Welcome to the YMCA podcast. This is Jack. Today, we are bringing in a special episode from The Irregular Warfare podcast. Also a special shout-out to Benjamin web for helping make this happen. Episode 66 is called Slow Burn. How US security cooperation shapes operational environments, it has a great discussion between retired lieutenant general Mark, hertling Professor Derrick reveron from the US Naval War college and host been
web and barrette. Elias episode is full and uncut and I wanted to share it because it's relevant to the last three feet of foreign policy and to introduce our listeners to The Irregular Warfare podcast and its sponsor the Modern Warfare Institute. Enjoy you can't search trust is the old phrase that you have to build that trust throughout.
And so we have we are training. Earning together, if we are working together, when an international crisis does occur, we can deploy together because we're interoperable. And when you're talking about this security cooperation, you have to consider a push and a pull system in Afghanistan. It was a push system. We were pushing things to them, they wanted us to fight for them and Ukraine. It's been a full system. Welcome to episode 66 at The Irregular. Warfare podcast.
I'm your host Ben Jeb and I'm pleased to introduce today's special guest host. Dr. Barbara Elias, today's episode, explores irregular warfare in the context of European security, cooperation. Our Guest today Begin by addressing. Why the US military? Adopt the global strategy of security cooperation, they then examine the range of activities that fall under the umbrella term of security cooperation and compare and contrast. Last building partner capacity, conventional operations, first
irregular, warfare activities. Finally, they invite talking about how past military cooperation efforts, have shaped today's Regional environment in Eastern Europe. What America can do to optimize its approach to security cooperation in the future. Tenants General, Mark hertling is a national security and Military analyst for CNN overs, 38-year long career, in the military lieutenant, general hurtling served or commanded at every level from the tomb.
Field Army in 2013, he retired from the military is a Commanding General of US Army Europe. The kind of Journal grilling graduated from West Point in 1975 and holds Advanced degrees from Indiana University, National Defense University and Rowland's college. Professor Derrick, reverend in the chair of National Security Affairs at the US, Naval War College in Newport Rhode Island. He is also a reserve. Naval officer who has testified
before the house armed services. His committee on security cooperation programs and has published multiple books and research articles on US. Military cooperation, efforts around the world. The second edition of his 2016 book exporting, security serves as the anchor for today's conversation, you are listening to The Irregular Warfare
podcast. A joint production of the Princeton empirical studies of conflict project 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. Here's our conversation with Lieutenant General Mark hertling and Professor Derrick reveron General hurtling, dr. Ron thanks for joining us on the irregular warfare podcast today, it's great to have you on the
show. Hey, it's great to be here. It's really good to be with you Ben and thanks so much for having us Dr. Reverend you've literally written the book on security cooperation. So I was hoping you could explain and its most basic form what security cooperation is and what is the logic that undergirds building the military capacity of America's Partners around the world?
Yeah, I think simply security cooperation is really just military-to-military relations and there's probably four basic Dimensions as I think through it.
You know, first is just relationship building and that could be everything from hosting Ting officers from other countries at our professional military schools like the naval war college and West Point also just key leader engagements so when our military leaders throughout the ranks, just engage with other officers and ncos throughout the world. A second, I think often has to do with access. The u.s. is a global power. Its defense strategy has very much been characterized by, right?
Forward engagement, at least since World War Two and probably even go before then. And so, we were Rely on our partners to provide critical base access host access to facilitate us defense strategy and I think us defense strategy is very much intertwined with our relationships, whether it's in Europe in the UK, Germany, Italy, and other countries, or in Asia, and Japan, South Korea, Australia.
I think a third dimension. And probably what most people think about is really sort of the hardware part that capability and Congress provides a lot of support to many countries around the world. World through foreign military financing. So this enables a country for example, like Israel to buy F-35 and to improve their air defense perspective and then developing capacity. And so the types of things that components lead.
So General hurtling when it was Army component commander in Europe, doing our exercises, bilateral multilateral with our European Partners to and able to deploy those forces in operations where they're often in Coalition and in terms of the logic, you know, I sort of see two basic things that kind of, uh, Gerd all this, you know, one is a term I use just security deficit. So this is when a country cannot meet its National Security obligations without us
assistance. And so this can be up at the high end, you know, for example, the US and Japan partner and many dimensions and in Japan seeks to deter Chinese aggression and it could be a more traditional lens, you know, supporting counterinsurgency counterterrorism operations in Nigeria or in Colombia. So security deficit is sort of my first Explanation. And then maybe my second one, the more pragmatic and this always gets into the questions
about how do we know this stuff works in the assessment? I think, you know, Coalition, Warfare is a norm. And so when I start looking out and saying, how effective is, as I look at the wars, the US has been engaged in Afghanistan Iraq. Smaller operations in Syria in East Africa. And I say are those countries that we partnered with trained with? Are they serving with us in our Listen combat formations.
