Syria and us military leadership in conflict zones. This is an hour and 45 minutes. Good afternoon and welcome to our newly renovated headquarters. I am gerald feierstein, Senior Vice President at the middle east institute. Welcome to todays important and timely panel, examining centcoms approach to the middle east. This gives us an opportunity to reflect on the approach and explore prospects for an effective us military role in the region especially given current news from northeast syria. We have a great panel of experts to discuss this with you today. Kenneth pollack, dana stroll and we are pleased to welcome back senior fellow director of the defense of Security Program after a 1year fellowship in the department of defense. We are happy to have him back and look forward to hearing his insights from his upcoming article in the 2019 fall issue of the washington quarterly entitled broken partnerships, can washington get Security Cooperation right . Moderating todays panel of distinguished experts is eric schmidt, senior right are covering terrorism and National Security for the new york times. Since 2007 he has reported on terrorism issues with assignments to pakistan, afghanistan, north africa, Southeast Asia among others, the coauthor of counterstrike, the untold story of americas secret campaign against al qaeda published in 2011. Before joining the times, eric was an education reporter in washington. Has come a long way. From september 1982. Eric will introduce the other distinguished members of todays panel but before he begins i remind you to silence your mobile devices. The Panel Discussion today, being covered by cspan2, fox, and cnn but join the conversation on twitter. I turn it over to eric schmitt. Thank you for coming today. I want to introduce our panelists before we get into the discussion started on the far left, dana stroll from the Washington Institute previously served as senior professional Staff Members where she covered the middle east. On her right, general joseph votel, dissing with fellow, mpi, you know him as the former commander of central command, special operations command. Kenneth pollack is a scholar at the American Enterprise institute, from the National Security council under bill clinton. He covered the middle east, particularly iran and iraq. On my left, senior fellow and director of the defense and Security Program here at mei and served as Senior Advisor for security the office of the secretary of defense or policy for responsibilities for centcom. We will have a discussion, for each of the speakers. We will throw it open to you all. Lets get a kick off where we stand. It is nice to be back at mei in this fabulous new building. There are other dimensions, and it is the root of everything. It is an issue that is well known to everyone in this room but one we dont like to talk about a lot. The arab allies do not have the capacity to defend themselves. That was driven home in recent weeks and recent years like any number of Development Across the middle east. The vast majority of americans would love it if our arab allies better defend themselves. For those who recognize there may be reasons we would want to stay anyway at the very least so they could do more for themselves and we didnt have to do much for them. There are a lot of reasons this is a problem. In my new book armies of sand, and we dont see the full description here. And it had such difficulty, conventional military operations in the last 70 years and whether they were likely to is rooted in large problems, are less likely fixed. They are rooted in politics, economics, culture, education practices of the arab world. None of that is changed very quickly. That doesnt mean the arab militaries are hopeless. If that is the concept of by, with and through, a virtue and a necessary. The truth is we might not have wanted to fight this way and when military commanders were first confronted with the problem of isis coming back into iraq and taking over extraordinary in syria is not necessarily the way they would like to have thought that war. That was what was available to that and made a virtue of necessity and there are some important things to take away from it. And they have tremendous difficulty with modern conventional warfare. They are not hapless. There are things that can be done. There are ways to approach military operations that have allowed them greater success in the past and what the approach did was it forced our commanders particularly my friend Sean Mcfarland who was really the guy who figured out how to do this and set the stage, created the model we are using elsewhere and realized things that are true for arab militaries across the board have been for the last 70 years. When they form small elite forces they tend to do better. When you can create a kind of military subculture the way the jordanians did in the 30s and 40s and the uae is doing today that stands in good stead. When they can rely on someone elses firepower and act as an adjunct they can do better. When they can do static operations, set piece operations they can do better. There are ways to do this that can take advantage of the skills that are there in arab militaries. I city the fact that we had a Leadership Back here that did not want to simply put an american heavy division down and wipe out isis by itself which plenty of people were talking about. Many in the military would love to do that because that was the easy answer. That would be a way to defeat isis and destroyed quickly and easily but it wasnt politically possible so they had to adopt another method. They had to go to the iraqis and secondarily to the syrians and say we cant do it for you, you guys have to do it yourself, we can provide you with a great deal of assistance but it the end of the will be iraqi and syrian combat troops who will need to take the fight and we need to figure out ways to train up a more