A conversation with author David Kilcullen

[Music] good morning everyone welcome to another united states study center webinar i'm simon jackman professor of political science at the university of sydney and the ceo of the united states study center and the united states study center when we're at the united states study center physically stands as does the university of sydney on the traditional lands of the gadigal people who form part of the euronation and we pay our respects to elders past present and emerging it is june 30 here in australia uh halfway through a tumultuous 2020. okay just before we get started today just want to thank everybody who's been regularly attending these webinars at this halfway point through the year um if these were physical events you'd all be seeing one another regularly in the audience and and perhaps forming a little bit of connection and community that way um but we are seeing on our end with through the registration process uh tons of repeat traffic um lots of people coming back multiple times uh for for the series of talks and and webinars we're hosting so thank you from everybody at the us study center for your interest in our work and in the mission of the center i just thought it'd be appropriate to to point that out just um how big the total audience is over this series of webinars numbering well into past five thousand six thousand unique views perhaps even seven or eight thousand um um uh so separate views but unique individuals in in the in the several thousands as well two three thousand uh people uh cumulatively unique individuals have tuned into these so thank you so much if these were in-person events they would be very large events and it's just one of the things that you know these adverse circumstances give us this opportunity um to reach an audience larger than we might otherwise and the other thing these events do is allow us to engage with individuals in the united states that we might not otherwise would be a very expensive proposition in uh flying some of the amazing people we've had the pleasure of talking to to australia and and and and all that goes with that but everybody's been so uh good-spirited and generous with their time in these circumstances and and that includes uh today's guest uh david kilcullen who is a long-time expatriate australian uh now based in the united states but um holds an affiliation back here in australia as professor of international political studies at the university of new south wales their canberra campus and he is also a professor of practice in global security at arizona state university now david's career if you don't know is a particularly fascinating one david begins life in the australian army and and becomes um one of our leaders uh with respect to doctrine um with respect to guerrilla warfare uh terrorism and counterterror terrorism um urban conflict and and and the future of conflict uh and between his service in uniform and then as a civilian serving both australian and and the united states governments uh that's 25 years of public service between the two countries in in a variety of different roles but um i first got to know about david his service during the iraq conflict when he was serving in baghdad as a member of the joint strategic assessment team and then a senior counter insurgency advisor to the multinational task force in iraq and then going on to be special adviser for counter insurgency to u.s secretary of state condi rice my former colleague from stanford and in 2009 um david was named as one of foreign policy's top 100 global thinkers he went on to serve alongside some of my former students from stanford who on a not dissimilar career trajectory academic in uniform at uh getting phds and then going on to serving leadership roles and and bringing truly innovative sort of mindset and tools from the from the from academia to bear on a very complicated mission that is a counterinsurgency uh in an environment like like afghanistan perhaps in particular so that's how i got to know about david's career and then fast forward the tape i want to i want to bring up real quickly i'll just screen share with you if i can um and i'll have to just get my act together do that an article that that david had in the australian um about a month ago now and and and there it is there if if i've pressed all the right buttons um this is not about counter insurgency uh and and but it's about a not unrelated topic shall we say and that is um um the the the threat at least for uh civil unrest in the united states and and this is a fascinating piece and totally consistent with the with the way i know david and his ill go about their work empirically rich and very close to the data um making a very compelling case and there you see a map um and and naming names and really doing the hard yards on understanding what the lay of the land is here as as as this map indicates the potential flash points in the u.s and and that i thought would be a great kickoff point for a conversation with david someone i've always wanted to have a chat with and it turns out as i said earlier adversity uh driving opportunity turns out that these are the circumstances uh uh david thanks for joining us from the united states thanks man great to be here that's terrific um and and i should point out david it's it's a little bit later than usual david's at the end of a of a big bit of cost cross-country moving at the moment and we especially appreciate him giving up his time um late in the evening uh there in the united states tonight hey david i thought as we discussed the planning this event out we would throw it over to you and i'll stop the screenshot now so we can do that um we'll throw it over to you uh for some opening remarks uh before um you know i turn us to some q and we've got some excellent questions from the floor already that that we'll get to but but with that david thank you so much and over to you yeah thanks simon um well so i'm sure you there's a lot of expertise on the call and i'm sure that people will have particular questions they want to pursue so what i thought i'd do is just open up with about you know 15 or 20 minutes of just sort of concentrated remarks on this issue of unrest in the united states um i don't normally touch us domestic politics um partly because i i think it's bad for someone who is data driven to take sides in this extremely partisan um very toxic debate that goes on in the u.s so i try to sort of stick to the facts wherever possible secondly uh and by no means um least important i'm technically the military correspondent for the australian and there is a u.s political correspondent and there's turf issues if i