Ep 199: Jonathan Hackett on Our Failures in Iraq & Afghanistan

Jonathan Hackett, former U.S. Marine Corps interrogator and author of Theory of Irregular War

Aaron MacLean:

Hi, I'm Aaron MacLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I'm delighted to welcome to the show today, Jonathan Hackett, author, most recently of Theory of A Regular War with a long career in the Marine Corps and the US government beyond his writing career. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining the show.

Johnathan Hackett:

Thanks for having me, Aaron.

Aaron MacLean:

Why don't we start a bit with your background? You're a Marine. You served overseas on numerous occasions. And you were an interrogator, to include in Helmand Province. Let me ask you this and we can use it as a way into your background. What makes a good interrogator?

Johnathan Hackett:

I think being a good interrogator is being a good listener. And listening almost unnaturally is the best way to go about it because we have a very high tendency to respond and to fill empty space, so when the detainee isn't speaking, many people would automatically want to say something back or fill that uncomfortable space. But really the most important spontaneous admissions come out of the silence.

Aaron MacLean:

And how does one get into this line of work of being an interrogator in the Marine Corps? Did you have a contract for that? Did you transition over from something else? What's your story?

Johnathan Hackett:

I actually came in as a signals intelligence analyst. So, I worked at the National Security Agency as a Marine for about six years in different capacities. And I noticed that in the Marine Corps, the longer you stay in that field, the further away from a window you get. So, I decided to make a movement back towards nature. So, I moved-

Aaron MacLean:

Not that interrogation rooms are probably the most pleasant spots in the Marine Corps, but, nevertheless.

Johnathan Hackett:

Yeah. So, then I decided to do that. And in the Marine Corps we have counterintelligence and human intelligence combined into a single job field, so I did that. We have a selection process for that. I went through that about 16 years ago, and my very first assignment, as you said, was to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2012 during the height of the Marine Corps's involvement in that war.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, you and I are of a similar vintage in that regard. I was there at, I think of it as peak COIN, which is relevant to your book and to what we're actually going to talk about today.

But okay, so well, take me back to those conversations in Afghanistan then. What were your objectives in those conversations? And what were you learning, I guess is my broader question. You had presumably day-to-day objectives you were trying to fulfill, but as you're there, you're learning about what the United States is up to there. How did your thinking about the Afghanistan War develop as you were sitting there doing that job?

Johnathan Hackett:

Well, it was very interesting coming into that because the types of interrogations I was doing were tactical or operational level interrogations. What's going on in the area, what's going on in the province, that kind of thing. Coming from the National Security Agency, we had very high-level requirements for national collection. And transitioning to that tactical type of questioning was a little bit difficult to narrow myself down into asking questions about what color poppies are growing on that field over there this summer, and how much do those cost per kilo, which at the moment when I was asking that felt very insignificant. But then when I started to realize, oh, these actually fill up international objectives as well because the Taliban is using those poppies to finance their activities, which in turn their whole shadow government is funded by that activity. So it's very important to know is it the pink and white poppy this summer or is it the just pink poppy? Because there's a massive billion dollar difference in that if you're going to refine it, ship it to Pakistan or Iran, and then onward to Europe or the United States.

So that was an interesting learning point for me in the very beginning. And we still had some leftover things from previous conflicts in Afghanistan that were still relevant in those interrogations. Like for example, in the 1980s during Operation Cyclone, when the CIA was providing stinger missiles to the mujahideen, they also provided some other equipment, some anti-aircraft equipment. And one of the questions earlier in the time that I was doing interrogations, we had to ask about those because we knew that some of them were still stray out on the battlefield. There were actually two that we thought of that were in Helmand at the time, and we knew the exact nomenclature of the devices that could shoot our own helicopters down. We didn't end up finding them on my deployment, but it was always interesting to insert those questions into a more tactical level line of questioning about what's going on in this province.

Aaron MacLean:

I'm embarrassed to confess, I think, that having been there during a poppy harvest and the poppy harvest was a big part of my life and major factor in our deployment, I had no idea about the economic distinction between different colors, which only goes to show, considering how relevant you're telling me that was how screwed I was in terms of my lack of local knowledge.

Johnathan Hackett:

But it was all of us.

