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Host
Iran peace deal Moscow in flames Rest in peace Indo Paycom hello, robot.
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Poet/Reader
Com.
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Host
Today. Joining us is Eli Ratner, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo Pacific Security affairs in the Biden administration, now a principal at the Marathon Initiative. We got the sparkly America garb in honor of defeating Australia this afternoon. I was going to make Australia jokes, but honestly I feel like we've beat up on them for far too much over the past two years for me to really lay it on thick. Who wants to kick us off with a little some thoughts on the Iran war deal?
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Brian
We obviously have seen an agreement to not shoot at each other for a while in the hopes that we come up with a longer term agreement that will keep us from shooting at each other for a longer while. The agreement seems like it's fairly well in Iran's favorite. The conditions that we're going to be operating under are going to be worse than we had before the war started. So I generally think that's going to be considered a loss for the US Side. The question now is how long does Iran drag this out? Because that's their normal M.O. they're going to drag these negotiations out forever. And we'll have this sort of muddy status of the Strait of Hormuz in which people eventually have to reach some agreement with Iran to have unfettered access. So the shipping companies can feel comfortable, you know, continuing to use the passage. But at the same time, the economy around the world has shifted to accommodate a reduction in flow from the Persian Gulf. So we're going to have now different supply chains and different players are becoming more prominent in the energy world. So we've upset the apple cart both economically and geopolitically as a result of this war and spent some money. And obviously people were killed in the process, which is terrible. But you know, in the end, what did we really get out of it? And are we, do we anticipate seeing long term impacts that are maybe beneficial overall or is this going to be just all downside going forward for anybody except Iran?
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Jordan
So I was trying to do the math yesterday in my head of how much this war cost. And it's hard to do that because, you know, there's a bunch of stuff behind the wall and you know, long term costs.
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Eli Ratner
But you know, I think you could
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Jordan
roughly say we probably spent somewhere between $200 billion worth of munitions alone, including ISR, support, time, everything, right? Then you've got the 300 billion in reconstruction funds that you're going for and then the tens, if not hundreds upon billions of Dollars that cost the world economy through this. Right. So you're looking at close to a trillion dollar war for what is essentially what did we get out of this? Because now it sounds like Iran's still going to keep its missiles. It might keep its quote, unquote, nuclear dust. And we've lost freedom of navigation as the foundation of American foreign policy. That has been the foundation for the last 250 years.
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Tony
Generally you can tell who's on the losing side and who's on the winning side by who is the first actor, who is the one who has to do something first to show commitment to the plan to allow the process to continue. And in this case, the US had to remove the blockade. That was the first condition for the rest of the steps in the mou, as it was spelled out, the US had to break down, I think by Friday, I think by today had to have removed the vestiges of the blockade and allow for free movement of Iranian vessels for the rest of the conditions to continue. That that is generally a sign that they are on the receiving end of whatever the, you know, the output is. What we now have is we have a younger, conceivably more hardline Iranian government that has just been taught that they can withstand American firepower and now wield a global economic weapon.
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Brian
So I'm always going to try to look at the bright side here. So one bright side is we just did a war game in Japan a couple weeks ago while this war was happening and they were taking some, some satisfaction in the fact that the Iran was standing up to the US attacks not because they like Iran, but because they were looking at, okay, well could we withstand those kinds of attacks? And is this evidence that maybe the firepower strike complex approach that China has maybe isn't quite up to the, the challenges of 21st century war fighting and adaptation. So do Taiwan and Japan take some comfort in the fact that maybe they can stand up to an outside aggressor in the way that Iran does? Just because the way that technology's evolved and the way you can adapt to come up with new ways to fight, even in the, you know, when you're subjected to a relatively large set of strike packages?
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Eli Ratner
Yeah, and I was in Taiwan just a few weeks ago and heard exactly the same thing. So there is, there is some solace to be taken in that. I guess the question I have going forward is almost every actor in this event does not want the war to continue, maybe minus Israel or Netanyahu. So I think the question is like, where does the rubber really meet the road on this MoU, because there's, there's just going to be after a suspension of disbelief on both sides. And as it relates to the straight Hormuz, as it relates to the nuclear issue, can both sides just pretend that they're agreeing to something that can last? Or at some point is there going to be a definitive moment that proves, rightly or wrongly, that one, one actor is doing one thing or the other? And I just think for the administration, they're not going to pile back. Certainly the international community doesn't want to see that. The Democrats don't want to see that either. So everyone kind of wants us to work, even though I think everybody knows the inner the Venn diagram between what Iran is talking about and what the administration is talking about feels like almost zero. But does that get exposed or do we just all kind of pretend that it's working and this is going to roll and roll, the 60 days is going to roll to another 60 days and then we're going to find ourselves, you know, in 2028 and this is going to be problem of the next administration to tie up.
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Brian
So, Eli, what do you how do you think this impacts the Asian players? Right. So you've got China and India, I guess, have made some separate peace with Iran and have been able to get their oil flow and gas flow coming out, but Japan and Australia and I guess Taiwan really haven't been able to do something similar. Does this shift their, you know, the relative kind of geopolitical balance between those countries because of their access to oil from the Middle East?
- [06:40]
Eli Ratner
I think they'll obviously be relieved economically. I think the Japanese and the Koreans were the most exposed among almost any country in the world. So they'll be happy to see that over. And frankly, I think they'll be happy to see the potential for the United States not to be tied down in another forever war, which I think is another question on top of this, which is like, what is the force posture that the Trump administration is going to keep in the region throughout this period? And is the message going to be if you don't do what we're asking you to do, we're going back to war. And for that to be a credible threat, are they going to have to keep a certain amount of force in the region, which again is going to take away from the benefits of actually being able to draw down from that conflict? But I think the folks, the Asian partners that I've been talking to were really worried watching assets moving from Asia over to the Middle east, watching the inventories draw down and then seeing another potentially multi year commitment into the future. So I think on balance they'll be happy to see this thing winding down. For sure.
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Tony
Yeah. I mean like, that's actually one of the, one of the things too. Like to your point, the murky language in some of the MOU is like, you know, keeping forces in proximity becomes problematic because like what is proximity to Iran? Because Amman's pretty close, Qatar's pretty close, UAE is pretty close, you know, Bahrain, Bahrain's right there. Yeah. So like, what are we considering? Proximity? Because like you said, like, maybe this is the way the administration is going to be able to sell reducing the footprint in CENTCOM overall. But again, like, was this what was necessary to do that? And that's where I go back to like all my problems. Like I get like, that the war had to end, that it needed to end, that we were stuck between having to do a land invasion or continuing to show that we didn't have the firepower to be able to actually create the kind of damage that needed to be created inside of Iran to cause the, you know, the country to capitulate. And economic sanctions weren't crippling the, the, the regime and the thought they were gonna, which was predictable. But still like I, so that's, you know, like that's where a lot of my hang up comes from, is that the foundations of the, the war were
- [08:55]
Jordan
never really having been on the peninsula. I think that that's probably what we're going to see here in CENTCOM is kind of this like forced posture of like we might go to war any day. The command is going to slowly become a backwater and then every now and then you're going to have to surge forces and it's going to become this distraction. But I don't think it's going to be what CENTCOM was prior to this year.