start getting into their area so i i try to stay away from this sort of political bit but this time my editor sort of um imposed on me to uh to to write something and i'd actually been writing it in april and it came out in may just as the whole george floyd situation kicked off so what i thought i'd do is talk a little bit about um some of the ideas that are in that piece uh some of the background to it which i didn't put in the piece and then i want to talk about um you know what i got wrong uh okay and right that was sort of exposed about 24 hours after the piece came out which i think was quite interesting let me share my screen i want to just um give you uh a couple of things to think about and it's probably easier to do that um uh by showing the screen i tend to think about background trends and think about what impact they have on the environment and then use that as a way of framing the analysis because there's so many things to look at if you're just driven by what's fashionable in the news you can be skewed i know this is a bit of an eye chart but let me just summarize it in the political angle we've seen a collapse of confidence in elites establishments and institutions i think that very much explains the election of donald trump in 2016. that's been combined with the collapse of the political center negative polarization and just this incredibly toxic partisan hypocrisy of people on in the establishment on both sides of politics which has led to a rise of populists on left and right trump but not only trump on the right and the whole bernie sanders aoc coalition on the left this is not unconnected with the public's war weariness after 20 years of inconclusive and or failed foreign wars even as supposed experts keep telling them they have the best military in history but they see that military struggling in iraq and afghanistan and elsewhere on the military side um the main point relevant to this discussion is that a lot of the things that we have been doing overseas in the past 20 years have come home to roost in the us in terms of technology techniques grievances the approximately three million u.s combat veterans who've returned to a country where 41 of people either own a weapon or live with someone who does um with significant experience in both rural and urban guerrilla conflict and those people are not overwhelmingly on the right then they're on all sides of politics of course we've also seen a return of great power armed confrontation although mostly right now hybrid and unconventional rather than conventional on the economic side you know for 20 years we've seen cyanocentric economic globalization but u.s centric political globalization and both of those now are on fairly rickety foundations a number of issues in the economy which we can come back to talk about but you know financialization specialization just-in-time logistics offshoring outsourcing labor cost arbitrage which pushed a lot of jobs overseas the collapse of what the economist graham summers calls the everything bubble um after 2008 and the the great depression 2.0 that we're starting to see rising inequality and populist rage which taps into that political discussion at the beginning and then just a string of crises and the other point that i want to highlight is informational in the year 1974 alone there were 2 000 domestic bombings in the united states an incredibly high level of military style violence politically motivated in the immediate aftermath of the vietnam war there is actually far less violence happening now but we have a social media network and a conventional media model that really emphasizes and amplifies that level of violence so that it has a significant political impact out of proportion to the reality um perhaps the best writer on this is a guy called matt tabi who used to write for rolling stone write a book called hate inc last year basically explaining how it's the media's economic business model that actually drives a lot of what's going on here and that means we can't just wake up and shake ourselves and decide to be less partisan is kind of a non-overlapping venn diagram now where people are in different bubbles so that was the situation you know when the coronavirus hit and in the business we call these kinds of events complex emergencies we have a combination of a public health or humanitarian issue with a economic crisis and then a security crisis which makes it hard to deal with the first two so if you think about the sort of first wave we're now into the second wave of covet and of course the u.s is the worst hit country in the world if you believe everyone's data i've marked the second wave is less severe in health terms in the first but we don't really know that yet it could actually turn out to be significantly worse the second wave is the economic impact 40 million people out of work since 12 weeks ago collapse in what was one of the best job markets uh in history for african americans uh in particular a wave of bankruptcies about 140 000 small and medium businesses have gone out of business since march we are just beginning to see the uh what i think is going to be a wave of municipal bankruptcies in the second half of the year as cities are just unable to fund themselves given the fact that they've had a massive collapse in tax revenue since march and then we've begun to see the security crisis a human security crisis generated by the economic impacts leading to internal unrest now and i argue in a number of pieces that i've written recently it's going to result in international or transnational security issues we're already seeing that in africa and latin america we've seen it a lot in the middle east we've seen it on the chinese in the indian border we are almost certainly going to see some kind of attempt by governments that are currently being blamed by their people to redirect that blame outward by scapegoating other countries and unfortunately for the us if you look at the peak compound impact of all those three waves it's right around the end of this year which means it'll coincide with probably one of the most violently contested presidential elections in living memory in the u.s so that that's sort of the overall situation um i'm gonna stop sharing but we can come back to any of these details if people want just to point out that you know people don't think this is a real economic crisis they blame the government they see it as a government-imposed shutdown and power grab and the government is in a double bind if it shuts down or reshuts down in this case uh millions more people will be out of work and people will blame the government and claim that it was an overreaction if it doesn't