We, of course, welcome those who will join us on cspan booktv in the future. For those watching online, youre welcome to send questions or comments simply emailing us at speaker heritage. Org and, of course, we will post the program on our heritage home page for your future reference as well. Welcoming our guest today and leading our program is dakota woods, Senior Research fellow in our center for national defense. Mr. Woods served in the u. S. Marine corps as well as in an assignment in the office of net assessment. Upon retirement, he helped organize the national bio surveillance integration system. For five years he served as senior fellow at the center for strategic and budget tear assessments budgetary assessments. Please join me in welcoming dakota wood. Dakota . [applause] thank you, jon. Its a real pleasure to have you all here, but to have dr. Crane all the way down from carlisle where he took the hyperloop, was that it . The fastest run hes ever made to d. C. , so were glad that travel wasnt interrupted. Normally you try to do something artful with an introduction, but i couldnt do anything better than draw from pure biographical information and take a moment of his time to really go over his background. Its remarkable. Currently serves as chief of the Historical Services at the Army Heritage and Education Center up in carlisle barracks, was director of the u. S. Military institute. He was with the war college from 20002003 where he held the general Douglas Macarthur chair of research. Its really interesting to have both an expert historian on land power and air power and being able to talk about the intersection of both. All of this followed a 26year career in the u. S. Army, concluded with nine years as a professor of history at the u. S. Military academy. Holds bachelors degrees from the military academy and his masters and doctorate from stanford university, the u. S. Army war college. By my count, hes authored 11 books or monographs since the or year 2000. I dont know whether theyre hobbies you might have monographs are short. Okay. Weve got at least 11 of them. Civil war, world war ii, world war ii, korea, vietnam, and his most recent work on reprising a lot of historical stuff and putting it in modern context and the environments in which that folds here in the modernday context. Was name one of newsweeks people to watch in 2007 for his leading work in leading the team that authored [inaudible] on counterinsurgency. I think it also has an army title to it, but i ignore that as a former marine, retired marine. November, 2008, named the archivist of the year, and just recently here in 2016 selected to receive Samuel Elliot morrison prize for lifetime contributions to the field of military history, so its a real pleasure to have dr. Crane with us. Look forward to your insights on kind of not only where weve been, where were at, possibly where were doing in counterinsurgency and stability operations. [applause] thank you very much. You know, fasten your seat belts, ive got about 30 slides i want to go through, and i want to leave time for questions. What im trying to do is titillate, not satisfy. [laughter] so youll want to go out and buy copies of the book. Its a lot cheaper out there than i can get it. If youre interested, its a really good deal out there. This is a image of the book. The other picture is outside the embassy in baghdad. That sign struck me as fairly interesting and kind of gave a sense of some of the atmosphere over there. I often wonderedded who was walking into the embassy drinking while they were armed. How i got into this, the term cassandra in oz, most of you are aware that cassandra was a figure from greek mythology who was cursed to tell truth the power and never get hurt. And i got involved in a number of things in the early years of this millenium. The red one on the right i talked about the armys response to vietnam which was not to learn how to fight these wars better, but to avoid these wars. And i closed in 2002 with a plea that we needed to revisit counterinsurgency doctrine. I was put in charge of a team to rebuild iraq for the mayor of baghdad in late 2002 when the army thought they were going to be in charge of reconstruction. The day we finished the was the day that secretary rumsfeld created the office of humanitarian affairs under general garner, and nobody was interested in our study anymore. We actually sent it to the planners in cue bait, and they used it in kuwait, and they used it to help develop their plan, but we all know how that came out. We became much more famous for being ignored. But because of that, when the time came to rewrite counterinsurgency doctrine, my west point classmate, Dave Petraeus, asked me to be in charge of the team to do that. What general petraeus was trying to do and general mattis also for the marine corps. Were really fortunate at this time in the history of those two services that they could pull two combat leaders out of the war and put them in positions where they could revise the training to bring them into the 21st century. And general petraeus model, this is what he called his engine of change which is a, you know, the idea is that you send people out to the field, you get your lessons as fast as you can, and you bring them back into the training system. You get them to collective training, Leader Development and doctrine. I used to tell people you can see my position in the engine of change. I used to tell people i was one tooth on one cog in Dave Petraeus engine of change. I can call him dave, he was a classmate. We had a number of arguments during the promulgation and development of the doctrine. I won a few but not as many as he did. Again, this whole idea that were going to create a learning organization for modern warfare. Both he and general mattis were doing that for the army and the marine corps. It was a very atypical process to develop this doctrine. We did it in less than a year which is light speed. A lot of it is because general petraeus as a champion, we went around a lot of the normal bureaucratic avenues to get it done. We also had a big tent. We had a number of contributors from all over the world involved in this. It was a joint army marine effort, a true