Book Launch: Three Dangerous Men with Seth Jones

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] welcome to csis online the way we bring you events is changing but we'll still present live analysis and award-winning digital media from our drakopolis ideas lab all on your time live or on demand this is csis online hello to our two panelists and all those joining virtually both of our panelists today have added substantially to the public record on a critically important topic gray zone warfare and the future of great power competition the launching pad for our discussion today is seth jones new book three dangerous men russia china iran and the rise of irregular warfare we'll cover some really compelling stories from the book but also talk about the future of conflict in a broader sense so first let me introduce seth jones he is the senior vice president at csis the harold brown chair the director of the international security program and the director of the transnational threats project in his copious free time he also teaches at johns hopkins school of advanced international studies he's held a wide variety of roles in the national security business including the representative for the commander of u.s special operations command to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations which is a long title meaning he was the link between the military and the civilian side of special operations he also served as the adviser to the commanding general of special operations forces in afghanistan so he has had many opportunities to view irregular warfare and grayzone activity up close and personal we also have david sanger his official new york times bio calls him a senior writer which seems about the understatement of the century he has a 38-year reporting on top national security issues he served on three teams that have won pulitzer's his latest book and i'm sorry i don't have a copy with me here but i have been reading it it's called the perfect weapon war sabotage and fear in the cyber age which was also made into a very compelling hbo documentary both are a thoughtful exploration of the implications of the new tools of warfare in the cyber domain for me personally in my my previous roles in the intelligence community we often refer to him as david how the bleep does he know that sanger we're pleased to have him here today as a guest so three dangerous men this book is a series topic but a fun and approachable book uh it uses the stories of three military intelligence leaders to describe how adversaries are using measures short of war to frustrate and undermine the u.s it talks about valerie grasimov who's the russian chief of staff to the armed forces you know you really made it when you have a doctrine named after you and he has one the grasshomp doctrine qasim solomani the now deceased head of the irgc codes force and yang yusha who's the vice chairman of the military commission in china so as we read the stories of these three men and their approach to modern warfare it occurs to me proxy forces mercenaries propaganda all as old as warfare itself so seth talk to us about what's new here what's new about the grasshombop doctrine about china's hole of society approach and about iran's proxy warfare thanks so much emily uh as you know there is uh the use of irregular asymmetric gray zone tactics and strategies is as old as war itself you have you just have to go to uh books like sun tzu to see the importance of deception the importance of how to win without fighting that comes from those uh very influential documents chinese have also given us uh mao zetong for example um and his uh path-breaking work on guerrilla warfare so what's new this is a this is a great question i think there are a few things one is the us is shifting now from a focus on uh counterterrorism to great power competition so uh we we saw that first in the trump administration's national defense strategy we saw it with the in interim strategic guidance from the biden administration but i think the question though is as as the us focuses on competition with the russians the chinese and even the iranians what forms is that likely to take and how do we think about competition in particular in the military there's a lot of focus on understandably in many ways large conventional wars whether it's with the chinese in the taiwan straits or the south china sea with the russians and the baltics how much of that is really going to be the domain of future warfare and how much of it is going to be in the irregular side so i think the shifting strategic landscape has changed there are also a number of new elements and how they've been utilized one and i i defer to david when he talks uh but you know one is certainly the cyber uh side of this and the use of social media and digital platforms for information and disinformation campaigns that's certainly not something that we saw during the cold war between the u.s and the soviets even though the soviets service a of the kgb was heavily involved in active measures in addition we certainly have also seen the the increasing use of various types of private military companies shells and fronts that have gone on uh gone along with that including the russians use of the wagner group and others in africa in the middle east in latin america including venezuela and overlaying those activities with russian intelligence both military intelligence gru as well as the foreign intelligence agency the svr so there's there's a bit of a new dynamic with how private military companies are used for influence and how they're also used on the economic side there's also some newness to at least new developments on the economic side i'm going to call it economic coercion so the use of the belt and road initiative not just for uh but by china not just for um economic investments in countries but also using the leverage from that to pursue issues of interest to the chinese regarding taiwan or or the uyghurs or uh or tibet so issues of strategic importance to the chinese and and then you know how this is done so there have been new elements in in this even though the the the just the concept of irregular warfare emily is as you point out it's not new so david with that i will turn to you to talk about that cyber issue that seth raised um in your book the perfect weapon you wrestle with the analogies between conventional warfare nuclear warfare and cyber warfare and you talk about how these are our inept analogies they don't they don't always work out so what's the closest analogy that you did find what bad habits in our thinking do we need to break here and if you could especially focus on the lessons for deterrence theory i think that's a ripe topic for conversation here sure well first i want