shut down you know there's already 127 000 deaths in the u.s it could be two or three times that many by the end of the year and government will be blamed for that so it's kind of a damned if you do damn if you don't scenario for the federal state and some local governments we're dealing with a complex pretty crowded conflict ecosystem red groups on the left yellow groups on the right there are a number of groups that don't quite fit that framework jihadists identitarian groups like nation of islam a number of so-called accelerationist groups that are ecological in orientation and then um most people don't include these in the uh in the analysis but i actually think they're very important there are a number of non-political or politically opportunistic groups that are out there that could potentially form what we call uh conflict entrepreneurs in the event of a conflict so a big preparation survivalist community significant number of community self-defense groups there's an incredibly robust tactical services industry you know 20 000 small businesses across the country that have a strong economic interest in training and selling weapons and getting people to be preppers and all that kind of stuff and then a lot of criminal uh gang and cartel activity associated with that um i won't go through this in detail i'm going to stop sharing now we can walk through this series of events if you want but you can go back to the early 1990s and you see an escalating series of events often described as a rise of hate groups but i think that's not quite the right way to think about it the emphasis on hate leads people to overstate the role of right-wing groups in the problem set uh actually we've seen a very substantial rise in right-wing hate but the literature is very clear on this and our experience in the middle east and africa and latin america is equally clear what drives the most intense violence in a conflict isn't hate it's fear when people fear other groups in society when they believe that those groups are encroaching on their territory and when they lose faith in the government as an impartial actor that can keep them safe that's when you start to see people engaging in incredibly vicious violence and that's partly why i'm sort of blowing the whistle now i think that we have to wake up and realize how close we are to the precipice of actually quite serious violence at the end of this year coming from both left and right and if we don't wake up to that i think it's going to be incredibly difficult to prevent it from happening now i can i can share much more detail about any of that stuff that people want to pick up but let me stop there and throw back to you um simon and perhaps we can you probably have a few questions before we get into yeah yeah yeah absolutely um that that was great thank you david um wow um um you did say in your remarks then um the probability of a violently contested election yeah um i i i i'm assuming you chose your words quite deliberately there what do you see as the things governments can be doing now perhaps to to stop that i mean you mentioned fear but then a loss of confidence in the state as a guarantor of of um yeah of social stability and what are the things that governments in the united states and governments plural um by the way it's state and local has absolutely implicated perhaps even more than state uh federal government what are the things they can be doing perhaps to head this off so i think one of the things that we should be doing in fact is to focus on local and state level issues more so than federal one of the problems in u.s politics is a sort of expansion of the federal discourse to shape everything at the state and local level so you know there's um almost laughable degree of um hypocrisy on the part of major media outlets such as the new york times which went from blaming all public assembly and calling people murderers to suddenly praising public assemblies in the event of uh the george floyd process to turning again on a dime to now blame uh reopening and uh tiring every republican state as bad and every democrat state is good if you look at fox news you see the exact same picture but in reverse right republicans good democrats bad um protest is bad you know and it's almost like whatever one side likes the other side has to hate and actually the you know i just drove through uh nine u.s states in the last week um you can see an incredible degree of variety in terms of state responses it doesn't actually track um republican or democrat it actually has a lot more to do with degree of urbanization and uh with population density and population makeup right and you know the states are incredibly diverse and one of the adaptive strengths of the us system is that you know if you don't want to live like people in new york you don't have to be there you can go to southern texas and if you think people in southern texas are ignorant rednecks okay move to san francisco right you don't have to um you know it's not a one-size-fits-all but the federal discourse has really expanded across i think um really you know the the most important thing is going to be how cities and states handle the reopening and the potential for a subsequent lockdown in the second part of the year some states are doing a great job with trying to contain and trace and do sort of a not immediately go back to a full scale lockdown if something breaks out again others are not uh and i actually i can show you my map later but i the map that i put into the um into the article in the oz uh was followed of course by major uh conflicts the week after so i have a map showing where those conflicts were and i called some of it right but some of it wrong and if you do look at it it's really overlapping zones of control of different political oriented armed groups right and the degree of of um of urbanization um i think if you wanted to show us that map now would be a great time it follows on pretty neatly from that last question yeah um so this is the map which my um my folks said the odds slightly butchered and put appalachia down in florida but that's okay um basically what i did here was i used the um use the maps that um the left-wing groups have of where their organizations are approximately 50 of them with and i use the maps that right-wing militias have as to where they are approximately 380 of those groups i discounted any groups that don't actually carry military-grade weapons right um and i mapped any area of influence where a group that has military-grade weapons on the left is within 25 miles or easy out and back drive from a group that's on the right and you see a number of major cities um uh seattle and portland