And so to me, that's kind of a really important assessment tool, that was an unbelievably, strong definition, and hit every aspect of it. What I would say, you know, when we're talking to an army audience, most younger officers and ncos have no idea, the amount of effort that goes into security cooperation, building, partners and alliances, but it's
one of those kind of things. You can't wait for a conflict to start to begin building it, and it's all, About truthfully generating, trust generating an understanding of each other's way of conducting operations. And having an understanding of just the way an organization works from leadership to maneuver, to Logistics support intelligence-sharing completely down the line. So, I think is there just said, you know, a lot of people get the feeling that it's mainly
just partnering. But as the Commander in Europe, I did not realize this until I became the G3 of Europe and 2005. But the component commanders also have an unbelievably strong connections with the defense attache is in every country because of Acquisitions because of the selling of equipment and how the embassy staff literally works with the foreign government.
It's fascinating to me that is both the G3 and the commander of US Army Europe. I was almost spending more time with embassies and ambassadorial Country teams than I was with soldiers on the train. In ground because you do have to sort of divvy up responsibilities to work with other countries as well as other armies. There was a great book written by a former boss of mine who now runs his own, Think Tank, the Quincy Institute Andrew
bacevich. His very first book was entitled diplomats and khaki and what he talks about is the military, literally building the strength of not only foreign armies, but often times foreign governments and I hope we talk about that a little bit today. I would say that we Need to come back to. These are foreign policy
programs right there. Foreign policy programs that have a defense character because many countries face a security dilemma, you know, both from internal and external threats and all that assistance is coordinated through the US ambassador and I know we'll talk about Ukraine in a little while. And certainly the secretary state blinken has been very much out front on this ensuring that the u.s. and the 50 or so countries are well organized to support Ukraine.
So, it seems like security cooperation is an umbrella term that covers Purrs a vast array of activities, it covers traditional warfighting Concepts but also addresses military education efforts to professionalize the officer and NCO Corps and even delves into humanitarian assistance in governance. So dr. Reverend could you provide us with a brief field survey of the different domains covered under security cooperation?
So the landscape is pretty big, so we could start with Hardware because it often gets like the most attention and as I think about the comparative advantage, the United States has in the defense industry is huge. If you are Japan and you wanted to buy a fifth-generation fighter, your choices of where to do that are pretty slim and so you look to the US and then you look at a program like F-35 which you know has been derided for decades is the most expensive.
Single program in the defense department, but the program has been internationalized. I think it's about up to 15 countries with Finland, maybe the latest country kind of adding on to it. And so the US defense sector is significant in the world and so Hardware, exports are critical second training and I hope to hear more about the time. General hurtling spent at Grafton ver because US military
are really well. Trained and professional in this goes throughout the ranks and I Think the ncos that we develop in the United States are somewhat unique and many countries, look to model on how we do NCO development. And in addition to just regular combat training so our training base is significant and very important and admired.
So you have Hardware, you've got the training that goes related to that and then I would say, you know, just the cooperation that happens on a day-to-day basis. So if I start with Coalition Warfare as a norm and general hurtling highlights, Something to the effect, you can't surge trust is the old phrase that you have to build that trust
throughout. And so if we are training together, if we are working together, when an international crisis does occur, we can deploy together because we're interoperable, we speak the same language, we can communicate on the same frequencies and we understand how to work together. Those are all really fascinating points. One of the things that I keep going back to the, you can't
surge trust. I was, unfortunately, the The latter part of my career involved in the downsizing of forces in Europe and we thought we had come up to a model. Based on the direction we had been given in terms of the amount of forces we were keeping their but as the war continued in both Iraq and Afghanistan, we realized that as countries were going as part of either, the I say F force or the Coalition force in Iraq. First of all, point to point out too. By the way, that any 6% of the I
say F Force leveled off. Mostly from European countries. And that was a direct result. I think of folks coming to my boss early on when I was the training center Commander graph, and beer and saying, hey, look, we're fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with all of these partners coming out of Europe but they don't have the same training capacity.
We do they don't understand how to conduct counterinsurgency Warfare. So you all have to help us before sending them over and training them up to our standards in terms of the train it gets directly. What doctor ever owned? Was saying, about not only the officers who were in charge of these units. But primarily in my view, the ncos were the most important part. And again, I can tell War story after were story about some of the things we did.
But I think one of the more interesting things that occurred when I was the commander of the training center was we posited an idea to our CG of Europe who at the time was General. Bell about opening up our NCO Academy at graph endure, and it got to the point where we An opportunity for about 200 soldiers in every class. But because of the downsizing in Europe, we were not filling the classes.
So I kind of came to the boss and said, what if we started inviting some of our allies and partners to the course, to start building their NCO Corps and their leadership at the junior level. And you have to understand that most armies in Europe, do not have a professional NCO Corps,
some of the bigger ones. Do Germany, France, A ously but back in those days in two thousand, four and five armies like Poland, Ukraine Romania, the Czech Republic, none of them had professional ncos so our requirement was you can send X number of bodies and we kind of Dole them out to our primary
leader development course. At the time later the warrior leader course wlc and it not only established that Bond and that relationship at the sergeant level but more than anything it is Others. The kind of standards that foreign armies would go by. And what I would tell you, I don't have the data from the research for this statement.
