Setting Out to Win: Why America Needs to Get Serious About Irregular Warfare

We need to be setting out to win, not just deter as a nation. We have a superior message and I'm afraid that if we keep focused on deterrence that it lends itself to our equities being chipped away at because it's inherently defensive. We are in dire crisis. There are 59 states in this world which are in the state of conflict, interstate conflict. 59 states and then there's 90 other states that are outside that conflict supporting either the resistance or the resilience within the state. This is the largest amount of interstate conflict in human memory. 25% of all human populations live in those conflict zones. And so we're in the state of a regular warfare right now. Welcome to episode 157 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Alexander Chinchilla, and my co-host is Kyle Atwell. Today's episode examines the question, how should the United States think about resilience and resistance as tools of a regular warfare under great power competition? To discuss this we are joined by Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland and Dr. Rob Burrell. The Irregular Warfare Podcast is 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. You can find more resources at the Irregular Warfare Initiative website, www.irregularwarfare.org. Support for the Irregular Warfare Podcast comes from members of the IW community like you, and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. We hope you enjoy today's conversation. Today we're discussing a book with which both of our guests collaborated on, and it opens with a provocative statement that immediately caught my attention. And I quote, over the past 75 years, the most significant national security failing of the United States has been its unwillingness to generate the needed capacity to win a regular war. Wow, this is a strong claim. So the whole point of the book is that it argues that if the United States wants to compete effectively against authoritarian regimes, insurgents, and other malign actors, it's going to need a much more serious understanding of a regular warfare. And to think about this, not just as a military problem, but as a political and social struggle. So to tackle this topic, I am joined by an outstanding panel. First I have Lieutenant General Charles Cleveland. Welcome to the show. Good to be here. It's great to have you. So you are a native of Arizona and a 1978 graduate of West Point. Your career included extensive experience across special operations. You retired from the Army in 2015 after commanding US Army Special Operations Command. And before that, you also had a very demanding assignment. You commanded Special Operations Command, Central and CentCom. So my question to you is how long of a vacation did you need after those two assignments back to back? I would say everything after my retirement has been a good vacation of sorts. Everything has been doing what I want to do. And I think that's, I've been blessed that way, frankly. That sounds awesome. I hear that you spend a lot of time on the water sailing these days, which as a former collegiate rower, I completely understand. It's not a sailing vessel. It's a trawler, which my wife calls an RV on the water, which General Odierno at my retirement said was a houseboat. And I had to, in front of God and everybody, say, no, sir, it's a trawler. The distinction was lost on everybody except for me, but I felt it important to get that in there. Great, great man. Sad, sad that he's passed. But, but yeah, no, it's been a, it's been a good run. And, you know, in retirement, you have to have something that keeps you energized and keeps your brain engaged. And I was not a sailor or on the water prior. So this was a whole new field. The boat was 48 feet, so it's not a small boat. So I had, there were a lot of things I had to learn and I'm still learning. But I love it. So. Well, sir, you earn every, every moment of that retirement. So our next guest is Dr. Rob Burrell. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Alex? You forgot to say, I think one of the most important distinctions of Charlie Cleveland is that he was the commander of Task Force Viking, which is the largest unconventional warfare campaign the U.S. has ever done. A mobilized 50,000 Peshmerga and completely contained and overran all of Northern Iraq with, with the, I don't know, how many ODAs were there? There's a lot. He had a few ODAs with him, but. Now we had three battalions worth. I mean, yeah, incredible. Yeah. We just had an episode on exactly that with retired Lieutenant General Tovo and Mark Sorkovich. So we just had that conversation. And that was what I realized from that, that conversation was that is probably the most important unconventional warfare campaign, at least in recent history. Yeah. Now they, 310 did a phenomenal job. I mean, the, the partners in there, the KDP, who Bob Waltmars Battalion was aligned with and then the P UK, who can, they took very different organizations, very different cultures, even though they were both Kurdish organizations, I would say Ken's was a much more traditional, it was kind of partner you want, right? The KDP much more politically astute, you know, and so the, the dynamics there were, were very different between the two. But it, it was, it was a perfect Special Forces mission. There's no book on it. You just have the problem. You have a bunch of great people and you figure out how to do the very best you can. And I was blessed with, you know, Ken Tovo and Bob Waltmars, you know, two of the fine, fine officers and, you know, good mission. You couldn't ask for anything better. I should have retired then. Get out of the peak. Yeah. Get out of the top. I hope we will come back to that because we will have a segment today where we talk about resistance, but I wanted to get back to introducing Rob. So Rob is a historian by training and you are currently a senior research fellow with the Global and National Security Institute at the University of South Florida. But the achievement that we are perhaps the most proud of or Kyle and I are most proud of is that you were a 2025, a regular warfare initiative fellow. So great to have you on the show. I'm still around in the soft segment of that organization. So I must not have done too bad during the fellowship. Glad to have you back. And lastly is my co-host Kyle Atwell, who all of the listeners are familiar with. Kyle, are your kids in the soccer Olympics yet? Yeah, I gotta be honest with you. My kids just let the dogs out and they were barking ferociously. So I'm trying to focus as much as I can. But yeah, this is a classic