#164: By All Means Available - Former Undersecretary Of Defense For Intelligence Michael Vickers

The directive given to our Green Berets is to win by All Means Available. To do so, requires a combination of ingenuity, understanding the environment, a clear plan and precision execution. Mike Vickers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_G._Vickers built a career on winning America’s shadow wars by All Means Available. Mike started his career as both a non-commissioned and commissioned officer Green Beret before becoming a Paramilitary Operations Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. Mike later served as the Undersecretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, as well as the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, where he served as the lead Intelligence official at the Pentagon. Secretary Vickers joined Fran Racioppi https://www.linkedin.com/in/francisracioppijr/to chronicle his new book By All Means Available https://www.amazon.com/All-Means-Available-Intelligence-Operations-ebook/dp/B0BG14NJDS, Memoirs Of A Life in Intelligence, Special Operations and Strategy. He has been a part of almost every American known and unknown conflict for the past 50 years; including leading the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We defined how America collects and uses intelligence in both national security and diplomacy. We discussed America’s will to win large conflicts, when we’ve gotten it right and why we get it wrong. And we went deep on the real enemy facing America today. Mike sees the United States in a New Cold War that will challenge the nation like never before. He shares the reasons why America got here, and most importantly his Grand Strategy to rebuild a culture of winning global conflict to solidify America’s position as the dominant world power for decades to come. Highlights 0:00 Introduction6:29 Definition and Significance of Intelligence8:00 DoD intelligence use10:59 Joining the Army15:45 By all means necessary21:12 Politics in War judgement28:11 China & Russia38:00 Defining American power42:28 Nuclear Weapons in Iran & North Korea46:06 Mobilization of American troops48:48 Pakistan49:38 Media on disunity50:56 The arms race against China54:20 Covert action56:34 Denial of Service59:48 Regional and Global Deterrence1:03:07 Transforming out alliances1:10:49 The Next Threat1:14:03 SOF integration1:18:15 America’s overconfidence1:20:51 10 Principles1:30:06 Daily Habits Quotes “We are in dynamic times. We are in polarizing times.”“It’s not just military and economic intelligence, it’s economic, scientific, and technical intelligence that can make a big difference.”“It became the largest covert action program in CIA history.” “Drive them out by all means available.”“How are we going to win?”“Ammunition is what really sustains operational tempo.”“When America goes to war, we’re going to bring everything and we are going to win.”“The more you put in it, the more you better win, and win quickly.”“America is arguably challenged right now, like never before.”“Once the sleeping giant wakes up, look out, they are going to lose.”“Strength is Power.”“There’s economic, military, intelligence, political strength, the power of your ideals, and so you try to aggregate that.”"We will win the new Cold War.”“When you think your biggest enemy is another American or group of Americans something’s wrong.”“Covert action is taking diplomacy operations, paramilitary operations, sabotage and others and just having it be done under title 50.”“Cyber is this unique weapon that it’s used for espionage. It’s a very powerful collection tool.”“You need survivable forward presence.”“I think the greatest threat is the combination of China and Russia and perhaps adding in Iran and North Korea.” Watch, listen or read our conversation from the Association of the United States Army https://www.ausa.org/ as Secretary Vickers shares his leadership lessons learned through covert action; and don’t miss the rest of our AUSA series. The Jedburgh Podcast is brought to you by University of Health & Performance, https://university-hp.com/ providing our Veterans world class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Follow the Jedburgh Podcast https://www.instagram.com/jedburghpodcast/ and the Green Beret Foundation https://www.instagram.com/greenberetfoundation/ on social media.

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

• 0:02Fran Racioppi?

  The directive often given to our Green Berets is to win by all means available. To do so requires a combination of ingenuity, understanding the environment, a clear plan, and precision execution. Mike Vickers built a career on winning America's shot at wars by all means available. Mike started his career as both a non-commissioned and commissioned officer Green Beret before becoming a paramilitary operations officer at the Central Intelligence Agency. Mike later served as the undersecretary of defense for special operations in low-intensity conflict, as well as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, where he served as the lead intelligence official at the Pentagon. Secretary Vickers joined me to chronicle his new book, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy.

• 0:45Fran Racioppi?

  He's been a part of almost every American known and unknown conflict for the past 50 years, including leading the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. So we defined how America collects and uses intelligence in both national security and diplomacy. We discussed America's will to win large conflicts, when we've gotten it right, and why we get it wrong. And we went deep on the real enemy facing America today. Mike sees the United States in a new Cold War that will challenge the nation like never before. He shares the reasons why America got here, and most importantly, his grand strategy to rebuild the culture of winning global conflict to solidify America's position as the dominant world power for decades to come. Watch, listen, and read our conversation from the Association of the United States Army Headquarters as Secretary Vickers shares his leadership lessons learned through covert action.

• 1:30Fran Racioppi?

  And don't miss the rest of our AUSA series. The Jedberg Podcast is brought to you by University of Health and Performance, providing our veterans world-class education and training as fitness and nutrition entrepreneurs. Follow the Jedberg Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on social media, listen on your favorite podcast platform, read on our website, and watch the full video version on YouTube as we show you why America must continue to lead from the front, no matter the challenge.

• 1:56Fran Racioppi?

  Secretary Vickers, welcome to the Jedberg Podcast.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Great to be here.

• 2:00Fran Racioppi?

  It's been a while. We met, and I told you this when I saw you a couple of weeks ago. We met. You don't remember because you were senior and I was very junior. But the story is, I got dragged into the basement of the Pentagon by then Major General Jim Linder, who's now a civilian like the rest of us.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know Jim well.

• 2:17Fran Racioppi?

  Okay, when I was his aide and he said, "We gotta go down there and see." He would always talk about Mike Vickers, Mike Vickers. And I'm like, "Who the hell is Mike Vickers?" And then we end up in the basement of the Pentagon, the rooms that you see on TV, that I didn't even know existed. And we sat and had a meeting with you. I was in the back row, nondescript, trying to stay awake. But I know that you guys talked about some really important stuff. And then fast forward, you know, whatever it's been 10 years or so, we were at an event together a few weeks ago here in DC. And you walked in the room and I said to General Linder, who was there too, I said, "We gotta get him on the podcast." And he said, "I'll be right back."

• 2:51Speaker 01

  Well, good to be here. What was General Linder's job at the time?

• 2:55Fran Racioppi?

  He was the SOC Africa Commander.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Okay, sure.

• 2:58Fran Racioppi?

  So we had come to DC for a couple of days and he was making his rounds around the Pentagon, advocating for the importance of Africa.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 3:06Fran Racioppi?

  So he did a good job in doing that. But your career has been, as I was reading the book yesterday, by all available means.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  All means available.

• 3:16Fran Racioppi?

  Oh, by all, by all means available. Memoirs of a life in intelligence, special operations and strategy. I mean, this is the history of where America has been from a national defense standpoint for the last 40 years. And it was comprehensive. And at moments, I would be like, "Oh, my gosh, I even forgot about that." I didn't even realize that that happened. But the way you told the story was profound. You served as the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. You served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  And interdependent capabilities. So they had nuclear weapons, space, cyber, lots of force transformation, as well as SOF and CT. So it's a great job.

• 3:56Fran Racioppi?

  No big deal.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  No big deal.

• 3:57Fran Racioppi?

  No big deal. You were also, you served in the Central Intelligence Agency as a paramilitary operations officer. Most importantly, you- You were a Green Beret, first and foremost. You were a Green Beret both as a non-commissioned officer and as a commissioned officer. And I'll tell you, like myself, we're in, or me like you, I'll put it that way. We're in Second Battalion, 10th Special Forces.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 4:20Fran Racioppi?

  Which I believe is the best battalion in all of the regiment, but it was an honor to serve in the same regiment.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, great. I remember when I went to Iraq in 2007 and visiting the 10th Group and other units in Iraq. And our old battalion was ensconced in a palace and a guy who later became retired as a major general, but was my military assistant when I was under Secretary for Intelligence. I was the battalion commander of Second Battalion. And I thought, when I was in Second Battalion, I never got to live in a palace. I mean, they've got other things to do that are pretty important. People shooting at them every day, but that palace stuff was pretty good.

• 4:53Fran Racioppi?

  Well, that palace, if I recall it correctly, had a big crack down the center of it. And I think, I think we put some ordinance on that. Or we lived in it for a few years.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 5:03Fran Racioppi?

  Those were good times. I love that unit. And I do believe still that 10th Group is, you know, really one of those premier organizations within the regiment. They all do great things, but it's certainly near and dear.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, they all do great things. That's certainly where I got my start.

• 5:16Fran Racioppi?

  We're going to talk about intelligence.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:18Fran Racioppi?

  And we're going to talk about where we've come from, but in the context of where we need to go. We, right now, are in dynamic times. We're in polarizing times. There's a lot of people who have a lot of ideas on where we need to go and what it needs to look like. And we've gone through now, over the last couple of weeks, a massive transition and started in many ways, a new chapter. Every time we get a new administration, it's a new chapter in American history. And so we're embarking on a new chapter. And so there's a lot of decisions. There's a lot of things that have to get made. But I want to start by defining intelligence. The Oxford Dictionary defines intelligence as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills, but it has a secondary definition, which is interesting. And it says,

• 6:01Fran Racioppi?

  "It's the collection of information of military or political value." So I'd say you lived certainly in that second definition. In leadership, we use intelligence and information to make informed decisions as best as we can. And your entire career was based on collection and analysis of intelligence to then make decisions, important decisions that would drive our country for decades. In your own words, what is intelligence and why is it so important in national security?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Well, that's not a bad definition. You know, it's the tasking and then you're determining your requirements and then the collection, some open, some clandestine, some technical, some human, and then processing in certain cases, if you need to analyze imagery or break codes or transcribe things. And then analysis, and analysis can be single source or all source, and then disseminating that information to policymakers. And my experience was more on the collection and covert action side, clandestine collection and covert action, and then overseeing most elements of the intelligence community in my last job. So I was never really formally an analyst, but I certainly benefited from analysis throughout my career. I worked with analysts closely.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  And then when I was a senior policymaker in the White House Situation Room, all our NSC meetings started with an intelligence briefing.

