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Amos Fox and Franz-Stefan Gady, "Multidomain Operations: The Pursuit of Battlefield Dominance in the 21st Century" (Howgate Publishing, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sickevich. My next guest is Amos Fox and we will be discussing his latest book, Multi Domain the Pursuit of Battlefield dominance in the 21st century, published by Howgate Publishing Ltd. In 2026 Co edited with Franz Stephan Gotti. Dr. Amos C. Fox is a professor of practice at Arizona State University's Future Security Initiative. Amos also works as a lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Houston, where he teaches strategy and international relations, and he is also host of the Revolution in Military affairs podcast. His latest book is Conflict Realism, which was a subject of a previous interview on the New Books Network. Amos is also a retired U.S. army lieutenant colonel. He is also managing editor of Small Wars Journal. Franz Stefan Gotti, who could not make it for this interview, has advised American and European militaries on structural reform and the future of high intensity warfare. He is an adjunct senior fellow with the center for a New American Security based in Washington, D.C. and he has conducted field research in Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine. His latest books are the Return of War and how the US Would Fight China. The Risks of Pursuing a Rapid Victory. Amos Fox, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:32]
B
Hey, thank you for the opportunity. Appreciate it and looking forward to the discussion.
- [01:37]
A
Yeah, I think this is our second discussion because we also talked about your book Conflict Realism. Is that correct?
- [01:44]
B
Yep, we sure did this one. I mean, hell, we're going to get to the point where we probably do one of these every six to nine months based off the number of books that are coming out here at this point. But yeah, well, you're always welcome to.
- [01:58]
A
Come back on the podcast anytime. But as you may remember from last time, we always like to begin our interviews by asking our guests, tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the backstory behind writing this book.
- [02:12]
B
Yeah, so I am a professor of practice at Arizona State University where I work in the Future Security Initiative in the School of Politics and Global Studies. And so I've been there for two years now. Before that, I retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel. I was an armor officer, which is a tank officer, for those who don't know what armor officer means. I know there's differences depending on where, where you come from and, you know, what your nationality is. So. But I did that, you know, a full career there in the armor branch as an armor officer. And then aside from that, well, I guess that's really it. I've spent my entire adult life in the army before getting into academia. And so as I was transitioning, you know, several years earlier or so, working a Ph.D. ph.D. In international relations at the University of Reading and then was able to basically transition right away into, into, into teaching and working at Arizona State. And so as part of that, I also in the managing editor at Small Wars Journal, Arizona State, owned Small Wars Journal. That took it over a couple years ago, right around the time that I got hired at asu. And so I run that as well. Everything that comes out every day I've had my hands on and my fingers in both good and bad. So if you read it and you hate it, it's my fault. If you read it and you love it, it's my fault too. Regarding the book itself, the publisher came to me Hal gate they came to me and said, hey, you know, we were prompted by somebody to work on mdo. There's no book about MDO out right now. And it's essentially an information gap in the bigger picture as it relates to understanding military concepts pertinent to multi domain operations. And so the publisher came and asked, hey, you know, do you mind writing this book? And I said, well, I don't have the time to write a whole book myself, but I can probably put together an edited volume. Plus I just didn't have the expertise myself to fully flesh out an entire book on multi domain operations. So I said hey, what about an edited volume on multi domain operations and I'll potentially find a co editor to help with all the work and with finding people to contribute. And the publisher said, absolutely. So they greenlit the book. I found Franz who wasn't able to make it today unfortunately. And Franz and I got to work on finding authors and framing the book in such a way that we had not scattershot ideas, but we tried to bracket it into big buckets which you see in the book in terms of its parts. And so Franz was really able to help pull in a lot of the international authors to the book, whereas most of the people that I brought in were the, the American authors. And so that was really helpful in that regard because you really do. I mean you get people from all over the world, contributors from all over the world. We got Brazil represented, Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, Denmark and Israel and Austria, because Franz has also got a chapter in there, plus the United States. And then within that also we didn't get as big showing from the joint services in the United States as we had hoped, but we have Air Force representation and then army representation as well. So we tried to go Big. Unfortunately, some of the people that we did have fell off and weren't able to complete the project with us for, for a variety of reasons. So you would have had, you know, had some of the other folks stayed on, some, some other perspectives that enhanced it. But I think we still got a lot of bases covered. That's the problem too, when you try and pull in all these different perspectives is you're going to have just this massive book and it's, I mean it's already pretty big as, as it is. It's, I think in its entirety as it's published right now. The hard copy versions to include all the back matter, 321 pages. And that's just with what we have. So the actual Word documents, when I sent them in collectively was like 450 pages. So it was a lot, it was a lot of work and a lot of material. So anyway, that's, that's the quick and dirty of it. Even though that wasn't quick.