balance kids and record a podcast moment. Yeah, I'm honestly exhausted just hearing how you do it. Okay, so really excited to just get into the topic here and talk about all of this. Rob, what motivated you to write this book? What problem were you trying to solve? Well, at the time I was teaching a regular warfare joint special operations university and there wasn't a book on how to teach it and it was very confusing time. And so I started interacting on this topic looking at what's out there on a regular warfare, getting ideas and what I decided was I need to just write the book on how to do this. And so that's what I did. One of the major things that I saw as a problem with the way that the US and the DoD looked at a regular warfare was, it's either a small compartmentalized piece of warfare or it's everything. The reality is that it's not either of those, right? You've got deterrence, competition or regular warfare and traditional warfare. They all have their own spheres and they all overlap one another. But that's what I wanted to get after because the US, the DoD in particular has really struggled with understanding how those spheres overlap. And so that's what this book went out to do. That's one of the chapters in there is to try to reframe where a regular warfare fits and how it relates with the other aspects of conflict. If I could, I think Rob, I think about our normal PME for our military education system. There is a set, for lack of a better term, maybe a canon, right? From which instruction is taken. And for all the challenges we've had in your regular warfare, as Rob just pointed out, I mean, we really don't have that same, if you will, canon. In other words, from what do you teach, right? What's good that needs to be taught? And in fact, I would argue that it's the requirement to teach that actually starts separating a week from the chat. And I think Rob was 100% right. I mean, we need to start setting down what is good, right? What are the best practices at the tactical, operational and strategic level? So I plotted Rob when he asked me to write the forward. I mean, I was honored to do so. And I think this is a good start on, if you will, an irregular warfare canon. And that forward, I mean, it was quite provocative to argue right from the get-go that the United States has failed to build this capacity need to win a regular war. So what was your thinking about that? Why is it so hard to have that comprehensive understanding of regular warfare that you said we need? Honestly, I think it's hard because our framing has always been from some point of view that begins with kind of the way we've structured ourselves for national security, starting in 1947 with the National Security Act that set forth the CIA and all these other defense department. I think that we were successful in World War II. We made this leap to say we need now as a superpower to frame our national security structure in this way. And we took that forward. And I think when we hit Vietnam, we watched the French, of course. And then when we hit Vietnam, I think we realized that, you know, we took that structure and we said we won World War II with this sort of thing, right? And now changed for, you know, being the world's superpower, we can apply it and adapt it to, you know, the problem in Vietnam. And again, this is gross generalization. But that idea that we can fold, spindle, and mutilate the structure for conventional war to apply it to what are basically population-centric conflicts, you know, in Vietnam's case, that heavy insurgency, foreign, supported, I think is the thinking that we've been doing. We brought forward through Vietnam into, you know, even Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, we had 10 years, if you go from 65, you know, before 65, it was kind of an SF CIA thing. After that, it was a conventional force thing till 75, 10 years. And then from, and we got into, you know, Afghanistan in 2001, and we spent 20 years working it, that problem. So, I mean, this is the idea, I guess, that there's this American way of war, which is conventionally oriented. But, I mean, it seems like with enough failures under your belt, I think you could argue Vietnam was an example of it not working out. And now we certainly have Afghanistan and Iraq. Why are we failing to adapt to these new realities, do you think? I think that our time horizon for thinking about national security is frankly too short. And for one reason, we have a whole apparatus that is built to field armies and navies and such. And we may need something different than armies and navies. You know, I use the example, if you think about the way counterinsurgency was conducted prior to, you know, television entering the scene and where you have the ability to see the battlefield almost instantaneously or put it in the living room of the voter, prior to that, you know, counterinsurgency was an absolutely brutal form of warfare. And you could use conventional troops to kill, you know, what needed to be killed in order to reduce the problem. I think with Vietnam, we encountered that this, all of a sudden, these pictures are coming back and they're informing voters and that political dynamic becomes increasingly important. And we can't kill our way, right? We can't do what the Brits did in Malaysia and put people, put wholesale populations into Contoneman areas. So those techniques just didn't work that well. And I think we carried that, you know, we're going to, we're just doubling down on, we're going to use what we've got. And I would have to say the Army did a great job and the services did a great job, again, bending tactical formations to work the best they could. We took tankers out of tanks and artillerymen off of artillery pieces. But those were all workaround measures. And the workarounds, while they were good, they didn't fix the problem. That increasingly, I think, we saw residing at the campaign and the strategy level. You know, it's the old Vietnam thing, yeah, we never lost a battle. That may be true, but it's irrelevant. And I think that's where this comes out. We're focused on winning battles, the shorter term thing. Irregular warfare is a long, normally a very long sort of affair. And we just aren't mentally geared that way. And we're structured to fail in these kinds of conflicts. Yeah. So I love that you said that we're not mentally geared that way. Because Rob, one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading this book is that it's not just an issue of having the wrong kind of army for these wars. It's also potentially just not understanding what kind of wars we're fighting. Is that correct? What did you