• 7:21Fran Racioppi?

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• 8:06Fran Racioppi?

  at various levels all across the world. And we hear about them, most people, on TV. You know, and they hear about things like organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency, or we have the NSA, we have the FBI, which made a massive transformation over the last 20 years plus into an effective intelligence organization. Can you talk for a second about Maybe the difference between a few of these organizations and how the Department of Defense structures and uses intelligence differently than the civilian-run organizations.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  Sure. So, our intelligence community has grown dramatically since it was founded after World War II with the Central Intelligence Agency and of course, the only real independent major organization, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence is the other, but it's much smaller and it doesn't have an operational role. And so now, you know, every service, military service, has intelligence organizations. There are major independent organizations besides CIA, NSA, NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, and then

• 9:21Speaker 01

  some that belong to other departments besides the Department of Defense. So FBI, you mentioned, also DEA has an intelligence function. FBI is a large one. And then there's one in state, in energy, in treasury, coupled in Homeland Security. And I don't know if I've left anybody out, but spans much of the government. And then you had a question about how DOD leaders use it. So in some cases, it's to inform policymakers, the chairman, the secretary of defense, people in the position that I held, and undersecretary for policy and others. But it also informs our capabilities development over time. So the service secretaries and service chiefs are looking at foreign weapons and how to counter them and our acquisition

• 10:06Speaker 01

  system. Our operating forces, the armed forces, use it more, as you know very well from your own experience, for operational purposes, like CIA does, like the FBI does. So a variety of uses. And, you know, the one thing I would add to your definition earlier, it's not just military and political intelligence, but economic intelligence, scientific and technical intelligence that can make a big difference as well. The weapons cases that I talked about earlier.

• 10:33Fran Racioppi?

  I mean, it's a differentiator when we look at, I mean, I would throw in there even diplomatic efforts.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:39Fran Racioppi?

  That we have talked to a number of leaders about when we talk about national security are the elements of national power, DIME, you know, diplomatic, informational, military, and economic levers that our government pulls. And what we come back to is, well, how do we know what to do across that spectrum? And so many times it comes down to the information that we have, the intelligence that we have.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  That's right. And, you know, and intelligence is informing each of those areas of the DIME as well. You know, for instance, cyber is a relatively new field. Well, it has operational aspects and intelligence aspects as well.

• 11:13Fran Racioppi?

  So we gave the highlights of your career, but it really started when you were young with a desire to be an athlete.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Indeed.

• 11:23Fran Racioppi?

  And then you had this individual, this teacher, who came over to you and said, hey, you might want to go do something else. Talk about what drove you to say, you know what? I'm not going to be an athlete, at least at a professional level, but this army thing looks pretty good.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, I was obsessed with sports. I was a quarterback in football and outfielder and pitcher in baseball. And I was hoping I might have a career in those areas. In my senior year of high school, I was taking an international relations class. And the teacher, we were in school library researching term papers. And the teacher put a copy of that day's New York Times on my desk in front of me. And it was a big story about CIA's paramilitary operations in Laos with the, among people, the mountain, mountain people in the north of Laos, and said, you might be interested in this. And I thought, why'd he say that?

• 12:21Speaker 01

  But then I, as I read it, I thought, secret armies and this. And I probably saw too many James Bond movies. And I thought, well, this is cool. But I wasn't quite ready yet to give up on my sports career. So I went to college for a few year, a year and a half to try to continue it, both in football and baseball. And it didn't work out too well. And so then I thought, well, what am I going to do with my life? Since I'm not going to be a major college or professional athlete. And then I started thinking about what that teacher had said and CIA. And then I had heard a lot about special forces in the Green Berets. And so I started doing my research and I thought this is a good path to go to. Immediately get adventure where an individual could do, make a big difference.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  So having qualified by taking the special forces selection battery and all the physical stuff you gotta do and everything else enlisted under the direct enlistment option. Today, we call it 18 x-ray, but that's what I did in those days with the plan of serving in special forces, finishing my degree and then going into the CIA and kind of worked out.

• 13:27Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. And the rest, the rest is history on that. You tell the story and as I was reading it in the book as well, I think about when I was in college and I wanted to be a journalist. So I went to Boston University, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Dan Rather were the network news anchors and all I wanted to do was be the next one. And then nine 11 was my junior year. And I said, well, what am I going to go do? Am I going to go into the middle America somewhere and be a traffic reporter while I build my career?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:00Fran Racioppi?

  Because there's these guys with beards and long hair, riding horses through Afghanistan, my opinions saving the world and seeking vengeance on those who did us wrong. And I said, I gotta go in the army.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 14:11Fran Racioppi?

  That was the calling and that call to do something more meaningful and truly make a difference, I think drives so many of us.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Well, one of my connections to our efforts in Afghanistan in, in 2001, I had a few, but one that I still chuckle about is the summer before nine 11, we had taken our three or five daughters. And so we had taken the three oldest ones who were not so old then, but on a, to a dude ranch for a horseback riding vacation. And so my wife was with the younger ones walking and I took my then 13 year old, who's now in her mid 30s, on the adult ride and the galloping and found myself on the side of a horse galloping down a trail where the latigo of the saddle had come loose. And I had one foot in the stirrup and I was on the side of this horse and I thought it's going to buck in any minute. You better get ready to do a parachute landing fall. So I, I did and everything.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And then fast forward after the, there's these stories of green berets on horseback in the fall of 2001 and toppling the Taliban and al Qaeda. And my then eight year old daughter says to me, dad, you know, it's a good thing you're not in special forces anymore. You would have fallen off the horse.

• 15:23Fran Racioppi?

  But that's most likely, probably is one of those things that everybody makes it look easier than it actually is.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:30Fran Racioppi?

  It really isn't that easy.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Well, and you know, I go back to Afghanistan to the eighties and those wooden saddles and stuff aren't for the faint of heart. I mean, they're, you know, they're for real cowboys. We'll put it that way.

• 15:41Fran Racioppi?

  Let's talk about Afghanistan for a second because the directive that you had in the eighties, when you were running the covert mission on behalf of America in Afghanistan to arm the Mujahideen against the Soviets, was the name of the book.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:56Fran Racioppi?

  By all means available. And I think about when I read that, the Jedbergs, the Jedbergs of World War II, who were the predecessor to the Green Berets, the predecessor to the CIA, where they had to parachute behind enemy lines starting the night before D-Day in three man teams with a very simple mission, win at all costs, do whatever it takes. And so as you think about that definition, that term, by all means necessary, talk about what it means to you.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Well, I tried to make it a theme of the book. So the origins is Soviets invaded Afghanistan in Christmas Eve, 1979, and President Carter, three days after that, issued what we call a lethal presidential finding to CIA to supply weapons and other things to the Afghan resistance. And within 10 days CIA had weapons in the hand and that the Afghan resistance and that start is very remarkable case of agility. But for the first five years of the war, there was no thought that the Soviets could be driven out or the resistance could win. It was considered hopeless. Resistance grew some and ended up being somewhat of a sailmate.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And then I came in at the midway point of the war in 1984. And at that point, a couple of things happened. One was a congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson, who was on the appropriate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee in the House, had quadrupled the program budget. So the budget went up from 120 million a year, the Saudis matched us dollar for dollar to 500 million and I got the job. Just at that time to be the program officer for this covert action program. So it became the largest covert action program in CIA's history. And then we had a NSC review that looked at our objectives. And one of them, you know, was stay the course, do other things, but variations on a theme.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  But one of them was drive the Soviets out by all means available. And I looked at that and I thought, that's the one I want to do. And fortunately was able to persuade my superiors at CIA and, and they in turn and other top cabinet officials, Defense Secretary Weinberger and Secretary of State Schultz went along with it as well. Reagan signed that and I remembered the phrase of drive them out by all means available. It was really in the working documents of the NSC. The final national security decision directive, which I talk about in the book, doesn't have those words. That was the top secret code word. And now major portions of it are declassified and I cite it in my book. It toned it down a bit, but that was our mission. And so suddenly it was to go for victory.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  And so what it meant in that immediate case for me was how are we going to win now? Not just impose costs on the Soviets, but how are we going to win? And so I started altering, transforming the program to enable the resistance to really contest the Soviets in the air. Soviets had complete air supremacy. So we went from about 20 surface air missiles to a couple thousand in a few annually in about 18 months. And to increase the combined arms sophistication of the resistance with all sorts of crew served weapons and others. They were mostly a small arms resistance up to that point at their training. And then ammunition, you know, ammunition is really what sustains operational tempo.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  And so if you want them to fight harder and more often, you really have to have the logistical networks and spend a lot of money on ammunition. You see that in Ukraine today. And so did that as well. And then to take the fight into the urban areas. And within about, the Soviets surged at the same time we did with their new leader Mikhail Gorbachev at the time. And within 12 months, they were look, starting to look for an exit and we had kind of. Have won the Battle of the Surges. And so it really stuck with me. It was the greatest job of a lifetime to fight our main enemy of the Cold War and to defeat them, you know, in the manner essentially of a year plus. And then it took time for them to withdraw the, in the agreement to withdraw.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  But I kept that idea in mind of when are we using, you know, in military strategy, we talk about ends, ways and means. You know, the objectives we're trying to accomplish, how we're going to do it. And then what do we need? What capabilities and resources do we need? And so I've tried to apply that in the book to various things, when we actually used the appropriate ways and all the necessary means at our disposal to defeat our adversaries and when we didn't. And how this helps explain why we win in some cases and don't win in others.

• 20:29Fran Racioppi?

  You know, we think about the Soviet activity in Afghanistan. And I think in a lot of ways, and as you reference, you, that was definitely not the only precursor to the fall of the Soviet Union. But it had a, it did have a big impact.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Had a major impact.

• 20:44Fran Racioppi?