But what I will tell you is I can name the armies that during about a three-year period made the determination to actually incorporate a professional NCO Corps, even to the point of for the first time in their lives appointing a sergeant major or First Sergeant's of units and something like that. I mean that's Ground for all of us in the US military. But when you go to a country, like, oh, I don't know. Let's say Romania or let's say Ukraine, because we're going to
get to that. They did not have a professional NCO Corps, and they also had a conscript Army. And it was a huge success story for me. Personally, when about a year after I retired, I got a call from my former sergeant major. You sir, sergeant major Dave Davenport. He said, sir, you'll never guess what happened. He said after, so many times asking us to help them do this, the Ukrainian.
You finally declared that, they would have a professional NCO Corps with ranks Associated to them in line with what the US Army does. These are the kind of Victories that mean a lot to people who are in the business of theater security. Cooperation, that are sort of under the wave tops of what most people understand, that it makes a huge difference as we're seeing today.
It seems like the armed forces are the default tool for a lot of different security problems, including Coalition, politics, and Trust building and critical alliances. He discussed the consequences for this on security and on the military is there a risk that the US military is just taking on too many different types of responsibilities. So I've been thinking about kind of this question, the military and foreign policy probably for a couple decades now.
So, you know, when my first writing stored, it came out, you know my I think tagline was initially. Combatant commanders are as much policy entrepreneurs is warfighters. And this upset many people to say, why is the military engaged in policy? Making the general officer and flag officer level. Your job starts to become your more broadly representing DOD and the US Government. Not necessarily your particular service, let alone just the US military.
So the danger that we often hear in Rosa Brooks book on. This is very good. You know, we're DOD becomes. I think she uses the Walmart metaphor DOD ends up having to do everything. I typically say DOD is more like Home Depot. You know, you can buy everything from Lumber to plans to power tools and everything that DOD is much more than warfighting. I think there's probably more non warfighting functions of DOD. Then we're fighting things like humanitarian assistance,
tremendous Logistics capability. Probably the largest medical system for a military and so DOD can offer a lot. So I guess the danger and I was a part of project with Gordon Adams and shoot Murray down at American University and their Book Project was called Mission creep. And this was sort of the word back then and all the contributors we had probably a four month conversation on the title and it was just going to be Mission creep and then half
of us, wanted a question mark. And the other half didn't because we couldn't quite determine. Is this really Mission creep or not? If these functions are foreign policy tool and DOD is much bigger than warfighting? I personally don't think it's Mission creep. I mean right, there are certain things that can go for a long time that can lead to this
Mission creep idea. But DOD is a very large organization and I sort of think even at what think we're going to look at the defense budget close to 800 billion plus nuclear weapons. We should be able to prepare for war. And especially if war is going to be coalition in nature. All of these security cooperation programs, I think are essential to that because we do not fight alone is to me at the end of the day, why we should do these engagement programs, even though they might
seem very frustrating at times. Using that model of the defense budget, I think one of the things a lot of Americans don't understand is that business concept of return on investment for Alliance building and the reason they don't see it as clearly as some of us. That work the projects do every day is because you don't get the return on the investment after the exercise. You get it when the nations are called to conduct operations together.
So again, I don't want to steal your thunder and but people will talk about Ukraine and how much we are buying in terms of equipment, but I would suggest that not just in Ukraine, but several other countries within the European footprint because I know them the best are as good as they are not.
Because of high Mars which everyone is proclaiming, although that certainly contributed quite a bit but there is good as they are because we have been training with them for the last 14 years or so and you don't get that return on an investment of capabilities in a foreign force that is actually helping us security interest by being prepared to go it alone in this case or as part of an alliance.
So it's sort of like why our universities paying so much to build gymnasiums or wire hospitals in. As did in building gyms and the pre-injury stuff that comes along with physical fitness. Well, you understand that once you are injured or have a disease that you can rebound a lot quicker if you do have that base, which is what security
cooperation is all about. And if I could follow up to back to Barbara's, point is there's been a lot of failure in these programs to and this is what I think policymakers. Find frustrating is if we were having this conversation a year ago, we wouldn't sort of have the aura of the Ukrainian Armed
Forces successes. Today we would have sort of the aura of the fall of Kabul and so there's a lot of failure in these programs to, which I think caused right for pause in this program that I mentioned Mission creep. But I really do think it is a political scientist. It's frustrating. Because the cases tend to be unique, it's hard to say, well, why did the rebuild in South Korea? Post 1953 work? But not in South Vietnam, for example, probably similar people. So why is?
Crane having these great successes but Afghanistan didn't very hard to explain how has the relationship between the US and Israel. Been managed in spite, its very high level of military-to-military Engagement with some consequences, but I would kind of put it in that larger context, but I think it does require everybody to do their jobs, right? That OSD needs to make sure they're giving the uniform the right direction.
