International Security and Defense: Lessons from the Past, Analysis of the Present, and Projection into the Future

>> H. R. McMaster: America and other free and open societies face crucial challenges and opportunities abroad that affect security and prosperity at home. This is a series of conversations with guests who bring deep understanding of today's battlegrounds and creative ideas about how to compete, overcome challenges, capitalize on opportunities, and secure a better future.

I am HR McMaster, this is BattleGrounds.

>> Speaker 2: On today's episode of Battlegrounds, our focus is on the United Kingdom and its armed forces. Our guest is General Sir Nick Carter, an accomplished strategic leader with over 45 years of military experience. General Carter served as the United Kingdom's chief of the Defense staff from 2018 to 2021.

In this position, Carter led the British armed forces as the most senior uniformed military advisor to the British prime minister. As chief of the defense staff, General Carter oversaw the British army's response to the Syrian civil War, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. General Carter joined the British army at age 18 as part of the Royal Green Jackets infantry regiment.

He served in West Germany during the end of the Cold War, Northern Ireland during the troubles, and in Bosnia and Kosovo during NATO peacekeeping operations. Carter served multiple tours in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2013 and commanded British forces in Basra, Iraq in 2004. He helped design the provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan, which were humanitarian reconstruction and growth projects that aimed to establish stability and security.

During the 2009 surge of troops in Afghanistan, General Carter commanded 55,000 NATO troops. In 2013, Carter became deputy commander of the International Security Assistance Force, ISAF. ISAF was a UN mandated NATO mission to train Afghan National Security Forces to rebuild crucial government institutions, provide security in Afghanistan, and ensure that it would never again serve as a safe haven for terrorists.

We welcome General Carter today to discuss his experiences in the British military, the war in Ukraine, the implications of the US end coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the future of warfare.

>> H. R. McMaster: General Sir Nick Carter, welcome to BattleGrounds, it's so great to see you.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: It's great to be with you HR, thank you.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: I mean, since we've retired, the world's gone to hell. General Nick I mean, I'd love to talk with you, really, first about geostrategic dynamics, but first, I wanna thank you for your leadership over the years. It was real privileged to serve alongside you in places like Afghanistan and to visit you and your division at York.

We have a lot of fond memories of your leadership and service over the years.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: No, well, thank you, and I've followed your career with great interest and learned a lot from you during the course of the process. And I think the partnership that we've struck up in various dusty places has been a very productive partnership.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: It has and, of course, I know it's been heartbreaking for you to see some of the developments in recent years and months, and we'll talk about Afghanistan we serve together there. But I'd like to first just talk to you about the general geostrategic dynamics as you see them.

The first major war in Europe since World War II is ongoing. There's an emerging geostrategic competition with two revanchist powers on the eurasian landmass. Some are saying that there's the emergence of what we might call an axis of authoritarians, including Russia and China, but also Iran who's in the game now.

Other countries around the world seem to be sizing up that competition and picking sides. And so I just like to ask you, how do you understand the world today?

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Yes, I think we've returned to an era that is probably reminiscent of the 1930s in terms of the level of disorder that we see and the level of instability.

And I think I put that down to three factors. I mean, you've mentioned this global competition between great powers, and we're up against now some revisionist powers, with Russia being the acute threat and, of course, China being, in a sense, the chronic challenge. And, of course, they have got an axis of clients around them who share their views on what the world order should look like.

And, of course, I think also we've seen developments in us foreign policy over the course of the last eight years or so, and that's had a bearing, I think, on how that competition is, is playing out. And I think the world is breaking down now, in a sense, into a framework where you've got three broad groupings of countries.

You've got those who are pro-West, those that we've been talking about who are clearly anti-West. And then you've got a lot of undecided or non-aligned who are sitting there, I think, waiting to be influenced. And, of course, those are countries a bit like India, Indonesia, maybe Malaysia, perhaps even Mexico, Brazil, South Africa.

And these are countries that are gonna have a large amount of the global humanity living within them and how they play into this debate, I think, is interesting. And, of course, I think the second reason is that the multilateral system that you and I have grown up in, that rules based order that the United States was so instrumental in constructing after the 1945 period.

That is now arguably no longer being respected and is arguably perhaps not fit for purpose, so I think we're between orders. And then when you then add on the third factor, which is the way in which the character of warfare and politics is evolving so rapidly because of technological change and the democratization of information.