  On the Soviet Union and the eventual breaking up of the Soviet Bloc. And then the establishment of all of these countries, but Soviet aggression is something that we've seen throughout history. I mean, we're talking about it today with you. You mentioned Ukraine. We had another leader in American military history, Colin Powell. And Colin Powell had the Powell Doctrine. And it was this theory that America doesn't want to go to war, but when America goes to war, we're going to bring everything and we're going to win. And we're going to win in a lot of ways, by all means available. But now if we think about some of the more recent conflicts, the conflict in Afghanistan over the last decade or so, you know, I think in the early days, we can argue and talk about we're very successful.

• 21:29Fran Racioppi?

  In the latter half, it became more and more challenging. The conflict in Iraq, which I want to ask you about too. Do we still operate with this mindset of by all means available? Or have we let policy, have we let politics start to get in the way? And cloud our judgment about when we as a country make the decision to go to war. Are we in it to win?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's a, it's really a great question. And the other side of the Powell Doctrine, which started with him and then Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, adopted it as well, is that you also ought to be clear about your objectives and then make sure you have what it takes to achieve those objectives. You know, that's kind of the all means available or, and you saw that with Desert Storm. There was a, a real good alignment between the broad array of military capabilities and quantity and quality that we brought to bear with the objective of kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, which we did in short order and, you know, and achieved our, our aims.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  As you apply it across the spectrum of conflict where you have lesser interests or where an insurgent has sanctuary and for whatever reason, you're not willing to invade that sanctuary, you still have the burden of being clear about your objective and in my mind, designing a way to win, whether you're using just a few forces, some special forces to do something as we did in Colombia, or massive military force, you still ought to apply the same thought process, but it is different and the timeframes can be different. And part of the lessons for the irregular wars is that, you know, as you said, Americans still think in terms of, okay, we fight this to win it and then we come home.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  And so it's the World War II model or the Civil War model and not all conflicts are aligned like that. And so as a strategist, you have to think about, okay, if this is going to be a protracted insurgency and our interests dictate that we fight this end or by with and through others, it's going to take some time. But if you overdo it, if you overreach strategically, when you mismatch those ends, ways and means, then you can lose the political support that's so essential in a democracy. And so that's the burden for a strategist. You know, the more you put in it, the more you better win and win quickly. You know, whereas if you, again, if you think it's a long war, you might want to think of your methods and how you have asymmetric advantage to win, you know, over time.

• 23:56Fran Racioppi?

  I think one of the biggest things that we would talk about at, as young officers, you would see this rotation of forces. Because if you think about World War II, they loaded ships, they went to Europe and, you know, when are you coming home? When complete. Yet are. Wars in Afghanistan or wars in Iraq, we rotated every six months, every 12 months. And so the country had a strategy for better or worse, and that strategy evolved over time that said, well, the country, America's going to remain here. But at an individual level, you had a six month deployment, you had a 12 month deployment.

• 24:40Fran Racioppi?

  If you were in Ranger Battalion, you had a 90 day deployment.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:43Fran Racioppi?

  And you had folks who served in Ranger Battalion, who at the end of 20 years had 40 deployments.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:49Fran Racioppi?

  How does that affect how we actually fight these conflicts? Because you're not fighting one war, you're fighting 20 wars, 40 wars, 30 wars.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, at the extreme, you know, this debate goes back to Vietnam, where it was said that the US didn't have 12 years of experience, it had one year 12 times. And it was John Paul Van who said that. But you know, you need to balance expertise, keep people in the fight with, you know, the idea that if you're going to fight for 20 years, they probably have to come home at some point, you know? It's not land at D-Day and march to Berlin and then, you know, you're done a year or two later. And so there's probably a good balance depending on the specialty you have. You know, intelligence officers tend to need more time on the ground to do their work. As you said, some units, some SOF units, because they're doing raids every night, maybe 90

• 25:46Speaker 01

  days is appropriate in these short cycles and things. So, you know, you need some flexibility there, but we probably err too much often on the side of bringing people out. Some of our most senior commanders tend to have slightly longer tours than the troops who are rotating, but not so much. So what I like to think of of the World War II model was my friend, General Stan McChrystal, who commanded a unit for five years essentially and was in the fight like those World War II generals, you know, stay there till you win it. And so.

• 26:17Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, General McChrystal, a friend of the Jedburgh Podcast.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:20Fran Racioppi?

  So we've got some, some great conversations with him. Let's talk about strategy. He brought up strategy a couple of times. And you've brought up in the book this concept of having a grand strategy. We started in the beginning, we said, you know, America's arguably challenged right now like never before. Threats exist in every region of the world as I was going through the book and you're you're kind of going through this chronological history of conflict. We hit you hit every continent. And then if you take a step back and you think about, well, what's going on in that you can really spend years. I mean, people dedicate their lives to single regions of the world to understand conflict that then affects US national security policy.

• 26:59Fran Racioppi?

  We have legacy foes like Russia, who we continuously seem to be at odds with over things. We have new radical organizations in terms of terrorist organizations, you know, some operating even domestically as well as internationally. And we could talk for hours about, you know, how did we get here with each one of these groups and where that journey looked like? We've lived it, lived a lot of that journey. But I want to focus on where we go from here. We have a common friend, Mr. Jack Devine, who you served with in the agency and has been a mentor of mine as I met him in the private security sector. And Jack always brings up this concept of what I call effective intelligence.

• 27:40Fran Racioppi?

  You live this life, you have these experiences and those experiences, they shape your mindset. They shape your decision making and our past very much affects how we view the future, how we make decisions on the future. How we interpret what's going on around us, how we interpret the intelligence that we see for good and bad in a lot of different ways. But you said that we're in a new cold war and this new cold war really has three causes and want to break them down, but I'll put them out here in a second. But number one, a failure to fully integrate China and Russia into the American led international order. Two, significant changes in the balance of power. And three, China and Russia's perception that America is in terminal decline.

• 28:22Fran Racioppi?

  I want to talk about each one of these, but starting with the first one, a failure to fully integrate China and Russia into the American-led international order. Have we ignored the threat faced by Russia and China as America focused on the war on terror and counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations while we had near-peer countries who really operated and were able to build capability while America was focused on something else?

• 28:51Speaker 01

  So this is a big topic, so if you'll forgive me and interrupt it anytime you want, I'll try to answer your question in all its complexity. You know, the short answer to the end of your question is we probably neglected Russia's revanchism, its return to adversarial status more than we did the rise of China, but there's some of that as well. So let me take a step back and talk about grand strategy just a bit, and then to get to your specific points about those three causes of the new Cold War. So America became a global power in World War II, and it has been a global power ever since, despite the changing threat landscape. And some of the important lessons about grand strategy from World War II is, are you going

• 29:35Speaker 01

  to fight just Japan, or Japan and Germany and Italy and all our foes? Well, Hitler made it easy on us by declaring war on the United States the day after Pearl Harbor, but the US military had worked on many plans during the interwar years of how they would fight and if they had to fight them at the same time. And out of that came this idea of Germany first, and then Japan, and it ended up being a bit balanced, but that's sort of in the realm of grand strategy, but then also harnessing national power, mobilizing your society, your economy for war, you know, it got us out of the Great Depression. And we won World War II for a variety of reasons, but one of the things I talk about in the book to outline what we do today is really this idea of escalation dominance,

• 30:19Speaker 01

  that once the American economy got going, as Admiral Yamamoto's said before Japan took over lots of East Asia, is that, you know, Japan will win for six months, but once the sleeping giant wakes up... Look out, they're gonna lose. And that turned out to be true, you know, we outproduced them dramatically in ships and everything else. Now, we fought well, but we also had a big advantage in mobilization and logistics, and then a technological advantage in the end with the atomic bomb. You know, and so that really gave us that escalation dominance, both technologically and logistically. And famous British historians, Sir Michael Howard, talk about, talked about the other dimensions of strategy besides the operational or technological, logistical and social. And all of those were in play in World War II.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  And then I've lived through four national security errors in my lifetime. The Cold War, brief period of unipolarity in the 90s, when the US was essentially the sole dominant power in the international system. And then the global war on terror after 9/11. And now what I call, and others call as well, this new Cold War with China and Russia. Now, the US has been a global power all that time, but again, very different strategic landscape. So what you do globally against Al Qaeda and its allies is very different than what you have to do against China and Russia. But also, the nature of the strategic competition is different. So for the first time in our history, in China,

• 31:45Speaker 01

  we have a country that has 70% of the GDP that we do. Now, it's not per capita GDP. We have never faced a rival like that. In the 20th century, we never had an adversary, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, et cetera, who had more than 50% of our GDP. So this form of economic escalation dominance that we had, if we ever got into a protracted war, we have less of today. We also have a new technological arms race in artificial intelligence. You know, it's in the news right now about DeepSeek, you know, a new, much cheaper Chinese AI program. And it's disrupting our stock markets, but also potentially our technological advantage in certain cases. Well, I don't think that will pan out.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  But in quantum computing and in synthetic biology, these are such big technologies. They will affect economic power as well as military power or national security power. So it's really important that you win that race like we did in. Tech races in the Cold War. And then we face two allies with other allies who seem to be joining in with them. So for the first time in a long time, many, many decades, we have China and Russia roughly aligned and best friends forever, as they say. And then North Korea and Iran joining the party to some extent. And so that's newer in this period. And all those things pose challenges for grand strategy, you know? And then the difference between World War II and today, it's why it's more like the original Cold War,

