Dr. David Kilcullen: Counterinsurgency Expert and Author - Danger Close with Jack Carr

[Music] this is the danger closed podcast beyond the books with me jack carr welcome to the danger clothes podcast an ironclad original presented by sig sauer my guest today is my friend dr david kilcullen david is a former australian army officer who managed to get a phd in political anthropology along the way he was the advisor on counter-insurgency to condoleezza rice at the state department and to david petraeus during the surge in iraq today he runs a strategic advisory firm and has written five books uh and if you've been paying attention you will notice his influence in each and every one of my novels in particular this last one in the devil's hand his latest novel the dragons and the snakes which i read back in early 2020 really helped lay a lot of that foundation for what i was writing in the devil's hand so uh without further ado my friend dr david kilcullen david colin thank you so much for jumping on i'm so excited to get to talk to you you know what the secret of this podcast of why i started it is so that we could have this conversation because we haven't talked to each other in so long so you essentially forced me yeah with all the different little uh apps and stuff like that that we have to communicate through when you're traveling all around the world doing your doing your thing i had to actually start a podcast so we could catch up so that's why i'm doing the whole thing i think the last time we had a drink together you were still a navy seal so that was a while ago and uh it was a while it's happened since then yeah it's been busy it's been busy and i think the last time we were actually the last time we were talking uh seriously about things was when i was going down i was in south africa with uh with a mutual friend of ours and i was going down there to help train up an anti-poaching unit um transitioning over to m4s and glocks which are two platforms that i have some experience with and uh and you were talking to him about something and so we got to got to catch up a little bit there but uh then it was off to the after the races yeah but you really haven't looked back man i mean it's a testament to your discipline and and the fact that people are interested in what you have to say and you know it's fantastic well i have certainly appreciated i honestly have no idea how you write fiction man it's so much harder than uh non-fiction and i've always looked up to guys that can actually pull that together because you know as i always say non-fiction only has to be true but fiction has to be believable right which is just true this is true and it's getting harder and harder to do that because if you were to write about some of the things that are actually happening today 10 years ago people would think it was science fiction people wouldn't believe it you would have been asking your reader to suspend their disbelief too many times um i think in fiction you get away with it once if you're writing like political thriller type things you can get away with it once they'll take that leap with you but if you continue to do it throughout a whole book four or five times they're not gonna stick with you so yeah but today there's so much crazy over the last year year and a half so much has happened if you just wrote a straight history of 2020 and tried to pass us pass it off as fiction a lot of people would have gone yeah you know it's just it's just fairly believable that all that stuff would have happened in one year yeah i know it's crazy it's crazy and then so in in uh i did a quick prep for this because i've been reading your stuff for so long before we knew each other before we were friends i knew who you were i was reading all your stuff every chance i got with uh the uh books articles online anything i could find i was trying to just devouring it as a combat leader because i thought that was my responsibility as a leader to be able to make those decisions either under fire or even in garrison in preparation for impacting the battlefield that's what i owed my guys i had my guys i had to be a student of history student of insurgencies of counterinsurgencies of terrorism warfare in general but uh but i grabbed the books off the shelf before i uh before we jumped on here and i i opened this one because i was gonna do i did a little skim so here i have all my all my notes and stuff there's alright like this one uh accidental gorilla i opened this one and it's like all yellow the whole thing is highlighted so it's like i might not i should have even used a highlighter because the whole thing is highlighted in there i think i think you were reading that one when you're in the philippines right that's right exactly you were in the middle of that very interesting deployment and uh hooked up on the on the basis of that yeah that was exactly right because that was the first time i really had time to take a take a breath and kind of process what i'd been doing for the previous nine years essentially yeah which was what any large city swat team does every night in uh in los angeles in albuquerque in chicago wherever serving warrants type thing kicking indoors grabbing somebody get bringing them out trying to get intelligence from them in order to go get somebody else um and essentially these different uh you know ied networks and and all the rest of it they looked like what i would had seen in movies of um of police uh in the united states putting together crime families or something like that yeah right who's connected to who all of that stuff so in the philippines was the first time where i could actually study this take a breath and say hey you know i could do this forever in kabul in missoula in baghdad and ramadi wherever um and we could continue to do this for 30 40 50 years that's the first time that i really took a breath and dove into this study and that's exactly when you published accidental gorilla so yeah that whole thing is is all you but i wanted to so i i i opened this and i read page 16 dragons and the snakes which is your your latest book yeah and as i was reading through i'm like oh my goodness i completely forgot that i got the almost exact wording from for the start of the devil's hand which is very academic in nature from this because i did so much research for this uh there was a lot of academic research involved in in the devil's hand the other ones uh not nearly as much but i didn't have any background really in bio weapons or that sort of thing when i started writing this but i read this and talking about the authorization for the use of military force uh which i have in the novel and then i read this part um 19 years later this 275 world revolution resolution passed by congress only seven days after 9 11 and with only two abstentions in the senate and a single nay in the house remains the sole legal basis for an ongoing worldwide uh forever war so anyway i took almost that exact wording and put it in the beginning of the devil's head and i didn't realize with all my where i had got it until about an hour ago when i just pulled this off the shelf uh so thank you uh for people who have read all your novels and all mine um they will find even in the in all the other novels but right here yeah right right right here seven days after 9 11 congress passes so almost exactly word for word yeah that's what happened so thank you so much for that but i remember i went to the resolution i copied and pasted it i did the word count i made sure you know because i cuz everybody can fact check you these days and there's no there's no barriers so uh so thank you so much for that and for people that have read both of our our stuff so much of what i've learned from you ends up in the pages of my novels because my protagonist has a background similar to mine and that just comes across and so a lot of me is in that character and because of uh how much respect i have for you and how much i've learned from you over the years uh that just comes across in the novel so i appreciate you saying that man but i i give you two two areas of kudos one is you know you are the door kicker with the experience doing that i obviously did different stuff um but also like seriously the ability to take dry non-fiction facts and weave them into a you know a historically accurate but still uh engaging narrative like very few people can do that you know every non-fiction author thinks they can write a novel and every publishers like dude and so you know kudos to your mana and and uh i'm a great fan of you of your books and i often sort of chuckle when i when i i read something i'm like oh all right in a slightly non-fictionalized form yeah that's it yeah there's a few of them in that first one crosscut targeting made it into the uh to the first novel uh in a sentence or two in there so uh yeah i guess so much of what i learned from you became a part of me that a lot of times it's almost like i'm so far behind i think i'm first i've heard that that journalist like like you're out there in the front and some of these things i've been studying for so long that i almost think that i came up with them when in fact uh you know they're they're all you so so thank you for well i'm gonna get i'm gonna give you a blanket endorsement right now to use any of my stuff that you don't want um uh you know put in a footnote or anything you're in the back you're in all the acknowledgements of course and all the rest of it uh but before we get to uh dragons and the snakes and all the rest of this stuff um for people that might not be uh familiar with your with your background how did you get up to the the point well of dragons and snakes but really up to um the the 28 articles like where did you from australian military up through uh through that time frame 2006 2007 time frame um what was that path like for you yeah well you know the great question for those that are on in our business you know i i um to explain my accent right i'm an american now that i straightened my background and um was in the australian military and the way that it worked back in the 80s when i graduated from the academy was that everyone had to do an asian language and um i did my sort of language test and tested out fairly high so i just finished my um my platoon command and the army's like right you're going to language school i