to say how much i enjoyed uh reading seth's book and how the technique he is used which i just admired as a writer of uh encapsulating these three really fascinating different national approaches through three very different kinds of of intelligence and military officials uh it's just a great read and i i think says not only congratulations to you but i think it's going to become required reading in irregular warfare courses and universities maybe even beyond just sighs so so uh so it's it's terrific and to our audience here today i i recommend it um so really great great question uh that you've raised here because in the early days of cyber there was this tendency for people to say well this is like the new nuclear weapon right and by the way we could why can't we deter it the same way that we deter nuclear weapons where it took us 10 years but we came up or 15 but what eventually came up with a mutually assured destruction kind of approach in fact it is as you say an inept analogy just doesn't apply all the questions about deterrence in the nuclear arena also arise in the cyber arena and every one of the answers is different and the reason for that is that cyber is available not just to nation states and not just to terrorists but to criminal groups and worse yet to teenagers and you know uh outside of the nation states those three groups don't tend to sign arms control treaties right so the whole concept that we ultimately had which was that we got the two largest possessors of nuclear weapons the u.s and the soviet union and ultimately its successor stayed in russia to diminish the size of their arsenals just will not work in cyber the second misapprehension we had i think was that cyber would be used initially just as a surveillance tool and if you think about it it makes sense that we started thinking about this because you know the post office was created and we learned how to open people's mail and then the telephone system was invented and you know not long after alexander graham bell went to all that work we figured out how to intercept phone conversations so when people first saw cyber they thought terrific you know we can read each other's emails and that falls into sort of traditional intelligence collection but as seth points out in his statement and as he does again in the book the really interesting uses of cyber are not surveillance uses so there is the social media side which is really more understood is more like propaganda than than a cyber operation i mean stalin used to put ads in farm newspapers in america in an effort to go try to to influence americans you know in the 1930s you just couldn't measure his results the way you can if you're having the internet research agency go at it but to my mind the more interesting uses of cyber are closer analogs to what seth is writing about in three dangerous man you can use cyber to manipulate data so you know can be as basic as trying to recalibrate the aim of a missile but as pernicious as getting into the pentagon's health database and changing the blood type of every soldier and sailor imagine the havoc you could reach you can try to conduct attacks that previously you could only do through sabotage putting somebody on the ground or bombing them from far so when the united states and israel decided to go after the natan's nuclear enrichment plant they considered the sabotage and the bombing effort and decided in the end that if you could use cyber it's much harder to go trace who's doing it but more importantly you may not prompt the kind of military reaction you would get from bombing and then the third arena in which you can use cyber is as an influence operation and as seth points out very well in uh his chapters on uh garazamov to the russians this is all on a spectrum you know we think of information operations separately from using cyber as a weapon they think of it all in a continuum and interestingly the chinese are beginning to uh as well so to the deterrence issues you know we just went through a lot of panels on uh 20 years after 9 11. and you know most remarkable thing is we actually managed to improve our defenses so well that we got a fair bit of deterrence by denial right it's hard to get a bomb up on a plane or into times square or through the through the tunnels or whatever it's not possible but we've just done a much better job at detection early detection and defense and frankly that's where we've done a crummy job in the cyber army where we are just so vulnerable as a society as you could see with the colonial pipeline case a ransomware case in which the attackers didn't even plan to cut off the flow of gasoline up and down the east coast but it happened anyway has the company cut it off that um that's really where we've got to begin to think about a true national effort well so on that happy note um seth we're talking about this continuum and how our adversaries think about war not as war and peace as we tend to but as war measures short of war and entire continuum of possibilities um how are we set up to respond to this you have the last chapter of your book you devote to some recommendations how is the u.s set up or not set up to go about combating this approach to warfare good good questions let me just start off emily with talking about warfare because there are a range of different ways that one can refer to this it's been called gray zone activity or or uh asymmetric i i think the term warfare i use it deliberately for a couple of reasons one is i think it this is this is the use of warfare that's much closer to sun tzu than it is of the prussian uh uh soldier and theorist uh klausovitz it's if you read sun tzu the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting so it's without actually having to resort to violence and i think in particular when you when you look at the terminology used by a number of the countries i looked at here china use uses terms uh including three warfares to describe important components of this three warfares are the use of media propaganda uh psychological and legal warfare for the uh export of the state's power and influence so it it is warfare it is a component of warfare the iranians have a term that they use which is jongi narm which is software probably not too different from the concept of soft power in the us but again defined in part using ideological information means as warfare and then even as as the u.s military historian uh charles bartles referred to this as the important point for understanding how the russians views these in these instruments he said is while the west consider these non-military measures like like uh information operations covert action support to non-state actors actors including proxies while the west consider these these