• 33:13Speaker 01

  is that, you know, we change governments every four years or every eight years at the most, according to our constitution. And so grand strategy operates in the realm when you're trying to build your power relative to others and then use your power wisely over decades. It has a longer time horizon than a big war typically or others. And so it's more of a challenge for a democracy to have continuity in those areas. And, you know, of course, we've seen that in our recent history, you know? Agreement on some broad principles, but really big differences, bigger differences in some cases than the original Cold War. So, you know, I hope we find that sort of bipartisan consensus. So finally, to your point about the causes of this new Cold War.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  You know, one of the patterns of history is that after one great era of competition comes to an end. So the first Cold War, you know, when the Soviet Union dissolved, China was our ally for the last decade plus of the Cold War. I went to China many times in the eighties as a CIA officer. We cooperated on Afghanistan, you know, to Soviets were our enemy. And Soviets and Chinese had fought a border skirmish in 1969. After the Cold War, they realized that, you know, now the two powers potentially in the future, you know, this is the time of Japan as number one, but was China and the United States. And they certainly thought that way. The Deng Xiaoping's reforms had been underway for some time.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  And the Chinese were the best students of all on Desert Storm. You know, you looked at this phenomenal victory and a lot of foreign militaries analyzed it and precision weapons of the United States and, you know, the Russians applied it against their literature of reconnaissance strike complex. Chinese said, what a dumb idea it did to allow the United States six months to build up massive force on on your border. Don't let them do that. And so that became the origins of the anti-access aerial denial strategy, which is try to keep US power projection out of the region or make it very costly if they come in. So they started targeting air bases and then surface ships and,

• 35:20Speaker 01

  you know, all the things we typically do to project power. And as China grew more powerful, they became a bit more assertive and that certainly culminated with with Xi. I like to say that, you know, one of the first signals of this new world that we were in came in 2007, actually, when China did an ASAT test, blew up one of its satellites. And Vladimir Putin gave this crazy speech at the Munich Security Conference that, you know, said the US is an enemy and is pushing its weight around the world and we have to contest it. And then in 2012, it accelerated as Putin returned to power and Xi came back. And so I don't think it was ever really possible

• 36:04Speaker 01

  to integrate them into the international system. We tried, you know, you could say we didn't try hard enough or something. I don't think it was possible. You know, our strategy with China was to invest in them and while still hedging, you know, to engage and hedge, it didn't work. And by 2018, in a bipartisan basis, we kind of realized that our strategy hadn't fully worked with China. And then with Russia, as one, they became more powerful in the first decade of the 21st century, but as Putin became more belligerent, it just didn't work there either.

• 36:35Fran Racioppi?

  Well, if you think about Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin and you take at face value what Putin said, now, I mean, we're also know that we're talking to like a career spy and master manipulator in Putin, but he blames the US and says that, well, we as Russia wanted to be part of NATO, we wanted to be part of the international, or you left us, you've created this mess.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he says that. And, you know, there were discussions about could you extend NATO to Russia at one point? And of course, Ukraine and Georgia and others. You know, he also felt that, you know, I think the NATO part has been overdone about Ukraine because that wasn't going to happen for God knows when, you know, the Germans opposed it and everything else. I think it was a convenient pretext to first invade on a smaller way in 2014 and then annex Crimea and then much bigger way in 2022. But he also felt that the US had meddled in their, his reelection, coming back to power in 2012. And so he really had it in for Hillary Clinton, wanted to destroy her.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  I mean, that was the origins of his intervention in the presidential election in 2016 was really to trash Clinton. He thought she would win, but he wanted to trash her. And then when he saw it was possible for President Trump to win, then he started backing Trump as well.

• 37:56Fran Racioppi?

  The second cause you lay out is the balance of power. It says significant changes in balance of power.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 38:02Fran Racioppi?

  Before you kind of talk about the changes, let's define power. Now, there are different interpretations. You mentioned President Trump. You know, he's front and center, obviously, now as his second Trump administration has come into power. In a lot of ways, very different than President Biden's perspective on the world order and what American power is. We've had an opportunity on this show to spend a good amount of time on Capitol Hill, sitting down with elected leaders and elected leaders will give you their interpretation of American power. And what we hear for many of them in the new administration is, well, strength is power. How do you define American power?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's multifaceted because there's economic strength, military strength, intelligence strength, political strength, the power of your ideals in array. And so you try to aggregate that. And as the Chinese talk about, get a sense of comprehensive national power. But some of it takes place over time. It's not something you can use right now. Like if, if you're perceived as on the side of liberty and freedom, that may prove decisive someday influence in the world, but it's, you don't necessarily know when and it may. May not be today, you know, when you need it. And you know, that's why military power becomes, you know, at the end of the day, the, the coin of the realm with, with intelligence power as well. And talked about technological as well. So what's happened in the change of the balance of power is,

• 39:26Speaker 01

  they said China's economy has grown very dramatically. And so they've got a lot more resources, including for protracted warfare. So they can outproduce us now in ships. Doesn't mean their ships are better, but they can produce more of them. And in general, the state is just richer and they've extended their influence around the world. They're doing reasonably well in the global south and with Russia and them, they've made some gains in various areas. But one of the biggest changes is in the military area. In their region, they have made it more difficult, more risky for us to project power and particularly in the old legacy ways. So bringing forces right on an adversary's doorstep, you know, to bases nearby or offshore naval waters,

• 40:09Speaker 01

  they've made it far more difficult. And so, and essentially they have demasked the United States to some extent, the way we traditionally project power. Now that doesn't mean we can't change and counter those things in various ways, but we've been a little slow to do that. And they've become a pretty big space power in the last decade or so, and a cyber power as well, the new domains of war. And so that's what's caused the change in the balance of power and made it, made it riskier and why I think we need to address it. And then with Russia, they're not a continental wide threat that they were in the Cold War or global threat in certain areas. It's more countries on the periphery, like we see with Ukraine right now, but Georgia and the Baltics and maybe some

• 40:52Speaker 01

  others as well, threat to, you know, NATO's eastern flank, not so much all of NATO, but they're still serious. And then they project power in other ways through covert action, influence, assassinations, a number of things that they're doing. So it's less favorable, you know, the other hand, that could change. Like for instance, the assessment in the late 1970s was that the Soviets were pulling ahead of us and a decade later they were gone and we got more aggressive in the 1980s.

• 41:18Fran Racioppi?

  You leave out Iran from this conversation about the balance of power. Why?

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't leave them out. It's just that North Korea and Iran are regional powers, you know, with interests in the region and some global capability, but really limited. You know, China's the big dog. Russia is the most acute threat right now, most aggressive threat. And Iran, more recently, Iran had been on a roll with the so-called its proxies and Shia crescents, but it's really suffered setbacks in terms of decimation of Hezbollah, its main proxy, but also its loss of Syria. So it lost territory that it could transship weapons through. Their defenses have been weakened and then Hamas as well. And so Iran's not to be taken too lightly. And North Korea, they can cause headaches, but one of the

• 42:05Speaker 01

  challenges you have to deal with in broad strategy and applies now as it did in the past, is you don't want to overdo lesser threats. It doesn't mean they're threats, but you have to have it in balance. You know, there's a famous phrase, you have to keep the main thing, the main thing. And so when we took on the Soviets in Afghanistan, if we won, it would have far greater geopolitical consequences. It was the only defeat the Red Army ever suffered in its history. Where if we won in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas, it's moving a piece on the chessboard, but it's not going to affect the global balance of power in the same way. And I think for the past decade plus, to your kind of your earlier observation, not only did we rightly focus on al Qaeda and those responsible for

• 42:50Speaker 01

  9/11 and its allies, but we kind of overdid for a while the Iran and North Korea threats. Doesn't mean they're not threats, but relative to China and Russia, who are more serious threats.

• 43:02Fran Racioppi?

  Does the proliferation of nuclear weapons for Iran and North Korea change that?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, North Korea has become a nuclear power. It's a question of how many and how capable their delivery systems are and their reach. Iran has always had a strategy of having a threshold capability, having a weapons design, the ability to mate it to a delivery system and having fissile material that it could become nuclear if it wanted to, but it hasn't wanted to cross that threshold. They've been stockpiling since the JCPOA, the Comprehensive Planal Action. But essentially, the Iran nuclear deal was with the US withdrew from it in President Trump's first term. And through Biden, they've been, President Biden's term, they've been stockpiling more

• 43:50Speaker 01

  and more material for weapons, but they're still at that threshold state. But yeah, nuclear weapons changed the calculus strategically. That's why states pursue them.

• 44:00Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. The third piece that you have here is China's and Russia's perception that America is in terminal decline. I think it's important to define what you mean by terminal decline, but I mean, I'll also, I'll also ask you, do you think that our national security strategy has gotten soft? And that's why they think that?

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Well, so part of it, you know, is a bit of ideology. I mean, the Soviets believed that through Marxist Leninism, that history was on their side, that, you know, history has to unfold in a certain way. And so if you wait long enough, the world will be theirs. Al Qaeda and the global jihadists believe that for different reasons, you know, not Marxist Leninism, but that just may take a lot of time, but things are going their way. So one of the things that unites all our adversaries, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, the global jihadists, is that they all think the US is weak and that it is in decline. And that doesn't mean they're right. You know, that doesn't mean it's an objective view of reality, but you know, they act on that. And you know, and sometimes, again, it can induce some caution that we don't want to

• 45:03Speaker 01

  be too reckless and peak too soon because things are going our way. But Al Qaeda, for instance, Bin Laden and his ilk looked at our withdrawal from Lebanon in the eighties and then Somalia in the nineties and thought, you know, you hit these people hard enough and they'll leave. And it turned out to be a big miscalculation on his part, but you know, they do believe that. And you know, and part of it, it's not purely military, it's, you know, some emphasize the cultural dimension that we're kind of...

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Like some views of ancient Rome, you know, that we will become dissipated or that we're divided, that we're polarized and we can't bring together all our power, that will inevitably become more isolationist, you know, so they have a lot of reasons for trying to make rationales for making this calculation. And again, I want to emphasize, doesn't mean it's right. You know, if you assess, I think somewhat objectively, US hard power and some elements of soft power against adversaries, we still look pretty darn good. Now, what the national will is, some of these intangible factors, that's tougher, you know, to assess.

• 46:10Fran Racioppi?

  Well, I think that brings up two points. I'm glad you brought up national will because, so one of the things you talked about mobilization.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:16Fran Racioppi?

  A while ago, and you said, you know, there, we've been successful in conflict where you've had national unity and mobilization.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:24Fran Racioppi?