- [06:50]
A
Yeah, no, you know, you covered a lot of, a lot of areas related to this concept. And of course for many of our listeners who might not understand the concept or this is their first time hearing it, what is the basic idea behind multi domain operations? We're definitely going to get into more detail throughout the course of the interview, but just give us like a brief introduction to the concept.
- [07:15]
B
So there's where it started and what it is. So I'll tell you what it is and we'll cover, I think, where it started and how things changed over time. But what it is essentially is an update to the U.S. joint forces concept of Joint Force operations. And the idea was that essentially two additional domains had emerged, the cyber domain and the space domain. And they weren't effectively articulated in pre existing Joint Force doctrine and army doctrine. And so essentially a new doctrine was needed to help address how cyber and space now contribute to Joint Force operations. And so because of that, multi domain operations came about and it went through several different iterations and a few different name changes throughout its process. But it's the idea essentially of just integrated joint operations across multiple domains. Right. Trying to apply combat power in a unified fashion when and where it's needed on the battlefield, across all domains. Right. And so it's trying to integrate everything as it's as needed. Right. And apply it where needed, when it's needed, as quick as possible. And so in a nutshell, stripping away all the bureaucratic language that comes with speaking and military talk in the most basic English, that's essentially what it Is.
- [08:43]
A
Now what are the origins of this concept? Like where did it originate?
- [08:50]
B
So initially the concept started off as multi domain battle, started off as an army concept to address the issues associated with Russia's reemergence in the wake of its 2014, 2015 invasion of Ukraine. Right? So it took Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine and the Donbas and took big chunks of Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. But in doing so it showed a lot of things that we hadn't, the US hadn't particularly seen before applied in a real world situation. And so one of those was the recon strike complex. You know, Russia on the battlefield had drones integrated with long range strike in ways that again, we hadn't really seen outside of, you know, war games and whatnot. And so that scared a lot of people. They're like, look at these drones out there operating, talking to other sensors in the sky, other sensors in space, and quickly bringing massive amounts of firepower from afar, right, from inside Russia to inside Ukraine in a matter of seconds. And so that really brought forward the idea of battlefield transparency, right? So a concept that had been around for a long time, you know, like if you go back and look, you can see it mentioned in the early 90s, for instance, battlefield transparency, the transparent battlefield. But Russia's ability to generate this reconnaissance strike complex really pushed that to the fore. And that's really where you start hearing the idea of, you know, if you can be seen, you can be killed immediately. And so that was one of the problems. Again, it was the reemergence of offensive large scaleish combat operations. Again at the time that was seen as large scale combat operations because we hadn't seen something that big in terms of land forces invading on the ground in that capacity for quite a while, up until it was dwarfed in size by the 2022 invasion. And so those were a lot of the dynamics that emerged, right? So it was Russia, the Russian threat again, the wan threat, the multi domain threat that existed. The integration of space and cyber capabilities. Cyber played a huge part in all this too, right? Cyber Russia had been striking essentially the Baltics all the way down to Crimea with cyber for several years by that point, and doing all sorts of cyber things. And so the army looked at itself and said, we need a concept to address this problem. Right? Because the situation had changed. It was no longer counterinsurgency in the Middle east, right? This was a new threat. And so it reoriented in that direction. And that was all under General Perkins primarily, who was the four star commander at US army tradoc, which no longer exists. It's been rolled up together with Army Futures Command now. And now it's called T2COM. I forget what the second T in that stands for at this point. I think it's Training and transformation command, T2 comp. And so anyway, TRADOC led that, General Perkins led that multi domain battle concept and the development of that concept. And then gradually over time it got, it evolved to multi domain operations. So I'll stop there so I can let you reset the conversation. Otherwise I keep rambling about the evolution of everything.
