transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:02] There's partnerships, and there are surrogates, and they're not the same. We use surrogates for all sorts of operations. It's a really good technique, and it's not specific only to unconventional warfare. It could be for anything. If we're talking about unconventional warfare, though, the relationship needs to be a legitimate partnership, and there's no air quotes with that. And if we don't have that, it becomes very problematic on the road.

Speaker 2:
[00:25] Almost every major war that you can look at in the 20th century has some aspect of it. It was unconventional warfare aspects in World War I, by both sides, right? The Germans in Africa against the Unconventional Powers, and the British, famous Lawrence of Arabia against the Ottoman Turks in the Middle East region. And obviously more contemporaneously, we started our post 9-11 response with an unconventional warfare effort in Afghanistan.

Speaker 3:
[00:52] Welcome to episode 153 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Atwell. Today's episode examines the question, what role can unconventional warfare and special operations forces more broadly play in a major conventional war? The Irregular Warfare Podcast is a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project at Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can find more resources at the Irregular Warfare Initiative website, www.irregularwarfare.org. All of the content you find is made possible by over 100 exceptional volunteers from around the world and generous support from listeners like you. We hope you enjoy today's conversation. What role can unconventional warfare and special operations forces play in a broader conventional war? To tackle this question, I'm joined by an outstanding panel. First, retired Lieutenant General Ken Tovo, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2:
[01:55] Hey, great to be here, Kyle, thanks.

Speaker 3:
[01:56] Ken, while you ended a long and distinguished military career as the commander of US. Army Special Operations Command, you are perhaps most famous for co-authoring an article with me. That article was Unconventional Warfare on the Conventional Battlefield, and we're going to dig into that today. And one thing I really appreciate about that article is I've written a couple of articles with senior leaders as the junior guy before, and I was super excited and impressed that when I sent you a draft, you completely tore it apart and actually wrote the article. So that was an awesome experience.

Speaker 2:
[02:28] Actually Kyle, if you remember, I mean, it's really tri-authored, that's a real word. We also had a, when we started the article, a young West Point cadet, and I thought that was kind of cool. We had somebody at the beginning of their career, you towards the end of your career, and me past my career, all putting our perspectives on a really important topic, not just for the special ops community, but really as a nation.

Speaker 3:
[02:52] First Lieutenant Tony Marco, who aspires, I hope, to become a special forces officer one day. And today you are doing all kinds of things. You're the president and CEO of your own consulting company, the chairman of the Green Beret Foundation, and a senior partner at National Security Capital Partners. I have to say, I feel like the life of a retired general sounds a little chaotic. Weren't you supposed to take a knee when you were done with the career, or did you just decide to keep going?

Speaker 2:
[03:16] Yeah, if you talk to my wife, I'm busier now than I was on active duty. I feel that's hard to believe, frankly. It is certainly an eclectic mix of activities. And even now, I am dialing in from Camp Dawson, West Virginia, where I'm serving as a senior mentor for an unconventional warfare exe shot. So unconventional warfare is at the forefront of my mind for the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 3:
[03:37] Well, hopefully you're also getting paid more than you did on active duty for all this work you're doing.

Speaker 2:
[03:42] And I'm paying more taxes.

Speaker 3:
[03:44] So next we have Mark Grdovic. He's the author of the book, Those Who Face Death, The Untold Story of Special Forces and the Iraqi Kurdish Resistance. Mark, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:
[03:54] Thanks very much. Great to be here.

Speaker 3:
[03:55] So you've known Ken for decades. And you write in the book about your time as the battalion operations officer while he was a battalion commander during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He must not have been that bad of a boss if you're still on talking terms right now.

Speaker 1:
[04:10] You know, normally I would jump on a sarcastic comment, but I don't have one for this. Yeah. No, he was a great boss. No, I'm serious. He knows it's uncanny for me to not take an easy softball like that. Now, he was a great boss to work for, and we just had a great relationship, and we've stayed friends ever since, fortunately.

Speaker 3:
[04:27] Well, we won't make him comment on what kind of a subordinate you were at the time, so be safe there.

Speaker 2:
[04:32] He was the right man at the right time.

Speaker 3:
[04:34] Today, Mark, you work at US. Socom. Just really briefly, what exactly are you doing there?

Speaker 1:
[04:39] I retired from active duty in 2012, and since then, I've supported the community, whether it be Soccent or US. Socom in some capacity as a contractor.

Speaker 3:
[04:47] Our third panelist is my co-host, Dr. Alexandra Chinchilla, who after coming on the podcast a couple of times as a guest and absolutely crushing it, I managed to trick into joining the team as a host. So welcome to the conversation, Alex.

Speaker 4:
[05:01] It's great to be here, Kyle. I definitely feel like the target of a multi-year Irregular Warfare campaign to finally be a co-host.

Speaker 3:
[05:10] Yeah. I'm sure you'll have no regrets.

Speaker 4:
[05:12] None whatsoever.

Speaker 3:
[05:14] So getting into the conversation, I'd like to start by motivating the conversation a little bit. So why are we talking about the role of Unconventional Warfare and SOF in a Major War? And why should our audience care? And I'll open by stating that I think the main target audience for this conversation is not current SOF entities, though, of course, there's tons to learn. In fact, if anybody at 10th Special Forces Group has not know this story, they need to listen to this. But actually, conventional Joint Force leaders and civilian leadership, who may not understand or care about Unconventional Warfare, they I think are the prime target audience for this conversation. I'll start with Ken. What is Unconventional Warfare and why should non-SOF National Security Professionals care about it?

