Ep. 1: H.R. McMaster on the Gulf War

On the 26th of February 1991, a young armored captain led his unit, Eagle Troop's second squadron, second armored cavalry regiment, into battle in the desert of Iraq, meeting the enemy in a place so featureless that the engagement came to be known as the Battle of the '73 Eastine. Eagle Troop devastated its Iraqi adversaries, who were well armed and part of what was regarded as a formidable military establishment, inflicting grievous casualties on the enemy while suffering little in return. Such encounters were occurring up and down the battlefield. It seemed like the American military had finally shaken off the legacy of Vietnam and notched a wind so lopsided that for a moment the term "superpower" couldn't fully capture the nature of American dominance. We'd need new terms like "hyperpower" and "unipolar moment" in our future adversaries, Chinese communists and Islamic extremists knew that they would have to find new ways to fight us. They did. It is a prescription for war this Iraqi invasion of place. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, which will never surrender. I'm Aaron McClain, and I'm delighted that you're joining me here today for this new podcast, which we're calling the School of War. So why a new podcast about a subject as grim as warfare? Today I work in national security policy in Washington, D.C., but I'm a marine infantry veteran of Afghanistan, and I come from a military family. My dad fought as an infantryman in World War Two, later went on to serve in Vietnam. So I'm personally familiar with the suffering and deprivation that combat poses on troops and on civilians unfortunate enough to be in its vicinity. Avoiding war is a good thing, but I'm worried that Americans are increasingly avoiding knowledge of war. Few of us, proportionally speaking, serve in the military today. Few are still seeing combat, but anywhere near it, compared to the World War Two generation, our collective national knowledge of combat is much less substantial. Meanwhile, the academic study of military history, of strategies, not exactly the trendy or popular thing on campus, except of course among the students who flocked to such classes on the rare occasions that they're offered. The overall result of all of this, I worry, is that we're becoming a nation that's increasingly ignorant about something very important. Avoiding war has its merits, but avoiding knowledge of war is dangerous. So every week, I'll interview leading strategists and military historians to discuss momentous battles, campaigns, conflicts, policy-making in the course of major international competitions, the work of famous strategists, or the legacy of important military commanders or statesmen in wartime. And today, we're just very lucky to get going with somebody who is a leading strategist, also a military historian, and also a general who's commanded in time of war. H.R. McMaster joins us today. He retired from the army as a lieutenant general, having led troops in the Gulf War, which is what we're going to discuss today, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. General McMaster served as the national security advisor to the president in the last administration. He's a scholar, he has a PhD from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and he's a fellow today at the Hoover Institution. He's written essentially countless articles and commentaries on strategic affairs, an extremely well-regarded book about Vietnam, called "The Air Election of Duty," and most recently a new book, "Battlegrounds," the fight to defend the free world, a fascinating survey of America's strategic moment and our various challenges around the globe. General McMaster, thanks for coming today. Why don't we start with you telling our audience about how you came to find yourself leading young troops in the desert back in the early 90s? How'd you grow up? What was your education like? What took you to the army? Well, Aaron, I mean, I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and I always wanted to serve in the army from the youngest age. You know, my mom was a great, great educator and an elementary school teacher, and she instilled in me, I think, an interest in history and Philadelphia is a great place to be interested in history, especially history of our country. And then my father served in the Korean War as an history soldier and then and then became a non-commission officer in the army reserves and an infantry unit in Philadelphia in the Germantown neighborhood. I grew up in the Rocksboro neighborhood of Philadelphia, and then he got a direct commission during the Vietnam War, remained in the reserves and commanded a company in that same unit. I really was exposed to military service early and to military history and to the history of our country from a political and diplomatic perspective as well. So that instilled in me a desire to serve in our army from a young age. I went to a Catholic grade school in Chestnut Hill called Norwood Academy, and from there begged my parents to let me go to a military school, Valley Forge Military Academy, which is typically the opposite of what is the case with military schools. And I had a great experience there, and it was, as you can imagine, kind of a bit of a leadership laboratory when you thrust adolescents into leadership responsibility over one another. And you peaked my interest even further in going to West Point and then getting commission in the army. So it's what I always wanted to do. I mean, I remember one day at Fort Hood, Texas as a lieutenant in the first battalion as a 66th armor. When I plan to transition to civilian life, go work in an