- [12:28]
A
No, no, no, that's fine. You gave a good explanation. Now perhaps maybe just to redirect it, why is this a necessary concept for understanding contemporary conflicts in the 21st century at the moment?
- [12:42]
B
So one of the issues with the concept and the doctrine at this point is that originally multi domain battle was developed for a specific threat in a specific theater, which is the way you should do concept development and Dr. Development. It should be developed for a specific threat in a specific place, multi domain operations. However, when it got essentially accelerated and expanded, the idea was, okay, how does it fit with the Joint Force? Right? How does it fit with what the Air Force wants to do? How does it fit with what the Navy wants to do? You know, where does the Marine Corps fit within that? How does Space Command fit within that? Not Space Command, but the Space Force fit within all that. And so it started incorporating all the other ideas from the other services about how to approach war fighting. At the same time too, the army and the Department of Defense said, wait a second, we need a concept that can do, that can address all the big picture problems that we're going to face. And so it moved from just being focused on Russia and Europe to also being applicable against China and the Indo Pacific. And so it transitioned from being a focused concept and a focused, it wasn't a doctrine at the time, a focused concept, to an unfocused doctrine. And that's where the rub with, with a lot of the feedback that you see in the book exists. It's not focused on a threat and it's not focused on a place. It's just saying how we want to fight, how the US Military wants to fight, and how the other militaries that have adopted it are attempting to fight within, underneath the multi domain operations umbrella. So it's very unfocused. And the first thing you have to do when you're looking at developing the concept is tying it to a threat and tying it to an environment, because otherwise it's just essentially painting an idea on canvas not tied to anything in the real world. And so that's where the concept is kind of lost its way a little bit. And so it's not necessarily. The problem is you can't associate. You can't, you can, but it's not going to be effective. You can't have a universal concept for fighting. Right. Because the way that you're going to fight China and Indo Pacific fundamentally is different than the way you would have to fight Russia and Europe which is fundamentally different than how you would fight fill in the blank in the Middle east or whomever in Africa. All of these places are different and they require a different doctrine. And so that's the thing with air land battle. Airline battle was tied to the Soviet Union and you know, Central Eastern Europe. You couldn't take air land battle and say now we're going to do that against China and Taiwan for instance. But that's what we've tried to do, the US military has tried to do with multi domain operations. And so that's really the rub. We shouldn't assume that there's one universal way of fighting, but we've attempted to do that with multi domain operations.
- [15:50]
A
Yes. I was about to ask what are some of the challenges but I think you just touched on it that there's a difference between the concept as a concept of multi domains. Yeah. You got to fight the enemy in all these different areas but then you got to look at it like what is the exact context that you're applying it? Like you just said in the Indo Pacific against say China, it's going to be very different than say fighting Russia against Russia in Europe. Is there anything more you want to add about like how concept and context interrelate?
- [16:23]
B
Yeah. So that it's important to, to flush that out. Because again, going back to the larger point, really like multi domain operations should be that way of thinking should be more just a principle of war or a principle of warfare, if you will. Right. The rubber stamp that you should always. Military should always be thinking about applying all military capabilities across all domains as situationally warranted or conditionally warranted. Right. If you don't have something available, obviously you're not going to be able to apply it. That should just be a general principle. So the idea of multi domain operations shouldn't and in my assessment shouldn't necessarily be just a concept for war fighting and a doctrine for war fighting. That idea itself is more a principle, an overarching way of thinking about war fighting. But to wicker it down to a specific theater, to a specific threat is really what you know, if you really like. I think if you're taking the multi domain operations ID and you really want to operationalize it, make it something that's useful for militaries, there needs to be like, I don't know, a part one through X on the different theaters and threats that you think it's going to have to apply against. And then you modify the general overarching principle of multi domain operations. Multi domain operations in Europe, multi domain operations in the Indo Pacific in Central or in the Middle east, in Africa, and you have specific nuanced variations of the concept that apply to each of those. And some of the services may come to the fore in different ways based off that. Right. In the Indo Pacific it's probably going to be far more naval and air power and Marine Corps focused than it is army focused because multi domain operations and that theater of war would be different. Same thing in Europe, right. The, the multi domain operations probably going to be far more air, land battle looking. Right. It's going to be very much land power with air power with cyber, you know, power. And then in Africa and the Middle east it's going to be very much, far more. Well, depending on what you're doing in the Middle east. As we've seen with Yemen. Right. And Iran, there's, there's a lot of different ways you can approach multi domain operations there, but it needs to be like modified I think personally, like you can have the overarching multi domain operations idea, but then there needs to be a discrete doctrine for each of those theaters and threats associated with it. And again, threats are different. Like in the Middle east you got very different threats. So even that maybe within there it's different versions of multi domain operations for the different types of fight that you may be fighting.
