robotics and autonomy realm where you're creating specific units, specific courses to account for them. What I'm finding for me myself that in command of SOC PAC, something that is absolutely necessary for me to understand is the networking aspects of these like the actual communicator, J6 people who, you know, used to fill your radio for you because you didn't know how to do it yourself. Now the need to really understand like how do these networks work, because ultimately it comes down to our ability to leverage the technologies to integrate them to the degree we need to command and control them and then what you're able to push down kind of from a mission command perspective. And that need to understand the networking doesn't mean everybody's got to be a network engineer or a data scientist, but it's increasingly becoming very important to be able to have the basic understanding to even be able to lead an organization whose ability to provide value is based upon the ability to leverage technologies, which is going to be the case regardless of where you're in once you get to like even a very tactical level, but certainly as you work your way up. You know, Jeff, I don't know how you'd answer this, but the team put soldiers in this story and it starts off with their having basically like who can handle the hottest, you know, spiciest food, which is kind of a familiar thing for anybody. Yeah, totally realistic. That's probably what's happening. You know, I was thinking about like there's a certain eagerness they have to be given a set of problems they don't know the answers to, and it sounds a little bit like that's what you're describing, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about that mindset piece of where you see soft formations, you know, whether they're army or joint, you know, shifting in that regard. Yeah, we absolutely want to solve our bosses problems is kind of the phrase we use here. You know, what are the hard problems that our bosses, and in my case, it starts at the end of paycom commander, and then the supported commands out here, what are the problems we're trying to solve? Some are really, really hard ones, really hard, technically, really hard from an access perspective, maybe based on the geography. And it's really going to work to understand those problems. And then understanding enough of your community, the larger Socom community, because it's not going to happen from the staff here at Sockpack. You know, we've got to be able to leverage the whole of Socom, that engine that can generate forces and capabilities, the magic is being able to do that in an accelerated type of way, as the environment, the operational environment in the technologies are together evolving so quickly, that being able to communicate that with specificity, you know, diagnose a problem, break it down in sort of as parts, and then figure out where is the soft value here? Where is the value that we provide? And how do we do that in a timely manner so that we're meeting kind of demand with supply? And it's difficult because we don't always have all the expertise out here, and we've got to really use our reach back to Socom and the interagency to come out and help define those problems for us. That is 100% our focus is those hard problems. Well, it's nice to hear a committee general music principles from microeconomics to explain their job. This next question is a bit of a mouthful here. And I kind of want to stick on this thread of risk and mission command, but a few things that stood out about the story were, one, the initiative employed by junior leaders, two, the ability for higher headquarters to mobilize joint capabilities to support those soldiers. And then three, the high level of risk tolerance and trust needed to actually prosecute a time sensitive target, right? Jeff, you're just talking about being a force employer. So could you just give us some insight into how you think about risk and empowering people to take initiative in such a large AOR? Yeah. Number one is you got to be in constant communication with each other. I'm not talking about like in constant communication during the tactical operation. We'll talk about that in just a second. But it's understanding the commander's intent, understanding the environment. What are the key things that we need to do? What is our overall purpose? And then really getting into, a lot of it is the type of conversations you'd expect people were having, which is sort of scenario based what ifs. In this scenario, we're going to conduct an operation even in kind of strategic competition. What if this thing happens? Some are the simple ones of, you know, they've got, hey, if you have a maintenance issue or something, but some of them are the things like, what if something really does go wrong or you have this kind of adversary action? What do we do? Because you know that the likelihood, particularly as you work towards more of a kind of a conflict scenario where now your communications are intentionally being denied or degraded, which we know they will, the ability to understand that intent and to be able to operate within it and to be able to do that type of risk management, risk mitigation, risk acceptance at a very low