on the on the west coast whole region around um the inland part of northern california san diego southern arizona around phoenix there's a whole area called the northwest redoubt which is a right-wing militia area an area called the southern border zone where you have both left and right groups a couple of distinct areas in in texas odessa and austin uh the city of denver in colorado you might actually say the front range urban area because it's a single connection from colorado springs up to fort collins but that's one basically 80 of the population of colorado lives in a fairly dense urban area that's actually contested the area of the kansas missouri border milwaukee detroit indianapolis in the midwest the so-called appalachian redout which is uh runs from western pennsylvania down to northern georgia and that's the scene of going back to the 70s clashes between actual neo-nazis um militia groups near confederates and far left groups and then the major cities on on the east coast so that's what i predicted i didn't really predict it that's what i analyzed at the end of may just before the violence broke out this is where the violence actually happened so you can see seattle and portland um did happen as major outbreaks um so did the san francisco area i called um southern california slightly wrong i thought it was more going to be around san diego it was actually mostly in la county um so slightly further north the denver area um you can see the front range that sort of row of vertical dots there texas midwest northeast and then the appalachian area what i didn't account for there's more than 200 cities here where we had states of emergency um you know 23 states had to call out the national guard um department of homeland security flew predator drones over 15 cities um during the during the uh so-called uprising so i think it was much more widespread than um in terms of spread than i expected but all the areas that i i predicted did see major major violence now one of the other lessons from insurgency and civil war history is that areas where there's been significant violence in recent times are more prone to break out into violence in the future people get radicalized they identify enemies more active radical groups recruit by a talent spotting on the street and pull people into more active roles so i think we can expect this to be a pretty decent map of where some significant violence might happen at the end of the year and if you want to think about the scenarios under which that violence might happen we can talk about that also sure um wow um one question i have david also an amazing stat that again i think you kind of know intellectually but the 70s were much more violent at least quantitatively yeah um um was that is the violence we're seeing now sort of starting to you know the way it's been present in australian media is it's there's no it's not a an organized group on the left attacking an organized group on the right or vice versa it seems to be just vandalism looting smashing things up um are you starting to see in any of these data organized group versus organized group conflict just yet yeah so um yes i am so we we we've seen different groups at the street thug level squaring off against each other for about five years now and this conference has really escalated that level of intensity so antifa on the left um squaring off with groups like the patriot prayer proud boys american identity movement that uh call themselves community self-defense militias they organize and follow basically the same um approach as the right-wing groups but with a different ideology and then at one level above that you have smaller underground groups that follow a cell-based structure so that's where the neo-nazis and some of the neoconfederate and far-right groups sit on the right-hand side on the left it actually starts to become a sort of subset of antifa and then some environmental groups like earth liberation front um alf the animal liberation front and a couple of far left um neo-marxist terrorist groups though so as you go up the pyramid the groups are smaller they're more covert and they tend to be more dangerous or have more dangerous intent um i think we can survive a fairly um we can survive a la a small amount of street violence which has been happening in portland and seattle when it becomes very violent across a very wide area which we started to see in the last few weeks that's when groups sort of one step up the pyramid start to organize and come to the fore so we've seen john brown gun club members for example um acting as guards with ak-47s in the so-called chads you know the zone in seattle um we've seen right-wing um oath keepers which is one of the equivalent groups and three percenters doing the same thing uh in the pacific northwest and the appalachian area to guard property against looters um and then i i would just say on antifa that um again it's just toxic polarization on the left people say it isn't a real thing it's not a big deal on the right people say they're a straight-up domestic terrorist neither of those points of view is true um it's a cell-based organization think of it as sort of a combination of the occupy movement and the anonymous hacking group online presence and a physical presence it has all kinds of organized tactics and you know publishes those tactics and shares them and it uses encrypted communications and you know trains people on how to make molotov cocktails you know it's a real group but it's not the sort of mastermind terrorist group that um president trump's been painting against hey david in popular media fictionalized in particular the standard the stereotype of a militia group is right-leaning perhaps spilling over into medium level organized crime um ex-military but but can you give a little bit of a portrait of the sociology if you will yeah of what of what the left looks like i think because we get a presentation i think of of that from the right and a so is that characterization we get from you know through through uh television uh fictionalized accounts on television of the right but but i think on the left there's far less sort of fictionalization and presentation or stylization of that for for for an audience particularly an australian audience yeah now that this is a great point um so on the the picture you paint at the right is slightly um off right i don't know you you're not you know you're saying that's the mainstream media point of view and i think the me the media does misinterpret the right um there are racist groups on the right and racist groups did feed into the um militia movement of the 1990s and in fact part of the rise of the militia who