was like jesus so i ended up going to language school i did indonesian ended up being trained to do what we call security force assistance a foreign internal defense uh so working with a foreign military that has a a threat um and helping them to sort of uh get a grip of it and so i went out as a young captain in the 90s all over indonesia working with the indonesians and at that point it was pretty quiet it was a military dictatorship at that point um we had yet to see the democratization that's been really amazing in indonesia in the last 20 years or so but i became pretty quickly aware that there was this entire um islamic extremist separatist organization that had existed in the 50s and 60s and arguably still existed in indonesia that had never really been written about um you know in in the academic world and i was have just started my phd on political anthropology so i sort of pitched the army on i'd like to do this study of islamic extremism and terrorist insurgency and the army was like dude no you know why are you doing that it's you know it's irrelevant you know it's post-cold war environment under what possible circumstances would we ever fight you know islamic insurgents so anyway eventually i talked them into it and they let me do it but they never gave me a day off or a dollar i just did it all on my own time while you know commanding a company and i was s3 of a like equivalent to a range of battalion and doing all that stuff um but then 911 happened and uh immediately uh people probably remember just after 9 11 there was a big spike of activity in indonesia and in october of 2002 there was really big uh terrorist bombing on the island of bali that actually killed more australians proportionally by population than 9 11 uh killed americans and it really engaged the government very heavily and okay we've got to do something about this everyone's like does anyone know anything about these guys and then the army were like oh yeah we we have a guy right well so where's that guy we told not to do that phd program they're like suddenly i was like they're you know the song of their president uh genius and not look i'm proud of that so i i went off um i was about to command a battalion but got sort of sidetracked and ended up in the intelligence community uh helping to respond to the barley bombing but it was also early days of afghanistan and iraq and after about a year or so i wrote a paper essentially saying look the iraq war is killing us right it's making more terrorists than we can kill it's generating this kind of cascading set of effects globally that are just making things a lot worse and we must get a grip of iraq or everything else is just pointless and a guy called paul wolfowitz who was the deputy secretary of defense in the pentagon at the time read that and sort of wrote to the aussies and said hey can we we borrow dave to come and help you know work on the there's this thing called the qdr the quadrennial defense review every four years um the pentagon has to put together a sort of strategic review for congress so they brought me over for that um i ended up getting seconded to the u.s state department counterterrorism bureau from there i ended up being working on the counter-insurgency manual which people were building at the time um and a general call david petraeus who was in charge of the um commander staff college out at leavenworth was writing that and then he got the gig to command uh multinational force iraq and asked the aussies if he could have me to come with him and i ended up sort of in there uh advising around the surge in 2007. um and you know i i often get misdescribed as petraeus as advisor right petraeus didn't need any advice on counterinsurgency i mean he literally wrote the book on it um my main job was to be out on the ground with the iraqi units and our guys and basically sort of like an on-field coaching job helping people figure out okay this is how we've been doing it this is the new construct and how do we how do we change what we're doing and about halfway through that was when the awakening happened right the sahua where the iraqi sunni tribes and you remember this from your own time there right turned against uh al-qaeda and you know people like to put a lot of credit on the counter-insurgency doctrine and the extra troops and all that that's all true but the real decisive thing in iraq was was the awakening and if that hadn't happened we we would have been defeated there you know 15 years ago of course we managed to snatch uh success from the jaws of defeat and then you know lost it again in a year or two when we decided to pull out and just let it all go to go to hell um and then we had to do it all over again with isis so anyway i that's how i got into what i'm doing now i left the government in 2010 uh started a firm called cordiera that does this stuff in africa and uh latin america and southeast asia and uh we do a lot of other stuff too but that's my sort of core expertise is helping people deal with um let's say complex social problems while getting shot at yeah yeah this will be a good summary yeah yeah no it's amazing what's always impressed me so much about about you is that you can you have that tactical level experience and you have that strategic level experience uh and you can speak at both levels and very few people can do that some people at that talk at that strategic level the people that they're talking to at the tactical level know they've never done anything down there know that their their touch point down here was like 1987 exercise uh you know in germany or something like that and you yeah and there's a lot of stuff where people have something that briefs well on powerpoint but it doesn't necessarily work on the ground i i like to say reality is tactical right so you can be as strategic as you like but unless you understand what it looks like how it works you know what a guy's what's going through a guy's head as he's kicking that door down um then you're possibly harming people by coming up with these ideas that you know seem like a good idea but don't necessarily work in practice so i always like to you know field test everything with guys like you but others that do the business you know um and i like to do the business myself whenever i can because that's the only way you stay current you know yeah now you're made and what i love about these is that every now and again you give a glimpse of some of those really cool personal stories that you have uh that i know about because we've talked but uh but they're not if there's not an autobiography type thing yet and there's that would be amazing at some point because there's so many touch points in all of these where i'm like oh i want to know more about that or i remember when we talked about that over drinks and that would make a great story there's some great lessons there but uh so were the 28 uh articles was was that um so here's the uh counter-insurgency field manual right now were those born of of that of this because this was what was the i mean i mean they all came from you but was this too too strategic in nature for that person that's out there that's just has a few minutes before he goes out on patrol and someone hands him this book in 2007. yeah i think they put the 28 articles in is in his appendix to that but it had already been published by the marine corps review and um in fact that counter-insurgency manual the first one fn324 of 2006 was a real group effort of a lot of um super smart people and i was sort of involved in it and i helped with it but you know i wasn't one of the major authors because i was busy you know in iraq right um but uh it's certainly you know it's worth a read even now uh because it captures a lot of the the core ideas but no 28 articles came about because of a really smart couple of marine corps captains um i'm sitting in my office in the state department one day in the county terrorism bureau there's a knock on the door and these two guys come in one's a guy called by the name of scott cuomo there's a couple others and they say look we're instructing out at quantico and we've seen all the sort of higher level strategic stuff about um you know how to achieve various high-level goals and counter-insurgency what it doesn't give you is the concrete detail of like how to do it um and would you be willing to kind of you know give us some pointers on that and as it happened i had to go to a meeting that afternoon in the pentagon and uh the guy i was supposed to meet stood me up he had another meeting come up you know that happens so i ended up sitting in a starbucks near the pentagon with like two hours to kill i didn't want to go back to the state department you know so i pulled out a little black notebook and i just started writing down all my sort of key points that i would have told those marine captains about how to think about what to do and i organized it in sort of chronological order happened to be 28 points and for people in my business there's a famous article by t.e lawrence called the 27 articles right which is his description of how to do guerrilla warfare against the turks in world war one and i'm like oh i have 28. so i said i win articles homage to uh to t lawrence not that i'd ever be in his category but you know just to kind of you know uh link it so a lot of guys read 27 27 27 articles by lawrence with 28 articles by me and i'm like well i wanted to be in the same company but you know he actually uh you know had a an amazing history in world war one but i i'd argue you should read probably both in uh you know together um but yeah that's how it came about and i went home from that starbucks and i basically drank about half a bottle of a freak that night stayed up until about two in the morning just wrote it up you know on my computer and sent it out and originally it was an email um and it just sort of went around like sort of sam is that under army captains and and uh around the marine corps and then i get this call from the marine corps review and they're like hey can you can you write that up as an article so i ended up putting it out i guess april six maybe it's about a year and a bit before the um the coin manual came out and about a year before the search and i think um it's funny because you put a lot of work into books right but sometimes it's the thing that you chunk out you