Retired 4-star General John Allen on Iran, AI hyperwar, and Taiwan’s future

John Allen is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as Special Presidential Envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS. After retiring from the military, he led the Brookings Institution as its president. He co-invented the term "hyperwar," holds five AI patents, and co-authored Turning Point: Policymaking in the Era of Artificial Intelligence. He currently serves as a strategic advisor to Microsoft. In...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Auren Hoffman?

  Hello fellow data nerds. Welcome to Summation. My guest today is John Allen. John is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as special envoy to the global coalition against ISIS. After retiring, he led Brookings Institution as its president. He co-invented the term hyperwar, holds five AI patents, and co-authored Turning Point: The policymaking in an era of artificial intelligence. And he currently serves as a strategic advisor to Microsoft. John, welcome to Summation.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  It is great to be with you, Orin.

• 0:38Auren Hoffman?

  Now, we're taping this conversation literally in the middle as the US is in this operation in Iran. By the time this conversation comes out in a few weeks, probably a lot has changed. But walk us through what somebody who wasn't in leadership in the military wouldn't appreciate about the operation thus far.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Well, if I were someone who was watching this from the outside, I think my first question would be, why did we do this? And I would, I would want to demand what the government's political objectives are with respect to this outcome. And we're, we're not getting a clear explanation. We've already had six Americans killed in action. Six Americans have been killed in action. Last week, they were writing home to their parents. They might have been, you know, a father playing with their child in the yard. They're dead now. Now, tell me why that happened. Tell me why we had to go to war today to bomb the Iranians in conjunction with Israelis, which has now initiated a regional conflagration.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  We have Americans by the hundreds, maybe the thousands accumulating in very vulnerable areas around the region because we now told Americans to leave the Middle East. Imagine that. We've told Americans to leave the Middle East. So if I'm a spectator to all of this, perhaps a member of your audience who is not steeped in this, this environment, I'd want to know what the political objectives were of the United States that sent us to war. Now, we're obviously in decisive operations right now. I talked about that a little while ago. Nobody does this better than the United States. And I keep hearing That we did this because it was it was clear that the Iranians were close to having a nuclear weapon. Wait a minute. Last year, we said we obliterated their nuclear program. So, you know, what happened in the meantime?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Or that the Iranians were going to attack Americans across the region. Well, you know, we've got pretty good force protection and and the kinds of self-defense capabilities that have kept us at peace and generally provided good security for our troops. So why did we do this? And I'm not sure I know why we did this. But I'm watching these decisive operations going, and we're expending a lot of ordinance. We're dropping a lot of ordinance, and we're expending a lot of interceptor ordinance to try to defend our allies. Our allies actually are doing pretty well themselves. And I say allies in the context of our partners in the Middle East. You know, many years ago, when I was the deputy commander of Central Command, one of our objectives was to create a region-wide network of command and control

• 3:12Speaker 01

  and equipping our our partners in the region with the kinds of interceptors necessary to defend themselves. And I think they're doing pretty well at this point. What's changed since the time I was working this, which was a few years ago, is the emergence of hundreds and hundreds of drones in the hands, maybe thousands of drones, in the hands of the Iranians. And they're sending them all across the region. And in the absence of a clear capacity to counter drone warfare, we end up having to use highly sophisticated, very expensive interceptors to bring these down, or we put fighters in the air, F-35s, F-16s in the air, to hunt down these air-breathing, slow-moving drones to shoot them down. So, again, tell me why we did this.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Tell me what our objectives are. Is it regime change? Well, you're not going to get regime change from the Iranians. You're going to kill a lot of people at the top, but the rot of that organization goes deep, deep, deep into the society. So what's gonna happen is

• 4:10Auren Hoffman?

  The most likely scenario is it's still run by some sort of IRGC.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  No question, no question.

• 4:17Auren Hoffman?

  System, right? Yeah, it might look a little different or might have a different name or something like that.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 4:21Auren Hoffman?

  But if you had a just like, if you had a, the poly market on it would probably be that's the most likely scenario a year from now or something, right?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Publicly, we're, we're, we're taking great pleasure in expressing the fact that we killed all the people that might've taken over. Now, that, that to me is sort of horrific, that, that kind of thinking and that kind of a public statement. But the, the bottom line is many of the folks who would have conceivably gravitated to the top are not available now. So they're gonna have to find if they decide to remain a theocracy, and I'm not so sure that that's necessarily the right outcome here, or the, the outcome that we're gonna see, then they've got to ultimately go through the process of

• 4:58Auren Hoffman?

  Do you think they were even a theocracy, or was it a, it was a really an IRGC run thing with like a quote unquote, like a theocracy rapper on it or something in the past?

• 5:09Speaker 01

  You know, you call it a Cadillac or a Volkswagen, whatever it is.

• 5:12Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  It was a theocracy that was, that floated on the top of the IRGC, and the IRGC floated on the top of the besiege. We didn't eliminate any of those.

• 5:21Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  There's the potential that there will be a, an element of the Ayatollahs that will still be put in charge. Certainly, the IRGC is dug into that society in ways we'll never eliminate with 2,000 pound bombs. And that's going to gravitate to the top, and it's going to maintain control of that society. And not only will it be making decisions about how long they're going to, if you will, explode this conflict out across the region, they're going to be extraordinarily repressive of the Iranian people. We've already killed 1,000 Iranian people. But, you know, we theoretically, again, when you hear the rhetoric in Washington, we want the Iranian people to rise up and take control of the, the Iranian government. IRGC isn't gonna permit that to happen. And if we kill enough Iranians by dropping bombs on the wrong targets, the girls' school

• 6:07Speaker 01

  in Tehran, if we continue to do that, we'll alienate the Iranian people who have never really been alienated from the American people. But if this continues, there's just no telling where this is going to go. But if the IRGC will remain in control, they'll tolerate the reemergence of some form of a theocracy, and they're going to either decide to continue to strike the region, or maybe hold off so they can withhold some of their resources for later operations. But they're going to be enormously repressive of the Iranian people. They just killed 30,000 Iranian people that went into the streets to demonstrate against the oppressiveness of the theocracy in the IRGC. You think they won't do that again to maintain control? So, you know, I don't know where we're going.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  If your listeners of this important podcast are watching and listening, they need to ask the question, what is our government's objectives? And we're putting Americans in harm's way. We're putting our allies in harm's way. What are our objectives? Tell me what we hope to accomplish coming out of this war.

