The center for political and military power which promotes understanding of the Defense Strategy, policy and capabilities necessary to deter and defeat threat to the freedom, security and prosperity of americans and our allies. I should mention doctor kilcullen is a member of the board of advisors chaired by National Security advisor general hr mcmaster. See mpd experts work closely with the center and our center on cybertechnology innovation. Integrating all instruments of American Power to achieve Better Outcomes for americans and our allies , we are a source of Timely Research analysis and policy options for congress. Theadministration, the media and the wider National Security community. We take no corporate funding. This is one of the many events we host throughout the year andstfor more information we encourage you to visit our website. Today we invite all of you to join the conversation. We dont have a studio audience today. We are being cautious in response to health concerns. We are live tweeting so please feel free to put the questions there andthey will get to me. Im going to start with a brief introduction of our panelists, David Kilcullen and i meant to hold up his book so you can see it and you should go out and get yourself a copy. He is an authoritative force on guerrilla and unconventional warfare, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency with extensive experience over a 25 year career with the australian and us governments as an army officer, analyst and diplomat. He serves as professor of practice at Arizona State university and is ceo and president of courier applications group. A research and operations Firm Providing geopolitical analysis, fieldwork and related to support to government, reindustry and ngos. Kori schake is the director of foreign defense policy studies at the American Enterprise institute. Doctor schake was previously at the institute for strategic studies and she is distinguished experience in government working with the department of defense, state as well as the white house is National Security council. Ntbradley bowman s senior director of our center on military and political power and serves as National Security advisor to members of the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committee and he has more than 40 years as amilitary officer. During that time he was both a blackhawk pilot and assistant professor at west point so lets getgoing. For those who havent read your book, explain briefly who are the dragons . Who are the snakes . This is a book about military adaptation by potential adversaries the end of the cold war and the title comes from jim wolseley who is president , clintons cia director. Not a chairman. Thank you for pointing that out and an incredibly prissy and guy. If you read his testimony when he was going through his confirmation hearing in 1993 he was asked the cold war just ended. What do you think will be the threat environment that America Needs to face in the postcold war. And he said weve slain a large dragon talking about the soviet union but now we find ourselves in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of and he goes out on the layout detailed vision week states, failing nonstate actors which im calling thesnakes. And ngsuggests that near here state adversaries are going to be a big deal for the in the future which im calling dragons and what im suggesting that we had a period of about 30 years since his money where our adversaries have adapted and evil and im trying to trace the history of how that t happened and where they are now. If you look at whats happened since then your book suggests that you have the snakes but the dragons have come back. Were not talking about dragons now, were talking about russia. Vladimir putin has, his aspiration was not to be a member in Good Standing of the international community. That was not up top of his to do list. We wanted to makerussia a normal country and russia said normal by whose definition. So i think russia has specialized inplaying a pretty weak hand extremely well. Then you have china and for years on both sides of the aisle, republicans and democrats thought as they get , as the chinese get rich they are going to get moderate. Theyre going to be a strategic partner. Its not really communism anymore. Its not okay, they havent involved in that way and we were all wrong and thats another dragon challenging us. Im suggesting the dragons are back but in the preceding 25 years theyve learned from the snakes and they operate in a different way now. Kori, the Trump Administrations National Security strategy, im sure youve read it and thought about it. It talks about thedragons and snakes, doesnt use those terms. But it refers to those revisionist powers, the snakes which we call rogue powers as well as nonstate giovanni actors so the nss, National Security strategy is recognizing thosethreats. Is it essentially saying the same thing , that dave is saying . Its definitely going in the same direction dave is going and in a much less erudite way. One thing i see, that i would love for people to take away from the conversation both about the nss and about the book which i dont think we have really centered our conversation with , i dont mean on this panel, i think generally talk about american strategy. Both against snakes and against dragons is that are the wages of oursuccess. Great powers were driven to the edges of the conflict spectrum the cause we are so dominant and on bahai wrongs of the escalation ladder. So nobody thought they could win a war against the western militaries and thats why they were driven to the edges of the conflict spectrum moreover , i think the notion that russia and china are revisionist powers, they are rejections powers. Russia has determined it