industry somewhere and then go to maybe a business school or law school. And I went out with my non-commissioned officers and what's called a right arm night where you bring your sergeants to the officer's club and you have drinks together and reminisce and telecompetitive war stories, that sort of thing. And on that evening, my sergeant said, "What are you doing getting out of the army?" You liked this too much, right? You got to stay in. And so I went home and taught the Katie about it and decided to stay in and wound up in the second capital regiment in Germany and then soon after that in Desert Storm. And you know, in the aftermath of the Gulf War, you wrote a justly famous essay, sort of mini history depicting a very significant battle that your troop and larger unit were in. The battle of the 73 Eastings, what the piece is called, by Captain H.R. McMaster, Eagle Troop, Second Squadron, Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. Tell us about Eagle Troop. Tell us about the men you led into battle. Well, it was really an extraordinary troop. We had tremendous leaders there, the lieutenants and our sergeants. And really, that's what gives you combat power, right? Are the competence of the leaders in an organization because really in combat, what you want to do is build up confidence, right? Confidence in your ability to overmatch the enemy in close combat when the stakes are literally life and death. And if you don't have that degree of confidence that's based in really confidence in your weapons systems, obviously, an individual soldier training, but really in your unit, your troops, your platoons, your squads, your sections ability to fight together as a team, that can lead to fear, right? And fear is the most debilitating emotion that you can have in close combat with the enemy because it can lead to hesitation. It can lead to poor decisions. And so we were extremely confident in one another based on the quality of the leaders that we had in position, the toughness, the resilience, the dedication of our soldiers, and really are demonstrated ability to fight together as a team in really tough, realistic training that really paid off. It wound up really paying off in the battle. And I think that that essay I wrote the day after the battle, that's the typed version that you cited. But I sat down to write my, my recollection of the battle the day after. And then later incorporated the perspectives of soldiers, because I asked our soldiers, you know, this was the kind of the nascent historian in me. I asked our, our soldiers and leaders to write it down, write down what you remember from the battle, right after the battle. I put that in a number of archives at the Command General Staff College of 411 Worth, and then also at the West Point Library archive has copies of all those testimonials. Thinking back to 1990, 1991 Desert Shield and Desert Storm, there was a long wind up ultimately to hostilities. You know, Saddam had obviously gone into Kuwait, George, HW Bush, Marshall, a large international coalition, before the hostilities kicked off. You're there as a young officer. What, what was the expectation there amongst the troops? And to the extent you can speak to it, what was sort of the global expectation regarding how tough of a fight this was going to be? We've remembered the Cold War had just recently ended, right? It's actually the same cavalry troopers of Eagle Troop, who deployed to Desert Shield and then Desert Storm and the Gulf War, had been patrolling the border on the day that East Germany lifted travel restrictions to the West in November of 1989, right? So less than a year before Saddam invaded Kuwait. And so there was a feeling, hey, the Cold War is over. What do we need a high degree of readiness in the army for and so forth? But of course, we had all instilled the culture of the post-Vietnam army, which was to be prepared for combat, right? There was a quotation from the chief staff of our army in the beginning of our training manual, right? That we all sort of internalized. And basically, this general Carl Vano said, our sacred duty is to ensure that no soldier ever dies in combat, because here she didn't have the proper training, right? So we trained even a part of almost the end of the Cold War that Saddam invaded in August of 1990. Our cavalry troop was in a major training exercise where you fire all of your weapon systems and try to demonstrate the speed, precision, an accuracy of all of your weapons and your cruisability to employ those weapons. And we're going to transition from that out to a major maneuver exercise against a British reconnaissance unit, was the opposing force. And we came out to a big basketball court in our barracks area, in the graph and viewer training area in Germany. And we had drawn all the trained features on the map, and we're about to do our rehearsal for what we called a zone reconnaissance in the cavalry. And I said to the troop, as I got them to huddle around, I said, we have to make the most out of this training exercise, because the next operations order I give you may be in the desert sands of Saudi Arabia. This is when the news just came over the radio, right? That Saddam invaded Kuwait. And I just got a gut feeling that we were going to go. And I think at my latest, I thought I was a little bit nutty about that, but we did, but we did train extremely hard from August until early November when we got the word that we were going to, in fact, deploy. This is when, when the Secretary of Defense, you know, read out the second cavalry regiment is one of the units deploying from Germany. And so we deployed quite rapidly to the desert in Saudi Arabia. We adapted