Speaker 2:
[05:55] Yeah. I'm going to give you a brief thing, but Mark actually taught us on our qualification course. So he can give you the fully doctrinal answer, which changes depending on which Green Beret you ask, actually. I kind of like to shortcut it or say it's our ability to leverage what I call indigenous mass, mobilize indigenous mass to either overthrow and occupying power or an unfilming government. I'll pass it on to Mark to give us a proper doctrinal conversation. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] I should caveat what Ken just said. I was actually an instructor twice. I was the Special Forces Head of Doctrine for a year, and then I was an instructor or an adjunct professor at JSAW teaching this several years ago as well. I was actually stunned when I was thinking about it yesterday. This is really involved in this debate continuously since 1999, which shocks me how long ago that was. While the definition has changed from time to time over the years, specifically in 2010, we tried to get it under control. A lot of the same challenges the Irregular Warfare definition and community are having right now, we had 10, 15 years ago. In simplest terms, I'll just say it this way. It's a type of special operation to enable or support resistance movements or uncertainties. Stop. There's more words you can add on to the end of it that are descriptive, but tend to cause more confusion and debate.

Speaker 3:
[07:10] Yeah. I'll jump in real quick on that. I was trying in the initial cut of Ken and my article to come up with the right definition of what unconventional warfare is. That was what Ken threw in is, hey, it's just support to resistance movement. A doctrine is incredibly important, but also can be incredibly fresh. Our whole last IW Podcast episode was on what the definition of irregular warfare was. It's very difficult and it gets political sometimes. But at the end of the day, what I liked about what Ken brought forward and what you just said, Mark, is if you are a military, like United States military and you have a war to conduct, there is a group of people probably in the country you're working with that don't like the government and are willing to work with you to help overthrow it or hurt it. That's just support to a resistance unit. It's not doctrinal, but it's very simple and easy to understand, I think.

Speaker 1:
[07:59] I don't remember his name, but in 2010, the Trinak commander said something that always stuck with me. His comment was, if you have to read a definition or think about it for more than 30 seconds to understand it, you don't have a good definition. I took that to heart back in my days when I was a doctrine writer. That's what you aspire to, that you heard it once and you can walk away and go, okay, I got it.

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Yeah, and I think the other aspect is our language has to be translatable outside of our community, right?

Speaker 1:
[08:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] Because we've got to be able to explain it to folks who don't read doctrine, who maybe have never worn a uniform. When you're trying to talk about options to civilian decision makers, it's got to be understandable in plain English.

Speaker 4:
[08:37] So I think the what it is part seems pretty straightforward just from listening to you all talk. But I think what people are also kind of hoping for is some idea of the strategic goals. What is this particular approach being used for? So could you talk a little bit about that? How do we know when it's the right time to actually be using UW?

Speaker 2:
[08:58] I'd say there's a multitude of goals that we could be seeking. We talked about some of them in the paper, and it really comes down to not just the goals you're going after, because it's not just as simple as, in this strategic case, use UW. Because there are times when UW is just not the right answer. The conditions on the ground are not acceptable to generating the success in this instance.

Speaker 1:
[09:22] I would describe it this way. It's a great tool in the military tool bag, but it's not a multi-tool. It's a specific tool that you might not use every single day. But it's that kind of tool. When you need it, it's really, really useful. And this is not something that's useful for very short military campaigns, something that's going to be a week long, like Just Cause in Panama in 1989, or Kosovo in 1989. It doesn't particularly fit that scenario. But when you have a broader, large, LISCO type scenario, it potentially becomes very important. And that puts it in a really odd position because we don't have personal familiarity with using it. And I'm saying we, the broader military, every day, it becomes somewhat unfamiliar or confusing.

Speaker 3:
[10:02] Yeah. I love what Ken said about we have to have definitions that non-experts can understand. And I think to motivate the conversation a little bit more, to convince somebody that this is something they need to understand within all the other things they need to understand as a national security expert. Can we give a little bit of scale to how common unconventional warfare is? And Ken, if you could just dig a little bit, is this a recent phenomenon or is this something that has held across time and space as a tool of national security?

Speaker 2:
[10:29] You know, I think in our paper, we go back to Sparta versus Athens and the mobilization of indigenous elements and the ability to use asymmetric and unconventional warfare techniques. Almost every major war that you can look at in the 20th century has some aspect of it, right? There was unconventional warfare aspects in World War I by both sides, right? The Germans in Africa against the untimed powers, and the British famous Lawrence of Arabia made a movie out of it against the Ottoman Turks. And the Middle East version. And obviously more contemporaneously, you know, we started our post 9-11 response with an unconventional warfare effort in Afghanistan, one by 50. And then of course, what Mark describes in his book, our unconventional warfare effort up north to augment the invasion forces coming out of the South. History is replete with the examples of it, even beyond US military history. We can find quite a few examples. It's always present. Sometimes it's the main effort, but more often it's a complementary effort to an uproar of military campaign.

Speaker 1:
[11:35] Yeah, I would go so far as to say, I'm not going to go all the way back to Sparta. If you look right after, let's say, the post-World War II era, there's actually quite a lot of application. A lot of it is not commonly known. Maybe it was conducted by the CIA or in a special operations capacity, but there's actually quite a lot from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the 2001 time period onward. It's really challenging for a young practitioner to grasp the lessons of those historical events. I can say, I've spent the better part of 27 years still finding historical examples that I did not know that much about, and then go find the book or go find something to capture some of those lessons because that's such an important thing. Because if you talk to policymakers or senior military folks, I dare to bet you they will have an opinion. Like I always jokingly say, if you talk to a State Department person, the first thing they're going to bring up is the Bay of Pigs, then that's not inappropriate as a concern or some of the challenges in Syria. As a practitioner, you need to be very aware of the difference between, is it a good or bad idea and was that example good or bad application? They're not one and the same and that sometimes hurts this topic a tremendous amount.

