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Future of War – New Threats & the Age of Danger – Andrew Hoehn and Thom Shanker
181 Plays2 years ago
Ep 019 - Nonfiction. How dangerous are things right now? In a first for the War Books Podcast, we discuss the future of war. Andrew Hoehn and Thom Shanker join me to chat about their terrific new book, "Age of Danger: Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Superpowers, New Weapons, and New Threats."
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Transcript
Introduction and Author Backgrounds
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war-related topics. Today, I'm really excited to have Andy Hone and Tom Shankar joining me on the show through their new book, Age of Danger, Keeping America Safe in an Era of New Weapons and New Threats, which is just out.
00:00:27
Speaker
Andy Hone is Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the RAND Corporation. He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, responsible for developing and implementing U.S. defense strategy, force planning and assessments, and long range policy planning.
00:00:44
Speaker
Tom Shanker is the director of the Project for Media and National Security. He was the National Security Foreign Policy Editor for the New York Times Washington Bureau, and is co-author of the New York Times bestseller Counter-Strike, The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al-Qaeda. Andy, Tom, how you doing today?
00:01:03
Speaker
Terrific. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us on today. Yeah. Thanks for joining me. And, um, we were talking a little bit, so you are both my first, um, this is the first three person interview that
Book's Theme and Origin
00:01:15
Speaker
I've done. So we'll try and make it work. Um, so thank you both. And another first for this show is normally.
00:01:25
Speaker
I have a lot of history books or books about past wars that we're talking about, but this will be the first show where we're actually talking about the future of war, which is of course what your book is about. But not completely because there's a lot of history that you talk about right up front, national security history, which I'll be very interested to hear a little bit about.
00:01:50
Speaker
So I guess first, a question I've got for you both is why did you decide to write this book? Let me jump in. AJ, again, thanks for having us. Really a pleasure to be here. This is a partnership that I think is 20 years in the making. I got to know Tom when he was reporting for the New York Times in the Pentagon.
00:02:15
Speaker
Tom's a remarkable person. We have spectators to history. Tom's a real witness to history. He's been on the ground. He knows the people. He knows the policy. I was head of strategy in the Pentagon. Tom was reporting for the New York Times. There were some things we were working out at the time that we wanted to make sure a larger public was aware of, and that's what really brought Tom and I into partnership.
00:02:45
Speaker
and we've been friends since then. But four or five years ago, we sat down over lunch and were puzzling with what I'll call a paradox.
National Security Spending and Strategic Failures
00:02:58
Speaker
We're spending more and more on national security, yet it wasn't clear that we necessarily thought ourselves feeling safer or more secure. Problems were mounting. We could see, you know,
00:03:14
Speaker
failed efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we saw new threats rising. We saw China's military modernizing the dangers of cyber and of potentially biological weapons, of climate changing that could be unsettling in so many ways, humans moving to
00:03:42
Speaker
and so forth, and it really got ourselves asking this question. We spend so much, yet we get a lot of things wrong. Not everything, but a lot of things wrong. That's what really brought us to the idea of let's see what's really going on here.
00:04:01
Speaker
And it really has been a four or five year process, as Andy says. We started out looking not narrowly, but specifically at what we call ticking time bombs. And that was the original thing that we were examining. And we did it over a series of dinners at this Lebanese restaurant near the Pentagon. We were such regulars that the waiter saw us coming in, always found us a quiet table.
00:04:22
Speaker
And I like to say that Andy's the brains of this operation because we evolved away from a book looking at a series of specific problems to trying to take a more strategic view.
Strategic Preparedness for Unseen Risks
00:04:33
Speaker
You know, 30,000 feet, 60,000 feet, because you can't list every single problem the country might face. So what are the tools? What are the approaches? What are the analytical systems that will prepare us for risks, even if we don't know what they are today? And that's the book that you're holding in your hand, AJ. Wonderful. Well, you know, talk about some of the challenges.
00:04:55
Speaker
that go into writing a book like this, you give two quotes at the beginning of the book that I like. The first is by Ian Kershaw, who's a historian, and it's, history has lived forward, but it is only understood backwards. And then immediately after that, you give a quote by Eric Edelman, that is, the reason we get things wrong so much in national security is because it's really effing hard.
00:05:22
Speaker
Talk about that. Talk about the challenges that go into a book like this. Well, I think that's one of the reasons that took us really four years to do this, because the problems are like a passing bullet train. And how do you paint a bullet train? Some of our chapters were written a year plus ago, not that we predicted the invasion of Ukraine, but the early Russia chapter
00:05:47
Speaker
clearly made the case that we should listen to what Putin says. He always does what he says. And so it should have been no surprise that he invaded Ukraine. Likewise, three years ago, we asked people what their biggest concerns were. And believe it or not, people said, well, don't know what kind of disease Ebola, something else. But but we really fear global pandemic that nobody is ready for. So the challenge was having
00:06:11
Speaker
an open aperture of our mind, AJ, to new things and expanding the definition of national security beyond bullets and bombs and things that blow up and kill people.
00:06:23
Speaker
You know, there's another angle to this, AJ. You said, so how do we find ourselves and what were the challenges of working through this? Both Tom and I have full-time jobs. But our full-time jobs are in the national security arena.
00:06:42
Speaker
I'm at the Rand Corporation, Tom's at George Washington University. I think it was a real advantage because we're in this larger system. We're interacting with people. It gave us a chance to observe where we're on this bullet train going by.