non-military measures as a as avoiding war the russians consider these these measures as war as a component of war and so that's why i think that the terminology here is important because i mean the whole idea here is to be understanding how they view warfare and and competition so these instruments are critical as part of of warfare and and in in kind of understanding the the way the chinese think about it i mean i i i i found it quite it's not a great movie i wouldn't i wouldn't suggest that people start running to go watch wolf warrior two [Laughter] the the general explosion scenes are sort of like 1990s uh hollywood but it is uh still i think the the highest grossing film in chinese history this is wolf warrior two and what's interesting here is the the signals that the chinese are sending the movie character is not a chinese infantry officer it's it's a it's a former special operations soldier so it's someone who can do both kung fu and he's part rambo um in addition it takes place not in the south china sea or in the taiwan straits or even in taiwan it takes place in africa and who's lung fung's enemy it is big daddy it's a it's a kind of an american drawl uh it's actually an american character in the movie and and the message of this of this of the uh of the second version of wolf warrior is at the end as long funk kills big daddy is basically the united states is the past and china is the future you are history he says so this gets to your question about what do we do about it and i think you know uh this this aspect emily that you talked about at the beginning on a war on warfare as really a continuum not as dichotomous gets to the way the cold war was at least partially conceptualized by some of the more influential individuals like george kennan in the u.s that's the way kennen conceptualized warfare between the u.s and the soviets as uh as operating uh not in dichotomous it starts and it ends but is a continuous hourly uh certainly daily uh activity and and i would say particularly with the chinese the us is just i mean it's just not prepared really at all it's not structured this way it doesn't have the resources i mean i what i find most concerning in many ways is even how um u.s competition with the chinese is conceptualized in the department of defense the op plans or operational plans you know the scenarios used to plan for the future of competition the weapons systems you know almost entirely envision conventional fights with the chinese uh whether it's in the taiwan uh in the the taiwan area around taiwan or the south china sea in addition i mean i find it striking how the u.s from an information standpoint is nowhere near prepared uh we we don't have translations of chinese uh material the entire open source enterprise uh during the cold war we had the u.s information agency and as part of that the foreign broadcast information service translated huge amounts of soviet warsaw pact radio programs uh television uh you know magazines newspapers to understand what was going on not just inside of the soviet union but also in its warsaw pact allies and we've got we've got nothing along those lines uh the the global engagement center the state department is underfunded under resourced and i mean in many ways it's considered a a backwater so i think we have to get really serious about this beijing has not made the same mistake it's the the chinese newspaper with the largest domestic circle circulation is a compilation of foreign news articles including english english language reports that are translated into chinese that is the largest domestic circulated newspaper in china so i think what it shows is there's a huge focus on understanding us the beijing side not a lot uh in in from from the us towards the chinese there's also emily a lot that we did in the 1980s in beaming in radio free europe and radio liberty into uh into the soviet union and warsaw pact which was frankly very successful in opening up dialogue in those countries we see in china russia iran all of them are closed societies they're they're they're not democratic they don't have freedom of the press they don't have freedom of religion uh so you know part of the focus i think has got to be beginning to open them up and they're both technical tools that the us can use use but also there's this constant campaign and thankfully from a u.s standpoint it doesn't have to be disinformation but everything from the assassination of defectors we've seen it on the russian side to um uh you know the the international coercion campaigns that have gone along with the belt road initiative to the massive doping scandals that both the chinese and the russians have been involved in to the extraordinary pressure the chinese put on companies including in hollywood the nba which they uh which they put significant pressure on the nba including executives not to criticize the chinese government or hong kong or they will take nba games off of uh television in china which they did and which the nba leadership paid a big economic price for doing i think there are a range of tools even from the last decade of the cold war that the u.s could do differently right i'd add i'd add one more to those emily i agree with everything that's on seth's list i think in some ways the most important move the chinese have made and that the russians just cannot and it's sort of the the difference between uh their approach and the iranians cannot is that they were well on their way and still are using huawei to wire the world right so you know if you think about the first real pushback by the united states and some of its reluctant allies on the chinese it was in the effort to block huawei from building 5g networks and initially our allies were quite reluctant some still are and the chinese have made great inroads in africa and latin america and so forth and building these but why is this important because we were looking at this as seth suggests as a commercial project and frankly we didn't have a whole lot to offer and the chinese were looking at this as both a commercial opportunity and an opportunity to make sure that the information that flows around the world flows not through the united states which built all the initial networks but instead would flow through beijing or shanghai and that has made a huge huge difference and only in the past two or three years have you seen the united states begin to push back even president trump viewed this half the time as a trade issue well maybe i'll give away the 5g thing you know if i get a better deal on something else which was a fundamental misreading of what the importance of 5g was to the chinese plan and it's interesting this week you know we spent our time discussing australian submarines uh up to