It for you. I think that so just to say this book is a book about military adaptation and its about how different players adapted over time and i begin the book at the end of the cold war and as i was casting around for a way to frame whats happened since then i found jim moses comments in his confirmation hearing extraordinarily apt its a rather prescient deer of the International Security environment of the ninetys but it really comes down to that one phrase where he says we slain a large dragon talking about this so he but now we find ourselves in a jungle filled with a broader and broader for the snakes and in many ways the dragon was easier to keep track of and i think what hes trying to say here is that weak states failing states and nonstate actors are the principal threat of the 99 is a. Minute or until it is the total color and. Its also way of categorising and its essentially putting legitimate state actors like russia or china into the same group as nonstate actors like isis and terror groups isnt just out just a little bit to give this a poke contrary if you are not we last year against that. So actually i think hes making the opposite point what hes saying is there are 2 different characters that are very different from each other theyre apia or and yet here state adversaries russia and china perhaps and then there are a completely different category which is the nonstate actors what he calls the snakes and my argument in the book is that weve spent basically 20 is focusing on snakes on only particularly one snake International Islamic extremism and the related terrorism and i think that the world that rules he describes in 993 was an accurate description for maybe 10 years but it is out of date now and we now harness those if you like maladapted to the modern environment its interesting that he said and because i had a chance to interview mr holder. On the u. S. Russia relationship back he struck me as somebody that very. Well here and. He was speaking about russia as a School Principal to talk about hes behaving student im thinking even knew their world as a dram that the United States. Needs the absolute world at me all the time its so i actually talk about this quite a lot in the book and i talk about how there was a period where the goal of the uni polar you know period after the. End of the cold war where the u. S. And nato countries and other people sort of wanted russia to become what they described as a normal country right what they meant by normal was a country that was democratic by western standards that was capitalist that was a member of the u. S. Led International Rules based order established by the u. S. And as i point out in the book for a lot of russia. Experiencing Shock Therapy and privatization and harvard economists coming and Rick Santorum a lot of people christie in the west Foreign Policy thats also money yeah i think a lot of people saw that as sort of permanent 2nd class status in a u. S. Led system and i think its pretty clear that russia in particular has been pushing back on that the assumptions that a lot of u. S. Policymakers i wouldnt actually put the at the top of the list there the person. Actually on albright who was the secretary of state for president clinton she made a comment in one in 98 when she said look if we have to use force its because were the United States we stand tall we see further than anybody else and sort of we know whats whats good for everybody well actually can see the number i think they have gotten my next question it well is populated by the sneaks and the johns who is there was down is it and i dont why not ive been signing arent you know this is a great question and actually i had to add. A note to the to the book to specify what i mean by the west so you know im a military analyst im not a partisan political person and so when i use the term the west what i mean is 2 things one are geopolitical entities are generally u. S. Led you know western countries naser the western alliance and the u. S. But i also include in that definition countries that fight in the same way that the us fights and its really a military definition which a couple of years before was his testimony was the basis for the u. S. Victory in the 1st gulf war and i kind of argue in the book that that victory actually force pretty much everybody else to adapt and evolve into. U. S. Military dominance and the us perhaps has become a little bit stagnant because it hasnt had to face an adaptive landscape that others have had to deal with each side just a moment ago that in your book you have. Specifically building our game and around the fact that after 99 to wind the west was left to fly be snakes while the dragons lay down once and watched closely from baghdad how to fly the west and now the last. Deal when the black this nation the dragons dont have the same nods of why it will not i mean russia or china at the lower trying have. Adapted Western Areas killed a captive them a problem chatteris they dont belong on airplanes they dont use terror as that. Isnt even fair in a 2 month these 2 very different kinds of action into the same category as acclaim and theyre essentially using the same methods the the book talks about dragons and snakes is being very different but whats really different in the book from a lot of the research that youll see in a lot of the analysis on military adaptation is that it actually draws on a different body of knowledge from what we normally years so most military and it. Is really a subset of business literature what ive done is to draw on which are from the science of evolutionary theory. Looking at adaptive landscapes and the way that a dominant president in an ecosystem creates a landscape that everybody else in that ecosystem has to adapt to and i think it is interesting i dont in any way. Or suggest an equivalence between say the Russian Federation an Islamic State in any way or the opposite actually but what i am saying is that everybody whoever