claimed to be non-racial and sort of constitutionalist rather than right-wing was a deliberate attempt to go underground by some of the racist groups that were being targeted after the oklahoma city bombing kathleen bellew um did a great book on this called bring the war home uh where she traces that history um i disagree with a couple of the things but over overwhelmingly it's it's a accurate account based on the data i've seen so but there is a racist core that sits behind the militia group but the vast majority of people that you see interacting with each other in these militia groups are not in fact um consciously um pursuing a racial agenda they're more of a sort of libertarian and constitutionalist model they believe the federal government's out of control but they don't express that usually in race terms there are many more groups on the right about 380 as i said compared to only 50 on the left um but you know again that's the start state for any conflict and as we know from history once a conflict starts groups will grow on both sides because the violence becomes uh self-sustaining on the left um the the malicious style groups grew out of antifa and um trade unionists actually uh in the about the middle of the of the 2000s so the first groups began to appear about 2006-2007 um the first so-called redneck revolts group um emerged around the 2008 um financial crisis and that actually was a big driver for a lot of radicalization of groups which began to organize initially on the east coast and then pretty heavily in the pacific northwest in california and they became sort of little fully armed uh well-organized groups that tried to be a left-wing counterpart of the right militias and to play a protective role over groups in the street the ferguson um protest in 2014 provided a big impetus to the to the redneck revolt and john brown doug clubs particularly because there was a couple of incidents where oath keepers turned up to protect the black protesters against the police right indicating what i was saying about not being particularly racist right they were there they saw themselves as kind of arbiters of um preventing any violence um that really offended people on the left and they they stood up these groups to a higher degree and then of course the rise of trump and the election of president trump saw a huge spike in their activity starting in 2018. so they tend to be regionally based um they tend to have a loose membership that self-selects and the activities they do they do range days they do urban warfare workshops they do a lot of work on um border protection down in the south the phoenix john brown club was one of the most active and it actually engages in pretty frequent armed standoffs with the right-wing groups down on the border right-wing groups going back to the ku klux klan border watch in the 1970's have had this sort of tradition of doing vigilante patrols on the southern border starting in 2015 the left-wing groups started to confront them and try to protect uh undocumented immigrants coming across the border so that's an area of standoff that's why i marked that area as a potential area of conflict because they regularly do face off against each other these groups are i'd say less well organized they have less military membership or less sorry less former military membership than on the right um frankly their weapon skills are not particularly good um and they often get accused by the right wing of uh laughing that is live action role-playing in other words it's just pretending to be che guevara you know um i think there's a lot of misplaced bravado because um uh i think they're actually better than the right-wing givens give them credit for and obviously somewhat less good than they they think themselves to be there are one or two military veterans on the left um in most groups on the right it's probably 25 to 30 rx military and there's another whole set of people on the right that are you know people are trained that i worked in unconventional warfare jobs for special forces in iraq and afghanistan they're not the guys running around in camouflage they're the guys with encrypted radios um thinking through plans and uh coordinating on the dark web with each other now they're not racist um and in fact they i wouldn't consider them to be insurrectionists in a traditional sense their theory is the state's going to collapse and we need to be ready to step into the bridge when it does and that's a pretty interesting choice of phrase because it actually skirts the us definition of insurrection legally and makes them perfectly legal um so not only is what they're doing legal but they obviously know exactly what the boundary is um which to my mind suggests they're they're pretty dangerous wow david um i could keep going like this for a while um i'm it's uh we're already 40 minutes into our hour and and so um real quickly last question from me because i definitely got some great questions i want to get to to what extent is the election in november are starting to appear as a motivator in in internal communications as a rallying point for these groups right now and you know what does that portend about you know the words you used earlier about you know violent electoral cycle yeah that's that's a great question so on the left there is a fairly widespread fear that president trump will lose the election but then refuse to step down and it may actually call in the military to um stop himself from having to leave i actually think that's reasonably unlikely um but it's a very widespread fantasy on the left on the right there is a fantasy that the left is going to rig the election uh that it's going to result in a clean sweep you know house senate president many governorships and that the left will then come after uh in a physical you know genocidal sense um people on the right um and that's equally i think over overblown um but if you think about it right the election has three possible outcomes trump wins trump loses or it's unclear like you know 2001 or 2000 2000 2001 you got it yeah trump wins if trump wins i think he steps down but i think there'll be significant violence of a low-grade you know baseball bats and bricks the sort of things we've seen the last few weeks um uh of the campaign of the campaign but also in transition right yeah sorry if trump loses i think he steps down but there will be some some violence during the campaign um secondly um you know the right wing will not immediately respond i don't think but when they do it'll be much more lethal than bricks in the street right it'll be it'll be ar-15s um in some groups in some areas i should say if um uh if trump wins i don't think you're going