The Strategic Logic of Large Militant Alliance Networks

Hi, I'm Kyle Atwell, the co-founder and current chair of the board at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. And I'm Tom Johansmeyer, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Strategic Competition. IWI has focused on bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Over the past six years, the community has driven a conversation on how states and non-state actors engage in conflict and competition short of direct major war. To continue this mission of bridging the gap, last year, IWI launched a new peer-reviewed academic journal, the Journal of Strategic Competition. We are proud to announce the release of Volume 2, Issue 1. In this volume, contributors with a mix of academic, practitioner, and commercial experiences write on topics from the role of alliances in a changing world order to the relationship between cyber threats and economic interests. To read these articles and submit your own research, visit www.strategiccompetition.org. Read, submit, and cite the Journal of Strategic Competition. Again, that's www.strategiccompetition.org. Thank you for your interest and for continuing to be part of the IWI community. Now on to today's episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Consistent with the theory of comparative advantage, we see that Al-Qaeda actually is forming alliances post-2001 with groups that are relatively stronger than it, that are conducting more attacks than Al-Qaeda itself is conducting. This is consistent with allying with operationally capable partners that give AQ a reach into these local conflicts in exchange for conferring its ideological clout. We were seeing in our intelligence collection and other things that there were definite tensions between the al-Qaeda core leadership, Zawahiri in particular, and Zawahiri between the two of them over the ideological and the tactical approaches those organizations I think that is a real vulnerability for us and something we ought to really be paying attention to in the future. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Elisa Laufer. Today's episode examines why militant organizations pursue alliances. Our discussion today is anchored in Professor Chris Blair's recent article, co-authored with Philip Potter, titled The Strategic Logic of Large Militant Alliance Networks. Our guests begin by describing the comparative advantage model for understanding militant alliance networks, whereby militant groups pursue alliances to fill organizational gaps. They then discuss how this concept applies to two cases, the Islamic State and the Al-Qaeda. Finally, our guests conclude the discussion of how policymakers can apply these insights to detect organizational weaknesses in militant groups. Professor Chris Blair is an assistant professor at Princeton University in the Department of Politics. Professor Blair's research mainly engages with questions of how counterinsurgency policies affect civilian and rebel behavior and how prospective host countries respond to forcibly displaced people. He has published prolifically in top academic journals, as well as publications such as Foreign Affairs and The Washington Post. General Joseph Fotel is the current distinguished chair of West Point's Combating Terrorism Center. He's a retired Army four-star officer who, in his last active duty assignment, served as the commanding general of U.S. Central Command. During his 39 years in the military, he commanded special operations and conventional military forces at every level. You're listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals Here's our conversation with Professor Blair and General Retired Motel Joe, Chris thank you so much for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast Thanks It's great to be back with you. Thanks, Elisa. It's a pleasure to be here. So, Chris, to start us off, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the status quo arguments in your academic field on the role of large militant alliance networks that previewed this article. And explain as you're doing that your initial motivation for researching the topic. Absolutely. So in general, there were two main motivations for this article. One was theoretical, building on previous literature, and the other one was empirical. So first, my co-author and I noticed a theoretical gap where existing scholarship had tended to treat the motivation for militant alliances as falling into one of two camps. The first camp emphasized the instrumental motivations, short-term operational needs like acquiring new capabilities, tactics, or resources that might drive a militant organization to ally with another violent non-state actor. Another camp in the literature emphasized symbolic motivations underpinning cooperation between these groups, shared ideology, fostering trust and commitment between leadership of different groups. But there wasn't really a unifying framework that developed the interdependence between these strategic, instrumental and symbolic motivations for militant alliances. And we really wanted to chart out how operational and ideological considerations might interact to drive militant cooperation. The empirical puzzle that motivated us was the fact that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State were heavily invested in building large alliance networks. But many of the relationships that emanated from these alliance networks actually involved little or no material exchange from either al-Qaeda or the Islamic State to the partner organization. And almost all of the existing work in political science, economics and sociology really had focused on material cooperation rather than the extensive rhetorical cooperation that we were seeing at the height of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the mid-2010s. 10s, right? So in 2016, for instance, there were huge numbers of pledges of allegiance, public endorsements that didn't necessarily fit the conventional model of alliances as pipelines for weapons, money, and fighters. And our main goal was to fill these gaps and outline this framework that would bridge all of that. So the main intuition for the article comes really from David Ricardo's classic gains