Speaker 3:
[12:47] Uncomventional warfare is a tool used in multiple contexts, but the interest here is, when can it be used by joint force commanders in the context of a broader war? The case studies there is, we find examples of both the Germans, the Brits, and the Americans using unconventional warfare to support broader campaigns during World War I and World War II. I will go back to Sparta and Athens because one of my favorite quotes, and I actually have this up on a painting on my wall is from the Spartan General Lysander who said, where the lion's skin will not reach, you must patch it with the foxes, which is the idea is that every conventional military force has limits, then where your front line can no longer extend, you need to use other unconventional tools to still cause problems for the enemy. So yeah, the historical depth of this I think is important because if you're trying to essentially convince a conventional force leader this is important, you have to show this isn't just a one-off, this happens over and over throughout history.

Speaker 2:
[13:42] And there are times when the campaign objectives aren't beyond this, either the lease or the political limitations of the conventional force. You're living through one of those today. We're in the middle of a conflict with Iran, in which, while it may not be the stated goal of regime change, one can imagine that the only way we can really achieve our objectives in this conflict is if the regime really changes. And an invasion is not a likely scenario, given recent history, the nature of Iran itself, science, et cetera. And so one might imagine if the conditions were acceptable, that perhaps some kind of unconventional solution to support potential internal dissent to overthrow the regime might be an option that would be considered.

Speaker 3:
[14:26] Yeah, I'd like to dig into that later in the conversation. But before doing so, I'd like to start with a thesis, which is that unconventional warfare can and often has in the past play a vital shaping operation in a broader conventional war. And for this to work, conventional joint force commanders must understand the capability at hand and how to integrate SOF assets into their planning and execution. I'll start with Mark. Do you agree or disagree with this argument?

Speaker 1:
[14:53] Yeah, absolutely. This again goes back to we as the person in time and space who are finding ourselves talking to a GCC commander, a geographic combatant commander, or a policymaker, a decision maker needs to be really clear on the value and the limitations of this option because that is what a policymaker will ask. I have many, many stories of being in that position. I used to do this with students all the time role playing, saying, well, I'm really concerned about this, but I'm still going to entertain it. Why should I do it? And we need to have very clear answers of when it is useful and applicable, what it would take, and what the potential risks and limitations are. And not just lump that all together as it's something we want to always promote. It's the right tool for the right job when it fits.

Speaker 4:
[15:33] I want to ask a little bit more about that actually, Mark, because UW in particular is just very dependent on having the right local force available. And as someone who works on proxy war, I know you're all familiar with this. There's just so many things that can go wrong anytime you're relying on others to do your work for you. What are permissive conditions for making this happen? And when is this just a bad idea?

Speaker 1:
[15:53] Such a great question. And I have to say before we start recording, Kyle, you made a comment in your own studies where you got to a point where you said that this seems impossible. And I almost was going to tell you then, I used to actually tell all my students when they would say back to me, this sounds impossible. And I would say, now you're trained. Now you're getting to a point where you understand this. And I have faith that you could potentially do it. It's the person who's like, I think this is pretty easy. So to answer your question, at the onset of an opportunity, and I'm going to say most of those opportunities start at the highest levels, be it whether the Pentagon or a Geographic Combatant Command or a 4-star Regional Command. They're the ones who are looking at the problems. They need to have some inject that can feed them, hey, this might be something that will meet your objectives, but that means there needs to be a Special Operations Representative that is aware of the challenges they're facing and can articulate this very, very quickly. Now, then it gets into what we call a feasibility assessment, which often gets skipped because we make a decision and then we got to try to fill it in backwards, and that leads to bad results. But simply put, there's a series of environmental criterias like, does this group have indigenous leadership that's competent? Do they have terrain that would allow them to fight and stay alive? Is there a weakness of the government control over the population? So you look at those things and say yes or no. And then we look at, do they have ideology that matches ours? Do they have objectives that match ours? We have a little bit of room to change these if it's not quite right. We can influence it and maybe get them to agree to stop certain behaviors that are not conducive. But nobody wants to hear the answer is no. But this is a really challenging thing to do on the front end before we get excited about tactical opportunities. Let's say we succeed in our tactical endeavors, but now we've got an armed group that never agreed to this new government we want to establish. And we've just now had a layer of instability into our own operation. There is an assessment of, is this the right group? And historically, when we've skipped that or shortchanged it, it generally leads to problems down the road.

Speaker 2:
[17:45] I would just emphasize one of the points Mark made, that is, I think common objectives or at least some level of alignment is really important. You've got to have an agreement between what the US is trying to achieve, and it reconciles with what the indigenous group that we're going to the workforce wants to achieve, at least to some extent. You're never going to get a complete overlap of objectives. And in some cases, your short-term objectives are enough to be aligned, and then you'll kind of agree to work through the other ones later. The experience Mark and I had with the Kurds was somewhat like that. You were aligned on one objective, at least, and that was that they all wanted Saddam to go. What wasn't clear was some of the more difficult issues like, hey, who gets to control Krakow and so on? Who gets to control oil fields? Do the Kurds get an autonomous, can they keep their autonomous region? Do they get something more than that? All those things were sort of put in the bay when we had our initial discussions, because we agreed on the first objective, which was, hey, we got to get rid of these terrorists over in the Eastern sector, and then we'll work to get Saddam going.