Aaron MacLean:

Well, so this is well past the time of, if people have seen Zero Dark Thirty, they're familiar with enhanced interrogation, all that kind of stuff. This is well past that time. This is also a different program from the kinds of programs that were permitted such things. Why did anyone ever talk to you? I remember people with Taliban connections giving me a hard time because they would say, "Oh, your president said you guys are leaving in just a couple years. Why would we work with you?" Obviously, you'd come up with something, but it was difficult to have a persuasive answer to that. How did you deal with that or other problems?

Johnathan Hackett:

So actually, I had a detainee that was very proud to tell me that, "Since Alexander the Great, the British failed three times, the Russians failed twice, America will fail now, and you will fail again." And he was really proud to tell me that in the interrogation room. And to me it was kind of strange because I'm sitting in a chair, he's sitting on the floor. I have the control in that moment. But he was right eventually.

And the most important part of that though is that he was talking to me. So, in his mind he was getting a little victory, a little conversational victory. But that's in my mind also a victory for me because as long as you're speaking, as long as the detainee is speaking, not myself, but the detainee is speaking, I'm learning something about them. And maybe I can't use that with that particular detainee, but if let's say we've got three people from that same city that are somewhat connected, I could use that information from that individual and use it against somebody else that maybe is a little bit weaker in their resistance posture. And then break that weakness down.

And I'll actually give you another example. We captured three people from a village. So, a Marine convoy was going through and the convoy was blown up by an IED. So, they sent another group of Marines out to go and investigate what happened. No Marines were harmed, but an Afghan was killed, an elderly Afghan man. And when the Marines got there, they were actually helping the Afghans pick up the body parts of this elderly man. And they noticed two men standing off to the side, one had a shovel, which is kind of ubiquitous in Afghanistan, a man standing by a farm with a shovel, especially in Helmand, and a younger man maybe in his teens standing next to that gentleman. So, because they were there standing watching this happen, the Marines arrested them and brought them back to the detention facility where I spoke to them.

So, I spoke first to the younger one because I thought maybe the younger one will have a little bit of a weaker resistance posture. I was wrong, made the wrong assumption. He actually had a stronger resistance posture. But since I had him in there, I talked to him for a while and I realized I'm not really getting very far with him. But I got enough information about his village to understand the context that the older gentleman probably would respond to. So I went to the next one, to the older gentleman, come to find out the Afghan who was killed was this older gentleman's father. So then I used that information because the older gentleman then told me that the other person was his son. So we've got three generations of people involved here.

So I used the information about the fact that the son killed the grandfather to go back to the son, the grandson, and inform him that he killed his grandfather. Because he thought he had been harming Americans, but he didn't. He instead killed his own family member unbeknownst to him. And he just broke down crying and he told me about how the Taliban had forced him to put that bomb there he didn't want to do and so on and so forth. It's a very sad situation, very difficult situation, but it's important to stay rational as an interrogator in that moment to see what are the points you can press to get someone to want to talk to you. You shouldn't be forcing them to talk to you. They should be dying to talk to you. And I've actually had detainees in some situations that actually called for me in the middle of the night to speak to me because they wanted to tell me something. I never even told them, "Hey, come find me if you need me." They knew that they could talk to me and I would listen to them and they would feel better about that when they left.

So very different approach to what you described, the early days, a lot of coercion and pressure. Instead, especially in the Marine Corps, we use the World War II method that Hanns Scharff used. Hanns Scharff is kind of a famous person in the interrogation community because he was an enlisted soldier in the Luftwaffe, which is the German Air Force, and he interrogated hundreds if not thousands of American and British pilots. And without ever asking them a single intelligence related question, he was able to figure out where all the bomber squadrons are located, when the next attack was going to happen, strategic level bombing raids into Germany, and he was able to safeguard multiple factories that the Germans were trying to protect in the Ruhr Valley without ever asking a single question about intelligence because he used those moments to just speak to the people. And he collected little bits here and there and wove an entire story together and was able to move forces across the entire battle space of Western Germany and protect his assets like that. So we try to use that in our approaches as well.

Aaron MacLean:

There's a lot there that I want to respond to, but first, the story that you told that you delivered in the most calm, restrained fashion is one of the wildest stories I have ever heard. Did I have that straight?

