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 two of our two -part series with author Sean McVeigh. Thank you for listening.
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Hi, and welcome to the 1CA Podcast. My name is John McKelligot, 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. interest, 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 Dyncore 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. McVeigh, visit his website, which is seanmcvete .com. Now, you talk about gray matter is superior to silicon, and... I want to talk about ways that we could really invest in training people and just instead of just investing hardware, you know, do both. But Americans are typically not inclined to speak foreign languages because most Americans don't have to. You know, we have we're bordered in the north by candidates, English speaking and in the south and Mexico and Spanish speaking. There's a growing population of America, of the United States that speaks Spanish. And we do have migrants who speak foreign languages and some of them join the military. What are the requirements you see in future war training or military personnel for the future warfare that you've envisioned?
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And we spend, I think, too much of our time investing in technological solutions to tactical problems and not enough time on training our minds, our thinking about, you know, how do we think out of this problem? And I think, you know, look at China, that's what they're doing. I mean, they are strategically, they're using strategic cunning to win places like the South China Sea and not, you know, blunt force. And at the tactical level, I mean, at the tactical level, we're actually quite good at this and soft in my opinion. it, but we need to become better. And of course, you know, Americans don't have to be multicultural because, again, as I was saying, we are the world's hegemon. We live in a country that's born by English speakers. Everybody speaks English, you know, mostly and largely in part of the last 70 years of dominance. You know, the business language of the world is English, but I think we can do better in terms of training and education. And, you know, think about this. Education, I think liberal arts is a great education for strategic thinking. Why do I say that? Because the liberal arts, when you read Dostoevsky's, you know, Brothers Karamazov, for example, you're not really reading about late 19th century Russian society. I mean, you kind of are, but you're learning to think about ambiguity. That's what good critical thinking is. That's what good liberal arts is, is thinking about ambiguity. And that's what, if you think about national, like, war problems, national security issues, it's all about wicked problems and ambiguity. But what do we train at academies? We train, you know, engineering. Engineering is the wrong model of thinking for modern warfare. So I think there's a lot of things that we can do that's not just languages. It's just education at large. But ultimately, we have to invest in people and not platforms.
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And do you see that as? For example, when someone raises their arm and volunteers to join one of the military services as being too late, does the United States as a nation need to invest in the liberal arts training or training that goes back to what Orson Scott Carr talked about in Ender's Game, starting when people were in their childhood?
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We get people like Abraham Lincoln, who is a great strategic thinker. We don't really, as I said earlier at the beginning of the podcast, we don't really have, there's no civilian universities for strategic thought. War colleges are more abundant. And I think, how old is an officer, how many years does an officer have before he gets a strategic education? Do you know?
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Typically, I mean, you have to get to, I think, 05. Yeah, 05. So you've got 15 to 20 years in. Why are we waiting? 15 to 20 years to teach our officers to think strategically.
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officers to think strategically. Why don't we do that when people are cadets in midshipmen? Why don't we do that in an A -knock and B -knock? I don't know. Why do we think that only officers can think strategically? And why do we think that only people in uniform can think strategically? Let's have a program where we invite, you know, we can recruit strategic thinkers from the civilian world. So I think we need to be a little bit more imaginative. That's why, like, Orson Scott Card, because in his book and, I guess, the movie, Ender's Game, they have a program where they identify strategic thinkers who are children, and they raise them up as children. I'm not saying we should do that, but it's a model that's kind of interesting to think about.
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Yeah. You also talk about, in the book, the balance of power between the executive branch and the legislative. And where do you draw the line between the powers the president should have for waging war as the commander -in -chief, which has really grown in power over the last several decades? And the check and balance that Congress has had with declaring war, you know, and funding them, right? So they really have the power of the purse. But, you know, where is that balance? Where should it be? That's an outstanding question. So this is a debate that's been raging since the founding of the republic, right?
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Where our founders distrusted standing militaries because they didn't want to have a military hunt up.
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up. And so it's curious that in the Constitution, you read it, they say that Congress was authorized to... This has always been a problem, and it's been a growing problem since the end of World War II. The last time our Congress declared war officially was World War II.
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So all the conflicts from Korea to Afghanistan, those are not technically official wars. Congress did not declare them official wars. This became a problem in the 1970s, and the War Powers Act was passed to sort of constrain what some saw as an imperial presidency. Others defend it. Say, look, we're a superpower now. You know, we have to have an executive who can act with power rapidly. We can't send it to a committee, you know. And those are the two camps. It's dangerous when, you know, we all love the military. I love the military. I'm a vet, but I teach at National Defense University in Washington. We have international students from around the world, and these are people who are going to become generals of their military someday. Some of them are kind of a little scared. degree of sort of flag waving and martial support in our country. Some people think that our civil and military relationship is kind of out of balance.
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And it's not that the generals are pushing this. It's not that. It's actually civilians. If you think about the Warhawk civilians from Madeleine Albright, you know, who's like, let's go to Bosnia, intervene there in Samantha Power, to like, you know, Wolfowitz and the neocons. In some ways, it's a reverse of Sam Huntington's The Soldier in the State, where the soldiers were seen as the bloodthirsty generals, for example, Dr. Strangelove, and the civilians are restraining them, which is the Clausewitzian approach. Now it's kind of flipped on its head. Now we have, like, bloodthirsty civilians who I think are mostly as chicken hawks, frankly, who want to go to war, and it's the military that's holding them back in a sort of Jacksonian way.
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want to go
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a sort of Jacksonian way. But I think we... need to have a national discourse about, not just about war, but what is our relationship to war, and who's in charge, you know, which branch of government is in charge. I see largely Congress, I guess, abdicated a great deal of power over the decades to the exact same branch, and not just in the sphere of warfare, but all sorts of areas. And that's, again, it's not a Republican versus Democrat issue, it's an American.
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Do you think that having so few Americans serve in uniform leads them to want to ask veterans to stand at every baseball game and be overly patriotic, if that's possible, but to defer so much to the military and say, well, you're amazing, let's use you as a tool for whatever the political lines are?
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was horrible. And I'm really happy to see American society hug their military as it should be.
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Yeah, much better approach than the Vietnam era. Yeah, you know, of course, sometimes from the jingoism of thank you for your service at the airport,
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at the airport, I mean, even if that's kind of rolled our eyes about this at the time. But I do think that, you know, if you think about it, you know, less than 1 % of our country serves in uniform. And we're asking our military to do...
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It's just not, you know, I think if we had a national service, it didn't have to be military national service. It could be civilian national service. I think Americans would be a lot more circumspect about foreign policy and listen to the debates a lot closer. Because right now, it's very easy for Americans to say,
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yeah, we're strong, we're USA, and you and the people go and fight the war for us. I think if we all had skin in the game, Americans would pay a lot more.
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After a break, we're going to return to our discussion with author Sean McFate.
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Welcome back to the 1CA podcast. I'm your host, John McElligot. Today, our guest is author Sean McFate.
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So your fourth rule that talks about hearts and minds do not matter. I was reading and interpreting as that the United States should get its hands dirty and really dirty with troops in the ground, possibly for a longer term. And my understanding is that American society generally abhors. prolonged wars. There's little consistency across administrations supporting them, right? You talk about every 48 years, the wins change and the strategy changes if we have that. So unless more Americans get involved in fighting the wars, do you ever