Because to me, that's a key piece of the civilian control, and then at the country Team level, that anything. She is proposing is supportive of broader us objectives, and those countries. I'm sure that like many bureaucracies the us as well as other branches of the government, were somewhat resistant to the idea of making security, cooperation is centerpiece of its military strategy, and Doctor. Reverend, you commit an entire chapter of your book to addressing this resistance.
So could you explain how the US National Security establishment, overcame bureaucratic inertia and finally came around to investing in partner capacity. Cassity building effort. It's a great question and thanks for calling out that chapter and I'll admit to it's a chapter. I did not originally have in the book. And so during the peer review process, you know, the criticism was. Hey, you're too Rosie on these programs. Where's all the resistance? And so that's where that chapter
came from. But when I thought about the resistance to security cooperation programs, I think it comes throughout many different levels people in the uniform military would say look. I didn't enlist to train Afghans in Marksmanship. That's not why I joined the military or in the Navy. I did not spend years training to conduct anti-submarine Warfare from ap8 to be, you know, supporting counter migrant operations or counterdrug
operations. And so you sort of have that resistance at every time we partner we are taking time away from our core combat training. Mission. So that was serious. And so, you know, I got a lot of hate mail from my uniform friends on these points and then on the civilian that, you know, we started out is that old idea, right? If all we have is a hammer, everything is a nail. And that's where I say, well, DOD is much bigger than a hammer.
It's got tremendous Logistics capability, tremendous planning capability, tremendous Intel capability that we're not using Special Forces officers to. I don't know. Dig wells in East Orca, it might be there but we're using Navy construction battalions. Their function is civil construction, projects and Military construction projects. So they're getting that training time anyway and then we're
broadly is there is a concern. The US has a very black history with mil-to-mil training and it's pretty current and you look at the senator from Vermont. Pat Leahy has the amendment to the foreign assistance act to make sure the u.s. is not training people and units. Accused of Human Rights abuses because that's a real part of this history, going back to the 1980s. And so we have to be really
careful about that. So, I would say, one of the caveats to, you know, for me, then with all this in mind is, we always have to solve for US national interests. We've got too many examples, whether it was during the Cold War. If a country wanted assistance, they would say, hey there are communists in the jungle, and then they would label their political enemies communist, and then us would help. So, if that was sort of the Red Scare, I think probably the last 20 years, we have the green
scare, right? There's Al Qaeda, there's Isis there and we have to be really careful because at the end of the day we're asking u.s. men and women in uniform to go do these training missions and support our partner. And we have to make sure the partner's interests are aligned with the US interest. So we don't put people in these situations and make things worse, and we've got lots of examples where intervention actually makes things worse. And that's what makes this so hard.
Deborah hurtling. I'd like to hear your perspective on something dr. Reverend mentioned regarding what kinds of interests between the u.s. and partners are the most important when there are so often. Disagreements and Divergent priorities between allies including the human rights issues doctor Reverend mentioned, could you speak to that a bit? Well, dr. Elias I'll introduce you to a term. The only graduates of the war
College know. And that's dots that's another military acronym dots that stands for depends on the situation. Ation. So in Europe there were like I said 49 countries on the continent that I was working with. I'll go back to what dr. Reverend said about focusing on the countries because in the military context we have something called targeting cells.
When you go to combat, you target something that you think the enemy has and you apply capabilities to destroy that Target or to disable it or whatever we expanded those targeting meetings to engagement with. Other countries and we use targeting the targeting methodology that you use in Military and combat to. How do we apply forces to achieve a specific objective with X country and every single one of them was different.
So, when you're dealing with a country, like I'll pick one Romania. The objectives of that nation, in terms of their government and Military are very different than the objectives of a more democratic state. Like Germany that's been around for a while and it reflects in
how you do theater security. Cooperation, I spent very little time as a commander in Europe with the German Army, I spent a whole lot of time with Romania. Bulgaria the Baltic countries, Croatia and each one of them had different ideas about what they want to do. Do in terms of their security forces. So you do push the US perspective certainly but one of the biggest Lessons.
I learned as a senior Commander was, you have to understand what the Strategic Dynamics are in the country you're dealing with and you can't push too hard on what the United States. One, you have to really have a nuanced hand in terms of allowing things to occur through various levels of influence, and that takes leadership, as well as an understanding of what your
National objectives are. If I can give you one small example, I got Got a call one Sunday afternoon from my counterpart in Croatia. And if you've ever been to Croatia Croatia, it is a gorgeous country. It has a great Sea Coast, great beaches, but it also has some great mountains. Well, they happen to get about three or four feet of snow in the mountain areas where most of their Farms were. I got a call from my Croatian, counterpart, a two star general in charge of their land forces.