Speaker 1:
[18:50] In that example, we were very fortunate because those particular partners worked out. We cleaned up as much of that as we could on the ground, and it was fortunate that they met the criteria, whether it was formally asked before we got in touch with them or not.

Speaker 4:
[19:03] Yeah. It seems like what is required in terms of working with the local force is going to change depending on the other US commitments in that particular conflict. Depending on whether you want these local forces to actually supplement for or potentially substitute for US ground forces.

Speaker 1:
[19:19] That speaks to a really, really important point for American planners to understand. They have a role in the battlefield. It's not automatic replacement of US forces. Because what I mean by that is, they can operate to some degree in their habitual area. I've seen this with several senior American commanders who just assumed it was going to be a one-for-one replacement with American infantry. That's not the case. As is the example, like in southern Afghanistan, after we saw the initial success of the Northern Alliance in the country, there was a great effort to replicate it in the South, and it didn't materialize correctly. There's a good reasons because we rushed through that criteria, and then we actually bust or trucked a lot of the new Southern Alliance to areas they were not familiar with, mentally hoping they were going to function like surrogate infantry and it didn't materialize. Unfortunately, some commanders walked away with, this non-conventional warfare thing doesn't really work. That's an example of, well, that's not really an accurate statement.

Speaker 3:
[20:11] I'd actually like to push back on Ken Tovo's argument a little bit. I feel like pushing back, I should refer to him as Lieutenant General Tovo though. But the argument, and we see this a lot both in policy circles, but also in academia, this argument has taken hold that interest alignment between the donor force, so us, and then the agent or the proxy force, that determines success. But inherently in a lot of these cases, we're working with people that actually don't have interest alignment with us. There's an adverse selection issue. And so, you know, something I've been exploring recently is can we get a partner to do what we want them to do when we don't necessarily have shared interest, but we just need them to go do violence on the part of the United States? I'd be curious to hear your guys' feedback on that.

Speaker 2:
[20:57] Yeah, I think that maybe at the tactical level, you can pull it right to forth. I can buy some level of activity through incentives. But I guess I'd like to hear some of your examples where we achieved operational strategic success with a gross misalignment of some objectives. That there's got to be at least some common objective. Somebody might look at our covert support to the Afghan guerrillas in the 80s and say, well, they had different objectives. Some of them wanted to set up a much different kind of post-war government than we did. But really the common objective that we could align on them was we wanted to get the Russians out of Afghanistan and impose calls. I think there's got to be at least some common objectives that's shared, but I'm open to hear a contrary. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:43] I mean, the idea is that I think you can reform a partner force. Maybe this applies more in cases where you're working with governments. Say, for example, you're working with a government that's corrupt and inefficient and militarily ineffective. The question is, you don't have interest alignment, but can you reform them through essentially providing a bunch of resources and training and stuff they want to change their behavior? On the unconventional warfare side, it's a little bit trickier because honestly, we don't have a lot of research on what works when you're supporting insurgent forces or resistance forces because it's usually pretty sensitive inherently.

Speaker 1:
[22:15] I'll jump on this one. This is like the example of the abusive relationship that I believe I can change it down the road. But it's actually really important because we all want things to work out to fit our plan. There's a great danger again for the strategic level planners, or I guess for the operational planners too, to overlook things and say, I think I can change it. I said a minute ago, there are some things you can adjust a little bit. There's factors. If we don't know, is there indigenous leadership that's competent? We can't just skip that and go, well, we're going to find some guys and we'll insert them. Doesn't work. If their objectives, their near term objectives are kind of aligned because they dislike the same people we have an issue with, that makes us feel good and it gets some near term results. But again, it speaks to what's the bigger end state? Do we agree on what happens after you defeat that guy on the battlefield? Then the other one that's the great danger of overlooking it, I distinguished ideology. Maybe they have the same objectives, I dislike that group and I will fight them if you give me guns. But our ideology is they support human trafficking on the black market, they get a lot of their funding for illicit drugs. That's an example. Maybe I can stop that behavior, but I should stop it before I start supporting them and not hope down the road, I'll be able to just compel them with my friendship.

Speaker 4:
[23:27] Yeah. I think part of what this conversation is pointing to is that it's probably that sort of medium area of interest divergence that is sort of the risky spot, but also the spot where a lot of policy makers might want to play, right? Because they're not so grossly misaligned that it's definitely going to fail. And they're not so closely aligned that you could just be like, you know, here's your weapons cash, go ahead and do something. But you know, you kind of want to play in this middle space. And then it depends on how willing you are to actually put the resources towards controlling them and account for the fact that there may be some dangerous surprises along the way.

Speaker 1:
[23:58] Well, and let me introduce the word partnership. This is a really important part of this too. There's partnerships and there are surrogates and they're not the same. We use surrogates for all sorts of operations. It's a really good technique. And it's not specific only to Unconventional Warfare. It could be for anything. If we're talking about Unconventional Warfare though, the relationship needs to be a legitimate partnership. And there's no air quotes with that. And if we don't have that, it becomes very problematic on the road.

Speaker 2:
[24:26] I agree with all that. I was just back to Alex's point. I would just say that there are very few perfect partners waiting out there for us to operate with in areas that we want to. And so, you want at least some level of, I think, interest alignment, particularly on the near to midterm interests. It's like it if we have kind of the same worldview on a variety of issues. It'd be really good if we were all free market, Jeffersonian democracy, believing people. But the reality is, the area of risk for strategic decision-makers on whether or not to work with this potential partner or where those divergences are, because there will be divergences. Mark and I have experiences with the PUK. They were a little bit more connected to elements out of Iran than I would have preferred. We did some things to mitigate that, but it is what it is. That was the environment we were going for, and that was an area of risk. And there were other areas of risk, but the bottom line is I think there's always going to be those kinds of considerations, whether it's what their social values are, what their political ideologies are, et cetera.