- [19:12]
A
Yeah, it almost reminds me of World War II, where in the Pacific theater the Marines played the main role. The army was also involved, I should know, my grandfather was in the Philippines. But even then the army and the Marines had to kind of divide up the the Pacific Ocean about who goes where and what, whereas in Europe, of course, it was mainly the army and the Air Force that was doing a lot of the fighting. So it's almost coming from a military historical perspective. It's almost like it's a similar issue we're facing now, but it's also a new nuance to it. And I noticed that this is a common feature in military concepts and planning.
- [19:55]
B
Yeah, that's the. Again, the problem is I think we often try to find an easy button solution, like one answer for all the problems and that's just not the case. And you know, you can see that when you look at the US Army's approach to war fighting. Before the invasion of Iraq, we had very much an airland battle maneuver centric approach to thinking about and applying combat power. And then it was okay, but what happens if, or what happens on the backside of that, Right. What about the security and stability focus that will be required there? And you know, in the US army and actually the Department of Defense, right. If you go back to Rumsfeld, he poo pooed a lot of that and was like, that's going to be the State Department's problem because the military is going to knock down the Saddam regime and get out of there. And then we found ourselves not leaving, found ourselves in the middle of an insurgency. Right. Not knowing what to do. And again, I was, I was there in 2005, 2006 as a wide eyed second lieutenant. And I can assure you that every day we're basically like, what are we doing? And it was us trying to figure out what was going on. The Department of Defense not admitting that there was an insurgency and then us on the ground saying no, this was legit, like a real full blown insurgency. And so that's, it's just the trouble with trying to hand wave away security concerns, realistic security factors that will impact military operations. And so you can't have just one big broad brushstroke approach to this is how the military is going to fight in the future. Like you may, you can wish that all you want, but the reality is it's going to differ depending on who you're fighting and where you're fighting. And so to have just this very vanilla overarching approach to warfare. And the other hiccup, the other issue with MBO is it's so tech focused, it's essentially forgetting the fact that, or just pushing aside the fact that like forces have to operate on the ground to achieve a lot of the lasting effects that are required to generate political decision. Right. To advance the ball strategically in your own favor. And as ndos become more fully embraced within the military, force structure has started changing. Within the military in particular to the Army. Again, I speak a lot about the army because I'm retired army officer. So I'm far more familiar with the army than everybody else, all the other services, you know, the Army's bought five multi domain task forces. As part of getting those multi domain task forces, it's getting rid of force structure within the land forces themselves within the combat formations and combat support formations within the army. And so it's selling off military police engineers, reconnaissance forces, what, manned helicopters, right? It's getting rid of all of these things that provide vital functions on the ground and security situation or situations that require security and not just striking things from afar. And so you've got that going on. The army is also selling off significant amounts of human capital manpower to build mobile brigade combat teams. And this is a relatively new thing too. Within the past year, 2025 into 2026, it's reconfiguring almost all of its infantry brigade combat teams from ibcts, right? Infantry brigade combat teams to mobile brigade combat teams. And so it's taking the manpower out. So infantry brigade combat teams are about 4,500 people. It's taking the humans out of that and reducing it down to 1900 people and then backfilling that gap and the force structure within the infantry brigade combat teams with technology, right? Drones, sensors, all these different things. And so again, the question is, as it relates to this concept in the way that it's affecting force structure with the multi domain task force and the mobile brigade combat team is, okay, you've got all this great strike and sensing capability, but then what happens on the ground after you've sensed and struck all these targets? Like we know from history, from our own experience, the US Military's own experience, that just because you strike something from afar and you destroy a few targets and kill, you know, X number of people, that they throw up their hands and say, we've been defeated, right? Often they just, you know, go hide for a bit and then come back, right? And if you don't have the people on the ground to address those problems of people hiding and coming back, you've created an incomplete doctrine, right? Your doctrine is incomplete. There's a massive gap in it. And essentially, mdo, one of my biggest hang ups with it is who consolidates the gains, right, associated with the sensing and striking, the idea of generating convergence. You've gutted your land force, you've gutted your infantry brigade combat teams. And again, I was not an infantry person, so I'm not advocating for the infantry because I was an infantryman, but I'm advocating for the fact that infantrymen by and large are the ones that go in and physically hold terrain and get into urban terrain and do things that robotics and sensing and technology that does things up in the sky, down to the ground can't do. And until we've developed, you know, UGVs that can essentially replicate what humans do on the ground. We're leaving this massive gap in the cycle of military operations that must occur. And so MDO has that, like, that massive gap in it from that regard.