see as potential misunderstandings and how we think about irregular warfare currently? Well, I mean, you can see the struggle currently in the DoD with their definition of irregular warfare not being kinetic. You know, if your English diction doesn't even make sense, you're calling something warfare, but it's not kinetic. You're going to confuse everyone, including our partners. So I think that's important to understand the difference between kinetic operations, which is war, and non-kinetic operations, which could be asymmetric, which is competition. Irregular warfare is warfare. It's mostly kinetic. And when we're talking about competition, there's irregular forms of competition. And then there's a gray zone in between. But that's really important about framing the problem. But to get after what Charlie was talking about with, and you really give him a softball there, Kyle, because he has his own study from Rand called America's Irregular Way of War. So that was a great question. But the other piece of our military, which is really designed around a five-year palm process and acquiring new stuff from the defense industrial base, is that there's no line numbers for irregular warfare. And so when you're not posturing resources towards creating new irregular warfare capabilities, then they don't exist. So then you just take the platforms you have and kind of apply them. This is something we think about a lot, right? And I think we had this discussion on this podcast is that the paradox of irregular warfare in garnering national political interest is that inherently it is an economy of force endeavor, which means it's cheap. And because it's cheap, it doesn't garner a lot of congressional funds. And so it doesn't garner a lot of interest as far as there aren't big ships being built across all the districts of the United States and an industrial complex tied to it, whatnot. Is that kind of where you're going with that, or am I seeing that differently? Well, I mean, there's two things. Yeah, that's true that we don't see the requirement. But the reality is we are in crisis right now. We are in dire crisis. There are 59 states in this world which are in the state of conflict, interstate conflict, 59 states. And then there's 90 other states that are outside that conflict supporting either the resistance or the resilience within the state. This is the largest amount of interstate conflict in human memory. 25% of all human populations live in those conflict zones. And so we are in a state of irregular warfare right now, but we keep looking at it as some future contest. It's happening around us. And the states that understand this are like China and Russia. They are in Iran. They're involved in these interstate conflicts. By the time we start looking and seeing the new international orders that has developed, it will be too late. So we need to shape the trajectory of our national security with asymmetric means right now. So these are important requirements that we in the United States need to address. And we can't do it with tanks and the new battleship. So there's no opt out option essentially. We may not be interested in irregular warfare, but a regular warfare is in front of us. That's right. I mean I'm torn here. You can't be everywhere and doing everything. So you have to pick and choose. And part of what I think this administration is trying to do is say that a lot of places that we thought mattered from our framing don't matter as much. And why not let the Russians get balled up in, pick a place in Africa and let, as we've seen, they've had some challenges. But having said that to the earlier discussion we had about how important presence is, your options are very limited when you see the world that way. You're the bystander. And I think you never know what part of the world is going to become or what country is going to become critical to you. You need to have your options open. And that's what I think we should be doing. One of the things that we talked about irregular warfare is a long-term affair. Think about how many teams we've deployed around the world. And we bring back a tremendous amount of understanding, how much we translate that back into an apparatus that can remember is questionable. And frankly, I think that's where we are giving away tremendous advantage that we used to have. You could come back and you had SFNCOs who had grown up with the chief of staff of a particular military, right? Gave you tremendous leverage in that place. So we have to build an apparatus, an organization. This is why I say we're kind of structured to fail in this regard that actually does value that kind of relationship information and can call back on it and use it and manipulate it. And I think that we are hurting right now because, you know, to Rob's point, because we're conceiting too much of the battlefield out there, the irregular warfare battlefield. Yeah. One of the questions I had for you, Charlie, was your book, which came out a few years ago, gave a call for a national level focus on irregular warfare with the establishment of an irregular warfare center. I'm not talking about the irregular warfare center, but some kind of central irregular warfare apparatus that could help oversee these types of capabilities and conflicts. And I'm curious now, a few years later, we have had the establishment of the irregular warfare center. We've had some congressional engagement. We've had some developments. Do you think our posture for managing irregular warfare globally is improving? Or do you think we're still facing challenges as we move forward? No, I still think we're facing challenges. I mean, I applaud the IWC, but I think that it's still very tactically oriented. And our problems, as I said, aren't really at the tactical level. It's much more at the campaign level than at the strategic level. And I think the other failing that the IWC isn't in a position to critique government, right? And to say, what irregular warfare initiatives are good or what needs to be taking place as a result of what's happening in the world? The original conception for what I wrote about was an organization that would be a place that would look at government's activities in this field, and no kidding, provide honest policy input and feedback. So it would be educating, it would be doing research, and would also be providing policy input and critiquing policy. I still think that's needed. And I think we need to have an organization that's actually dedicated to this problem. It's fractured among a variety of departments, and our adversaries are taking advantage of the fact that it's fractured. I tell you, if somebody wants to give $20 million to the irregular warfare initiative, we'll take it on. Yeah, I think, again, I hope the IWC, now that it's under SOCOM, I hope they start kind of broadening, if you will, the aperture of how they're looking at the problem. I do worry, though, I mean, not to play devil's advocate here, but IW still seems just very soft-coded. And what you just said, Charlie, is that this is not a tactical problem. This is at the campaign and strategic level. Once we start talking about that, we're adding in the interagency. We're interested in the political objectives that we're trying to accomplish with military and non-military means. So how do you actually do that? And I'm just not sure that current efforts are actually getting us there. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I don't think they are getting us there. I think you can do things inside of SOCOM to make the bandaid bigger, right? But to your point, an inside SOCOM effort isn't going to solve the interagency problem, right? You've got the CIA, others who've got a big piece of this activity, and they've got equities there. So it's going to have to be something that actually bridges all that in my view, which makes it nigh on impossible to actually see a solution. But in a perfect world, like I think I recommended in the book, I would actually take a look at creating something that had this as its purpose, an interagency led by a civilian with a military deputy, with forces seconded to it, interagency staff, and it had to be with presidential backing. It's a lot like OSS 2.0, which is what everybody, every SF guy kind of comes down on the side of, you know, we really do need something like this. At least that's every SF guy of my ilk, right? I think the younger generation is much more support to conventional forces oriented, and that, you know, maybe that's what the leadership needs it to be. I'm not to editorialize here, critique their activities, but I worry that we chase relevance to maintain size when you really need to focus on being better, not bigger, right? And I'm not saying that leadership is doing that, but the little snippets that I get, that is potentially a danger. And so that's probably more than I should say about the current trend. Again, I do think that the focus needs to be on filling the gap, you know, one last thing. I think part of the problem is that philosophically, we are so bent on deterrence, and I'm not sure that we shouldn't be actually focused on winning. And that includes in the political warfare fight that we're engaged in now. We have a much superior message. We don't use it very well. We need to weaponize who we are better. That's part of your regular warfare. That's part of the regular warfare fight. And I think we ought to be looking at the long term for an American irregular warfare effort to actually defeat our adversaries. Yeah, deterrence is a part of that, right? Deterrence keeps us from, and we don't, you know, if we have to beat them on a battlefield, then we probably that's the lesser way that we want to beat them. We got to be ready to do that. But where we want to beat them is using your regular warfare means ourselves and taking it to our adversaries. Like get out in front. Don't just be resilient, but create resistance problems for them elsewhere in their own place. Exactly. Now, Rob wrote the book, so I don't know, you may have a different view. Yeah. So, Rob, I'm curious to just get your reaction to that really quickly. Your reaction to, are we set up to do this properly? You know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. We've done this before. We brought down communism around the world. We did it, like your last question to Charlie, which was, you know, we need a whole government right effort. 100% we do. Competition and irregular warfare are constant. They're going to remain constant our whole lifetime. There's not going to be huge wins. It's just going to be constant struggle in this space. But we see in our own recent memory, our own recent history, that we brought down the Soviet Union and it was a death by a thousand cuts. As an historian, I'd hate to cover that topic and try to figure out definitively what brought them down because no one knows. The wall comes down and Berlin and suddenly, you know, there's East Germans running over, you know, minefields and nobody can explain it. Well, because it was a thousand cuts and it was having the whole of government focused on that for decades. And so now we live in this multipolar world where if you look at the arch, Upsville University has a great chart on this, which shows steady state on state conflict, which is a really small number, like no more than six per year. And then it shows all the interest state conflict from 1945, just it's exploding. And internationalized interest state conflict, which is other 90 nations I mentioned, involved in somebody else's interest state conflict is also exploding. And U.S. capabilities are going nowhere. Right. And so this is where we have to look at this as a crisis and address it. And you know, one of the things that, you know, the general gave me some feedback on my initial draft because on my model on trying to assess what we do in interest state conflict, my first proposition was you either support the resilience of the state, right? Or you support resistance and some change within that state, or you don't do either. And he came back and he said, no, you're missing something. You have to prepare the environment. We have to be in preparation stage in every state because you can't just jump in at the last minute. And I changed the entire book based upon that those two sentences wrote back to me. I was like, oh my God, you're exactly right. We can't just jump in on either side. We have to have planners in state department in the DOD. When we're doing contingency plans, they should be focused on what's the resilience of the state? What are the resistance? What are the elements? How potent are either one? No need to pick a side, but when the time comes, hey, I need you to support this. They can either, hey, we're going to support the PRC because we want China to be stable, or hey, we're going to go support the Uyghur, the Tibetans, Taiwan, and Mongolia all simultaneously, right? Because you've already done the preparation environment, you know the groups, you have the human contacts, you know the levers to pull to bring down the PRC. So we have to do that in every state. Myanmar is a quagmire right now, and I keep wondering like, where is our contingency plan for Myanmar? You know, I don't work at Pekong anymore, but I would speculate that we don't really have one if we