Speaker 3:
[25:32] I think it's important to interject here to emphasize that in my personal relationship, in response to Mark, I do have interest alignment, and I don't think it's abusive and I need to reform her. But just to throw it out there.

Speaker 4:
[25:42] Yeah, because that's not going to work. It never works.

Speaker 3:
[25:45] But I'd like to pull it back to a broader framework for understanding how unconventional warfare or utilizing local resistance forces can be helpful to a joint force commander. Ken, in the article you and I wrote, we talked about special operations forces and unconventional warfare can be used to supplement or substitute conventional forces. Could you dig in a little bit on what this means and explain it to a potential joint force planner or military planner who may not understand why this can be a valuable tool and under what conditions?

Speaker 2:
[26:15] Yeah, I think for a joint force planner, the idea will be supplement is essentially a shaping tool. How do we provide a capability that helps shake the battlefield in conjunction with the joint force planner's plan? Then to substitute is obviously, hey, I've got an area or an operational act that needs to happen where I would like to use conventional forces. For some reason, I just can't get conventional forces to have the access. Mark lays out in the book, the fourth ID was supposed to be in the north of Iraq for the invasion. They were supposed to pass through Turkey, come into the northern sector, and be the northern effort as a supporting effort to the invasion outside. They couldn't get access. Turks decided at the relatively last minute, they're doing more support the American invasion at large, and they denied them entry. The fourth ID could not get in there. As a result, we went with an unconventional warfare campaign that was already in the plan anyways, but rather than a piece of the northern effort, it became the whole northern effort, augmented by some conventional forces in the end. But it was substituting for a specific military unit, the fourth ID and the capabilities that they were owning there.

Speaker 3:
[27:31] Just to sum it up, supplementation is you have a limited conventional forces, your lines run thin, like we talked about with Lysander earlier, where you no longer have conventional brigades to put along the front line, or in a broader global campaign like World War I or World War II, you might supplement them with SOF forces. In the example we used there, and there's multiple examples, but the Germans in World War I were sending small numbers of German, what we would probably call today special operations leaders or special forces, Green Beret equivalents into Africa to raise just thousands of indigenous forces to heckle the Allies. Similarly, we saw in Saudi Arabia the use of British forces to raise indigenous forces that would fight against the Ottoman Empire. So this is a historic tool. It's not just a modern tool. And then substitution is at some point, there's just places where you can't send your conventional forces due to political reasons or other types of constraints. And I mean, there's all kinds of examples. We've talked in this podcast before about in Ukraine, there is a front line with Russian troops and behind that, there's an occupied territory and you just can't send certain American or Western forces back there. So how do you actually cause problems for the Russians when it's politically or physically denied? You can do that through local resistance or civilian or other types of forces. So I think that sums it up. But Mark, if you could just give us an overview of exactly how did this play out in the 2003 invasion? How is this a case of SOF?

Speaker 1:
[28:58] 2003 invasion is really a fascinating example, and not just the part that Ken and I were involved in, but I'm talking about the whole campaign plan, like watching CENTCOM suddenly struggle with, wow, we got to really do this, and break out a 10-year-old Gulf War plan that was no longer relevant because the Army had shrunk considerably since 1990. So suddenly, all tools were on the table, and especially because of what happened in Afghanistan six months to a year ago with the Northern Alliance, they were interested. And as it turned out, the scenario was such that, hey, there might be a Kurdish potential in the North, and there might be a Shia potential in the South. So they started to look at both of those. And this is an important point that I would describe for anybody. A good rule of thumb, if you will, for unconventional warfare is there's two applications. There's in support of LISCO, it has two subparts, and there's as a standalone effort, traditionally more like the CIA in Afghanistan in 1980s. That's a separate scenario. So when I say in support of LISCO, there's two sub-scenarios to that. One is create a second front, which was the scenario that Ken and I faced with the Kurds in the North, for obvious reasons, to verge forces from the enemy, things like that. And then there's in support of the invasion area. And that's what Fifth Group and the Shia potential idea was facing in the South. There's very technically different information on how to do both of those. That one is harder. Supporting an invasion area is more challenging to plan than supporting the development of a second front. And subsequently, there was a lot of challenges. I think also the Shia panned out to not have the potential anymore because we were not aligned. Five years earlier, around 1995, the Shia potential that was there may have been in a better position, but over the years, they got closer and closer to Iran. So in 2002, when we looked at it, it just didn't really materialize as a viable option anymore. If it had, understanding what you would do to support a conventional commander and invasion from the conventional perspective and special operations is so under discussed and so difficult.

Speaker 3:
[30:58] I mean, so what we did, what 10th Special Forces Group did in the north, we partnered with local Kurdish Peshmerga forces to create a new front in support of the broader US military conventional offensive that was coming from the south. So we essentially made a northern front to tie up Iraqi forces while the conventional forces were coming from the south. Is that right?