And he asked if I could help somehow because we had an aviation unit training in Croatia, Time at their training center. And there were a couple of ch-47f down there. The big helicopters, the twin bladed helicopters and he said, I sure could use some of those helicopters to move cows out of the mountain areas and get them from dying in the snow, because the farmers are really pushing
my president heart. I said, okay, so I called the Aviation Brigade Commander. I said, let's turn this into a training Mission. They move something like 75 cows and a four-day period and the farmers thought that the Ation US military relationship was the best thing ever, that got to the Ambassador level. Got to the president of Croatia level and something as silly as moving. Cows out of a snowstorm had strategic effects in terms of our relationship with an emerging country that eventually
was led into NATO. So question, I'd like to pose the both of you covers the difference between mil-to-mil cooperation over conventional capacity. Building versus security assistance to more irregular warfare activities. I know there's nothing easy about building partner capacity in any context, but is it may be somehow more straightforward to train forces on large
conventional. Maneuver Warfare rather than addressing counterterrorism and unconventional warfare or maybe they're both equally difficult in their own way. I'm going to go back if you don't mind doctor and I'll take the first shot at this. Again, dots mean, when you talk about the Special Forces capability of the Baltic countries, relatively small countries, with relatively small militaries, that can't do much against a large Russian
Onslaught as we're seeing now. And by the way, I mentioned Army Navy Air Force in my previous statement about theater security, cooperation, sock, your those Special Operations Command. Europe was Table in terms of the things they did with the special forces of various countries, primarily there in Road, was to get the counterinsurgency counterterrorism capability but they were also training things like leadership Supply at the small unit level and then I'll
add one more capability. And that's the US National Guard. Both Air Force and army. There's a place in Ukraine that absolutely nobody knows about called. Yeah, bereaved, which was the Ukrainian training base. We took a sellout of graph and beer and put it in your favor, even 2011 to help them with their exercises, it formalized in 2014.
After the invasion of Crimea and the donbas with something that is called the JMT gu joint multinational training group Ukraine and that was modeled after the JMT gr, which was the joint multinational training group Romania at a place called
sink. Ooh, I know Another place drops Copa more ski in Poland. I mean I can name down a several more places where the US Army. In this case, literally had a hub-and-spoke concept with training centers, where both Special Operations, and conventional operations were trained. And then the special operators, the Green Berets basically, the special forces would dig deeper into the training of individuals and individual teams.
One of the things that I think has prevented early on, Crane from doing, as well as they could is because from the years 2014 to 2018, we were training them on conventional operations, up to the Battalion level. When you get above the Battalion level other things, come into play like Logistics intelligence, engineering things like that and the US military in yeah, bereaved in their training ground.
Did not get to those things. So, whereas the conventional National forces in Ukraine are pretty good. When you get into the operational, level of war, with large scale units, doing large-scale things over big areas. That's when Logistics takes over and we never really got to that part because we were more involved in the conventional training at the Tactical level. I might add, I think people in the US National Security System. Don't always appreciate how much bigger the United States is
relative to our partners. And so it often gets pitched is this trade-off. Well, I can do this in a regular I can do this in conventional and I did some quick Consulting here. So US Special Operations Command claims to have about 70,000 personnel with all the service
right contributions. That's about 10,000 bigger than the German Army, just us. So calm, the Royal Navy for the United Kingdom. It's got about 35,000 according to my search, the US Navy Reserve is Fifteen thousand Personnel bigger than the Royal Navy. So I often think back to what general hurtling said earlier. It's trying to figure out, you know, from the partner countries perspective is what do they need shared interest and then we're in the dod structure can support that need.
So whether it's a National Guard unit, a reserve unit or write a unit from another part of the world. It can help kind of meet those needs in their certain high, demand, low density asset, That, you know, do stress the system and probably with Special Operations training because I think many militaries in Europe and particular have right soft capability and they want to preserve that.
And so, oftentimes, it's just trying to figure out who can do that and when, and in ensuring the training doesn't detract from their core skill set, one of the other things to I'd be remiss since Ben's interviewing us is one of the objections back to the resistance. Is this used to be just the domain of Special Forces. All this training stuff and then it became conventional and I have seen and receive that
criticism from rsf officers. In particular saying, look, conventional forces, shouldn't be doing this. That's not what they're good at, they don't have the language skills, they don't have the maturity, right? All of those key things that make Special Operations forces. Special, there is a difference, but to the earlier point, I think we've all made, is there such a demand for US security, cooperation that so calm, no matter how big it 70,000, can't
meet all of these demands. And then the final Point two is this came up I think when General hurtling was talking is the u.s. is not the only country out there doing security cooperation and this is what makes assessment of our programs really hard. You know did that coup in Mali
occur because it was u.s. training or was it French training or was it you know Chinese training often times smaller countries are getting assistance on the security front from many different countries and this is where it makes it hard to say. Well why did this one work and not this one. Why did a coup happened there? Even though they went through our training program, but not there. We're not the only ones out there, they're in their own National context as well.
And we sometimes think, well, if you come to the naval war college for a year, you will stop being your own nationality and you'll Embrace positive signal control, democracy, free enterprise, but you go back, that's not necessarily Your Country. And this is where we just need to be sort of careful and employee. The dots assessment. We don't say that Newport. We do the depends, but I'm going to bring in dots now. So we'll be more joint that's good.
And, by the way, I want to comment too because you said something very important that just struck to me. Yes, training of foreign militaries was normally the domain of Special Forces. That's what they were set up to do what we found in Europe, kind of a counter to.
