Welcome to the One CA Podcast. Today, we have Author Sean McFate, PhD, discuss his book The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder and its application to Civil Affairs. Episode sponsored by Third Order Effects at www.thirdordereffects.com
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Transcript:
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This is part one of our interview with author Sean McFaith. Please come back after the episode and listen to part two.
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Hi, and welcome to the 1CA Podcast. My name is John McElligot, your host for today's episode. We're joined by Dr. Sean McFate. He is an author, novelist, and foreign policy expert. He is a professor of strategy at the National Defense University and Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D .C. He is also an advisor to Oxford University's Center for Technology and Global Affairs. A specialist in national security strategy, Dr. McFate was a think tank scholar at the RAND Corporation, Atlantic Council, Bipartisan Policy Center, and New America Foundation. Recently, he was a visiting scholar at Oxford University's Changing Character of War program, where he conducted research on future war. His career began as a paratrooper and officer in the U .S. Army's storied 82nd Airborne Division, where he served under Stan McChrystal and David Petraeus, and graduated from elite training programs such as Jungle Warfare School in Panama, and he was also a Jumpmaster. Dr. McFate then became a private military contractor. Among his many experiences, he dealt with warlords, raised armies for U .S. interests, rode with armed groups in the Sahara, conducted strategic recon for oil companies, transacted arms deals in Eastern Europe, and helped prevent an impending genocide in the Rwanda region. In the world of international business, he was a vice president at TD International, a boutique political risk consulting firm. He was also a manager at Dining Court International, a consultant at Baring Point, and an associate for Booz Allen Hamilton. His nonfiction books include The New Rules of War, Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder, which we're going to discuss today, that was published by William Morrow, and The Modern Mercenary, Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order, which was published by Oxford University Press. His fiction books include Shadow War and Deep Black, both published by William Morrow. A coveted speaker, Dr. McFate has also written for and appeared on numerous media outlets. He has authored eight book chapters and edited academic volumes. and published a monograph for the U .S. Army War College on how to raise foreign armies. He holds a B .A. from Brown University, a Master's in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Ph .D. in International Relations from LSE, the London School of Economics and Political Science. He lives in Washington, D .C. For more information about Dr. McFaith, visit his website, which is seanmcfaith .com. Dr. McFaith, welcome to the 1CA Podcast.
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Yeah, and thank you for your time. I know you've got a lot going on these days. You've been connected to the civil affairs community for quite a while and know some people who are in the Civil Affairs Association. Today we want to focus the conversation about your latest book, The New Rules of War. What's at stake really with The New Rules of War? And you talk about in the book how the U .S. has such a huge lead on other countries in terms of military spending and technological advantage so that we could defeat many foes several times over. So why do the new rules matter to policymakers and military leaders?
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national image tarnished by low -level foes. Yet we have the best military, even our enemies know that. So what's the problem? Why are we struggling at winning wars? And that's why I wrote the book to answer that question. Like, why are we continuing to struggle with wars despite all of our advantages,
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despite our amazing military? What's the problem?
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And so you took, would you say it was a scholarly approach or scholarly? combined with your personal experience, because you have a lot of stories about what you've gone through in your career and applying it to the new rules. Yeah, so this book, it's not a scholar. Well, it's undergirded by real scholarship,
00:05:45 SPEAKER_03
by real scholarship, real rigor. But I wrote it like a magazine article. I wrote it to be read. I wrote it so you can read it on an airport or you can read it downrange or anywhere. It's not like a heavily footnoted academic home or treatise. It's written so everybody can read it. It's written like me. sold at Walmart and everybody would read it, and it is. Because we have to get, all of us have to get the word out. We need a national discourse about what does winning look like in modern war because what we're doing is not working.
00:06:13 SPEAKER_02
Yeah. And you mentioned you wanted to write this for your mother. Was your mother one of the early reviewers and gave you feedback on it too? No, she, my mother's not. My mother is like, you know, the furthest away from war. I wrote it so like everybody could read it. I mean, I wrote it so like I could go to a local parking lot. oh, this is interesting. It does not read like a think tank walk piece. It does not read like an academic press piece or some piece of political science. The ideas that undergird it are very serious, very rigorous, but it reads, again, it reads like a Vanity Fair article.
00:06:49 SPEAKER_02
Yeah, no, it's a great read. And I think you try to frame it by talking about strategic atrophy. What you argue is at the heart of why Western militaries have been losing wars for decades. There were many battles but losing the wars. So why does that continue? So look, the last time the West decisively won a war was 1945, right? World War II. Since then, the West has been struggling all the world. Think of like, you know, it's not just the United States and Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
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It's the French in Vietnam and Algeria. It's the British.
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struggling, including our own. The reason, tactically and operationally, at those levels of war, we dominate, we rock, we kick butt. The problem is at the strategic level of war, the national security establishment, that's the problem. We have a low strategic IQ.
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We have an amazing military. We have other amazing instruments of national power, but the people in charge of deploying them are frankly not high strategic IQ people. Republican or Democrat. And I call this strategic atrophy. And I talk about this in the book, about what does that mean? So winning wars is, you know, it takes strategic thought. And that is the problem. Our strategic thought is atrophied.