Johnathan Hackett:

Yes.

Aaron MacLean:

The guy accidentally kills his own dad having laid an IED for the Americans, and whoops, his dad's killed in the explosion. Then the Americans stumble upon that guy and then his son, and reasonably, I mean when you said guy with a shovel and a kid standing next to him, I thought to myself, well, 50/50 odds they did. And it turns out they did. But oh, that's an unbelievable story. I mean actually quite believable, but still shocking.

Johnathan Hackett:

Yeah, it captures the tragedy of what was going on there. A lot of lower-level folks in smaller villages just getting wrapped up into the conflict on either side and placed into danger, waking up one morning not realizing that's the morning that something happens.

Aaron MacLean:

And then the second part of your remark on Scharff. I feel like that guy's a character in Masters of the Air. Is he fictionalized? Masters is a miniseries that came out last year on the Eighth Air Force, and there are a series of interrogation scenes which I feel like are at least inspired by what you're saying.

And it's really interesting to me, and I have no real, I mean basically no serious knowledge of the field, which is your background there, but weirdly to the extent that I do, it's from a police perspective because my dad spent a good chunk of his career as a cop. And there, as you know, it's all about either leverage or incentive. So you either have some power over this person, you're squeezing them, I guess you could call that a form of coercion, or you're portraying yourself as their friend, which inevitably you're not, but they may not be quick enough to realize that. And that's basically the whole game. And you're describing some third thing entirely, a kind of, I don't know, I don't actually know how to characterize what you're describing.

Johnathan Hackett:

So actually, what you're referring to is often called the Reid Technique. And there's a whole script for this. A lot of law enforcement uses it. You can find it on YouTube. A lot of it is coercive to a degree, not physically, but the way that it leads the brain down a pathway tends to entrap someone in an answer that unfortunately is not always correct or accurate. And there's actually been a few cases where they've shown that someone has admitted using a knife to murder somebody, for example, and in fact, that person has never even met that person. But it's because of the way the interrogation was conducted, the person felt that they're compelled to answer in a particular way.

So we actually are sometimes trained in that. I went through the training for it in 2013. Never used it, but we objectively thought it was not a good tool to use, especially for intelligence interrogations because law enforcement interrogations are looking for a conviction or an admission or a lead. Intelligence is looking to answer a question. And we don't care if the detainee did it or didn't do it. There is no “it” to do. Instead, we want to know more about the situation so that we can reduce uncertainty and protect forces and those larger military type things or intelligence type objectives.

Aaron MacLean:

So your career carried on, you went other places, you supported the special operations community, intelligence community in a variety of different capacities, and along the way you started thinking about what the hell is it we're doing here? I confess to having the same thoughts. And one phrase you used in your book that stuck with me is you're criticizing sort of a lot of the existing literature on irregular war or irregular warfare or however you want to characterize it as "state-centered colonial policing books."

Aaron MacLean:

Which I guess is a literal reference to something like David Galula, which I was trained on. All the officers in Quantico read David Galula in 2007 and '08. Maybe we can talk about who that is and why it mattered. But I also took it as a bit of a swipe over the sort of modern run of books and you cite people like David Kilcullen by name. You seem like you're pretty dissatisfied by the reigning theory of the day, and I confess, I share that dissatisfaction. How did the US military, how does the US military, assuming we haven't changed much in the last 15 years, think about irregular war? What is our house theory of the case?

And what was wrong with it?

Johnathan Hackett:

We borrowed a lot of things from Galula, who was a French author, another, Roger Trinquier is another one. These French authors actually developed most of their ideas fighting in Algeria and Vietnam and other French possessions during the middle of the 20th century. And Trinquier in particular used a very extreme and brutal method of repression to get local people to do what you wanted, which is whatever it is, that's part of its time. However, that information, the techniques you use were borrowed into US counterinsurgency manuals, the field manuals. I think that the problem with our military deployments is we have six-month deployments, or even 15-month deployments, let's say. Or if you're with a Joint Special Operations Command, you might have a four-month deployment or even a few days. That's not really enough time to solve an issue. And the people that you're there helping will have been there before you got there, and they're there after you leave and they have to pay the price for working with you. So it has to be worth it. And as we were talking about, the folks in Afghanistan, for example, knew that we would leave eventually. And so they had to think about hedging their future, what happens when the Americans leave, what do we do next? And how many risks do we take right now? And I think that wasn't considered in a large enough aspect to be successful for us.