You've got a cocktail of ingredients that lead to the disorder that we're now seeing.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I'd like to talk about each of those, I think it's interesting, these three groups of course, there's a lot of variation within each of these groups. But the competitions that are playing out really play out among these three groups.

And I'd like to get your assessment of what you think the relative strengths and weaknesses are of these three groupings. The authoritarians, the West, or like-minded free market systems and free and open societies, and where the competition between the two is largely playing out. Whether it's across what Mackinder called the shatter zones of the Middle East and Africa, or here in the Western Hemisphere.

But when we look at these authoritarians, you called it an acute threat with Russia and a chronic one with China. How do you assess their trajectory and their relative strengths and weaknesses?

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I think if you look for the slightly longer term, Russia is undoubtedly a declining power, not least because of demography, but also, I think, because where its money comes from, which essentially is about fossil fuels, that is something thats not going to endure forever.

So when you see a population shrinking, like the population is shrinking in Russia, I think there are obvious longer term vulnerabilities there. But the next ten years are gonna be difficult. We can talk in a minute about how the war in Ukraine might play out. But however it plays out, Russia is going to be a factor in that equation.

And, of course, China is also confronted with some headwinds and when you think the working age population in China is gonna decline by 10% in the next ten years. And by 30% over the next 30 to 40 years, you can't change demography unless you're prepared to open your doors to immigration.

And we all know that China's unlikely to do that and it's somewhat xenophobic, perhaps, in its approach. They've also got some difficult headwinds to cope with. And of course, they've got a middle class that wants to be wealthy and wants to be productive and everything that goes with it.

And that's gonna be quite a challenging beast to keep going, given that demography and how that demography is going to change. But we should be in no doubt that over the course of the next ten to 15 years, China and what China is doing with its technology. And much of what President Xi Jinping is saying publicly about where he wants China to be placed in the next decade means that there are some serious questions that we need to think about how we're gonna answer.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Certainly, I think it's a cause for concern. I'm thinking of his recent four speeches at the two sessions in which he seemed to be preparing the Chinese people for war. And I think when you read more and more of these primary documents, it's a cause for concern.

It does seem to me to Sir Nick, that there is this perception on the part of these authoritarian regimes that we are weak, we being our open, democratic societies and our free market economic systems. I think the joint declaration that Xi Jinping and Putin made right before the Beijing Olympics is telling and that really the message was, hey, you're overdevelop.

But I think Putin certainly was in for a surprise. I think at least the record is mixed, I mean, we have what appear to be some cracks with, I think President Macron's visit to China may not have been the right message at this time. But the NATO alliance has not only held together but has expanded.

You went through Brexit, but I think European unity on the issue of Ukraine and now waking up even on the part of Germany for the need to compete with Russia. And to take more responsibility for their defense, to do what Donald Trump was asking them to do l actually during his presidency, to share more of the burden and don't give coercive power over your economy to Russia.

And I think the transatlantic relationship and alliance looks pretty strong to me, but of course, it's never gonna be perfect. But we do have kind of a new conscience in Europe to a certain extent in Eastern Europe, centered maybe on Poland, and I think the scandinavian countries are quite strong.

What's your overall assessment of us being the West, and we could obviously talk about the relationship with Japan as well and others.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I mean, I think that as you inferred, Putin will have been surprised, as I suspect will Xi Jinping, by the sense of Western cohesion that emerged during the course of that invasion last February.

And I remember sitting around our national Security Council table in the UK the previous year, and whilst we were mentally wargaming what might play out in Ukraine. I don't think anybody around that table would have imagined that we'd have been able to do the sort of actions that have followed in March, only six months later.

When he invaded Ukraine, expelling Russia from the Swift system banking system. None of us, I think, would have imagined we'd have ever have gone as far as that. And, of course, we've gone even further in terms of those financial sanctions. So I think they will have been surprised by that.

And, of course, we now see that China is doing what it can to try and reduce its vulnerability to those sorts of approaches that we've done in economic terms. But I think what, of course, they miss is that whilst the froth at the top of our politics is populist and looks like we're becoming decadent and we're missing the point.