they are whatever the basis for existence is reacting to the in the period after 9 straight to us military dominance and one of the interesting things actually. Is that people have started to copy each other and one of the case studies i point to is the evolution of israel and hezbollah which is just a very clean example because its a small geographical area in southern lebanon where these 2 people or 2 groups have been fighting each other for going on 40 years and you see over time they become to resemble each other in terms of their tactics not in any way morally right but in terms of the way that they are. Now. In your book here also suggest or list several mechanisms of adaptation a way the evolution of that i mean including what you call artificial selection that is the west inadvertently build a barrier at class of terrorists by the way its got its war on terror and i want to seize on the word inadvertent maybe the last quite deliberately uses militant terrorist groups in many wars and i mean from afghanistan to syria its its hard to find a place that wasnt done. If our knight in shining armor wasnt trying to trying to sneak some ice dont you think that you know it would have a detrimental effect on babbling. So yeah i think one of the points that i make is that it is a bell curve in Evolutionary Pressure if any so you assume a dominant factor in their ecosystem and then everybody else is adapting to the pressure theyre getting from their act if the pressure on them is too low or too little now stagnate if the pressure is too high theyll be destroyed and weve seen that with some groups but theres a sort of band in the middle in the middle of the bell curve where youre putting enough pressure on an adversary to force them to adapt and get better but not enough to destroy them and thats in my own ability and i am actually add to an issue we have not only you can see russia and china as adversaries because im not sure that you are specifically now calling those groups adversarial and we know that from history that it wasnt always the case the United States and the west deliberately supported a number of those groups starting from al qaida and many of the militant groups are leaving syria so isnt really about fighting adversaries so much as you know like we have a and especially here in russia to sort of. Give our sneak a bit of space and the chaff so i mean we warm up needs that was amusing in the book are not about russia and china theyre about nonstate actors are the specific example that i point to in the book their experience one is the way that israeli counterterrorism since the ninetys actually created a better cost of palestinian terrorists and my sources for that are the surviving heads of shin bet which is the internal but the f. S. A. Approval in israel and they are the 1st to say that the way that they approached this problem was as they describe it point to cities all tactics no strategy and that over time they actually bred a more capable adversary i also point to the u. S. I think there the way that. We operated in particular in august on twitter not pressure on the Pakistani Taliban to make them dead to write them into a single unified organization and take them from a bunch of guerrilla groups in a valley in pakistan to a Trans National act by 2010 right now saying its actually york city and the argument here is that. I guess we were gonna hold to keep succeeding in the way that we have been against these terrorist groups because the more we do in this particular way the bigger the threat becomes well looked at helen as they like to say what Goes Around Comes Around we have to take a short break and well be back in just a few moments they. Are. Talking no t. V. No crowd. No shots. Actually felt. Well and strong no as to. Which your thirst for action. The world is driven by drama shaped by. The dares thinks. We dare to ask. Our. Welcome back to all the for a great day now calling the author of the book the dragons and the snakes how their brass learned to fight the west not take a pill and regardless of where we are in the world like right now i think we are all taking a bad by whats happening on the american streets pretty clear weve been violent party. Teasing the jogging to the snakes you see i am running away with the about her theory does she think that the americans. Have lost sight of big sheep cans that are now coming home to roost. You know thats an interesting 3rd animal to to add into the mix the other person that i think described this very well in the not in seventies was the french radical philosopher michel foukara who said look about boomerang effects right there what an empire does overseas eventually comes back to be applied domestically run russia sort this out of the end of the act the war in afghanistan for example the us or enough to be unarmed and i think were seeing some of that here the point that i have made in response to others that have asked this is to say what weve seen across the west not not just the west but particularly in the west is a collapse confidence in elites and institutions and experts of all times and one subcategory of that is military experts and i think that the 2 things are very closely linked the us sort of lead. Rules based world all of that people talk about people have started to go. When in western countries to take that for granted after about the middle of the 99 days and not realizing i think that it actually rested on a very hard Power Foundation of American Military effectiveness which is really eroded since that time and political in all due respect im not asking you about the world order im asking you specifically about the nasty quarter in the United States beached seems to be falling apart and these days a lot of people like quality abravanel a girl who famously said of the danger that the east of america cannot come from abroad it must bring amongst us thats what he sat and this is not just a rhetorical question its a question of how you to