our tactics, our techniques to desert warfare. We read and discussed and thought about the history of desert warfare, especially the campaigns in North Africa and World War II. And based on memoirs from, you know, from Irwin Rommel, the Rommel papers to Ernest Harmon, who was a wonderful commanding general, a tremendous commanding commander on the second armored division in World War II to, you know, to patents papers and other memoirs of desert warfare, you know, we changed our tactics. We changed our movement techniques and the battle, what we call battle drills, which are immediate responses to predictable sets of circumstances in combat. We, I think, became extremely well prepared, you know, for what we were about to encounter on February 26, 1991. Before the fighting, what was Captain McMaster's view of the Iraqi army? What kind of fight were you expecting? We thought that it was going to be a tough fight and everyone to underestimate your enemy. But I was very much aware of our competitive advantages, especially those that are less tangible. Our level of training, you know, the confidence and competence of our soldiers and our non-commissioned officers and our officers and our ability, therefore, to employ our weapons systems to achieve overmatched over this enemy. And overmatched really in desert warfare comes from a number of factors, right? I mean, in desert warfare, you know, the side that shoots first gets a big jump, gets a big advantage, right? The side that can distribute fires to take out, you know, large numbers of the enemy in a short period of time gets a tremendous advantage. The side that can maneuver, not unlike maneuver at sea, right? Because of the relatively speechless terrain and that can employ all arms into the fight, direct fire, indirect fire or artillery mortars, as well as the various weapon systems at your disposal, whether it be the missile systems and chain guns on a Bradley or the tank main gun, and understand how to employ those systems so you maximize your competitive advantages. And I think we were ready to do that. The Iraqis had wide disparity in capabilities across their formations, across their combat units. They had these conscript units that were just kind of thrown out into the middle of the desert to look big, right? And to sort of try to get the United States to face the specter and the coalition of massive casualties and therefore dissuade us from the attack. And those units were easily bypassed. We had some short actions against them and then massive surrenders, which we passed onto the units as we continued on to the Republican Guard. But then the Republican Guard who turned out to fight in a very spirited way, but they fought in a way that was maybe more appropriate to the 1980 to 1988 Iran or Iraq war. And they weren't ready. They weren't ready for the US military or the US Army in particular on the day that we engage them in close combat. And so therefore their sense of time and space was off. They didn't really recognize the psychological as well as the physical effect of the Abrams tank, right? A 70-ton tank that can move it up to 50 kilometers an hour with a stabilized weapon system that allows you to fire on the move. And with the weapon system that just never misses if you have a good crew and you prepare that tank for combat effectively. So I think we overmatched the enemy based on surprise, but not surprise in the sense that the enemy didn't know we were there. But the Iraqis had no idea about how much destruction we could visit upon them in a very short period of time. I often thought during my own time in uniform that if there were two weapon systems, I never wanted to find myself on the wrong side of and I was grateful were on my side. It was a a cobra gunship and an Abrams tank because I figured if one of those things ever really decided that it didn't want you there, there was a pretty good chance of it succeeding. As you mentioned, you step off, you cross the line of departure, you move north through the desert with eagle troop, with the whole seventh core, you face what I think is fairly described as light resistance along the way. And then all of a sudden on the 26th of February, you find yourself in something somewhat different. What happened? Well, the night of the 25th of February, G-Trub under the command of my good friend and West Point classmate Joe Sardiano, made contact with the enemy's first, the enemy Republican guards reconnaissance organizations. And we made contact with some elements of those reconnaissance forces the next day as well. So we knew we were entering Republican guard territory, G-Trub and their engagement, they destroyed some of their BMPs, these armored fighting vehicles, and they captured some of the BMPs and the MTLBs, which are just multi-purpose light armored track vehicles. And they brought them to the squadron command post. So we all met, the troop commanders came in to talk with the squadron commander, and we're examining the maps and their weapons, their weapons were brand new, they were clear that this was a well-equipped high priority unit, and their maps showed the general layout of their defense. So we knew that we were moving toward Republican guard main defenses. And so when I went back to the troop that night in the middle of pouring rain, a poured rain all that night, I issued a fragmentary order to them to be prepared for a movement to contact. You know, the next day to identify the Republican guards made defenses. And the plan was then to vector in the heavy divisions behind us into avenues that would give them advantage over the enemy areas where the enemy was relatively weak so they can penetrate the