Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I am the ambassador. My role tonight is just to host and nothing else. I am happy to have for another time in nine, ten months the Women Policy Group at the Croatian Embassy. Im very happy to have you here as frequently as possible, because these events are really very nice. I will say no more except we are happy also the embassies keep open in washington. [laughter] and while my pleasure and honor to have ms. Linda robinson whom i met at georgetown . We shared one evening and i must say that probably i was the most attentive of all the listeners at your part of the presentation which has to do with what you are going to talk about tonight. So, that much for a knee. I am sorry that we have bring you from the food so quickly, but time is running. [applause] thank you so much, ambassador, for having us back again for opening your beautiful embassy. We had a wonderful time last year and we know that this will be another wonderful evening here [inaudible] we are truly grateful to be back again. So good evening and welcome to all of our members and guests. Thank you all again for braving the rain and for joining us for tonights Author Series Program with Linda Robinson on her new book, one hundred victories special ops and the future of american warfare. Tonights discussion could not be more timely given last weekends events, the raids in both libya by the special Operations Forces and in somalia by the navy seals. And of course theres been a lot of discussions and aftermath most recently today the kid napping and release of the libyan prime minister. I know that you are all eager to hear from linda, so im going to be brief. I am Patricia Ellis of the foreignpolicy group that promotes womens voices and leadership on pressing issues of the day. We in addition to our author series we have any other International Programs and then touring activities we highlight of senior women officials, experts, diplomats, journalists, all of whom are involved in shaping foreign policy. So our next event, another very timely event, october 15 will be about theory and refugees. And we hope that you ca you can. Before i introduce the speaker i would like to extend a warm welcome to also diplomats here, and of course to recognize the double you fpg Board Members sarah and paper who is here with us this evening. So it is now my privilege and pleasure to welcome back my friend Linda Robinson. She has been very generous. Every time she has a book she comes and speaks to us and we love having her. We spoke in both washington and new york. I will just give you a few highlights of her very impressive career. So linda is a very accomplished journalist, author and currently Senior International policy analyst at rand. She has covered wars in iraq, afghanistan, latin america. When she was the Senior Writer for the u. S. News and world report. Shes also been a Senior Editor of Foreign Affairs and adjunct senior Fellows Council on foreign, Public Policy scholar at the wilson center. And this is her third book. The first one was about the war in iraq, another one on special operations, and for which she has received many accolades and several awards for her journalism. I could go on but i would like to turn the program over to linda. After she speaks, i will open up the discussion and then we will turn it over to you for your questions. We look forward to a very rich and interesting discussion. So please, join me in welcoming when robinson Linda Robinson. [applause] mac thank you pat. Im delighted to be here. And thank you ambassador. Its a delight to see you again. I certainly recognize some faces in the audience here. I would like to leave enough time to have a conversation about the aspects of my book and this topic that most interests you, and of course subject myself to the fellow journalists from latin america days. But i thought i better leave the groundwork because this is a complex topic, and ive been very involved in research on special Operation Forces for many years. So i can vote down rabbit holes. What i would like to do is tell you a little about the book, how i researched it and be specific subject matter of the book but then broaden out to some of the future special operations issues, the policy issues and the institutional changes that or going on within the special ops community. And that may get a little bit wonky but i think this is a pretty wonky crowd. To start out with the book, i spent two years coming and going from afghanistan to follow what was their Largest Initiative since vietnam in terms of the number of special Operations Forces devoted to a countrywide effort to raise Civil Defense of civilians who volunteer to be defenders of their villages. And as part of a broad Village Stability Operations initiative. So, this was a very extensive effort spread out all over the country. I had to focus on certain areas so that i wind up with a coherent story. So, i looked at the map and i looked at how they were planning to use these special Operations Teams. At the peak there were 52, 12 to 14 member teams spread out over afghanistan. But as you know if you follow the war at all with the taliban and al qaeda related threat is on the east and the south. So i decided that i needed to focus in those areas even though the teams were spread out in every part of the country. I picked three provinces kumar, paktika and kandahar. Then i drilled down even further because they had a signed one team per district in the key districts that they all felt there were villagers that wanted to stand up and defend against the taliban and areas that were of some consequence strategically. So i spent most of that two years in the mud walled collapse, which is the mud walled homes that encompass their livestock yard and its really an enclosed living area. I spent a little time in kabul, although