The reality is that democracies like ours, and particularly the United States of America, have this infinite ability to be able to reinvent itself. And that's what the United States has always done, and we as your allies, also feel that reinvention every time it occurs. And I think in reinventing, that is our great strength and our ability to be able to counter authoritarian regimes that can't reinvent themselves, they are essentially fragile.

Putin's regime is fragile, as is Xi Jinping's, because it's centralized. And if you have a centralized relationship with your population, like they both do, that leads to vulnerabilities and it leads to fragility, and we shouldn't lose sight of that. And, of course, the thing that bothers both of those gentlemen are the prospects of color revolutions like we saw playing out as the soviet empire came to a conclusion.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: And they mentioned it explicitly in their joint statement just recently as well. There'll be no color revolutions, we're against those. And I'm thinking of what Wang Ahn said, who was a great American citizen, Chinese immigrant to the United States, and founded Wang computers. And he basically said that democracies, we have our problems, but what we have is we have mechanisms for self correction, short of revolution.

We have a say in how we're governed. And so I guess, to your point, we look ugly from the outside, but I do think that we're more resilient than maybe our adversaries give us credit for. And, of course, Russia looked pretty darn strong on parade. Their military did, and they didn't actually fight very well in February of last year, and it's revealed, really, deficiencies in their military.

Of course, the reinvasion of Ukraine has been a galvanizing moment. We're talking about the west, but really, the support for the Ukrainians and the degree to which countries are willing to condemn the invasion. And condemn Russia's aggression has varied across that third grouping of countries you discussed. I'm thinking of India and the Emiratis and others who we thought we might have counted on.

How do you see that competition playing out, the competition between the authoritarian revisionist powers and the West broadly playing out in the. Some people call it the global south, but it's much more than that, it involves the most populous country on earth, India, the largest democracy on earth.

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Yes, I think we should look at ourselves quite closely in the mirror on this particular issue. I mean, I travel quite widely in my new life, and I go to countries in Africa and also in South Asia. And people will say to me, what's the difference between what Mister Putin is doing in Ukraine and what you did in 2003 in Iraq?

And of course, superficially, you can see why they would ask that question. And of course, none of them are necessarily prepared to listen hard to the arguments that we might put across as to why Iraq actually is rather different to what took place in Ukraine. And then I think if you also look at the way that we probably behaved during COVID where we made very sure that we'd inoculated our population three or four times over before we perhaps leant into what those countries might have needed in terms of vaccinations and everything associated with it.

You can see why there's a possibly a slightly cynical agenda, a slightly cynical view as to our behavior. And I think we therefore need to be reflecting on that. And I think we need to remind ourselves what Western soft power was all about. And we need to remind ourselves that the values that we espouse and the soft power that flows from those values needs to be given to these countries in a way that genuinely resonates.

And we need to think about our narrative. And until we get that right, we are going to have, I think, not necessarily the strongest hand to play in relation to the relationships we need to have with those sorts of countries. And that requires a great deal of thought.

And I think we underestimate the power of our soft power and how that soft power should be applied globally to achieve that effect. And that's what we've got to go back and think hard about, I would suggest.

>> H. R. McMaster: And I think maybe our greatest assets in that connection are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.

With obviously, Vladimir Putin really perpetuating these serial episodes of mass homicide and the Syrian Civil War and trying to pose both as arsonist and firemen in the region. China's predatory lending practices, for example, and creation of servile relationships with corrupt governments. And I think the more we can pull the curtain back on That and provide an alternative, I think, to these various forms of aggression is important.

And I think we just have not done a good job, as you've mentioned, in engaging others and explaining really how this ideally should not be a choice between Washington and Beijing. It should be a choice between sovereignty and servitude, with us obviously being on the side of sovereignty in that choice.

I'd like to ask you, beyond soft power, how about some good old-fashioned hard power, right? The reinvasion of Ukraine, obviously was not deterred. I think that the preferred means of deterrence had been the threat of sanctions, which turned out to be inadequate. There were a number of actions taken in the lead up to the invasion, pulling both of our fleets out of the Black Sea, assuring Putin about everything we weren't going to do to support the Ukrainians.

And it failed, I think, because Putin perceived weakness. But could you really talk about what you think we should have learned from the reinvasion in terms of, what is necessary for deterrence to be effective? It's never been foolproof. But as we look at really trying to restore, playing a role at least, in restoring peace and preventing further conflict, what should we take away from Ukraine that we can apply more broadly?