So we had human terrain teams and we had these other smaller components like AFPAK Hands, which was another kind of civil engagement program, really great programs, really well-placed. The Marine Corps had its marine advisor course and security cooperation group. These were smaller components of a much larger conventional approach to solving this non-military problem, in my opinion. And because we didn't make those the centerpiece of our strategy, the strategy was bound to fail because we were looking at Afghanistan or Iraq or you name it like a nail rather than a people problem. So we were being hammers instead of helpers.

Aaron MacLean:

So I want to draw you out on this question of military solutions being inappropriate. I mean, in fairness, after 9/11, we issue an ultimatum. You got to give up Al-Qaeda. The Taliban doesn't. We quite understandably go in. The Taliban take to the hills. We kind of screw up the structure of the political settlement, which we can talk more about. That's hours if not lifetimes of conversation we could have about the Bonn Conference and everything else. But nevertheless, we're there, there are Taliban and other people who don't like us as it were, up in the hills and also down in the valleys, and things get violent. Things get violent and then they get really violent after a few years. How is a military solution not relevant or applicable here?

Johnathan Hackett:

I think a military solution is part of a larger solution, but you have to ask yourself, after operation Anaconda, where did the Taliban leadership go? Well, they were not in Afghanistan, they were in Pakistan. Wasn't it the Pakistanis in the '80s who were helping us train the mujahideen? Wasn't it the Pakistanis in the '90s who were helping us, and again, in the early 2000s who were there to "help us", while in fact allowing the Taliban to live in Quetta down in Balochistan and actually run the Taliban from Pakistan remotely. And that's why Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

And perhaps the military part of it was helpful on the ground, but there's a political aspect that was never solved. And as soon as that political aspect was never solved, you would constantly have frictions below that level. And when Clausewitz said that war is an extension of politics by other means, what he meant was that the military part is a small kernel of a larger thing, and the way that we approached the conflict was more military first, everything second. Even the way that we got Karzai into power was a military method. And we were very successful in the very beginning. Operation Anaconda, as I said, was a very successful special operation combined with the intelligence community. Highly successful. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. But after that, we didn't really have a structured political end state beyond keeping Karzai there and the Taliban out. Which sounds simple, but it's actually a very complex problem that I think we never actually had a working solution that was made at the first priority in that conflict.

Aaron MacLean:

My take is I feel like if you challenge someone around that time, they would have said they had a political solution. We wrote a whole constitution. In theory, Karzai would one day be succeeded by someone else. In practice, maybe that was a little bit more complicated. But we had a political solution. The problem from my perspective, I don't know if you would agree with this statement, was that we made a lot of assumptions about what a state ought to be based on our post-Cold War witnessing of democratization in Eastern Europe and our, in my view, correct sense that the United States is more or less a successful polity. So, we thought, "Well, obviously whatever it is in Afghanistan should kind of look something like us."

And then we tried to take that idea and marry it somewhat awkwardly to a variety of, we sort of dusted some local color into it. If you read the constitution, which, if I recall correctly, the Afghan constitution both guarantees women's rights and then a clause or two later guarantees that Hanafi Sharia will be the law of the land. I never quite understood how those two things were going to go together. But nevertheless, my take is, it's not that we didn't have a political vision, it's that we had a deeply naive political vision. And then I think I agree with you that we never devoted sufficient energy to resolving those paradoxes or problems that we dealt ourselves at the top. And then, yeah, once people started shooting at us, shooting back was much more straightforward as a course of action.

Johnathan Hackett:

And if you look back at the 19th century when the British were there and they drew the Durand Line, which separated Pakistan from Afghanistan, that was an arbitrary straight line made on a map, not really accounting for culture, people, history, et cetera. And that happens all over the world. But I zoom in on that because we used a system of states, like you said, that came from the piece of Westphalia in 1648, which is a very European method of looking at what a state, is should be. And so we took that very European method of forming a state and we said, "You will have a constitution. Not only will you have a constitution, you'll have a president. And not only will you have a president, you're going to have this structure of elders and etcetera, etcetera."