00:07:05
Speaker
And we did almost all of our writing at nights, Saturday and Sunday mornings, up early in the morning and so forth. But I think the fact that we're involved in this larger enterprise gave us a particular window on it. And it led us in a way to this exploration when we talk about the machine. I know we'll get back to that porn conversation.
00:07:32
Speaker
But we could see how the apparatus was working in some ways of the machine, but not working and not delivering in other ways. And I think we'll want to talk some more about that. But I think the fact that we're part of that larger enterprise gave us a particularly good window on the problems that we see here.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a note on fitting in writing time. I'm also working on a novel, actually. So I get trying to like fit into fit writing time in whenever you can. And then also just kind of like with what you were talking about, Tom, with the challenges of writing a book over three years when things are constantly changing. I just had a guest on Mark Galliati, who wrote a book called Putin's Wars, and he wrote it before the invasion of Ukraine.
00:08:26
Speaker
And then obviously that happened and he's like, or he was drafting it before and he's like, oh, like things are way different now. But I guess that's just like the nature of national security is just, it's just like ever changing. Well, let's start first with some of the history of national security in America, since we're often talking about history on this podcast.
00:08:53
Speaker
Real quick, maybe we could just talk about, I guess, going all the way back to the founding and up to World War II. What is the history of America's national
Evolution of US National Security
00:09:04
Speaker
security operations? I think it's one of seeking clarity on the role of the United States in the world, how we thought about
00:09:21
Speaker
dealing with various problems. Ours is in the history. I think our watchers and listeners are going to find better histories. But what we wanted to say was we really didn't have good clarity on America's role in the world until the end of the Second World War. That in the early days, we didn't really have a national security machine.
00:09:50
Speaker
We had a state department and we had a war department. We had a Navy department. They were all part of the cabinet is, you know, in modern day terms, the cabinet. They reported to the president. There weren't, you know, deep collaboration mechanisms, not built in, nothing like the current National Security Council system. And it's not to suggest there's no collaboration. Of course there is. But, you know, the
00:10:16
Speaker
when we talk about the machinery of having systems that bring people together and planning and so forth, that really is a, you know, that's at the end of World War II. It's when we realize or decide as a country that we need to be involved. Not only do we need to be involved in the world, we need a lead in the world.
00:10:38
Speaker
And so we structures and mechanisms, both here in the United States, but we built alliances, economic instruments, the IMF, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, all those things are part of the system that are built coming out of World War II. And before that, it was others.
00:11:03
Speaker
Great Britain, you know, set up the international system that guided so many things. But coming out of World War Two, the United States decided we need to lead because that's what's in our interest. Yeah, you're right. If there is a country, then we're going to have to do that.
00:11:19
Speaker
You write 1947 was actually a critical year for American national security because that's when the National Security Act was passed, which we've talked about the machine a little bit, but that's kind of like the machine that you write about. That's when that, maybe if you want to call it gets put into motion. Can we just real quick just like define the machine for our audience? When you write about the machine, what are you writing about?
00:11:49
Speaker
Well, the 1947 machine was this sort of first brand new car off the assembly line. And, you know, it did everything. There was, you know, the War Department became the Department of Defense and a lot of the structures that we have even today were created then. And they served us pretty well. But Andy and I make the point that, you know, the 47 Chevy, which was a great car then,
00:12:13
Speaker
It lasted many, many years. It's been tinkered with, polished, some upgrades to the motor, but it didn't have a serious overhaul until 9-11 when the nation realized, or its leadership, that the machine hadn't prepared us for an attack on our homeland by al-Qaeda.
00:12:31
Speaker
And then the whole system was reformed. You have the Department of Homeland Security created out of lots of other agencies to be in charge. You have the National Counterterrorism Center created. You have an Office of Director of National Intelligence put over the entire 18 departments, agencies of the intelligence community, sort of like rather than having a whole kennel of dogs, the president wanted just one dog to kick. And that's the Director of National Intelligence. And you have
00:12:58
Speaker
you know a new command nor northern command responsible for defense of the homeland and our argument AJ is that machine worked pretty well there has not been a significant attack on the homeland since then and that is a tribute to that system but that system was designed mostly
00:13:17
Speaker
to deal with one threat. And we call for the machine to be, if not completely reorganized, at least refocused from the zoom on counterterrorism put to a panoramic view of a wider array of threats for the future. Yeah. And so obviously the title of your book is Age of Danger. So let's let's talk about the Age of Danger then.
00:13:42
Speaker
So the first kind of threat that you both lay out is China. How have we historically dealt with China from a national security perspective and then maybe talk about these threats that are coming out of China?
00:14:04
Speaker
AJ, let me pick up here. And we're gonna let the readers get the whole story, but I'll give you a few highlights here.
00:14:16
Speaker
You know, if we go back to the beginning of the Cold War, I think China was very much on people's minds. We know the, you know, the focus on the Soviet Union and so forth.
00:14:35
Speaker
first decade of the Cold War, China is on people's minds. And we know of the politics in this country, Senator McCarthy, the Red Scare, so forth, of what it means to have communist leadership in China. But by the early 60s, China goes its own way. It's not going to be subservient to the Soviet Union. It's going to
00:15:05
Speaker
chart its own course. I think it recedes. It's not that it's on people's minds, but it's not a preoccupation. We're focused on the Cold War and we're focused on containing the Soviet threat. And that takes us through the 60s into the 70s, late 70s. China embarks on a very different path.