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I mean, I absolutely agree with you that soft power needs to be underpinned by hard power. And of course, hard power ultimately is the essence of deterrence, as we both know. I think that going back to the point I made at the beginning about the character of warfare evolving.

And what has happened during the course of that, is that that has blurred the distinctions between peace and war, between state and non state, between foreign and domestic policy, even between virtual and reality. And that has given regimes like Mr. Putin's regime, and for that matter, the Chinese regime, the opportunity to use new tools, tactics, and techniques to undermine our way of life.

By exploiting those gray areas that have come as a consequence of that blurring and those distinctions. And of course, what that means is that deterrence becomes harder, because if you are engaged in computer network exploitation within the cyber domain, how do you actually deter without actually competing? The answer is that modern deterrence, I think, increasingly requires countries to compete.

You can't just sit back on your laurels like this and say, I've got this great force, that if you do that, I'll smack you. Because actually, they ignore that, cuz they've got other ways of undermining our way of life and making the sort of mischief that they're making.

And we've seen that repeatedly over the course of the last 15 years, with American elections being undermined, probably the Brexit campaign being supported, and so on and so forth.

>> H. R. McMaster: The anti-fracking movement in Europe to perpetuate dependency on Russian hydrocarbons.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: So I think we need to think a little differently about deterrence and the fact that deterrence actually requires us to compete.

Now, that's not easy for western democracies, and it's not easy for a western NATO alliance, which has a series of articles and processes that were designed for a different era. The articles in the NATO treaty which say an attack on one is an attack on us all, you've gotta nowadays work out what an attack is.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: What is an attack?

>> General Sir Nick Carter: And that is very difficult to do. So I think the time is right for some serious academic study, I would suggest, HR. That people like us probably need to do, to work out how you play into a much more demanding strategic context and provide that sense of modern deterrence.

Which will mean that people like Xi Jinping and Putin understand that they cannot get away with it.

>> H. R. McMaster: Right, the most recent NATO strategic assessment made some of these points, and I think you're right. As the historian comrade Crane has said, there are two ways to fight, asymmetrically, and stupidly, right?

And you hope your enemy picks stupidly, like in the 1991 Gulf War, for example, but they're unlikely to do so, and I think that's a lesson of 911 as well. So what are your prescriptions? I know that you've done quite a bit of work in innovating in the defense space, especially when your were chief of the defense staff and actually chief of the army.

When you actually formed a brigade, a brigade that was aimed at really competing more effectively in the information space, for example. And you exercised that brigade to a certain extent during COVID, and I think probably learned some lessons from that. But what do you think are the concrete adaptations that countries can take to integrate all elements of national power.

To compete against this kind of, what some people call hybrid warfare or aggression, that operates below the threshold of what might elicit a military response?

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I mean, I think the key word you use there is this word integration. And certainly from a military perspective, I think the acme of modern military skill is the ability to be able to integrate across the traditional domains of land, air, and maritime, but also space and cyber.

And bring the information piece into it as well. And if you can do that, then not only will you be able to bring capability to bear at any point in time, you'll be able to do it throughout the levels of command. From the strategic, through the operational, down to the tactical, and vice versa.

And that, I think, takes what you and I would have described as jointry to another level. And I think that's probably the acme of military skill now. But the challenge for it, of course, is to make it happen. Not only it requires human beings who are very skilled and able to be comfortable with decentralization and the chaos that comes with decentralization, it also requires technology to be in the right place.

And I think we all know that the future is going to be about information centric technologies. But picking the right combination of those technologies is immensely challenging, and we're not good at predicting the future. Our procurement processes are not very effective at dealing with the technology and the pace of that technological change.

But I think there's some interesting lessons that are coming out of Ukraine. I mean, it's always dangerous to learn lessons a year into a war or a campaign. But I do think the way in which the Ukrainians are exploiting and managing data is an extremely good example of what the future probably portends over the next five to ten years.

Right, I think also from Ukraine, you can learn the lesson that the new doesn't completely replace the old.

>> H. R. McMaster: That often, I mean, almost always, they have to be combined. And you see quite a bit of kind of just blunt use of force, right? Massive artillery, use of artillery to the extent that we're almost running out of it.