know in one night without bolo whiskey that that is most resonant and part of it is because it's practical right it's like here's what you do first right then do this think about this you know try to kind of give people a how-to guide but i also tried to caveat it to say like this is what i know from the campaigns i've done uh when you get out on the ground this is only ever going to be a very rough guide and you've got to figure it out for yourself right and that that's a message that i think has resonated with a lot of people over the years years ago now yeah i know it's crazy our time is flying and here it's captured here in uh encounter insurgency um right there i think you can yeah see it right there but um yeah this is all my books i don't know what's going on i have to get my publisher to send you a card or whiskey please hey i won't turn it down uh but uh this one i put these on my uh the professional reading list that i was asked to put together before i left the military for the naval special warfare center i don't know if they actually implemented it or not um but uh but i put all those books that had uh impacted me and the ones that i'd recommended over the years uh to junior officers to chiefs to anybody that expressed an interest um and uh and turn that into this professional reading list right here and all um your books of course a couple of them weren't out then when i was back in the military but uh but all these books are required reading as far as i'm concerned for any student of warfare whether they're going to be a practitioner of that or they're going to be a policy maker or they're going to be sending out a tweet uh on on on this subject that's going to be read by one person or 10 million people it doesn't matter um these are absolutely fantastic right here and jumping back to david petraeus um really quickly there was something that happened in i think it was afghanistan in 2011 where uh you got your hands on a uh an al-qaeda after action report that described you as petraeus australian mercenary that's right it was actually it was actually a report from iraq um but people were sort of passing it around and it's interesting right because we think about terrorists as being you know on the one hand you think of them as sort of depraved psychos which is actually not true most of the time and then we also tend to think of them as kind of ten feet tall evil geniuses and the truth is you know they what what they are is a learning organization that's continually adapting uh to a really hostile environment and people that don't adapt fast enough die so you know it's sort of combat darwinism right and the the guys we're fighting 20 years into the war on terrorism by definition the smart and the lucky and the cunning and the adaptive guys are still out there and the stupid and unlucky are dead so they put a lot of effort into adaptation and lessons learned much as a professional military organization does and basically one of my analysts found this thing is like hey look at this and basically it was an after-action review by a group in iraq about why they lost during the search and talking about the different elements that made it hard for them to operate and then recommending some ideas for the afghan taliban and others about how to react to the u.s surge in afghanistan which was about to happen so it's a classic example of you know cross-pollination of information amongst different groups um and about you know how really the common feature here is that they're learning they're adapting all the time this stuff never stays still and again back to your earlier point that's why you have to be in the field all the time and stay current because you know stuff that you did a week ago or two weeks ago um is out of date and by definition if something works once it's a lot less likely to work you know a second or a third or a tenth time um and yeah they described me as petraeus as australian mercenary i'm like no you know i i'll take that yeah no that's a good one i like that one is what the enemy says about you that's uh that's uh most honest that's pretty cool we should frame that one i think it was i think it was an unclassified because they just put that out there on their channels that's a good one to frame i love it uh that's fantastic uh but yeah i found that also that um obviously it's important to be anything whether it's military or business whatever to be a learning organization and on the ground in iraq and afghanistan the enemy could adapt a little quicker than we could because we are still even in special operations we were a bureaucracy yeah and thank you you know i remember just to tell a brief story during the battle of amaria which is in june of 2007 in in downtown baghdad a great cavalry officer by the name of dale cool had uh the district of amaria and as part of that battle he ended up working with local guys who are fighting al-qaeda and one of the big issues as you know was figuring out how to tell the guys that were working with us from you know the other iraqis who are also in civilian clothes also carrying the same weapons fighting in the same area so one of these units got um you know those uh reflective sashes that army guys wear when they go running yes i heard that i don't have to do that on some basis anymore i actually wrote that into my last novel really i did uh yeah i know but yeah point being i know those reflective vests yeah and uh so they basically cut them up into little reflective squares and they got them to stick them on their backs so they had like a um uh some means of sort of telling them apart this happened at like maybe 8 p.m like dawn the next day all the al-qaeda guys had them too right within one night they found out about it figured out what's going on fabricated their own got them out there and before the sun comes up al-qaeda's doing it too you know that's how quick they were adapting um and that i would argue islamic state you know successor to aqi is probably the most resilient and adaptive organization that i've ever encountered you know um friendly our enemy right um and without in any way seeking to copy their methods we could learn a lot from the way that they adapt you know um because as you said we're slow we're dinosaurs to their mammals you know yep no exactly i mean they can pivot on a dime it seems um particularly id technology as soon as we counter that they're figuring out a way around it that's that game of constant adaptation and we're both looking for for gaps in each other's defenses we're both looking to capitalize on momentum um and continually adapt faster obviously than uh meanwhile you've got great power actors like china and russia and iran to some extent looking at what we're doing and going yeah i'll take some of that i'll take some of that and they're copying from our methods but also copying from our adversaries and sort of sitting to one side letting us fight each other for the last 20 years and you know exploiting that that and that became the basis for my fourth novel uh what the enemy has learned by watching us on the field of battle for the last 20 years and um and i always wanted to write something about that because i thought a lot about that during my time in uniform i continued to think about that as a citizen as an as an author um what the enemy is learning by watching because we've been essentially playing poker for the last 20 years here and they've been looking at our cards seeing how we play those cards taking notes seeing what works seeing what doesn't uh that's a long period of time to be able to do that um and in the novel i look at two distinctly different periods i go back about 1979 to 1953 briefly but 79 to 2001 2001 onward and i have some older managers talking about iran yeah and uh what had some characters that are older that grew up during that time in the 80s uh and early 90s and what did they learn during that time frame and then what did they learn during that next uh period is when we were talking about about terrorism that that different paradigm there what do they learn in those two distinctly different periods um and that brings yeah dragons and the snakes i mean that's uh yeah that's and and point being i wanted to always write about that so it was in my wheelhouse and then i talked to somebody in uh in argentina in 2017 uh who mentioned a few things about security pre-911 and airports and post 911 in airports and i started thinking about those things and then i figured okay now is the time to to sit down and write this novel and then that's right about the time that this came out so early 2020 uh dragons and the snakes comes out and i'm reading it and that really framed how i wanted to explore those themes in this fourth novel um and that's all due to that's all due to you from not just me man i mean i know you get out and talk to a lot of people and you you have a lot of your own field research too but i'm happy to contribute a little bit yeah wow it was fantastic it really brought all that together for me as i started down the path of writing this but um when you say the dragons and the snakes for uh for those who haven't read the book what are you what are you talking about well it's actually not my phrase it comes from jim woolsey who was uh president clinton's first cia director and uh when he was doing his confirmation hearing so if you want to be the head of an agency um and get nominated by the president you have to be approved by the senate and you go through a whole process for that and when woolsey was giving his um confirmation testimony in february of 1993 so about maybe 15 months after the the end of the cold war uh one of the people on the on the committee said well how do you see the next 10 years of sort of post-cold war environment and he said we've slain a large dragon talking about the soviet union but now we find ourselves in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of snakes and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of so by dragon he means you know peer adversary great power states with nuclear weapons you know like the soviet union by dragons he goes on to talk about basically weak states failing states and non-state actors so when i decided to write this book the first person that i spoke to was actually jim woolsey and i met with him a couple times as i was writing the book he's a fabulous