  And people will say, well, we were at war for 20 years. And I'll say, hmm, were we? Were we all at war for 20 years? Or was 3% of our population at war for 20 years? You know, because, because that's really, it wasn't a World War II, you know, we're not making cars anymore, we're making airplanes.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Right. And the third example of that, besides the protracted wars against the global jihadists, is the war in Ukraine right now. And you look at it and you think, okay, we have a clear aggressor. This is in the US interest to see them defeated and Ukraine's territory and sovereignty remain intact. And yet, the arsenal of democracy of World War II can't seem to outproduce in weapons, you know, the Russian Federation and its allies. How can that be when our economies are so much bigger? And it's because we can't really mobilize and for a variety of reasons in the way we have in the past, you know, so even for a shorter war, and a war that we're not, no American troops are dying and other

• 47:26Speaker 01

  people are doing the dying and our job is to provide weapons, it is a very strong, if not vital, interest to the United States. We can't mobilize.

• 47:34Fran Racioppi?

  So how do you, how do you change that? Because you say in the book, you talk about how this political infighting can very well be detrimental. The national security strategies. So what do you, what do you do?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I think it's core. And I know a number of my former colleagues, my four star colleagues and others think the same way that. So I, when I talked about strategy going forward at the end of the book, restoring the domestic bases of our power, you know, we don't have to have perfect unity, but we ought to have unity on really the fundamental things. And then, you know, if grand strategy is going to work in a long-term competition, some coherence and strategy like we did in the first Cold War. And, you know, in a time of disruptive economic change, that's challenging. So, because people get disgruntled when they're left behind. There are big political problems with, you know, I'm waiting for the political leader who can actually unify the country

• 48:29Speaker 01

  and get us on the same page. And I don't know what it's going to take to produce that. But that seems to me, you know, if we can solve that problem, that we can restore the domestic bases of our power, and it's, you know, it's a combination of economic power and national will and a lot of things and technology, leadership and others, we'll win the new Cold War. We'll deal with the, where I spent my life, you know, on the external national security threats. I'm not a politician, so I can't tell you, you know, I'm the guy to do that. I'm not. But we're clearly waiting for that person or persons right now. You know, and again, proximity matters for that kind of thing. That's a very nightmare scenario, but proximity matters there too. So, you know, it was just horrible strategic decision to abandon that.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  And, you know, it took us 45 years to defeat more or less the insurgency in Colombia. We did that with a small footprint the whole time, but should we have quit at the 20-year point? I mean, it just, that wasn't going so well then.

• 49:26Fran Racioppi?

  Is Pakistan a friend or a foe?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Well, I call them a frenemy. They were an ally in the 1980s, but they were a bit of a difficult one. And, you know, when our interests are very aligned, they're very important. The dilemma we had in the last 20 years was they were helpful on Al Qaeda, better to engage with them, given the nuclear weapons and obviously supporting an insurgency that was killing Americans in Afghanistan. And we never, across two administrations that I served in at a high level, never really were able to deal with that problem.

• 50:03Fran Racioppi?

  When faced with a challenge, Green Berets adapt, overcome, and keep moving forward. Now's your chance to stand with them. Join the 1952 Society with a monthly gift of just $19.52 to provide critical medical devices for wounded, ill, and injured Green Berets. Your support fuels their recovery, helping them return to duty or continue serving their communities. A Green Beret's mission never stops. Neither should our support. Join the 1952 Society today and stand with those who stand for us. What's your perspective on the media's involvement in this disunity? Because if we're going to bring people together, there's got to be messaging behind that.

• 50:44Fran Racioppi?

  It's got to start with a will, but we see so much in the media, this divide.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Well, I think it starts with political leadership, both in the Congress and in the presidency, to rally the country behind a fairly unified purpose, whether it's domestic and foreign or both, and most likely both. It has to begin there, but the information environment is increasingly important. And so when the media turns against you, you've got a problem, as happened. Now, again, you put yourself in bad situations. They're trying to report things as best they can, but it's happened after Tet in Vietnam in 1968, famously Walter Cronkite. But now, you know, information is so siloed. People don't get information from major sources, you know?

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And so we don't even have the same information that we can argue about. And, you know, one of the things I like to say too about domestic unity or polarization is, you know, you can be very passionate about beliefs and we can really disagree on a number of things. When you think your biggest enemy is another American or group of Americans, something's wrong. That's not going to end well, no matter who wins, which, you know, when you've got people who really hate each other, you get civil war.

• 51:58Fran Racioppi?

  The second element that you have is posturing ourselves to prevail in the race for economic and technological supremacy. Are we losing the tech and economic war to China?

• 52:08Speaker 01

  No, I think China stumbled economically after four great decades of growth and they're doing well in certain economic areas, but I think the US still has the advantage. The challenge is maintaining it. And one of the tensions is the national debt grows, but budget deficits grow would be to shift more resources into domestic entitlement programs and therefore not invest in the future, you know, kind of current consumption versus investment. And then you could lose the tech arms race. A lot of it is in the private sector, so it may be not over-regulating is what the government can do. We're not breaking up certain companies that might seem good if you had just a domestic economy, but when

• 52:50Speaker 01

  you look at it, that you've got big international competitors in these big challenges. We wouldn't have broken up the Manhattan Project for more economic competition. You want to get that thing before your enemies do, or it's going to be horrible consequences. So that, to me, is really the central competition. Like, if you look back from 30 years from now and say, who's the leading power in the world with the most influence, maybe has won limited wars, it'll be the country that is the most economically powerful, but particularly technologically, that wins that tech arms race.

• 53:22Fran Racioppi?

  Where are we behind?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  I don't think, there are certain areas where I think maybe we're behind, but I don't think there's any particular one. So the Chinese have an advantage in terms of for national security, in terms of the civil-military fusion of taking data from private companies and then using it for national security capabilities. And for instance, Beijing Genomics has the largest genetic database in the world. And the more you understand about synthetic biology is manipulating biology for some other purpose. So that can first some advantage. But I think in most of those areas, and they've done well in quantum computing in certain areas, I still think we have the advantage in all three, and in nuclear fusion, and some of the other big technologies of the future.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  At risk in terms of supply chain vulnerability, in terms of critical minerals processing, not so much the minerals themselves, but the ability to turn them into something useful, the processing part, and then, you know, things like batteries for electric vehicles, but it's not insurmountable. You know, I mean, US position is still strongest technologically. If you don't want to lose it, that's the big thing.

• 54:32Fran Racioppi?

  The third element is winning the intelligence in covert action wars. Covert action, as you mentioned, is this balance between diplomacy and military force. We're hearing a lot specifically, you know, this week about designation of organizations as terrorist organizations. The Houthis are back on the list after the Trump administration has come in. He's now designated and looking at designating cartels as terrorist organizations, which then allows us and allows for the use of military assets at times. But this isn't also a new concept. I mean, covert action is something that we've been involved in, you've been involved in your whole career, and it's been incredibly important.

• 55:17Fran Racioppi?

  You mentioned Columbia. I mean, Delta Force killed Pablo Escobar. So this isn't a new concept to leverage covert action in the going out to achieve national security aims. But why do we have to stay at it and possibly expand?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Well, so first, Soviet American Cold War is any guide is that it will be, you know, we call it a Cold War, but another term for it is hot peace. But a lot of people died in conflict in the Cold War. But its distinguishing characteristic is that it was indirect. You know, the two superpowers didn't fight each other directly. So in Korea, we're directly engaged against the North Koreans and the Chinese. The Soviets are helping out a little bit with fighters and other pilots and things, but basically just helping supply. Same thing in Vietnam. Ukraine, you know, we're the kind of a supplier and they're directly engaged. And, you know, that's a fairly typical pattern. And then covert action is just taking

• 56:18Speaker 01

  Diplomacy, information operations, paramilitary operations, sabotage and others, and just having it be done by, oh, under Title 50 or covert means, the Central Intelligence Agency, and that can be counter narcotics, counter terrorism, all kinds of missions as well. And so designating, for instance, a cartel as terrorist organization, or the Houthis, I don't think it changes that much in a sense that you have the right of self-defense. So if the Houthis are attacking you, you have the right to shoot back. You don't have to designate them something to shoot back at them. You know, if you just wanted to invade them and they weren't shooting at you, you know, you have some legal challenges to get over. And it's the same thing with terrorism, you know, you can do that covertly or overtly.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  And so if you wanted to use overt military force, you need to make sure that you've got the proper justifications for doing that. You know, a lot of laws, I'm not an attorney, but international and domestic as well, war powers and others. But, you know, you can take military capabilities and detail them to CI. And so there's a lot of flexibility for presidents, you know, to get at things. And I don't think these things are necessar-- I mean, are the cartels very bad and are they killing lots of Americans? Yes, they are.

• 57:30Fran Racioppi?

  I had a chance to sit down with the former Boeing Chief Security Officer, Dave Commandant, was on not too long ago. And we had a long, lengthy discussion about not only aviation security, but denial of service attacks. Where did denial of service attacks fall into this?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  Well, it's the ongoing cyber competition. You know, cyber is this unique weapon that it's used for espionage. It's a very powerful collection tool. Chinese have stolen a lot of intellectual property and other things, and America's data and others. And then occasionally you can use the same thing for action, computer network attack as opposed to computer network exploitation. And at the lower end of that spectrum is distributed denial of service, which is kind of taking you offline for a while, harassing you, overloading your system so you can't access an ATM or get access to a website. But that usually passes over time, you know.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Cyber is a perishable capability as you go in and figure out what happens to you. And then there's, you know, obviously more extreme versions of that, where you, you know, attacking an electrical power grid or other things.

• 58:42Fran Racioppi?

  You see that as a big risk?

• 58:45Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, it's a cyber world and we, and you know, so a couple of things. One, our attack surfaces are increasing substantially. So we're more open and more now we've, you know, there's a security arms race, cybersecurity arms race going on, but there's always soft spots somewhere. And, you know, not everybody can afford the best defenses or, or see the threats coming in the way that some can, you know, parts of the US government. So yeah, it's a, it's a big threat.

• 59:14Fran Racioppi?