The importance of protected mobility and mobile protected firepower, and tiered and layered air defense and long range precision strike. And now, of course, with probably a renewed Ukrainian offensive engineering capabilities integrated into maneuver formations. And this is what we understand and have understood across our careers. Combined arms, air, ground operations, now augmented quite heavily with electronic warfare, drones, operations in cyberspace, in the information domain.

What do you think that the experience in Ukraine portends for future war? And what would your priorities be today as Chief of the Defense Staff or as Secretary of Defense here in the United States, to really make sure that forces are prepared to deter conflict. But if necessary, to fight and win in future war?

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I mean, I think one thing that we've reminded ourselves about repeatedly over the course of the last year or so, looking into Ukraine, is the nature of war doesn't change. It is essentially a political interaction between human beings. It's visceral, it's violent, and it's bloody, and it's Very, very challenging in terms of the friction that it brings with it, And I think we've been repeatedly reminded of that throughout the last year or so.

But the character of warfare is evolving, and I think the extent to which the Ukrainians are innovating. The extent to which they've brought together the whole enterprise of their society in order to be able to fight for their existence, has been really rather remarkable and most impressive to see.

And of course, they've used lots of things that are essentially available in your normal daily life, whether that's 3D printing in back rooms, that are creating small drones that are then brought forward by a girl on a bicycle to the soldier in the frontline trench, or whatever it might be.

They are, I think, demonstrating the level of ingenuity that comes when you're faced by an existential challenge in the way that they obviously are. So I think there's some good lessons there, but I think going back to my point about data. I think how they have exploited data, the way in which they have used commercial satellites provided by an American in order to be able to draw really quite interesting and real time information from that battlefield.

Then to be able to translate that information into intelligence that can inform a targeting process in real time, then to apply Uber technologies to the way in which they've manoeuvred their artillery pieces around that battlefield. In order to be able to strike high value targets and be selective about it, I think, is an indication of what our armed forces in the future are gonna have to be able to do.

Now, the point I made a moment ago about our rather clunky procurement processes, these are not going to enable that. I mean, what Ukraine has demonstrated, because it had to, is you've got to be very agile in the way that you develop these things. It is a laboratory in which they are experimenting.

And our militaries need to find a way of getting over the processes that we currently have in order to be able to embrace the level of technological experimentation and development that they're showing on the ground.

>> H. R. McMaster: And with a sense of urgency. And, of course, we served, both of us, in Germany, during the Cold War and then saw the changes in European security that occurred after the end of the Cold War, through the 1990s.

But then, in the two thousands, it seemed as if we failed to adapt to what was a growing and more discernible threat from a resurgent Russia or a Russia that had designs to threaten European security. We continued to reduce defense budgets, European nations in particular. And I know that it was difficult for you to see the severe reductions in the British army, for example.

I mean, Germany, I think, for all intents purposes unilaterally disarmed, I mean, the Bundesvir that we knew is gone. And now there seems to be a recognition that that has to be reversed. What are your predictions about follow through on that? On the ability to not only to modernize more rapidly and have a sense of urgency about, as you're mentioning.

But also maybe to increase the capacity of the armed forces under the recognition that turned out to be inadequate for deterrence and may be needed in the future. And, of course, we hope not, but it does take really, forces that have sufficient capability and capacity can operate for ample scale and duration to win and to demonstrate that to a potential adversary so they don't have the temerity for aggression.

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I mean, I think it will be quite challenging, notwithstanding the moment of the Ukraine war, to reverse decades of decline. The peace dividend has been spent many times over already by European countries and to a degree, the United States as well, and somehow one has to reverse that.

And I think the thing that is most worrying is the extent to which European militaries are hollow, because it's not the stuff you can necessarily see on display which matters, leopard, two tanks or attack helicopters, what it might be. It's what you've got in your ammunition bunkers, it's what you've got in your locker of precision missiles and weapon systems.

It's all of that stuff that,-

>> H. R. McMaster: you cut parts.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Exactly, and that, of course, we've had seen in spades in terms of, from Russia's perspective as well. I mean, they were much more hollow than any of us might have imagined. But how you reverse that hollowness and how you therefore give yourself the basic resilience to be genuinely ready, that is gonna take a very long time to change, not least because our defence industries are not tooled to be able to do this.

And I was reading an article in the London Daily Telegraph last week about the US Army Scranton ammunition factory, which makes 155 ammunition, and at maximum capacity at the moment, they can turn out 11,000 shells a month. Well, the reality, of course, is that the Ukrainians are going through 7000 shells a week.