effort. Each chapter had an army and marine corps author for it. We had sarah sewall as one of the initial sponsors, she contributed to the manual as well, people from the human rights community, academia, the media. When we had our major vetting conference, jim fowler was there, tom ricks was involved many some of the early stuff. We tried to get a lot of people involve in giving us their ideas on how to better fight these kinds of wars. A lot of help from think tanks, rand, a number of others like that who also gave us their input. But in the end, it was going to be the army and the ma reap corps authors marine corps authors who really formatted this. General petraeus was really he read every word. I massaged everything. He was the last guy to look at it before it went out for general view to the forces. Still have ptsd over what i call petraeus pronouns. If any of you are writing papers and he used the phrase this is or it is, i still have precedent and antecedent nightmares. He said, oh, im not that hard an editor. Yeah, dave, you are. The intent was to be applicable to counterinsurgencies anywhere anytime. But 2006 version especially ended up being shaped very much by iraq. Not just because general petraeus knew he was going to iraq, because most of the inputs we got from the critics from the soldiers and marines out in the field giving us their ideas were shape very much by iraq. So the 2006 version of the doctrine, this is very much a manual that is aimed at iraq. A lot of details, most of you may be aware of these. How it was different from normal focus on combat, it was very populationcentric. You had to protect the population first, and eventually people needed to accept the government as legitimate. Your main goal is legitimacy. Youve still got to kill and capture people. But youve got to be careful how you apply it in a mosaic war that differs from village to village, valley to valley, city to city. As Dave Petraeus used to say, you cant kill yourself to victory in these kind of wars. It takes a team effort not only with your own interagencies, but also with the home the host nation has got to win a lot of its own war as well. Intelligence gathering is more cultural anthropology many these kind of wars. Youve got to understand how the societies work, how politics work, gender roles. Its a very different kind of intelligence process. And youve got to think on campaign design. Ill illustrate in a second, when i came into the early in the 70s, i knew who the enemy was. The enemy was the next soviet motorized regiment coming over the hill. Basically, the way you fought the war in the 70s was you beat the first echelon, the soviets, the second echelon came, and you nuked them. You knew who the enemy was going to be. In modern wars, you dont. Your first step is the figure out whats my problem set. Its a much different warfare. You have this process Call Campaign design which we introduced and which is now involved in all our doctrine. Youve got to youre fighting a set of enemies, not an enemy. So you have to disaggregate your enmies and deal with each one differently. Perceptions are more important hand reality in these kinds of wars. What people think you do is more important than what you do in many cases. Youve got to manage communication. The dominant theme was learn and adapt faster than your enemy did. The dominant approach was clear, hold, build. Ill talk about that in a little bit. Its expensive, its timeconsuming, but its very effective, and also things called lines of effort. And, again, a point ill make again later, counterinsurgency is really just modern warfare. As much as we may not like it, its not going away because modern warfares not going away. This is modern warfare in a diagram what youve got is youve got a whole set of operations going on. Its not just combat operations, its also developing Host Nation Security forces, developing restoring essential services, developing Good Governance and also economic development. This is all a part of what it takes to be victorious in these kind of wars because youre trying to to change peoples attitudes. You trying to get more people to support the government than dont. Now, this is not hearts and minds coin. Hearts and minds often gets hearts and minds is very much a social science approach that somehow you make everybody love you. We realized when we were doing the doctrine that there are other parts of the anatomy you have to grab sometimes to get people to do what you want them to do. So theres a bunch of coercive as well as you use carrots and sticks both. The bottom line is you want to get the public to support, most of the people to support the governing authority. And everything is wrapped in Information Operations. Everything you do has an information reaction. And youve got to deal with that as well. So this is, again, this is modern warfare in a simple diagram. What it looks like on the ground, this is general mattis plan in Anbar Province when he came in with the marines early in the iraq campaign. And he went out and identified his problem set as three different enemies, three different insurgencies. I never when we were doing the doctrine, we were never quite sure whether we were talking about insurgency or insurgencies. In anbar there was the tribal, there was a baathist insurgency from all those people we threw out with the debaathification edict the in 2003, and then there was a group from alqaeda. The foreign fighters. And the idea was it had to deal with each of those separately. The sunni tribes wanted to get back into society, so they were going to be attracted with jobs. The baathists could be attracted with some kind of political compromise. The foreign fighters, theyd have to be kill or captured. And eventually, we get the sunni tribes to kill the alqaeda guys. They turn. We turn the tribes to come over to our side, and they help us take out the foreign fighters. Thats the way these kind of wars tend to go. Now, we had a number of battles within we had internal battles as well as external battles to try to get doctrine done. One of them was just numbering the manual. The initial numbering was fm3 fm3. 