00:15:29
Speaker
It's going to modernize. It's introducing, I'll say, quasi free market approaches. It wants to be part of the global economy. We can see that happening.
00:15:42
Speaker
But by the mid-80s, there's some very shrewd observers in the Defense Department that are looking out over time. And we tell the story of the two of these analysts, senior people, I say analysts, these are very senior well-known people that are by the mid-80s are doing some economic forecasting.
00:16:08
Speaker
you know, come to the conclusion that by the 2010 or so, China's economy is going to surpass the Soviet economy. So by the mid 80s, they're not predicting the end of the Soviet Union, but they are predicting something else. This China's modernization effort has got ahead of steam and it's going to surpass the Soviet economy. And they're beginning to warn, you know, we talk about the machine,
00:16:34
Speaker
you know, there is a warning machine and an action machine. This is the beginning of the warning that says, we need to pay attention to
China's Military Modernization and Implications
00:16:41
Speaker
this. We need to pay attention to this challenge that is China. And that sets in motion sort of, I'll call the slow awareness, Edo. By the early 1990s, of course, the Soviet Union is no more, but there is more attention now to what this modernizing China's become.
00:17:06
Speaker
And by the mid-90s, there is a crisis over the Taiwan Straits. The PLA, the People's Liberation Army, fires some missiles in the vicinity of Taiwan because there's a concern that the government in Taiwan might be thinking about or moving toward independence. The United States responds to that.
00:17:31
Speaker
And the crisis settled us down pretty quickly because the United States has enormous advantage at that point. China's leadership understands it is not ready and does not want to go to war in the United States. We send a carrier into the Taiwan Strait. Crisis is largely over.
00:17:50
Speaker
But there is a decision that's made in China at that time, a new set of thinking, this isn't going to happen again. And China embarks on a very sustained military modernization effort that begins. And we see that play out. And so I'm curious, Andy, from your time in the Department of Defense, we'll say, I don't know, even 10 years ago, 20 years ago maybe,
00:18:18
Speaker
How much of the conversation, how much did China factor into the thought process in the Pentagon? How much attention were we paying to this threat? I think we were. Let me pick up my story a little bit. I mentioned some of the mid-90s. By the late 90s, there was a fair amount of effort in the Pentagon looking at
00:18:43
Speaker
this then very, you know, the beginning of China's military modernization. But, you know, there were war games being done, people beginning to think, you know, what might China's military be doing as it's modernizing what capabilities might it possess? Some of these very experimental war games were beginning to send louder and louder warnings. The warning machine is now
00:19:12
Speaker
you know, saying, this could be a problem. But at that point, it was viewed as a 20-year problem. Not, you know, we weren't saying this is going to be a problem next year or the year after, but by the late 90s, this is going to be a problem. In fact, when George Bush is elected as president,
00:19:33
Speaker
in 2000 arrives in office in 2001. There's a major strategy review that's underway. I was part of that team that that was part of the team that led that review. There was, you know, this was the moment where we began thinking we have to be get, we have to begin getting ready. We have to begin that set of preparations that we could look out 10, 15, 20 years and realizing that a modern
00:20:01
Speaker
a modern military in China could pose a potential challenge. Not certainly Taiwan becomes a focal point, but could pose a challenge in East Asia more generally, to Japan, to interests in Korea and so forth. The whole notion that global commerce and so much of it was coming now from East Asia, this was going to be a focal point for national security planning.
00:20:30
Speaker
That was until 9-11. It doesn't even change. Yeah. And you write a little bit about how we've kind of tried to respond more recently. So the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, gets written about
00:20:49
Speaker
Talk a little bit about this more recently, our efforts to try and address the Chinese threat, and talk about why those efforts haven't maybe panned out like we hope they would. Yeah, AJ, thanks for this. I think picking that story up
00:21:08
Speaker
When I said then came 9-11, it was clear and it was right that we had to address the terrorist threat. I mean, this was a direct threat to the nation. Let's never forget the horrific acts in New York, in Washington DC, playing down in Pennsylvania. It was a horrible day for all of us. But that became your preoccupation. And I don't think anyone,
00:21:38
Speaker
head of strategy at the time. I don't think we thought that focus or zoom that talked about that Tom talked about was going to be a 20 year activity that that was going to be so dominating, but it turned out that it was. So all the while,
00:21:57
Speaker
China's moving along. Its military is modernizing. It's developing more capabilities. And within the defense circles, we tell the story of how these aren't just notional games, but these are in operational settings.
00:22:15
Speaker
the team at Pacific Air Forces is running more games and beginning to get worried that this isn't going to go well for us. Or back in the Pentagon, we tell the story of a senior general who says we're running game after game, and what we're learning is that we're losing faster. The alarm bells start going off. So what looked like a 20-year window of time for planning
00:22:44
Speaker
in late 90s, early 2000s, you know, you fast forward two decades and there's, you know, there's a real concern. There's a real concern that that enormous advantage that we possessed in the mid 90s, go back to the, and when I mentioned the Taiwan Strait crisis, we steamed a carrier through the strait, things settle down. That wouldn't happen today. We wouldn't put a carrier that close because it would be at risk.