to get triumphalist violence from the right you'll get responsive reactive violence from the left but it'll be fairly low grade if trump loses you'll get pretty triumphalist political behavior on the on the left and then after a delay you'll get some kind of backlash on the right um so i you know and if it's unclear then i think it's just a very messy transition and potentially that's where the the most dangerous environment is and of course this whole discussion we haven't really talked about the fact that china russia and iran all have a very strong interest in ensuring a bad transition in november uh and there's already at least some evidence of of attempts to interfere not on the level of facebook ads like in 2016 but um sponsoring some of the far-right groups and the far left groups money flows you know that kind of stuff wow um let's turn to some questions from them from from participants online um andrew condon who's affiliated with the rsl here david rsl life care asks a great question australia needs a stable united states but without interfering in domestic u.s matters can australia do anything to assist the us stabilize itself i i'm afraid we just really need to watch at the moment um what's going on in the domestic scene but as i talked about at the very beginning one of the big risks here is a china-u.s conflict as both countries start to scapegoat the other and we've seen an obviously very substantial spike in u.s china tension in the last few months i do think we've got a very important role to play there and an important restraining role on the us but importantly also continuing to stand up to china as we have been doing over the past few months um so i think um you know president trump i think is unlikely to deliberately start a war with china um but i think the posture that u.s and china are adopting in our apart our neck of the woods is actually becoming increasingly dangerous in terms of the possibility of miscalculation and i do think we've got an important role uh to play there the other big international uh issue that we have a role in is the quad um right of course india and china have significant tension right now so i think we've got a pretty important diplomatic role to play in our region um unfortunately i don't think another power trying to interfere in us politics would be would make it any better yeah yeah um um brenda burrito and i hope i'm pronouncing your last name correctly brenda a student asks um this is a great question dave one for you what's the difference between an uprising slash insurgency and a social movement slash change movement uh arms right i mean so the definition of of insurgency that we use is an attempt to exclude or challenge uh or change a political order using violence uh lethal violence plus political subversion so what makes the difference they may have the same objectives but only when you start to see you know actual lethal violence uh in the service of uh a non-electoral change of political order that that's when we would start to categorize it as insurgency importantly you probably noticed that there's been a bunch of debates about the insurrection act in the u.s yes and insurrection is not the same as insurgency so that the definition of insurgency that i just gave is the standard military definition there's a very specific legal meaning of insurrection in the u.s and it is an organized armed movement attempting to overthrow the constituted government and replace it by force of arms right that's defined in u.s law and it's quite interesting if you look at the left groups they're not really organized enough to be considered an insurrection if you look at the right groups they're not calling for the overthrow of the government um so both of them are sort of walking the line neither of them could really be defined as an insurrection uh right now that that's great thank you um for that um a look at a number of questions about i mean you've touched on this but um i'll just pick out one that's kind of emblematic of um of this set and this this comes from elizabeth german and david i want to take you back to remarks about foreign actors um but also you know one thing we we come across in our work at the center david when we talk about social media as a pernicious factor that that yeah you've got the foreign actors but but plenty of domestic actors are availing themselves of social media could you talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing there you know the balance there and what it is that that um that that governments can possibly do um to to counter some of that yeah so all the companies themselves by the way yeah yeah so there's obviously a very active debate right now in the states about companies controlling hate speech um this has generally been portrayed as um it's one of these you know political raw shark plots like everything else in the states now where if you're on the right you think it's these left-leaning tech companies trying to silence the right if you're on the left you tend to think of it as people tolerating hate speech and having a short-sighted view of the risks that come from their platforms um and i think that's you know that's going to continue there's a lot of defunding or d the um uh boycotting of advertising on facebook happening right now their shares took a big hit um in the last couple of days and that's related to this particular issue um the way i think of it you know you're probably aware that the fbi investigated russian interference in the 2016 campaign on facebook right and um russia's put forward about 66 000 distinct ads targeting different groups trying to push them in uh particular directions not necessarily pro-trump more in in terms of exacerbating existing conflicts among groups um that sounds like a lot and they spent you know several a hundred thousand dollars doing that but you know the brad pascal who is the the social media director for the trump campaign they put out 5.9 million distinctives right they spent billions of dollars on facebook so the russian interference i think was a drop and drop in the bucket compared to what u.s political actors were doing it was much more important what trump was doing and the clinton campaign wasn't doing on facebook um rather than um what the russians were doing that's not to say the russians didn't play a role the thing that really the interference that was really significant in 2016 was actually the leaking of the dnc emails which killed the bernie sanders campaign but in such a way as to lead to pretty significant disruption and division on the left so i think that was a russian activity as far as we know um it's debatable uh that had a major effect but