level. And to do that with the end in mind becomes more and more important. The way we think about it here, you know, our pause got a great quote. He says, leaders, commanders eat risk. What we need to be able to do is be in good communication with our subordinates so that we understand the risk and then be able to on their behalf know what risk we're all collectively willing to accept. And then where we've got to draw the line, because in the moment, it'll be very difficult to do that. But it is a challenge. And I think we'll see more and more of the type of scenario that August lays out here where you've got a small element who there's not time to do a bunch of consulting with echelons above a command to seek to EA, you know, target engagement authority to employ some system, whether it's in surveillance or in sort of a finished role. A lot of that you'll have to have established that beforehand and then have trust in your subordinates to execute within the intent. It's almost like you're looking at a left to right graph and the risk spikes almost like a heartbeat on a EKG and that there's the velocity, right, of an operation. The faster it goes, you know, it's not going to be a steady state, but that risk is going to spike. It's going to drop off. And then having almost like that word audacity has been used a lot, you know, in the 20th century to talk about special operations, but there's almost like an informed audacity, kind of a newer version of that where it speaks to, you know, almost like the OOONI loop like understanding and action that you have to probably consider, right, in the next decade, plus as machine speed takes over. And I think if anything, trying to show that some of that compression in the story was important, because I do only think it's going to get faster, especially when adversaries try to exploit that right the moment they can identify a process, floss, so to speak, you know, you can exploit that with myriad measures, whether they're information, cyber, or tactical for that matter. And so that's almost another kind of reframing of threat, you know, in terms of what process to mitigate risk does an adversary actually try to get inside. Yeah, I think obviously the way you laid out in this, and yet as well, where you got one thing that kind of goes bad, then you start to realize the scope of the kind of the problem. Those are things where if you're having to communicate to our headquarters and like seek direction before you can take action, you're always going to be behind the loop. You're always going to be behind addressing, you know, one of the previous spikes as another has already arrived. This is just my past experience over the past 20 plus years of doing this is rarely whether it's a crisis on target, or a crisis in a larger sense, like organizationally, certainly on target, where, you know, you're not the only actor acting, there is someone else who is also acting against you. And so it's not just you and the environment, it's you, the environment, and maybe multiple actors in there is you can rarely solve a problem in one like fell swoop, you know, one genius idea, one great thing. It's doing the next right thing, the next best thing, and then the next right thing and gradually you start to work your way out of it, you start to see more light, and you're alive an hour later, and then six hours later, and then now it's 24 hours later, man, they've seen a little bit more light, and that was that was crazy with it. Here we are, you know, I think that is going to be even more true as the number of actors increase, and the number of variables affecting the equation, the ability to be able to take a lot of time deliberating to solve this problem in one fell swoop will be very difficult. It'll be much more of powering down authority is close to the information as possible. You got to have trained people who understand what's going on that you trust, and then allowing them to do the next best thing, the next right thing to work their way through it. I hate to corral such a dynamic conversation between the two of you, but we do have a story to listen to at the end of this podcast, and I'm sure everybody's anxious to get to it. So I'll wrap up by first asking you, August, based on some of the themes from today's conversation, how should practitioners, policymakers, and academics think about the future of war? Well, that's a big one. All right. Hopefully, one of the takeaways from this story is there is an intersection of technology in the human dimension that doesn't need to be in tension, and that in fact, you can use it to reinforce some of that connection that in the special operations context, particularly Army Special Forces, civil affairs and others, is going to be crucial to maintaining and having those future emissions be successful. And as we're just talking about this notion of speed, of being able to process information, react, and having a fairly large operating envelope to make decisions that are reasonable that involve some of these technologies, that there may not be policies or doctrine for you, that making the right decision in that moment may actually require that soldier, sailor, marine, you know, airman to be able to process and understand