the region which is important and an important way of pushing the chinese back but if you made me choose between control the submarine routes and control of the s of the submarine cables flowing around the world the two have some relationship i'd pick the cables any day yes because of this information warfare piece that we've been talking about and because if you control the information you control the world i have to give in the ability to turn not only to listen in which chinese are good at doing now but turn it off right one of those cables get snipped and we're all in trouble i have to give a uh a small bit of kudos to my former boss chairman burr and chairman warner for their leadership on the 5g issue i think that that was a real wake-up moment for for the united states government yeah and they managed to do it together and it was relatively bipartisan and there's a huge amount of work most of it classified so it's you know hard to go dig out about u.s efforts to protect those undersea cables and it's part of what that australian submarine deal is about well this is this is the whole reason that you focus a lot of your activity on irregular activity it's not this is this is this is how you take islands in the south china sea turn atolls into essentially military bases you do it with dredgers not with with uh by bringing in pla navy forces to uh control the islands i mean this is this is the the whole use of underwater cables for information 5g 6g where we're headed next i mean this is this is all off of the overt radar screen and this is part of the point that i think both david and i and even emily are making now is is these are less publicly aware activities but they're extraordinarily important components of competition and they are not even they're not the side issue as they were once considered to be they are the central game and you know you were asking me for better and worse and now you asked me at the beginning ellie what's what's the better analogy but i think the better analogy is the invention of the airplane right so when when wilbur and orville wright first showed aircraft to um to american military officials in 1909 up on what is now the university of maryland at college park out on what is now the soccer field and they flew there they flew the right military flyer around the initial reaction of the army was this is a great surveillance device you know we'll fly it out over enemy troops and we'll see where their openings are and we'll send in the cavalry right so they were thinking of it all as surveillance what's this like it's like the early days of cyber right and it took about five or six years for the germans to catch on and say hey we could drop bombs from this thing right or we could or we could arm these planes and at that time there was a lot of discussion including in britain i've got a great british book published in 1910 called uh aeroplanes in peace and war and the question was could london ever be bombed well we answered that quickly okay so by world war ii airplanes moved from being this sort of interesting sideshow to being the central strategic weapon and the question here is is cyber and the other irregular techniques that seth has laid out so well in the world are will they in 20 or 30 years be the central game and my guess is the answer to that is yes because no one wants to take the us military on frontally nor do they see that as particularly advantageous if i could just jump in one time sorry emily just to just to highlight the point here i mean i think there there's this interesting period when the soviets and the americans are close to war during the cuban missile crisis where it dawns on both leaders that a nuclear war if that's where this goes now you're talking about you know threatening cities in both the us and in the soviet union the the reality of nuclear weapons and you know one of the ironies of participating both in classified and unclassified war games with the chinese is when you're fighting in and around the south china sea and you're flying f-35s part of your suppression of enemy air defense almost inexorably includes striking targets along the chinese mainland because that's where they're shooting missiles or that's where their radar systems are electronic warfare that raises the prospect of nuclear war because when you start conducting strikes in and around someone's homeland it becomes very difficult to distinguish or these are these measures that you're doing so that you're protecting your aircraft or your forces on the ground in taiwan or your submarines or your aircraft carriers or is the next step you're going to start hitting beijing and you're going to attempt to overthrow the government becomes very hard to distinguish offense and defense and that balance so the issue is i mean that looming issue of escalation to nuclear war i think will be very uh concerning to both leaders in washington and beijing and you could you could also extend this analogy to moscow and washington in the baltic states which is why it's it's it's partly what david said which is that that the u.s is conventionally and from a nuclear perspective continues to be quite strong but also now all these major powers they have nuclear weapons so conventional or nuclear war i mean you're talking about huge economic impacts i mean one one uh scenario that ran ran the chinese gdp in a war uh decreased by 25 percent just because of the destruction that was caused by the war and i so what i think this means is the day-to-day activity gets pushed below that threshold absolutely so on that note our adversaries very much seem to be playing a long game they are looking to undermine america in various ways the russians in 2016 did a masterful probably a better job than they expected to do making us question each other making us question democracy and really undermining the roots of what makes us function as a society and that's a very long game kind of strategy um as americans you know we tend to be optimistic and go get them but it also means that we tend to think a little bit more short term than our adversaries how should we be adapting to this long game perspective and what do you see as the potential inflection points in this long game do you want to go first step no no you go ahead first okay well um the first is they are playing it for the launch and that's not something democracies do really well because we um change uh presidents every four or eight years and because in that time period you can have major changes of policy and you know that's just the way democracies operate we have a much harder time setting 10 20 30 40 year goals if you want to look at the best example of this and again it goes to competition with china look at the china bill the