00:23:12
Speaker
And so now there's a lot of attention. How do we catch up? But we tell the story here of going from position of enormous advantage to parody or maybe worse.
00:23:24
Speaker
And then we spent some time talking about the people that are focused on how do we write the ship? How do we get this back into a better place? And there are really interesting people working on this, really interesting. And I think the characters that we talk about are fascinating. Well, what do you both think that as of today, we're in May, 2023,
00:23:53
Speaker
What do you think today the biggest threat coming from China is? I think where I would start, AJ, is this. I don't think anyone's predicting that there's going to be a war over Taiwan or today or tomorrow or that China would use military force to unset the balance in East Asia.
00:24:20
Speaker
What I think we're worried about most is that day could come where the Chinese Communist Party leadership, and this begins with Xi and advisors, that day comes when they feel confident enough that if they want to use force, they could do so successfully. I don't know that that
00:24:44
Speaker
a sense of calculation has arrived yet that we that if we want to use force against Taiwan or elsewhere that. So you say it's that they have the capability that is the awareness that they would have the capability if they wanted to exercise you if they wanted
00:25:03
Speaker
to use force against Taiwan or elsewhere in East Asia, they could succeed. That's the moment that worries me. And I think that moment's coming. I wouldn't say it's here today, but I think over the next number of years, that moment could arrive. And that's what people in the Pentagon now are focused on, is what do we do so that we can delay or postpone that moment into the indefinite future?
00:25:27
Speaker
Well, let's talk about Russia. So obviously, like Ukraine is a real time example of the danger posed by Russia.
Overlooked Threats from Russia
00:25:36
Speaker
Talk about, it's what you call in your book, it's hiding in plain sight is the threat posed by Russia. Talk about Russia a little bit.
00:25:44
Speaker
Sure. I was based in Moscow for five years and I was standing on Drusinski Square in front of the KGB headquarters, you know, that August of 1991 midnight when they were pulling down the statue of the hated founder of the KGB, Felix Drusinski. And there was just a sense that, you know, good times are here. The world is a safer place. Democracy has finally come to the
00:26:09
Speaker
Soviet Union, which was not only a communist government, but probably the largest organized criminal organization in the history of the world. They owned 11 time zones. And then sort of through willful benign neglect and through some bad strategies, we just stopped paying attention.
00:26:31
Speaker
You know, Russia was dismissed as upper Volta with rockets, wouldn't be a threat, didn't need to worry about it. And Vladimir Putin personified this sense of anger and frustration and humiliation. I mean, here's a man who said that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the most catastrophic event of the 20th century, forgetting World War I, World War II and the Holocaust. So this is a man with a set of grievances who came to the world stage, but was still dismissed.
00:27:01
Speaker
And the reason we call it hiding in plain sight is everything Putin has done, he told us in advance he was going to do. And we take you to the Munich Security Conference in 2007 when Putin is the keynote speaker and he gives this speech where he accuses the US of being a hyper-power
00:27:20
Speaker
and pledges to do everything in his power to constrain the US and says Russia is going its own way. And while he doesn't declare the version of a Monroe Doctrine for Russia, he talks about the near abroad and Russia's role in exerting influence.
00:27:36
Speaker
And a year plus later, he invades Georgia, you know, completely taking the world by surprise. 2014, he makes the first move into Ukraine. And we talked to a senior general, head of NATO military forces at the time. And he said the invasion of Crimea in 2014 caught him by such surprise that he went off like a well-hit nine iron in a tile bathroom.
00:28:01
Speaker
I mean, that is one angry four star. And he came back to Washington to demand how he, as commander of NATO, could be caught completely surprised by a Russian invasion in Europe. And they made the case that on the day the Berlin Wall went down, there were between 13,000 and 15,000 analysts assigned to watch the Soviet Union, the warning machine.
00:28:26
Speaker
at the invasion of Ukraine, that number had dwindled to 1,000 or 2,000 analysts. So there were some experts to be sure, but it went from 15,000 to 1,000 and the part of the intelligence community's budget devoted to the Soviet Union went from
00:28:42
Speaker
50 percent to 10 to 11 percent. And not only that, but it was divided across 18 or 19 new targets as the Soviet Union dissolved into all these independent republics that had to be watched. So we didn't pay attention to Putin. We willfully and knowingly and consciously stopped paying attention. And that's how we have Vladimir Putin, who basically is stomping across his area of interest today.
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah, and so your argument is that the machine was just so focused on terrorism, correct? That Russia just wasn't, as you said, it was seen as a regional power. I think that was like a big issue in like the 2012 election or something like that. I think President Obama called it a regional player. It could be misremembering it, but something like that.
00:29:37
Speaker
Obviously, there are people who watch Russia in our national security machine. Why do you think they were ignored when they did sound the alarm bells? What happened was when this cadre of very terrific analysts inside the warning machine, and that's CIA, DIA, elsewhere,
00:30:03
Speaker
When they dwindled from 15,000 to one or 2,000, they had to prioritize. And we were told that the US had pretty good intelligence on Russia's nuclear arsenal, because that was the existential threat. But what they stopped doing was the kind of personal hands-on fingertip intelligence gathering that might have given them clues to Putin's intention.