• 7:09Auren Hoffman?

  In some ways, like, we could ask about every operation we've gone to in the past, and it seems like we don't have answers for any of them. Like, probably the only one that had, like, maybe the clearest objectives was, like, Gulf War I or something. But since then, it's like, I don't know that we have anyone that had any clear objectives. It's very, it's a, and of course, once we create a military, we, the objectives change, or they morph, or they multiply or something, right? It is very, once you start fighting, it seems like these things have a life of their own.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  They can. And you can have what they call mission creep. And this is why, when I took command in Afghanistan, within a couple of hours, I convened all my generals to begin a campaign review. We had political objectives when we went to war in Afghanistan. I wanted to make sure that the operations that I led in that country still were either relevant to those political objectives, or what did I need to change ultimately to be relevant to these objectives going forward, which was the transition of the war, which was a very different place than Petraeus had been, and McChrystal had been, and McKernan had been before me. I was transitioning the war ultimately to something where the Afghans would be in the lead. And so we had to decide whether the campaign was still relevant to our initial objectives, and it was changing.

• 8:22Auren Hoffman?

  We're now, okay, we've got this, we, we, well, obviously, we have operation, ongoing operation right now in Iran. We, we, we did an operation in Venezuela, and there's still obviously some ongoing things there. There's this war in Ukraine, which has been going on for roughly four years now. If you, if you're thinking of like the China-Taiwan axis, what are both sides learning from all of these engagements?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really important question. I was just in Taiwan about two and a half weeks ago on, on some of these very, very issues. The Chinese have been extraordinarily observant of what's been going on the ground in Ukraine. They are masters of cyber operations, masters of cognitive warfare. They've been watching the trend towards autonomous and autonomy on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghan, sorry, in Ukraine. So the Chinese are harvesting tactical lessons all the way up to the strategic in this regard. At the same time, you know, they have to decide, Xi Jinping, of course, who's now the sole leader as opposed to being part of a collective, he's going to have to decide ultimately what his objectives are

• 9:33Speaker 01

  with regard to Taiwan and what, what he's willing to risk going forward. The Chinese have a very sophisticated military and it's, it's well-modernized. And just as we talk about operating in a multi-domain environment, which is, which includes space and cyber as well as the traditional physical domains, the Chinese are there too. And they've been doing very well in terms of their modernization and their adoption, say, of artificial intelligence, as I said, with the augment of cognitive warfare. And when you talk about the employment of cognitive warfare and cyber operations, one of the things that ultimately you have to do is that, one of the objectives is that you want to isolate the population from themselves, and you want to isolate the population from the government.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  And the the population of Taiwan is under assault every single day in that regard. So that for us now, as the Chinese wage cyber conflict against us, against Europe, against the against Taiwan, how do we help them to preserve their cyber integrity? And how do we help the society ultimately to resist the kind of cognitive warfare assaults that the Chinese are launching against them?

• 10:46Auren Hoffman?

  And do you think the Taiwanese people have both the will and the ability to fight?

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Well, I think so. You know, the question is, you know, what the contingency will look like going forward. You know, an awful lot of the analysis, and you know, much of it is good, but much of the analysis takes you immediately to the cross-strait assault. And that, you know, that to me is interesting, but I think it's to me, it's not the most likely scenario. I think the most likely scenario and the most dangerous for us and ultimately for Taiwan is the scenario of a, what I would call a cordons sanitaires, where naval and air blockades, if you will, of Taiwan force an enormously difficult political and national security decision upon American leadership, which is, are we prepared to break that that

• 11:36Speaker 01

  blockade ultimately to come to the aid of Taiwan? And what the bigger thing, Aron, that almost no one talks about in terms of the analysis is, in the event that this conflict breaks out in some form or another, and it can break out because of a flashpoint, it can break out because of deteriorating political situations in the region, the likelihood of a horizontal escalation across the region, if the if the fighting actually starts, is very high. The Chinese aren't going to let us fly off Japanese air bases. They're not going to let us fly off of the Korean air bases. They're not going to let us get underway from Singapore, for example. They're going to make, they're going to want to make sure that they have the capacity

• 12:19Speaker 01

  to control the American forces that are closing on the region. And that will have a global economic effect that the the size and the enormity of which I think we truly have not attempted to understand. And the effect on China's economy, the effect on our economy, the effect on the global economy of a war between the United States and China is something that we should be spending a lot of time thinking about because that to me is almost one of the most important deterrent effects that we should be attempting to push in these conversations. I'm not excited at all about having the conversation about whether we're going to lose two carriers or one carrier, et cetera. We'll do what we need to for decisive operations.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And we may take casualties, but for me, if we do this wrong, the effect economically on the global economy could be generational. And this is why we've got to be clear eyed and clear minded in our thinking about going forward. And I think to this point, you know, particularly now, that's not clear to me.

• 13:18Auren Hoffman?