guy very knowledgeable on all kinds of different ranges of threats not shy about expressing his point of view you know um not in any way politically correct you know it's very very direct and we had a great conversation about basically how we screwed it up right and how um ideas that were pretty obvious to them in the 1990s we somehow lost that during the war on terror and basically the argument of the book is for 10 years after the cold war from 91 to 2001 we focused on snakes right um weak states nonsense actors failing states you know rwanda somalia liberia you know all the stuff we did in the 1990s after 9 11 we narrowed that focus to just one snake you know international jihadist terrorism and we had such a narrow focus that everybody else was able to adapt around us and do all that learning that we've just been talking about today we're in like a post warsian environment where the dragons are back china russia you know to some extent iran and north korea but really china and russia are back in a great power um competition i hear people saying we should avoid getting into a cold war with the chinese dude we are already in a cold war with the chinese we've been in one they've been in one with us for years we just have just started to wake up um and so what i wanted to show is how china russia all of the terrorist organizations iran the north koreans how they've learned in that period since um since woolsey so basically i have a chapter where i talk a lot about non-state actors and how they learn and have a theory chapter you know talking about application of a bunch of ideas from evolutionary theory right to how people adapt in a war fighting environment um and then i have a big long chapter on russia a big one on china and shorter ones on uh on on around north korea for the russia chapter i actually went up to the arctic border between norway and russia that was fascinating like i wanted to take that and just do another book on that i feel like i should not read when they come out read them cover to cover i should just pick a chapter and then start my next novel like just get a spark or something to explore and start that next chapter but that was fascinating yeah what so what inspired you to go to go up there as part of this research was there something that stuck out yeah so well a couple of things one i love the norwegians i don't know if you've worked with them i haven't but i always wanted to i missed that part they're just fantastic and um for an army their size of a nation their size i'd say no one beats them in terms of quality and particularly their special forces are just outstanding and um the norwegians played a really big role in a number of the campaigns obviously since 9 11. i knew a bunch of guys um from afghanistan and elsewhere and i've been invited to go to oslo um to speak at a conference talking about the future of uh potential conflict with the russians and i was like oh come and you don't have to pay me of course but um i'll do a little contra deal take me up to the russian border there's a special unit up there uh it's sort of like um you know elves running around at the border of mordor uh you know hanging out in the forest with the eye of sauron looking at them um these tiny little units about 600 people very elite you're about 400 miles north of the arctic circle it's all forest and swamp and tundra and on the other side is basically the entire russian arctic you know northern fleet plus about three divisions of airborne troops and motor rifle troops this huge amount of russian firepower uh on the other side of this tiny little border and half of it is um water it's a little small boat type uh river and half of it is forest so i managed to go out with these guys for a few days and um talk to them they hide in these little ops keep keeping an eye on the russians that are moving around by small boat um and i managed to you know ride about half the border on quad bike uh in the in the forest right up to the edge of the of the border like a couple of feet from from russia what's astounding when you see that is how much gear the russians have up there right in terms of like electronic attack um uh sophisticated aircraft there's a whole nuclear submarine bastion up there but they've also got like an entire brigade of vdv so airborne troops that can like drop in with with weapons i got like a assault hovercraft there's all this stuff out there um and but also when you look at it you realize that their border even 30 years after the fall of the soviet union is not designed to keep people out it's designed to keep people in um so it's a very interesting sort of verdict on you know modern russia when you think about it but the interesting thing about that area is there's a lot of russian speaking norwegians there are a lot of norwegians who actually fought with the russians against the germans in world war ii um you know people from if you've ever been to norway bring your own alcohol because it costs like a bomb to buy like a bottle of whiskey up there okay i don't mind yeah it's ridiculous so people and petrol too so people drive across the border into russia all the time to get vodka and gasoline right wow meanwhile russians come into uh kirkness which is the big town up there to get diapers for some reason the russian they're gonna make a decent diaper that years after communism and that and they and to get you know aircraft flights to go to the rest of europe so there's a lot of cross-border traffic there's intelligence activity goes on um there's cross-border movement a few years ago 5 000 afghan and middle eastern refugees came across the border in basically one two week period uh in this one little crossing point up there in the arctic and it's like how did they get there you know well they had help you know and a lot of what the russians have been doing to the europeans and to us and to others i think um you can see that happening on the ground up in in norway and again i always like to make it concrete so people can have a visual right and what are we actually talking about here you can talk in sort of platitudes about the generic nature of it but um you know people uh you can lose people on that so i try to be as concrete as i can i'll just say i'm not one of these people who believes that you know president trump was a russian asset or that the russians hacked the election i i don't think that's true um i don't think there's ever been any good evidence for it what there is good evidence for is the russians manipulated our political polarization with a technique they call reflexive control as a way of getting us to shout at each other so they could do all the things they wanted to do in places like syria and africa and ukraine uh and elsewhere you know so i think it's worth bearing in mind that sometimes we're our own worst enemies when we make these guys out to be you know 10 feet tall and bulletproof the russians are they have some serious weaknesses um and i think uh that equally goes for the chinese um i didn't write about it very much when i wrote the china chapter i spent a bit of time out in new guinea and out in the pacific uh various places in southeast asia and latin america and africa and it's astounding how much the chinese have expanded into that space so we can talk about that if you want but the the russian stuff um i find fascinating the russians are a lot easier for us to understand than the chinese are i think no i think you're you're absolutely right on that point and that the few paragraphs that you have on uh why there was russian meddling in uh an election the distraction all that stuff the division that that caused so they could do these other things i mean every single chat every single paragraph in these are they're so good there's so much there's so much value in every single sentence here but for the country as a whole to read those couple paragraphs that you have about that i think would be so therapeutic for people that are at each other's throats about these things because they read an uninformed you know tweet or an article that's meant to divide or manipulate um but i mean that that's everybody should read that for just that couple of those couple paragraphs it's so yeah so valuable it is it is very sad what they've been able to do and i think you know i'm i'm happy to be an american but i just got here right and i i don't really have an opinion on u.s domestic politics i try to focus on what i what i know well but even i looking at that can see like hey this is totally you know uh exaggerated and polarized for political gain and it isn't helping the country it's actually making things you know a lot worse um and interestingly if you go to somewhere like ukraine or even norway or finland what you see is that this technique of pitting people against each other is a classic russian technique and they do it all over the place right it's not unique to the us and you don't need you know a russian asset in the white house you know that's completely unnecessary right and i always you know notice when everyone brings this up with putin he just laughs right he's not laughing out of some kind of like you know dr evil he's laughing at the sheer naivete of thinking that you actually need to do that you know i mean it's it's so easy to manipulate a modern democracy uh you know just because the way we operate yeah the way it's structured but uh you know it's been a year since i read over a year since i read dragons and snakes um but uh i didn't know about that norwegian i mean i knew about norwegian involvement was a special operations executive and all that sort of thing in world war ii and that's fascinating but i didn't know about the russian side of it on the allied part like that was that was fast i had no idea that was that was in there yeah thousands of norwegians went to went to the soviet union came back and invaded northern norway with the russian army in 1945 and for most of the cold war the norwegian government treated them like they were more or less criminals right i mean guys who were in the norwegian resistance against the nazis on the western side got medals and pensions and had movies made about them you know heroes yeah um and meanwhile there's this whole other thing that went on up in the north and you know i've heard people say that you can still drive around up there and those people