that they're going to have to shift or leverage what they've learned to do something totally novel. And that may be actually what the threat or the adversary requires, because again, so much is going to be modeled. There's going to be so much data, people are going to be known where they are, what they're going to be doing next, that, you know, in viewing, I use this word creativity, and maybe it's my defect as a writer, but you know, how can you be so creative, essentially, that somebody's machine and software systems don't actually anticipate what comes next? And to me, that's an operational edge that I think you have to start putting the foundational work now so you can do that work later that's, you know, truly going to surprise an adversary. And then I guess similar question to you, Jeff, although I guess somewhat slightly smaller in scope, how should Indo paycom units and their constituent organizations think about the future of warfare? What changes need to be made? And what should remain constant? You know, we definitely have to commit to understanding the technology and its application. And that's a broad word in numbers of technologies, we've talked about many years, understanding the technology and its application, because it's necessary in order to understand really where risk and opportunity lie. Is risk is at the center of our business, having to accept it, as Kam says here, you know, leaders eat risk, the ability to accept that risk and know where that cost benefit analysis is favorable, and being able to quickly move out and seize opportunity. I think increasingly understanding the application of these technologies is going to be incredibly important. And, you know, it's not just the lessons learned sort of along the plot in Ukraine, where you see just the value of kind of mass with precision and the type of ubiquitous kind of surveillance that enables that and understanding the electromagnetic spectrum and how you're both kind of both vulnerable, and you can take advantage of that, you know, from a targeting your adversary perspective. But I think understanding it in terms of the context out here in the Indo Pacific, of how it affects your partners as well, because they're dealing with the same thing, maybe not again, the Venn diagram isn't completely overlapping, you know, but understanding where their interests are, where their vulnerabilities are, where their risk is, and then where their opportunity is, and being able to as much as possible gain ground by cooperating, you know, for going in a cooperative way forward. I think that's just the nature of strategic competition kind of writ large. I like the infinite game kind of analogy or way of thinking about it, essentially is geopolitics is a bit of an infinite game, and there's finite games within that game, but in a player game, you're better off finding areas where you can cooperate, and you can move together forward. And this is not something that's uniquely happening to us in the US, like it's absolutely happened to our partners as well. And many of them are at the same kind of a level in the fielding of these technologies as we are, potentially with less capacity, and maybe even less demand. But there's a level of urgency kind of across the board. And so I think there's great opportunity with partners to move out here, if we can understand their perspectives, which is what we spend a ton of our time doing. Well, the best conversations for me and Catherine at least are the ones where our guests feed off each other's positive energy, and it was great to host such compatible guests. So August Cole, Major General Van Antwerp, thanks for joining us on the regular warfare podcast today. Really enjoyed it. It's great to be here. Thanks again. Thanks, Ben and Catherine. August, you're welcome to visit me in Hawaii. Come get some, sir. I'm going to make it happen sooner than later. Thanks again for joining us on the regular warfare podcast. In a moment, we'll play an excerpt from August Cole's short story entitled On Their Own. But to catch you up, the story opens in Bangkok, where a small US Army special operations team stays behind after Cobra Gold, a combined US Thai military exercise. Their mission is to help build up unit 38, a new Thai command force created to counter Beijing's growing Malay influence in Thailand. With Chinese monitoring ever present, the Americans can operate openly and instead advise from the sidelines helping unit 38 integrate robotics, AI, and cyber tools. Tensions rise when intelligence reveals that a criminal syndicate, Red Sunrise, is moving drones and weapons throughout the city, likely with PLA backing. Unit 38 prepares for a close reconnaissance mission with American technical overwatch. As the raid nears, the story underscores the trust between US and Thai partners, the risks of partner led innovation, and the strategic stakes as China presses for influence, while a US multi domain task force ready to deploy to Thailand. It is at this point in the unit 38 tactical operations center, as the mission begins to unfold that today's reading picks up. Here's the story brought to life by our narrator, Patrick Kirchner. On Their Own, written by Peter W. Singer and August Cole, narrated