defenses. Well, of course, as it turned out, we wound up making direct contact with that enemy force and then overwhelming it in a 23-minute assault and a battle that went on much longer than that across the regimental front. But I mean, we knew that we were moving toward the Republican guard on the night of the 25th, and then the next day we began that movement directly to the east now, oriented on Kuwait, out of the Iraqi desert, in sort of a halting controlled set of movements, which frankly was quite frustrating to me, but we were moving based on restrictions placed on us limits of advance, corresponding with the north-south grid lines on a map or eastings. So we had permission to move initially to the 5-0 easting, then to the 6-0 easting, then to the 6-5, and the 6-7, and then ultimately the 7-0. And it was in the, during these movements toward the east, that we made contact with some of the enemy main defensive outposts, and then ultimately made contact with and then penetrated their main defensive positions. You made reference to the Iraqis being kind of conditioned by their experience fighting Iran earlier in the 80s. What were the, as it were, the wrong lessons that they took away from that? Another way of asking the same question was, what should they have done differently? Well, the enemy brigade commander, he had been actually educated at Fort Benning, Georgia, as a man when he went to the, the infantry officers, the captain's course there. And his defense was actually fundamentally sound. What he had done is it organized a reverse slope defense on the backside of an imperceptible rise in the terrain. And because we didn't have any maps to the area, we were navigating either by dead reckoning, maybe didn't have a GPS signal, or by GPS. We didn't realize that we're paralleling a road that ran west to east into Kuwait. And along that road was a barracks area. I think it was an oil workers barracks area that had been fortified with infantry. And that that village or that barracks area sat a stride not only the road, but a north-south running imperceptible ridge. On the backside of that ridge is where Muhammad organized his defense, right? And it made sense. He's strong-pointed the village. He thought we'd have to move down the road. And then we would bounce off that, then move over the ridge. And on the backside of the ridge, on the north and south side of that barracks area, he built kill sacks or engagement areas. He emplaced minefields on the backside of the ridge. So the mines would disrupt our forward advance, maybe get us to stop. And then his tanks and his fighting vehicles and his dug-in infantry were oriented into these kill sacks, really at a range to the ridge of about a thousand meters. So he had equalized his weapons ranges and capabilities with our longer range weapon systems. But what he didn't really consider adequately was the fact that he didn't have sufficient depth in his defense and that our tanks, as we did, thanks to my driver initially, Chris Hedenskog, who decided to just wind his way through the minefield and tell me afterwards, he said, "Sir, we just went through a minefield and I instructed all the rest of the tanks to move through the minefield and for the Bradley's to get in the tracks of the tanks so the minefield didn't slow us down." They'd mainly put in antipersonal mines mixed with antitank mines, but the antipersonal mines, which would have been great for an attacking Iranian infantry, popped like, it sounded like microwave popcorn under the tracks of our tanks. He didn't disfers his forces enough. If you can imagine nine M1 tanks, M1A1 tanks firing around every three seconds and not missing, it doesn't take a lot of time to destroy a formation. They did not do, I don't think they're prepped to fire checks well and they're bore sighting. Two tanks engaged my tank as I came over the rise right after I destroyed the first tank of the three that our tank crew destroyed in about 10 seconds, and both those rounds fell short of my tank. I didn't even notice them. The tanks on my either side are the ones who told me later about that. They didn't have the level of training, they didn't prepare for combat the way that you should prepare for armored combat in the desert, and then the forces that he positioned in death, we also rapidly penetrated with by the continuation of our assault. Again, getting to his envisioning of time and space and in particular, he had put a reserve position on a subsequent ridge about three and a half kilometers beyond to the east of his main defenses. As we slowly climbed that ridge, we destroyed the lead tank that we could identify in this coil, a circle of 18 T-72 tanks, and then we entered that assembly area of tanks just as they were trying to deploy against us, just as they were firing up their engines, which of course was too late, and we destroyed them before they could be deployed against us, and they consolidated on this ridge line and then shot and destroyed everything within a range of our guns, and then we continued the fight into the evening, but that was really the end of the major assault. So time and space, relationships, not adapting to the enemy that you're fighting, a lack of training and proficiency in weapon systems, probably poor pre-combat checks for the tanks that he had employed there. The major Muhammad, you know, when he was in his elaborate bunker just at the front edge of his reserve, his tank reserve, and he told me later, after we captured him, he spoke perfectly English, but the first time he knew that he was under an assault was when someone ran into his bunker and yelled, "Tanks, tanks," and he came out and ran up to a really elaborate