are the descendants will like flip you the bird if you're a norwegian because they got they got screwed over yeah um and they're you know they're loyal norwegians right but um they were treated like you know a fifth column for most of the whole war now the norwegian government to its credit um remedied that you know after the cold war okay um and it took a while that took a while yeah yeah totally yeah that was fascinating i hadn't studied that side of that now i'm always very uh interested so interested in special operations in general and then that cold weather warfare side of it particularly what happened uh up there during world war i absolutely that's that's definitely a growth area right i mean you would assume um there's a lot of saber rattling going on in the arctic um russians have an incredibly um aggressive approach to um international waters and to the you know the dominance of particular parts of territory up there the chinese have now had themselves declared an a near arctic power which is kind of amusing because the closest they get to the arctic is about roughly where pittsburgh is you know but they um they've had themselves declared that way they've got icebreakers and all kinds of stuff going on and then you know my own home command special operations command down in australia they they're starting to focus very heavily on the antarctic threat um yeah and the fact that we you know i think we've all been used to running around deserts and cities for the last 20 years that's going to continue you know i wrote a whole book on urban warfare i think that's definitely going to be the way of the future but we're going to have to master some uh let's call them special environments that we haven't had much to do with in the last 20 years and one of those is definitely um arctic and cold weather i think you just gave me my idea for see i'm writing book five now i have book six already uh outlined so i know where it's going i found that helps me that i'm not wasting bandwidth worried about how i'm gonna end one book and start another so that's already done but i think you've given me an idea for book uh seven or eight so i'm gonna have to dive into that a little more hemingway mate you know hemingway had this thing about you should never stop writing for the day too you know what you're going to say next there we go that's perfect and it does help because then i'm not worried about wasting that bandwidth and tiring myself out but uh you know talking about the domestic side of the house um uh a little bit here so in writing this novel about what the enemies learn by watching us what are they incorporating into their future battle plans all those things uh i got to about october november of 2020 and i ran into a problem because i put myself in the enemy's shoes from august of 2019 when i first outlined the book started doing all this web research into bioweapons got into january february read your book kind of narrowed things down a little bit continued that research and writing throughout the year and as i'm finishing up in october november 2020 i realized wow if i was the enemy i wouldn't do much right now i would just kind of sit back and watch because we're doing a pretty good job of tearing ourselves apart from the inside out and so i had to then figure out a way in a fictional sense to uh to make it necessary for the enemy to strike now which i which i did figure out which is part of the fun of writing these things is you're aggressively solving problems on the written page the same way i would have on the battlefield but if i mess it up on the written page it's okay no one's coming home in a in a body bag but um but that was the problem i had i got to that point and kind of red selling this from the outside that's what i came up with like just watch for a little while longer inside you do not need to assume that the chinese or the russians or any other out of the iranians or any other extraneous actor owns or is manipulating some player in u.s politics right you just have to see that they're looking at us and just gently nudging you know both sides to get people to be more aggressive to each other and help to tear us down and frankly they've got a lot of assistance from elites right in the us and one of my questions in my mind and it's an open question is whether a country can survive when its own elite seems to hate it right i was really struck by the meaning that just happened up in alaska between um our state department and and uh and the chinese where the chinese launched this blistering attack on the us and every one of their talking points came out of the editorial pages of the new york times right so like what do you do when your own leaders and your own sort of uh quote-unquote elites um legacy media let's say um are pushing a narrative that's the same narrative that the adversary is well you flip that around the adversary doesn't need to make up their own stuff they just replay what the new york times is already saying right or cnn is already saying and that's that's a technique again it's it's a recognized information warfare technique developed by the russians during the cold war it's not some nefarious weird thing it's you know you can read academic books on it that were written 20 years ago um so you know that's the that's the thing i think we have to be worried about the other thing i would just comment on um with respect to 2020 is you know as you guys know uh and i'm sure you've talked about it with others on the podcast there's been a debate about the origins of covid um i do not have any more knowledge than anyone else does but certainly looking at it sort of a bayesian you know best fit of all the data that we have available i've always felt like the best fit theory was a accidental leak from a lab right um i don't at all discount the sort of you know what i call zoonotic origin you know animal origin but um certainly there's elements about it that suggests to me that it might have been an accidental lab league i'm not one of those guys who thinks it was a deliberate chinese bio weapon right but having said that china's got one of the most active bio-warfare programs on the planet they have actively engaged in human performance enhancement with a variety of military objectives uh the first major military group they sent to wuhan after the outbreak of the flu was their was from their bio warfare command and look at what's happened over the last you know 12 months uss um eisenhower was essentially out of action for about six weeks anderson air force base on guam was massively disrupted for a couple of months uh the french aircraft carrier the shoulder ball got knocked out of action for a couple of months as well the effect of that virus on not just the western economy but on particularly maritime and air assets had a huge impact and i would just suggest that if the chinese bio warfare guys are not currently right now studying this and saying hey if that's what we could achieve with an accidental release of a non-wether weaponized pathogen imagine what we could do with a deliberate release of something that was tailored for you know particular effect then they're guilty of military malpractice if they're not doing that right so i think the next time this happens um you know we're going to be dealing with adversaries who have learned a lot not just about masks and you know vaccination and lockdowns but about how to weaponize stuff in a way that generates the most disruptive effect on already polarized um western societies so you know this is a if it wasn't in the repertoire of our adversaries a year ago it absolutely is now and i think it's something to be thinking about very hard um as we go forward oh absolutely that's uh as i was writing this book with the basis being what the enemy has learned by watching us on the field of battle well i start writing this and then covet hits so being in the enemy's shoes i have to go okay what are they learning from our response to kovit so that makes its way into the novel then we hit a summer of civil unrest once again they're not just looking at that and with passing interest seeing it on a headline and then going on to their next thing they're learning from that and then we have a very contentious political season an election cycle of course they're learning from that so as i'm writing this novel because i had no idea in 2019 when i outlined it that 2020 was going to be such a pivotal year in the history of this country and the world but the enemy was learning from those things and it just became natural for me to weave those in to the storyline and when and in researching the bioweapons side of the house i had no touch points with that while i was in the military but in doing this research in academic journals and uh in just chapters and books here and there interviews with people um and the interviews was fascinating because it's the first time that i think i did what maybe a journalist would do when talking to one source and then they leave out something because they don't want to tell you everything but then you talk to somebody else that does a similar thing they leave something out but that's what the other guy put in so then you get to weave this thing together and put these puzzle pieces together which is what i did for the for the novel here but uh but the enemy is certainly learning by watching us over this last year and absolutely incorporating these lessons into their battle plan and you know i i would just say it's it's a feature of american political discourse and the way we like to think about ourselves that we we think we were just uniquely sucky right at dealing with covert um yeah we were terrible our response was horrible actually if you look at it u.s was in the middle of the pack um european nations did really badly uh a lot of places in africa and south america and and south east asia have really struggled a few notable countries taiwan um hong kong initially but not lately um you know australia new zealand have done well on a health standpoint but everyone screwed up something everyone's suffered and i think we we can sort of be a little bit narcissistic sometimes and say well you know we're just we're just uniquely bad and this is not true right um and i think we need to sort of give ourselves a bit of credit sometimes that uh you know perhaps the u.s is is not