etcant be successful on so they rightly point out in the book they taken on a liminal strategy. Defined liminal because its not a word everybody uses all the time. Working on the margins. Theyre trying not to cross the threshold that would provoke direct confrontation confrontation and thats a smart marginal strategy. It indicates that we are actually still in their minds dodominant in the middle of the conflict spectrum so both in terms of what they are trying to achieve politically and how they judge their military opportunities , we should acknowledge that we start from a notion of the success of what we did e. Its just not going to be good enough and dave makes an argument really nicely in the book that our adversaries have been much more adaptive than we have been and we need to limber ourselves up in order to remain the rule center of our own fortune. Brad is the military guy, theres a tendency i think david alludes to and talks about it from the military to say lets do what we do well. We would really prefer that our enemies help us by challenging us in ways we are used too. L if they begin to challenge us in other ways that screws up all the plans we have and all the things, the weapons we are going todesign. Thats of course exactly what they want to do and part of daves point is our enemies are adapting and evil thing to use darwinian terms which we do and anthropological terms and we are not because we get on a track and we like to stay on it. As our adversaries are employing methods far beyond just military power, and our war colleges and advanced courses we talk a lot about that but in and sometimes our strategies are onedimensional and part of that is because our military is so effective but if you look at the way the russians and chinese are operating its clear that military power is necessary for that position and thats why i think cutting the state departments budget by 10 percent or cutting the budget is so shortsighted because if you talk to anyone who spends far more time in these places that i ever will, if you talk to war fighters they want those development and diplomatic experts beside them because they understand its a longterm sustainable political game that requires far more military power and aptitude in areas of diplomacy. One other thing which i think is a distinction between what dave argues for in the book and what the National Security strategy argues for which is the National Security strategy makes a narrow argument about National American first nationalism and for the kinds of challenges that dave rightly identifies in the book and that the nss rightly identifies, cooperation and pulling institutions and pulling allies along with us is a much stronger front with which to confront these challenges. Thats the failing, the 2 failings of the nss our first they are not carrying out their strategy because theyre not funding the nonmilitary owners of it and secondly the house a conceptual mistake that cooperative enterprises are diminishing to American Power instead of the fact that which i believe to be true that playing team sports is actually what we do well and being the captain of teams is what we, is our comparative advantage relative to any of our adversaries, dragons or snakes. [inaudible] often our allies are he portrayed in recent years as liabilities. On the contrary i view our allies as one of our great Strategic Assets and if you look at dave was there when we had 100,000 , 100,000 troops in afghanistan, unless we have another 9 11 we are probably not going to go there again because its not politically doable but what we can do is have 1000 troops in syria averaging Defense Forces who with our logistical air support defeated the isis caliphate. The American People need to understand the isis caliphate would still exist if it werent for our partners in syria or we would have to send the hundred first or 82nd with a lot of american casualties. Allies are a great great Strategic Asset then we cannot implement the Defense Strategy without ourallies if the combined powers are two great. I want todig in on this point. I happen to agree that our allies in say syria, the kurds, the arabs are working with we are a force multiplier. I dont understand why President Trump is taking great credit for this goldilocks solution , neither 100,000 troops or zero troops and where as you say diminishing the Islamic State but also by the way secondarily tertiary only working at bay this republic of iran which has its ambitions and russia which has its ambitions, all that being done with a small footprint of highly skilled troops that are in combat and probably upstanding but i want to say our other allies, when we talk about our allies and im going to get a lot of then angry at me, the germans are not contribute to the collective security the way they might be. Theyre not spending enough money and when they dotheir spending on benefits for retired soldiers rather than making sure their tanksare capable. The turks are the second biggest military and nato and i dont see them coming in to defend estonia. I cant imagine that. Thefrench have some capabilities , its not nato but theyllhave capabilities, the british some and thats about it. The rest of the nato members, i dont see them being allies that we can count on. They expect us to protect them with very little input from us. I think its good to criticize that which i do in the book for being too unwieldy and too threatening to russia and yet at the same time being too disorganized to generate a unified effect in the places that count. Its interesting to see how the european version within nato has in fact started to spend more in the last 2 or 3 years. Trump has made the set same comments the last three or four president s have made. Its just less diplomatic. In