observation post they had built. Looked out his binoculars and he said that all of his forward units armored vehicles were in flames already by that point. So he gave you order to deploy the reserve, which of course I mentioned was too late. He ran by foot with others to retreat further to the east to the logistics area, which we mortared heavily, fired artillery against, and then broadcast a surrender appeal. And then he came forward with the first 42 prisoners we took, and that's one, that's one, some of our soldiers, and then later the next day I had a chance to talk with him and and others. So that's the other guys, General McMaster, you sort of touched on this already, but explicitly assessed for us in terms of Eagle Troops own success. What element of that success was due to, we'll call them technological advantages. The sort of the hardware and to the extent relevant, I guess, the software advantages of the American military brought to bear against an inferior force. And what weight should we then also give to more timeless human factors? The quality of training, quality of leadership, a spritical or things, things like that, that could be, you know, the same in 1991 as they were in 1891, essentially. I think the two are interconnected, right? So, you know, I'll tell you, one of the greatest aspects of fighting, you know, with the US Army is that you have the US Air Force, right? And US naval aviation, right? I mean, so this whole time, right, from the attack into Iraq on the 24th until this battle into the 26th, I never once had to look up and think, is that friendly or enemy, right? So knowing that our air services give you air supremacy, I mean, that's a big boost to your confidence, right? And then so is the technology you have at your disposal, especially, you know, the incredible, you know, lethality and protection that the Abrams tank provides you, right? I mean, I think in many ways, in this fight, I mean, the safest place to be was an Abrams tank in the front of the battle, right? I mean, Bradley's more vulnerable. And then of course, some of our most courageous soldiers are driving around, you know, fuel trucks with 2,500 gallons of fuel behind it, right? I mean, so I think the confidence that your weapon systems give you the protection of armored vehicles, the combined arms and joint capabilities, that bolsters your confidence. And that gives you the psychological advantage, which is timeless. I mean, I remember John Keegan's phrase from the face of battle in his conclusion, right? This is a survey of battle in the same geographic area across four centuries. And he concludes at the end that there were a lot of changes, right? In the nature of battle over time, induced mainly by social societal change or technological change. But what he found that was, I think, most profound was a continuity, the human nature of war. And he has this great passage in the back of face of battle. I would pull it off my shelf, I wouldn't disrupt our conversation. But it begins with what battles have in common is human. The struggle of men and of course, today, men and women struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation with the achievement of some aim over which others are trying to kill them. And I found that to be a continuity in late, I guess, late 20th century warfare in desert storm. And of course, in the fights that I've had the privilege to be involved in Iraq and in Afghanistan as well. Let's come forward 30 years to the present day, relative to our adversaries, relative to the other guys out there in the world. Are we militarily as dominant today as we were in 1991, less dominant or more dominant? I would say we never were that dominant, right? As we thought we were even after 1991. And I wrote about this pretty extensively in the introduction of battlegrounds. And I think you really put your finger on it, Aaron. These two experiences at the beginning of the 1990s, right? The victory in the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lopsided victory over the fourth largest army in the world in Iraq. These created, I think, a sense of overoptimism and even a touch of hubris in the belief that that really an arc of history had guaranteed the primacy of our free and open societies over closed authoritarian systems. And America's technological military prowess, right? Would guarantee our security well into the future. And the language of the 1990s associated with so-called defense transformation or the revolution in military affairs was hebristic because you couldn't read a sentence without the word dominance appearing at it, right? And I think what that sort of construct forgets, we talked about the human dimension of war as a continuity. Well, another aspect of continuity in the nature of war is its interactive nature. And the fact really that is the great historian and my old friend Conrad Crane says, "Pithily, there are two ways to fight asymmetrically and stupidly, right?" And you hope your enemy picks stupidly as Saddam Hussein did in 1991, so that we could bring all of our competitive advantages to bear. But you know what, a lot of adversaries and enemies learn vicariously through the fate of Iraq's army, and they adopted the asymmetric approach, right? And you see that obviously with Jihadist terrorists who use box cutters and airplanes to bypass our military prowess and inflict on us the most devastating terrorist mass murder attack in history. And you also see it with the protracted insurgencies that we encountered in both Afghanistan and in Iraq after failing to consolidate the military gains adequately to get the sustainable political outcomes in both places. So I think in many ways the overconfidence of the 90s was a setup, right? It was a setup for the strategic shocks and frustrations of the early 2000s. So you talk about how insurgents or future insurgents potential Jihadists, what have you developed an asymmetric response to American military power? Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the Chinese and the People's Liberation Army watching what was happening in 1991, which your point is well taken and the appearance of dominance may have been as much appearance as anything else, but nevertheless, I mean, to the world it was a very dramatic show. And some of our listeners here will remember, if not, I'm sure you can find it on YouTube, the briefings that were done at the time showing footage from the battlefield of these precision airstrikes, which in the moment achieved on that scale were really something kind of new and impressive and it was cinematic. The Chinese are watching this. They've also responded. They also paid attention and thought about, well, if we have to fight this thing one day, how the heck are we going to do it? It looks pretty formidable. How did their thinking develop? Well, Ernie, I write about this and it's not the most readable, you know, monograph, I'll have to tell you, but it's available on the internet. It's called Crack in the Foundation, Defense Transformation and the underlying assumption of dominant knowledge in future war. And in it, I also, you know, write about the Chinese reaction and there's the appearance of this monograph in 1999 of unrestricted warfare by some PLA, People's Liberation Army theorists and so forth. But of course, in the 90s, the Chinese studied the outcome of the Gulf War carefully, but they didn't have the resources to do much about it, right? It wasn't until the transformation in the global economy into the 1990s, you know, Deng Xiaoping's opening up, but that also are, I think, really poor decision, certainly in retrospect, to admit trying into the World Trade Organization in 2001 that really led to the transformation of the Chinese economy in such a way that the People's Liberation Army got the resources and needed to do something about what they viewed as America's overmatched capability. And what the Chinese did was pretty smart, right? They developed some capabilities that looked like ours, right? Advanced fighter aircraft, even an aircraft carrier, right? But what they put their main effort on were asymmetric capabilities that could break apart what they saw as their differential advantages. And those were offensive cyber capabilities, counter-satellite capabilities, long-range precision fires, tiered and layered air defense, electromagnetic warfare capabilities, swarm, unmanned aerial systems, and undersea systems. And so what they what they tried to do is take apart what they saw as our competitive advantages in our ability, especially to conduct integrated joint operations and joint operations are operations conducted across multiple domains by multiple service components, right? So the domains being aerospace land, you know, sea maritime and then cyberspace, obviously also. So this is what China has invested in and what China and Russia both invested in these capabilities in an effort to try to create exclusionary areas of primacy militarily that would challenge American freedom of movement and action. And that would allow them to create survival relationships, right? With countries and areas where our military forces didn't have that freedom of movement in action, you know, with the message of to we countries on the you're on the periphery of the Eurasian landmass. I mean, the message is really who's your daddy, you know? And and and and then also obviously to be able to contest, you know, the US ability to project power into those areas in time of conflict. And so you see this playing out, you know, you saw this play out with the threats against the Baltic states with with Russia's invasion of eastern Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, Russia's endeavoring to create these sort of anti-access area denial bubbles from the Arctic to the Baltics to the Black Sea to Syria and to Libya so that they can contest freedom of movement and action in the Eastern Mediterranean. And of course, China has been doing this as well, especially in an effort to create areas of privacy across the Indo-Pacific region, an effort to maybe isolate Taiwan as the first step in isolating its main regional competitor, which is Japan. So listening to you describe it, it sounds like they're at least two major ingredients to the response. One is watching US forces and coalition forces mass in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. There's a realization that gosh, if we let the United States and its partners build up that kind of force right next to us, it might be difficult to get it stopped. So response one is to create these areas as you point out where it would be challenging at best to be as kind of a euphemism to call it challenging to build up that kind of force force posture close to one of our adversaries. And then the second ingredient is what in crack of the foundation you talk about, you know, the expectation of information superiority undermining that for American forces, making sure that information superiority is not actually something that we would operate with. Do you think that covers it? Are there other major ingredients that you would say? Oh, yeah. The other ingredients are to sap our will, right? And you see this with maybe cyber-enabled information warfare against us. What Russia is really trying to do, Russia in particular, because it doesn't have the same amount of resources as