  The fourth one is strengthening region.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  So, you know, the key point about that one though, you could also apply it to information, influence and others and indirect conflict is that that's, you know, in addition to getting your domestic house in order and winning the arms race and having the world's leading economy, this is where you're really going to fight, you know, and it doesn't, you know, if you fight in the next one, we're going to talk about it's far more significant consequences and complications, but this is where most of it's going to go on. And so you got to be on the offense and do a range of things to prevail in that area if you're going to win.

• 59:48Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Well, the next one is strengthening regional and global deterrence. And if required, defeating aggression is very interesting. You reference in the book, you talk about the Navy and you talk about investment in maybe less expensive ships, but at a greater number, investing in things like the submarine fleet, and maybe it's not the Ohio class, but maybe it's the, I forget the name of the, the secondary class. And maybe, you know, we've had an argument over the last couple of years of, you know, what about our investment in these aircraft carriers? And, you know, do we need 12 aircraft carriers? And with the Ford class aircraft carrier and it takes 10 years to build this thing, that really what we need to be doing.

• 1:00:28Fran Racioppi?

  But then, you know, I think a little bit as, as I was reading it, it came to my mind, you know, almost a bit of the contrary, you know, something like Israel situation, the October 7th attack occurs. And what's the first thing America does is we forward deploy aircraft carrier strike groups and all of a sudden it's like, hey, America is serious because we're here. So talk a bit about how do you strengthen regional and global deterrence and be prepared to defeat aggression very quickly, very rapidly, as we've kind of been talking about before.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as I said, so in terms of direct conflict, particularly with the China or Russia, but also North Korea, because it's a nuclear power and it's, you know, right on the DMZ. You know, Iran less so for direct power projection, but I never know what will happen there. But so the problems of China being strong in its area, you know, East Asia and particularly threat to Taiwan, but others in the region, and then Russia on its periphery. How do you strengthen deterrence in those areas? So one, you need survivable forward presence, not forward presence that can be attacked. You need a lot more mass than we have, because as I said, we've been demassed by China.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  And so you need a combination of high-low mixes and rapid reaction forces and survivable forward forces. And there's several areas where the United States, like technology, still has a big advantage. Undersea warfare, global strike, space, the real high end of of cyber. And we want to continue to lead in those areas, because if you lose some of them, you not only lose regionally, but you lose globally. You know, cyber and space are inherently global domains. Undersea warfare is one, global strike as well. And so that doesn't mean you need to refashion the armed forces just for those areas. It's like nuclear weapons. You must have them for their existential

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  threat. You don't make your whole military look like that. But then you have to have the affordable mass. And that's why I think a mix of cheaper but unmanned systems are uncrewed, as we now say these days, whether aircraft or UUVs, unmanned undersea vehicles, or ground vehicles. They're important force multipliers. We can only buy so many submarines or B-21 bombers or other things. And so, you know, if they meet the same criteria, they're survivable, they could be forward or rapid reinforcing missiles versus aircraft, they're useful for deterrence. And then I said, as you, if you look at the world today.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  And you think about deterrence, it needs to be in a regional context, but you also don't want your adversary breaking out and becoming a global power. And what stops that? Well, it's those things I just talked about.

• 1:03:16Fran Racioppi?

  The fifth piece is transforming our alliances and national security institutions for our new era of great power competition. As a new administration has come in, we've, there's been a lot of talk about isolationism, you know, and are we going to become more isolationist? You mentioned it a few minutes ago. And then to the contrary, I sat down with some congressmen who said, you know, the best way to lose global power is to become isolationist. So there's obviously different arguments when we talk about how do we build these alliances? NATO has come under pressure over the last couple of years with respect to Ukraine and the situation there with Russia. And you know, how hard has America forced the NATO alliance to come together to combat Russia, you know, which I, you could argue

• 1:03:59Fran Racioppi?

  pretty well. But now, you know, President Trump has come in and he has gone back to the rhetoric of, you know, pay your share, we might not defend you. And you know, the constant back and forth that he's had over the years. How do we do that? How do we transform our alliances? How do we build them? And really, how are we going to define that? What is the new great power competition?

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So again, if you look at the central characteristics, we have this tech arms race, economic competition, competition for global influence, changing balance of power, et cetera. How do you refashion the government and alliances to deal with this new world? So at the end of World War II, where we wanted to come home, what did we have to do in short order? We had to do the Marshall Plan. We had to create new institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the NSC, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Air Force, separating it from the Army and the Army Air Corps. And we did all that in a manner of a few years. We did aid to Greece and Turkey when they

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  were under subversion, announced the Truman Doctrine, and then Berlin Airlift, and then NATO, created NATO in 1949, all that in three years. And so we, one, yes, are we up to that now at this new world? But so I think in some respects, It's nineteen forty six or nineteen forty seven redux, maybe you don't need quite that urgency. But you ought to think the allies are can be an advantage, obviously. They're central to American global power and American-led order. That's been very beneficial for Americans since World War Two. But do you need to repurpose them? Is the threat the same that, you know, you have a big Soviet army that could come over a flattened Eastern, Eastern Europe? Or the geography in Asia is very different than it was in Europe's.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  And so, but also if economic and technological competition is central, do you need an alliance that helps you in those dimensions? As we did to a significant extent in the Cold War, but maybe more now to give us more economic mass and more advantage, et cetera. And do you have specialization where some countries can concentrate on some things? Their technologically or in their force structure, et cetera? What kind of expertise do you need to bring into government? And, you know, so a lot of that really, you know, we're on the cusp of a big period of change. And how do you posture yourself for that? You know, both ourselves and our allies, our military, our intelligence services, et cetera. It's a pretty big bill.

• 1:06:25Fran Racioppi?

  No, and then understanding too that are the composition of our allies changes.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:31Fran Racioppi?

  I think over time too, I mean, I think we've seen a very interesting situation. When you look at Israel, the situation in Gaza, the involvement of, you know, Lebanon, their support to Hamas and Hezbollah. You've seen the Middle East in some ways come together around that and not on the Iranian side, in support of Israel. And, you know, I, I think, can an ally in that situation like Saudi Arabia, can they be a difference maker?

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, there's certainly possibility of some regional realignment, which could work to our benefit. That happened in the last two decades of the Cold War, where Egypt came over to our side after Yom Kippur War and others. Iran went the other way, but so, yeah. And then there's new actors, you know, arising India since the end of the Cold. War, every US administration has been trying to court India to a lesser extent, Vietnam, you know, so your point about new allies too. So I mean, the point to wrap up these things, you know, the domestic one is really the central. And then the tech competition, as I said, I think is is central. But if you're successful in your goals of transforming government institutions and alliances

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  and deterring conflict, you still got to win.

• 1:07:48Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  And so that's why that third element in there about winning the intelligence war and the indirect conflict and, you know, all the things we had to do in the Cold War to win, that matters.

• 1:07:58Fran Racioppi?

  Let's talk about the next threat.

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:00Fran Racioppi?

  Where we're going, it's it's interesting. You say that we're in this 1947 type moment when I've spent the last year talking to leaders who've said we're in an interwar period, more like 1939. So it's interesting, your perspective, because I actually haven't heard that before in some of the conversations that we've been having. Critics in hindsight.

• 1:08:22Speaker 01

  I think both can be true.

• 1:08:24Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, how come?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Well, because I think the danger with a new Cold War and great power competition is it could go hot, right? And so to some extent, there's, you know, there's a higher risk of direct conflict between global strategic competitors, China and Russia, than there has been. And protracted conflict, you know, and I mean, it's a horrible thing to think about, but I think that risk has gone up. So in a sense, that part of the competition looks like the 1930s, as you see these rising or recovering belligerent aggressive powers. And at some point, as war forced on you, whether you want it or not.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  And on the other hand, if you think, well, that would be calamitous to everybody unless you really win big and nuclear weapons makes that tough. And so this has a long term competition aspect like the Cold War, then it looks more like the beginning of a period of protracted strategic competition that could have lots of turns to it. Looks more like second half of the 1940s, the post Cold War period than the 30s. But both can be true. I would say, you know, one is likely a subset of the other, though. That's sort of focused on the near term war dimension rather than the long term strategic competition dimension.

• 1:09:49Fran Racioppi?

  Right. Well, critics in hindsight are 2020. They know everything. And we also know that we haven't done the greatest job over history of properly predicting the next conflict that we get drawn into. Too often, when we develop our doctrine, when we think about our readiness and our training, and we're fortunate to be in this building a couple of weeks ago and talk all about readiness with the former Sergeant Major of the Army, Dan Daley, who's now here at AUSA, we often realize too late who our enemy actually is. And we prepare sometimes for the wrong thing. The DOD, the Army, have been investing heavily in what they're calling the near-peer threat.

• 1:10:34Fran Racioppi?

  Our special operations units have been going back to many conversations in training with regard to unconventional warfare, because they've seen their place in the near-peer threat as being, number one, forward, deployed, and being advanced elements, and having and maintaining and creating the deep strike capability. But also, as we alluded to a bit ago, what SOF's job in the near-peer fight will prevent the fight, prevent the nation-state on nation-state, and keep the term "near" in "peer" for as long as possible. And SOF becomes critical to be able to do that, while our conventional forces increase

• 1:11:17Fran Racioppi?

  long-range precision fires, invest in deep-strike bombers and other capabilities, depending on what their service component is. Although there are many who believe that we face a direct conflict or a high-intensity indirect conflict with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, there are many who believe that the vacuum that has been created in Afghanistan has led to a resurgence of Al Qaeda, of Islamic fundamentalism. We have reports, and we've seen the stories of Osama bin Laden's son now is really creating a significant organization coming out of Afghanistan. What do you see as the next biggest threat to America?