That was all of the new NATO Nations, all of the new allies after the fall of the wall and lowering of the curtain, all the new nations wanted Special ops guys, just like everybody that goes to see a movie, you know, SEAL Team Six wants to wear camouflage gear around the street.
I mean, I'm kidding about it to a degree, but the cool thing for a country is Special Operations and I'm not denigrating them, they're cheap to build, they're small, they're relatively highly trained, but you can do that with a lack of money, conventional forces, not so much. I think that's what's hurting some part of Ukraine. Right now, they spent a lot of Time wanting to spend money on Special Forces because they saw how capable they were, but you can't win a war with special forces.
Just like you can't win a war with f-16s. I mean, you've got to have all of those kinds of forces to play together. So I think that's a good segue to discuss European theater security, cooperation directly lieutenant-general hurtling. How did the Ark of build partner capacity activities? Change over time in Europe? I know that as a field grade officer. You were stationed in Europe during the Cold War and then kind of return to Europe episodically over your career.
And I would imagine military cooperation in the 1980s was different than efforts in 2008 or 2011 or even today. I would almost say that it was security cooperation. In per se was non-existent in the 1980s. What we had in the 1980s and before that was more alliances. And there was the expectation that other countries would train their Force. So sometimes when you came together back in the days, the hottie days of the Cold War,
what you saw is what you got. There was no training together, there was a lot of exercising together, but I think what happened at least where I saw changing was, as a result of 9/11 and some renewed. Emphasis on NATO, as a governing body. What some people are now calling NATO 2.0. The change from, you know, what they did during the Cold War to defend against a Soviet invasion to Preparing forces to train in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And what really drove that like I said before, a lot of the combatant commanders are the Commander's on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq. We're coming to the Department of the Army, in the Army's case and saying, hey, these guys are coming from XYZ country and they can't fight alongside of us. So that trickled down to, at the time, my boss in Europe.
Who said to me, we've got to train them before they get to Iraq Afghanistan. And what we were finding is not only were we training other forces for working with ours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we were learning an awful lot of lessons to from them. It was amazing how much we were taking away from working with the Czech Republic.
I remember one day, I'd first sergeant told me that his unit had lost the capability for making range cards because they had been in Iraq. So many times, when the Czech Republic came in and dug their foxholes and made their range
plan, their range cards. It's something his soldiers had never seen before from an old Cold War perspective, that's unfathomable to me, but we had lost a lot of capability in 2011, when I first became commander of US Army Europe, the secretary of the army came over to visit and he Take Lee said he wanted to go see a foreign training event.
This was 2011. So the only thing that was going on during his visit was an exercise called rapid Trident being held at the robbery of training area in Ukraine. So it on our flight up there. He asked me, he said, why are we doing exercises with Ukraine? He said, tell me about the Ukrainian Army. I said, well, they're corrupt,
but they're getting better. And the Ukrainian government is extremely corrupt but the Army can drive an illumination of Corruption and he says, well why are we playing with corrupt, armies? And I said because there's the potential there when we got there what he saw was not just us, Ukrainian forces training, but this rapid Trident event had 16 other nations there it was in everything but name a NATO
training event. So the secretary of the army saw Canadian British German Ukrainian Italian, all jumping out of eating out of airplanes and a major drop zone and he got to talk to him. And he walked away with a different perspective of what was going on there, from both the unit and the command level in terms of coordination these exercises. And by the way, that exercise of Rapid, Trident was a yearly thing that continued on until last year when the Russians invaded Ukraine.
So, we've discussed the critical importance of appreciating the context of each partnership AKA dots, and Doctor, Reverend you've mentioned Partner willpower discussing Russia Ukraine, as well as Afghanistan saying mentioning that we the u.s. can't want Victory anymore than partner forces wanted. So, where does partner will power come from? Why are the ukrainians overcoming corruption and organizational issues? For example, where our Afghan
Partners failed to do? So it's a great question and so for all those in graduate school looking for a topic, I mean, I think a great one would be to kind of do a nice. Comparative study between International assistance and support the Afghan forces and international assistance to support the Ukrainian forces. Because I think it's
fascinating, it is right? It's too soon to say, you know, what explains at least today as we're recording relative, success of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, integrating Western you know, not only us but Spanish air defense, German air defense. Also write French artillery all across the board about 50
countries are supporting you. Crane on this one of the ones is I think to me, you know, the bigger lesson that I took away out of Afghanistan is we can't want it more than they want it and I think in this case clearly the ukrainians are fighting for their lives literally and they want it, right? They have to succeed if they don't succeed then we know what will happen but probably the technical Dimensions to operating major air defense networks is significant.
It's not like giving somebody a stinger and relatively fast but if you want to set up So, nay Sam's, The Joint system between the u.s. and Norway and then I saw the Brits are kicking in about 1000 missiles to kind of. Fill it out, Spain, releasing the hawk missiles and Sam batteries. Same thing, the u.s. old Avenger systems, I don't know, the last time an Avenger was activated, but it's got to be a long time ago, the Germans with their Iris system.