Well, don't turn to Europe, because our industry's certainly not gonna be able to backfill any of that. And it's those sorts of things which are dull and there aren't many votes in it which are gonna have to be addressed if we are serious about providing the sort of hard power deterrence which is gonna be necessary against a Russia that's not going away anytime soon.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Right, and to generate the will to make those investments. And I think, obviously, the lead time, as you're mentioning, is machine tools for this particular plant, but then there are supply chain complications as well. Well, I hope that we do generate the will, but it remains to be seen, in the US, as you know, there are more investments now in the defense industrial base, but they're inadequate in terms of the scale.

And once you give up capacity, it's very difficult to build it back, you mentioned already that war really is a contest of wills. When I look at really the stain of 2021, of August 2021 and the humiliating withdrawal from Kabul, I see that as mainly a failure of will.

We heard for many years, there's no military solution to Afghanistan, but the Taliban came up with one. And they came up with one in large measure, because I think we engaged in self defeat based on self delusion in a number of areas. The Taliban were not terrorists, there's a bold line between them and the Haqqani network and al Qaeda and so forth.

The Taliban was really Taliban 2.0, that they would be more benign and respectful of human rights and women's rights in particular, or that the Taliban was going to somehow share power. And I think this all, to me at the time, seemed like a pipe dream. But when we prioritized withdrawal over the achievement of an aim consistent with what brought us into that war to begin with back, all the way back in 2001.

I think that that's when the writing was on the wall for what we saw as the humiliation. But I'd just like to ask you if deterrence really is capability times will, is our will zero, or can we rekindle our will and then. And then also reconstitute it, and what's your view of that difficult, what we witnessed and the afghan people experienced in terms of the withdrawal and surrender, I would say surrender withdrawal from Afghanistan?

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Yeah, I mean, it was an extraordinarily painful moment, and I was the CDS at the time, so the equivalent of the chairman sitting over the top of it. And I had spent about three years of my life in the country and many other years of my life devoted to the country, so for me, it was a very personally painful period to see that happen.

And I very much agree with you, I mean, I think it indicated a failure of political will, and, of course, if you put that on top of. Of the way that we performed from 2014 onwards in relation to Putin's invasion of Crimea. Small wonder that he thought he could get away with what he's doing in Ukraine now, cuz it does demonstrate that extent to which you're prepared to put up for what you really believe in.

Now, it's nonetheless a very complex question, isn't it, how the Afghan campaign unfolded. And I think the strategy that you developed when you were national security adviser was a sustainable strategy. And I think if that had been seen through, I think it could have been done so at a level which was not only sustainable in terms of human lives, but also sustainable in terms of the economics of it.

And it's a sadness that it didn't happen. But I think you mentioned 2001, and, of course, the reality of all of this is that we know that wars ultimately end in a conversation. And the trick is to make sure that you have an inclusive conversation in order to be able to create an inclusive political solution at the end of that conversation.

And I think that we thought, probably rather hubristically back in 2001, that we had defeated the enemy. Job done. And indeed, you'll recall that Donald Rumsfeld actually wanted us to leave pretty quickly thereafter.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, I mean, a lot of people remember the mission accomplished speech that President Bush gave.

But forget that Secretary Rumsfeld was making a very similar speech in Afghanistan that same day, saying, hey, we're out of here.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: And of course, maybe that would have been the right thing to do looking back on it. But if you are gonna stay and you are essentially gonna get involved in nation build, which is, of course, what it became, then you need to understand the local politics very comprehensively.

And you need to be very strategically patient in terms of how you're gonna develop the country that you're trying to build. Because going back to when we were talking about democracies, the reality of democracies, they're based upon sound and solid institutions. And when you look at Afghanistan, we invested a lot of money in trying to build an Afghan army as a key institution.

But we didn't invest much effort in building a civil service or any of the other institutions that we take for granted in countries like yours and mine. So I think you have to look at the whole campaign over a 20 year period to really understand what went wrong in 2021, and whether there was any way back, I don't know.

But I do believe that the sort of things that you were talking about doing in 2017 were probably the things that might have made a difference.

>> H. R. McMaster: And even when we put those in place, I wonder if they were too late. I think that this short term approach to what was a long term problem in Afghanistan actually lengthened the war and made it more costly.