So we made it look Afghan, but in fact it was kind of an enlightenment era structure of a state, an idealized version of a state, which we also tried in Iraq as well. We've tried in other countries to varying degrees of success. But it's really up to the people to decide: do they want a democracy? I love democracy myself, but does that mean that because I love it that this other group of people have to accept it? Just like we were talking about with interrogations, when you force somebody to do something, you get a very different response than when somebody just wants to do it inherently. And if they want to do it inherently there'll be very little for us to do. We can stand back and maybe give them resources or a little bit of rudder steering but otherwise forcing them is a little bit coercive and you're only hitting extrinsic motivations at that point. You're ignoring the intrinsic things that are pushing those people every single day when they wake up and ask, what do I do today?

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, this is complicated though, isn't it? We're replicating here and recording a conversation, versions of which I have had, I'm sure you have had many times with people like us who served there with at the time limited understanding of what the heck was going on. Even if we thought we had... I certainly thought I had an okay understanding at the time and then was disabused of that notion. And another complaining conversation I have had with someone with overlapping background to yourself is the problem with the counterinsurgency theorists' take on people like Galula and the earlier wave of anti-communist, irregular warfare thinkers is that they kind of edited out all the ruthlessness in Galula. That if you read, you actually read Galula or watch, what's the movie? It's-

Johnathan Hackett:

The Battle for Algiers.

Aaron MacLean:

Thank you. The Battle for Algiers, which is sort of based on all this. Methods are used by the French in Algeria that the United States military, generally speaking, would not countenance. I mean he's baking people in ovens. I mean it's ugly stuff.

And my interlocutor's point in this other conversation was there's a dark heart to the imposition of power and we've just sort of whistled past that part of the story to a nicer sounding story where we're going to provide all these nice things that are obviously good, and people are going to obviously elect for them. And in fact, what we should be doing is imposing order and security first and then going on to other things second. And you could look at the Taliban, there's popular support for the Taliban here and there in Afghanistan, but for the most part, the Taliban did not worry themselves with too much. They didn't overly worry themselves with whether or not the Hazaris were going to accept them in the end. They were just going to impose that when it came down to it. So I guess that's my question for you is what is the role of a voluntary acceptance of a political settlement actually play here?

Johnathan Hackett:

I think it has to make sense in their context. So if we have this menu of political options, we need to sell it in such a way that makes sense for the recipient rather than just telling the recipient to take it. If you bring them a political solution, it needs to make sense in their context. And the Afghans had something like that called the Loya Jirga, which was the great council of elders coming together and kind of democratically deciding things. That is a fantastic method for them. It worked for them. But we wouldn't let them just stay with that. Instead, we said, "You have to adopt all these other liberal democratic things that we're going to give to you right now." And I think a lot of us forget that we got those liberal democratic outcomes through many revolutionary wars in Europe and America. A lot of blood was spilled to get those liberal ideas.

So for us to just bring it to someone and say, "Hey, just take this," as you said, we're skipping over a lot of that earlier foundational history that's actually really critical to each of those very unique types of liberty. Liberty in France is different than liberty in America, even during our Revolutionary War and France's revolution, the meaning of what is Liberty had two totally different definitions. I mean, if you take Rousseau versus Locke, very different views on how government should be designed, but we look at it as, oh, that's democracy. We look at it that way now because it was a long time ago and none of us were there. And then we bring those ideas kind of mashed together and give them to the Afghans who are looking at this alien concept that they've never had before, in a successful way at least. And yet they have their own structures that already exist, like the Loya Jirga, that we're forcing them not to use.

Aaron MacLean:

Just to step back from Afghanistan and speak more broadly then, based on what you just said. In other words, irregular war starts because there is some sort of government or sovereign or trying to be a sovereign entity that's just not getting it done. And it goes to war with some element of its people. It could be a faction of its population; it could be a good chunk of its population depending on the details. And that's irregular war. Is that fair to say is your definition?