by Patrick Kirchner. Camp Arawan, Bangkok, Thailand, 1931 local. In the unit 38 talk, Hausmann stepped back from the flurry of activity to see how his soldiers were doing alongside their Thai counterparts, both in the virtual spaces they operate in and within the command center itself. A commander had to be able to see both virtual and real world aspects of a tactical operation and assess where trouble might be lurking, and where they could press their advantage with an adversary. Right now, the Americans in unit 38 were on the defensive. Breeds initial assessment was that a very sophisticated electronic warfare system was in place at the target location. AI powered jammers, which studied and sorted the signals in an area and constantly modeled which ones fit in and which ones did not, could jam or worse spoof covert robotic surveillance in the blink of an eye by using those models to develop countermeasures. From outside the radius of whatever jammer technology was being used, Anand could still communicate with the talk. Seeing it as increasingly likely he'd have to extract his compromised reconnaissance soldiers at the target site, he'd called in a Thai Special Forces quick reaction force who were going to arrive in two Black Hawk helicopters that had been on standby. Perhaps it was the bulky crawler that gave them all away, Anand thought, as his commandos sought to steer the robot away from trouble. There would be time later for an after-action review and plenty of code to sort through. Right now, he had his close reconnaissance team in vulnerable positions around the facility and they were starting to take fire from inside the Battery Recycling Center and from drones darting in and out of the trees. The delivery drones nearby began avoiding the area, sensing the denied zone and automatically rerouting themselves. Checking in with each of his soldiers, Hausmann knew they were to a person hoping to be able to be part of the QRF. They had no expectations, but if the opportunity to potentially do so presented itself, they would not want to be passed over. That was the tension in these kinds of missions. The better you did your job of training your partners, the less you would get to do yourself. In this era of standoff robotics and persistent surveillance, it seemed like that was becoming even more true. Hausmann looked over at Lin, who rolled her eyes and raised the middle finger. One of the Thai commandos cracked a smile at the exchange and returned to his work alongside Lin. Major Anand had created a tightly wound culture within Unit 38, which Hausmann understood, given that it was early days for the unit. The Royal Thai Army already had numerous special operations units, from Thai Navy SEALs to Army Special Forces and more. The legacy they built would be shaped heavily by the ethos and attitudes of the officers and senior enlisted on these first missions. For that reason, the Thai commandos appreciated the fairly laid back and level camaraderie of their American counterparts. At a high stakes moment like this, tension would regularly be broken by unexpected humor from Lin. She had a natural ability to say the seemingly wrong thing that was actually necessary. Major, I know we're supposed to remain on base, but we can join your QRF. Just give the word, said Hausmann, making the offer even if he knew it would be rebuffed. This was still an early phase in their relationship and trust was being built. He had been discouraged by his superiors from doing so, but not forbidden. Hausmann was grateful to have the leeway to make the call. There was too much on the line strategically for the US to pass on the opportunity to tactically support a partner when they needed it most. That evolved attitude toward such risk, both in terms of safety as well as the visibility of their mission, carried potential consequences far beyond Hausmann himself. He had done the work to create what he called a bubble around his potential courses of action. He'd had his team work on those relationships locally at the Thai base, as well as with the US Embassy. He'd assigned his civil affairs sergeant Dorne the job of expanding that realm of the permissible. Thank you, but we're going to handle this ourselves. What we need is your help figuring out the technical issues with the robot ISR feed and reestablishing calm with my team, said Anand. Stand by. Hausmann considered the calmly relayed request. He wondered if Anand blamed the Americans for the technical problems with the crawlers and the vulnerabilities of the drones. They weren't supposed to be jammable, or at least not for this long. It had been over 15 minutes, which felt like 15 weeks inside the talk, probably longer for Anand. Anand pushed a medium altitude drone's video clip to Hausmann. It showed one of Unit 38's undercover commandos taking fire from the two people in the gleaming black Prado. Upon discovering the commando near the main entrance, the vehicle stopped right in front of the main gate. The ensuing arms-length gunfight continued for almost a minute before the Unit 38 commando lobbed a finger-sized sticky bomb onto the hood of the SUV. The explosion cracked the windows and stunned the two inside. The commando dashed to cover, but was