• 1:12:00Speaker 01

  So I think the greatest threat is combination of China, Russia, and perhaps adding in Iran and North Korea. But as I said, there's reasonable, there's the possibility of direct great power war is still a reasonably low one, even if it's increasing, and it's something we ought to take seriously. You know, DOD doesn't like to plan now for more than one war at a time, and usually against the NATO peer, but you know, somebody lesser. Well, that's not the world we have. And so you have to, at the extreme end, think about what it would take to defeat combination of these big countries. But nuclear weapons are still a big level for everybody. But you also can't ignore other threats.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  So global jihadism hasn't gone away. And what you don't want to have happen is take your eye off the ball and say, well, it's all this. Like, I remember in the Pentagon, we would have these debates, okay, you want me to do China, or you want me to do Al Qaeda? Well, I want you to do both. But it's not either war, but then you need the right balance and mix and others. And so I think the Soviet American Cold War is instructive for a range of things that SOF might do, and it's not all that SOF would do going forward. But you know, for instance, you mentioned 10th Group at the beginning of our interview. When I was there, we were oriented toward Europe and the Soviet Union, and half of us essentially were going into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and so we learned those

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  languages. And I learned, I had had Russian, and I learned Czech, and you know, and then we also learned direct action skills, like special backpack nuke, special atomic demolition munition that I was trained on, and I learned parachute and whiff and things. But the other half of the group was for stay behind missions. If they were overrun, working with people who were overrun. And so you can imagine that certainly today in a big way of being, helping locals defend themselves against direct aggression, as well as possibly liberating captured areas, the UW part you mentioned. But also then there's this global competition for influence.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  The things that SOF does to try to prevail in this below conventional conflict struggle of influence is very important and they're uniquely capable of doing that. And then, you know, direct action and special reconnaissance could also play a role. So almost every mission you could think of beyond counterterrorism or counter narcotics and applies to great power competition in just in different aspects. And, you know, and as I said, you know, the great danger of turning our back on terrorism is it can, you could still have a big attack and you can, and then it could divert you strategically. And so I don't know when the global jihadist idea will be so discredited that it goes away,

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  but it isn't anytime soon. And so our strategy has to be aimed at keeping them down and keeping them off balance and not letting that threat gather again, as we unfortunately did in the past.

• 1:15:07Fran Racioppi?

  Where do you think SOF needs to focus? And how do you see SOF's integration with the conventional force over the next decade?

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you know, if you looked at, again, direct great power war, like in the original Cold War, things like special reconnaissance and direct action can be contributors. And then if areas are overrun where conventional forces have to take it back to deter that or to make it tougher, the porcupine defense kind of idea that stay behind, I think is a very powerful role. It's not directly in support of conventional forces, but it's very broadly in support of the strategy. You know, they're our first line of defense, essentially. And then the indirect conflicts, you know, if we don't want to commit direct troops, even, you know, to an indirect fight, then SOF would play an important role, role there too.

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  So one of the things, mistakes I think we made in the 1980s, I had, early in the 80s, I'd gone to CIA, but was coming out of Vietnam, tending to see SOF as, well, you did Vietnam, but you're no longer relevant. And so you can do these few things, but if war breaks out in Europe, it's going to be this massive war. That may be true, but there's still things you can do to really help that.

• 1:16:17Fran Racioppi?

  Do you think we're seeing some of that now? Because I'm hearing a bit of that.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:22Fran Racioppi?

  When it comes, especially when it starts coming down to what we've seen over the last year, 18 months is reduction in funding. We've seen the directed reductions enforced for soft elements.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so you do want to transform the services within them and then to a lesser extent across them. I mean, we tend to focus on the across part more, but it's the same logic that, well, China's our biggest threat. It's really air, maritime, space and cyber. So there's really no role for the army and there's not much of a role for the Marine Corps. And there's not much of a role for SOF. Well, one, that's just one threat. It's like nuclear weapons. We talked about that earlier, you know, they're critical. I used to oversee them, but our nuclear strategy and one, one job. But you can't have your whole military do that or your, your security would be weakened. And the same is true for some of the things that are valuable to deter China.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Global long range strike, the ISR that goes with it, undersea warfare. You need that to deter, if necessary, defeat, but you've got a lot of other stuff going on. And that both the conventional forces, the ground forces and SOF can still play important roles in those things. You know, there's still people fight over land, you know, they're still on land in some ways. Now, given the anti-access threat, it may be as the Marines had done under General Berger. You emphasize long range fires and smaller groups than amphibious landings for just that threat. You know, that may be true for the Navy. It may be more undersea warfare and less the surface ships. So then you have to look at how much of this do I want versus how much of that, but you end up needing a mix.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  So, you know, one of the things we talked about counterterrorism earlier, you know, one of our most effective weapons against Al Qaeda was the Predator and Reaper. It provided armed ISR and persistence that nothing else could provide and with enormous precision. The most precision of any aircraft essentially, and it enabled us to really. You take down Al Qaeda in a country we couldn't in the Afghanistan Pakistan border region that we couldn't reach any other way. And after you say, well, this thing's no good against China. Well, it might be actually useful in certain aspects in phase zero and others, but it's clearly great in counterterrorism. Nothing you're going to buy for China is going to deal with that terrorism problem. And so you ought to spend some of your budget on,

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  you know, things like that, you know, it's not all the latest whiz bank stuff. It's stuff that does what a mission to perfection.

• 1:18:47Fran Racioppi?

  Do we get overconfident as Americans as you know, we do we tend to think back on our successes and maybe put them a little higher on the ladder than they're supposed to be, but and then also, you know, don't really put enough value or stake in some of our losses. I asked the question because you brought up in the book, the importance of some of the failures that we've had, the war in Yemen, some of the Syria stuff. But when we look forward, we hear the rhetoric out of our leaders. And I've sat down with with so many leaders who talk about, hey, look, when it comes down to it again, America will be ready. And regardless of what it takes, you know, we're going to get it done. Are we overconfident?

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  I think it cuts both ways. I think to some extent you can, but I think you can be, but you could also be too depressed that you have no chance. And, you know, that's equally bad or worse. And I think the, you know, the right way to approach it is really to be very clear eyed about it and do what it takes to win. And the reason I wrote about successes as well as failures in the book was one, to show the range of things that I was involved in, but more importantly, to really say, well, why answer the question, why did we win in this case, doing this kind of operation? For instance, supporting an opposition movement or resistance? How could we defeat the whole Soviet Army in Afghanistan,

• 1:20:07Speaker 01

  yet not win in Syria? Well, there were certain choices that were made that led to that outcome, you know, and we could have won that variety ways. And I talk about that. Why did we do so well against Al Qaeda in the Afghanistan Pakistan border region? And it took much longer in Yemen? Well, it was certain constraints that we put on Yemen that we didn't do. In the other place, you ought to learn those lessons. So if you go into one for general purposes, but if you go into, if you're going to do one of those operations again, you can see, well, okay, this is increases your odds of winning and this doesn't. And then, as you said, you know, you can kind of have confidence that, well, because I can win a big battle, doesn't mean I can with the same force, win the smaller battles or the war in the

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  shadows. And you can have overconfidence from thinking, well, I've got the best military in the world. Meanwhile, I'm losing in lots of places. Well, why is that? We're applying the wrong ways and means. So

• 1:21:02Fran Racioppi?

  And you got to have the political will.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  And you got to have the political will. Right. Right. So that's, you know, that's what I, again, there'll be lots of new things going forward too. But, you know, what we have in, you know, since Thucydides, you know, it's, history is a pretty good indicator of mistakes people have made in the past and clever things they've done and you ought to learn from it.

• 1:21:25Fran Racioppi?

  Let's talk about leadership.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:26Fran Racioppi?

  At the end of the day, I believe, and I think you do too, that our Green Berets make some of the best leaders, if not the best leaders that are out there. I think that that leadership transcends their military service. Being out now, being an entrepreneur, starting businesses, working with others. We've built an entire company that seeks to bring in Green Berets at every opportunity. You highlight these 10 principles of leadership development. And what I want to do is I want to throw them out there. And then if you would kind of, you will do like a bit of a rapid fire, you know, I'll throw it out, you tell me quickly exactly what it means.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:22:02Fran Racioppi?

  All right. So the first one, take only jobs you really like and think you can make a difference.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is really my reflections on my career. So I wouldn't call these universal principles, but it's what animated me, you know, and what I would say is, you know, we tell our young people, pursue your passions. We got to be good at it. You know, I mean, I wanted to be a baseball or football player and I was pretty good, but I wasn't good enough. And, you know, so find what you're good at and then be passionate and aggressive about it and aim high. I wouldn't be an absolutist about this principle, but it's sort of shows that find what you're good at and you love, and then you're going to be successful if you have both of those things.

• 1:22:41Fran Racioppi?

  Expert and referent power.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this made a big influence on me when I first went into the Army and was getting leadership training, you know, at the infantry school and elsewhere as part of my special forces training. And it was, you know, you have the traditional forms of power that my position in command gives me authority and I can give punishments or rewards, but there are these other kinds of power. Sociologists and two sociologists in the late 50s had written about this, that, you know, like doctors and others, that scientists, that it's experts, you know, it's real expertise in a thing. Or it's sometimes in informal organizations, you have the formal structure and the informal structure. People know who can kind of organize the group and come up with the good ideas. So it's less rank conscious.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  And you see this in startups and fluid organizations a lot. And so that fit me, you know, kind of psychologically perfectly in terms of special forces. I thought, you know, we're supposed to be the best individual soldiers and you should strive to master all the skills you need to do that as a special operator or CIA officer, because you're out there alone and unafraid, or at least with a few band of brothers. And so that struck me a lot as to, you know, early in your career, you really want to try to become some of the best at it. And if you are a good leader, you know, be alert to opportunities where people will let you have outsized influence. You know, and that was true for me in special forces. It was, I got early command. I had, you know, I was blessed by mentors, but in

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  CIA as well for the invasion of Grenada and Afghanistan and others, that they allowed me to have responsibilities way above my grade level.

• 1:24:20Fran Racioppi?