a stylistically unusual way and that had an effect. Have the effect was russias invasion of crimea. [inaudible] actually you do. Despite crimea the germans are or going out more extreme to which i believe, this administration believes and maybe you dont will make germany and america more dependent on russia than ever but he said his freedom gas Program People are paying attention to which is about weaning some parts of europe off russian natural gas and i think thats a critical. And i thought allies more broadly people would say your a Great Coalition partner and id say were not a Great Coalition partner, where a treaty ally. Theres a difference between allies by treaty who are committed to certain requirements and then theres people that you aggregates on the ground and one of the points i make in the book is that us dominance poses an adaptation challenge not just for our adversaries but also for our allies so o theyve chosen to focus on certain capabilities and want to keep up with the United States but they have sort of let other capabilities slide by the wayside. Kori can tell you better than i the british had tried to cover a wider band of things that keep up but theyve got less resources for each individual category so part of this, thats why i say how the rest learned to fight the west. We have to start thinking is a collection of western powers, as a joint set of capabilities rather than individually competing. One more point i want you to talk about is your not talking only about our military allies, youre talking about when we have a battlefield success, we need to have a way to translate that into a political success afterwardswe have not been very successful at that. The question is who does that . If its left to the military will try whatever their mission is. I remember being in afghanistan and have generals talk about the crops they should be planting and i said why is an infantry officer telling me that and he said because i want to win and thats my mission but what do we have at the state department, us aig, the National Endowment for democracy . Do we have people who know not so much a nation build in the ends were creating a jeffersonian Democratic Society at least inputting the institutions ofgovernment so that its not , so that its not a total failure, corrupt and a failed state the minute we leave. Is a good challenge and my having worked in both the state department and pentagon i was shocked at how little advantage the state personnel system makes of the amendments. If you think about the american army, no offense bradley, mostly what they are brilliant at is taking talent at the middle of the bell curve andshifting the bell curve upwards. So they look for young women who have the skills that would make her a good soldier. A recruiter. They train her. They spent about a third of their Career Training her and promote her not just on what she has done well to contribute broader challenges going forward. The state department does none of those things. You have brilliant american diplomats. Bill burns for example. They are people you can throw into the deep p end of the pool and they wont drown but nobody ever teaches themto swim. So the institution doesnt array itself to set diplomats up to be successful. I cringe every time he argues for a whole of government anything in the United States because we are politically incapableof that. We have a government designed not to do that. What we are brilliant at is swarms of independent action that add up to stuff. And instead of trying to make us culturally different than we are and we are successful for a reason and the reason isnt the ability to create wholeof government operations. Its to build a better mousetrap entrepreneurialism and we should have strategies as they learn that build on that. Want you to answer me quickly thbut im serious, if president obama had not pulled all our troops out of iraq in 2011, if we had stayed there building the largest embassy in the world and we had worked harder with the iraqis on, im not going to say nationbuilding. Im going to call it building institutions. They were proud, would we be in a different place in iraq today with the state to broker among the various factions and we had put more effort into trying to create institutions of government and bureaucracy . Yes. Do you agree with that . I was there supporting in the center and the Service Committee when people like john mccain were warning the Obama Administration not to do it and its exactly what ended up happening red after 9 11 you think are country wouldnt need a reminder. It happened again when we left early in iraq and its going to happen again in afghanistan if we dont learn the lesson. I was not a fan of going into iraq in the first place. I was not a fan of leaving as we did in 2011. If we hadnt done thatthere probably would not have been assets in the form we have found, we wouldnt have had to go back in. This is part of that statement, the Trump Administration maybe about to make the identical mistake in afghanistan and syria. I want to come back to that but i dont want to miss what were going through. Dont let me forget to come back to that. I want to start with, im going to name them because i like the names and i like to be able to say themon the air so were going to r. Start. Start with just explain your option, embracing the sox. Embracing the sox is military slang but accepting the fact that something unpleasant is going to happen and trying to make the most of it soso in embracing the sox strategy would be to say eto the extent that the us global fantasy over the past seven years as an example of a historical phenomenon of an going to decline. Ther empire we just have to deal with that and go for a soft landing but keep up success that can take the re