from trade model, where countries can specialize in producing different products and then capitalize on the gains from trade by trading the products that they specialize in. And in our framework, the same logic applies to militant organization. Militant organizations like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State might have ample ideological credibility, or they might have ample operational surplus. And they can specialize in those goods, so to speak, and trade through alliances in order to address the relative deficits that they might have. So in our framework, we examine the Islamic State, which was an operationally capable group that was seeking ideological validation versus al-Qaeda, which post-2001 was seeking operational reach, but had ample ideological clout and credibility. That's great background and introduction to the theory itself. You talk in the article about how this comparative advantage framework for understanding the alliances works against some of the intuition that predated your article on how alliances reflect strength, which was the status quo understanding of what militant alliance networks is. And actually, you think that given this comparative advantage logic, sometimes alliances reflect weaknesses or gaps in these organizations. Can you talk a little bit more about that theory of interdependence and what that means for weakness versus strength? Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, I think the key insight is that if we can read alliance patterns correctly, we can see what the organizations are worried about and potentially exploit those vulnerabilities as counterterrorism, counterinsurgency practitioners. Really, in the article, we focus on militant groups that have expansive transnational aspirations. These are the groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that have both an ideology that can inspire support from a broad swath of potential adherence and operational capacity to deliver on that vision. And the challenge for these major, major groups with expansive transnational aspirations is to put those two things together, when often they pull in opposite directions. So to give you an example, the Islamic State in Iraq, which was the predecessor organization of ISIS proper, had this ideology that demanded an Islamic state governed by strict Salafi jihadist principles. But after being decimated by U.S. counterterrorism operations in Iraq between 2006 and 2010 or so, they needed to rebuild quickly. And their solution was to recruit officers from the former Ba'athist military and intelligence apparatus in Iraq. So officers from Saddam Hussein's military and intelligence services. And these were secular nationalists who had a long career serving the Ba'athist regime. They had tactical expertise in military operations, but they didn't necessarily profile that ISIS wanted to espouse. And our argument basically suggests that to compensate for that sort of one-sidedness in ISIS's repertoire, where they were more operationally capable than ideologically credible. The group sought a network of affiliates and allies in all parts of the world that could confer credibility on the ideological mission to build a global caliphate. Joe, before we go deeper into the case studies that Chris covers in his article, I want to get your impressions of the topic based on your experience as commander at U.S. Central Command, as well as Special Operations Command and JSOC. In your time leading these organizations, what were your general impressions on why militant groups pursued alliance networks? And I'm curious whether you noticed militant groups forming alliances specifically because they were weak in either operational capability or ideological credibility. Yeah, sure. Thanks. I'm happy to address that. I want to just start off by complimenting Chris and his co-author Philip Potter on this really, really great article. You know, I think it's really critical to have these kinds of articles get published because they really add to the intellectual discourse around counterterrorism. And I'm very, very pleased to join you today to have a discussion about this. So Chris, congratulations on this really great work. To the question, I mean, I think from my observation, terrorist groups need a couple of things. They got to have an inspiring ideology out there that draws people to them, that draws attention to their cause. And then they have to have some capabilities in order to kind of back that up to demonstrate that there's more than just there's actions behind their words in terms of what they do. And so, you know, those two things are critical components for terrorist organizations, I think, to be successful. So, yes, I agree with the premise of the article that organizations, in particular the two we're talking about here, Al-Qaeda and ISIS, for various reasons, reach out and try to establish broader networks that help offset some of, well, at least what their perceived weaknesses are and, I think, really draw more attention to their causes. And I think as the article kind of makes a really compelling case for each of these two major organizations had different reasons why they were doing that. And, you know, in retrospect, I think that's very, very clear to us. I think in the moment we may, you know, to answer the second part of your question, Alisa, is that we may not necessarily see it the way that, you know, it's kind of portrayed right now. I think as practitioners, we looked at Al-Qaeda largely on the success of their attacks of 9-11, looking to expand their brand, to expand much more broadly. And at the time, we may not have necessarily looked at it through the lens of them expanding their capacity as much as we were really looking about this everybody kind of jumping on the bandwagon. I think the same thing applies a little bit with the Islamic State. Clearly a different type of organization here you know extraordinarily violent and not only extraordinarily violent but extraordinarily prolific in publicizing that violence in a way that we had not necessarily seen before So again you see groups jumping onto that or others jumping onto that brand, so to speak, because they recognize the shock value that that has for terrorist