as as evil and satanic and systemically bad as people tend to think it is yeah i agree and forgiveness is a very powerful tool as well and no matter what you're dealing with whether it's personal or or professional um but uh i mean i'm with you on the the accidental relief back in i was on joe rogan's podcast where i mentioned your book by the way in uh in april of last year when the last novel came out absolutely of course my goodness uh it's everything's been so so impactful but we talked about that and i said that yeah if you were a detective and uh in any country in the world and you had something happen uh let's say a a virus escapes in a general vicinity of a lab that does similar type research we would want we call that a clue and you'd want to maybe ask a few questions maybe look into that that sort of thing i mean that's uh you know and there is precedent of course for uh for labs having unintentional leaks in the former soviet union uh in our country um happens all the time and it's recognized as having happened dozens of times from from chinese labs right and people may not be catching up may not be keeping up with the chinese sort of propaganda narrative but um they are no longer saying that it was an accidental you know animal-based wet market thing that was their original story now they're saying it isn't even chinese it came from outside there's one story that they're pushing that says it came in frozen food from europe to china right this is stuff that's just not in any way believable um and you know right now the chinese are massively smacking the aussies with all this incredible um bullying behavior on the economic front because canberra had the temerity that literally asked the question hey we would like to have an independent investigation into the origin of the uh of the wuhan flu so you know it when you're reacting that way to someone literally just asking the question it tends to signal that you've got something to hide you know so you know i'd be more than happy to discount the accidental lab leak if they would allow us to investigate and identify what really did happen right um so you know i mean it it's in common with many other things people that try to stifle debate and prevent anyone from even asking the question they don't shut down people's doubts they just make themselves look insecure and that can long term you know undermine their credibility and i think that's what's happened to china i mean you know international perceptions of the chinese have created in the last 12 months uh in large part because of this right which they inflicted on on the world i mean at the same time that china had shut down internal travel from wuhan to everywhere else in china they were still encouraging travelers to come into china and leave china to go to the united states and elsewhere i was breathtakingly irresponsible behavior right even if it wasn't a uh deliberate leak so you know i think there's let's just say there's questions to answer right uh and until people are held accountable what i worry about is next time around we won't have learned the lessons we need to protect ourselves when we get a flu that could be much more dangerous than than this one oh yeah that's what we mean as we owe it at the tactical level to pass on lessons to the next group coming in or to the military as a whole and at the strategic level that's what our leaders also owe us is making the best decisions possible at that strategic level like you talk about understanding the nature of the conflict in which you're engaged well our senior level leaders uh at the initial at the outset after 9 11 and when we entered iraq they didn't do that they didn't put that i mean maybe they put the time in but they certainly didn't take the lessons and apply those lessons moving forward as wisdom they missed that so in this case we have an opportunity we've had a full year to look back on and to uh to look at data and to look at the decisions that were made to see the outcomes of those decisions and then to apply that going forward that knowledge going forward is wisdom so i hope that we can do that yeah and i hope we can and take and you know take the domestic partisan politics out of it and be just like you know look yeah we all have different political points of view but let's figure out what really did happen you know which you know i i have the quaint old-fashioned belief that there is such a thing as objective truth right and we need to try and figure that out and you know truth is whatever to quote philip k dick right another great author um the reality is that with which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away that's fine right um so it doesn't really matter whether you uh whether you believe a particular narrative or another it's you know there's real facts and they're going to bite you in the ass if you if you don't take cognizance of them yeah i mean going back to the frozen food coming into wuhan that sort of thing it is so much and i don't say easier is the wrong word it's always i never i try to avoid saying easier but there are so many more options today when you're trying to manipulate a populace than there was were in say 1955 1965 1975. um although over time there become more and more ways to do it let's say in 1955 if you're trying to influence somebody well maybe you black you have blackmail on a reporter at the at the new york times or you pay a reporter at the new york times to put out a story that is uh says what you want it to say well now with the this connectivity that we have with all these different platforms and ways to communicate uh influencers who don't do their research that don't put the time energy and effort into the study of history uh they a lot easier to manipulate a populace today uh so i think if you understand that if you take a breath as a citizen and realize that uh that that's out there that that those forces are at play and you are probably being manipulated uh today because there are so many more ways to do it than there were 30 40 50 years ago um the manipulation's still at work but there are more ways to reach you almost continuously all day every day if you're connecting one of the sources i quoted my my book described it as a fire hose of falsehood right just this continuous stream of that you get from um all sides and it's incredibly difficult you know i'm a trained intelligence officer and i still have trouble figuring out how to you know how to grade different sources in terms of you know access placement accuracy you know intent to manipulate all those kinds of things things that you know i would love to live in a world where you didn't have to apply analytical tradecraft to the mass media but unfortunately that's not the world we live in right you do have to sift through this stuff and you know i i often um because i do a lot of work in places like africa and and latin america i have personal phone first-hand knowledge from stuff on the ground and i often find when i'm reading you know the mainstream media uh the bits that i know well i'll be like yeah that ain't right and that's not true and that isn't correct and then when i go to the next thing i'm like well how do i know that they are any more accurate on this other stuff than on the stuff that i know where i know they're not accurate trust me it's all about that that trust right we have very little trust in our media and i think uh i mean i think either it's pew research polling or it's uh rand corporation studies but uh i think trust in the united states government was at an all-time high right around 1962-63 somewhere in somewhere in there it went to an all-time low although i haven't checked recently um right around 1979-80 right right about that that time in the carter administration uh i would actually apart from now right yeah exactly i would venture that today we're probably in that same area as far as trust and government trust in our institutions trust in our media i think we i think we've actually gotten to a place where there's been this kind of collapse of confidence in elites and experts and institutions of all kinds and look mate i mean you and i are not not guiltless here right because part of this is military because we've spent 20 years chasing little non-state actors around iraq and afghanistan and libya and you know all these other places and the mass media and so-called experts keep on telling the american people we've got the best military that has ever existed there's never been anything like it best military in history uh and at the same time they can see with their own eyes that we just can't close the deal right in iraq and afghanistan and elsewhere and at some point people start to go hey you so-called experts you're all full of right um and i think that's you know it's part of a bigger pattern right it applies to every aspect of society but i i think we have our part in that too and that's why we've got to be upfront about what we know we don't know you know um because i think that there's only so much more of this that we can take before society really starts to come apart at the sims oh yeah no at the tactical level like we're pretty good at kicking in those doors we're pretty good at that level but uh we're talking about we're talking about something besides that now you have a great chapter in here um where you reference uh uh right first rise and kill first um yeah which is right riley journalist yeah a really good amazing book and he had the secret war with iran is another one of his his books uh used both of those in research for my last novel as well but uh you reference him in that exact context as far as how what the israelis did particularly in the in the 80s um and up to like 2002 and seeing how uh how their their tactical level uh pursuit and target assassination program yeah it took a lot of people off the battlefield very successful but the enemy in turn now we're having more attacks because everything speeds up that process speeds up so is that successful strategically so we have that same problem in our country totally and you know in that part of the book where i talk about the uh sort of adaptive adaptation of evolution of um hezbollah and the palestinian groups i also quote this great documentary which if people have an opportunity to watch it i strongly recommend it's called the gatekeepers uh and basically