  One scenario would be China runs enough psychological operations and bribes enough people in Taiwan that Taiwan just decides to have some sort of like different relationship with China, some sort of like partner, maybe China reneges on it like they reneged on Hong Kong or something. And China essentially takes it over without any shots fired. Like what, where do you put that scenario?

• 13:44Speaker 01

  I don't see that happening. I just don't see it happening. The Chinese have been very clear that if Taiwan declares independence, and this would be the cause of speli for them. If China, if Taiwan declares independence, then then all bets are off and China will take steps as is necessary to unify the island with the.

• 14:03Auren Hoffman?

  But you don't think like China could somehow convince the Taiwanese leadership or if there's a new election in Taiwan to essentially become a part of China, maybe not exactly, you know, in the full part of China, but a kind of like a old school Hong Kong and then like slowly kind of infiltrate and take it, take it over?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know that that's not impossible. There's two principal parties in Taiwan called the KMT, the Kuomintang, or the Blue Party. And that's the party for in many respects, unification with China. And they're, they're in active conversations with China.

• 14:38Auren Hoffman?

  Right. I mean, they could win the next election and it's not uncrazy that they would.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  They could. And then there's the PPP, which is the Green Party. It's not an independence party, but it is a party oriented on Taiwan's democracy. And if, if a declaration of independence ever is enunciated, it'll come from that party. But the party's very clear. With the members of the party and very clear with the United States that it never intends to do that, which makes it easy for the United States ultimately to support. So if there is no Declaration of Independence and there is a conversation that is held periodically across the strait with China, it is in China's interests over the long term. And China has a history of great strategic patience on many things, as you would know. It's in their

• 15:20Speaker 01

  interest to let this play out because of the enormity of the value of Taiwan's economy and ultimately how that economy can assist China's economy in a non-conflict environment. You know, the logic of leaving that be and let it evolve over time to a position where both Taiwan and China come to an accommodation, there's a great logic to that. Short of that logic, forcing something that requires that the United States respond in some military manner, I just think that that's not in the cards for now. And one thing to remember, virtually the entire Chinese military is a one-child military. And if you take the bet that you want to take on the United States over Taiwan or take on Taiwan itself,

• 16:04Speaker 01

  which has significant military capabilities, and you're ready to pay the price of having tens of thousands of Chinese casualties or maybe deaths among a one-child military, the effect on the Chinese society, I think, will be difficult to overstate. You know, on Xi Jinping, his number one goal is for the Communist Party to remain in control of China. And I'm not so sure if you watched how COVID went and the lockdown of the cities and the rebellion in the cities against that eventually, and how quickly the Communist Party flipped on the lockdown of those cities, I'm not so sure that we wouldn't see some real problems at a societal level if an expedition across the strait failed. It would

• 16:44Speaker 01

  have to be an overwhelming success for the casualties that China would ultimately sustain for this thing to not potentially destabilize the control of the Communist Party. So, you know, we're looking for stability here. There's a lot of prosperity that can accrue. When we think about the instability that can occur, Through the economic disruption of a war, as well as the casualties and the deaths and the destruction of infrastructure, what happens if TSMC is taken out tomorrow? What happens if ballistic missiles take out TSMC to the global economy and to the forward movement of technology? So these are things we have to think about as we consider whether some kind of a conflict in Southeast or East Asia is inevitable. I don't think it is inevitable.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I think that there is the potential that we'll come to a point in our history in the future where we're going to be able to see some kind of an accommodation going forward.

• 17:40Auren Hoffman?

  I think the most likely scenario is an accommodation where essentially Taiwan becomes part of China. It's not an accommodation that many people in the world, including many people in the US, probably most people in the US would like, and where it becomes a peaceful, almost decision, where it's a KMT decision, or they can take it over without shots fired. I don't think the Chinese don't have a history yet of lots of, as you mentioned, lots of people dying when their military is fighting. A lot of it is fighting with fists on the border with India or something like that. And I think once, they don't yet have that ability to probably take all those blows. But they're very, very smart psychologically,

• 18:23Auren Hoffman?

  and they could take over this country without the shots fired. That's where I think it goes. And I don't know how we prevent that, like, if we want to prevent it.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Our policy is a one child, one child. Our policy is a one-China policy. We have acknowledged that Taiwan exists within a one-China policy. And we've also said, our policy is very clear, that we do not support Taiwan independence, which is very clear. We don't say we oppose it. We say we don't support Taiwan independence. But we do say, in the next sentence, which almost never gets quoted, that we will oppose any unilateral attempt by force to change the status quo in the strait. So for now, we're prepared to wait and see. And if Taiwan finds its way into some kind of a conversation about a long-term geopolitical relationship with China, and it doesn't require a military intervention by the United States,

• 19:12Speaker 01

  or doesn't generate a military intervention by the Chinese, we're prepared to wait and see. And I think that's the place that we should be.

• 19:19Auren Hoffman?

  You published this book Turning Point in 2020. What has changed since then?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  We started to write it in 2017, late 2017, early 2018. And there was actually so little information about artificial intelligence, which is what we were beginning to write this book about, and the whole policy obligation that you had. It took a while to put it together. And what has changed, I think, the most profound change is we thought that AI was going to be an enabler in many respects, kind of a back end of people's functions. Daryl West was my co-author. We never had a sense of the explosion of AI usage across civil society. And I think the other thing that we had hoped that this book would try to stimulate was

• 20:05Speaker 01

  the alignment between the formulation of regulatory policy for safety purposes, security purposes, and artificial intelligence going forward. And we're still not there. Although I think this administration has really gone gangbusters in terms of trying to find the relationship between artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and safety and security. So lots has happened in that regard. But our concern was that the time difference between new technologies and the regulatory or the policy framework for those new technologies often lags seven to 10 years. And as you would know, certainly from your perch, technology is moving so fast, we can't afford a seven to 10-year lag in being able to structure

• 20:48Speaker 01

  the policy framework. So those really were the two things. We thought we'd change that, not changed.