doesn't stop. It's not that great. You can't just jump in to these conflicts. We need to prepare the environment, and we need to be assessing both sides. What's the resistance in the country, and how resilient is the state? We should be assessing that everywhere. Alex, that's the presence mission that we talked about before we got on the podcast. That's all a part of it. That's why whatever structure would be taking this on, not only would it be interagency, and it would also include what look like some pretty mundane missions that Special Forces undertakes around the world. Because it's these day in, day out sort of presence missions that you are developing the relationships, gathering the, not only the, you don't want to say intel per se, but you are gathering intel, but you're gathering up relationship credibility to some degree. And I think that's important in the irregular warfare, but it's not valued in maneuver warfare. Right? So the fact that we haven't really taken on irregular warfare head on and for the purpose of winning kind of leaves you with kind of the maneuver warfare framework, which says, well, we don't really don't need you there for just presence. Right? So it's this paradox where, as Rob pointed out, the wars that you're actually seeing all the time are these small wars, these interstate conflict, to know enough about that kind of conflict to do anything meaningful about it requires this deep knowledge of really complicated domestic political processes that you could only get by actually being there. But you're also stretched between all these different resources. It's not only that. You have to have a headquarters that remembers it, right? Because it's the it's the accumulation of activities of 20 or 30 years, perhaps, or the last 10 years or the last five years of activities and engagements that you are shaping all of this. And in irregular warfare, local is everything. Right? It's go early, go local, go small and go long. And, you know, this, this local understanding, local knowledge, it's got to be warehoused and used. And you have to have an organization that can turn the knowledge into feasible actions on the ground. Gentlemen, we got so excited talking about your perspective on the current state of irregular warfare, which is super important. And, and honestly, Charlie, I've been hoping to talk to you about this for years because you wrote this important book. And there has been a lot of movement on the irregular warfare front. I mean, even the the national defense strategy had an annex on irregular warfare a few years ago, right? Like that's a pretty big step toward acknowledging this might be an important aspect of national security. And so hearing that, that you don't think we've quite bridged that gap to executing perfectly is a sobering. I think one thing we need to do before we go on is actually just touch on some key definitions from the book, Rob. So you talk about the concepts of resistance and resilience and you introduce a resistance and resilience model. You use a boxing analogy to do this just very briefly. Could you provide a quick overview of what resistance and resilience are and what is this boxing model to help the audience understand what we're talking about? Well, thank you for asking me about the boxing model because I get all these other questions, but it's never about that one. And as a former boxer, I really liked the boxing analogy. It was great. So thanks. So, you know, in typically in the boxing room, there's two, there's two opponents, right, that are going after each other. But in reality, as an irregular warfare, you know, kind of interstate conflict analysis, there are two rival parties sparring off in the ring. One is resilience, right, which is the established power of power trying to absorb shocks, maintain legitimacy and endure. And his opponent is resistance. And the challenger is aiming to disrupt and change the status quo, right. But there's also external support. Your external support is in the corners, right. So these are basically the arm train and equip components of this conflict, right. The fact that they're in the ring in the corners is making this conflict internationalized, right, is bringing out geopolitical competition, whether it's Sudan or whatever case study you pull on. Libya, which I just published on this week, right. You have players outside that country who are influencing the contest. But the key battlefield that is really being affected here as the spectators look on is the population. The population is either supporting one side with their cheering or they're supporting another side or they're neutral in the middle. But those opinions will shape the legitimacy of either resiliency or resistance, right, the government or resistance to it. And so this boxing model emphasizes interstate conflict. It's a dynamic contest between multiple actors, both inside the ring and outside the ring. I mean, the interesting thing I took from the model that you presented is essentially every state has some degree of resistance, because it's not always explicit violent resistance. Sometimes it's just an opposition party in a very peaceful democracy. And there's kind of a spectrum of resistance from, you know, just opposition to the current government, peaceful protest all the way to open insurgency. And so I thought that was interesting. And every state has essentially a degree of resilience, which is everybody's trying to reinforce the current status quo power. And so it's a good framework for explaining not just governments that we would conventionally think are in a civil war, but really the state of every political system around the world that's trying to defend itself. And then then those who are trying to take over power. Yeah. I mean, I call it the yin and the yang, right? So every society has has this kind of polarity between, you know, governance and resistance to it. And I was at the NATO soft headquarters and I was explaining this to some of our allies and partners. And I kept, I got this like weird, weird look from some of our partners like, oh, well, that doesn't happen here. And I was like, France just had a million people protest in Paris yesterday. Right. You know, we don't see resistance is in nonviolent forms. We wait for it to spike in some type of violent outburst. But it's happening all around us. You know, we were living it today, you know, in the United States, you're seeing the, you know, some, some parts of our society trying to keep some institutions resilient and other ones trying to change them. So you have this, this polarity between that it's happening all the time all around us. Yeah. I just do I just