Speaker 2:
[31:21] Yeah. Essentially, when you looked at the pre-war Iraqi lay down in forces, about two-thirds of the Iraqi military was right in the north. Three corps, 13 divisions. So a pretty significant element. And part of that was because of the Kurds. I think part of it was also they perceived a potential threat from Turkey. And so when they looked around their neighborhood as far as where they needed to array their forces, two-thirds in North. As you evaluate that, the plan became, okay, how do we keep the two-thirds in the north so that they can't interfere with the invasion coming out of Kuwait from the south aimed at Baghdad? And essentially our mission up north, to sort of north, of which we were a part, became at least in the CENTCOM mind, and Mark addresses this in the book, to quote, fix 13 divisions in place. And we had a lot of fun and many conversations about whether or not that was actually an achievable objective. In civilian terms, we were to prevent them from interfering with the defensive back end.

Speaker 4:
[32:19] So one thing I've been wondering about is whether this particular case was unique, particularly given the context of US maintained no-fly zones in the North and the South, Operation Northern Watch and Southern Watch. How typical is this for other unconventional warfare campaigns?

Speaker 2:
[32:36] To some extent, it was a very favorable condition. Under the Northern No-Fly Zone, particularly, the Kurds had been able to establish an autonomous zone in which they were surviving. Although notably, primarily, the KDP was under the Northern No-Fly Zone. The PNK, their territory that they control was not under the Northern No-Fly Zone, yet they were maintaining their own autonomy through their ability to ensure that the Iraqi army did not want to come with. They had a pretty good defensive line and very defensible to many of the mountains. I would say it was analogous to the fact that the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan had retained control of some territory. I think that allows you to jumpstart an unconventional warfare campaign. If the resistance element that you're going to work with already controls some amount of, let's call it safe haven or has some contested territory where the government hasn't really locked down their control, then that is a much more favorable condition for operations.

Speaker 3:
[33:34] These are ideal conditions for conventional warfare.

Speaker 2:
[33:38] It allows you to then have an area to operate from. Certainly lowers the risk of entry for US forces that want to come in and support. Conversely, look at something like the Russian controlled zone in eastern Ukraine. Because of the ability of the Russians to very brutally lock down the population, that's a place where it's hard for even Ukrainian SOF to operate. I think it seems like the Ukrainian SOF has found it easier to operate in parts of Russia to conduct operations. That's correct. Then they have in the eastern part of the Ukraine, just because of the level of control. In short, I wouldn't say it's a unique condition because quite frequently, these efforts involve falling in on a resistance element that owns some contested.

Speaker 3:
[34:23] The interesting thing from Mark's book is that the northern front ended up becoming a SOF dominant unconventional warfare mission working with the Kurds, essentially a textbook shaping operation for the broader war. What's unclear to me is, was this actually part of the original plan? I noticed there were some political issues with Turkey allowing our conventional forces to cross the border. I'd love to know, was this the deliberate plan? How did planning go with the broader invasion forces, the planners at the conventional headquarters?

Speaker 2:
[34:50] Well, correct me if your memory of this is different, but as I recall, planning for this started pretty far out. The fourth ID wasn't in the initial plan. They came midway. In the initial plan, we got told, hey, 10th Group, you're in the plan, you're going to be in the north. Full stop. That was it for the mission statement. We essentially spent some time looking at the problem at the battalion level, and then literally one Saturday morning, the group commander convened a meeting in the basement of the headquarters, and it was Saturday morning because we all know you do your best work on the weekend. There's just not enough time on Monday to try.

Speaker 3:
[35:25] It just makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[35:27] Focus on the important stuff like invading a country. Anyway, Saturday morning, we're sitting around a map and having this framing discussion is what I'd call it. If you're into the operational design methodology, essentially we were framing the problem. We didn't know anything about operational design at the time, but that's, Mark, if you recall, that's kind of what we were doing. But at that point, we came to the conclusion of, hey, they haven't asked us this, but it seems like our job is going to be, how do we keep the bulk of the Iraqi force up north? We then came to the conclusion that we could leverage the Kurdish Peshmerga that were there in an unconventional warfare effort. By that point, I think, Mark, we already knew that in our sector, in the eastern portion of the PUK., the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, our partner to be, had a challenge with a significant Al Qaeda-inspired and Al Qaeda-related terrorist group in their eastern sector, and that if we were going to get them to work with us against Saddam's forces, we were going to first have to eliminate threat. And so out of that Saturday morning, essentially came the intellectual framework for us to begin planning what we were going to do in the east, what the 2nd Battalion was going to do in the west. And then there were multiple iterations from that. And at one point we found out, hey, the 4th ID is going to attack through Turkey. And we were back and forth to Turkey quite a few times over the course of the next year. And we got to sit and listen to Turkish conversations that made it sound unlikely that the 4th ID was coming, but it wasn't our business to declare possible or not. And frankly, road infrastructure was going to make it really hard for the 4th ID to get from the port to the border in any time of the time of the station. So it started out, no 4th ID, 4th ID got added, 4th ID got taken away. Throughout the plan, we knew we were going to the north and that our focus was going to be unconventional warfare with this Peshmerga counterpoint.

Speaker 1:
[37:16] It's so much more complex than Ken's making it sound. I'm laughing thinking about the Saturday morning events you're talking about. He and I spent literally hours together talking about the wording in the mission statement. When I make this point, we got to a degree of fidelity of clarity that we didn't get from our hire that we were not doing unconventional warfare. That's a characterization or the type of operation I'm going to talk about, but I would not say my mission was to do unconventional warfare. I wouldn't say my mission was to work with the Kurds. That's also my method. My mission was to tie up Saddam's forces north of Baghdad in support of the invasion force from the south.