• 20:53Auren Hoffman?

  Now, you kind of complemented this term hyperwar, which is kind of war at machine speed, where humans can't often even be in the loop because things are moving so fast. Where are we at on that continuum?

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Hyperwar is really a description of an effect. And it comes from the speed of action and the role of artificial intelligence and compute in warfighting. So where are we in that today? We're seeing widespread adoption of artificial intelligence within the US military. It's increasing all the time, but we haven't created, we haven't moved towards an objective of hyperwar, which is speed so fast that our opponents can't keep up with us. But it's coming. I think there's, there's no question that we will eventually see that. Where we are seeing a dimension of hyperwar, which relies in many respects on autonomous systems, whether it's in command and control, or intelligence, or in target development,

• 21:49Speaker 01

  target engagement, where we are seeing a hyperwar beginning to play out is on the battlefield in Ukraine. You know, the Ukrainians are vastly outnumbered. There's a lot more Russian equipment and numbers on the battlefield than the Ukrainians have. And so they have had to rely on autonomous systems in ways we think is far faster than we could have imagined in order for them to deal with the disparity in numbers. So it's a, it's kind of, it's kind of coming up from the bottom. We didn't expect that. We expected it would be something that would be pursued as a matter of defense policy and ultimately organizational structure. And it's happening at the top level, but it's, it's not widespread at this point. And only, I think at this point, the United States and China will be able to do that.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  But at the bottom level, we're seeing a lot of autonomy that's moving us towards a hyperwar.

• 22:39Auren Hoffman?

  Why do you think, why do you think only US and China could do it? Like, it seems like potentially a lot of actors could do it and, and move very, very quickly.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  That is correct, because there are many countries out there that are technologically advanced that can. They're just beginning the process of doing it. The Germans, the French, the British, in our, in the NATO context, probably farthest along. There are others that are following, in East Asia.

• 23:01Auren Hoffman?

  If you think about like the whole idea of like the John Boyd Oodle Loop, right? As you want to get inside someone else's loop.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:07Auren Hoffman?

  So they have to react, and every time they start something, they're starting something based on like something you've already finished. And so they never get out of that loop.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  They're reacting to me, always reacting and always getting slower.

• 23:17Auren Hoffman?

  Right, they're always reacting to me. So you, you can imagine. Even a very, very small entity like a terrorist organization, you know, is like, we're caught like they're forcing us to react and they're they're inside our loop. Right. Does it have to be like the US is the one that's in control or are we going to get affected by this in a in a bad way?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Well, we're going to see it. We're going to see smaller states have the capacity to use artificial intelligence ultimately and and have autonomous weapons systems. But I'm talking about the United States adopting it as a as an objective ultimately for our entire military. So that's really what I'm saying. The Chinese and the Americans are probably the farthest along with the other technologically advanced countries coming along behind us.

• 23:58Auren Hoffman?

  When when you were in your kind of four star, three star capacity and true leadership, how often were the intelligence briefings you were getting just plain wrong?

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Seldom were they completely wrong, but there were plenty that came up that had inaccuracies in them or miscalculations. You know, one of the things you said you calibrated the question against the four star.

• 24:20Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  When I was a more junior general officer in Iraq in particular, I was an infantry officer, but I was also an intelligence officer. And I spent a lot of time in my career working on the intelligence infrastructure inside my commands to make sure they were as responsive to me as they could possibly be, to include the people that I hired, the access that I gave them, my time that I spent with them to get to know them. So I I was very attentive to the intelligence infrastructure within my commands. When I took a command of a 50 nation international coalition, that was a very different environment. So I had to make sure that my intelligence officers, Steve Fogarty, Army two star, and Bob Ashley,

• 25:02Speaker 01

  who succeeded him, they were fantastic intelligence officers. We spoke constantly about the kinds of products that I wanted and how much I would be willing to rely on raw intelligence to get it to me fast versus finished intelligence, which could come to me much later and have some inaccuracies on it. So we we tried to balance the relationship in that regard. But I got a couple that were just flat wrong. And when you make life and death decisions based on intelligence that is wrong, then, you know, obviously, it's it's a it's a it can create a real crisis.

• 25:32Auren Hoffman?

  How do we think about like experts in general? Like, you know, in some ways, like almost every foreign policy expert was wrong about Afghanistan. Most of them were wrong about Iraq. Like, how do we actually get to like a better expert class?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  That's a very hard decision or a very hard question. I'm always very careful about who would be anointed as a foreign policy expert. For me, lots of on the ground experience, cultural experience, cultural intelligence. Those are the kinds of people I want to listen to, people who really know.

• 26:04Auren Hoffman?

  Why? It seemed like almost all the people had the most cultural experience about the Middle East were wrong. About almost everything, right?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that that's right. Okay. You know, I had a lot of people that worked for me who had a lot of cultural experience. And when I listened to them closely, it was very helpful to me. Now, I didn't let them make my decisions for me. I made my own decisions. But I'll tell you one thing, Orin. The biggest failure in Afghanistan was that we didn't treat the threat that came out of Pakistan. And we never held Pakistan accountable for that. And that made it very difficult for us to conduct comprehensive, long-term operations out of Afghanistan with Pakistan a safe haven, a logistics center, a movement opportunity for the enemy. The enemy could get around our strengths and our weaknesses by coming at us from out of Pakistan in various locations. And that, I think.

• 26:52Auren Hoffman?