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Brian
So. Which, yeah, well, just to jump in and say one thing, you know, is that as a Navy guy, I'll say, I think what I, you know, is going to be happening is a lot of it's going to go offshore. So we're going to take this as a rationale for, you know, decamping from the basing that we had in the Middle east, which has been largely destroyed at this point, and then we're going to end up with a bunch of stuff at sea. Yesterday I was looking at the intel plot for what's happening out in, in the, in pacom. There's not a lot of ships at sea right now out there and they're all clustered around Middle east and that this is just going to make it so that the Navy ends up stuck offshore there and isn't able to deploy to the into the westpac except for the FDNF guys that are based in Japan.
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Jordan
Well, and what's interesting is that I, and sorry to take away from this, Jordan, is that what I've heard repeatedly from the army is that this validated all of the Army's concerns that they're going to have to fight it out themselves in the first island chain. And if the Navy continues to get pulled there, then I think you're just going to see an expanded role for ground forces because there's no other option.
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Tony
I love the Air Force and I love the Navy, but the people live on the land. So the army was always going to have a job.
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Brian
That's why we joined the Navy though, is we don't want to be around the people.
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Tony
Good.
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Jordan
Yeah, you want to be around the same 200 people for nine months, breathing
- [10:29]
Tony
their air and drinking their water for six months at a time.
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Host
So at 7:15 yesterday morning, in a giant throng of Knicks fans down on Wall Street, I got asked a very sophisticated question by a friend of this Iran war 20 years from now, you know, how many paragraphs is it going to get in the AP U.S. history book? Like, is this going to be some big, you know, Vietnam style turning point? Is this like a one line Panama excursion thing? I mean, to me it, it feels like it just depends on whether or not Iran decides to get a nuclear weapon and like, what that kicks off. But I'm curious because like, it seems like our base case among the contingent here, you know, folks just muddle along for a while. But in what, you know, what are the trajectories where this actually becomes, well, I'll either muddles along for a while or, you know, we have a war in two years and don't have any missiles to fight it and that's like not great. But are there, what are the other pathways where this ends up reverberating even more loudly in the coming.
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Jordan
I think it depends entirely if we go to war with the PRC in a few years. If we don't, then yeah, you probably get a big section. If we do, then yeah, there's probably, you know, British adventures in Africa prior to World War I kind of section at most.
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Brian
Eli, what do you think that does this, you know, really, do you think this should impact our decision making in terms of how kind of forward leaning we are in terms of our efforts to, you know, reassure our allies or push back on Chinese aggression.
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Eli Ratner
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously the readiness question and the defense industrial based question, which is right at the center of this. So that, that, I guess my answer to Jordan's question, I think is if the war winds down or doesn't reignite, it feels to me very sort of personalistic to Trump and something that if what the administration needs to do vis a vis deterrence in the Indo Pacific is largely separate from this. And in many ways, I think a lot of folks were at the beginning of the Iran war asking the question of, well, with the Trump administration invading Iran, does that mean that now Xi Jinping is going to invade Taiwan? And my answer to that was it's gone probably from like very low probability to low probability that it's not. The factors that are constraining or deterring Xi Jinping right now are not being flipped by the war or in Iran in any. I mean, certainly not from like the international norms perspective, but I think also from his own calculations around how he's looking at politics in the United States, politics in Taiwan, his own corruption issues within his military, and then what the balance of forces actually looks like across the Strait. So I think this affects some of those things, but I don't think it's absolutely fundamental. And it's just a question of like, can the administration get back to the business of strengthening deterrence in the Indo Pacific, which I don't think they have been doing at an A level over the last 18 months. And is there a degree to which maybe, you know, the Iran war will open up some like diplomatic, senior official space to do some of that work? And I don't know, because the Iran issue, even if it is a muddle through issue, it may be sort of an intensive effort inside the administration and that's what folks are focused on. But what we need to be doing is supporting Taiwan, strengthening Taiwan's defense and resilience, strengthening our alliances and partnerships, and focusing on our posture in the Indo Pacific, which I'm not sure is moving as fast as it needs to be in Japan and the Philippines and elsewhere. So there's a ton of work to do in the Indo Pacific that I think is going to be more decisive than what's happening in Iran. So I think there's like a lot of downside if it goes sideways, but I don't think it has been to Jordan's question. Kind of a defining hinge of Indo
- [14:31]
Tony
Pacific security oh, and I think that looking at that question, like, it's hard to do the prediction on like where I think that's going to fall in the history books. But what I will say is that early on in the Iran war, we had defender people that were defending the administration's move, talking about how we had just cut off this large percentage of oil that was going to be able to go to China and we were pressuring China and we were pressuring their infrastructure and we were putting them in a place where they were going to be shown how weak they are. If you want to believe that, if that's the argument you've made and now you're making an agreement where now Iran can legally export oil at whatever price and can full tilt their industry, what you've started to develop is that rationale has gone out the door and you've started to build a system where now we don't even have that control because we've set a new norm in the Middle East. So all these oil suppliers that we used to have, like, because we were the regional protectors and because we were the hegemon and because, you know, pick the reason we had the ability to get them to kind of not support the PRC should they go into conflict. That's where the chain of events goes. In my mind that could be the most damning is if we have a new norm in the Middle east and that energy supply for China is now secure long term in the event of a conflict, that kind of changes the dynamic from what the administration and administration backers were. The argument they were making for taking action in Iran two weeks, three weeks into the conflict.
- [16:09]
Eli Ratner
Yeah, we would still have means, military and economic to really squeeze them on the energy front if we needed to, even if they have a greater control over the Strait itself. But I agree with you broadly that I never bought these arguments, whether it was Venezuela or Iran, that somehow this was a three dimensional chess play against the prc. There might be folks who were thinking that, but again, I would just go back to the problem is that that only makes sense if you're actually putting forward a strong deterrent in the Indo Pacific. And if you're holding up arms sales to Taiwan, if you're not backing Prime Minister Takechi when the PRC is crunching down on her, if you're like cratering the US India relationship, then don't tell me that you're prioritizing deterrence against China. So I just feel like the relative weakness of the policy in the Indo Pacific just means it's not credible to say that we're doing these other things in other, other theaters for China purposes.
- [17:03]
Tony
You've seen, like, the FT and some of the American, like, economic reporters that are saying, like, oh, China is propping up the world's, you know, the global oil markets right now by lowering their imports. And they're saying that that's been like, the. What we've been shown in this, in this conflict. But I really wonder, like, is it just that China doesn't need the imports anymore? Like, is their economy at the point for strengths or weaknesses? And I'm not trying to determine which one it is. Their economy just is in a point where it doesn't need the amount of oil that it was importing. And this gave them the ability to actually lower that.
- [17:37]
Eli Ratner
Yeah, this is a super important question that I hope the US Intelligence community is really trying to understand in a granular way, because, yes, there was a general assumption over the last decade that China was trying to reduce its dependence on imported oil, but still the largest importer of crude oil in the world by far, and needing that for its military and transportation and its industry. And it's been doing a lot of things with renewables and diversification, coal for electrification to try to draw down those needs. And it does seem to have been relatively resilient throughout this period. But I think the jury's still out on that. And it does. I think the reports that I'm hearing from folks inside China is that they were coming to the end of their rope in terms of being able to sustain this already. So I don't think, what I don't think we know is in a protracted conflict, where are the pressure points that the United States could still apply on China's energy needs? Because it certainly doesn't have indigenous resources that it can apply to this in an endless capacity. But it also isn't the case that it's going to be an easy shutting off the switch. So understanding exactly where those vulnerabilities are is like a really important analytical task for the next 612 months.
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Tony
Yeah.