00:30:27
Speaker
his expansion into Georgia, his expansion into Ukraine and the Donbass. Because as you said so correctly, AJ, these were viewed as regional issues and not a concern at the time. The U.S. was Zoom like focus on terrorism. Everybody wanted some kind of refund, a Cold War dividend. And so Russia was just discounted and Putin took advantage of that because again, he never hit his intentions not once.
00:30:54
Speaker
Well, kind of seem it. I want to add here that, you know, we really came out as we were trying to tell this story and Tom, Tom, because of his experience was really the lead on this, but
00:31:07
Speaker
There was a sense of the Russia we wanted it to be as opposed to the Russia that really was the case. That is, I think among some elements of the leadership, and this runs across administration, so we're not pointing fingers at one or another, but there was an assumption that Russia is going to align with the West. This is in its interest.
00:31:35
Speaker
It's seeking a developing economy. It's going to be tied to the larger global marketplace. It's export of energy supplies. It's modernization and so forth. It will be part of the West. That's what we wanted Russia to be, as opposed to really understanding the path that Russia was itself on.
00:31:59
Speaker
And this is one of the things that we really were trying to tease out as wishful thinking the story. Yeah. And if I could just foot stomp on that back to China, which is Andy's area of expertise, it was that same wishful thinking. The US thought that by making China a partner in global trade, that it would take on our views of a world order organized by certain laws and behavior. And that wishful thinking has proved wrong just as it's proved false in trying to deal with Vladimir Putin.
00:32:29
Speaker
Well, same question about Russia as I had with China. Today, May 2023, what's the biggest threat posed by Russia? Putin has threatened tactical nuclear use. That would be a red line that once crossed you could never undo.
00:32:46
Speaker
I'm not predicting that, AJ, but we do need to be very concerned about that, and the US and the allies need to be putting down even stronger markers of deterrence and reprisal should that happen. I think a more, not likely, but the more logical outcome is another
00:33:05
Speaker
horrible frozen conflict. I'm not making a joke about Eastern European winters, but if you think about where we are with Georgia, where we are in Nagorno-Karabakh, elsewhere in the region, Chechnya, Putin can claim victory once he's taken some land and the front is frozen or holds. So I think a possible outcome would be that Ukraine on a much larger scale becomes yet another frozen conflict.
00:33:31
Speaker
that Putin still tries to eke out kilometer by kilometer over future years. And that actually would, of course, reward aggression. Now, the final solution is up to the Ukrainian people, not the U.S., but one can see that being a very unhappy but very likely outcome. Well, with both of these threats, these from China and Russia, how are we doing in responding to them right now?
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah, if I could hop on Rush and I'll let Andy do it. You know, people are always asking me, you know, Tom, you lived there for five years.
00:34:07
Speaker
Are we at war with Russia? Well, we're not at war with Russia, AJ, but Russia is at war with us. And that's because Putin has a very sort of Eastern view of conflict. The United States, which is a wonderful thing, the default mode of a democracy is peace, and going to war is a major flip of a major switch. But in Putin's view, it's a continuum.
00:34:32
Speaker
You know, it's a rheostat. It's not just on or off war and peace. You know, he tried to hack the American election system. That's regime change by any definition. You know, his proxies are doing all sorts of horrible stuff all around the world, Western Europe, etc. So make no mistake, Putin is at war with us now, but not by the terms that we use. And he is defining the conflict. And that to me is a great worry.
00:34:58
Speaker
How are we doing with China? I think there are terrific minds working on this matter. And I want to cast this in a bigger strategic issue. It's not just the military dimension.
00:35:14
Speaker
I think there are clear efforts to try to ensure that we think about the resilience of the global economy and coming out of our efforts in the pandemic, but particularly looking at things like areas like micro-processing and ships and so forth.
00:35:37
Speaker
We're in an effort right now to build a more resilient system. So advanced manufacturing of microchips isn't taking place primarily on Taiwan, but it is distributed more generally.
00:35:52
Speaker
That takes a lot of pressure off a little island that sits 100 miles off the coast of China. That needs to continue. It's happening. It's got bipartisan support. I feel reasonably good in a couple of years. We'll build some of that resilience.
00:36:09
Speaker
On the military side, there's some terrific people and minds working across a lot of places. We give just a few of the stories, but there's more stories to tell on that. My bigger concern there is the slowness. We talked about the 47 Chevy, the system that was built at the end of World War II. This was a system that could deliver
00:36:34
Speaker
quickly. Think about the space race. We've got this competition in space. We decide we're going to put a person on the moon by the end of the 1960s. So in roughly a decade, that happens. We're two decades out from this focus at the early Bush administration, this real awareness getting of
00:37:01
Speaker
China potentially represents a significant military challenge. The system is slow. It's become stodgy. Hardworking people, not taking away from any of the people, but the system itself needs to be pruned. We talk about a former secretary of defense who tells the story that there are too many people that can say no
00:37:28
Speaker
and only one or two people in the system that can really say yes. We need to get a few of the people that can say no out of there so we can turn some of this American genius loose. And there's some really genius out there. Go read these stories, but you're going to see it. It's heartwarming in a way.
00:37:45
Speaker
But we've got to overcome the slowness. I've got a lot of confidence in American ingenuity, but I've got a lot of concern about the slowness of a system that isn't delivering. And character after character is people or senior people, civilian and military leaving the Pentagon. What's your frustration?
00:38:08
Speaker
time after time, it's the slowness. And Tom and I have seen it up close. It's got to get better. And if we can break through some of that, then I've got a lot of confidence, but we've got to break through it. How long do you think it'll be until the machine retools itself?