effective forces and provide them with combat and enablers that will make them successful and put them in situations where they can be successful. That was a necessity for the political restrictions placed on people trying to implement the mission but it does speak to deeper truths that there are better ways to do this and ways to think about how we helped train our arab allies that will allow them to do better than they have done in the past and it starts with recognition that those armies arent like our own. I talk about it at length in my book, it is really obvious but the truth is we havent respected it for the last 70 years which is the average arab 18yearold boy isnt like the average american 18yearold boy or girl. Trying to train and arab boy the way we would train an american boy or girl is not going to work. It just isnt. They arent the same as us and dont come from the same society, they dont think about things the same way as we do, they have different strengths and weaknesses. Our interest, the russians did the same thing, the british did the same thing, the french did the same thing. We all assume our system is simply right and it is right for everyone and when you try to train someone, the system isnt properly devised, properly adapted for their society. It doesnt work well. We find all around the world, militaries that do best are the ones who take someone elses system, when they take someone elses system they adapt it to their own society, their own circumstances and by, with and through forced us to do the same exact thing for the iraqis and syrian opposition. Moving forward that does set up a temporary model until you have deeper larger societal change, societal change that i think everyone in this room knows they were nervous about trying to implement it. There are other things that can be done but the big issues there bring us back to politics. Both here and in the arab world because it requires going to arab leaders and saying we are not going to give you the same training we give to american troops because honestly it is not right for your forces. Instead, we are going to tailor something else. And whatever the americans give their own troops has got to be the best. It is also hard back here in washington because when they pay us to give them the best training we are going to give them the best training and that is how we train our own troops. There are political battles, a big part of getting us to the point that we can deal with these other set of issues. Let me turn it over to general joseph votel and maybe he can strain out the 30,000 foot level. Let me ask you about iraq. There was an uptick in violence in the last week or so. You can be more specific when talking about this model that was developed. What are the take aways that have been learned successfully or havent been learned successfully given the time the us military spending iraq the last two decades. The key take aways we have learned, parts of the United States and learned it is not clear the whole Us Government has learned it. Things we hit upon during the course of by, with and through. Recognizing the iraqi cts, a small elite force of hector shoulders in some degree combat capability. They can do some basic firing maneuver but enough that they could clear a photo that was tough but not superhuman under circumstances with a lot of american support recognizing that cts was critical recognizing the iraqi command structure. During the surge, and Iraqi Military command, malik he destroyed it after we pulled out in 2011. We need to rebuild to create the command and control circumstance to do what we do. Giving the iraqis ownership of it, you building up a sense of national selfesteem was also a very important one and there was this issue of picking out the right missions, not putting these guys in a position they had to deal with big freeflowing unscripted maneuver battles. That is not what the iraqi cts is capable of doing. Limited offenses and lots of american enablers that could do fine. Those are things we want to take away but the us military recognizes that is the way forward. That is the model for other militarys. The thing we didnt learn is obvious. The military piece of any of these wars is about 10 of actually solving. The other 90 is economic which we once again have blithely ignored and iraq is teetering on the brink of another conflict as a result. That is great. I wanted to pivot to joseph votel. The American Public have gotten a crash course of by, with and through in northEastern Syria, you know quite well and the turkish offense of carried out that started yesterday after donald trump seemingly green lit this operation after a phone call on sunday and president erdogan, you were quite critical in an oped you wrote yesterday in the atlantic, tell us a little more about your experience and what you draw from this. Thanks, let me start by getting to the area we just talked about. The Current NationalDefense Strategy released in 2018 it really articulated principal priority maintaining competitive advantage against great powers and a key precept in that. And the economy, military resources, there is a strong belief. I firmly subscribe to this, Strong Partnership can act as a mitigate or in areas where we accept some risk but where we also retain important National Security interests. What i am trying to convey is partnership is part of the overall approach. We havent have had a lot of tools in the past to deal with this. Things like Security Forces in the system. This is unified action across the government to help the country develop their own Security Apparatus to answer to their people and their government. You can think of this as any one of our offices that act in conjunction with combatant commands, and security requirements of partners out there. And special operations we have things like foreign internal defense. And military activities supporter from