  Well, and that brings on number three, which is take on more responsibilities.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so one of the things that impressed me later was being alert to that. But a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, who was Secretary of Treasury in late Bush, I heard him say one time that job enlargement was key to a success at Goldman. You know, he was doing very well in certain areas, but bosses sometimes say, well, could you take on this or could you take on this? And you learn a lot doing that. You know, and as I thought about it, you know, I thought I got pretty good in the early stages of my career in special operations and intelligence and covert action. But then in the intermediate phase, when I went for my MBA and PhD and then did some think tank work before coming back into government, I learned a lot about nuclear weapons and future warfare. And so suddenly when I had

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Responsibilities, force transformation and nuclear strategy, I knew a lot about it. You know, and it's that depth and then broadening. And you know, our military education system, at least in the army, you know, tries to follow that in the conventional realm in a sense of first you learn your branch at a very narrow level, and then you learn more and more about other branches, and then you learn more about other services, and then you learn about strategy, and supposedly it produces a good senior officer by the time you're done.

• 1:25:37Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, and that's where you're talking about in number five, is develop this deep experience and what area and broaden that out. Another one here, have mentors.

• 1:25:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they were central to my career, as I say, from enlisted in SOF, where they gave me big opportunities beyond what my, you know, I might be the 11th ranking man on a 12 man team and was given bigger responsibilities for tactics and other stuff when I showed I could do it. And then command, and then being one of the first couple CIA people on the ground in Grenada with the invasion, and then Afghanistan, and then finally these bigger jobs in the Pentagon. You know, and at each stage, it was people believed in me that I could do more than what I was doing in my current job.

• 1:26:19Fran Racioppi?

  He talked a bit about six about building and rebuilding intellectual capital, because the more you know, the more educated you are on certain topics, I think becomes critical.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so again, I talked about that a bit earlier about the deepening and broadening, but also you get stale periodically. Henry Kissinger had this famous line about whatever you come into government with, you learn new intelligence and a lot of things, but basically you're drawing down on your intellectual capital to some degree. It's like also if you go to a school and a break between combat assignments, when you finish the school, you've thought a lot about stuff, but then you've got jobs to do. And so some of that fades a bit. And so you need to be cognizant that every now and then you need to really refresh and say, okay, am I, is the world still the way it was five years ago? Do I need to think about it differently? And that's why I think periodic breaks where you can do that are important for, you know,

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  if you're going to go to the highest realms of policy.

• 1:27:14Fran Racioppi?

  Senior leaders need operational experience.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  Well, I don't say they all do, but one of the things I observed in government is you have very smart people at the top of government and including our military leaders, but they know what they know, you know, and so the way we tend to select people for this, whether it's electing our presidents or choosing national security advisors, cabinet officials, our top military, you know, it's based on certain things. And so, you know, again, imagine like in nine 11, you know, the people that become our top military leaders were people who had grown up in the Cold War, had mastered conventional warfare generally, their domain of conventional warfare. And then suddenly they're in these top positions and you're

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  at war with al Qaeda and nothing, there may be smart people and everything, but nothing in their previous 35 years has prepared them for this new thing. So it's something, you know, being lucky, being right time, right spot is very important. And, you know, one of the things I found in my later years in government at the policymaking level and overseeing big parts of the IC was I was just lucky that my background had prepared me for that at that moment. And so then you can have influence in the NSC and elsewhere. How should we do the bin Laden raid or how should we do it or operation, I should say, because there was more than raids considered and it helps to know something about that stuff.

• 1:28:44Fran Racioppi?

  And that brings up the next one, which is recognize when you need to adapt.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that kind of goes back to the rebuilding capital from time to time. But, you know, when things aren't working and/or enough has changed that you really have to go in a different direction, you know, you have to do that.

• 1:28:58Fran Racioppi?

  The second to last one here is identify what really matters and get the most important things done.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's kind of keeping the main thing, the main thing. And you're not going to do everything, you know, as a president, I don't, of course, I haven't had that experience. But generally in your tenures, which are very few people, they're very long, you're operating against the clock and you've got to, it takes time to implement big change. And, and that's why that focus is, is, is very important. You know, and you know that as an entrepreneur, how am I going to win? What does it take to do this? But you're you're running against the threat of survival for your business. And so you better get that right.

• 1:29:37Fran Racioppi?

  All day, every day.

• 1:29:38Speaker 01

  All day, every day.

• 1:29:39Fran Racioppi?

  The last one I enjoyed looking at this one because it was it was about one line. And it said, leave things better than when you got there.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that should be true for almost any job. And that's how we should measure people is, you know, I don't care how nice you sound or anything else. Did you succeed at the end of the day? You know, don't tell, you know, again, you know, we have people who, when they don't succeed, they tell you how great they were. What you're really looking at is great success. You may not see it, but how we judge.

• 1:30:05Fran Racioppi?

  I tell the organizations I work with that results matter.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Fran Racioppi?

  At the end of the day, results matter, the rest we can work with.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  The rest we can work with. There you go.

• 1:30:14Fran Racioppi?

  All right, last question, test question now. I believe that habits are foundational to effective leadership and building great individual performance. But also great individuals build great teams, which build great organizations and then achieve results as we're talking about. So that means that we've got to do some things every day at our own personal level that set the foundation for success. When I think about an organization that had to be very proficient at that, I think about the Jedbergs. Cause they were our show and what, and when I was creating this show, I thought about an organization that had very little guidance. When they went off and parachuted behind enemy lines, but they needed to do some things really well.

• 1:30:56Fran Racioppi?

  And those three things where they needed to be able to shoot, they needed to be able to move, and they needed to be able to communicate. Those were the tangible things that they could actually train on because the rest they knew they'd have to figure out. That means that we've got to do certain things very well every day. And that will allow us to focus on more complex challenges that come our way. What are the three things that you do every day in your world to be successful?

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's depends on your position and level and others, you know, your circumstances, but you know, I agree with the selecting the right people, but then shoot, moving and communicate, you know, that was me a long time ago. But and you know, you see this sometimes when new commanders come in, often the way they fix a unit is going back to certain fundamentals and making sure you can do those. And but, you know, I would say, certainly in later years for me, it's been more always continuously learning. And then, you know, again, back to some of those principles I talked about, trying to find out what matters

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  and then work on it till, you know, work on it for success, determine what results look like and get it done. You know, if you're getting distracted or other, you know, you're probably not going to succeed and, you know, and then think big.

• 1:32:13Fran Racioppi?

  Continuously learn, find out what matters and then execute against it and think big. And I think all those are really critically important. I think we forget to think.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  I mean, because, you know, habits and also your character, just, you know, how has your life up to this point? And it could be when you're 18 or elsewhere, prepared you for what's coming. You know, and as you said, with the Jedbergs and stuff, they needed to come in, in some cases with language, some of them had it, some of it in area knowledge, but you know, you still got to survive by your wits. And, you know, and as you know, in special forces and CIA, you have to adapt on the spot a lot of times. There's just not, you know, you can't prepare, you can't train for everything. And so that matters.

• 1:32:54Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah. Well, you tell the story in the book, you've told it here about your ability and desire to think big from a young age. And you had this dream, this dream to go into the army, be a Green Beret, become a case officer, you know, work at the CIA. And you had this vision to, you know, lead intelligence operations and you did it for 40 years. So many realms of the government. And I'll tell you that, you know, we talk about mentors, we talk about people that we look up to. So many of us have looked up to you and everything you've done for us, for the country, much of it known, much of it talked about in the book. Probably much more never known.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Fran Racioppi?

  And it's probably better that we don't know.

• 1:33:34Speaker 01

  Right, of course.

• 1:33:34Fran Racioppi?

  And we're gonna keep it that way.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 1:33:36Fran Racioppi?

  There are two things that I really take away from really this incredible experience of sitting down with you and having the opportunity to learn much more about you from reading by all means available. And it's that strategy is ends, ways and means, because I think if we truly understand that, then we can pull those levers. That when we talk about results, generating results, we gotta go back to why are we here? How can we do it? And what do we want to achieve? And

• 1:34:01Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you know, as an entrepreneur, you either need to be really good, better than your competition at something, but just having the capability or ideas, not enough. Some cases, you gotta scale it and scale it fast. You know, your, your case maybe not quite as much, but you know, as long as you're, you stand out. And it matters in a lot of aspects. So like, you know, when people say execute, it's also execute fast, deep and wide.

• 1:34:25Fran Racioppi?

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta take action. And I think that brings up the other piece, which is you're not done until you're done.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  You're not done until you're

• 1:34:30Fran Racioppi?

  And I think that we need to keep that in mind. And you mentioned here, even in your, in your three habits, find out what matters and execute against it. Finish the job. Get the result that you set out to do, because if, if you don't do that, then you run the risk of putting in all that effort for no reason, and we gotta get the job.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Well, and one of the lessons I learned in strategy over the long haul is no matter how great your achievement, success is never final. And so you have to pass that on to others and you have to adapt to make sure that you continue to have success as circumstances change. But that's what we've got future generations for.

• 1:35:06Fran Racioppi?

  Well, we're at an interesting time in America. There's things changing rapidly on a daily basis around here. I appreciate you coming down here and spending some time with us. Special thanks to the Association of the US Army for hosting us today. And I look forward to the follow-up, because I think a lot of the things we talked about here today are very much works in progress. And we're gonna see some evolution of this. The new threat will emerge and it'll be an opportunity for us to come back together.

• 1:35:30Speaker 01

  Sounds good.

• 1:35:31Fran Racioppi?

  Thank you.

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  Alrighty.

• 1:35:34Fran Racioppi?

  American Jedbergs went on to form the foundation of the United States Special Forces and the Special Activities Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Thanks for listening to the Jed Burke Podcast, an official program of the Green Beret Foundation. I'm your creator and host, Fran Rychowi. Join us next week for a new episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check us out on YouTube for full episodes, highlights, and other long and short form content. If you like what you heard, give us a like and leave a review. Follow the Jed Burke Podcast and the Green Beret Foundation on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Extra Threads. Send your comments and inquiries to [email protected]. As former members of Special Operations Forces, the Jed Burke Media Channel, and the Green Beret Foundation remain committed to supporting all generations of US Army Special Forces and their families.

• 1:36:18Fran Racioppi?

  Thanks for joining us on this episode. How you prepare today determines success tomorrow.