infrastructure went through the senate early this summer still has not passed the house so all of the technologies that we are thinking of putting money into billions of dollars into in sort of new industrial policy ai quantum computing semiconductor lithography um autonomous vehicles long battery life uh issues encryption all of that the list matches up almost perfectly with china's made in china 2025 list the problem is they started their made in china 2025 list in 2015. and so they're in year six they'll make it on some on others like semiconductors they are behind they won't you know so not going to be 100 success we shouldn't say they're 10 feet high um but here we are by just getting our long-term government involvement strategy together in 2021 and it's entirely conceivable if you have a a change in government come uh the next presidential election or even the one after that that that whole effort gets interrupted so one thing that's common to the um three societies that seth writes about in three dangerous men china uh russia and iran is they don't go through this process their downside is they don't have the kind of entrepreneurial energy that we do they've got greater focus and probably less content and i think the race of the next few years is going to be which of those turns out to be more important seth do you want to chime in there yeah just to add to that so let me uh david focused on the chinese let me just start with the russians you know the russians are starting with a much weaker hand you know they're not the economic power that the chinese are and they they they won't be but when you look at the long-term strategy um i mean it's important i think to look at the where the russians came out of the cold war and and they they lost out uh in so many different ways they they lost the warsaw pac countries virtually all of whom went to the european union and nato uh they lost uh their their uh southern flank the u.s deployed forces to afghanistan obviously where they had invaded at the end of the 1970s they lost partners in libya after the u.s the french and the british overthrew gaddafi so they were in pretty tough shape over the next two decades after the end of the cold war so what does the russian long-term game plan look like for individuals like garasimov you can see it starting to happen in 2013 2014 2015 and again look at the annexation of crimea it is done in ways that look a lot like uh sun tzu's use of the the tools of warfare to subdue the enemy without fighting the russians didn't fire a shot really in crimea they used betsnots and russian special operations forces disinformation campaigns intelligence uh individuals so in that sense svr as well as gru so uh starting to take back uh territory and influence look at supporting assad i mean there was there was grave concern during the obama administration that the u.s would back rebels and just like they had done in libya in 2011 overthrow the assad regime well what did the russians do in response they did not do what they did in afghanistan starting in 1978 and 79 which is deploying over a hundred thousand infantry soldiers uh uh armor into into afghanistan instead uh the maneuver force so they they conducted strikes from maritime vessels caliber cruise missiles they also dropped some bombs from fixed-wing aircraft but who was the maneuver force for the russians in in syria it was lebanese hezbollah a u.s designated terrorist organization it was iranian trained militias from iraq palestinian territory afghanistan and and pakistan among other places i mean in addition to some syrian forces it was a very different way of protecting an ally and then using bases in that country for power projection how do we see the russians attempting to expand not just their influence but also their economic activity in africa so china has its belt and road initiative you know not saying this is going to be a particularly effective strategy but the russians have deployed their private military companies and their shells and fronts to central central african republic madagascar mozambique egypt libya and the whole venezuela nicaragua we've seen the russians deploy these kinds of forces again not large numbers of russian infantry but but also a heavy focus on wagner group with the support of russian military intelligence the gru and the fbr so we what we see in the long game is the russians trying to expand influence in eastern europe in in south asia in the middle east in parts of africa and even in latin america primarily through irregular means i would say on balance it's actually been fairly successful with the weak hand that the russians have had and and i i would wholly support david's comments and then look at made in uh china 2025. it is it's a 10-year plan to transform china into a leading manufacturing power by 2049 that's the 100th anniversary of the founding of the people's republic of china but look at how they've been also doing it it's it's significant stealing of technology to be competitive both from a defense industry perspective as well as a a a business perspective what makes the chinese nervous and i think this is this is kind of the last issue i wanted to raise uh emily is what makes the chinese nervous about its approach it's um i think it feels a little nervous about hong kong uh you know it's an area that needs to watch very closely it feels a little nervous and we've seen it in the last couple of weeks with the uh overthrow of the afghan government by the taliban that the chinese have basically basically said both to mula baradar on his trip to china in the summer as well as to senior pakistan leaders that with the rise of the taliban you must take care of the uyghur problem in china we do not want to see east turkestan islamic movement sanctuaries base camps operating from afghanistan they can conduct attacks inside of china so there certainly are concerns about some of these internal dynamics that i think makes the chinese a little worrisome as part of their long-term strategy absolutely so i want to turn back to the idea of this book as part biography and part lessons for the future of warfare there are three very different men that you describe in the book but they do have some similarities so i'm curious as to what you what your takeaways were on the personality characteristics that made them successful at their jobs how they went about it what you see is the similarities and differences and uh david then i'll turn to you and ask a question sort of from the flip side which is that given what we know about these men and the way that these countries go about irregular warfare what are our options for trying to push back so i think there are a couple of things that i was particularly interested in in many ways