00:38:29
Speaker
We actually make the case that we don't need another top to bottom restructuring. You know, Andy and I have some views somewhat differing on whether the post 9-11 reforms should be maintained or not, but because we want things to happen and work better, one thing that we have several people telling us.
00:38:47
Speaker
Leon Panetta, a former Defense Secretary, former CIA Director, General Stanley McChrystal, who completely reformed the combination of intelligence and special operations to actually have an effect on terror cells. And so what we learned from that is rather than restructuring the whole system, we should come up with some very, very agile fixes. We call them standing joint task forces.
00:39:13
Speaker
Just as we saw with the pandemic and the vaccine, you pull people together from various agencies, give them the clearances, give them the legal protections, give them the money. And even though the world was caught surprised by COVID, that vaccine came to our arms in record time.
00:39:29
Speaker
because of American ingenuity and the right people came together. So what we propose is a series of joint task forces be organized and practiced. You don't pull them out of their home organizations. They don't work every day. Maybe they come together four times a year to practice for a pandemic.
00:39:47
Speaker
to practice for an agricultural blight disaster, to practice for biological warfare, to practice for colossal data breach, so that when something happens, even if you can't predict it exactly AJ, you have a team of people from all across the government ready to go into action that very night. That would make a huge difference. We don't always have to seize on the most expensive fix too. This is why we like the story that you get in the
00:40:16
Speaker
in our description of China and the challenge of looking for less expensive fixes of a physicist and a senior Air Force general that are looking at sensors that could cost $100,000 or $200,000 a copy, not millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of which you could put
00:40:42
Speaker
big numbers of sensors. The physicist calls them flying iPhones, but could create such density and awareness that would be very hard to challenge it. But that's thinking more about simplicity, thinking about experimenting, the time to experiments before the crisis, the times right now to experiment, doing those kinds of things.
00:41:10
Speaker
and getting some of these ideas out into the field and letting smart people operate with them and decide what's working and not working. And over my career, Tom's seen it too. It's amazing when you put things in the hands of young Americans, what they do with it. This is the moment to experiment, but we're going to have to get those cycles much faster.
00:41:39
Speaker
The former Secretary of Defense told us we've got to get some of the people saying no out of that system so we can try these ideas out, see what works. The ones that work, hang on to them. The ones that don't work, put them aside, but get these cycles faster. Congress has got a role to play here, too, because Congress authorizes and appropriates all the money. We're hanging on to hardware and facilities and
00:42:03
Speaker
and parts of the machinery that we really don't need anymore. And of course this is politics and these are jobs and so forth. We're not going to shed it all, but we got to get rid of some of it. We got to let some of that go because we're never going to unleash sort of this opportunity to think differently and move more creatively. If we're having to, you know, you know, keep the lights on and, and,
00:42:28
Speaker
and keeping capabilities operating that we just know we're not going to use anymore. So it's going to take the smarts of putting these packages together that Tom talked about. It's going to take leadership to stay focused on these problems.
Leadership in National Security
00:42:44
Speaker
It's going to take Congress that's going to have to create some space so this genius and ingenuity can be turned loose. And these are all things that the United States has done in the past. So we've got it in us.
00:42:58
Speaker
We just have to strip away some of the underbrush. Tom knows I have my wife and I have a weekend property up in the Shenandoah Mountains and I'll go there and clear underbrush and come home scratched up from thorns and whatnot. We've got to do a big clearing of the underbrush so that we can make some of the space for these things to happen.
00:43:23
Speaker
You'll hear about a national security advisor in our final chapter. I want to underline it. The time to experiment is now. And we couldn't agree more. We got to get on with the experiments because there is just enormous smarts and capability to turn loose here, but let's clear the underbrush, get the experiments underway. And with that in mind, I'm pretty bullish on the future.
00:43:50
Speaker
And if I could just compliment that, Andy's talking about the underbrush. I'll talk about the top canopy. One of my, you know, greatest realizations in this book, AJ, we went into it looking at policy and systems, but I've come away agreeing with what Andy said about people. And there has never been a more important time.
00:44:09
Speaker
in the history of our nation for us to have leaders who act with integrity and sophistication. And every time a president is faced with a national security decision, whispering in one ear is, remember the elections, remember the elections. And I'm not going to be so Pollyanna-ish as to think that will go away, but political expediency
00:44:30
Speaker
and polarization are going to doom this country if our leaders at the very top cannot start acting with integrity and patriotism and empathy and understanding and compromise. I know I sound like a civics lesson, but we started out writing a national security book, but I've come away feeling very, very strong about the importance of the quality of our leadership. And by the way, we know off camera it's possible
00:45:00
Speaker
We know it's possible. You get behind the scenes and there are serious people working on serious problems. We need that to be more public facing as well. And it really has to happen. Yeah. Well, let's talk a little bit about some of the consequences of these things not happening because we are talking about the age of danger here.
00:45:23
Speaker
say we just go on the same path we're on right now, how dangerous are things? This is a big question, but putting the whole of human history into perspective, how dangerous are things right now? Ajay, you've started with having us talk about China and Russia, I think very dangerous in the sense that
00:45:48
Speaker
There's a war underway. We're supporting one of the parties to that war, and there are nuclear weapons that could be used. Danger, very high. You know, when we talk about China, is that the idea that the Communist Party leadership in China might that one day realize that we've now got the capability. If we want to take Taiwan by force, we're going to do it. That's a huge danger.