China, right? Russia's economy is about the size of exorcism's economy or Italy's economy. But so Russia's theory of victory is to drag everybody else down and therefore be the last man standing so to speak in Europe and vis-a-vis the West and the United States. And they're doing that by trying to polarize American society further to diminish our confidence in democratic principles and institutions and processes and therefore sap our will, right? Because deterrent capability, I think is best thought of as capability times will, right? And if will goes down to zero, as apparently our will did in Afghanistan, it will embolden our adversaries in ways that I think would be very dangerous. And so there are many other aspects to China's, I think efforts are not only military, not even primarily military, but are economic and political. But China is engaged in a strategy of co-option coercion and concealment, right? Co-opt countries, you'll co-opt companies, co-opt elites across the West with you know, with the law of profits and the benefits of Chinese investment, for example. But once you're in, once you're dependent, like Australia seemed to get for a while and other countries did then they'll bludgeon you, right? And course you into conforming to their foreign policy and national security goals and objectives. And then they'll just, you know, they'll conceal this and just say, this is just normal business practices. So I think the strategies for both Russia and China go way beyond the military and are, in fact, much more dangerous because of their pernicious nature. So let's talk, since you bring it up, let's talk about Afghanistan for a bit. So this is another situation where the story begins after 9/11 with a moment of really an impressive display of American military capabilities and intelligence capabilities going into Afghanistan. I believe the first air strikes were in October of 2001, a fiber call correctly. You know, CIA and Special Forces elements on the ground at that time or perhaps not that long after. And you know, after a relatively brief campaign, you saw the fall of the Taliban regime, its remnants, you know, more or less literally take to the hills and they're after an American effort to help create something in its place. And ultimately, beginning a few years later, you know, pretty long and ultimately bitter fight took the form of a counterinsurgency at times and at other times maybe something more complicated. We are, officially, as of about 24 hours ago out. Gentlemen, master, you talked about the American. Well, it's certainly the case that opinion polls in recent months and years, if you ask, you know, the average group of Americans should be stashed, do we go? There was a pretty, pretty consistent consensus on the side of go. But there's another side to that story now, which is having witnessed the disastrous finale in Kabul. People are pretty upset. And I think there's a legitimate debate to be had about are they upset at the execution of something that in general, they still want or are there cold feet and second thoughts about the departure big picture. So here we are in the 31st of August. Where do you think it goes from here? Where do you think it ought to go? Do those who say that this will, this departure from Afghanistan is going to free us of this, you know, kind of strategic distraction and allow us to focus on the real adversaries like China? Are they right? Are they on to something? Or are they missing something? Well, I think this is the most misunderstood war, you know, in our history. And the misunderstandings are what led to our self delusion that led to self defeat in Afghanistan. The Taliban didn't win in Afghanistan. We defeated ourselves. And we defeated ourselves based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the war. What did Klausel would say, you know, the first duty of the of the statesmen or stateswoman is to not try to turn war into something alien to its nature. And what we've forgotten Afghanistan from the beginning that, hey, war is an extension of politics. So whereas we had that very successful military campaign that you described, we didn't do adequate planning and we didn't actually execute to bridge that military gain into a sustainable political outcome. What you hear today is we failed in Afghanistan because we tried to transform it into a Jeffersonian democracy. And Afghanistan wasn't yet Denmark. So we lost and that led to a defeatist attitude. Well, what we had though, Aaron, but you know, just a couple of years ago was a very sustainable commitment to Afghanistan that helped bring to the Afghan army and in support of the Afghan government the same kinds of asymmetrical capabilities that allowed us to collapse the Taliban regime with a very small military force. But what did we do based on this defeatist narrative that Afghanistan is not Denmark. So therefore we have lost and that we wasted, you know, trillions of dollars there and our efforts there even though now we see what we did accomplish because we're seeing all those accomplished accomplishments, you know, by by the brutal Taliban, you know, is this narrative led to withdrawal of those same asymmetrical capabilities. But you know what the Taliban maintain theirs, which is unscrupulousness and the willingness to brutalize civilians to incite fear to accomplish their political objectives. You know, you kept hearing there's no military solution in Afghanistan. But Aaron, I guess apparently the Taliban had one in mind, right? And so our so our lack of will to sustain that effort is what led to self defeat. And now we're seeing the price for it. You mentioned the fact that the war, it was in the minds of