the government against internal threat. And there are different examples. In 201113, dealing with al qaeda, on the southern part of the country, working to address that. There are things like unconventional warfare. I have an important concept, the opposite approach here is where we support an insurgency against occupying power and adversary government and a number of examples of this. One of the best ones is our support of the mujahedin in afghanistan during the soviet invasion. I would say our operations in afghanistan after 2001 especially in the north. Working closely with the Northern Alliance to accomplish military objectives against the taliban and government that was in place. Complementing this approach is the idea of by, with and through. What it represents is where the rubber meets the road, how we implement these ideas on the ground. I think it is important. By, with and through actually means, it kind of sounds the same but in my mind they mean something different. By implies these are activities conducted largely by our partners on the ground, whether they are state forces or indigenous partners. With means with enabling capabilities and advice. We are bringing something to them to help them move forward. Through refers to authority, approvals, agreements, expectations that are established. One of the things we work with them over a number of months and years, established red lines, we are not going to support any efforts to unite we are not going to go after the turkish incursion. These are the types of expectations i am talking about. In the background of how this approach plays out on the ground, there are disadvantages to this approach and it is important to recognize what that is. That could be an advantage but in most cases we are beholden to the things in which they are doing things. They will not do things the same way we would do. Ethically or legally, that is an imperative up front. The law of armed conflict, one of those expectations through which we are providing this support. The deeper we got into the euphrates valley in the last 5 or 6 months of the campaign, the Syrian Democratic forces, stopping elevations to negotiate so to speak with isis, to minimize the impact on villages, i dont think anybody can argue with that but we are concerned how we maintained the momentum. We dont want to get a way to fight another day in terms of this. And the Strategic Risk as we have seen this week. We have always known there was a risk in our approach with turkey and that is a risk we have owned. There are some advantages with this. It minimizes our footprint and operational risk, tactical operational risk. We have seen a number of things, casualties and Democratic Forces absorbed what the coalition did. All cash will these are horrific. I think you get my point that when you minimize the operational risk, there is a certain political advantage to that as we pursue it. Another advantage, partners own the outcome. One of the most prolific pictures i use and a lot of presentations and discussions with the iraqi leadership in those all after the completion of operations is quite poignant and it is all iraqis from different flavors of their forces surrounding other members of the government raising their own flag and their own people for this. This is a really important aspect and owning this after words as we completed operations in syria, what we often saw, local partners beginning to set up local security and local governance. This is an incredibly important aspect. We can advise on that but they are on it. This can be effective without this Institution Building aspect of partnership. We did not try to reorganize the arab militias. We took them as they were. And we do a little bit of rebuilding, Sean Mcfarland, his predecessors, successors are very key to this. Then that is as accomplished and helping them be successful. The Syrian Democratic forces. And talk about it in some detail. How it started was literally pushed against the border. And trying to fight to save their lives and we became aware of this through other contact in the region and through authorities and discussions that took place. There was significant discussion in the National Security process throughout all of this and would have fire support to help them break out of this. What we saw was they were very successful at this, made good use of this and it through on the innovativeness of our people to communicate with them. Nontraditional ways, not highly technical from our standpoint and leveraging applications. We got success with that. And we put people on the ground with them to enhance their successes. We begin to expand our touch even more with them. Our discussions of the National Security council level, and approval being passed down to us to do these things. We added a train the trainer capacity, and brought people in the fourth and a mechanism to bring them up to a level. We had an equipment provision in there and significant policy discussions associated with it, we started with the arab component of it and came to realize we also equipping the kurdish portions of this organization because they were the backbone and a lot of difficult places where we were fighting. And isr and drones, we had artillery, a variety of other enablers on the grounds to do this and expand it out. Small start teams, the magnificent 7, 7 people, they were great and move in conjunction and did a lot of great work complementing the things we are doing. And there was a significant military task. And we have a by, with and through approach. This is a good model we ought to look at. And we have to look and cant blindly apply this in other places. I would close by telling you, the success of this approach came down to three things. And building on the external strength and capabilities and organization we had and not trying to recreate them in our own image. We did not try to reach into spf a