00:46:16
Speaker
We've talked about not just in terms of a political outcome, but for the global economy, when you see that very high concentration of the advanced microelectronics production on Taiwan itself. And we haven't begun to touch yet in this discussion. I suspect you're taking us there about the problems that we characterize as germs, digits, storms, and drones.
00:46:43
Speaker
You know, these are layered on sort of the geopolitical, but yeah, I worry a lot. You know, we went through a pandemic and it wasn't COVID-19 was not, you know, the worst threat we could face in terms of a biological outbreak. There are people that are far more worried. And, you know, I think we get about a B minus at best in terms of what we did.
00:47:11
Speaker
Tom did mention we had a vaccine coming out of that, but the system wasn't delivering. It doesn't think about, we haven't built a public health preparedness system that thinks the way the military thinks, that it is ready. Like when the military thinks about readiness, they think, ready to fight tonight. You know, tonight, not tomorrow, the next day, tonight. We need a public health preparedness that's thinking the same way.
00:47:38
Speaker
So climate change is a perfect example of that. It's a problem that, you know, most sentient people agree. But what we look at in our book, AJ, is the sort of unexpected second and third order impacts on national security of climate change.
Emerging Threats: Pandemics and Climate Change
00:47:54
Speaker
I mean, the military is well aware that some of its most significant installations on the coast, Norfolk, Virginia, San Diego, Coronado, the sub base in Washington state could be underwater in 20 or 30 years.
00:48:07
Speaker
And there's just not enough money in the budget to deal with that. Forced migration as well. I mean, a billion people could be moving north from Africa toward Europe and the Middle East over coming decades. And the instability that that would bring is simply frightening. You know, Andy spoke about
00:48:27
Speaker
pandemic and the rush to get the vaccine. And the coming crisis could be even worse. I would never say that any death above zero is too many. But let's recall that 3,000 people died on 9-11, but COVID has claimed a million American lives. But this nation never went on a war footing to fight COVID.
00:48:51
Speaker
And people said, well, it'd been a hundred years since the Spanish flu. I would just like to recall also, it's been only 150 years since the Irish potato famine, which not only devastated the Irish economy in Ireland, but also on the continent of Europe, where a hundred thousand people, and there are people in the US now who are worried about a agra catastrophe, naturally occurring, manmade from a lab or even terrorists.
00:49:19
Speaker
And there's a retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who became president at Kansas State University. He had read all the intelligence about al-Qaeda experimenting with brucellosis and other crop and livestock disease. And he was so concerned about an agro-terror attack that he got billions of dollars from the US government to build the National Bio-Agro Defense Facility at Kansas State University.
00:49:45
Speaker
This is a building that most people have never even heard of, but this could be one of the most life saving investments that America has made. And so it's that kind of creative thinking because there are people who are convinced that the age of danger is rushing toward us and they're trying to think outside the box on ways to resolve it.
00:50:05
Speaker
Yeah, in climate change, I think specifically, I had on this show a few weeks ago, a gentleman who wrote a book about the Bangladesh Liberation War, which most people have never heard of, but it's commonly referred to as the world's first climate war. And that's because in 1970,
00:50:28
Speaker
a cyclone hit what was at the time East Pakistan destabilized the government and a terrible genocide ensued because of what was perceived as a lack of response to the cyclone and terrible destruction and political upheaval. And to see, I mean, it's happened once, but to put into perspective what you all are talking about in your book,
00:51:00
Speaker
you know, climate change could be the trigger to something like the superpowers. So I don't know if this is, I don't know the geography of Taiwan, but you know, let's say that, you know, Taiwan is affected by climate change and China perceives it as a good time to invade Taiwan. And then America responds to the invasion of Taiwan. And you're like, holy cow, what started all this was something like climate change. And I don't know how plausible that situation is.
00:51:30
Speaker
There are even more recent examples. The Syrian civil war, which has been catastrophic for those local populations, had a big climate element. Drought forced people from their villages into the big cities, upsetting the minority majority ruling status. And while that wasn't the only cause of the civil war, government corruption and all that, it was an important one.
00:51:52
Speaker
Remember a few years back when piracy off the Horn of Africa was such a big problem. The pirates were seizing pleasure boats and tankers and freighters. Well, a lot of those pirates had been fishermen who'd been providing a very good life for their family. But then those waters became overfished mostly by Japanese
00:52:13
Speaker
commercial fish factories, and with the fishing stocks down, these men had to turn to other ways to feed their family, and that provoked piracy, which prompted the US and the allies to create a military maritime task force to battle piracy. I mean, it's something out of Thomas Jefferson's day, so.
00:52:32
Speaker
some of the movement to our southern borders, some of the migration attributed from some of the experts we met with to the crop failures and so forth that are happening in Central and South America. And you mentioned Taiwan, AJ. We talk about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but a cyclone that disrupts or damages
00:52:59
Speaker
the microchip factories at Taiwan's semiconductor industries can have just as great an impact on the global economy as an invasion could. So this is a real issue. And there's always been climate effects. If you talk to the US military, one of the great things that the United States does in the world is provides humanitarian assistance
00:53:27
Speaker
And I think it's a source of pride for us as Americans that we do this around the world. Increasingly, the American military is providing humanitarian assistance at home. We tell the story of the National Guard that's not just fighting fires on a seasonal basis, but doing it increasingly year round.