a couple of israeli filmmakers uh interviewed all the surviving heads of the shin bet which is israel's internal security service and one of them who i quote in the book said look we were we were killing all these guys but it was point specific it was all tactics no strategy right and i think you could apply the same uh lessons to us i would just say that at the military level sort of military instrument of power as we say in the business really the u.s is is unparalleled right i mean i i have been counting seven or eight um counter insurgency or irregular warfare campaigns that i've personally fought in i've worked with 17 different militaries i've never seen a military that's better at the tactical level at defeating an irregular adversary than the us military the problem is not that the military can't defeat the adversary the problem is that the nation can't take that military success and then translate it into a piece that serves our our objectives right so it's like we just can't close the deal you think about afghanistan we've repeatedly defeated the taliban in battle probably four or five times right the guys we're fighting today in afghanistan are sons of or younger brothers or guys that we killed 10 years ago or 15 years ago we're in the sort of taliban 5.0 at this point every time we defeat them on the battlefield they recuperate and we just can't seem to politically and diplomatically come up with a solution so frankly the military's done a great job in re reforming itself and trying to improve but if the problem's not a fundamentally military problem well that's not going to help us right and i think the problem really lies in us as a nation and the way we think about war and the way that so few of our leaders have any direct experience of it um you know there's great congress people like mark waltz or alyssa slocum who have you know combat experience in afghanistan and iraq or served in the cia has elicited but they're a rare exception right and the majority of these people are you know octogenarians who manage to avoid any form of military service in their very long lives and that it's all theory to them you know and it is not theory to our adversaries and i think that's that's part of the problem yep snatching that defeat from the jaws of victory again and so i want to be cognizant in your time because i so i didn't get to one of my questions i wrote down a bunch i didn't get to one of them so so we're gonna have to do this uh again at some point and now i want to talk about mumbai i want to talk about a whole bunch of different things but uh because we did touch on china i love when you talk about in uh in the book your most recent book when you're sitting at the hotel del coronado having a cocktail and because i thought all from before i even well my first day stepping on the quarter deck at seal team five um was i looked up and the hotel dell's a little farther down but right there when you look up from the grinder this very open area uh where you lay out all your gear get ready to go on deployment or training trips you look up and you see these things called the shores which are i think they're built in the 70s it looks like 1970s style architecture kind of an eyesore but these very tall buildings right on the waterfront that look guess where directly down at war com so the command that controls all the uh the the seals and then seal team five seal team three seal team one uh and i always thought i bet china's up there i bet russia is up there somebody's renting out some of these floors up there that have some sophisticated listening devices and they're pointing right down here at this compound um catch so much just a crosstalk walking across the the compound totally and you know you sit there at the hotel you sit there at the hotel delia in one of the most dense concentrations of naval power anywhere on the planet i just sketch out just a tiny you know unclassified portion of what that is in the book um someone who read the book said to me well okay this doesn't make any sense right because the chinese have satellites they've got um aircraft and they've got the ability to do this stuff remotely without having to put somebody on the ground my response to that was twofold one sometimes you just have to have a person on the spot right that's why we still have a cia even after we have all this other uh stuff and sometimes there's just no substitute for actually being there but the other thing to be aware of is space warfare right and it doesn't make any sense to create a ground listing post when you've got space assets unless you plan to knock those space assets out right and what we see now is the chinese and the russians talking about building a joint permanent moon base by 2027 we've got china building a rival platform to the international space station last september china put the final touches to the baidu system which is their equivalent to gps which now goes globally and you know both china and russia have weaponized space to the point where you know people perhaps don't realize just quite how much modern civil society and economies depend on gps and at some point if you can turn that off you you know you can massively disrupt not only the us military but basically every aspect of modern society in most of the west of course if they do that to us we are going to retaliate to them in space they've clearly thought ahead of that and they're starting to build ground assets to enable them to still function even in the event of of space being knocked down it's it's really important to kind of think outside the box of that modern let's call it the apple family of of you know devices that everyone walks around with to realize that like that stuff's a hell of a lot easier to put an end to than we like to think oh yeah and all anybody has to do to figure out how important gps is towards to our daily lives is to try to get somewhere give someone direction somewhere without sending them a a google map or an apple map uh link um yeah it's uh i just got done running a resistance warfare course for a bunch of us government folks and uh one of the hardest things hardest of all the things that people have to do in that environment is figure out again how to navigate without some electronic device that's continually pinging their location and you know with with a components made in china you know you're driving around with um and the ability to like dump your electronics and still function in an off the grid manner uh that's hard for us but it's second nature that most of the guys are fighting you know so i think part of it is that old school element you know having like two or three really important bits of gear that you know you can rely on they're going to be there when the time when the chips are down you can trust you know uh and and trying to i always say more skill less equipment you know um and if you have the better skills you can do more with less but we've become very kind of um you know prisoners of our own gadgets at some level i think big time uh not just in the intelligent side of the house or the special operations side of the house but just as citizens in general uh yeah as far as being self-reliant and responsible and all those other things um so i know i've kept you longer than i than we said and i sincerely appreciate you taking time to do this and once again i did not get to any of my questions here uh but i want so i want to do this again when you have time but uh before we go um i wanna i was thinking of as i was uh i was zipping back through these these novels are these books here and i was just thinking about having seen you for a while and thinking about everything that has happened since we last met up um i was looking for a little hope because when i am uh looking at our our our uh domestic situation here in the united states i'm looking at covet i'm looking at civil unrest i'm looking at these uh what seemed to be from the if you were the enemy looking in almost irreconcilable political differences um when we talk about empires um and i like the the uh how you framed this and this is why i ask it in terms of hope because you because you do talk about it almost in terms of hope in the in the novel um when we talk about the decline of an empire and we talk about a uh i think you call it a culminating point um maybe iraq march 2003 um yeah we look back at that as that was the the culminating point where we started our decline as an empire as a military um when you look at all all this and having put the time you have it have on the ground everything that you've seen everything that you have studied uh everything that you have have written and then seen politicians maybe squander perhaps what gives you hope going forward uh when you look at this nation uh which you are now a citizen are we on the decline as an empire or is there is there hope out there where we can continue to go forward and get stronger as a nation well it's kind of both right i mean i think um if if you want to preserve the american quote unquote empire as it existed in the middle of the 1990s you know when us was to use madeleine albright's term you know the indispensable nation um and you think that we're going to be this sort of global hegemon you know to use that term uh forever then i have bad news for you right we are not going to probably ever get back to where we were in the 1990s and i do think we're in a multi-polar environment where we have um real serious peer rivals who are you know um posing a much greater threat than anything you and i dealt with during our our active military careers so i think you know if if if you want to hope that we're going to get back to that you know um clintonian era it's not going to happen right but i would offer a different kind of hope which is um people still are people people believe in freedom people believe in free enterprise in free speech in you know family in traditional values and you can only push people so far before you get people calling on that and saying no you know i'm i'm not prepared to uh walk around in you know sackcloth and ashes and just decide that my day is done and america is a you know is busted uh and i think we're already seeing that push back we're also seeing it in europe we're seeing it elsewhere um i also think people are realizing that a lot of the racial stuff and the class stuff