organizations. So I guess the point I'm trying to make to you is I think in retrospect, In fact, yeah, I think we can see this very, very clearly. In reality, I don't know that it is necessarily as clear to the practitioner on the ground as to why organizations are jumping on with this. When you're engaged in a campaign, you're not necessarily seeing where they're trying to expand to overcome for some type of weakness. That may be a byproduct of trying to conduct counterterrorism operations at scale, which is exactly what we're doing in places like Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or Yemen or wherever we happen to be. So I think there are some blind spots to us here. But yeah, certainly in retrospect, it becomes much, much clearer as to what these organizations were trying to do. Yeah, I think that's a really great and frank point about how in the reality of, you know, fighting these counterterrorism battles, it can be very hard to see the forest for the trees. And, you know, these academic insights from articles like Chris are so helpful, but sometimes can't even be built until we have several, if not more, years of data to actually pick up on those patterns and draw them out clearly. Joe, you did say that even if the understanding of alliances wasn't exactly matched to what Chris and his co-author have picked up on in this article, you were attuned to the fact that alliances meant something and that they were something to pay attention to. Do you think that there was ever cause to change an approach to targeting or even thinking higher level than targeting coordination across global combatant commands to countering these organizations when a group did pursue an alliance or based on the particular kind of alliance you saw it pursuing? Yeah, I absolutely do. I mean, I'll stick with Al Qaeda for a moment. Certainly, you know, a lot of our focus really at the beginning of the war on terror and then really continued throughout that certainly was on what we referred to as core al-Qaeda, that form of al-Qaeda that existed in eastern Afghanistan and in Pakistan that really, you know, was the bin Laden, the Zoukawi flavor of al-Qaeda that really represented the senior leadership. Of course, that was the object of a lot of our initial focus as we went into the region and started conducting large-scale counterterrorism operations. And they bore the brunt of a lot of our efforts. And I think what you began to see, at least what I began to see, was that some of the locus of their support, of their operations, really began to move to other areas. So think about an organization like Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That group of Al-Qaeda linked to Al-Qaeda core, but actually located in Yemen, again, now beginning to take on responsibilities for external plotting, for advanced technology, for advanced terrorism techniques. And in addition to waging a very aggressive campaign in Yemen that, unlike what we necessarily saw in Afghanistan, was actually focused on trying to control terrain. I think people lose sight of the fact, you know, we think of ISIS this way, but in Yemen, Al Qaeda and Rabin Peninsula, AQAP, actually controlled a swath of central Yemen for a long period of time, which was a little bit of a, you know, at the time, of course, we didn't appreciate it, was a precursor to what ISIS was going to do. But that became the focus of our effort. We were always concerned about the core al-Qaeda. And, of course, it was not just the U.S. military, but it was the intelligence community that was focused on that. And they went to ground and they went to more challenging areas for us to target them. And we had to rely on some of our unique authorities and capabilities to go after them. But certainly in Yemen, that took on a major focus for us in terms of where we were going to be looking. So I think that's a great example of how that kind of migrated. And then I think if you just think about the broader region there, I mean, the Arabian Peninsula, you know, where Yemen is, and then you jump across the Bab al-Mandeb, you're into Somalia. And, of course, there we have al-Shabaab, which becomes kind of a, you know, again, a local franchise of al-Qaeda there. And we actually began to see some levels of collaboration, you know, cooperation between those two organizations that really, I think, drew our efforts to it. So, yeah, I definitely think we saw that against al-Qaeda. I think a fair argument could be made on the same thing with ISIS. When you look at ISIS, certainly in Syria and Iraq, but then you also look at ISIS in the Khorasan, again, back to Afghanistan. The Khorasan referring to that portion of Central South Asia where we found these organizations, that has become a bit of a focus for us as well. And again, we've seen that organization pick up some of the responsibilities for external plotting. So we had to pay more and more attention to that as well. So I definitely think there's several examples of that out there. I'll just jump in briefly to say, you know, it's really refreshing to hear these insights. And I think that this is one reason why it's particularly important to understand the content of alliances. If you understand that tactical or operational guidance is flowing from a group like ISIS or Al-Qaeda to a local partner, you can start to help prepare partner forces in the country affected by the operations of the local partner for new tactics that might be emerging, distributed by the hub organization, or targeting information operations to undercut whatever ideological appeals might be made linked back to the hub organization. I think the U.S. has also done a pretty excellent job at undercutting some of the financial flows between these parent organizations and smaller affiliates through what are ultimately pretty hard to track networks like Hawala and kind of other informal channels for transfer. Yeah, excellent point, Chris, that the alliance is another place you can look for understanding how the affiliate might evolve and what kind of tactics you can anticipate the affiliate to be learning and undertaking in the field. With that said, I do want to get back to your article, Chris. You gave us a little bit of background on how