your priorities where you put your money as a security professional do you mean that actually is of Funding Priorities spending surely. Instead of Holland Program do you think bad choice of priorities has made all where america well i think actually do make this point in the book i say that we need to be focusing much more heavily on resilience and home and get out of the business of. You know what the president trying to sort of endless wars overseas because thats what president obama wanted to do as well as what president bush wanted to do after his 1st term and also point to nato as another major plan nato has been focusing a lot on domestic resiliency that is you know guaranteeing its ability to continue functioning under conditions of chaos for about the last 4 or 5 years and of course we should be honest here and say that one of the main drivers for that is russian aggression in the baltics. Crimea if they dont forget about that very much everywhere else around the world now speaking about again the affix the United States we hear a lot because hes about to funding or directing this. Forces from the police the people who day have to be encounter emergencies on the street but if you look again on america being on. You know the soldiers idling in poland on you know thousands and thousands of american soldiers overseas you know that. At a very huge price tag to the american taxpayers to be precise it was 100000000000. 00 just last year alone. Do you make america safer you do have the entire u. S. Defense budget theyre not really sure services and actually it is in fact more expensive to bring those troops back to the u. S. Than it is to have them overseas in many cases which has been part of the debate in the us about about the u. S. Has forces in about 80 countries overseas in terms of bases much of the u. S. International posture relates to the end of the cold war and it is a live debate and has been for quite a while in the United States about whether. Those bases do make america safer or in fact on the other hand whether they draw america into conflicts that it might be bene to stay our friend and that is a you know its a political debate thats probably as old in the us as this period were talking about it really started immediately after the end of the cold war last year the United States states 114000000000. 00 on Law Enforcement graphic Law Enforcement saves more than 6 times last than what its bad for overseas and we are now hearing at many many calls and even support from some like just later use at sea diver in that money and put that to the developer and all the disadvantaged neighborhoods again as a security professional deep think thats a good idea because i can think of dealings of ways that dragging this nation media beast get exploited that situation the absence of police or you know they handled were all security functions to sound like militarized brigades. Yeah i dont it is easy chance in the us of a hand in military factions to policing functions to the military theres a number of long internationals not not not military militant brigades im sure youre hearing about are as inside the admiral barrett may sensually you know forced police out that they are now people you know with 8040 sevenths walking the streets and claiming Police Functions doesnt your azad one of russias greatest exports i think the point i would make is more broadly there is. Nothing to fear in just the people you know im talking about the age of 47 as a as probably the most widely used. In the world but just a point just to go back to a couple of points you were complaining that the entire u. S. Defense budget with the. U. S. Policing budget and of course the u. S. Defense budget is not the same as what the u. S. Spends a misses that includes all kinds of things including health care for members of the u. S. Military and their families the cost of bases domestically a lot of things its not just the overall and the legal come i mean you would agree with me that damn im sick why didnt. The countries combined it and not its clear that a superpower laid it out of states have to have ample Security Budget my question was about the choice of priorities because whilst russia and china many other countries are not taking their security lightly by that guy they balance him after iowa it is a slightly different that they have new faces but the basic right yes so the correct comparison i think would be to train their operational budget for wars overseas and the domestic budget in the u. S. Which actually was about 1. 00 to 1. 00 at the height of the war on terror it wasnt significantly larger overseas and domestically but the other question is whether its a reasonable comparison right because when the u. S. Lauren for some budget does is to aggregate and local and federal funding there are actually 18000 Different Police forces in the us the question about whether you should divert funding from Public Safety to other forms i think is a very valid conversation and i think were going to see that play out but i suspect that its going to be more at the local like at the city level. And at the state level than at the federal level to the point in seattle its worth mentioning were talking about a 6 block radius of downtown seattle which has been in existence for what 48 hours but really going to yourselves and speaking about the hundreds of hours since thousands of businesses look at. Nini mean millions of dollars in damages dozens of People Killed many more injured we dont have a precise. 20 you know pretty worrying statistics i mean you can accuse me or you know trying to amplify the fear but you know i have no interest in that i dont know how many different i mean. By whats happening there. Right now i dont think that is find anything although i think your coverage has been quite amusing of the. No no i think its actually the u. S. Media thats amplifying a lot of this stuff and one of the issues that we have in the United States is with a ve