It's an observation, I think from a Ukrainian perspective, it could be a criticism because they wanted everything immediately and I can't really explain. I mean, why those things became slowly? Some of it is just having those equipment being made available. Second, is the training that's involved in the maintenance that's involved in those systems so so far so good. So maybe the criticism is too slow. I think that Legacy of corruption, I'm not sure.
In terms of the perception of President solinsky, I think if you go back to probably maybe December a couple months before, the war started, you know, his perception was yes. Use elected on a counter corruption. Option campaign but I think the perception was well as he really serious leader, you know, given his background as an actor and a comedian and he's proven to be a great leader in really leading his country in the defense of his country.
So I know that's a lot but curious General hurtling how he kind of thinks about these issues to the corruption issue. It's interesting because America has now latched on to phrases like Javelin and high Mars. And there was a time period where people were saying we need to give them. 400 High Marsh. Well there are not 400. High Mars in the system, what Ukraine really wants right now and I love Ukraine train with
them. I have good friends there but sometimes I've been accused of being the naysayer because I say, no, you can't give them these things because either they don't exist or it requires a long time to train or the maintenance and repair requirements is just off the charts that you don't understand, you just don't drop something in the middle. And say go for it. I'll get to the tanks in a minute. But what was interesting? Because I do know, a little bit
of a background. What was going on between 2011 and 2013? 18 or 19 was corruption was still rampant in the Ukrainian government. They wanted a new military but they didn't want to pay for it. And truthfully are giving of equipment is not the norm, it's usually selling of equipment after a lot of checks.
Into place. So what Ukraine wants and now what most of America wants because they don't understand these things is for us to just create them a new technologically, advanced Army, and do it right now. The polls went through this process and it took about 14 years and the first delivery of M1A1 tanks was to them about a year ago as well as F-16. So it's just a matter of. How do you pay for these very expensive Weapons Systems and for America to give these things?
The president has the unfortunate requirement of actually getting the money from Congress and it's a lot of money. I mean we spent close to 20 billion dollars and that's a drop in the bucket based on what Ukraine would like to have or what they need. But truthfully, they couldn't handle it right now and I would say that to any Ukrainian that's pushing. These kind of things right now. So far dr. Aaron said the javelins and The Stingers and the high Mars are relatively easy. Field.
It doesn't take that much training. I was in grafenwoehr about a month ago. I was in Germany about a month and a half ago and I was watching some ukrainians trading train on the 120, mm mortar. That's a good piece of equipment takes a long time to train on it and that's one of the easier ones. So again it has to do with none of these things can provide a quick fix and that's why as we started the conversation trust and building relationships over the long term.
ERM is critically important and we get fixated on hardware for whatever reason. I think it's easier to understand, nice demonstration videos and I think again, the big lesson, why of the ukrainians been successful is their will to fight is really strong. Their leadership is really strong. We haven't seen videos of what a Ukrainian Command Center looks like. But we have seen those releases of high Mars launches but to me, right?
As you know, your general and certainly, that's where the real work and success. It's coming on, it's the leadership, it's the planning, it's the implementation and you can't capture that in a short video or a photo. And that's where I think the ukrainians have been right.
Extremely successful is employment of all these equipment following up on a point made by General hurtling on the importance, not only of material in Ukraine, but long-standing partner, assistance efforts, I'd like to ask both of you in what ways has u.s. partner assistance, been most helpful in Ukraine. And what are the limits of that
help? Is there a tendency for For Americans to take credit for Ukrainian organization, agency, and efforts to combat Russia. Yeah, I hate just give the generic leadership matters, but leadership matters and so I'll sort of offer three examples that I sort of thing. Change it to positive and one negative. So first Columbia, you know what explains why plan Colombia in the early 2000s was effective? I think it was good leadership.
You know, starting at the top with president or Ebay because there were previous efforts for the u.s. Support Columbia against the farc Insurgency was decades-old. Why did plan Colombia work? I think, you know, a number of restraints Congress imposed strict limits of how many uniform people could be in the country at any one time.
So this kind of held back I think you know, the American tendency is we want to write help everybody and solve their problems and we want it more than they do, but it was all about the Colombians and I think starting with president or Ebay, you know, very effective against the farc. The larger question is still open.
And on The Afghan question, I think the US did want it more than the Afghans. And certainly I was in meetings and Kabul during, you know, 10 and 11 in the search and I'd often walked away from those meetings in the Afghans would
almost. I don't know if they explicitly said this or I walked away in the meetings of yeah this is all on you America. If we succeed or fail it's all on you and somehow we had all convinced ourselves that the u.s. was more important to the situation than the Afghans were. And I think on the Ukrainian side, obviously, you know, outside the US Embassy in kyiv is there. But, you know, there is not kind of an industrial scale Network that was created to support the Ukrainian.