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Brian
So the other thing, though, that that raises is thinking about protraction as a strategy for how do you counter China and how do you demonstrate the ability to support protraction? Right. Because the, if you're, if you're going to use the energy tool against them, you need to have a way to fight long enough for that tool to take hold. And so to what degree do we need to encourage our allies in the region to think about the kind of Finland approach, you know, to what, you know, we were talking about, Justin was mentioning earlier about being resilient. How do I withstand an assault by China for long enough so that things like energy blockades can start to really pinch them in a way that makes them think twice about continuing the conflict?
- [19:30]
Eli Ratner
Well, and the maybe bad news on that front is the PRC has been preparing for a protracted conflict for years now. And I think in a funny way I feel like what we started to see three, four years ago was some recognition in Beijing that the short sharp invasion maybe wasn't going to be the only kinetic path and that it was kind of a barbell strategy and they might have to start thinking about the other end of the barbell for protraction. And you have this concept of fortress economy and whether it's food, energy, across the board levels of resilience. And obviously we have not done anything like that as a society, much less necessarily as a military, to be able to think about that. So I think one, and it's sort of similar on our side, I think once we started, certainly not to get comfort, but got conceptually our heads around the question of what does a denial strategy look like. And to the extent that maybe we see a way forward in a light at the end of the tunnel of being able to blunt an initial invasion, which I think we're getting pretty close to, at least from knowing what we need to do, even if we haven't done all of it, then it opens up this question of protraction and there's a lot of really hard questions associated with that. And then obviously the economics come into that as well.
- [20:43]
Brian
Right?
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Eli Ratner
Yeah.
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Brian
And also what the other countries are able to do in the region. Right. Because they have to be able to, they might need to be able to survive for the first few weeks almost on their own. Right. Because the US may be unable to really provide as much support as I think they're expecting. So have you seen like with Taiwan or Japan or Australia, an effort to make themselves able to withstand that initial assault without US forces being like embedded with them?
- [21:10]
Eli Ratner
Well, certainly Taiwan, I mean the, the, one of the major efforts that we had inside the previous administration was trying to drive Taiwan forward on this issue of resilience because, you know, even under best of circumstances we're going to need to them to hold out for some period of days. And so we worked with them on an interagency basis, not just the military, but from a whole of government setting from like an NSC to NSC capacity. And I think we got quite a distance and again, I mentioned, I was just there a couple weeks ago. Well, the, you know, there's been a lot of swirl around the defense budget and the opposition and how that's all playing out domestically inside Taiwan on the resilience front. They've made a lot of headway. And I had the opportunity to go over to the Interior Ministry and get some briefings on what the fire departments are doing and the police departments at the local level to prepare people for these kind of crises and eventualities. And it's pretty impressive to the extent that you guys have been there. They have these little booklets prepared that tell folks what they need to do. And I think they're making good progress there. And one of the interesting parts about this, actually, in some ways one of the, I guess, striking insights that I had or observations while I was there was that, you know, again, if you went back a few years and you were talking to Taiwan officials, let's say you go back five years to the Tsai administration and you were talking to senior officials there, what they would say is, yeah, we know we got to get prepared, but we also need to do it in a very careful way because if we sort of spook the population and tell them, you know, war's coming, get prepared, like, number one, it's
- [22:52]
Tony
not going to work.
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Eli Ratner
Number two, it's probably not going to work politically. So particularly with the KMT putting forward a critique of the DPP as like the warmongering, walking us into devastating war party critique. So you got to do it carefully, that that was sort of Tsai Ing Wen's style anyway. And President Lai has clearly had a different playbook. He's been very public about the nature of the threat, the need for society to prepare itself. And I think there was some concern when he started doing that that the either politically or again, from a public opinion perspective, that there was going to be a rejection of that kind of effort and tone. And I think what they've seen is actually the complete opposite, that even while the country's very divided politically, that they have found that folks want to be prepared. They want to know what they should do. And I think the Lai administration has been encouraged by the degree which the Taiwan public has welcomed that. And, you know, he's chairing these resilience committees himself quarterly. It's sort of a very public thing. So I think bringing that conversation into the public has been really successful. And that's a huge part of this because it obviously not only addresses the big invasion problem, but it addresses all of the levels of coercion down from blockade and quarantine and other types of economic coercion that are much more likely to occur. So to the extent that the Taiwans have steeled themselves against that, at least for a period of time, I think that makes things a lot harder for Beijing. And I think the resilience agenda kind of sits astride the deterrence agenda is a key part of keeping the peace here.
- [24:27]
Host
So clearly, I mean, this was the, the miniseries that ended up turning the tide here. What other 10 episode shows need to be made to get people's national security heads right? What's the like 10 part rebuild the dib? Let's like make more than 200 patriots a year.
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Tony
You mean in the US or HBO drama?
- [24:50]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
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Tony
I mean in the US like, I. That's actually a great one because I think, Eli, you earlier in the year had a discussion where you were talking about the potential for the Dems to turn this into a, a winning strategy. And I think, you know, what we've seen is, to borrow Tony's term, a bullshit detente right now that we have with China. So I think first thing is just like something that caused that out and like what that actually looks like because like the, the whole point of like this emerging Daytona over the last 18 months has been a major critique of Trump. One coming in was we have not seen China clearly. And then there was like all this push with his NSC and his, you know, State Department to like see and categorize the Chinese threat clearly. And then again, Trump too, we get kind of what we're seeing now.
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Eli Ratner
I think what you're raising here is such an important question and I'd be interested in. Jordan, you're kind of asking, you're putting your finger on it, which is how do you mobilize politically in the United States to deal with at least what a segment of the national security community and the economic and tech community see as a, you know, a tsunami coming at the United States and people not really being attuned to it. And I think it's a hard question because the very broad geopolitical arguments about the China challenge, I think here in Washington, we can go to think tank events and I'll nod our head and we all agree and we understand what the nature of the challenges and what the implications are if we don't get our act together. But that's not going to motivate voters and it's not necessarily going to motivate the kind of political action that we need. So exactly how you do that and how you characterize the nature of the challenge and how you do it in a way that sort of fits with the tide of American politics right now. And that, I think, is getting back to the Iran question, actually, to the extent that the diagnosis on the war in Iran is just like, we don't need any more of that. It's not some random bad Trump policy. It's like the final play in decades of US Military overextension. And one of the things that I'm worried about is when folks from the national security come forward and say, well, like, I get that. And I thought the war in Iran was a terrible idea as well. And frankly, I thought the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan for several decades was not the right policy either. But the challenge that we are seeing from the, from China is in a different category. It's real. It's much more fundamental to US national security interests. And we need to move faster and with more urgency and with more resources to prepare ourselves for this, including for deterrence. What I'm worried about is you're going to have a segment of the political body on both sides that's like, there they go again. Here comes the military industrial complex arguing for more money, more resources, more confrontation, more militarization, like, enough is enough. And if China gets thrown into the category of the Iran threat and otherwise, I think it becomes very, very difficult. So this question of, again, you know, we are clearly kind of tracking the China debate in Washington. I think the first Trump administration into Biden, like a very healthy argument around how do we compete best against China. And I feel like that has been coming apart at the seams even actually before Trump. But to the point now where it's a total jump ball about whether we get back to a competitive policy. But it's going to require an answer to Jordan's question and it's not going to be the like big, oh my gosh, hair is burning. Don't you guys realize the, the nature of this never before seen geopolitical challenge? I think it's going to have to be more tangible. It's going to have to relate to economics and technology. And that's all there for the taking, too, including for the Democrats. So I think the, again, just, I don't know how much time you guys spend talking about politics here, but I would say to the extent that you think about the Venn diagram between what the Democrats hopefully will be putting forward, which is an agenda of renewal and affirmative rebuilding of the United States, rebuilding of our industrialization and Manufacturing in the middle class. Where does that overlap with a strategy of a China competition economic and technology strategy? And I think there's actually a lot of goodness there to do to work on.