  We didn't do that because like it just, we didn't have the political will to do it?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Yes, we didn't have the political will to do it. And that was a problem. You know, when I got to Afghanistan, I immediately after I took command, I did a campaign review, which is what you should do. You know, I was there at the 10-year point. My mission from President Obama was to transition to war. Put the Afghans in the lead, continue to fight, reorganize the organization that I led into an advisory organization, shut down hundreds of bases. And but to do that, I had to do a campaign analysis. And as we did the campaign analysis, you always start with the political objectives. Are they still operational? Are they still relevant? And the answer was yes. But then you go to the assumptions for the campaign. And one of the principal assumptions of the campaign was that by the 10-year point,

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Pakistan would have become an ally for us and would have denied safe haven to the Taliban. And that assumption was flat wrong. And it really was a major inhibitor for us to be able to accomplish the objectives that we needed to have.

• 27:54Auren Hoffman?

  What was the objective like at that point?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Well, the objectives were twofold. One was to. Afghanistan, these are political objectives. One was to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a platform for continued terrorist attacks against the United States. And eventually Afghanistan could have become a platform for terrorist attacks in all directions, not just against the United States and our allies. And the other was, in order to sustain that platform as a, in the context of preventing it becoming a basis for terrorist attacks, was to build the capacity of the Afghan government over time to, in fact, prevent that from occurring and to become a stable platform ultimately for relations with the West. And that required an awful lot of work beyond just simply counterterrorism.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  This became a counterinsurgency under operation.

• 28:42Auren Hoffman?

  I've never been to Afghanistan, but from my reading, it seems like a lot of what we were doing, we're doing along the bidding of like one Afghani tribe or one Afghani group against another Afghani group, and they were kind of playing us off them. We were going after people that are quote unquote, "bad people," but they're not the terrorists because one guy convinced us. We were almost pawns in a way, rather than the other way around. Or would you disagree with that assessment?

• 29:08Speaker 01

  To some extent, you're exactly correct. And it happened both in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we didn't, in many respects, many of the people that were leading our forces or formulating our policy really didn't know a thing about Iraq or didn't really know a thing about Afghanistan. And they were willing to have, and you pointed to them a few minutes ago, foreign policy experts or indigenous experts who saw this was an opportunity ultimately to further their personal or their organizational objectives. And we listened to the wrong people on frequent, uh, pretty frequently. By the time I got there, which was just a couple of days from the 10th anniversary of 9/11, we had a pretty good sight picture on a lot of the actors in the country.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  The former warlords had largely been marginalized by then, and those were the ones that we put a lot of faith in going into the campaign or going into the war, who ultimately had in terms of helping us their own personal objectives. And consequently, we were helping them to accomplish their own objectives, which in the end for us. Didn't further our campaign or didn't further our war aims.

• 30:13Auren Hoffman?

  Well, go back to like the experts, like if you think of the Middle East, it seems like most experts have been mostly wrong. People who actually have got a lot of stuff done are people who didn't really know anything about the Middle East at all. Maybe they didn't even know anything about foreign policy at all. They literally came to it with a completely fresh perspective and they seem to have gotten like way more accomplished than the people who were on the ground who studied there or knew Arabic or who, you know, who had close relationships. Why is that? If you would have asked me 20 years or someone who had studied there, someone who knows the culture, they would have been better off. The Lawrence of Arabia would be better than the Neo Fight.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Well, in some respects, I absolutely agree with you. When I led our operations in the Al Anbar province in Iraq, you know, I had no exposure to the Sunni tribes. What I had done though was I had read everything that had ever been written by a British diplomat by the name of Gertrude Bell, who around the time of the First World War, wrote definitively about the, you know, the socio-economic DNA of a Sunni Arab tribe in Anbar. So I came in with, I was an open book and I read her stuff and it really helped me to understand what was going on around me in the context of the tribal environment. This is where we got things wrong in a very big way in Iraq, for example, and to a lesser extent,

• 31:34Speaker 01

  but still an important extent in Afghanistan. We never understood the essence of what makes the societies in those traditional regions function. And it's almost always going to be a tribal environment that makes it function. In Anbar province, for example, all of the tribes lived within a tribal confederation that had migrated from Yemen 500 years earlier across the, you know, the tortuous desert of the Arabian Peninsula. And they found themselves one day along the Euphrates River and they put down their roots there. And if you didn't understand first what the dynamics operated within a tribe, if you didn't understand that and you didn't understand the role of the sheikh.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And you didn't understand tribal justice. I mean, you were really a spectator to what was going on. I studied this extensively and I made my forces study it extensively. So rather than to operate outside the tribes, eventually they accepted us as, in some respects, their savior from al Qaeda. And also because we concentrated on making the lives better of the tribes, they permitted us inside the tribes. And that was a fundamental and profound change ultimately in the way we were able to conduct operations. Our casualties dropped. The tribal casualties dropped in huge numbers. We went long periods of time without any shots being fired in anger because we ultimately

• 33:01Speaker 01

  convinced the tribes that we were there to help them to stabilize the situation and ultimately to help them come on our side to help us fight Afghanist or fight the al Qaeda.

• 33:11Auren Hoffman?