Speaker 3:
[37:52] What exactly are some of the tactical effects and strategic effects that Special Operations Forces or Unconventional Warfare can have in support of a joint force commander? We started out the conversation with my thesis that unconventional warfare can be very valuable in the context of a broader campaign as a shaping operation. That's a strategic perspective. Now, if you could just provide some of the insights on in the article that Ken wrote, he talks about sabotage and kinetic effects, intelligence support and preparation of the environment, maneuvering to the close fight. What are some of these examples that we can provide? How you would make the sales pitch?

Speaker 1:
[38:26] Sales pitch is a great term. I was thinking about this yesterday. It is weird in my career, given the rank that I was, the degree of time I've had working for significant four stars related to this topic. What I mean by that is, in the last few years of my uniform time and the first few years of my civilian time, I specifically worked for General Petraeus, General Maddus, General Allen, and General Austin. So I really developed a perspective of how a four star looks at these kinds of things, the questions they will ask. It's important. So again, when a practitioner comes in and says, hey, we think we want to do unconventional warfare, almost to a man, the first thing they think is, okay, I don't really know what that is. They need you to say in clear terms, we think we could provide support to this indigenous group because it could achieve this. Okay, they're going to feel uncomfortable with this because they're not familiar with it. And they're going to ask, they're going to tell you, hey, I think this could mess up my invasion. I got a lot of stuff maneuvering and I don't need indigenous guys running around in front of the battlefield. Why should I do this? And I found it amusing how hard of a time we have sometimes articulating this in a way that makes sense to that consumer, the customer. There's a menu of none of it's particularly impressive, but when you add it all up, it's actually pretty significant. So for example, I can provide you enhanced intelligence. I can provide you potentially some capability to recover isolated personnel or downed airmen. I can conduct some degree of sabotage or deception efforts, subversion efforts with an underground. I can conduct kinetic activity with guerrillas in limited capacity. And I've seen this a lot where people will overstate that guerrillas can capture the weapons of mass destruction, or guerrillas can cripple all the air defense systems at the same time. That's not true. So all of this is not a super selling point, now I'm going to say the unattractive one that most commanders are pretty excited about. Once your conventional forces pass through an area, I can link them up with the local indigenous guerrilla or underground elements, and you can hand off certain security requirements for the lines of communications. I can give you personnel who will know how to re-institute the stability of the city, be it the electricity, the power plants, things of that nature. That's suddenly very appealing because now you don't have to burn up the limited conventional forces protecting the lines of communication. We can have indigenous guerrillas do it with special forces guys.

Speaker 2:
[40:44] Really on that stabilization piece, make you look at the challenge that we always seem to have. Once the conflict is over, it's how do we stabilize the area and eventually turn it over to somebody else, to an indigenous government that can exert control and then we leave. Depending on how mature the resistance element is, they may have their own shadow government established already, but they certainly have a leadership structure and they can be part of rapidly establishing indigenous government. For example, our main counterpart from a political level in the Eastern portion was the head of the PUK, Jalal Talabani. He was incredibly influential in his relationships across Iraq to the point where in the post-invention period, he becomes the president of Iraq. That's the other value of this resistance, is that it gives you a line into the post-conflict. I'll just amplify a couple of things back to the case study, Mark's book, if you will. One of the other things that it brought was this ability to mobilize indigenous mass. Between the PUK and the Kaydent P, there was about 55,000 Peshmerga in the north. That's a pretty significant force. It's not the combat power or the fourth ID, but it's still a pretty significant force.

Speaker 3:
[41:59] Can you give a sense of scale of how many Americans we had on the ground, you just gave the Peshmerga numbers, and how many Iraqis were actually being tied up from that to get a sense of scale?

Speaker 2:
[42:08] Yeah, sure. We had two battalions from 10th Group. We're both about, with augmentees, probably just under 400 each, 400 personnel. You figure about two-thirds of those are Green Berets and the rest are support personnel, given the structure back then. Then we had a battalion out of a third group that was a mounted SF battalion that was very focused on the live-alive actions and did some work on looking for W&D. So with staff at the legislative level, we're probably talking 1200 total folks in the ground force in the north, but not counting when the MEU came in and then the 173rd. But from an S-up perspective, probably 1200, 1300. And then, as I said, about between 50 and 55,000 Peshmerga total. And then the Iraqi Army, I think the estimated in the three corps is about 150,000. And so, you know, if you just look at the US to an enemy ratio, the ability of 1200, 1300 Americans to leverage an indigenous partner to tie down 150,000 Iraqi combatants is fairly significant. The other thing I'd like to talk about though really quickly is just the intel aspect. We fell in with some agency partners who had done some development work. We had augmented them with our pilot team. We had been on the ground for quite some time before the invasion started, which helped us plan and prepare. But it also helped develop that overarching intel picture that turned out to be really impactful across the theater. Long story short, in our sector, they essentially had a walk-in who had a connection to a religious group that spanned Iraq. They essentially had a ready-made intel network that our folks and the agency folks helped operationalize. In fact, they turned out to be the intel that initiated the war. One of one of their network reporters became the person who called in and said, hey, Saddam is at this place at this time, and the president made the decision that we're going to try and take him out of there. From that perspective, you look at strategic and operational level impact, the intel and preparation of the environment aspect is usually important. And it's really hard to do without an indigenous partner because they know the people, they know the societies, they know the terrain. You're not going to go in on your own and establish all that level of understanding.

Speaker 3:
[44:21] I mean, I think the sales pitch for a conventional commander in the top line, if you had a 22nd pitch, was with under 1500 US personnel on the ground and some partners that we're going to work with, we can tie up over 100,000 Iraqi forces to buy you time to not have to deal with them on the invasion. That's a pretty compelling narrative, but I think we often get lost telling that story and the details and the complexity of how this is going to work and who we're going to work with. I almost think we just need to get to that bottom line up front and hope that's conveyed effectively so we can move out with the mission.