Johnathan Hackett:

Yeah, I talk a lot about that in my book, quite a bit about sovereign dysfunction as the term I use for that where the people expect something from the government and the government's not meeting that expectation. Now, Locke wrote about this pretty extensively, and if you read our Declaration of Independence, a lot of his words are in there specifically talking about these great mistakes of government, and people are just not willing to rise up and shake them off their shoulders. They don't do that until they're so repressed and so oppressed that they have no other way out. There's no other spigot to turn on to allow that to escape.

And in those moments, these people look for a violent solution because they feel that they have no other solution. Maybe they do have another one, but the way they feel in that moment is that they're backed against the wall and they have no other choice. Now, if the average person is feeling that way and then some leader comes along who's able to catalyze that feeling into a single movement, now you have a more organized problem against the sovereign.

Aaron MacLean:

And just again, sort of speaking at 30,000 feet, looking across the range of some of these conflicts, what characterizes the methods of how insurgents fight, how do these wars play out?

Johnathan Hackett:

They play out in very different ways, and I think that's part of the confusion. When we look at, for example, the last 20 years, there was a lot of special operations folks on our side wearing night vision goggles and going in the middle of the night grabbing people. That works in certain contexts. In other contexts, the insurgents were more conventional, especially if you look at World War II, the Yugoslavian partisans were more organized than some of the Germans they were fighting against. And in fact, Churchill observed that they were more successful in battle than the Germans were. And they did defeat the Germans on numerous occasions. They were structured in brigade size elements. They had command and control, very good command and control. The British were there helping them a little bit, giving some special operations support before special operations was a doctrinal thing.

Aaron MacLean:

Evelyn Waugh writes about the partisans in Yugoslavia, not very favorably, I would point out. But then he was a man of the right and they obviously were not. So he was starting with a bit of prejudice there.

Why does all of this matter today? I have it on good authority that we are washing our hands of the Middle East after some misadventures there. It's the era of great power competition. Now, great power competition has "gray zone warfare," but I take that to be something else entirely. That's more a question of tactics and operational concepts and state cleverness manifesting itself out there in battlefield-like, but not actually battlefields places or situations. Just like we did after Vietnam, we're going to try to wash our hands of this difficult state building, state backing, state vindicating stuff. So in 2025, Jonathan, why should we be thinking about this?

Johnathan Hackett:

Well, I think first of all, the great power competition concept is an aspiration. And we always want to fight the wars either the last war we fought or the war that we wish we had. And we try our hardest to ignore the war that we're having we're about to have. So that's a philosophical point that I would just put there.

But in 2025, as a capitalist world power, which we are, we're involved in many, many parts of the world that require safety of our supply lines, of our economic relations with those countries, and maybe not even countries, but portions of countries. Like in Morocco for example. There's a part of Morocco, about half of it that's not recognized as a state by many countries, and that the US used recently to recognize to get Moroccan favor. Well, that causes a problem in West Africa if you're Algeria for example, or if you're the Sahrawis, which is the other half of Morocco. These have implications over time, especially in places in South America right now. There's a lot of liminal space, which means kind of a gap between control. If you look at Venezuela for example, there's a lot of ungoverned areas there, in Colombia. And if we don't notice that and yet still try to do economic things in those countries, our economic relations will be impacted by those things we ignored.

And we need to think about that more holistically. It's not just the economic question or the military question. It should be a holistic approach to how do we maximize both our output and outcomes and their output and outcomes to get mutual benefits, which mutual benefit is the best benefit in my opinion.

Aaron MacLean:

And then it is also probably fair to say that great power conflict, should it occur, certainly doesn't rule out the relevance or even grave importance of irregular conflict as part of a broader complex of war. As your Yugoslavia example actually well illustrates, you have throughout the Second World War all manner of irregular wars that are very relevant in their regions to the ultimate outcome of the conflict. You've got wars like Vietnam, which are again, they're sort of hybrids. You have irregular war in South Vietnam with the Vietcong. You also have maneuver war against conventional forces with the NVA. And the whole thing is a big great superpower competition at the highest level. So I guess there's all sorts of reasons to be focused on it and caring, but I take one of your main points that the United States is still not thinking about it in the right way. 15 years ago-ish, we made a real effort at getting better at this stuff, and that's what the COIN movement was, and you and I both are skeptics of the intellectual fruits of that exercise. And the results in Afghanistan and Iraq are both pretty bad. I don't think you can ascribe all of those bad results to the COIN theorists, but you can ascribe some of them. I can only really speak to Afghanistan. Maybe it's more complicated in Iraq. What did they get wrong and what do we need to get right as we are, in some ways, already in, in other ways, gearing up for another round of human conflict?