  If we think like the meta picture, like it seems like if you think of the US, if it's a kinetic thing, we're very good at executing on something. If you think of the Osama bin Laden raid or the raid to get Maduro, like it was unbelievable what we can do, but it seems like we're quite terrible at policing, helping govern, et cetera. How should we be thinking about this from like both like a geopolitical military objective going forward?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Well, you couldn't be more right in the way you phrased the question. You know, as we think through how we do campaigning in the US context, and it's largely NATO as well and most of our allies, we see in the context of a war, we see an eventual escalation that leads us to make the decision as a nation to go to war for to conduct what we call decisive operations. That's what you're seeing in the Middle East right now, decisive operations. And no one does this better than the United States of America. Multi-domain decisive operations.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Where we begin to have difficulty is in the transition from what we call Phase 3 decisive operations to Phase 4, which is the long-term stabilization of the situation in the post-conflict era. We do not do that very well. Steve Hadley once said, and I've got enormous respect for him, "If we did this right, we would think about what we want Phase 4 to look like, the long-term stabilization of the society, and then reverse-engineer the way we conduct our decisive operations so that the one flows more naturally into the other." But the other thing, Aron, that is absolutely necessary is that our governments have got to have the patience necessary for us ultimately to transition from large-scale

• 34:52Speaker 01

  decisive operations to longer-term stability operations as we go forward. If you just conduct the decisive operations and you pull out, you leave the environment in which you've just been fighting traumatized, infrastructure's been destroyed, much of the fabric of society's been torn asunder, you just leave a mess. And this is why we've seen in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, we've seen it in other places, when you tamper with the governance structure in these countries, and many of them are quite fragile, and they don't have resilience in their institutions of government, you don't see regime change, you see just flat regime collapse. We've had to deal with that a couple of times, and the regime collapse could have been prevented if we had thought through how we intended for the Phase 4 or

• 35:37Speaker 01

  the stabilization phase to go before we started to conduct the decisive operation.

• 35:41Auren Hoffman?

  Do you think there's anything we could have done differently where Afghanistan would not have failed eventually? It seems to me in almost every scenario we look at, there was a 70, 80% probability that Afghanistan would still be run by, you know, someone in a tribal way. It doesn't seem like it would be like a real state in any scenario. From my perspective, it doesn't seem like we could have done it, even if we had all the things and all the experts and all the other and all the wills. I mean, we were there for like 20 years.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, 20 years, that's right. You know, I always got the question, what does winning look like in Afghanistan? And I said, "I'm not going to use that word. It's a binary term, winning or losing. It's a term that applies to other wars and other conflicts." I said, "What I hope is..." That if we stay there long enough, we will prevail in the end to accomplish the objectives of a stable country that ultimately denies terrorists a platform that can become a functioning member of the community of nations. And, you know, in the back of my mind, the entire time I was there as a commander, my father fought in Korea, I served in Korea, and I thought Korea was a really interesting way to look at Afghanistan and why our long-term presence in Afghanistan would have created

• 36:56Speaker 01

  ultimately the catalytic effect for success. Now, in 1953, Korea was flat on its back. Its military had been decimated, its society had been decimated, there was no economy to speak of and no real governance. We've been there 73 years with tens of thousands of American troops and a diplomatic presence and an American interest. After that period of time, well into the 70s, Korea wasn't even a recognizable democracy. It was still a very corrupt regime. Today, that democracy is pretty solid. I mean, they're putting their presidents in prison for violating the tenets of their constitution and their democracy, and they have one of the largest economies on the planet and a true democracy.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  It didn't happen because we pulled out 18 months after the end of the Korean War. Imagine what that would have looked like. So from my perspective, it's less about the binary effect of winning or losing than it is about prevailing over time because you have clear objectives and you're willing ultimately to dedicate the troops necessary to do that. 2,500 troops on the ground in Afghanistan could have-

• 37:59Auren Hoffman?

  Vietnam went through it. Vietnam today is a good, decent country, maybe not as good as Korea, but it's a decent country. We pulled out and they kind of worked through it on their own and they kind of got there and, you know, over 50 years later, we don't have troops being shot at and-

• 38:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:16Auren Hoffman?

  It's somehow, so it can work even if we're not there too. You don't always have to be there with that kind of sizable kind of threat and, you know, Korea is a little different where they have like a nuclear country right on its north with a kind of maniacal leader who might actually invade, who might, you know, do these other things, all these people might die. It's a different situation than like Afghanistan, like no one's going to just like random country is going to go invade Afghanistan and kill all those people, et cetera.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Well, the Soviets did.

• 38:49Auren Hoffman?

  That's true.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  I think, look, no historic analogy, no historic analogy is perfect.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  But the issue for me wasn't whether you want to try to be able to point to a win versus a loss. From my perspective, this was going to require a long engagement in order to create the stability that we wanted to see come out. And 18 to 25 months, 24 months, was the engagement that we ultimately were willing to invest after fighting there for 20 years. That's crazy. That's not how this is going to happen. 2,500 troops could have continued to professionalize the Afghan military to provide the security platform ultimately, to bring an economy out of the distortion of a wartime economy after 20 years and create the opportunity for Afghanistan to plug in ultimately to the West. It's not going to be perfect and it's going to take a long time to do. But when we abandon that

• 39:38Speaker 01

  country and we basically turned it back over to the Taliban, you know, no outcome there is acceptable. And of course, as I said, Pakistan was a real problem for us. And we never solved that problem the entire time I was the commander nor any time following my, my command.

• 39:54Auren Hoffman?

  Going back to experts, like you led like one of the most profound expert institutions, the Brookings right there, very well known as kind of an establishment, let's say, quote unquote, center-left establishment place. We're the, what are the future of these types of institutions? We say Brookings, Council for Relations, kind of like organizations that we've been relying on for the last 100 years in our country.

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I think it's a really important question. You know, for many, many years, these institutions created the basis for some pretty powerful policy decisions. The Marshall Plan, for example, got its first serious fielding from a memo that was written at Brookings. NASA came from a memo written at Brookings. I'm not saying that the, the omnipotence of these organizations is unchallenged and is indefinite. The reality was that much of these, much of the work that occurred in these kinds of so-called think tanks occurred because they could operate in a bipartisan way or a nonpartisan way.