i did visit the command on each visit and sort of worked my way down as a way understood what the various vot both ofe romantic side and the high command level diplomatic side and high command level. I really concentrated my time and my focus on this village level. So i have some broad comments i can make about the war and im happy to do so. But what i was really looking at after ten years of a very heavy focus of the special Operations Community on what is called with a kill and capture aspect. The direct action, the candidatc activity going after enemy elements, terrorists, insurgents, arme or in the elem. This was a turn to working with civilians. This was a turn to working with tribal elders. This was a turn really away from that heavy focus on combat to try to go into a village understand their issues were, understand why the taliban have some routes into that area, and help them work through some of the problem. So, i can go into greater depths of the various stages. But the nutshell of the Defense Program is that it was to be kept small. No district was to have more than 300 of these defenders. So, you may have seen or read some articles and refer to these groups as malicious. But malicious in the afghan context really to note the 10,000 larger groups that were formed in the era of the soviet occupation earlier and that is how i used malicious. These were really local defenders that were responsible to and answerable to those local village and district elders. Now, another step taken to prevent these groups from becoming rogue elements was to type into the formal governmentr which has a formal purview over the police in afghanistan. Now, that latter collectivity was and still is a work in progress because afghanistan has never had a government that has reached all the way down to the district level, much less the village level. So it was the concept of this initiative was first and foremost trying to get the locals who want to defend their villages against the taliban to do so. Give them training and give them arms, small arms to do that. But to make sure that they were picked by the village elders and overseen by the elders. Then in the cases where you have the district chiefs of police who were not corrupt, who are wanting to do their jobs come and who were willing and who were competent enough to help ensure the flow because all of this, the pay cut ammunition, all of the supplies, the vehicles and truck and later they got motorcycles, all of this was flowing through the afghan channels after the initial start up. So it was an incredibly difficult program to try to make this whole system work. I have to say this is what i call the hard work of the special operations. There are so many popular images out there that really equate special ops with the call of duty video games and yes they do sometimes jump out of helicopters at night into the compound but that is not hard to do. And what i have really tried to investigate in my career and in this latest product is that other side and we really emphasize how do we help the people in those countries take care of themselves, defend themselves, vote up their own security structures and connect to their country . It is not and i do not want you to take away from this idna pollyanna that its easy and that they did it by no problems. If you read the book you will find they encountered problems every day. Small problems and problems. The first commander when i went in to begin this project did special ops general then in charge of it and hes actually back there now. General scott miller he shook his head like the weight of the world was on his shoulder and he said there are problems every day. Every day. And i will tell you about some of those problems but i also want to tell you about whats worked. And in regards to what worked, some people were pessimistic about the future of afghanistan. And i think the afghans are probably going to surprise us all with there will and their ability to defend their country. They would just probably did dot more in their own way done in an americanstyle way. And where i think this program had the most impact included a couple of very critical areas. Kumar province and particularly southern kunar province right alongside the border with pakistan and paktika province, another area where i spent a lot of time. Thats province had very little emphasis by the u. S. Special forces and the coalition forces. There were some Afghan National army units. There were some Afghan Police units. From what i can tell, the afghan army the commanders and the soldiers were largely from other parts of afghanistan. And the largely stayed in their posts. So, these local defenders as they grew, they became really i think the glue of that province. And they wound up sort of in the series of Building Blocks as the villagers came out from their towns and said we want to be part of this and they wanted to build their little outpost. The watch towers outside of the village. And they would run shifts and guard these areas and they were just very simple rudimentary outposts. But it seemed to almost have a psychological effect. This was a very heavily taliban dominated area. But once these outposts were built all along this main artery from the pakistan border up to sure on in the capital, the area started becoming secured him and the villagers with tommy in the special Operations Teams just concluded that it was as much as anything psychological. They were saying that we now have this territory command the taliban would go back into some still very conflicted areas but one reason why im leaving for a moment on paktika is because the provincial chief of police, his name is dallek on the dallah where the network is, so that was one of the key Insurgent Networks that both allied with the al qaeda and part of the taliban to the fact you have a provincial chief of