your theory applies to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but I'm wondering if you could specifically describe the data you collected on the cooperation that these two groups pursued across their networks over time and summarize how that theory of alliance has applied to those cases. Yeah, absolutely. So the paper that we're talking about today uses a combination of kind of descriptive data analysis from a project called the Militant Group Alliances and Relationships data set. And that's a data set that we built that we think represents the most comprehensive global time series data on cooperation between militant groups. There's something like 2,600 groups in the data set, and we track their relationships with one another over time from 1950 to 2016. And I think most importantly, we try and track the content of their alliances in a time-varying fashion. So observing whether material support is flowing between groups, training, territorial support, operational coordination, and financial support. And then In this article, we focus in on arguably the two kind of most prolific alliance partners that we've seen certainly over the past three decades, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. And, you know, both groups maintained at their height something like 35 or 40 different alliances at one point in time. You can literally see the small drop in the alliances that Al-Qaeda has as ISIS explodes onto the scene in 2013, 2014, and starts co-opting some of al-Qaeda's previous partners. But most directly for this article, consistent with the theory of comparative advantage, we see that al-Qaeda actually is forming alliances post-2001 with groups that are relatively stronger than it, that are conducting more attacks than al-Qaeda itself is conducting. This is consistent with aligning with operationally capable partners that give a Q, a reach into these local conflicts in exchange for conferring its ideological clout on those local partners. And so because of its ideological reputation, al-Qaeda mustered these large kind of financial reserves. We see, you know, consistent again with the argument that al-Qaeda is giving financial support more often than ISIS is giving financial support. ISIS, by contrast, channels its ample financial reserves into its own combat capabilities rather than into the operational capabilities of its partners like al-Qaeda. So on the flip side, the Islamic State has this really formidable operational capability. It's tremendously successful on the battlefield and it's remarkably sophisticated tactically, but it faces this ideological challenge after its split with Al-Qaeda in 2013-2014. And consistent with the comparative advantage argument that we make, which suggests that the Islamic State should try and compensate for some of its ideological deficits by conferring material support to partners who can provide it in turn with the sort of ideological support it needs for its global caliphate project. But ISIS overwhelmingly allies with much weaker partners who are often only giving a rhetorical confirmation, a pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State's caliphate project. And ISIS is passing in exchange operational support, tactical advice, battlefield formation to these groups. So opposite dynamics emerge in the data concerning the content of al-Qaeda and the Islamic States alliances that line up with our expectations about what the comparative advantage logic suggests these groups need. Really fascinating findings. And Joe, I'm curious to hear your reaction. Does the way Chris describes these two organizations and their different approaches to alliances map to what you were seeing on the ground and what you know now with all the time that's passed, or do you see things slightly differently? Yeah, I agree with the summary that Chris laid out there. I mean, I think very clearly when we saw in the summer of 2014, when we saw ISIS begin really to begin to move very, very quickly, we recognized that this was, even before that, we recognized that this was a different animal. One of my good friends, Mike Nagata, who was the Soxin commander at the time, always referred to this as a kind of a terrorist army. That's what we were actually looking at, which is a different characterization than how we thought about Al-Qaeda. So we definitely picked up on the differences in this. clearly their use of social media, their recruiting efforts, the very obvious recruiting of foreign fighters coming from literally hundreds of countries through a well-established network. I think all of this was very well known to us at the beginning. And this represented, I think, a very significant difference between these organizations and how they were going about about their own specific objectives here. So yeah, I definitely agree with Chris's characterization of this. Great. Chris, I do want to contextualize these findings a little bit in the broader universe of cases on militant alliance networks, because you mentioned in your article that these two cases that you focus on are more or less a minority in the data, and their choice to pursue alliances as a reflection of organizational weaknesses, as we've discussed, rather than strengths. But you do say that these are important anomalies, given that these two groups rose to such huge global prominence and consumed so much attention and resources of the U.S. government and many of its allies and partners. All militant groups face challenges and have weaknesses. So what do you think it is that's different about al-Qaeda and ISIS that drove them to pursue alliances as a response to ideological or operational deficits? And why are you not seeing that elsewhere? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's absolutely true that al-Qaeda and the Islamic State are unique and exceptional groups They the most effective and powerful militant organizations I think that we seen in the past three decades far and away And two factors really distinguish them in my mind The first is that these organizations have uniquely expansive transnational goals, right? Most militant groups have pretty local or regional goals. And this is true even of highly capable groups like the Taliban, right? The Taliban has won in Afghanistan, but their goals are local. So many militant groups have goals like regime change, secession, autonomy for the ethnic group that they claim to represent. But al-Qaeda and ISIS claim to lead this universal movement, and that creates some unique pressures. They have to demonstrate global relevance. They have to attract supporters around the world. They have to compete for leadership of this broader kind of jihadist community. Local groups can often survive just with local legitimacy. AQ and IS need this global reach. And then relatedly, second, are the structural tensions between ideological purity and battlefield pragmatism, right? So because they claim this universal authority, Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State often faced heightened scrutiny when they compromised on certain ideological principles, like ISIS's incorporation of former Ba'athist elements into its fighting force was ideologically problematic in ways that wouldn't matter for purely nationalist insurgent groups like we saw operating in Anbar in Iraq between 2004 and 2007, say. Al-Qaeda, similarly, after their post-9-11 operational decline, that decline threatened their claim to lead the global jihad. And these groups, because of those expansive aspirations and this kind of tension between ideological purity and pragmatism, they can't just be effective in one domain. They have to be seen as both ideologically legitimate and operationally relevant simultaneously in a way that many other groups do not. So alliance networks then, you know, for these groups specifically become a mechanism for resolving the kind of tensions that I just outlined at scale. That said, I do think that the research offers some insights relevant for many other groups. And in the article, we talk about, for instance, leftist movements like the Red Brigades and Action Direct and the Bader-Meinhof Group in Italy and West Germany during the Cold War, which were engaged in a kind of similar trading of ideological clout for operational capabilities within the network of leftist movements. And similarly, Chechen groups in the 90s tried to latch on to an Islamist ideological frame as a way of augmenting their operational capabilities with the kind of virulence empowered by ideological credibility. Yeah, so it sounds like the challenges that these two groups face in balancing those two areas of organizational strength come from how they've defined their organizational goals. And what you're saying is, it's actually pretty rare for militant groups to define such broad goals. And, you know, your average local rebel group, it doesn't need ideological credibility with global reach because their goals are locally focused. Am I understanding that correctly? Absolutely. I think that's a fair characterization. And I'll just add that although it is rare, it's extraordinarily disruptive when it does happen, which is precisely why these are important groups to understand. You know, the U.S. and its partners spent literally trillions of dollars since 2001 trying to fight these organizations. Yeah, definitely. And you also make the point in the article that you're talking about relative strengths and deficits. And so while ISIS and al-Qaeda, you know, each might only be better at one, they're both still probably more proficient, again, than your average small local rebel group. And because they have that global mandate and global ambitions and after a certain amount of time resource, you know, that's where they're able to draw on other partners to fill those gaps. So, yeah, really fascinating. As we've kind of discussed, Chris, already, you discuss in your work how the Islamic State prioritized more rhetorical alliances. So we're looking at pledges without a ton of material exchange, while Al-Qaeda invested heavily in material support to affiliates so that they could advance their operational reputation through reach and recognition in local conflicts. I'm curious to hear from both of you, if you kind of put yourself in the shoes of a special operations team leader, do you think your approach to disrupting an IS affiliate should differ from that of disrupting an Al-Qaeda affiliate based on that distinction? Yeah, I definitely think there should be some differences to the approach here. I think the practical aspect is there probably isn't much difference when it comes to the rubber meets the road. I mean, these largely were the military tactics that we employed against both those organizations. I think not exactly the same. Certainly some rhyming among all of them. I mean, kinetic strikes, raids on the ground, enabling partner forces to go after them and to remove them. So, you know, I think some of that is there's some commonality to it. I think one of the things, you know, that I kind of reflect, particularly on the fight against Al-Qaeda, I think one of the things we talked a lot about because of Al-Qaeda's longer term approach to, you know, achieving their objectives, They had a much longer horizon, at least in my view, of trying to achieve their goal and, you know, to ultimately force the U.S. and Western countries out of Muslim nations and get rid of the apostate states and then ultimately, you know, create the caliphate, which they viewed as kind of a long-term objective. I think that argued for more military or more diplomatic or informational efforts that were much more focused on trying to address the ideology. We certainly talked about this a lot. How do you begin to undermine the toxic narrative that comes along with all of that organization? How do you begin to address that in countries that are vulnerable and populations that are vulnerable? You know, we spent an awful lot of time talking about that. In some cases, we actually expended resources to it. We had a very difficult time measuring progress in that. And ultimately, I think we largely abandoned that approach that, you know, we could begin to address the underlying causes that led young men to join organizations like Al-Qaeda or whatever, you know, flavor you want to choose here. We largely abandoned that because it was difficult. It was long term. It was hard to measure. And we felt that we could achieve the effects much, much more quickly by