quickly pinned down by fire from inside the compound. Hausmann acknowledged the video and followed up by calling Anand. We're working on the comms in ISR now, said Hausmann. More to come. Copy, said Anand. Let me know as this change. At that point, Anand had his hands full. Three of his six close surveillance soldiers were in gunfights and under drone attack, all having sought shelter inside nearby apartment buildings, storefronts, and warehouses. The others who had not, he'd recalled back to his position as they waited for the Blackhawks to arrive. From there, it would be only a few minutes to reach the four soldiers, but that task was going to be more difficult as they tried to evade their pursuers. Normally, Hausmann considered, the pursuers from the gang would back off once a threat had left the general area, but in this case, they were unrelenting and growing their ranks, and that anomalous behavior hinted at PLA involvement. He wanted to ask Anand again if his team could backstop the QRF, though the Blackhawks were already airborne. Instead, he found Dorn with an idea. The sergeant was leaning against the back wall of the talk, standing beneath the chilly flow of an air conditioning duct. He had his vizglasses on and was working on a tablet at the same time. Hey, what's the one thing Anand needs most right now? He asked Dorn. Thankful for Dorn's deadpan demeanor, he waited while the Civil Affairs Sergeant took off his vizglasses and considered the question. SA, Dorn said, using the colloquial acronym for situational awareness. He continued, yeah, he's got plenty of guns coming with the QRF, but he doesn't have eyes on his troops in contact or where the bad guys are. When's close to figuring out the fix for the crawlers, so yeah, SA it is. Hausmann asked, and it's close work too, built up area, dense? We don't have any assets we can steer his way, right? Nothing that'll get there in time. Black Hawks just landed, said Dorn. You said close, but what if we go wide angle? There's that local data broker you met last month through your NIA contact. The one with their own Microsat Constellation? The National Intelligence Agency was one of Thailand's intelligence services that reported to the Prime Minister's office. Hausmann squinted at him. Dorn, I know you've been talking to her already. Just see what she has that she can get us in the next few minutes. I've got unit crypto funds we can use. Dorn raised his eyebrows. Yeah, she's probably the most important contact I've made here, honestly. I'm on it. Good. Breeds been on with the Space Force rep at the T-Sock, and they're trying to shut down the jamming at the target site. The convoy of five gray armored land cruisers raced toward the Battery Recycling Facility, but Major Annen was still not sure where his forces had gone. From the front passenger seat, Major Annen had one hand on the grab handle while the other tapped the tablet screen affixed to the dash in front of him. A moment ago, it had lit up with a space-based hyperspectral imagery data feed of the target area. Dorn's data broker had delivered the ultimate advantage in a fight like this, an hour of real-time coverage of the city with a high-resolution feed. While the jamming prevented any transmissions from his soldiers, he could see the drone activity and gang members in pursuit. He might lose the feed once they got closer, but it would at least give him a precise location from where to start. Bravo, Charlie Delta and Echo, sending your objective, Annen said, pushing the data feed onward to the other five land cruisers. He would join Echo and the soldiers inside at the main gate near where his trapped soldier was still positioned. He'd taken cover inside the guardhouse. The better trained and armed unit 38 soldiers overwhelmed the attacking gang members. Annen resisted the urge to get in the fight but hung back, directing the counter-offensive in front of him and trusting his commandos to figure out their own way through the tactical situations. He ducked as a damaged drone dove for him before it clattered off the land cruiser's roof rack in a spray of hard foam chunks and plastic shards. IEAN, the drone's signal processor and memory core on the asphalt, he snatched it up and put it in a dump pocket on the back of his tactical vest. Two nearby drones crashed as well in the roadway, targeted by shoulder-fired counter-drone rifles two of his soldiers carried. He checked his tack pad and saw the jamming persisted. His men collapsed back on the land cruiser, bringing their lightly injured comrade with them. The soldier, dressed in the oily and torn oversized coveralls meant to disguise him as an itinerant scrap vendor, was one of the unit's youngest. He nodded at his commander, his wide eyes and trembling right hand revealing what he'd been through during the past 90 minutes. It was a true fight for his life, Anon considered. We are all proud of you, Kopu Tong, Anon offered. It was high praise from the Lekanik commander. Sir, thank you. Tong said as he scanned the sky for more drones. Anon's pride in the soldier distracted him for a moment. Do we assault the compound now? Tong asked. Not yet. A red element is coming, said Anon. You are finished for today. Tong nodded, but