frankly you know u.s political actors don't actually need foreign interference to do damage to they're doing plenty of damage to themselves as it is good point okay um look um i want to um peter field from the university of canterbury in new zealand um we've talked about you know in advertising this event uh david we talked a lot about you know the risk of um of violence uh from from the groups we've been talking about in the run-up to the election but peter asks us to disaster rather to perhaps contrast risk of occurrence versus the the consequence the how consequential any any act of violence might be and and and i'm wondering if you could distinguish that and again i'm just struck i keep coming with sort of one of the things that stuck in my head from our chat so far david is this reminding us just how prevalent violence was in the united states in the you know late 60s through the early 70s you know you know cornell universities its computer center being blown up um uh and that just being one of many campuses um the berkeley campus um i'm just thinking if we could get your assessment of the distinguish between the occurrence versus consequence as sort of invites you to do no this is a this is a point let me let me phrase that slightly differently right um i think there's a 100 chance that we're going to see some acts of violence in november right um i think that you know you have to ask the question at what level does violence or disruption start to threaten the fabric of u.s society and the u.s state and then by extension the u.s role in the world and i think if there's a contested outcome and significant violence in the transition period and the u.s is basically paralyzed and doesn't have a government come 20th of january um 2021. i think that's a very significant outcome i think it's probably less than 20 likely right now um if uh you start to see um diffuse but significant violence and a major military uh crackdown as this thing from a national guard call out i think that would also be considered to be you know a pretty severe outcome that would likely um destroy u.s self-confidence and u.s role in the world again i think that's slightly more likely but probably less than 50 i actually like to think about this differently i have a background in um strategic intelligence and there's a thing in intelligence work called inw indications and warnings and the way that we structure that is we ask the question um why hasn't a civil war in the u.s already broken out right and we look for the factors that are holding it back so not necessarily the risk factors that i've been pushing forward but the things that are holding it back and you can come up with a number of things that are resiliencies that are preventing um you know state collapse right now and i think they're the things that you need to track because as those resiliencies weaken that um you know indicates increasing risk you know doing doing a sort of total you know um you know horse racing style um guess some of the probabilities you know investment banks like to do that but i think in the intel business we like to be a little more model based um so that's kind of where where my team is right now um there's a great question here from um jim rogers um and i'll i'll just read it in its entirety david notes that the federal narrative has expanded to crowd out local solutions and that local governments may offer a way forward but some local places that you would expect to succeed are already hitting strong resistance louisville kentucky and minnesota are hitting strong resistance on the political economy of policing reform jacksonville hosts the gop convention and struggling uh with its public health situation but david is there a bright spot um that you would highlight um in the united states um at the moment i guess in terms of this local solutions um uh perhaps easing ameliorating um what might otherwise be a tough situation yeah well i would just say you know um the the coronavirus is in fact i mean it looks extremely scary to sit in australia and see the data in the u.s you know there's 330 million people uh 42 of all deaths so far have been in nursing homes and the majority of those were in one state new york um so if you look at the um rate of infection that's actually quite high the level of herd immunity that's developing is probably also quite high the you've got a less than one percent chance of you know being hospitalized and even lower chance of dying so i think the the the real threat of the pandemic which has created a lot of this tension is actually not as bad necessarily as um people might think and there are vast areas of the of the country where there just aren't very many people affected by it you can drive through you know most of my route driving from virginia to montana you just did yeah it's not a lot of code yeah it's really the urban um centers and the the impact has been largely economic i also think there's another um sort of resiliency here which is people are not going to go back to a full scale lockdown we've already seen significant pushback on that and i think governments are smart enough to um to not push that there's also developing technology to do with sampling of water systems and so on that's allowing people to identify the virus before the next outbreak happens i actually have always thought of local policing as an important strength in the u.s but there are two really negative things in u.s policing one is i think called the 1033 program which has existed since the 1990s and it distributes um actually i'm going to add one three things uh it it distributes military-grade weaponry and surplus armored vehicles and heavy weapons to police departments across the country that's a bad idea right i mean it just leads to this kind of escalatory violence and cops um turning to the weapon rather than you know talking down as happens in australia more more often um and i think that one encouraging sign is congress is looking very strongly and ending that program and possibly returning um you know to a less militarized form of policing the second problem is i think called civil asset forfeiture basically if the police suspect you of being a drug trafficker for example they can impound your car on suspicion um sell that car and use the money to fund their own operations and can take years to get that asset back even if you found to be innocent it's been a strong point of contention across the political spectrum um for a long time but it particularly affects uh people of color and and um and immigrant communities so that's one that's also being looked at as frankly a bit of an abuse um where you know police departments have a financial