applying more of the hammer associated with the military approach on that. So I do think we probably missed on that. I don't want to suggest that that was missed because I think there were lots of people that talked about that. I know I was engaged in a lot of discussions about that with counterparts from the Department of State and various CT organizations that we had here that we wanted to focus on that, but yet that did not prove to be a viable approach for us. Viable is not the right word. It was not one that we favored, frankly, for the reasons that I've cited to. We couldn't measure it. We weren't sure of it. We were unsure of where the resources were going and how they're going to be accounted for. And we just couldn't trust that. But what we couldn't trust was kinetic operations. We couldn't trust military operations against these that we could look at. We could measure. We could see the effects on the ground. We could see what that was doing to the networks, which in many cases was very successful in disrupting those networks and removing leadership, you know, tearing apart the network that existed there. So, I mean, I guess that's kind of the way I think about it, Alisa. I hope that answers your question there. Yeah, definitely. I'm just left with the additional question now of, do you think we'll ever find a way to have better measures of success and effectiveness of the more fuzzy, intangible, you know, counter ideology approaches? Or is that just always inherently going to be so different and so much more difficult than the very practical and measurable military and state goals? Well, yes, yes, yes. On all that. I think it will be difficult for us to move into this. We are relegating some of our softer power approaches to the backseat as we move forward in our new national security environment that we operate in. So we're putting less focus on those types of areas. We, in some cases, are de-emphasizing the role that we have played in developing effective counterterrorism partners out there. I think it's important. We have to continue to pay attention. I think I continue to feel that that's a very viable approach for us. I think we've got lots of examples where that has been successful for us, where we've invested manpower, we've invested dollars, we've invested resources into creating capable counterterrorism partners out there who have carried that with us. But again, I think we're looking at that approach and asking questions about whether that is viable or not. I think that it certainly is. And then, of course, a lot of our strategic focus is changing a little bit here. We might get in a little bit in the great power competition and some of the things here a little bit later in the discussion. But that is drawing a lot of our attention that has in the past been focused on counterterrorism away from that. And so I think it begins to make it difficult. And so, you know, you know, going after the longer term, softer, more difficult to measure approaches to combating terrorism, I think, are always going to be a challenge for us. I might just add that I fully, fully concur with Joe's past points. And I think one thing I would emphasize as a priority for future practitioners, maybe strategic planners, not necessarily special operators on the ground, is the importance of exploiting ideological tensions. tensions. I mean, almost all of these alliances involve some degree of ideological compromise around tactics or the degree of civilian victimization that's tolerable for the group. And amplifying those tensions, highlighting where an affiliate or a hub organization like Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State has strayed from their espoused orthodoxy, can really help create internal discord. We talked briefly about this in the article, but a key driver of the split between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq prior to the full-on creation of ISIS proper was over civilian targeting by al-Qaeda in Iraq, later the Islamic State of Iraq. In Iraq, during the war there, particularly in 2006 and 2007, when after a series of leadership losses, the organization kind of resorted to extreme barbarism and violence against civilians that drove a lot of people away from the fold. And I think Al-Qaeda core tried to do its best to smooth over some of those ideological tensions and coach its then affiliate AQI on avoiding problematic civilian victimization. But that was an opportunity, for example, where the U.S. could have done more potentially to exploit ideological tensions between organizations to drive fractures and exacerbate the underlying weaknesses that the groups had at the moment. I like the way you said that, Chris, and I think that's a really excellent point. I think I'm a little more focused on that specific example that you talked about there between Al-Qaeda core and Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the differences between those two organizations, not just in their approaches with the tactics on the ground and who they were targeting, that really did draw a lot of attention to that. And I think at the time, as I recall, I think that was very clear that there was difference. I think we were seeing in our intelligence collection and other things that there were definite tensions between the al-Qaeda core leadership, Zawahiri in particular, and Zawahiri, between the two of them over the ideological and the tactical approaches those organizations were taking. I think that is a real vulnerability for us and something we ought to really be paying attention to in the future. Yeah, I think the points that the two of you are making right now really speak to one of the main findings of Chris's work, which is that ultimately these alliances in these two particular cases are somewhat transactional and reflect a need by the organization to fill gaps. and those alliances can work very well insofar as they fill the gaps. But, you know, at the end of the day, if the organizations aren't aligned on their core values, the alliance can fall apart, as you've illustrated with the examples. Building on that, Chris, I wanted to ask you, in what sense do you consider these alliances to be successful, as I put successful in air quotes, in that