In the international organization, the american journal of political science, journal of politics and security studies, he is already launched on the second book project which is very ambitious which analyzes the role of Sensitive Information and secrecy in international organizations. He received his ph. D from ohio state in 2013 and as i previously mentioned, he was a Summer Research scholar under the title eight program here at the Cannon Institute in 2013. So with that ill turn the floor over to austin. Great. Thanks so much, will. Thanks also to all of you for coming out. It is great to be back here at the Wilson Center and i appreciate the support, the support of the Cold War International history project and shout out to victoria and cindy for all youve done to make it possible to come out here. So i want to start my talk about this book with a simple but i think profound question. Which is how have we as an International Community avoided world war iii. After suffering two catastrophic global conflicts in the first half of the 20th century, we have so far managed to avoid it. And the most common answer is that scholars have given is that it has something to do with the spread of democracy, with the emergence of International Law and Nuclear Weapons and destruction or the International System for much of the post war period of bipolarity. And this is provocative and interesting claim that a nonobvious reason for why weve avoided world war iii is secrecy. Factors like the spread of democracy or Nuclear Weapons are insufficient to prevent disagreements from the major powers of the International System. Smaller wars happen. And interests, opportunistic or defensive remain. And those clashes of interests invite military disputes and invite situations that could escalate to larger and larger scale of conflict. Furthermore limited war as an exercise is very difficult. It is very hard to restrain once self when an adversary may not respect that same form of restraint and limited war is sometimes messy. So in this book secret wars secrecy about military intervention could help keep those clashes of political interest that can emerge and take manifestation on the battlefield and kept those clashes from becoming larger wars. It is a specific use as i said. Hiding external military intervention so the focus is on covert forms of military intervention which ill talk about in more detail and the secrecy dynamics that surround it. And using secrecy allows governments, major powers to conceal as pecks of conflict which would invite reactions or reputational reactions or miscommunicate among the adversaries in a way that would make limited war difficult to maintain. And one of the things i developed in the book is that this process is supported by a surprising and interesting form of collusion. So what youll see later on in my discussion is a presentation of some of the Raw Materials which show the degree to which the United States for example was aware of covert or soviet or Chinese Military involvement in some of the most important wars of the 20th century and despite knowing that chose not to use that information as a political weapon and to stay quiets about that facet of the war. But one thing that this means is that part of how weve avoided world war iii has come at a steep price. What the book lays out doesnt wrestle with a ton but begins a conversation about this required outright deception, misleading disassembling to American Public and other publics. Misleading not about small trivial matters but who was killing whom during those conflicts and i might show you evidence about the truth of the covert side of say the kooern war or the vietnam war but it means the stories we tell about those wars is sometimes just not accurate and something to be wrestled with. So while the book is historical, i think it raises some questions that are of clear relevance for today in a world of cyber conflict for example, where the deniable of acts of aggression or coercion is at the center of debate about what to do about that form of conflict and escalation dynamics remain a challenge for actors that are working in that space. So what i want to cover today is just review some of the main ideas of the book which have two components, a sort of concept youll or theoretical arg and the historical finding and narrative that i draw out in the bulk of the book. And then im going to walk you through some of the archival evidence in part because it showcases some of the what the Wilson Center did for the project which is provide some of the raw material for the claims that i make in the book and also just because it is fun to look at stuff that used to be secret. That is part of where any research is enjoyable. So first i want to lay out the basic argument that i make in the book. I develop a limited war theory of secrecy. And i want to first step back and lay out the basics and define what the book is doing and talking about. So i ask two questions specifically in the book. First, why do governments, major powers inter veen militarily in an ongoing project, why do they do it covertly and overtly. And the second yes is why covert intervention might an adversary collude in keeping that intervention secret. And it is important to clarify, an important point today as much for the past, covertness is the intention to conceal the sponsors identity of a particular policy action such as military intervention. The intention is to keep it secret and not acknowledge it but that doesnt mean the secrecy is 100 e effective. To take an example from the book, the intervention in laos during the war was in american newspapers but when you read the declassified material from the program, they were bending over backwards and engaging in linguistic contortions not to acknowledge the american role in laos. That doesnt mean the role in laos was over in my definitional use of the term, it means it was more of an open secret than an effectively kept secret. And