incentive in using people the third one um and again a little bit different from australia there's more than 85 000 police departments yeah and virtually all of them have uh police union and one of the things that we're seeing in some states now is a move to de-unionize the police or to reform the police unions which have basically become a racket for protecting bad officers and um you know the probably the shining example that is the city of camden which is sometimes misunderstood as having disbanded its police it didn't actually disband its police it dissolved the police including the union and then created a brand new non-unionized police structure with different standards and different people so it basically declared the police bankrupt and started a new one didn't get rid of the police it created a whole new system so you know i think there are there is some hope as we're starting to see moves that will reform that uh to some extent but again like once the grievance leads to this degree of widespread violence solving the original grievance is only part of the answer there's a lot of angst out there now that that isn't going to go away just because you know moves get taken to um to remedy some of the underlying issues hey um we're almost out of time this is probably going to be the last question but i i just so many have come in as we've been chatting david is a great sign of a really engaging webinar but um alexandra phelan um i really want to get to her question she says to what degree do you feel cell structure and loose membership contributes to fragmentation on the far left particularly in terms of organized militancy she says we've found from some of our own research here in australia that there are significant ideological divides that causing severe internal divisions among some groups that affiliate with antifa um albeit a quote common enemy vis-a-vis although i guess albeit they have a common enemy visa be the the far right um yeah um great point i actually have spent a lot of time looking at this it's probably a much longer yeah than 60 seconds yeah but the the um yes there's a lot of different factions they usually don't cooperate unless there is a uh common enemy they've evolved a system of what they call affinity groups and clusters that allow groups that don't necessarily agree on everything to cooperate tactically on the ground they also have a backbone of encrypted tactical communications that is helping them through software-defined radios and so on to organize on the right also there's a very similar cell-based structure and actually there's a lot of cross-pollination the left-wing groups are actually copying an older right-wing technique called leaderless resistance that was invented in the right-wing groups in the racist movement in the 1980s and then has spread to the left on the right they don't have such a solid grasp of tactical communications but they do have a much better national networks which runs on hf radio through i think called the amron the american redoubt radio operators network which is a right-wing militia based hf network and they have regular you know saturday evening what we call scheds where everyone gets on the hf and talks in code about what's going on uh whereas the left or more online and in the deep web um but one of the strongest trends i'm seeing is actually co-evolution where left-wing groups and white-ring groups are starting to develop equivalent governing and military structures and increasingly resembling each other even though their ideology is completely different and this is a classic my book that i've published about a week into the covert crisis i talk a lot about um co-evolution in this kind of conflicts didn't think i'd end up seeing it directly in the u.s but it's certainly been a feature of what we've seen wow um david we could go for another hour easily there's so many great questions here that we haven't got to and as i said that they're piling in um late late in the webinar so no no chance of getting to them um but but let me let me commend uh people to the to the book uh that we you you just referenced um i think we had that up on on a slide a little bit earlier there it is thank you janine um i do want to do want to uh plug the book um it's very interesting our conversation today is about internal to the united states but the point is that you know it's it's quite chilling actually that the the categories and methodologies uh and lessons learned from david's long work uh analyzing counterinsurgency and civil unrest and and uh escalatory spirals of violence and organization of these sorts of groups so many of that those lessons and the methodology is is is being deployed or can be deployed and probably should be deployed as david points out to uh our understanding of of what's happening in the united states right now which is on the one hand you know chilling frankly but but i think really important work and and the last thing to to say david is just again this is the we just spoke to jonathan swann um last week it's just terrific to hear an australian accent in a position such as yours so knowledgeable um about what's going on in the united states and and again i don't think a few i think quite a few australians understand the career you've had but but more should um the contribution you made and and and uh to to to the united states uh and and to the alliance more broadly and and to the to the to the to the causes we have in common between the two countries um few australians have a career like you're so you know on behalf of two two countries thank you and i'm a dual citizen so thank you thank you um but but just terrific to have someone like you david um the director you've had being able to share um again this this not not just the insights but but just the data richness i think i hope everybody appreciated that um very close to the ground and close to the facts and and and that's the way we like to roll too at the united states study center thanks david please go to our website there you can see all the events uh coming plenty more where that came from i'm just so thrilled with a the audience size sizes we're pulling to these events and and and the caliber of the people that are willing to give us their time from the united states it's it's terrific david um again this hour we have with him uh exhibit a for that so thank you everybody thanks again to david thanks to the team in sydney and we'll see you on friday for our discussion with mia cheers thanks david [Music] you

Channel: United States Studies Centre

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Length: 62min 13sec (3733 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020