- [29:13]
Brian
I think so. But I think what it sort of suggests is that we should be thinking about the design of the military differently going forward because buying more PAC threes and buying more of the stuff we've been buying is just going to kind of foster a small segment of the industrial or the manufacturing sector. And if we want to try to argue that this is an example of renewal and we need to compete with China more broadly, maybe we need to think about the design of the military changing to incorporate more commercially available technologies, take advantage of maybe drones and modular missiles that use commercial components and a lot of things that the department is looking at, trying to figure out how to do. But if we continue to go down the road of this very sophisticated kind of high end military that only privileges a small sector of the economy, people are just not going to buy that as being an example of renewal. It just seems like more of the same sort of defense industrial congressional complex.
- [30:09]
Eli Ratner
Well then the question for you, Brian and others is does the operational imperative then actually call for that also? Like can you get away with saying we're going to transform the military, it's going to be more integrated in this broader re industrialization project and it's actually what we need to fight wars? Or are we deluding ourselves that we can do kind of this lower end, attritable mass approach?
- [30:31]
Brian
I wouldn't say it's attributeable mass. I mean it's, it, you know, this stuff is just as sophisticated as a lot of the, you know, the, you know, specific military capabilities. But it just may not be as multi mission, it may not be, you know, as crude, it may not be quite as stealthy perhaps. But in a lot of ways those technologies are being obviated by other technologies. Right. I mean stealth is increasingly not as useful as it was in the past as new sensor technologies come along and make it able to be detected at range. So I think we've sort of sleepwalked our way into thinking that, you know, continuing to build this very sophisticated military is a necessary element of competing with China, despite the evidence that we've seen in Ukraine and Iran and elsewhere where countries have been able to stand up to more capable aggressors using a lot of commercially available technology made, made possible by digitization.
- [31:22]
Host
Well, the reason I talk about Moscow burning. Is that where you were going, Tony, or.
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Jordan
Yeah, yeah, no, I Was. I was going to, I was going to say two parts. First of all, is that like, I think to Eli's point about how do we transition to, you know, focusing on, you know, kind of a war of attrition? Right. If that's the case, that happens because we are pretty good, we have gotten pretty good at preparing for the blunting scenario, but perhaps not the drawn out war. I think that if you focus on reindustrialization from a foreign policy strategy, so long as the other foreign policy message is not let's make friends with Beijing, I think that's a winning message for the Demps. Right. Because you can do that without making it sound hawkish. On the other hand, there's also the we need to protect our industry because after what we've seen in Moscow is that nothing is safe.
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Tony
Yeah, well, Operation Spiderweb.
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Poet/Reader
Right.
- [32:15]
Tony
Like there's plenty of people who have said it's not an if, but when something like that would happen in the United States. I think that's not insane to think that. I wonder. The issue with moving away from the high end and broadcasting a move away from high end capabilities and saying that we have the most technologically sophisticated military in the world is that you start to say our military is basically the same as everybody else's. And when you've grounded a lot of American, you know, the hegemonic power capability and the, you know, the ability to kind of push our will when we need to and use the big stick and talk quietly and all that stuff like the reason we've been able to do that is because we have had the military might to be able to bring and the industrial might to be able to bring to bear should it be required. How do we need to rethink the way that we actually engage in the world is also something that has to happen. And I think that has to happen happen at at least the same time that the military reconceptualizes itself. And you know, again, I go back to Mattis who I disagreed with on a lot of things, but he, you know, either give me diplomats or give me bullets because I'm going to need one of them. And I think that's.
- [33:25]
Eli Ratner
Yeah, I would just say herein lies the problem of the, of the BS Dayton because it's not just that the Trump administration and Trump himself, one day it's this one day he loves Xi Jinping, the next day he's a hawk. Like he's kind of going back and forth. It's all fun, it's barg it's negotiating well, that's all happening. The whole world is watching this, right?
- [33:45]
Tony
Yep.
- [33:45]
Eli Ratner
And what they are seeing are two things. They are seeing the United States being an unreliable ally, like, explicitly in some instances, just through silence in other issues. And they're seeing the United States cozying up to Beijing and looking to strike its own deals, trade deals and whatnot. And if you're any of these partners, the way one of the reactions, like, you're just not going to stick your neck out when it comes to China issues, and the way that we need to mobilize on almost any of these issues is to galvanize some coalition, whether it's with the Europeans or the Australians and the Japanese and the Indians. And what I am starting to hear, what I'm talking to folks about, potentially, you talk to allies and partners, you're like, okay, I get it. You guys are concerned about the United States. Even if you got a new administration in 2029 who said, hey, we're back. Let's start working together again, you're going to have a degree skepticism because there's going to be a concern of, like, yeah, we'll work with you, but, like, there might be another Trump around the corner in four years. So we're only going to do so much. And the limiting areas where I think they're going to be most reluctant are areas where if they take competitive actions toward China and the United States pulls the rug out from under them and they're left hanging, they're going to be the most exposed. Those are the things they're going to be least likely to do. So on technology controls, trade controls, and on some of these military actions on support for Taiwan, I think you get this, like, reduction of overall energy around China, competition globally, and a little bit of an unwillingness to engage in the areas where we really need to build that coalition. So I think to me, that that's going to be almost the number one when it comes to the China challenge. Like, the US Policy is really concerning, and what we're doing vis a vis Taiwan is really concerning. But it's like, like breaking the flank, that becomes the real problem. Because these issues, many of them, we cannot handle on our own.
- [35:38]
Jordan
To that note, when you talk to den politicians, either at national level, state level, if you do, and war is politics by the means. So this show is politics by the means. Like, what questions do they have for you about China? Because something that we've talked a lot about on the show is how do you rebuild the foreign policy establishment? And I'M curious if there's even a broader interest from politicians in doing China policy.
- [36:02]
Eli Ratner
I think there's an interest, but I think it's just seen as a really hard problem. I think, you know, one of the, the question I often get is like, how should I talk to my constituents about the China challenge? And my answer is always like, look, dude, you are the politician. Like that is, that is like, you're done.
- [36:19]
Host
I got my Poli Sci Ph.D. yeah,
- [36:22]
Eli Ratner
but it's not going to be, it's not going to be like, go back and tell them the list of horrors that are going to occur if Beijing has effective control over the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait. It's just not really going to work. And so I think part of the issue is how do you harness very sort of politically salient events to try to motivate action, whether it's Covid or the spy balloon or some of these other things. Of course we don't want to have to wait for a crisis. But then I think it's a question again, how do you, I think as, as we've been sort of talking around here, like, how do you put the China issue in the background and foreground China competition actions within a competitive landscape? Because I think the question how do I explain to my constituencies why we would go to war over Taiwan? Or how do I explain to them that we have these tariffs that are making everything more expensive or why aren't we working with them on curing cancer and climate change and these other issues? And it's a pretty sophisticated or at least complex answer about how you balance that and why competition is still important. But I think, again, I think the way forward is going to be situating it within favorable domestic political zones. And I think there are definitely ways to do that. I think the hard part comes in how do you deal with the China competition issues that fall outside of that comfortable nest of re industrialization and renewal. And that's where it gets more tricky. And that's where you're going to have a hard time making an argument about cranking our defense industrial base at a time when it's possible that Democratic candidates are going to be coming forward and saying, you got to be kidding me, with a trillion dollar defense, I mean, not even 1.5, but with a trillion, like we're taking the top line down and let's talk about that. So don't tell me about your new big defense spend that you're going to do to deal with missile defense or counter UAS priorities. So I think making that argument is going to be, going to be difficult, but it's doable and maybe it's going to require trade offs in other regions, but the rest of the world's going to have a vote and all that.