And I hope that we're just not learning the exact diametrically or the opposite lessons, the wrong lessons from the war, which is like, hey, we'll just never have to do that again. And it just reminds me of the army I came into after Vietnam, when the officers with whom I interacted as a cadet at West Point never spoke of you enough.

We were just never gonna have to do that again, that being a counterinsurgency. And, of course, that the latter parts of our career were spent fighting counter insurgency.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: I remember my father telling me that when he went through the staff college at Camberley as a major in the early 1960s, World War I was not discussed.

You didn't talk about it, it was a disaster. Now, we all know, having studied World War I since then, that, of course, there were some amazingly positive lessons to be learned from that experience. Not least the 100 day campaign at the end of World War I, so I absolutely agree with you.

There is a risk that we shelve these things and we don't learn and then, importantly, apply the lessons looking forward. So whilst I think our politicians wouldn't want to get involved in an intervention like Iraq or Afghanistan again, the reality is that other countries are gonna be involved in similar problems to the ones that we encountered in Afghanistan.

And when you go to many African nations now, they will need advice on how to deal with Islamic insurgencies, and Islamic extremism, and the terrorism associated with it. And the lessons that we have learned from our experience in Afghanistan will be useful to them to be applied in order to try and deal with their problems.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: Absolutely. And I think that we have to avoid this false dilemma that, well, Afghanistan wasn't Denmark, so it was a failure, it didn't need to be Denmark. And I think nation building is a fool's errand, especially if you try to nation build in your own image. But the consolidation of gains, as you know, has never been an optional phase in war, unless it's a raid.

But I'd like to talk with you more about the writing that you're doing and the thinking that you're doing about future war. What are you doing these days and how are you organizing your thoughts about what you'd like to write and explain to readers and audiences about future armed conflict and its relation to politics, for example.

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Yes, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be with you here at Stanford. And indeed, the director just asked me if I'll do another year. So I'm really delighted about that, because what better place to be able to get your thinking in order and what better, better basis of talent to draw upon to develop that thinking in the right direction.

And for me, I think what I want to study, perhaps less about the technology of future war. A lot of people have written about artificial intelligence and drones and robots and all this sort of good stuff. What I'm much more interested in is the political dimension of warfare.

And what I would propose to do, I think, is to write a book probably in two parts. A part where I would draw upon my 20 years experience in Afghanistan, and then a part where I would draw probably the last ten years of my military career. Where as a chief of staff and then ultimately as the chief of the defense staff, one was engaged in the challenge of modern deterrence and the threat that was coming from Russia particularly.

And the challenge that was coming from China, and how one approaches that sense of deterrence in the context of political warfare and everything that that stands for. And how one then sought, in a sense, to try and get the armed forces to understand its role in a subordinate capacity to all of the instruments of statecraft that are necessary to prevail in those circumstances.

On the Afghan thing, in many ways, I'm probably quite trite to say it, but I think that the clasp dictum that war is an extension of politics is slightly reversed in Afghanistan. And probably encounter insurgencies more generally, where actually what you're really doing is armed politics. And ironically, in a way, the politics is an extension of the war.

And what you have to do, I think, is to understand how you can therefore use tools, often short of kinetic, lethal tools, in order to be able to have the sorts of conversations that probably lead to stability and how that all plays through. And much of what we achieved in Southern Afghanistan from 2010 onwards was in essentially a political campaign rather more than a military campaign.

And I think that angle is something that will be useful to countries that are struggling with that sort of insurgency at the moment.

>> H. R. McMaster: I think that's a really important insight. I think what was necessary in Afghanistan was to harden Afghanistan against the regenerative capacity of the Taliban, which lied mainly across the border in Pakistan.

And to do that, you had to strengthen government institutions and functions enough to be able to withstand it. And of course, I think when we were talking to the Taliban in Doha, we maybe ought to be. We should have been talking to Afghans and forcing Afghans to talk to one another, to become stakeholders in strength of institutions rather than many of them who would become stakeholders of state weakness as they pursued their own kind of particularistic agendas.

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: You know that old Afghan joke, God came to Afghanistan several hundred years ago and saw the nature of the problem, and he said to them, don't do anything till I come back. And of course, that is always the challenge. Getting, I found in my many years in Afghanistan, it was trying to get the Afghans to own the problem.