• 40:54Speaker 01

  But the politics of this country have changed so dramatically in the last several years. First of all, many of these think tanks considered that they were successful by the numbers of books that they published or long-form essays they were able to post. The consequent engagement that was necessary to try to influence policymakers, either to create policy, or to modify policy, or to end defective policy, that was possible when we had spirits of bipartisanship in the federal government. But now, the polarization of our democracy has become so dramatic that it's difficult for institutions like this to function.

• 41:32Auren Hoffman?

  A lot of these things are not necessarily partisan. For a lot of these foreign policy things, I don't know that Rs or Ds have any strong opinions about what we do in Korea, for instance. They're not necessarily partisan, potential things. Like, don't you think, like, good ideas will surface and good ideas will influence?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Yes, they should. And that should be the purpose of a think tank. When I was the president of Brookings, my comment to them was, "I don't want you to worry about the politics, I want you to worry about the policies." And try to help policymakers understand how they can do a better job in policy formulation. So yes, I think there's a role for these. The question isn't necessarily whether there's a role or not, the question is who can listen to them. And part of who's going to listen to them is how they deploy their products, how they attempt to create, and this is the key word, how they attempt to create impact. And my own experience is the very best impact comes from person to person.

• 42:31Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  If you get up on the Hill, almost anybody, regardless of their politics, on the Hill is generally pretty civil, you know, one-on-one or in small group conversations, where you can have difficult conversations about...

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Policy change, or policy formulation, or policy termination. And if it's not held in the light of day, where suddenly it becomes an issue for the media, you can have really hard conversations. And this is where a think tank can be quite valuable. But when a think tank writes the playbook for an entire administration, that takes it in a different kind of a direction, I think. This is, I'm thinking about Project 2025, which in many respects was the playbook for this administration. That's not typically what you see come out of a think tank. You know, I think there will be a role for them going forward. There are smaller think tanks in the world today that have niche capacity to be very influential and very helpful to our societies, and very helpful to the administration in terms of governing.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And I think those have probably found their way into greater prominence over the last couple of administrations than the big mega think tanks like Brookings.

• 43:37Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, it seems like the startup think tanks are good. But when they have like interesting ideas, whenever I go to like these mega think tank and or read or their website, honestly, it seems like their ideas are not that different than, if I could have read their website 20 years ago, it doesn't seem like the ideas have really changed. They're kind of boring. You don't even learn something from going there.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  The challenge for think tanks today is moving fast enough so that their products are relevant. And that is something the big think tanks have traditionally just moved too slowly. And I think what you're seeing, and I won't comment on Brookings, but what I see in terms of Council on Foreign Relations, for example, they, I'm on all their mailing lists. There is something coming out every single day. And it's short form, it's highly impactful, it's well-written, and it's helpful for a policymaker.

• 44:25Auren Hoffman?

  I'm a member of Council for Relations as well, I've been for a long time. But honestly, I haven't seen anything in the last, you know, 10 years that was like interesting, that they came out with. Like, it's like, it is kind of the same old stuff. They haven't been innovating. I don't feel like people are listening to them because it's the same old thing. It's the same people even. And these are smart, well-meaning people. Many of my friends are great people, but they're not pushing new ideas.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I don't disagree with you entirely. What I'm saying is, a think tank is going to die if it doesn't do what you just said. And that is to have scholars who are relevant, scholars who are able to produce quickly, scholars who are willing to engage. And if you don't have those qualities within the think tank, then you are frankly irrelevant. In which case, you know, you'll just go out of business. And you see them going out of business.

• 45:16Auren Hoffman?

  And you mentioned the word scholar. Maybe I have my own biases here, but it does seem like the having a PhD to having a really innovative idea ratio is a very low ratio. Like, it seems less likely to come out of somebody who has a PhD? Or would you disagree with that statement as well? Do you think it's more likely a new innovative idea comes from someone with a PhD or less likely?

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a combination of both. I think it's a combination of two things. It's a combination of your educational level, whatever that might be. But it also comes from practical experience. You know, one of the things that I tried to do at the Brookings Institution was to bring in mid-grade PhDs who had a lot of street cred, who had taught or who had been in NGOs, who were down on the street, who had operated overseas. And they were extremely important to me, as opposed to someone who had gotten a PhD and had sat in an office for 20 or 25 years doing nothing but scholarly work. You know, I'm interested in practical experience, tempering and educational background. And I think those are the kinds of people you want writing your policy directives

• 46:21Speaker 01

  or policy formulations or policy proposals. And those are the kinds of people that I wanted. And I wanted young men and women who had gotten PhDs but had come from areas of study, a practical experience, that were really able to help policymakers understand how to apply the work.

• 46:40Auren Hoffman?

  And you don't think just having a PhD is anti-correlated to having good ideas?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I don't think so, but having a PhD is...

• 46:48Auren Hoffman?

  My bias would be it would be, but I don't know. Like, I don't, yeah, yeah. It's like someone who's spent all that time studying would be like a low-risk person, essentially.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't agree with that. I think that having a PhD is a very important quality, but it's not the essential quality. It's not the only quality. Having practical experience is very important. And you see more and more today. Universities hiring people they call professors of practice. And they're not, they don't necessarily have a PhD, but they have such profound operational experience that the level of what they can convey to students in a classroom begins to look like terminal degree type information. So I, you know, this is a mixed bag right now. And I don't think an absolute requirement for one or the other is where you want to be. I think you can have a hybrid environment here.

• 47:34Auren Hoffman?