- [38:24]
Brian
So Eli, we've been doing a bunch of war gaming and research with Australia and Japan over the last couple of years and both countries, as you'd expect, are focused a lot more on their self defense, recognizing the fickleness of the US Potential support. So is there a way to argue for U.S. support to these allies in the context of China? If we can argue, hey, they're doing a better job of defending themselves and if they can hold up for a couple of weeks against a Chinese assault, we owe it to them to be able to back them up. So we're not looking to go to war with China over Taiwan or Japan or Australia, but we're looking to back them up if they are going to be faced with a Chinese attack and they've made the necessary investments and changes to be able to defend themselves for, you know, at least a couple, for the first couple of weeks. You know, so we're not now, we're not now acting as the world police. We're acting instead as a supporter of our allies. Is that more tractable or not?
- [39:25]
Eli Ratner
I think it is. And I actually think, Brian, I think you could take it a step further and argue that it's in our direct national interest that this isn't even necessarily about just defending them. I had a piece in Foreign affairs last year arguing for a the politics are maybe not in the place to do this right now, but arguing for a collective security pact between the United States, Australia, Japan and the Philippines, which I think was both viable and increasingly necessary from an alliance perspective in terms of much deeper integration on planning and force posture, command and control and other related issues. And actually politically, something like that, well, it feels like that would be the United States sort of deepening alliances in some ways. On the other hand, we already have bilateral defense treaties with all of these countries and what that means really in practice, if we had a collective defense agreement is that those countries would be contributing more. And so I think if the message continues to be, and I think this is talk about like continuity from Trump to whatever comes next, I think the allies doing more theme and pulling their own weight and paying their fair share will continue. It may have a slightly different tone to it, but I think the, the overall thrust will be similar. But I think the argument is, look, Australia, Japan, Philippines, a little Bit different. They've got a little bit longer ways to go. But nonetheless, if Japan and Australia are more capable and are more integrated and are willing to play, especially Japan, more significant roles and missions in potential conflict, like, that's good for us, that's not us carrying more burden. And in some ways that's allowing us to reduce our risk a little bit. And that's particularly true. And what is so frustrating on the Taiwan question to see the Trump administration, in part because of the BS detente, postponing these arms sales and reducing defense engagements and political engagements with Taiwan, is that the stronger Taiwan is, that is drawing risk down for US Forces, as you know, and that that affects the type of forces and the degree with which we have to flow forces into the first island chain. So this is all for buying down risk for U.S. forces. And I have heard people making the argument, I don't have a mathematical equation to show you, but actually dollar for dollar, to a certain extent, supporting Taiwan's military is better for the United States in terms of return on investment than more money to the US Military. So I think if we're in that headspace, more missions, more frontline activity from our partners, then that's a, that's a win for the United States. And this isn't about like us defending them or some act of charity.
- [42:04]
Tony
Well, and that's one of the arguments just at the end of her term. I was in AIT when Sandra Oudekirk was the director of ait. So one of the things we did is we were putting together the helping the, you know, AIT put together, like what they would think of as a resistance operating concept for Taiwan. And it was, you know, very much, much whole of society. The things like the pamphlets that the firefighters are giving out, things like, hey, how do IDPs or internally displaced persons, how do they move and how are they cared for and how are they shepherd, you know, on the island to be able to be cared for, things like that, to be able to think through before a conflict. And she'd ask, hey, what are the things that I need to go and take to the administration Taiwan on my way out, when I go and have my last sit down and kind of like, these are, these are the things that I think you need to put, pay attention to very much. She was, she got briefed and she was told and she was a firm believer in, like, this is a risk mitigation and, and a, this investment that the US Makes now by having, you know, the, the joint training team Taiwan there And by having, you know, us, you know, deep integrations with the mod there, those are all dollars that we are spending so that we do not have to spend more money next time, like having them in a better place. That was one of the things that was kind of a recurring theme during the Cold War is it's interesting height of the Cold War, there were absolutely huge disparities between the Dems and the Republicans. But our foreign policy was overwhelmingly kind of in lockstep. We understood what was. These are all goods for the nation. The fact that we've divorced from that is where a lot of this threat comes from. And getting people back in a place to where they're going to, to see, okay, they're still common goods. Like, you know, Eli, even to your point, like you, you made the point about like, you know, would they want to fund with Dems, want to fund the defense industrial base. I would make the argument that no, we're just talking about the industrial base.
- [44:04]
Eli Ratner
Yeah.
- [44:04]
Tony
Like If World War II teaches us something, it is the industrial base that matters. There's no such thing as a defense industrial base. So like, how do we get them behind that? And how do we say like, no, no, building our defense capability. It means building our, you know, industrial capability. And this is why we need to spend.
- [44:22]
Brian
Depends on the military you're building.
- [44:25]
Tony
It does. No, absolutely. And that goes back to should we redesign the military to be more open and more modular and things like that.
- [44:32]
Eli Ratner
And just a final thought before maybe jumping to another issue, but just to draw the thread between a couple of these issues, which is sort of the effects of questions about the credibility of the United States and questions about U.S. support. I mean, that is a very live conversation in Taiwan, obviously. And I will say questions Congressmen, members of Congress ask about China and Asia and Taiwan. One of the most common ones is what's the will to fight in Taiwan? Are they going to be Afghanistan or are they going to be Ukraine? And it's a very hard question to answer. But I think one of the things that I think is true and that the Taiwan self report is that that their own. This is sort of a political issue, but I think it's true from the public as well. Their own willingness to prepare and willingness to fight will be heavily predicated on their belief that there is at least a potential for the United States to support them. And if the United States is backing away and you know, concerns about talking about Taiwan. Trump used the phrase bargaining chip. I was in Taiwan just days after the Trump Xi summit that was still very fresh wound from that particular comment. And then sort of Trump parroting what sounds like talking points out of the Foreign Ministry about just the framing of the Taiwan is very far away. Taiwan's very far away. And, you know, all these issues, they had a lot of concern and it's in part support for the Taiwans. But then they're looking internally, it becomes much harder for them to galvanize resources and whatnot if the United States is not going to be supporting them. So it's another reason why the sort of ambiguity around US Support. And I heard someone joke recently that the Trump administration has moved from a policy of strategic ambiguity to just ambiguity when it comes to Taiwan, which I thought was pretty funny. But this ambiguity, it is really deleterious. And I don't think in a lot of these instances, it has the effect that maybe the Trump administration is hoping, which is they, they want allies to look over their shoulder, say, well, maybe the United States isn't going to be there, so I better get ready myself. The problem is in the Taiwan case, there is no scenario in which they independently build a military that can fight the PLA for an extended period of time. So they have a really important role, but it's not going to be wholly independent. And they do need some support from the United States. So we gotta, we gotta be there for them, at least in terms of preparation and resilience in deterrence difference.