Some of it is just time, I mean I think as we start to sort of regular eyes and normalize, you know, what is US, assistance International assistance. Look like from a bureaucratic organizational perspective. Say, you know, six months from now does that get back into that old adage right? Bureaucracy, does its thing and that could be good and bad but you know, again I think the will too. Fight, partly comes from the leadership, zielinski Deluge
knee, all down the list. Reznikov, doing great work. And then the context that if the ukrainians do not succeed, they will die. And I think the other thing, too, we've kind of neglected, a little bit. Is we focused on security cooperation?
Which is nice. But there's also the broader effort that's been going on within Europe and the US to provide economic support just for regular government operations and then, the massive refugee, Settlement or at least support in Poland and in other countries in Europe. You know, again I have to imagine as a deployed sailor, I
want to focus on my job. I don't want to worry about my family and so I think the type of support that European governments have been providing for Ukrainian families. Is also enabled the Ukrainian soldiers and Airmen and, you know, a few Sailors and Marines out there to be able to do their job and kind of restore their country.
General hurtling. What are some policy considerations that policymakers should take into account, to better optimize America's theater security, cooperation strategy, and Derek based on today's conversation. What are the implications for practitioners? Who are tasked with implementing the United States is approach to
security cooperation? We're already starting our after-action, reviews of what's going on in Ukraine, as well as we continually do the status of our theater security, cooperation, plans around the world. That's It's a yearly update. Then each combatant commands office. What I've learned from the
campaign in Ukraine, as well. As some of the other things I experienced as a commander in Europe was and it reared, its ugly head as Derek said before, they got to want it more than we do. That's a recurring theme in many countries and when you're talking about this security cooperation, you have to consider a push and a pull system in Afghanistan. It was a push system. We were pushing Things to them, they wanted us to fight for them in Ukraine. It's been a pull system.
They've wanted assistance. They've seen the opportunities that they have to protect their sovereignty and their territorial integrity. And when you consider the implications of where we do business, a lot of stuff is laid on the intelligence Community, both CIA Dia, the various combat commands Intel section which is all good. But even that's um what stove-piped I'm going to go back
to the evaluation of countries. We work with an old thought of if you want a new idea, read an old book and I keep going back to Old Dead Carl clausewitz who said for a nation to be successful, they have to have the Holy Trinity as it were have to have a performing and capable Military Support of government and a people that understand what the military is fighting for it to win their conflicts and when they're And increase
security. If you look at those three areas capable Military, Support of government and not corrupt government and a people that understands what the military does, those clausewitz and principles may be a pretty good approach to security cooperation, as opposed to just wanting to sell things or wanting to build allies because allies live up to those three elements of the Holy Trinity or
they don't. So those should be The durations of I'm going to say commanders, but I'm talking about policy folks. As opposed to just what the Intel Community is feeding them, which is all very good. And I don't mean to denigrate the Intel Community, but it has to be bigger than that. Some really great points. So I'm a professor at the naval war college.
And so even though these are my personal views, you know, some of the things that I really like to emphasize with everybody is you know, first know the history, how did we get here? And so we have Looking at these programs and we've been a part of these programs for decades. So, if you find yourself, you know, back my sort of first foray into this was really looking at the former Yugoslavia and Bosnian particular, there's a deep history that undergirds everything.
And if you walk into another country trying to quote help and you do not appreciate the history, you will probably fail and do harm. So maybe that's kind of the second, right? Is remember, you're supposed to be there to help. Help not do harm. Second, I think is know the limits of the US military.
I think fundamentally, we can create time and space for policymakers for negotiations, for diplomats to try to bring apart some resolution because I think the overall goal the u.s. always has is to sort of return to some peaceful State bring stability. And so you know in sure what we're doing is supporting those efforts. Know what US interests are with that country and then you have
to be careful. A balance, what our partners interests are with us, interests, and remember who you work for, is probably the key thing. And then the final thought is all these programs are foreign policy programs. And so it's a key aspect of foreign policy. And so I think always keeping in mind. What are you doing to advance and defend? Foreign policy is important. I mean, I really try to drop away from the notion of the US. Military's job is to fight and win our nation's Wars.
That's a part of it, but it's also a part of of larger foreign policy and we have to understand what those are. And so I hope to see some of the listeners in classrooms in Newport Rhode Island at the naval war College, where you can find all our syllabi online and you can do your own self study. Well, Lieutenant General Mark, hertling, dr. Derek Rev Run. Thanks again for coming on the irregular warfare podcast. I was a fascinating conversation about European theater security cooperation.
Thank you both for having me and general hurtling. Enjoy the conversation. Same! I learned a lot from dr. Reverend, thank you. And dr. Elias and then I was fun. Thanks for having both of us. Thank you again for joining us for episode. 66 of the irregular warfare podcast. We release a new episode every two weeks. Next episode, Kyle, and Ben will discuss the implications for us credibility in the wake of America's withdrawal from Afghanistan following that. Laura and Jeff will explore the
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great day. Well there you have it, a special. Thank you to The Irregular Warfare podcast and Modern Warfare Institute, I appreciate you sharing. This is a one c. A podcast special episode. I'm your host Jack gains. Thanks for listening and have a great day.