  Well, let's talk about like the kind of the next generation of national security leaders, whether it's people going to military or going to national security. Probably for, for 40 years or so, the smartest 22 year olds were going to Wall Street. They're going to private equity. They were going to hedge funds. And then I would say in the last few years that has shifted. And now they're probably going to AI labs, a more recent shift. You know, whereas maybe in the sixties and stuff, they were like studying physics and, and, and inventing interesting, interesting types of things. Where are we like with this like national security pipeline? Is it something you're worried about or something you're excited about with this kind of like new wave of let's say 22 year olds today?

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, I think you have framed this pretty well. But I think the entire environment is so different than it was. You know, when I, I went to the Naval Academy as a midshipman. Every one of us in my class, our parents had all suffered through the Great Depression and World War II. Every one of us, I went back 30 years later as the commandant of midshipmen at the Naval Academy. And there were large numbers in the brigade who didn't have a single person in their family that ever served in the military or any national security entity whatsoever. And that's just, that has exacerbated, that has become even greater as time goes on. What we're seeing, and I've been watching this closely from my perch in the private sector,

• 49:00Speaker 01

  is that so many of the national security type technologies are in the hands of the hyperscalers or the emerging startups. Some of the startups are just spectacularly capable, eye watering in terms of the technologies that they're developing.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  That in many respects, these youngsters that go into these startups and they achieve innovative greatness, they're truly contributing to national security in their own way. But I don't think we really see that yet. We're not understanding that that is a contribution to national security that doesn't require you to put on a uniform or commute as a civilian to the Pentagon every single day. And I think the obligation is that the private sector and the public sector have these conversations more and more about these very, very important national security relationships. You know, almost every technology that our military has comes out of the private sector. And more and more, as I sort of work my way across one startup after another startup,

• 50:01Speaker 01

  or it's, you know, some of the midsize companies or my relationship with a hyperscaler, you know, a lot of these folks in the private sector feel a great responsibility to the security of the United States. And they see that the work that they're doing in the private sector contributes directly to the, not just the bottom line in their companies, but for them, it's sometimes, often, much less about the bottom line of the company than it is about the security of the United States. And they feel in their own way, a responsibility in the work that they're doing in the private sector to contribute to our national security. But your question, though, is do young men and women who are 22 years old coming out of college, do they want to serve in the public sector? I think that while, I think that that's difficult right now.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  I think the Doge massacre, the Doge massacre in Washington, I think really frightened a lot of youngsters from wanting to serve in our government. And I'm not sure when we're going to turn that around, Frank.

• 50:57Auren Hoffman?

  I would have thought the Doge would have been, got people more excited to go do it because it's about eliminating the biggest reason that super talented people don't serve because of all the bureaucracy. Because it's so hard to get stuff done. It's so long to get stuff done. If we can make the bureaucracy more limited, I would have thought the, now, I don't know that we've eliminated the bureaucracy, unfortunately, but this idea of eliminating bureaucracy would have probably got a lot of really super talented people. And certainly, I know, like, a lot of people I know who have joined in the last year, you just think of like, all these super talented people who have joined who are young, who are, you know, let's say, 22 to 25, they seem like, like, incredible. And I don't think they would have joined if they, if they thought

• 51:41Auren Hoffman?

  they'd have to go back and like, this is kind of like, more bureaucratic kind of institution. But you disagree?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I do. I do. We eliminated the entire functions without creating efficiency. And I think that that was wrong. Some people that I knew at the State Department who were doing very important work in very important areas found themselves on a Monday, packing up and leaving on a Friday with no clear explanation as to why. When we decided on a weekend that we were going to insert USAID into a wood chipper, the, the effect of USAID basically just disappearing over a weekend, I think created damage to the American soft power reputation around the world and our capabilities at a humanitarian level that we have always believed was part of the American identity in the world. I think that damage

• 52:29Speaker 01

  is going to be irreparable until we find ourselves recreating something that performs what USAID has been doing for years. No one will argue with you that greater efficiency isn't essential to our government being streamlined and operating at the speeds that we want it to. But that wasn't what happened. What happened was entire structures were eliminated without some kind of a substitute that was better. And I think that that was the fallacy of what Doge did when it went through the government. And it's not doing it now, because there was so much headwind that was created by the massacre, I think, that occurred because of it.

• 53:03Auren Hoffman?

  Last question we ask all of our guests, what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It's a good one. What conventional wisdom or advice is bad advice? I'm not sure if I've ever been asked that question before. You know, the conventional wisdom, I think that past is prologue. You know, an awful lot of people will tell me that we've been here before in our history. And I'm not talking about today, this conversation you have, you and I are having. But I think everyone has an obligation to understand the environment around them. And that comes from study and understanding that you're not living in the moment. You know, you're living in a timeline. And if you truly understand that timeline, then you've got context within which then those things that are occurring around you have context and you have perspective on it.

• 53:52Auren Hoffman?

  I think it's like a Shakespearean quote. Like, what, what is, are you saying that is good advice or you think that's bad advice or something?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  That advice alone, without having historical context, isn't all that you need. I think you need to have historical context to understand that while there are analogies that can occur, and I said this earlier when we were talking about, I think Afghanistan or Iraq, you can have, people can point to history, but there are no perfect analogies. And understanding history can give you a context and a perspective that puts the current time into context that you need to have.

• 54:33Auren Hoffman?

  This has been really great. I love the spirited discussion that we had. This was amazing. Thank you, John Allen, for joining us on Summation. I think our audience is going to love this. This has been a super, super duper fun.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Orin, it's been great to see you. It always is, but today in particular, it was a lot of fun.

• 54:50Auren Hoffman?

  One more thing before we go. I wrote a blog called Summation. It's the same as this podcast. The blog is about non-obvious idea sharing on business, talent, data, longevity, and random contrarian takes. If you like the conversations on this show, you'll probably like the blog. It's free. New content comes out twice a month. You could subscribe at orin.substack.com. That's orin.substack.com.