that's going on is people deliberately trying to set americans of different skin colors and of different social classes against each other and rather than being manipulated into fighting each other we need to step back and go hey we're not the other americans we're talking about are not the enemy you know and i i hear people saying that um i believe you know that there is hope in that sense and i guess this is a slightly dark point of view but who wants to live in a world where every problem is solved right i mean that's just the definition of boring as far as you know why did why did humans rise from you know the savannah of africa 270 000 years ago to be where we are now it was facing challenges right lethal challenges and you know i had to break it you know you know better than anyone we're all going to die right at some point and it's how you go right and it's how you face the challenges that that makes a difference and i think ultimately you know a life well lived is what matters most and i think all those opportunities are still out there regardless of what's happening you know inside the beltway or on cnn or in nike you know there's there's a um there's a real world out there with plenty of challenges and i think that getting you know engaged in that is is uh is the way to you know unlock that hope i love it i love it i think we'll leave it at that because i've kept you longer than i than i said i would and uh man i sincerely appreciate you doing this um and i know you're not on the social channels you are you are very wisely these days i think uh you're on twitter for like a second or two years and years i have a twitter account i have a twitter account i never use it i um i just don't have time man you know better than anyone i just totally suck at email right i'm that bad at even responding to emails you know i just i couldn't i couldn't write books and do field work and want to you know run a company and all that if i was also on twitter although i don't have time i get it i get it so that's a loss for the rest of us but very wise decision on your part um but uh these uh these books right here absolutely fantastic uh can't recommend them highly enough to everybody i'd say you know usually i would tell people to go in order but uh but because of the dragons and the snakes and just how timely this is and what was to me when i when i read it last year um you know i'd say people jump in with this one then then go through then go through the rest um yeah because the other book that i think um people might like is called blood year and it's about the rise of isis yeah right here less bit less academic a bit more of a narrative uh yeah yeah right there so my oxford university press appreciates you yeah there we go yeah that one right there i want to talk to you about this one uh for sure next time around yeah well let's do it again man i'm sure that uh stuff is gonna happen that'll bring things up we can talk about one right there yeah yeah yeah and uh yeah we'll go through all these with you but uh uh hopefully we'll see each other in person before too long and it's always hard to keep track of you because you're always zipping around the world and i'll get some sort of a a text on a uh a different type of platform and you'll be somewhere you know in some jungle in some desert in some urban environment that doesn't seem too safe to me and uh and hopefully we'll link up here and be able to grab some some drinks soon and then we'll do it over at colorado perfect at some point welcome to the gear highlight section of the danger clothes podcast and because i had my friend dr david kilcullen on this podcast i wanted to talk about his books a little bit more i talked about them quite a bit during the podcast but everybody every student of warfare needs to have these books not just in their library but they need to be read they need to be highlighted they need to be revisited i can't stress that enough and if you're not signed up for my reading list selections every month i have a reading a selection that comes out you can sign up for my newsletter on the blog blog section of my website there and each month i take six and some of those are books that come from the professional reading list that i was asked to put together for the naval special warfare center before i left the seal teams and others are books that influenced me on some way along my journey and i'll tell you what these books have all influenced not just me but an entire generation of combat leaders and david kilcullen is the main driving force behind that impact and that influence so um get these books can't recommend them enough the dragons and the snakes when i sat down to write the devil's hand uh i jumped right in to this book and this really helped focus me uh along the path as i was putting that book together so i was putting myself in the enemy shoes looking back on particularly the last 20 years and what they've learned by watching us on the field of battle for those last 20 years so david coquelin does that in this book uh at a strategic and tactical level uh for those who are interested which should be everybody because going forward uh we we have some challenges ahead as we discuss in the podcast so the dragons and the snakes definitely pick this up usually i tell people to start at the beginning with accidental gorilla but i think jump in with this one because it is so timely so the dragons and the snakes and for sure pick up counter insurgency and this one right here goes into the background behind the 28 articles of counterinsurgency which we talked about on the podcast so once again uh required reading for students of war blood year for sure you can see all these i have i don't even know why i highlight them because the whole book ends up being highlighted so blood year out of the mountains uh i'm actually quoted in here uh which was such an honor for me and we're going to talk about each and every one of these books i hope in separate podcasts going forward because there's so much to talk about and the accidental gorilla right here so amazing work david thank you so much for writing these and on the podcast we talk about a couple other books rise and kill first which uh if you've been following along you know influenced me as i wrote the devil's hand so as you can tell those yellow stickies again uh this is another book that ended up getting quite a few highlights here so uh absolutely fantastic we talked about the counterinsurgency field manual his involvement with this um so also uh although some parts of it maybe well things have evolved quite a bit because the enemy as we talked about on the podcast is always adapting we're always adapting to the enemy they're always adapting to us so uh this should be in everyone's library as well and what i didn't get to ask david about because i didn't get to any of my questions uh because we just started talking is unrestricted warfare here and this one really is a um well i think it's a paper that was written by two chinese military officers uh i think around 1999 i might be wrong with that date 98.99 somewhere but in the us it says 2002 right here but it was written earlier than that but i want to talk to them about this about how uh this was interpreted in the united states and uh some of the uh it's some things we can learn from this so we'll talk about that next time and when david was talking about how he created those 28 articles of counterinsurgency well he was at the starbucks in the pentagon and it happened because somebody had another meeting they couldn't uh couldn't make it to to meet him so he took out his black moleskin notebook and he wrote those down so notebook just like this one so i always have a notebook with me no matter where i go always writing down those notes those ideas uh usually as they pertain to future novels these days um and but i've graduated from this size to this size this one from sig thank you sig but i love this so each and every book gets its own notebook like this so i have one for uh for each of the novels thus far and this one is going to be for this fifth novel that i'm writing have all sorts of notes in here and very cool this pen right here kelly slayton so he's at kelly slaton on instagram and at palmetto patriot flags um but this pen awesome thank you for making this pen it means a lot to me and uh this is the one that's gonna take a ton of notes here as i get deeper and deeper into uh writing and the edits for book five title classified so sincerely appreciate that thank you so much and in these novels or not novels these books here obviously osama bin laden is mentioned al-qaeda is mentioned there's a lot of information about uh that terrorist organization and uh how it's evolved from i think their first meeting was i think in 1988 you can fact check me on that but so much has happened over the years obviously but this right here this is from my friend james yeager and this is the original wanted poster for osama bin laden you can see the u right there because you see that he's called ubl when you're talking about i'm not obl so this is the you spelling right there wanted by the fbi murder of u.s nationals outside of the united states conspiracy to murder us nationals outside the united states attack on a federal facility resulting in death and the date on this thing is march 29th 1999. so uh james yeager tactical response thank you so much for sending this um that means a lot to me that you'd send this to me sincerely appreciate it my friend so there we go i think that's everything all right get reading thank you for tuning in to the danger clothes podcast in ironclad original presented by sig sauer for more on david kilcullen you can pick up his books wherever books are sold the dragons and the snakes counterinsurgency blood year out of the mountains and the accidental gorilla i'll have to have him back on the podcast soon because he is such a treasure trove of information and knowledge but more importantly of wisdom and if you enjoyed the podcast be sure and leave a five-star rating and review wherever you watch your podcasts on apple spotify or on youtube and i'll see you next time on danger close

Channel: JackCarrUSA

Views: 11,641

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Id: Jvku3HLY2CU

Length: 79min 7sec (4747 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 16 2021