do scroll on my Facebook feed and I see resistance and resistance every, every other political advertisement I get. There you go. Just go on, go on X scroll down. Yeah. Okay. But one thing I did actually have to ask you about that though, Rob, particularly about resilience, because that's the one that I think it's a little bit trickier sometimes to understand because it's almost like it's like the absence of conflict. How is that different from just like straight up state capacity? Well, resilience is much more than capacity. You know, it's the capability of the system to handle pressure, you know, effectively adjust and then maintain legitimacy under stress. So resilience encompasses effective government, social unity and public confidence. But a state might have strong capacity, but it could still be weak if it lacks legitimacy, it can't adapt to stress or it fails to address the population's needs. So resilience really captures the qualitative, political and social aspects of endurance, right, not just the physical strength that you might see and measure. And so here I want to talk a bit about the other piece of this, which is the resistance continuum. Rob, can you tell us a little bit more about this and why it's really important to think about these different forms of resistance and distinguish between them? Resistance is a whole spectrum. I define five categories there. It's not just insurgency. It's not just civil disobedience. It's this whole spectrum of different type of resistance activities. One could be peaceful protests, right? So you might look at Martin Luther King's protests as a good example of that. One could be illegal protest, right? So if you look at Harriet Tubman in the Civil War, she was running the Underground Railroad. Well, that's illegal. Violates congressional law. So she's doing an illegal form of protest. Then you could have a rebellion and rebellion is usually a small flash up, right? And the real difference of that, it's violence against humans, right? That's when you get into rebellion. But the difference between rebellion as insurgency is when civil law enforcement or local enforcement measures can contain rebellion. But in insurgency, the state has to use its own military to defend itself. That's when you you've broken through rebellion into insurgency. And then you have belligerency, which is a legal international legal term, but that's basically civil war, right? So then you have, you know, in US terms, that's our civil war, where the Confederacy looks like another state, right? They have uniforms, they do taxes, they do all those things. So that's a spectrum. It doesn't mean that a resistance goes through stages. It just means that each type of resistance has a different nature. And that's very important to understand that when you're looking at either supporting a state against resistance, that you understand how to kind of undermine that resistance by understanding its nature. But also if you're going to support resistance, what type of measures you would do to support that resistance, which doesn't undermine its nature, right? So if you have a Gandhi in India, sending sending him rifles is probably not the best way to support the type of actions he's trying to do. So it's just, you know, understanding resistance is there. And I use a lot of different data centric ways to identify resistance in different states. If you use the armed conflict, conflict, location, and vent data project, you can download all of the different acts that happen within a state. And then you can look for what is the most prevalent, right? And data can be elusive, right? So if you look at if you're looking for Muslim brotherhood as a as a type of nonviolent resistance, there's not a lot of news out there, but it's very prevalent, right? So you have to look, you know, academic sources as well. But you can't find data to identify prevalent resistance movements and kind of categorize them by their nature. Rob, let me ask you, I mean, how well do you think the organizations, the military organizations that are built or even the governmental organizations that are supposed to fashion these, you know, what you're describing really as a campaign? How well are we doing into taking this stuff into account? And if we're not doing well, why do you think that's the case? I think if you look at what happened in Ukraine and what we got to keep everything open source, but what happened in Ukraine after 2014, kind of the recent activities in Taiwan, I think there's segments of the DOD that are taking this into account, that they're understanding, you know, how to create resiliency of a state, how to do, you know, nationalized resistance or get ready for a transition to resistance. So it is being considered in some hot spots, but not to the extent that I'm really advocating in the book, which is we should be analyzing this around the world. It should be a consistent effort so that we're ready to act. I think in those two cases, we did act in Ukraine. I think we've referred to in Taiwan. I mean, that's a good point, though. A point I'm taking away from this is that resistance and resilience are just states of politics that every country or every nation has around the world to varying degrees and to continuum. What we're really asking, I think, is when we as the United States are looking at civil conflicts and other great powers are as an external actor, when can we get involved, when should we get involved, what is a viable partner to get involved with? I think that's really the core of what we're asking from the US perspective. And Charlie, you've observed multiple partners the US has chosen to go in with. I'm sure some were great partners and some were terrible ones. What are the lessons you've taken away from of when you're looking at various fractions within a state we're going to intervene? You know, who do we work with and why? That's a great question. I think that probably the I've found the best partners have been the ones that are no kidding, deep believers. This is, you know, I think about like the Georgian case, you know, when the Republic of Georgia was actually trying to hold on to its sovereignty, right? And the post-Soviet Union days, they were great partners, probably not unlike the Ukrainians, right? I mean, but the Georgians were full on. They'd listened to everything that you had to say. They were ready to sacrifice on behalf of their country. Then the partners that weren't so good, you were the civil, you know, and I think of my time with on the counter drug side down in Central America, South America, the police that we were working with weren't paid very well. They didn't have