00:53:50
Speaker
you know, how we have to respond to storm events that have growing damage and of increasing frequency here at home.
00:54:04
Speaker
It may be the right thing for the National Guard to be helping deal and providing humanitarian assistance at home, but that's also the part of the National Guard that's not going to be there if you want to call it up to do something else. So these are some of the compounding effects that we see as we're looking at this issue of climate change, and it adds to the problems that we're really calling out in this book.
00:54:27
Speaker
We close our climate chapter with a quote that applies all across the national security spectrum. It's a very smart analyst who says, you know, the government's saying the right things on climate change, just like it's saying the right things on pandemic and all of that. But she told us a plan without a budget is a fantasy. And they're and they're not putting money to back the words at this range of more panoramic threats that we're describing. Well, a question for you both.
00:54:57
Speaker
right now at this point in time, what should be the number one priority for America's national security experts? I'll start with that, AJ. I think first off, we've touched on it throughout this great conversation. It's opening the lens, looking more broadly at what we think about national security.
00:55:22
Speaker
Neither Tom nor I want to be dismissive of where some of the focus is. But as we went to Zoom and stayed on Zoom, that was the problem that was terrorism. And as we found ourselves preoccupied in the Middle East for two decades,
00:55:41
Speaker
these new issues were arising, were growing, these new threats were growing. We need to open the aperture and think of these problems, not just China and Russia, but as we think about germs, digits, storms and drones, which we haven't talked about yet, but drones in a way is our shorthand for saying areas of technology advantage
00:56:11
Speaker
We've got to have that aperture open. We've got to look at these in a more holistic way. And this is the moment, we're not advocates for creating new departments, but we are advocates for creating structures across departments. We've got these verticals, Department of Defense, Department of State, the CIA, increasingly the Department of Treasury, the Department of Commerce, as we think about how we get resilience in the global economy and so forth.
00:56:40
Speaker
and others, Health and Human Services and CDC and so forth. We need to build the horizontals across those verticals. We've got the departments, they're the vertical structure. We need the horizontal structure. Those are the standing joint task forces that Tom talked about. They need to be empowered to be looking at how we're gonna handle with problems. They need to run serious training exercises.
00:57:07
Speaker
experiments. This is the moment to experiment, to truly see how we're going to deal, throw hard problems at these people, let them experiment, let them see where the vulnerabilities are, and then turn to fixing them. Importantly, too, let me add a point that Steve Hadley, former National Security Advisor, reminded us
00:57:31
Speaker
Many of these problems are going to involve the private sector. So this isn't just building horizontals across the government. It's going to have the private sector involved. Think of what's happening with artificial intelligence. If we aren't cooperating with the handful of key companies that are building this capability, we're not going to have a good outcome. So they're going to be partners in this.
00:57:53
Speaker
And we have to find ways to build that partnership, create these horizontals. And then we have to also beware of the temptation to bring every big problem into the White House. We don't want to do that.
00:58:12
Speaker
Tom talked about things becoming political. If it's going to go to the White House, it's going to become political. Yes, the president and key advisors have to make decisions, but we have to create that structure across departments and agencies, including the private sector, that's going to be equipped to carry out the policy when it's done. We can't run every problem out of the White House.
00:58:35
Speaker
And so that's the beginning of the solution as we see it. I love the Stan McChrystal line that he talked to us about. It's in his book, but we had a good period of time with him. And he talked about when he built the new apparatus, he had a guideline in his mind. And that was set up the structure, set up the rules and let it run. He called it eyes on, hands off, put guardrails around it. We're not going to do illegal things. We're not going to do immoral things.
00:59:06
Speaker
Empower the people whose job it is to do their jobs. Don't make them ask permission every time we have to go and do something. Give them the guidelines, set guardrails or rules around it, and empower them to do it. Eyes on, hands off. It sounds like a really good rule to us.
00:59:27
Speaker
Well, AJ, I would say an answer to your question. The military is very, very good at fighting off the crocodile closest to the canoe, or in my case, the crocodile closest to the kayak. And we simply cannot ignore current and rapidly approaching problems. But I think our government and its analysts and the people inside also need to make sure that the future has a seat at the table. And that's what's been missing for too long.
00:59:52
Speaker
Wow, wonderful. Well, Andy, Tom, I know that we're over our time. So thank you both for sticking here with me. For just kind of like lastly, if people want to, if they want to follow you, if they want to find out more about what you're working on, where can they do that at? We have a brand new website for the book, ageofdanger.com, and I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn and
01:00:21
Speaker
Twitter against my better wishes. My wife prohibited me from being on Twitter my 25 years at the New York Times because she knew I'd get fired. But now that I'm an academic, she says, okay, you can be on Twitter.
01:00:33
Speaker
You can find us there. We look forward to hearing from your listeners. This has been a terrific conversation. Yeah. And I, again, like I learned so much from your book and a little, I mean, it's a little, a little frightening at times, but I'm glad to hear you're both, you know, optimistic. So thank you both for joining me and everyone check out Age of Danger. Go buy a copy. Go check it out from your library.
01:01:00
Speaker
It's worth the read. And Andy, Tom, thank you so much. Thank you. It was a great discussion. Terrific time.