the book is framed by two conventional intuitions or scholarly explanations for what secrecy is doing during war. And one of them is the traditional Operational Security logic, loose lips sink ships. Wartime secrecy is a resource that once i use it at the expense of other side to protect ones forces in the field or engage in surprise military maneuvers. The other admonition in american context is to handle antiwar or sort of reluctance to go to war among the people. So if a leader thinks that the United States reputation or Regional Security interests required an intervention but you have a domestic public is a sleep at the wheel oro posed, secrecy might be a way to get around that. And think there is a lot of truth to both of these. And these logics especially the Operational Security one is consistent with and can accompany the logic im going to lay out. But i think theyre too simplistic at the expense of an adversary. I tell a story in the book that is interesting and certainly doesnt happen all of the time but is one that suggests there is something more complicated going on and also think there is something going on at the domestic level. The reactions are not always a force for restraint and they could be something that makes it very difficult and costly for leaders to act with restraint. So i develop a distinct logic for secrecy that is anchored in the process of fighting limited war. Especially in the modern era. So i use that answer of why what does secrecy do during war, it is a reason why if youre an adversary and it provides a good reason to stay quiet about it as well. So it supports that collusion logic. So boil down the argument in four points that will hopefully stick. Number one, is i start by arguing that large scale military conflict escalation of military conflicts which i define as a regional conventional conflict or above in the current industrialized warfare with Nuclear Weapons and even without them is ruinously destructive and all states all of the time or most states most the time try to avoid conflicts reaching that level. That is the sort of starting point of the argument and i date that particular reality or the perception to world war i which is Chapter Three of the book which kicks off the story that i tell. Secondly, i argue that control of escalation, not just the costliness of escalation in the modern era is very difficult. Modern kinds of politics make starting a controlling war, once you start a war, controlling the scope and scale and it is very difficult and i point to two reasons. The problem of hawks rather than doves. If you were following the news with india and pakistan last week, what specialists of south asia were saying is that part of the force that may have pushed the hand of india or pakistan at that different stages back and forth over kashmir was looking weak. It could be a significant problem if the military in pakistan, say, views a leaders decision as to weak, that could be the end of the government. So once the hostility start and people start dieing it is difrl it is difficult to control. It is difficult to know if would you like engage in limited war whether or not the other side is ready to do so as well. It takes two to tango and if the other side is not willing to play and it is not limited and it is unlimited in a way that very much at your disadvantage. So the book gets into something that hasnt been analyzed in the field of International Relations with as much care as it should be which is how do governments through behavior or words, mostly behavior, communicate their interest in keeping a conflict limited. So theyre willing to get involved with an intervention but want to keep it controlled and limited lets say. How do you communicate that to an adversary. The third point in the sort of argument is that covert methods of intervention address those two escalation control problems. The problems of the domestic hawks and the miscommunication. So if you intervene covertly, one of the things that does is it allows you to provide arms or military personnel to one of the sides of the conflict that you support without hume ill ating a major power on the other side. That is you dont do your intervention in a way creating domestic restraint for those reacting to your intervention. First of all, it helps retain escalation control even as you enter into and put your thumb on the scales of the conflict. The second mechanism is a little bit more subtle and that is that i think that adversaries appreciate that there are other their counterpart has three options in the modern system. They have dont intervene, overtly and covertly intervene as of now. When you witness the other siden gauging in covert intervention, that communicated something to you. Theyre willing to do more than nothing, the first option, but more restrained than doing the maximum. And that communicates a mix of resolve because it is more than nothing and restraint because it is something that is less provocative than the most extreme alternative. And ill show you some evidence in a second about how that interpretation helps support and reinforce and provide a useful signal that one is interested in controlling the scale and scope of war even as one intervenes. And in the theory chapter, if you do pick up a copy of the book, youll see i draw some parallels to every day life. I draw in some sociology and intuition was from irving golfman was a bizarre place to look for war dynamics but he talked about how the fluidity and the viscosity of social life is not pointing out flaws that other people have, it is looking the other way, it is the art of saving face and i think a lot of what my story about, covertness and secrecy is about is an appreciation for the way that giving both sides an opportunity to save face is one of the ways to avoid the titfortat cycle of escalation. The last point and then ill move on is one of the biproducts of the process that i develop in the book is some unexpected uses of