surprised by qasim suleimani by zhang as well as by valerie garassimov all of them actually studied pretty carefully the last several decades of warfare by the united states i mean they were they were p i mean it was almost like phd exercises in understanding both the us weaknesses and its strengths us overthrows the taliban regime not by sending in large numbers of forces same thing in libya but using small numbers of special operations forces uh cia paramilitary on the ground and some air power that went wet with it also a recognition that that the some of the us's weaknesses the large deployment of forces on the ground uh the hundred thousand plus in iraq and afghanistan so you know what did the u.s do well what did it not do well also some interesting uh almost bizarre lessons you know reading grassemob's uh historical overview of the past several decades he he uh he gives a lot of credit where credit really isn't due to the us for its involvement in the arab spring in overthrowing multiple countries across the arab world as well as the color revolution so i mean my guess is if you asked a range of individuals in langley they would have loved to have been involved in more of those than the u.s was ever involved in uh but you know the russians saw u.s hands in everything from ukraine to uh to a number of other countries in eastern europe and and across the arab spring so i mean that's one one big theme that cuts across all of those and i think a second we've already highlighted to some degree which is recognition that uh certainly true and zhang and grasimov but also suleimani and his successor ishmael hani how powerful the united states is from a conventional and a nuclear standpoint and how weak the us has even just looked in afghanistan at the hands of a pretty well or pretty poorly uh equipped taliban force that wore the us down conducted guerrilla raids almost directly right from mao's guerilla warfare book almost directly from sun tzu so the us's weaknesses are in these areas so i mean just to summarize is how much really students of history all three of them were i mean their own interpretations of history but all three uh uh historians of the us experience and trying to to pull lessons from that i mean i found i actually found quite surprising one of the really frustrating things about trying to conduct diplomacy with the russians is saying but that wasn't us and them absolutely not believing us that it wasn't us and if you say you didn't do it then they say that's exactly what you would say if you did do it and there's just no no convincing them that our hidden hand is not behind everything so david over to you what what options do we have for these men well first in them in when you turn the mirror around um we don't believe they're not involved in a lot of these operations as well and so you know the most recent great example of this is the ransomware craze right so you know the other day uh general nakasone the head of the nsa and cyber command said at a conference here in washington you know six months ago if you raised ransomware i would have described it as a criminal activity which was his nice way of saying not my problem right i got plenty to do in all the areas that seth just described uh hand the ransomware characters over to the justice department they want to go indict them or block their funds you know that's their job not my job now all of a sudden we view ransomware as a central national security threat because as by president biden's own description if it's emerging from russia the russian government must either be tolerating it at a minimum or encouraging it as a way to undercut us which takes us to your question which is what do you do to begin to deter this kind of activity and the the what it hinges on is do we come to define national security in a much broader way than we did that if the russians are going to determine that that our greatest vulnerability isn't what they could do to us in the south china sea but the fact that they can get into the electric grid or they can get into colonial pipeline or they can execute the kind of attack seth makes a brief reference to it at the beginning of his book that they did in solar winds where they basically got into the update system of a piece of software that was used across corporate america even at the new york times and across the federal government then they can do far more damage than they could do with a conventional kind of uh with a terror attack much less a conventional attack and that takes me back to my first point which is we have to think about the cyber defenses for our own society the way we thought about securing airports and so forth after 9 11. and we're not at that point yet and we're not at that point yet because our adversaries including these three men have figured out that if you calibrate the attacks at a low enough level you're not going to get a kinetic response and you're probably not going to get much of a response at all and that's what's happened and so we keep talking about raising the price raising the cost how many times did you hear that when you were on the senate intelligence committee how many times have you heard that you know uh in in meetings of special forces but clearly we have not raised the cost to the point that it's led to a diminution of activity president united states just went and spent most of a meeting in geneva in june with uh with the vladimir putin and spent it warning him about ransomware and we had a nice abeyance in the summer while some of their best hackers i guess decided to go to the black sea and enjoy the sunshine but all the evidence is they're back at this point and so the answer to that has got to be some mixture of much higher pain and much higher defenses that's absolutely right and this question of deniability i mean this underlies a lot of what's in the book um both of your books actually you know it's an adversary conducting activity that is an arm's length removed or several arms links removed and the russians in particular are really outstanding at this idea where they can say well they're not under our control even though we know that generally speaking the way the kremlin operates is that people are allowed to do things as long as they are in line with the kremlin's interests we see this with the pmcs we see this with some of the the ransomware groups they get a little bit out of line and they get a quick correction but as long as they're operating in line with kremlin interests and they're allowed to continue and the kremlin gets the the opportunity of the deniability but that also makes it much harder for american policymakers one of the things that we saw with the russia report in 2016 was the obama administration really struggling