- [25:47]
A
Yeah. There's also another nuance that I thought about when listening to your answer. There was also the role of special Forces and covert operations that they go in, they make a precise strike operation, like, for example, the kidnapping of Maduro very recently, but then they get out. They don't stay there and hold the. The ground. That's more of an infantry thing. And I think that's been an issue too, that we may have been over reliant on the Special Forces operations. But then they go in, they go out, but they don't, like, secure the area the way that the infantry would.
- [26:26]
B
Yeah. And that's something that we saw time and time again between Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Right. You had all sorts of special operations forces. And I saw this again when I was a lieutenant in Iraq in 2005, 2006. You know, special operations forces would come in. You wouldn't even necessarily know that they were coming into your area. They would come in, they would do whatever they had to do. They would, you know, generate whatever positive effect they were trying to generate. But then also there would be residual negative effect associated with that, whether they, you know, killed people or destroyed some stuff. And then they. But they would leave, Right. They would rarely. They didn't stick around. Right. And then half the time you'd show up the next day doing your normal patrols, and the people in your area would be incensed because, you know, they would just assume. They would just say, American soldiers. And you're like, what are you talking about? We own this area. This is our area of operation. And then they'd always end up saying, no, it was the soldiers with beards. And then that's how you would know that it was some sort of special operations force that came in. Because we, you know, at the time, didn't we. We didn't have beards. I have a beard now, but definitely did not back then, you know. And so then you would play the. The game of trying to go back and fix or at least, at least, you know, say you're sorry and offer some sort of, you know, whether it was a payment or whatever, or, hey, we'll help you fix this thing that was broken. And so, yeah, that's, you know, that's part of the problem too, with this over reliance on special operations. Like they do great work. I'm not saying they don't, but if you don't have special operations within an accompanying force behind it that can go in and take care of the security situation in the, in the wake of whatever it is they do, you'll also have an incomplete approach to war fighting. Right. Because again, it's not just that initial punch. And Franz makes this point quite a bit, actually. We were talking yesterday, in fact, the MDO overly focuses, and you can see this in his chapter with Mike Kaufman. It's overly focused on that front end punch, essentially like that first punch. But there's never the follow through. And that's a fault with Western military thinking, but American military thinking in particular is it's always we're going to front load what we do. And then after that it's like, well, we don't know what to do. And it goes back. If you, you know, if you study what the Germans did, that was one of the, you know, big critiques on the Germans in the Second World War and up to, you know, well, prior to that was it was always about that first big initial punch. But if that thing failed, then what? And Robert Citino, I think does a good job of talking about this. He always says, you know, what happens if that first punch, that first blitzkrieg doesn't generate the desired result? You launch another blitzkrieg. Right. And so it was a very hollow concept that was only focused on front loading the operation. But then if the front load fails, what next? And that's the same problem you see here with mdo. If that front front loaded strike strikes, that front loaded attack, whatever that is, doesn't succeed, there's nothing on the back end conceptually right within the doctrine. But then structurally regarding force structure, now because we've sold off so much of the land force to create multi domain task forces and the mobile brigade combat team that you can't come in after the fact, exploit success and consolidate gains. Or if things have gone sideways, you don't have people on the ground that can then say, hey, this is going sideways. We need to do this, this, this and this to, you know, quickly adjudicate the situation and get things going back better for you.