police from the tribe went to stand up and use these local defenders to help secure the province thats why im at least modestly optimistic about the future. Now, we know as anyone that followed the war there are problems with corruption and a lot of problems with the future of the u. S. Commitment. And even though we have dealt a 350,000 strong Afghan Security forces, it is not clear if we pulled the rug out from aid and continue to be advisory assistance and so forth it could go proof so i dont want to be taken at with a pollyanna either. With a small continuing advisory presence and i want is a to y advisory with some and desist because if we just leave a small element of the special ops to do counterterrorism that is not going to hold it together in my personal opinion. Because that will not have confidence to the afghans and support these afghans that are out there and willing to do the main job of securing their territory. As you can see i am pivoting a little bit more to the broader policy implications. What does this mean for the future of the special operations and for their use elsewhere . I do not believe that the u. S. Is going to be putting 52 special ops teams in any country anytime soon. So, the number one thing is we will not see an operation of this scale, including nato, east european, some middle eastern d. Were almost 15,000 special operators in afghanistan, which is a huge number. That also includes the aviators and all of their support elements you need so that was an enormous special Office Footprint in afghanistan. I do though think that the model is exportable in a much smaller scale and the reason i think that is because there are still the countries with the terrorist threat and the problems by and large many of them have the rural hinterlands that are beyond the reach of their own government. And if their populations that wants to defend themselves, the special operators were trained, and now they are i think we trained in the arts of engaging with villagers in figuring out how to help them how to motivate them but at the end of the day follow their lead. I cant tell you that the talented team leaders that i saw would go into the villages meetings and they wouldnt say a word. They were just sitting along the wall observing and listening. They gave all of their advice before the meeting and after that meeting, behind closed doors. It was all about trying to help those people figured out what was going to serve their interest and i know that this is contrary to a lot of the unilateral direct action image and i have to say in some places probably a combination. I know that path will probably get into the toolkit of the special operators. Yes there are drones and i am really just trying to emphasize the parts nothing aspect because for my research on the command and you all know admiral bill mc raven at the special Operations Commander even though he led the operation neptune sphere that wound up with the demise of bin laden, he is very strong on his need to work through with the partners and partner countries. And even though there are i think some people in this town that really believe that you can solve these problems by sending an Seal Team Six in the dead of night and taking out a few highvolume targets. He, believe me, he really understands that you cannot get to the finish line from there. That may be part of the formula in some cases, but i think that the way that the wave of the future is sending the teams out at what level and where . We can talk about that. Somalia is one case actually where there has been a surprising partnering role that the special office have been training in kenya and uganda units along with a broad effort that includes African Union, conventional forces training African Union member countries and the state department has a program of code that has been supporting the training and capacity building. , that may not be as sexy in many peoples playbooks but in my book that is how you really get to a sustainable solution. I think probably this is a good point for me to pause. We can talk more about some of the institutional changes that are underway in the special ops command. I will give a quick other reference. I did a report for the council on Foreign Relations this spring that goes into great depth and recommends a 16 institutional changes that for my research would most help this Community Moved kind of pivot away from the direct action focused enhancing their ability to work through partners. So, pat, with bat and going to hand it off to you. [applause] linda, before i start on the issues and use that as a vehicle for getting into what the raids tell us about the lessons we can learn about the evolution of the special ops and also the challenges that we face and their relations with other branches of the military, im just wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the special ops how large they are and things like that, what kind of people how has it changed from vietnam, their age, how long do they stay, just things like that because i think that would be a great place to start and then we can get into the sexier issues of today. Select this is important to define who and what we are talking about. Currently, there are 33,000 batch uuniform operators and many people are shocked to find out they are the numerous because they think of this very small, you know, Seal Team Six and so forth but there is a large community. They are in fact one of the smaller elements. They are quite small. The largest comprising almost 50 is the army special forces. The army also has through the affairs which used to be called psychological operations thats now been renamed military support operations. Terrible acronym. Everyone thinks it is a japanese soup. There are aviators and they are army and air force aviators and the newest component of the special Opera