much allegiance to the national government. They weren't very well educated. You know, they were relatively poor partners. Now, in both cases, you have to make them effective. And that's a Green Berets job. You have that to work with. How do you make it effective? But one, you have to show perhaps tough love to the other, not so much, right? One, you can entice with the extra equipment and stuff. Others, you don't have to entice them that way. They're they're ready to take whatever you give them and make best use of it. So I guess it's there are a lot of factors that have come out of the society itself that determine, you know, how good a partner they've been, at least from my experience. Yeah. And there's it sounds like there's also, I mean, a whole segment of the resistance continuum that you can't or don't want to support with military power. You want to do something else, right? This is something that we're we're still struggling with, right? So I particularly in authoritarian regimes, right? There's limits in authoritarian regimes and what you can support nonviolent protest. In the current administration, you know, what we're doing in Iran, I think, was brought on by the protests that occurred there in December and January. And, you know, the numbers are estimated over 30,000 protesters killed, right? So how do you support those protesters with lethal support? I think right now they're just dug in probably very wisely or just dug in their homes and trying to stay out of the way. So when you're supporting nonviolent resistance, whether it's just to make a change in the government or to overthrow the government or to just coerce the government, there are ways to do it, but you have to be very, you have to understand the environment very well and then, you know, look for slow change. It's not going to be a radical, you know, the civil rights movement in America was not a one year event, right? It was it was a 60 year event, right? From reconstruction onward, you know, it was a long turn. So as in all irregular warfare, we have to have patience and a strategy and be able to flex because things are going to change on the ground very rapidly and, you know, also be cautious about introducing violent means into something which is inherently nonviolent, right? If you send the resistance a surface to air missile, you should expect they're going to use it, right? Is that where you wanted the conflict to go? Right? So we have to be careful about what type of support we do. But the US has huge influence around the world. And so we can we can use those. You've seen, you know, we talk about law, lawfare in terms of the Chinese use using it. The number one user of lawfare is us. We do a great job of writing the laws and ensuring that people, different countries abide by them. So there are ways that we can influence conflicts to fit our national interest. Yeah. So that takes me directly to the last thing I want to cover, which is how irregular warfare intersects with a deterrence in competition. So what are your thoughts on this? Is it actually possible to use irregular warfare to deter adversaries? Well, the number one example of this is the resistance operating concept. So, you know, in a nationalized resistance strategy where you're lapped and you've got a public site that says, hey, this is how we're going to resist you when you invade. The whole point of making that website is to say, you know, if you come in, this is going to be brutal, it's going to be costly, and you're not going to you're not going to get a concrete win. So just to clarify, there are states, there are states on the Russian periphery that have adopted a public resistance operating concept and then explicitly state that to signal that they are ready to resist should Russia invade. Yeah. I mean, traditional deterrence is denial. Meaning you can't win because I got too much stuff or punishment. Like it's going to be so painful. Like if you go into Afghanistan, no one's ever won there. You won't win there and it's going to be very painful. Or, you know, it's just a deterrence to a perceived, protracted conflict of, you know, traditional in the DoD lexicon, traditional resistance, right? Resisting occupation. And so just like regular deterrence, you don't know if it worked. You know if it worked if it didn't happen, right? You don't know if deterrence is working only if it's not happening, right? So we're doing this in Taiwan right now. The Baltic states have been doing this well. Finland does it. Sweden does it. There's a lot of smaller countries with large adversarial neighbors who have adopted this, how well it works. It didn't work in the Ukraine case. Maybe they adopted it too late. But there is a deterrence strategy through that type of resistance. Yes. My only caveat to that is, you know, when the larger country doesn't feel compelled to abide by, if you will, what we see is the norms of combat in particular with regards to civilians. And I think the Russians have shown that increasingly, you know, they've got general disregard for civilian casualties. I worry that you have to be ready to resist, but you have to be ready to take and suffer a whole bunch of casualties as a result of it, because I think these, both the Chinese and the Russians, it'll be brutal, would be my guess. So if I understand, tell me if I'm misunderstanding, but the resistance hinges on the idea that civilians who aren't dressed as soldiers can cause trouble for an invading force. And then the invading force won't just wipe out every civilian they see as a response. So if an invading force is willing to just essentially subjugate the civilian population to mass reprisals without actually identifying you did the attacks, that makes it a less credible deterrent? I don't know. I mean, I think that it's what you have, right? I suspect it's a demonstration that, in fact, you know, we're not going to roll over. But I think even a lot of those are dependent on eventually some assistance from outside. Again, I don't know, Rob, if that comports with what you're. Well, if you look at World War Two and the OSS in France and in China, MacArthur in the Philippines, the OSS in Burma, these were kind of we were creating chaos with UW, making things difficult for the Japanese and the Germans. But the ultimate outcome was that US conventional forces were going to arrive and save the day. And this is what really concerns me about supporting a resistance strategy on Taiwan. Because I hear this a lot and it sounds like a great idea. But if the Seventh Fleet is not coming at the end, it's going to be extremely painful if Taiwan is occupied. And so there's a there's a moral component