they actually did resolve operational or ideological gaps? And where in your case studies maybe beyond the examples we just discussed, is you see them fall apart. There's a point in your article where you talk about how people might chafe at the idea that the Islamic State was ideologically weak because we think of it as such a massive ideological organization with global appeal. As Joe mentioned, you know, foreign fighters from over 100 countries. Is that an indicator that that alliance was somewhat successful? Yeah, yeah. And I guess first, I'll just clarify that last point, too, because, you know, I think it's important for us to to reemphasize that the argument is really about relative and potential deficits. And I think, you know, ISIS did successfully mitigate some of the ideological gaps or deficits that its internal planners, we know from documents that are now in the open source, were worried about early in the organization's history. So, yeah, I mean, to an extent, they did succeed in mitigating some of these these ideological deficits through acquiring these large numbers of pledges of allegiance from affiliates all around the world, in turn, legitimating this this claim to a global caliphate. But I mean, I think overall, both both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, although they are absolutely, you know, weaker than they were at their heights, were pretty successful in leveraging alliances to kind of sustain their resilience. And, you know, both organizations, as I mentioned, much weaker than they were at their heights, but both still kind of pose lingering challenges. So Joe earlier mentioned AQAP, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, which, you know, is still a force on the ground today, as far as I can tell, certainly gave Al-Qaeda operational relevance in the conflict in the 2010s. And that kind of operational reach into that local conflict in Yemen also translated into external attack capabilities. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was behind the attempted underwear bombing in 2009, plots against cargo planes in 2010. Similarly, Joe mentioned Al-Shabaab, another Al-Qaeda affiliate that still has pretty tremendous capabilities on the ground in Somalia today. Al-Qaeda affiliates in West Africa and the Sahel today have given AQ still this residual and pretty powerful operational footprint there. So I think those affiliates are still delivering what Al-Qaeda needs in order to sustain resilience, a presence in conflicts where it can't otherwise operate because of the constraints imposed on the core group by concerted counterterrorism campaigns in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere that the core leadership resides. Similarly, the Islamic State drastically reduced its capabilities today, but that rapid accumulation of pledges in 2014 and 2015 certainly validated their claim to a caliphate, helped sustain the group's territorial foothold through 2019. And today, again, Islamic State affiliates give the group, kind of lingering operational reach in far-flung theaters all around the world, from the Sahel and West Africa to Somalia and the Philippines. And so, you know, certainly the alliances fell apart in some cases. We've talked about the al-Qaeda in Iraq relationship as one, you know, clear example of alliance breakdown. Boko Haram similarly split into factions after They're one part of the group affiliated with the Islamic State in 2014. So certainly, you know, there are pretty clear cases where some of these alliances have fallen apart. But overall, I think both groups have leveraged their broader networks as a source of resilience. Well, I want to move into policy implications because I know we only have so much time left. So, Joe, I want to start with you and acknowledge the fact that this article speaks very much to the groups and challenges that the United States was focused on during the global war on terror era. But the U.S. has, in recent years, as you've mentioned in this conversation, kind of de-emphasized its focus on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency missions to ramp up investments in it, preparing for potential great power conflict. So I want to know specifically what your main takeaways are from this article for policymakers and practitioners who are being told from the highest levels to focus mainly on threats from great powers like China and Russia, but still need to use efficient approaches and resources to keep non-state actors, militant groups at bay. Yeah, thanks. I think that's a really important question to consider, and I'm glad you asked it there. And I would just share just, you know, for the record here is the CENTCOM commander during, you know, some of my posture hearings with the Armed Services Committees. I mean, I acknowledge the fact that, you know, our necessary focus on China and great power competition was really existential to us. And we had to pay attention to that. But at the same time, we also had to deal with the other threats that were being posed to us, which included the persistent challenge of terrorism in the Middle East and in other areas. So, I mean, this has been a discussion that's been going on for a long time. I think there's three things that I would point to for policymakers maybe to think about as a result of this really excellent article here. So to the point I just tried to make here, I think we have to think about prioritization. Policymakers will have to determine what are the existential threats to the United States, what are the things that could alter our way of life and impact our citizens to the greatest degree. And I think what you'll find when you look at that, it's going to fall into the realm of great power competition. And so it is important to recognize that while we have to continue to deal with terrorism as it presents itself, at a time when we're very focused on great power competition, we do have to guard against becoming overprioritized again on counterterrorism. I mean, I'm kind of making an argument against myself here with saying that. But my point is, is that we have to choose very, very carefully here in terms of this. And, you know, the set of capabilities, the set of approaches, the