because they wanted to know for sure that this was russian activity before they tried to deploy any of these carrots and sticks that you're talking about and this gray zone activity is just not the kind of place where you get that kind of certainty and i think that is going to be a huge challenge for american policymakers operating in this realm where you are not going to be sure but you still have to respond in order to preserve these tools of deterrence so seth i'll throw that to you to see if you want to react at all and then i have a couple more questions before we wrap up no i i think i i would actually agree with what both of you said so i don't have i don't actually have any more to add to that well then that's a win we all agree we're all set here we're done um seth i wanted to ask you a little bit about your original document use in the book it was really fun to see you pull from some of garasimov's powerpoint presentations uh some of the the chinese documents that you found can you talk a little bit about how you went about finding those and and what you did to translate them make them usable emily this is this is a much bigger issue than i had anticipated there actually was you know there was a fair amount of russian russian documents available um i mean i identified a bunch of what uh grasimov had said i do speak a little bit of russian so that was helpful what i found particularly discouraging was the well what were two things one is uh during the the cold war uh and even in graduate school and afterwards i had relied on translated cold war material from the foreign broadcast information service that's the open source enterprise that the intelligence community made available publicly it's it's now all closed so uh governments not providing public translations of documents writ large that was one uh you know discovery that was frustrating the second is how little publicly available information uh translated from mandarin there exists a major documents none of the science of military strategies these are momentous chinese documents they are not publicly available in english in in uh in in the us on web services so i actually had to get a lot of of information translated in fact just the lack of information translated from mandarin to to english it's so bad that csis as as part of a major effort which i think we're going to make publicly available in november of of this year of 2021 is it is an open source china analysis center so that we are translating you know substantial amounts of chinese documents and you know the purpose is that it's not pro or anti-china it's more just to understand what is going on inside of china i mean i think it eventually uh it will include uh key debates going on on digital platforms inside of china as well as journal articles media government documents even on government documents what i noticed is in the translations is when the chinese you know they may actually translate a white paper into english but what you find pretty quickly is that their translations are designed entirely for their audiences so they may have a white paper in mandarin largely designed for a chinese speaking audience the english version which is designed for a different audience actually is diff different in many ways the phrases are different it's a lot less aggressive uh in talking about the united states so that that just that that whole process of translating chinese documents to me was was a huge epiphany on how far behind we are on understanding what is going on inside of china i mean the easiest way to classify a chinese document is to keep it in mandarin uh because nobody in the u.s can speak uh can speak mandarin i mean i say that a little bit of tongue-in-cheek but there is definitely some some truth to it so that that was that was actually one of the more interesting findings from the book is how much we had to translate from chinese on the one hand it's terrible that the us is not putting more of this stuff out you know and the good news is there's a lot of of technological solution to this of automated translation it's not perfect but you know will make up for the high labor cost of doing this the good news about all of this and i know sometimes emily this can drive people crazy in the intelligence world is that uh there's a huge amount more open source available for us to go follow our adversaries right i get every few weeks satellite photographs of north korea which we can hand off to you know outside experts that give us sub meter uh view of the major nuclear facilities and can people can come to judgments now you know a decade ago you know that was only available through highly classified systems so when president trump was declaring after his meetings with kim jong-un that he had had phenomenal success in getting them to stop their nuclear program we were able to go out and write stories that established that no they were building new bases there was activity at young beyond the main nuclear site you could see when they turned on and off the reactor because of thermal heat sides and all that kind of stuff and um this is highly frustrating to people in the intelligence community who were accustomed for a while to a monopoly on this data but it's a wonderful thing for bringing people into an awareness of the degree to which this is a constant a constant struggle back and forth and at times i think is fairly useful even to the us government because something that is classified in their at their end can still get some public discussion so david just to highlight that point how did i even for this book get information on russian private military company wagner group activity in africa well we uh conducted satellite imagery analysis commercial off-the-shelf satellite imagery analysis of found wagner group bases in barango central african republic could do analysis of ranges there the airports they were flying into you could look at at the classrooms the buildings the infrastructure same thing on the iranian side could could look at satellite imagery analysis of irgc islamic revolutionary guards could force training facilities outside of tehran or along the lebanese syrian border and actually see the ranges on there see where their explode exploding ordinance i mean it's a wonderful capability but again the u.s is not in government is not a position it was or hasn't made the decision on open source to provide some of that information the way it did uh during the cold war but the private sector has definitely um has definitely kept pace and i think this is where we had to go for the research on the book and david's exactly right i'll give one other example again that's been a bit uncomfortable for the us government you'll remember the uh strike the drone strike