to unconventional warfare, right? Whether whether you're supporting the secret war in Laos or the secret war in Tibet, whatever we're doing to support a resistance and we all have our national strategies and interests that might not generally align with them being successful in the end, but there is a moral component that the folks who support that have to live with the rest of their life. And so is the Seventh Fleet coming to Taiwan? That's a big question that I think about every time I hear about national resistance strategy there. If you think more broadly, as Rob's done in the book, you know, you know, one of the other strategies is that you take a long view of what resistance looks like, right? And, you know, you start taking pages out of solidarity and some of these other ways to actually make life painful for an occupier. You know, because an occupier, they can't do anything but use force for the most part. So time is on the side of the resistance. And you just have to be careful. You don't kill off the resistance too early, you know, because you are conducting activities that feel good and perhaps but prompt a harsh response and, you know, where in some cases, perhaps a longer term, longer view might be better. That's 100 percent true. Most successful resistance movements are the ones that are very patient. You know, those who rise up very quick in occupation, they learn some really painful lessons. And as as Charlie was saying, the Russians are extremely good at suppression. So there's some tough lessons there. So gentlemen, this has been a great conversation, but we are almost at time. And we always finish with implications for the conversation for policy makers, practitioners and scholars. So I wanted to give you a chance to tell us what you want listeners to take away from your book and what would you want them to do differently as a result of this conversation? I covered one of those was we need to make three big shifts. One of those is to understand the crisis we're in today. We need to understand how important this is. You know, this isn't something in the planning horizon. It's happening right now. What does book advocates for is being able to understand interstate conflict in terms of resiliency and resistance. And if we do that in all of our partners and in our adversaries and in other potential states, we'll have a better way to intervene if and when we need to. I think we need to reframe persistent engagement activities and contingency plans in terms of assessing and influencing resilience of the government, as well as societal resistance to the same. I mean, this is the persistent engagement and contingency planning is where this this type of planning really would be helpful. And then treat a regular warfare and competition as continuous forms of conflict. Unlike conventional war, which is episodic and it just reaches its head above the fray every once in a while. This is this is continuous. It's all the time. There's not going to be a big victory day at LAP. It's mostly going to be just continual. And we need to accept that plan for it and participate. I mean, the world's being decided around us. Yeah, I think those are all good. I mean, I I think we need to be setting out to win, not just deter as a nation. We have a superior message and I'm afraid that if we keep focused on deterrence, that it lends itself to our equities being chipped away at because it's inherently defensive. I think that there are some bright spots out there. You know, we stood up the National Center for Narrative Intelligence. There's a recognition, a lot of writing on cognitive warfare. Those are, I think, signs that the institution that is responsible for national security understands that we've got some holes in our swing, if you will. And so they're responding to that challenge. And I think that's a good thing. I think if I had to ask somebody to do something is I think, you know, take a look at what President Kennedy did in response to what he saw as, you know, this new kind of enemy. And I think that was really wise. And that was probably the last time we had presidential understanding of the problem and the solution. Again, we we have a lot of understanding and we're getting increasingly better at understanding the problem. I don't think that we are adapting quickly enough to build the structures that will deal with the problem because we're hide bound with these legacy organizations. But Kennedy, I think, saw it and between not only the Green Berets and making those organizations, you know, making more of them and building special military, you know, SAFs and creation of the USIA Peace Corps. Those were the kinds of structures that I think were responding to this reality that is present again in my view today. And to Rob's point, you need if you're going to fight this thing 24-7, 365. And the last thing is I think part of the problem is and no podcast with me in it probably would be complete if I don't mention that part of the challenge is this is not a land domain problem. This is a human domain problem and resistance and rebellion insurgency fits very incompletely in land domain warfare because we create domains not for the purpose of identifying a place or a thing. We create domains so that we can put money against building capability to dominate in that domain because if we don't, our military campaign is at risk. And I would contend that the reason we struggled in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and had unsatisfying conclusions to no small degree is we were very much focused on taking land domain solutions and trying to make them work in what really has emerged as a new domain, just like the air emerged as a domain of warfare, that if you didn't do something about it, your campaigns were at risk. I would contend that human terrain has emerged as its own domain and you need to have capability, not in just the military, but across the government that allows you to understand and over time, act to and manipulate so that your national security campaigns have a better chance of being successful. Thank you both so much for joining us on the regular warfare podcast. It's been great to have you. Thank you so much for inviting us. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the regular warfare podcast. If you like the show, please spread the word and consider sharing this episode with others. You can subscribe to the regular warfare podcast, so you do not miss an episode. You can also engage with us on X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram 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. 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