Johnathan Hackett:

What immediately comes to mind is the three block war concept that the Marine Corps had in the 1990s that General Krulak, who was our commandant, came up with about a, let's say a corporal, a very lower-level enlisted person standing there in a street corner. Within three blocks, he could be fighting an insurgency, he could be handing out rice and grain, and he could be doing peacekeeping operations, the same person doing those three seemingly different things.

I think if we look at it from that perspective, that there are multiple goals we can accomplish with the same person, and then we maximize that or multiply it across the total force. Even though we're military instruments, we can carry a lot of other tools with us that we can use simultaneously. Rather than just having a SOT, special operations team, going in and doing a direct action raid, maybe we should coordinate that direct action raid with the civil affairs team that's going to be in there tomorrow morning digging a well, so that after we've grabbed that person from their bed, go into that town the next day with a totally different US military presence, the person in that village is going to look at it as, that's just the US military. They're not going to understand the difference.

And instead, we need to also look at it that way too, that we are part of a larger thing that has to have several little components inside of it, almost like campaign planning. There's all these different things working together towards the same outcome, but they have to actually be synchronized, especially in a conflict like this where politics, economics, political institutions really matter. They matter perhaps more than the violence itself. Because the violence is kind of a symptom. It is also a very important aspect of what's happening every day with people on the ground. But what if we could reduce it, prevent it, change the way it's perceived? What if the people that live there realize they don't want it?

Recently we saw that in Gaza Palestinians were protesting against Hamas for the first time, which is very, very, very significant. And I think that should be maximized more rather than a blip on the news cycle. That should be a huge shout that, hey, there are people here who are unhappy with everything going on. This is your opportunity to look at it from a non-military perspective and solve the social problem perhaps.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, and you see how difficult it is for the Israelis to exploit that because I agree completely. I've been following it closely. And you have the Israelis who have been looking at Gaza for forever as an intelligence Petri dish. They presumably have, in some fashion, a pretty good understanding of who's who there. But even so, I mean leveraging that information into something that actually sticks is hard.

In the American context, it just strikes me, and we've alluded to this already, but in my view, we shouldn't look past just its centrality as a problem. You pointed out that the Brits would stick around in places for a long time. They would have these political agents. The political agents, I have it on the good authority of a lot of British novels I've read about India, if the military had to be called in to quell some riot, they saw it as a failure. They had screwed up, they had lost control. And sometimes you lose control and you have to bring in the mouth-breathing, infantry to fire a couple of volleys into the streets. But that didn't mean you had done a good job as a political agent. You had failed. And we're complaining that our military has short deployments, and so the officers who have been cast now as diplomats and political strategists, perhaps a bit unfairly, are then doing it in six-month sprints, which renders the absurd even more absurd.

Well, where are the political agents? And to have such an institution, to have diplomats who lived in a country for a very long time would also require a kind of more, well, an attitude that accepted that our role in guaranteeing order was more like the British than I think Americans are comfortable accepting. And so as a result, we just generally speaking, have no idea what we're doing. We end up in peak COIN in Afghanistan 2012 when you were there, or 2010 when I was there with all sorts of strategies and metrics and arrows on maps. And I mean this literally, I can picture what I'm talking about as I say it. That just don't-

Johnathan Hackett:

That spaghetti chart.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. They just don't matter because what matters is the opinions of, can make up a number, a few thousand people maybe who are in elite positions in different communities, and what they choose is what's going to go, and we don't even know half the time who those people are or how to condition their thinking. And political strategy, when it comes down to it, is about affecting and manipulating and seeking agreement/coercing/intimidating, depending on the day, those people. And find me the regimental commander, or find me anyone who actually had a holistic view of the place. I mean no one even speaks the language. No one even speaks the language. We don't even care about that.