- [47:03]
Host
Yeah, there's. There's just this spectrum of, like, expensive and like, expensive hard to justify for a. Gavin Newsom. John Ossoff, AOC Kamala Pete Buttigieg. Our top five currently on the prediction markets and a sort of like, you know, lines up with, like, broader manufacturing priorities and is just like, words, right? And, you know, saying. Saying the right things to not bum people out in Taiwan counts as words. And building, you know, very exquisite planes that, like, have no utility for many other things besides blowing stuff up is on the other side of the spectrum. And figuring out somewhere to, you know, push towards the stuff which is relatively affordable, palatable, and kind of like lines up with other kind of Dem priorities is something that folks should focus on. And I guess it's on me to just like, get all these folks on,
- [48:05]
Eli Ratner
trying to talk to, just to stick on the politics for a second, get off the Dems. Like, I think there's an important question about what is the Republican approach to the China issue and the Taiwan issue going to look like after November? Because heretofore. Brian, I think you can't. Heretofore Obviously the Republicans have been sitting back and there's been a little bit of criticism, a little bit of letter writing, but not enough. And I guess the question is, does that change after November if the R's take a real body blow and people are seeing Trump as neither sort of the horse that they want to hitch their wagon to, but also that they need to bolster their sort of natural positions on the China question themselves. So I guess it's my expectation, hope that maybe into next year there's much stronger concern and critique from the administration about some of these China issues. And I think that makes it less comfortable. Not that Trump is 100% responsive to that, but I think it makes it less comfortable for him to be in the position he's in. And then maybe we get back to a national conversation about a serious it's not going to be again some comprehensive whole of government strategy, but at least in the areas that matter most, can we get a little bit of focus and maybe even bipartisan consensus in some of these areas?
- [49:27]
Host
Yeah, we've had this whole conversation basically talking about the US as the independent variable. And I think not like, like the, the way this gets catalyzed is either you have some leader on either side of the aisle who really makes it their thing or something really obnoxious happens out of the prc. And you know, for what it's worth, we have not had something really obnoxious happen out of the prc. I don't know since like balloon, I
- [50:00]
Tony
mean, when I don't even think that. Like, I think if you really think about it like the balloon reaction was,
- [50:05]
Eli Ratner
it was, it was, that was like a week long story.
- [50:07]
Host
I mean it was really like, like,
- [50:09]
Eli Ratner
well, that was honest. That was, that's what I was saying unequivocally that that was a, I did not support that approach from the Biden administration. And I think it would have been, it would have been an opportunity to expose that issue domestically here in the United States. But also the fact that that thing was circling, they had balloons circling the globe and we had dozens and dozens of countries around the world where we knew these things were soaring right over their countries. And interestingly, just to get back to the question of what motivates people, I think the broader geopolitical stuff doesn't as much the violations of sovereignty and like balloons overhead in your country spying on you. Actually people don't love that. And we for various reasons sat on our hands on that. And I think it was a huge missed opportunity. And again, I've kind of joked, but I don't think I'm actually joking that that thing ought to be hanging in the Air and Space Museum with the little like SIGINT shell at the base of it with like a little diagram showing all the elements of the spy balloon. I think we ought to put that forward as a real case of the kinds of things the PRC is doing. But yeah, that isn't a national crisis on the scale of something much more significant.
- [51:21]
Host
The most dramatic blunder we've seen was the little India border kerfuffle. And it's been, you know, five plus years since there's been something like, as dumb and dramatic that she has done as that.
- [51:38]
Eli Ratner
So some of the South China Sea stuff, I mean, they ended up chopping off the finger of some Philippine service member. And the water cannons, which, like, when you're watching them from far away, they look like a garden hose that, like your kids shooting in the yard. But the like on the boat videos of that, people are getting like blasted against walls. But, but I take your point there. But that's Jordan, that's as you know, that's the whole strategy in activating those antibodies.
- [52:03]
Host
The point being, like, I think there's been a lot of lessons learned in Beijing on how to sort of manage this stuff. And you know, you should not ex, like, you shouldn't be banking your strategy. Some like galvanizing from across the Pacific.
- [52:18]
Tony
If they can tie whatever their action is to somehow embarrassing the political party that is in power in the US to take action against it, then they think they're safe. Salt typhoon, Volt typhoon, the spy balloon. Like all of those things came with egg on the sitting administration's face because they had to admit me a culpa and say, like, we had this vulnerability or we allowed this to happen or we didn't. And that pushes them to want to deny that it's happening or downplay it so you get an internal tension there. And China can play in that same space where they can actually, you know, ratchet up tensions. But because they're, it's going to be, it's going to be bad for the administration, they have to push down the effect of it. And I think as long as they're able to play that game, which again is a weakness of a democratic system, but it's also a strength of a democratic system system, you know, and I'm not saying that there's a better system on Earth, I agree with Churchill. But, but that, that play and that tension is where we actually really find ourselves and I think having a leader who's willing to come out and say like, hey, this happened and it sucks and yeah, my administration should have caught it, but this is what they're doing and we want to like very forcefully put that out there for everyone so that again, you get the, hey, violation of our sovereignty. Yeah.
- [53:39]
Eli Ratner
And I think that where this is going to play out next I don't think is going to be in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea. It's going to be on trade and technology and one of these. I don't think this is quite like the slow moving glacier problem because it's more dramatic than that. But you do see if you look at China's exports globally just growing and growing and growing and the amount of the degree to which their economic model is dependent on this is only becoming more so as just within the last week, sort of for the, for the first time in years, a reduction in retail sales inside China, meaning that the export markets become all the more important. And I had a chance to meet with some bankers from Hong Kong earlier this week and what they were saying is actually that in much of the world, including the developing world, China actually has a lot more headroom in terms of the amount of critical industries that they can still gobble up. So they haven't reached the limit of that. And yet the politics of it, losing thousands of jobs a month in Germany, and I think this is the question is again not something that any single country can respond to. But is there an opportunity for a collective response to deal with this? And to me politically here and abroad, that shouldn't be such a hard argument to try to do something about. But it has to be coordinated internationally.
- [55:01]
Jordan
So Eli, to pivot a little bit, look, you were in the building for several years. You've been in and out of the national security community, I think your entire life. What do you wish you could have done more of when you were in the building? And I guess what do Dems specifically within the party not understand about what it takes to run the Pentagon?