before he could climb into the land cruiser, he stopped. We need to pull the data from the Pajero over there. The unarmored Black SUV's cracked windshield had four holes punched in it, each corresponding to the front seats. I can do it. Good, Kopu Tong, said Anon. He wondered if the soldier needed to see the two bodies of the dead gang members one more time, as if to reinforce for himself that he had in fact done that. Hausmann had assembled his team in a corner of the Tock, the same chilly spot that Dorn had staked out underneath the air conditioning vent. I just spoke with Major Anon, said Hausmann. He secured the perimeter around the target site and the new raid force is about to add her. Suffice to say, there won't be any new shipments anytime soon. One of Unit 38's soldiers had given them flying Tiger energy drinks during the pause in the action. Hausmann watched Breed eyeing the drink warily. She never consumed caffeine or stims that he'd seen. Her always-on enthusiasm probably meant it would be wasted on her. She took a tentative sip and raised it in a toast-like gesture at the Thai soldier who had provided it, at which Lin started cracking up. That's the job, Breed, said Lin. Yeah, I heard that one before, she responded. Hausmann cleared his throat and said his jaw as he often did when he was about to speak to the entire team. Things are moving to a new phase and this is no longer just a reconnaissance support mission, said Hausmann. Breed was able to break the jamming at the site with the help of our Space Force friends, so we are back with comms and feeds. Correct, and we set up a backup relay for Bandwidth if that happens again, Breed said. Sergeant Wen, update. Look, we can't unfuck the crawlers from here for ISR. Best I can do is this. I'm having one of 38's texts jam and update on site, and we'll just repurpose them as IEDs to be deployed by the RAID Force to stop any gang reinforcements from coming. Villeney, said Lin. I like it. Right. Dorn, how much did that imaging cost us? Aside from it being priceless? A lot, Dorn said. But you know how it is, that's the kind of, uh, impulse buy that results in good customers getting better service. So I'll see what else I can develop there. Putting my intel hat on, 38's pulled some interesting location and signals data off the initial vehicle we were tracking, that Pajero that one of their guys lit up at the gate. You know that skinny kid who kept building those weird cicada bots? And, said Hausmann, that Pajero has been going by clonk-premmed central prison regularly over the past three weeks, about when we started seeing the intercepts about the arms shipment cropping up. There was something else my data broker passed me that is also an outlier. She made it as an off the record comment, but she's been seeing a lot of bid and buy activity on data sets for the prisoners at clonk-prem, like all 20,000 of them. Someone's paying really good money for some pretty basic information and is hiring local taskers to sift and sort those data sets. And there's similar activity for other prison populations. Which means what? Breed asked. If we're talking maybes, I'll add that our SIGINT points to PLA waveforms and algos for that jamming. At least that's what Space Force said. Either PLA were being sloppy or they didn't think to hide the attribution for their EW. Or the weapons delivery was important enough that they were using their front line algos, not their usual outdated stuff they give these gangs. Yeah, I'm pretty sure we'll see more PLA fingerprints on that arms shipment, said Hausman. This op blew up in a way it shouldn't have if it was just the usual suspects. After Anand's raid force gets back, I'll make sure we can sit in on the debriefs and we'll get the embassy T-sock looped in. Doran spit in the black-taped bottle. Idea. What if the arms shipment wasn't for targeting the inbound MDTF like we'd assumed? PLA officers selling for some cash on the side, Wynne said. Always a possibility, but I'm thinking about that Pajero. All those drive-bys of the prison, said Doran. A prison full of 20,000 people and there's someone with deep pockets figuring out who the worst ones are and how to persuade them. Breedside. Jailbreak. IS and Taliban did it all the time. Had a Q-course instructor tell me about that. Jail breaks, Lynn said. Plural. That's what I'd do. The group collectively cursed. Dealing with discreet Chinese or even proxy threats was bad, but using a massive prison break, potentially more than one, could put the whole country in crisis. Housman leaned into the group of his soldiers and felt the tickle of cold air on the back of his neck. The clock was ticking for Anin and his raid force and also for the thousands of army soldiers from first multi-domain task force about to deploy in Thailand. Okay, let's see what major Anin needs next, he said. Thanks again for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed the recording, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the regular warfare podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners and one last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at West Point, Princeton or any agency of the US government. Thanks again and we'll see you next time.