- [30:03]
A
Yeah. And even speaking about the Germans, this also reminds me of World War I when they employed the Stastrup and the Stormtrooper assault troops to assault the enemy trenches. But of course it also required the regular infantry to back them up and secure the new, the, the territory that they had won and to also secure the flanks of the, the Stormtroopers, otherwise, you know, of course they would be surrounded or taken out as well. And this was one, of course this is getting into military history again. But this is kind of how the German offensive of 1918 kind of fell apart after the initial successes. Because.
- [30:43]
B
Can I jump in on that real quick though? And I think the important thing too is that we can't, whoever the we is, right? The big picture people that are developing strategies, military concepts and war fighting doctrines is you can't forget military history. You have to remember it now, you can't go to it and cherry pick the good things you want out of it and say, look, history says this, right? That's part of the problem the US has in particular, we go through and cherry pick the good parts and negate the bad parts. But military history has several continuities. And that's what I think that this concept misses. And this is one of the things that I've been trying to hammer home a lot lately. And that's part of why for me, just outside of this, my focus here lately has been on talking about attrition and positional warfare. The war in Ukraine has made that more than apparent. The war in Gaza has made that more than apparent. And then Iraq and Afghanistan, both versions of Iraq, whether it was oif, Iraqi Freedom or the counter ISIS fight, and then also the war in Afghanistan. And there's some fundamental truths that go into any war that's fought on land and that's you have to be able to take, retake, hold and clear territory. You have to be able to protect populations and you have to be able to protect and, or seal borders and boundaries. And if you have force structure and doctrine that don't support those fundamental continuities of warfare that you can go back and look at recent military history or you can go back and look at the, that like you just described with the German stormtrooper tactics from the First World War. Those things transcend time, right? If you don't have a military that can, an army in particular that can do those six things that I just quickly hit, like you're stepping off in the wrong direction from the get go and you're going to have to figure out once things do hit that point where you find out that you have to control territory to get the gains that it is you think you're going to get in the war, then you quickly start looking around and realizing, oh, we don't have the forces we need. And again, we saw that in Iraq, right? We didn't have sufficient Force. After the initial punch and defeated the Iraqi military, the army quickly generated a bunch of formations, right? Every division went from having two brigades to or three brigades. Some, a couple had two, but three brigades to some had four and five brigades. And then those brigades were sent quickly, trained quickly, and sent quickly. And you saw the same thing in Afghanistan. One of the continual trends, when you go back and look at the general officer conundrums that they faced, was the insufficient number of troops on the ground to solve the problem that they had at their hands, right? And the problem wasn't necessarily insurgency. It was control of terrain. And those are somewhat interrelated but also somewhat distinct. And they didn't have sufficient forces to control terrain. If you go back, McKiernan says it, right, the land force component commander at the very beginning, all the way through McChrystal, Petraeus, everybody up until the end, that was the one thing that they kept talking about, right. And we created the sbabs partially to help solve that problem. And so again, like, history matters. That's the point, you know, And I thought that your, your, your description there of the stormtrooper tactics is helpful because if you overlook the negative parts of history, right. Or the parts of history that don't align with what it is, your narrative, maybe your transformation narrative, because that's the problem too. Is everything today on the US Sides about transformation and innovation? Well, what about the continuities? And that goes back to my book, Conflict Realism. I try and highlight. You got to be realistic about it. There's continuities that permeate, that you have to address whether you want to or not. And so again, ndo, I think, falls short because it doesn't address appropriately military history and the continuities of war that are associated with that.