- [55:22]
Eli Ratner
Oh boy. Well, I think the, I guess on the first question sort of what would you do differently? I think we all need, and maybe I would put this to when I was in my role, I think less tolerance for timelines and everything just takes so long. And some of that is budget cycles and processes. But the Pentagon has proven when it wants to do things quickly, it can. And yet so many of the challenges we're facing, again, whether it's on the defense industrial base on the manufacturing side or Also I would say from the force posture side, we're doing a lot of work to design new arrangements and new agreements, whether in Japan or the Philippines or Australia, PNG other places toward this more idealized, resilient, distributed, more lethal mobile force posture, which we need to deal with deterrence going forward. And yet when you talk to folks about when this stuff was going to deliver, they would say, well, you know, usually a force posture project inside the Pentagon takes seven years. And you would get all the reasons why that would be. And yeah, you know, we're doing a little here and a little there. I think the what I would have done differently or what I wished we had done differently is take a few of these issues and move them into the break glass category. And I love this quote that I heard from Admiral Aquilino, which I use all the time, which is we ought to be talking about output metrics and not input metrics. And I think that is like the most crystallizing part of this, where the Pentagon is so good at input metrics. If you ask them what are you doing on the div or what are you doing on force posture? The answer you get is, well, we've invested $357 million in this and we've invested in that. And the answer needs to be like. Like that wasn't my question. My question is like, how many missiles are rolling off the production line on what date? Right? Or we're in this, like rare earths spin up right now and we're hearing about all these things we're doing on rare earths, right? The question is, okay, like by when and to what degree are we going to be able to reduce our dependency on rare earths? And I understand this stuff is really hard to get. Again, a very pinpoint answer. But I just generally, my answer to your question would be things are taking too long and we can't tolerate that. And we need better processes and better systems inside the Pentagon. And in some ways, this was my first tour in the Pentagon the four years during the Biden administration. I had worked on the Hill a couple times at the State Department, inside the White House. The Pentagon is really like an interagency government in and of itself in terms of the number of bureaucracies and stakeholders. And yet there is no singular decision making body. And so one of the things that I have always thought, or not one of the things I thought during my time at the Pentagon was because the. Let me just step back a sec to say one of the things that I did at the beginning of the Biden administration was run this China task force. While I was waiting for nomination and confirmation, I went in on inauguration day, built a big team. We did hundreds of of interviews around the department. It was a very down and in study. It was not like an up think about China strategy study. It was about how is the Pentagon doing on the China challenge. And the conclusion was broadly there are pockets of excellence but we have a synchronization and a coordination problem. And all of you who've touched and worked in the Pentagon know what I'm talking about, where the services are doing one thing and the staff is doing another and OSD is doing another. And that all needs to be better coordinated and better synchronized. And I think we tried to make some efforts around that. But what I was going to say is, is I guess it surprises me that there is not a single decision making process inside the Pentagon that does something like the nsc which is brings stakeholders together, moves options up for senior leaders and there are on particular issues, Obviously there are DMAGs, there are things on the budget and there are things on acquisition. But I think you actually need some central decision making body including with the combatant commands kind of running their own fiefdoms out in theater that all needs to be better synchronized and we don't have the processes to do that.
- [59:39]
Tony
Yeah, I mean I think that's excellent. I wonder though, when you talk about those upper level leaders, like what is in your mind like from being in there, what are the capabilities that you're like this is what they need, this is how I need them to think or this is how we would want them to be structured. And then these are the things that we actually pick for that are deleterious to that decision making and rapid movement inside the building, inside the Pentagon on.
- [60:05]
Eli Ratner
Well how do you mean? What would be an example of that?
- [60:09]
Tony
If you're getting promoted within inside a bureaucracy, obviously that means you know how to work within that bureaucracy. Now you're saying that at the upper levels of leadership what we need is a change management system that allows that like focuses on the ability to do speed and get to drive to solutions a faster way. Does that mean that it can't be promotion inside the building up to those upper levels of leadership because those people are kind of encrusted within that bureaucratic process us. Where does the right change elements and where do the right qualifications come in to actually implement those the changes that you were talking about?
- [60:38]
Eli Ratner
Yeah, I mean I'd be interested in your all views on that. I Don't know if I have special insight on that. I think again, it just feels to me like the decisions are being made in a lot of different places in a way where they need to be moving faster. And again, the other problem is that the tyranny of the rest of the world was a very real thing. And so whether we had the national defense strategy with China as the pacing challenge, and to a degree that was certainly the case. But you also had senior leaders all day long focused on Afghanistan at first and then Ukraine and then Gaza and Ukraine. And in that kind of world, I think it is hard to drive the speed of change that we need in the Indo Pacific. And a lot of that stuff kind of falls down to the assistant secretary level in the working level. And then of course, you have a whole problem with the interagency as well, which is at least over the last few decades, during the Dem administrations that I've been part of, you haven't had a very defense heavy. The experience and knowledge inside the interagency, whether it's at the State Department or the White House. And so you don't necessarily have the level of knowledge that you would need at the White House at senior levels to be giving political direction and sort of must dos toward the Pentagon. I think when you did have that on things like Aukus, it was able to move bureaucratic mountains and on other issues, but you didn't have that on sort of a regular drumbeat basis on China defense issues either. Coming from the interagency.
- [62:21]
Jordan
Yeah, I think it starts, we've talked about it before, like clear commander's intent and like understanding not just that's what the principal wants, but like you as the subordinate need to actually follow what the principal wants. And it's not everyone gets their own fiefdom because, you know, I was, you know, much lower level in osd, you know, the same time you were there. And I would hear two things from folks, one of which was from people who didn't understand the problem. Don't touch Eli's stuff was the first one.
- [62:50]
Eli Ratner
That wasn't my message, to be clear.
- [62:52]
Jordan
No, I think it came from people who did not understand the problem, didn't want to deal with the problem, and rather than engage with the problem set just say, you know what? Eli's gonna do it, because that's not really a me thing, even though in those offices it absolutely should have been a them thing. And the other half was who cares about China? And so it was clearly not communicated from the top down. And when I say the top down, I mean SecDef, I mean POTUS that like this is the thing we have to worry about most in the building. And to be fair, like you said, Ukraine was going on, Afghanistan was going on, but I don't think there was good messaging from the top down saying yes, these things are going on day to day. Long term challenge is still China. And I think this goes back to the reindustrialized point. How do we still consider China the long term challenge while addressing all those day to day things that get us ready for that bigger challenge?
- [63:48]
Tony
Yeah, I mean I think from my perspective as somebody who'd never worked in the Pentagon, who just had the Pentagon imposed upon me through missions in Syria and stuff like that and reports that we would get directed to answer in 24 hours and stuff is being on the outside now working in industry. I see a lot of of the. There seems to be a divorce between PMs and CPEs and the people who own programs and own like acquisitions and the people who think about what the next generation of threats and the future threat profile that the US military is going to face. And I don't know where that blending needs to occur at to ensure that yes we're handling today's issues and we're equipping for today, but that we're also setting ourselves to be able to rapidly equip for what we are seeing emerge in the future future because again, we've never predicted the next war successfully, but we've always had to get ready for it. And that's where I think there's some bifurcation or duplication of efforts even that are going on where you have PMs that are doing what they think is right but may not actually be in line with what the people who are thinking about future threats are actually seeing and conceptualizing what's going to occur on the horizon.
- [65:01]
Eli Ratner
And I think the final element of this is just going to be, I think and this will happen naturally. It's just a generation of national security leaders who have spent more time wrestling with the China issue. And I think that this has just been, you've got, if you look across, for instance the cabinet level, deputy level, undersecretary level across the Biden administration, those are folks who cut their teeth and made their name during the war on terror and on Europe and NATO issues and, and Middle east issues. And so that just makes it all the more complicated when people's knowledge and focus and interest aren't necessarily waking up every day like oh my gosh, I gotta get to work because we've gotta deal with the China challenge. But I think that will change because I think you have more people of our generation and below us who are coming up professionally who have been working on these issues for decades. They're comfortable with them, they know a lot about them, they care a lot about them. And I think that will have a huge effect in terms of, of how it affects priorities across all these issues we're talking about, rather than it having to be a voice somewhere else, you know, setting the alarm bell and trying to galvanize action here.
- [66:11]
Host
Is this a way to. Maybe we'll close briefly on robotcom, our new combatant command. Robocom.
- [66:18]
Tony
Yeah.
- [66:18]
Host
What are the, what are the pros and cons of like, I don't know, outsourcing drones and autonomy to a whole new combatant command as suggested by the upcoming NDA.