Speaker 2:
[44:51] What are the effects you're going to create?

Speaker 3:
[44:53] There's so much more in this conversation, but we're running up on time and I'm sure Alex is going to hate me for this because I know she has a lot of more questions, but I'm going to move us toward closing based on your extensive experience with unconventional warfare and then also integrating SOF with conventional forces. What are the implications for policymakers and practitioners that you take from this conversation?

Speaker 1:
[45:13] For SOF integration or SF integration with conventional forces, the biggest thing I would say is the message needs to be clear, and it needs to be tailored to what they're interested in. They don't want to hear that it's our original mission. They don't want to hear that it's our raison d'etre. They want to hear what it's in it for them. It needs to resonate with them very, very clearly. That's actually challenging too because for special forces personnel or any SOF personnel, the military keeps evolving how it fights. The battlefield is changing so rapidly. The SOF community needs to be really fluent, if you will, in how is the military currently fighting and what are their challenges.

Speaker 2:
[45:51] I think I'd add to that, make sure policy makers understood it. This is most likely to be an available tool if you make some investments early in time. Some of the things that need to be developed in order to increase the likelihood of success of an unconventional warfare offer take time to develop. You can get lucky. You can fall in on a ready-made resistance organization that's already in sanctuary like to some extent like we did in the north. We didn't talk about the fact we have pre-existing relationship that's occurred that really went back into the Gulf War, post-Gulf War. We had developed relationships. We had built in credibility relationships and to some extent experience with the terrain, the people on the ground to set it. If you don't already have that ready-made, it's not as easy as saying, hey, things aren't working out for us right now. And let's throw that UW tool at their heads. And reality is, boy, there should have been a lot of work going on already in order to make it a viable option for the policymaker. So I would say, you know, you got to develop and maintain long-term relationships and places where you think you might want to use this tool. You got to develop physical and human infrastructure to support it. I'd end with, you need to make sure that we're developing the leaders that can execute this kind of operation because it really is a, you know, it's a team effort. You're working with an indigenous partner. You're generally working with other governmental partners, intel, state, others. This is truly a whole of government effort in a lot of ways to do a successful unconventional warfare campaign. And so, you know, we got to have the right people in charge that understand leadership without ego or ownership, because you're not going to own all the aspects of the mission. It's not all going to be up-combed to you.

Speaker 3:
[47:37] Alex, you are a leading scholar on working with partner forces. I'll let you see if you have any closing questions before we move out.

Speaker 4:
[47:46] Yeah, I just echo everything that you said with my understanding of the Ukraine case. But one question I had that's still just really bothering me, I know all you SOF guys like to be good at everything. Are there some trade-offs involved trying to be good at UW, being good at direct action, being good at everything else? Because this seems important as we think about the future of special operations forces and great power competition.

Speaker 2:
[48:09] Yeah, I think Mark and I are in the same place on this, right? As a special forces soldier, your focus is working with and through partners. And so you need to be good enough at all of those skills. Very rarely is an SF team going to be asked to do a unilateral direct action. You need to be able to organize an indigenous element, train them and lead them or partner with them in a direct action. So it's great if you got a 12-man team, that's just an awesome level of fire and maneuver. But that's really not your job. Your job is developing an indigenous partner to get it done. And so good enough at all those other tasks, but you really got to be superior at working with an indigenous partner.

Speaker 3:
[48:56] It's interesting you say that because I've worked with Special Forces teams who say, you know, they went down to a country we've been working with with decades and training them. And now that country is better at the task that we're training them with. And they say that kind of a bad thing, like the Special Forces guys are no longer the direct action experts because they're being outperformed by the partner. But actually to me, that's a positive sign. That means after decades of training, they've developed that skill set. And now, you know, our main skill set is actually the training aspect, not being the best at kicking in doors or clearing rooms or whatever it is.

Speaker 1:
[49:26] The one thing I will say about that, that I will also point out, that myself and Kent have some similar background, and we both came from a CIF in 110, First Battalion Forward in Germany. And I think that contributed to our mindset. Like, I love that kind of work, and, you know, and I was really good at it, but I'm very comfortable with it. So I've always tried to teach students to, hey, be more like an OSS guy, you know, and don't just walk around saying, hey, this is the mission I want to do. Like, be prepared to say, what do you need me to do? Whether it's foreign internal defense, whether it's unconventional warfare, or those rare opportunities where we will do direct action or CT-type things. You know, we have a very rounded background that I think helps us apply a more even perspective on how to do things. Sometimes when guys are raised and they're only focusing on like one mission that they want to do, it can kind of unbalance them a little bit.

Speaker 3:
[50:16] Well, this has been an amazing conversation, but we have gone well beyond time. Ken Tovo, Mark Grdovic, thank you so much for your time and sharing your expertise on the Irregular Warfare Podcast.

Speaker 2:
[50:27] Hey, thanks for the opportunity. Really enjoyed it.

Speaker 1:
[50:30] Yeah, my pleasure.

Speaker 3:
[50:36] Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Irregular Warfare Podcast. If you like the show, please spread the word and consider sharing this episode with others. You can subscribe to the Irregular Warfare Podcast so you do not miss an episode. You can also engage with us on X, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and across many other platforms. If you found value in today's conversation, please leave us a review on Apple Podcast. It really helps us reach new audiences. And one last thing. What you heard in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of West Point, Princeton University, the Irregular Warfare Initiative or any agency of the US or any other government. Thanks again for being part of this community and we'll see you next time.