many unsustainable because the lack of public support. You know, I think you could say that the reason for that is that three presidents in a row said it is not worth it. And you know, it's a futile endeavor. And therefore withdrawal should be our objective. Well, I mean, big surprise that the American people concluded that as well. But I think a lot of Americans are looking at the catastrophe that is unfolding. And then you have this morphing into a political, you know, political disaster in terms of our credibility with our European allies. Remember America, the America's back narrative, right? And then how mad everybody what was about the insulting tweets that Donald Trump was about our about European allies. Well, how about just abandoning your allies and not giving them the opportunity to even evacuate their citizens? I mean, they think we should be maybe concerned about that and the effect that that has on a reputation or how it emboldens our our adversaries. I mean, I think that you can draw a direct line from the unenforced red line in Syria after the Assad regime committed the mass murder of innocence using nerve agent to the to Russia's annexation of crime, the innovation of Ukraine, you know, to the to China's China's development of of of islands in the South China scene weaponizing. So I think that this is just the beginning of not only humanitarian catastrophe, but a political catastrophe and a security threat because jihadist terrorists are emboldened by this. This is a victory for jihadist terrorists who want to commit mass murder against us. You know, we conjured up in Afghanistan, the enemy we would prefer, right? And we're benign Taliban. How's that working out? A Taliban who would share power? A Taliban that's separate from and would be a partner with us against jihadist terrorists. But of course, you know, the Taliban is completely intertwined with al-Qaeda in our jihadist terrorist groups, especially the Hikani network. Sharaj Hikani, who is a specialist in kidnapping and mass murder, it wasn't is in charge of security in Kabul now. So I think it's time to stop pretending, Aaron, you know, because we've been pretending about Afghanistan. And what we're about to to to to suffer the consequences of a lost war. Yeah. Many people, I would say in particular President Biden, the way that that this was this was conducted, I think assumed that there are no consequences to surrendering to a terrorist organization. We're just beginning to see those consequences now. You know, you talk about the role of presidential leadership and all this. I served in Afghanistan under President Obama, which was an odd moment because you're certainly right. President Obama was was quite clear about what was at best, depending on, you know, the year we're talking about his ambivalence towards the American presence in Afghanistan. And yet I went as part of a surge as part of an increase in troops. No one has satisfactorily explained to me how it will be how how the existence of an independent Narco terror state in the heart of Central Asia is going to make it easier, rather than harder to focus on China. I suppose part of the account. I'm curious to know your response to this is we're going to do these over the horizon strikes. You know, this is on the theme of what we've been discussing this whole hour in terms of American technological dominance in our our love of technology and military affairs. We are so powerful, General of Master that from from over the horizon, if you're a terrorist, you rear your ugly head in Afghanistan, our sensors are going to find you. We're going to discern your intent and we're going to snuff you out. What's your what's your view of that plan into pipe dream? It's complete pipe dream. When you lose access to human intelligence, human intelligence is essential to identify an enemy that is intermingle with the displaying population. There's no way you can make up for that with communications intelligence or signal intelligence, combined with surveillance capabilities. It's just impossible. So everybody wants to reduce counterterrorism to a targeting exercise, right? But you have to recognize with the Taliban, there are tens of thousands of targets all of whom are trying to avoid being classified as such. And by the way, they're intermingling with civilian population. So we're just going to start dropping 500 pound bombs and we don't care about how many innocent civilians are killed. Of course, we're not going to do that. So this is an organization that will essentially use a captive population as human shields as they continue to terrorize that population and plan to prepare and execute attacks against us. You know, I mean, these are the enemies of all humanity. Afghanistan exists on a modern day frontier between barbarism and civilization. The world is a much less safe place because of our capitulation to the Taliban and our self-defeat. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we might be able to begin recovering from this and to begin to try to remove the stain of 2021. Well, that's, I think a good place for us to wrap up for today. It was a real pleasure talking to you. I learned a lot. I'm sure everyone listening did as well. General McMaster, thank you very much. Aaron, thanks. And thanks for this great podcast. I mean, I think the whole idea of making sure that we try to understand how the past produced a present as a first step of understanding, you know, and learning about our future, projecting into the future is just a great initiative and so glad to be part of it. Thank you. Sir, thanks for joining School of War. Appreciate it. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.