- [66:28]
Jordan
So, so I'll say this is clearly inspired by what Ukraine is doing, which that they have their own command set up to acquire and then deploy units. The Russians actually have an equivalent, Rob Lee wrote on it called, I think it's called Rubicon, having seen some things about how the force is adopting autonomy. The challenge is that we are acquiring a bunch of things which we need. And you have commanders in their own egos who are often like, this is not how I do things. This is not how I've done things for 20, 30 years. And if it's really forced upon me where I can't just say no, I'm going to give it to the worst soldiers, sailors, airmen in the unit because I don't want to lose my good guys for the projects I actually care about. Now there are commanders who are forward leaning and so where I, I think that this can help in the short term, I'm worried about it from a long term force structure perspective because you should never keep units segregated. The point of combined arms is that everybody operates together and that requires integrating at the lowest tactical level. Is that it is going to force those commanders to have to adopt those things because it's going to be a pathway for combatant commands, for the higher level units to at least get stuff to them and then it is on them to make sure it integrates at the lowest level. But yeah, this is a means to an end if it's going to work correctly.
- [67:55]
Tony
Taking a slightly longer look, I'll give a pro. A pro is that the geographic combatant commanders do not have procurement dollars. That has always been an issue when they see something specific to their theater that they think they need to have industrial solution for or a tech solution for. They don't actually have the money to buy that, that, that they can do like rapid procurement, low level stuff. But if they really wanted to procure to keep in theater like a exquisite capability or just a capability in general, they have to funnel that back to the Pentagon. They have to get a service to pick it up or they have to get somebody with actual dollars to pick it up, fund it and then send it out. This is the MRAP story kind of encapsulated very neatly. That's a positive of having a comm that has acquisitions authority with autonomy in the near term that will be able to help, have some guidance and put some principles and could potentially support the geographic combatant commanders when they need certain, you know, capabilities or they say they need certain capabilities and getting them procured and getting them into the pipeline for production. The downside I see is it's going to be similar or has the potential to be similar to something like Cybercom, which is, if you really think about it, Cybercom to Jordan, to Tony's point, should be an integrated combined arms capability that commanders are layering in for effects both defensive and offensive whenever they plan an operation. Therefore there shouldn't be a separate four star commander who runs Cybercom. And I have to go ask for permission to take people. Those should be assigned to my stack that I can then give them tasks and as long as they are within whatever their rules of engagement are and within their left and right authority, they can do the thing that I'm asking them to do. We have viewed cyber as different than the other domains that we operate in. So land, sea, air and space. We view cyber differently because of a lot of reasons. But that is something that is an impediment to operations. A fear with creating a command is that you create the same type of I have to go ask them for permission, I have to write in triplicate all of the reasons and justifications to be able to get this from them. And then I've actually just enhanced bureaucracy and maybe not in this permeation of it, but in two permeations later when we're on the third commander. That's when the bureaucracy really sets in and they really want to have iron fisted control over it.
- [70:22]
Eli Ratner
I will say great set of comments. And the problem is we were already like three or four too many combatant commands as it relates to that problem vis a vis the China problem. And you get into these games and whatnot and the debates and questions around who's the supporting command and who's the supported command and who's going to make decisions around exactly where assets are going and to do what. And is it the now PACOM commander who's going to be in charge of this? I think that's not necessarily agreed upon. And so separate from the merits of this particular effort, I think consolidation of combatant commands was an idea that was floated earlier in the Trump administration that I think is actually a pretty good idea because we're already at a point of it being too unwieldy from an operational perspective.
- [71:06]
Jordan
Yeah, they're all operating well below what their staffs need to be across the board. And so if we, if we. Consolidation is going to be the only way to actually get effective planning staffs.
- [71:17]
Host
Feel like we're ending with a whimper, but.
- [71:20]
Jordan
Well, we can end with. What are you reading right now? What should we read?
- [71:25]
Host
Justin told me I needed to go back to my Plutarch and understand the Crassus Parthian war analogies. I just, I love this line this morning.
- [71:35]
Jordan
Morning.
- [71:35]
Host
So Crassus, he goes to Parthia basically because like, he thinks he's not as cool as Caesar and Pompey and like he never got his own parade or, you know, UFC fight on the lawn, whatever. So he decides to like invade this country that everyone is like, don't invade, you're going to lose. Like, they're really on their shit. They got these like super awesome cavalry. There are all these wonderful warnings that, that Plutarch relates. So there's like, he encount preternaturally violent thunder and a hurricane broke on the bridge and carried it away. His troops are telling him to reconsider the entire enterprise. The soothsayers privately told him the signs found in the sacrifices were continually adverse and unfavorable. And even when they did the last sacrifice, the entrails slipped out of his hands. The standards by were very concerned about it. But he said, look, look, this is just what it means to be an old man. And you know, he goes on and on, he makes these dumb decisions. He like goes away from the river because like, he gets talked into it. To think he wants to fight in the plane, big mistake, stay on the river. And he's basically laying there dying. And the line Plutarch has is he lay there, you know, about to die as an example to ordinary minds of the caprice of fortune. But to the wise of inconsiderateness and ambition, who not content to be superior to so many millions of men, being inferior to Two esteemed himself as the lowest of all, so be thankful we are still alive. You don't have to be cooler than Caesar. You don't have to invade countries or punch people in the face to feel tough like, I don't know, Just enjoy. Enjoy the World cup match, everyone.
- [73:27]
Eli Ratner
That's right. Go usa.
- [73:28]
Host
It's all pleasures in life.
- [73:29]
Eli Ratner
Life.
- [73:30]
Tony
Hopefully we beat Australia. I really thought Turkey was going to beat Australia. So now I'm slightly worried about this match if they win.
- [73:35]
Host
But maybe it's good for the alliance if they win, right?
- [73:38]
Tony
Like they, they, they, they.
- [73:39]
Host
They need a little revenge.
- [73:40]
Tony
I don't know. I just got back from Australia. We really need to win because I'm going to have a lot of people talking, a lot of if we lose.
- [73:46]
Host
Okay, I take it back. I was bad. That was bad. We're not losing for Aus.
- [73:52]
Tony
Okay, yeah, exactly.
- [73:53]
Host
I'll take the win. I'll take the win. They can, they can. They can pay all they want for the. All right. Enjoy your long weekend, everyone. Eli, thanks so much for being a
- [74:02]
Eli Ratner
part of war Talk. This is really fun. Thanks for having me.
- [74:17]
Poet/Reader
Old crashes bought up Rome one burn building at a time had more money than the steak which made him feel like nothing in the end for money's a quiet thing and quiet never made a man feel great so 60 years old every omen scream and don't he win anyhow? And it's a long way down, boys A long way down when every map you got says turn around they told him and they told him and they told him once more But a man chasing the parade don't hear it anymore well, he got his parade in them Just not the kind he'd pick some other fella in his robe and the crowd laid on it thick they passed his head around the stage like a prop in the third act and the man who wanted glory will he finally got it back and it's a long way down, boys along long way down when every map you got says turn around they told him and they told him and they told him once more But a man chasing a parade don't hear it anymore. They ran the thing a hundred ways Before a shot was fired Every table, every model Said the ending's dark and dire But a stranger had a chart that promised quick and cheap and sure and the man who loves a flatter don't listen to the war It's a long way down, boys A long way down Every map said turn and he drove into the ground the sun's still up the game still on. Remind me what it it's for? Just a man in the parade that he don't get anymore.