uh a few weeks ago on the car that was allegedly heading for a second strike on the baghdad i'm sorry on the uh airport in kabul and our um it just feels like baghdad it feels like baghdad sorry about that and uh we published out of our video investigations unit last friday uh a reconstruction a devastating reconstruction of the activity of the main target of that attack which ended up killing a lot of kids uh and so forth that strongly suggests that the activity that from satellites look to the us like he was gathering explosives was in fact him going around gathering fuel for his family and for his activity as an aid worker and then we went back biographically and discovered that 10 to 15 years of work in in aid work and certainly did not look like a classic terrorist to all who knew him and this has caused a real issue inside the pentagon because it has raised new questions about whether or not in our last act in afghanistan we ended up using a drone to strike the wrong target and you know five or ten years ago it would not have been possible for a journalistic enterprise even one with the reach of the new york times to go out and in a matter of days pick apart the us government's rationale for a drone strike well so seth i will turn to you for the last word on that in just a second but i do think that it's important to note that the commercial enterprise is going to be the future of the intelligence community a little competition now and then is a very good thing and then in addition there's just things that only the intelligence community can do and then there are things that the commercial sector is phenomenal at i mean companies like hawkeye 360 or spacex or a lot of these other firms that are coming up with really brilliant ways to attack some of the same problems it's insane for us to not be working together we could do an entire separate discussion about the ways that the us government needs to reform itself to make that really happen but it's something that has to happen yeah we should do that we should do that we should do that so seth and the the minute we have left before you and i actually have to head off to test some of these theories in a tabletop exercise um do you want to say anything about the book and about your recommendation on building on america's core principles and that being one way to push back on this kind of behavior we talk a lot about the mismatch between america being an open society and some of these countries being highly authoritarian being able to marshal state resources just by snapping their fingers whereas you know we on the other hand have a kind of bright line between the commercial sector and the government sector and the public and the private um when you think about marshaling our core values as a nation what does that really say to you well i think at the end of the day the u.s and western open democratic societies i mean are very competitive and people around the globe we've gone through waves along these lines they they that we're our values our economic systems are attractive and so i think that that in looking forward that the us has to continue to operate based on its core principles its democratic system its commitment to freedom of information freedom of the press freedom of religion and and that actually is its strength i mean you know one of the things that's interesting uh i looked a little bit at this in the book but if you look at how countries responded to covet 19 i mean what was interesting about the us response was that the private sector led the way in the vaccines and that when it came to the effectiveness of those vaccines uh they were you know they ended up standing the test of time at least uh so far including the exports of them and this is an area that has probably been understudied but where the chinese have definitely struggled and the chinese vaccines have definitely struggled it's the it's the innovation that comes from an open effective uh uh competitive economic system uh that that the the us has and i think you know this on the to ship to the political side this is also an advantage to the us and it was an advantage during the cold war i mean the soviet union in the 1960s and 70s and even very early 80s i mean it was an imposing uh force it we saw marxist leninism take hold across the globe in africa in latin america but the end of the day when you start to to uh to close off sources of information when you make it impossible for individuals to choose their own leaders whether they're good or bad you know people get frustrated uh over time so i i think at the end of the day it's i mean i i i i expect the chinese over time are going to struggle to keep up with us competitiveness and innovation silicon valley remains a dominant competitive industry and i think again covet 19 was was one good example of that in addition i think that chinese are going to have problems in hong kong they're going to have problems in xinjiang they're going to have problems in and around tibet and i think this is what happens at the end of the day when you try to close off society when you don't when things go poorly and you have an authoritarian regime and again this is you know it's interesting to see how solidarity emerges in the 1980s as a uh strong force as uh the the polish economy starts to collapse over the course and you know interesting and i'm not saying that the us should conduct this kind of activity but it was also one of the most successful covert action programs of the cia during the entire cold war to keep solidarity alive this was not providing weapons uh bullets to solidarity it was printer cartridges so i mean that's kind of the the part of competition that i think uh you know that i'll be looking at over the next decade or two great and with that we are a little bit over so we're going to end i want to give a shout out though to our colleague bonnie lynn you say that's an understudied question about chinese medical diplomacy she and her colleagues are looking at this question and i think are going to have something out in the next few months so we're all excited to see that i want to thank david sanger for joining us today and i want to thank seth too for his book three dangerous men highly recommend uh it's like i said it's a very serious topic but also highly approachable and i really enjoyed reading it so thank you gentlemen and i hope to talk to you again soon thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Rating: 4.4285712 out of 5

Keywords: Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, bipartisan, policy, foreign relations, national security, think tank, politics, iran, china, russia, men

Id: tXB-kGREtYs

Length: 68min 10sec (4090 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021