tactics, the strategies that we applied for counterterrorism may not necessarily be applicable to the great power competition that we have ongoing. So we have to recognize that. And we have to address terrorism, but we have to make sure that it is not the eclipse, the more important things that we have to deal with, which largely fall in the realm of great power accomplishments. So prioritization is really, really critical. I think our policymakers need to think about how we assess risk in this environment. Are we focused on eliminating risks or are we focused on mitigating and managing risks? and when we I think we have to avoid approaches that are open-ended and are focused on complete elimination of terrorist threats I mean it's hard to argue against why you wouldn't want to get rid of that but the resources the time the effort associated with that I think is is pretty considerable so there has to be a risk mitigation approach that addresses those threats that are most acute and contribute to our challenges in the great power competition, I think is where we have to prioritize our efforts. So we have to look at approaches like over-the-horizon attack. We have to look at raids that go in and address acute threats or limited high-value targeting. And we have to look at intelligence sharing with our partners to help mitigate those kinds of So we have to think of this from a risk mitigation standpoint, and we have to have a risk management approach that is really focused on mitigating the threat and not becoming over-focused on the counterterrorism to the detriment of our more important existential challenges in the great power competition. I think the third area, and we touched on it briefly, is the importance of continuing to work with partners and allies throughout all of this. We've seen a number of really good examples of where we have worked with partners. I would think the Lebanese Armed Forces has a good example of this. I mean, we've seen some good examples with the Iraqi counterterrorism services at a time when we were operating in Afghanistan. We had some success with the Afghan Special Operations Force, and we've seen some examples in Yemen and Somali and others where we've developed partners on the ground who are very capable of conducting counterterrorism operations with a little bit of help from us and keeping the threat in check. And so we've got to think through that and consider how our policymakers have to look at how we enable partners to do this kind of thing so we can focus on really the things that only the United States can do, which might be high-end strikes or really focusing in on great power competition. So I think those are three things that kind of jump out for me for policymakers as a result of this article. And Chris, what are the main implications of your findings that you would want to share with policymakers as well as commanders and operators in the field? Absolutely. I mean, I think I completely agree with everything that Joe just outlined. Ultimately, I believe that analyzing alliances, examining the content of militant alliances in order to surmise potential organizational vulnerabilities or weaknesses of the groups involved is really a low cost intelligence tool. It requires data collection and analysis, but that's cheaper, easier often than kinetic operations. And so if we're really interested in a great power competition world in preserving scarce kinetic resources for high end threats, using the framework here to intuit organizational vulnerabilities and exploit those through non-kinetic means is a way to kind of break apart militant alliances, potentially without ever needing to put boots on the ground or drones in the sky or to kinetically target some of these groups. So I think, you know, prioritization is absolutely key. But really thinking about analyzing the content of alliances as a diagnostic tool is ultimately the main location here. Right. We can understand what organizations are worried about and where they're vulnerable. And that then is central to informing resource allocation and strategy and things like that. I guess the second point kind of also related to things that Joe said is that different organizational models might require different approaches. The Al-Qaeda model, ideologically resilient, operationally constrained, is probably harder to defeat than the Islamic State model, just because the Islamic State was more vulnerable to conventional military pressure. And so I think for commanders and operators on the ground, the key is going to be tailoring disruption strategies to alliance types. You know, high visibility operations that undermine the caliphate narrative might work better against the Islamic State. Targeting material flows or exploiting ideological tensions might work better against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. And then I guess one one final point to the importance of allies and partners is that really, you know, partner force development that addresses legitimacy and not just capability is going to be really important, particularly because Al Qaeda and groups like it, you know, specifically target areas where local forces have have credibility problems, either because of, you know, kind of structural conditions in the country or because of, you know, bad practices that they may have. engage in the past alienating the civilian population and things like that. So I think that there's a number of kind of key implications that jive pretty closely with what Joe just outlined. Excellent. Well, I wish we have more time because I can think of about 10 more questions that I want to ask of each of you. But unfortunately, we do have to wrap here. So I do just want to say thank you again, Joe and Chris, for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. Great to be with Thanks, Lisa. Thanks, Lisa, and thank you, Joe. Thank you again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We're a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. If you enjoyed today's episode, please leave a comment and a positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the Irregular 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 of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you.