0722 which meant it was the 22nd category. I showed up and i said this is among the team we talked about it, and we said counterinsurgency differs because of the level of violation involved, and we felt it needed its own category. So i said i want to change the number on the manual. And it was like a monk had said to the pope i want to rearrange the old testament. [laughter] they said, oh, the whole doctrine system will collapse. Two weeks later, general petraeus had the same idea, and i guess they had thought about it for two weeks, because when he made the suggestion, it was a great idea. [laughter] so the number changed. We also, this is the only manual youll find in the u. S. Government inventory that has a referenced bibliography of civilian works, recommended readings, as we were ld told we couldnt do that because that implied government endorsement of civilian, privatelypublished works. Again, the lawyers told us thatting, but when general petraeus asked, they gave him a different answer. Reading level, Army Doctrine is written normally at an eighth grade reading level not because soldiers are stupid, but because the idea is its going to be read and absorbed quickly. The argument i made was that this is being written more battalion staffs and above, college graduates, they can read a harder text. And so it is the reading is up maybe 10th or 12th, i think is where it ended up. Its so good, it has been used as a College Textbook at a number of universities. I had a number of professors complain to me when the manual got revised in 2014 that they were losing their best textbook, they didnt want us to change it. This is the time of abu ghraib, that was a big debate that eventually got resolved because, you know, the mccainfeingold, i think it was bottom line was Congress Passed the regulation, the rules for it. Another army manual became the standard for it, so we didnt have to deal with it, which it was a real finish it was a tough nut to deal with. We had a big debate on that when we wrote the manual and eventually decidedded we would not allow any gray areas in any the morality, no torture, no waterboarding. The the manual took a hard line on that. The air power appendix, i decided we needed an appendix on air power because ground guys needed to understand the air role. Marines didnt want to do it. I kind of forced it down peoples throats. We wanted to get the air force involved the air force didnt care until we started to get publicity, then they jumped right in and proposed their own p appendix. The first thing they talk about was the air force controlling all air power. You want to get hama leans crawling off the marines crawling off the ceiling, tell them youre taking their airplanes away. We probably end up doing more harm than good with that because the air force still im kind of an antichrist for putting them in the appendix. Theyre lucky they got that. It did get the air force interested in this, and theyve done some pretty good stuff since. The Army Intelligence center was very ununeasy, eventually we got them to come on board, but it delayed the manual by two months, and because of that, ralph peters had a chance to write a nasty editorial. Petraeus approach, bring the dissidents out, draw them into the mix, they had a big debate between ralph peters and john nagl. We changed seven sentences in the manual. Seven sentences. But that was good enough so when the manual came out in december, really peters called in the most ralph peters called in the most improved government resource [laughter] at the time it came out, he actually supported it. And the last one was the paradox. This was my idea to put in the manual which actually is a nato manual as its continued through doctrine. The idea was to get people to realize this is a different kind of war, youve got to think about it different, and there are some possible dilemmas youve got to face in how you use force and how you conduct it. You know, the first one, sometimes less security maybe. You cant lock yourself in your Forward Operating base. You have got to get out and patrol. Youve got to take some risks. Youve got to provide the people security, and theyve got to see you out there, you know . Sometimes the more force is used, the less effective it is. It doesnt pay to kill five insurgents if the backlash creates 50 more. Youve got to be very careful how you do that. Sometimes doing nothing is the best reaction. If a tactic works this week, it might not work next week. If it works in this province, it might not work in the next. Why not . What is your enemy doing . Theyre learning and adapting too, the bastards. Theyre continuing to change. So youve got to understand that if something works now, it might not work in the nexting village. When the enemy finds a good tactic in iraq, it shows up in afghanistan a month later. The enemys communicating as well. Its a learning and adapting kind of war youve got to be in. The last one, many important decisions were not made are not made by generals, was initially written as most important decisions are not made by generals. Guess who has the last say this the development of any doctrine . The generals. So they changed that. But at least they kept it in, and they changed most to many. Ill get to another point later that, you know, my revision, my thoughts about process after watching the doctor in action, thats really not right either. Most important decisions are not made by any kind of soldier at all. Criticism, a lot of people didnt like the doctrine. Only [inaudible] calls it military malpractice, says the only way to do counterinsurgency is the way the nazis did against the russians, make the people fear you more than they do the insr. Gents insurgents. Bing west also is a big push for youve got to kill the very enemycentric as is ralph peters. I was really surprised, i got invited to do a presentation at nyu, and i walked into the conference, and they didnt tell me the name of the conference. The conference is counterinsur general city counterinsurgency, the new imperialism. I didnt realize we were doing that, to be honest. But there are some that see this as brutal. Steve little and others biddle and others have argued there are some similarities and there are similar kind of wars. Some said there was too much mao in the d