Johnathan Hackett:

It's funny, actually in 2011, right before I went to Afghanistan, we had a language class and they said, "You can pick a Dari or a Pashto, go ahead pick one." So I picked a Pashto and that was it. There was no, where are you going to be deployed to in Afghanistan or where might this matter most? And so did a year of Pashto. Fantastic. Then I get deployed to an area that speaks Dari exclusively. Some of our detainees spoke Pashto. Sure. But I didn't speak it to the level that was required for that to be useful. So it was a year wasted on something that I could have spent helping my deployment and helping the people I was going to be there for in Afghanistan, both the Afghans and us, and instead I learned a language that I never used.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah. It's also unserious and it speaks to the lack of existential stakes for the military organizations involved. You manage your piece of the pie for your period as a commander or at whatever level you are, and so long as the division is still there when you leave it, you didn't really lose. In World War II, you could lose a division. You could have catastrophic failure. You could lose the war and lose American freedom. There could be catastrophic failure, and that had a way of concentrating the mind. I don't feel like anyone in leadership, yeah, I can consider myself as a platoon commander, but nevertheless, my platoon was there at the start of the deployment. It was there at the end of the deployment. Did we win in Marjah? I don't know. I could make a case that we made some progress here and there, but certainly the overall bigger effort that we were a part of did not win. And no one's career was really negatively affected by that in the end.

I can do you one better. My Arabic was pretty decent when I joined the Marines, and I took the test and I got paid extra and everything. Never once set foot in an Arabic-speaking country. Not once.

Johnathan Hackett:

Yep, that's the way we do it. And also, we have the Foreign Area Officer program, which is fantastic, and we have a lot of Foreign Area officers in not the Marine Corps, but the other branches that that's their career. They come in as a young officer and all the way through general, they can serve as a senior Defense official or Defense attaché. They've got great language skills, they've got great relationships built with the people that they work with. The Army's got the State Partnership Program, which is similar for the National Guard. Well, if you spent 30 years doing that, where's the give back of knowledge to the institution when they leave? And a lot of them are stove piped, almost ostracized in some ways. Either you're going to work at the Pentagon when you're stateside or you're going to work in the embassy when you're overseas, and we don't want you at the conventional units because you're going to bring your suits and your etiquette to us, and that's the way it sometimes feels.

I worked in half a dozen embassies, and I've worked in Defense Attache offices in Jordan most recently, and there's almost like a community that's very difficult to break out of. Once you're painted with that foreign area officer brush and you try to come back and give those ideas, planners aren't interested in that. They're not interested in the long-term ideas about culture and society and all these things. Maybe they are to a small degree, but that's not what the campaign plan asks for. It asks for end states and how to get there with the means we have available, and there's a lot of times we don't ask the bigger questions that these people in our same institution could possibly help us with.

Aaron MacLean:

Yeah, I mean, I guess in the military's defense, in a way, it's sort of rejecting this foreign organism or the antibodies are fighting against this foreign area officer thing that doesn't really make sense in the conventional military. It's a bit beside the point. And the only reason it really needs to exist is because of the failure of other parts of the US government to fulfill, I'll keep using the term just because I don't have a better one, the political agent role in these difficult places where people are actually there, they actually live there. They actually speak the language. They actually know who's who. They actually can pursue the American interest. But the people who should be doing that, they're rotated through as well. Their language skills are not great. And they don't often have the resource. The only organization with resources is the military, which doesn't know how to do it. Sorry, the subject brings out the most skeptical, cynical side of me.

Johnathan Hackett:

I think that's really healthy because that's how we get better. We look at what are our flaws and how do we make them better next time? And if we don't stop asking that, maybe we'll be better off next time. But I think that's what happened with the last conflicts. We kind of forgot the Vietnam lessons. We forgot the colonial policing lessons. We forgot our own lessons even from the Revolutionary War, or ignored them or thought they were from a different time, and so we didn't put the value on them that maybe we should have. So maybe in the next conflict, we can not break the chain this time.

Aaron MacLean:

That is a good and non-suicidal intentions inducing note on which to end with you, Jonathan. Jonathan Hackett, veteran, patriot, author of Theory of Irregular War. It's been really interesting. Thanks for coming on the show.

Johnathan Hackett:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.