- [34:27]
A
Yeah. In fact, I just had a discussion in one of my other previous episodes with Andrew Monahan, we discussed this distinction between Russian military theory and American military theory. And it was. And I made this comment that the Russians, they take military history very seriously, and it's very part of their military thinking and doctrine in America. It's almost like military doctrine and military history are two very distinct things, and some. And they're not usually talking to.
- [34:56]
B
Now, one of the problems, too, you see, with American professional military education, pme, is that history is usually always one of the first things that's cut. You know, when a new leader comes in, they're like, let me look at the curriculum. You've got too much military history and not enough practical exercise in the Curriculum. Right. So we need more war games or we need more exercises in the curriculum and we'll cut those history classes to make room for that. And that's really, I think, putting the cart in front of the horse, you need the history because it provides mental reps, it provides historical context, it illuminates continuities that everybody encounters, not just the US and it shows where advocating for one thing at the expense of another can be detrimental to a campaign, an operation of war, whatever the case may be. And so you have to have that well established pedigree of historical knowledge about warm warfare and strategy to develop a good coherent concept and doctrine. And military professionals. Right. Military officers, non commissioned officers and soldiers that can like reference something quickly in their mind and be like, oh, hey, you know, in this one thing, when they tried this, it didn't work because of that. Right. Well, again, history doesn't repeat itself, but it may rhyme. And so maybe in this situation we shouldn't do the thing that they did and do the thing that they didn't do. Right. And without those, without that grounding in military history, it's hard to replicate that because everything then is discovery learning. And discovery learning is not the best way to approach war when you're in the middle of it.
- [36:43]
A
Yeah. And we're kind of seeing that even in Ukraine, where we've seen now like the reemergence of trench warfare, which we haven't seen in over a century since World War I. And it would be, it wouldn't be accurate to say it's just World War I with drones, but at the same time, it's like World War I does kind of carry a lot of relevance to understanding what's going on in Ukraine. And I also remember when the war in Ukraine started, a lot of commentaries were like, oh, the Russians are just incompetent. But even an article, I believe this was before you took over Small Wars Journal, but there was an article that even said, yes, NATO, if they attacked Ukraine, they would have done things differently, but they would have also been facing a lot of the same challenges that the Russians are facing. So it's not like, oh, the Russians are just incompetent, it's just, no, this is what an army invading Ukraine is going to have to deal with one way or another.
- [37:39]
B
Yeah. The World War I analogy I think is useful and helpful part of the problem. And Franz, he likes to bring this point up quite a bit when we talk about the book and when you read again what he said about it, we've pulled the bad parts of systems thinking and systems theory forward, right? So there's this idea of systems theory. I think it's really useful. Actually that's my next book that I'm working on right now. It just got whatever greenlit by Rutledge, so it'll be out next year. And so I'm actively working on this. But it's updating this idea of systems theory as it relates to military operations. And you had a lot of people in the late 80s, early 90s that were influential in generating this idea of systems thinking, right? John Warden and his five Rings theory. You had the OODA Loop by John Boyd, right? Some of these ideas you had Deptula's effects based operations concept. Those ideas are basically the bread and butter of what's in mdo. But those ideas have continually failed because they've misinterpreted systems theory and the way that systems truly operate. And so this is one of the things when you look at Russia, Ukraine and folks were astounded by the fact that it quickly went positional and became an attritional fight as quickly as it did and that whomever wasn't able to just go out and generate effects, right? And quickly win the war. When you look at systems theory, the first rule of systems theory is survive, right? And so what are you going to do when you're at a disadvantage and you're getting hit from above? You're going to go underground. It's basic, like systems thinking, right? System always wants to, to, to survive. And so it's going to do whatever it has to do to survive. And that's where systems theory as it is within multi domain operations gets things so wrong is that it's again, it just regurgitates Warden's ideas, Boyd's ideas, Deptula's ideas that you can just magically come out and decapitate a threat and it's going to just evaporate and be like oh gosh, you won, right? And you saw this early in the conflict in Ukraine, right? Ukraine killed whatever the number is. I think it's still kind of debated but that 14 Russian generals in whatever it was, six month period. And then folks are like, well they're going to fall apart. Russia's going