And it was very difficult sometimes because I think they thought That you Westerners knew the answer to all these problems. But actually it was their answers that we really needed.

>> H. R. McMaster: Well, what sad for me is I would have been fine with this, just leaving, but I was really disconcerted about the degree to which we seem to side with the Taliban against the Afghan government on our way out.

Delivering blow after blow, not having the Afghans with us during negotiations, forcing them to release 5,000 and then 2,000 more prisoners, withdrawing our air intelligence support, not actively targeting the Taliban, removing our contractor support. I mean, it seemed as if we were siding with the Taliban against the Afghan government.

And I would hear these complaints about Ashraf Gandhi, who we both know very well. And I would just say, okay, do you prefer Haibetullah Alcanzada, really? So I think that was what was most disheartening for me. And it's gonna take me a while, obviously, to get over this.

But of course, the Afghans are really the ones bearing the brunt of the consequences. What do you think we should be doing now in terms of what we've learned from everything we've discussed? And this might be the wrap up conversation here. We've seen the first major war in Europe since World War II.

We see an increasingly aggressive China. I mean, from bludgeoning Indian soldiers to death in the homeland frontier to trying to own the ocean in the South China Sea to threatening Taiwan. We see us really partnerships weakening with critical, reliable partners in Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and the Chinese extending their influence into the region.

This peace deal between or not peace deal, really, it's really a reestablishment of relationship rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. What can we learn from these recent experiences? But what can we do about it? What should we be prioritizing now? We being the United States, the UK, Europe, Japan, Australia, like minded countries?

 

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Yes, I mean, I think that you'll recall George Kennan and that George Kennan moment when he sent the long telegram back in 1947 to the State Department from Moscow. Making the point that he didn't think we would be able to live in peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union in the direction it was going.

And of course, that led to the Truman doctrine, and the Truman doctrine became a bipartisan doctrine. And of course, we all, as NATO allies, got in behind it. And of course, history would judge that it was very successful as the Cold War came to an end at the end of the 1980s.

And I think in a way, we almost need another moment where we recognize the nature of the problem, and as a collective group of like-minded nations, we work out what the strategy should be to deal with the problem. And, of course, I mean, very dangerous to use class fits twice in a conversation, but I'm going to use them again.

 

>> H. R. McMaster: What do you expect from watched-up generals?

>> H. R. McMaster: This is, as my daughter would say, hash, predictable.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: But I think one of the things he did say was that the first requirement on a leader or a commander is to work out what sort of war you're going to prosecute.

Now, I'm not suggesting we're going to war, I hasten to add, and we've got to do everything we can to avoid that happening, but we need to work out what is the problem and what we're going to do to solve that problem collectively. And my bet is that's going to require strategy.

And strategy is a word that policymakers don't necessarily like having thrown in their faces at the moment. And I think it requires us to recognize that so much of the challenge we're up against is a technological challenge. And what China is doing to the world is deliberately putting its technology throughout the world, and then what will follow from its technology will be its ideology.

And that is the challenge that we're up against. And the reality is that people are opening their arms to Chinese technology because it comes with not many strings attached. This sort of so-called.

>> H. R. McMaster: It's a great deal, right?

>> General Sir Nick Carter: It is, it's a great deal. And you probably know this BeiDou, which is their equivalent of GPS, means the Big Dipper, it's extraordinarily accurate.

And that's the beginning of a city like Nairobi becoming a smart city, using Chinese technology to become that smart city. And pretty quickly, surveillance will follow. And what follows with surveillance? The opportunity for governments to behave like authoritarian governments. And this is the sort of problem we're up against.

And if we don't think about how we're going to help others to avoid getting sucked into that technological dilemma, then we've got a problem.

>> H. R. McMaster: Absolutely, I mean, the Philippines essentially did it. Now they're tryna figure out how the hell they reduce their exposure to it. Well, General Nick Carter, I can't thank you enough for helping us learn about battlegrounds critical to our future and hopefully a future of peace and prosperity.

And it's just wonderful to have you here at Hoover. Great to see you, thank you so much.

>> General Sir Nick Carter: Well, thanks, HR. It's a great privilege to be here, and it's wonderful to be back with you.

>> Speaker 2: Battlegrounds is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society.

For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.