secrecy. One is the collusion. If you are protecting your own leader from a dovish domestic reaction, there isnt a whole lot of reason why the other counterpart, the adversary, should keep a secret about the same covert intervention in they detect it. If they also share a interest in supporting interest but not having the conflict get out of control then there is a good reason to collude in keeping secret an aspect of war which might drive escalation wider. The od by product is the open secrecy. What i argue in the book is seeing your adversary after they are exposed to a certain extent, maintain that fiction they are not involved could become a sort of grammar or communicative meck six to say they want to keep this under control and keep a way out of the conflict so that provides a logic for why even open secrets could be useful. Okay. So in the book i develop a argument and make a historical sort of broad historical claim and a series of chapters devoted to individual conflicts. The coverage of the book starts with world war i, the end point is the u. S. Occupation of iraq about ten years ago is where i end it. World war i i make an argument but how the nature or the appreciation of how escalation works changed after world war i and communication became much more salient and a nonnuclear but conventional global scale conflict was graphically and tragically displayed in that conflict. So that sort of sets the wheels in motion for the development of new ways of intervening in war, which i talk about in the interwar period as a time of experimentation. When governments arent just either declaring war and acting in intervention or staying out but rather doing things without calling them war or doing things covertly. And that period also it showcases the first case study i look at which is the spanish civil war in the late 30s which was a series of interventions by italy, the Su Soviet Union and were actually participating in the war but which never owned their participation, called them volunteers or concealed them. That is the first chapter that analyzed those dynamics. I then pick up the pieces after world war ii and look the at korean war at the external intervention and the secrecy dynamics in that conflict. I have a chapter on the vietnam war. A chapter at the end of the cold war on soviet occupied afghanistan looking not only at the u. S. Covert assistance to afghan rebels but also covert soviet crossborder operations in pakistan for example, some lesser known facets of that war. And i have a short section on the u. S. Occupied iraq and the conclusion chapter. In the two key themes about the Overall Historical arc in these conflicts that i draw out which is that escalation control problems are recurrent issue in each of the conflicts and that most of these the important conflicts of the 20th century have this sort of covert aspect to it which is important to understand. Okay. So now i want to review in highlights from two of the chapters, show you some of the raw material that i work into the narratives in those case studies and im happy to talk about some of the other conflicts that ive discussed in the book but ill focus on the korean and vietnam war for today. So first the korean war. External interventions that i analyze in that conflict are the United States who intervened on behalf of south korea. China which had a it is hard to describe intervention. They called and relabelled the troops the peoples volunteers but they are were clearly visible Chinese Ground forces that entered in november 1950 and the soviet union which kept its role secret and sending pilots to fly the planes that engaged in the air war with the United States. And my focus today in the slides that ill show you is on the soviet role in the air war which is the origins of the book and the dissertation that it is based on and one of the most interesting aspects of it. So i first want to talk about soviet documents that came from the Wilson Center. And one documents we have access to is a translated report by the commander of the soviet air division sent engage in air role during the korean war. And that report included figures, internal report and not for public consumption and accounting purposes in a soviet military bureaucracy, it reported that the soviet air crews which entered in november 1950 and stayed active through the end of the war shot down 1,097 aircraft during the war, being american aircraft. Suffered 319 soviet aircraft lost and 110 pilots that were killed. The missions they were flying were to protect bridges that spanned the river that divides china from north korea. Airfields in that area of northern north korea and hydroelectric station in northern north korea. And so provides a sense of the scale. This is not just for a couple of weeks they flew a few flights. This is a sustained operation for a couple of years. And this included some of the material that includes messages about the logistics of doing a Covert Military intervention which i think are interesting. One of the documents that came from the Wilson Center collection was a cable that was sent from stalin to a military official zackaroff in november of 1950 and authorizing and it is in russian so those of it like me that cant read it, i had to had it translated by a Research Assistant but it gives instructions to provide and send troops with secret training manuals approved earlier in 1950 and to, quote, allow the war ministry to send personnel into china in soviet uniforms and change into chinese uniforms and the soviet insignia is to be removed before being sent to china. They would prevent they were the chinese and this was picked up on and noticed by american pilots and i read archive material that this plane was using world war ii era tactics which we didnt know the chinese had but the markings on the plane were north korean or clps. One of the other things that came up, another one from the Wilson Center is from the military commander in charge in northe