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So we have a National Security Council. We have a whole body of government that has committees of oversight. We have all these agencies. Who are these people at the table who should be? developing the strategy?
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Great question. So the people who are developing the strategy,
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the strategy, if you look back to the last time the U .S. had a real grand strategy, it was the Cold War, it was containment, it was Kennan's long telegram and NSE 68. Those were strategic thinkers. The people who are in the National Security Council today, I'm not talking about the secondees in the interagency and the military. I'm talking about the political appointments. These are speechwriters. They have no background. There's no Dean Atkinson. This is not a partisan issue. This is not a Democratic versus Republican issue. This is an American issue. And that's the problem. We don't have strategic thinkers. And there's a lot of reasons for it. One reason is that in a civilian university world, there's nowhere you can learn to study warfare. War is just not politically correct. So nobody studies it. And in our war colleges, and there are no war colleges in the civilian world, in the war colleges, we've had to fade into war colleges. There's some war colleges that still teach, essentially stuff from the 1980s. That really is not relevant. War has moved on. We have to move on, too. And that's one of the reasons I like the CAA community, because I think the CAA community, they are on the frontier of warfare, and they see what's required. And one of the rules of the 10 new rules of war layout is that some of the best weapons don't fire bullets.
00:09:56 SPEAKER_02
Okay. Let's dive into this a little bit more. Well, before we do that, I want to ask you about being a futurist, right? So this is about future war. And in your book, you talk about how everyone else who predicts future conflicts is wrong. But that's what you do in the book. So why are your predictions any better than anyone else's?
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But war has moved on. We have not. That's the bottom line problem. That's why we struggle. So what's the reason for this? The reason is because our war futurists are backwards looking. So where does the Pentagon think? You know, when you think like, well, okay, the Pentagon wants to buy two more aircraft carriers. Who's driving that demand signal? It's war futurists. You know, there's obviously Lockheed Martin and Congress. They have their fingers in pots. Ultimately, war futurists have a vision of the future of war that we're buying stuff against, that we're training against. And who are the most powerful war futurists? It's not generals and soldiers. It's not even think tank people or academics. The most powerful war futurist is Hollywood. It's novels. Because they have the ability to fire up our imagination. So if you look at, and if you think about what do they base war on? For them, it's World War II with better technology. I mean, think about Star Wars. Star Wars is like midway in space, about a midway in space with light sabers, right? You know, most people, if you look at Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, a book about World War III in the 1980s that everybody read, it was basically World War II with better technology. There's no nuclear weapons in that book, nothing. And so most war futurists, they think they're looking forward, but really they're looking backwards and they imagine the future of war being fought with the last war with better technology. And for us, that's World War II. And everything we're doing now, like F -35 or the Ford -class carrier, this is all for like some big battle of midway in the South China Sea using Ford -class carriers and F -35s. But that's not how China's winning the South China Sea.
00:12:06 SPEAKER_03
They're winning it without carrier groups. and that's an example of what I'm talking about.
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So you go back into history a little bit to talk about Billy Mitchell, General Billy Mitchell, who came up with some great ideas that were poo -pooed at the time. So that was from the 1930s. You've come out with an amazing book, which I think you probably know the numbers, read by thousands of people, purchased the books, downloaded copies, gone to the library. Has DOD given you the cold shoulder? Do you have what you call Cassandra's Curse as well? And it's actually being read widely within DOD.
00:12:45 SPEAKER_03
We can talk about the reactions in DOD, which are a bit nuanced. But basically, one of my heroes is Billy Mitchell, right? Billy Mitchell was a true war futurist. Most war futurists are fraud, but they do exist, and they're rare, these war prophets. And when they come out, they're usually, as you said, poo -pooed.
00:13:02 SPEAKER_03
And Mitchell's an example. So he was a U .S. Army aviator in World War I. And he saw the future of war, and it was air power, air power. And when he came back as a one -star to Washington, he told all his friends and colleagues, peers, the future is air power. We've got to prepare for it. And, of course, they were backwards looking, too. They thought the future of war would look like the last war, which would be trench line warfare. So they and, like, the French and others, what did they invest in? They invested the Maginot Line, the biggest trench system in history. Mitchell was saying, no, the future is air power, and nobody would listen to him. He went on this command tour of the Pacific Ocean. He came back, and he said, he predicted in 1924 that the Japanese will launch a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning at 7 .30 a .m. using airplanes.
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And guess what happened after this?
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And we know how this ends. You know, Pearl Harbor happened 15 years later. The military set was caught completely by surprise, even though one of its own called it. And that's what we're doing now. We are sitting behind our national lines of these big -ticket tactical warfare items like Bradley fighting vehicles and, you know, again, F -35s, which we spent $1 .5 trillion on. Trillion. You know, and these are magical lines.
00:14:38 SPEAKER_02
So it's not like we're asleep at the wheel. People are doing things, but you think they're the wrong things to be doing, the wrong investments that are happening. Yeah, at the strategic level.
00:14:44 SPEAKER_03
are happening. Yeah, at the strategic level. So at three levels to war, there's tactical at the bottom, operational in the middle, and strategic at the top. The strategic level, which is where wars are won and lost, you know, I think, again, you can win every battle but lose the war. That's where we're messing up. And we're investing in the wrong things. Things that we need to inve