to fall apart at any time because we've killed these generals. No, that's the other part of systems, right? When like a leader's eliminated, the next man up or the next woman up steps up and takes charge, right? Systems seek hierarchy and order. So this idea that you can generate cognitive paralysis and chaos and disorder and cause the system to fail. Because you've eliminated something at the top, the brain, if you will. Going back to Warden's concept, right? That's just nonsense. And that's part of the problem with this. And that's why, again, like, I was not surprised when the war went positional as quickly as it did, because essentially it's all right, well, we got to go to ground because we don't want to die, right? So we got to, whoever we is, the collective, we have to quit placing our own narratives about war and warfare ahead of the realities of war and warfare. And we have to have clear articulation and understanding of how systems operate, especially if systems are going to be the backbone of how we approach a military concept, a war fighting concept. And then the other part, again with the Russian incompetence, again, that was just us projecting our own narrative about the Russians, right? Well, the Russians are so dumb, they're not nearly as good as us. They're incompetent, right. There's a high degree of cultural chauvinism associated with how the US Thinks and speaks about potential adversaries. And that's not a good thing. Like, you shouldn't overinflate the threat and the capability associated with potential threats. But at the same time, you need to be realistic about how you speak about them. And to completely discredit the way that Russia might fight because they're Russian is doing a disservice. And also back to the military history point, overlooking a lot of military history, you know, like, everybody's been beaten somewhere. We like to point to where Russia's been beaten, but we forget that Russia's won a lot, too. And historically, they know how to fight and win, Right? It may not be the way that the US Wants to fight and win. We value life a little differently than the Russians, but if we're stepping back from that, from virtue, you know, signaling and trying to force our norms and values on. On military thought, and we're just looking at wins and losses, right? That's helped Russia win many times in many places with significant geostrategic value for them. And so we. We just can't push it aside and be like, Russia's dumb and they're going to fight poorly. And the other thing too, again, like, nobody's fought like that. We fought the US Fought the Iraqis, right? That didn't come without challenge. Now, we won in 2003, and the military in the conventional portion of that fight, we won a 91 in the conventional portion of that fight we won, you know, in Afghanistan, again, in the early part of the conventional. Ish. It wasn't super conventional, but it was still more conventional than unconventional. Right. But none of that came without challenge. And the other part is we also have gotten like significant losses in places too where we just came out and didn't understand the environment and how to fight and what the threat was going to do. Right. And so we can't set aside our own missteps as well when we, when we talk about that because I think if the US Were to find itself in a similar position, especially in 2022. Right. We would have, we would have stumbled out the gate pretty hard as well, and we would not have come out swinging as great as what we thought we probably would have.
- [43:46]
A
Yeah. Namely, forget in 2021, there was the withdrawal from Afghanistan as, as well. And that caught a lot of people off guard. And it, and at the time I read one interesting analysis, I think it was in Small Wars Journal, I don't know. But it was one of the issues the US army had with the Afghan, our Afghan allies was that we were trying to turn them into like a NATO like force. But the problem was we needed an Afghan army that was on our side. Not necessarily a NATO army on our side, but an Afghan army. And we just weren't really understanding like, how an Afghan army would operate. Do you have any experience or comments?
- [44:31]
B
Yeah, that's a big mirror imaging. I think it's just, it's when you sit down to say, okay, we've got this partner and we need to make them effective, what's the first thing we can do? And you start thinking and immediately you think of yourself. Right. Because, you know, we, the US Military, US army thinks that it's a good army. It tells itself it's the best army in the world. Right. So why not try and replicate it? And so that's, I just think, a natural byproduct of that. When you find yourself in that situation, it's not even intentional, I don't think. But that's part of the problem is it's not intentional. And you need people saying, no, we need Afghan or whoever the partner is to look like the partner. And I think that was part of the rub that you saw with Ukraine when the counteroffensive didn't go as well as what the Ukrainians hoped. I think it was that summer of 2023. Right. If you go back and look at the criticism and there's been several things that have come out, it Was, you know, they just didn't do maneuver right. And if they had just done maneuver better, they would have gone out and beat the Russians. But the problem was, like, that didn't fit the situation, the battlefield. You know, they were so close on the battlefield that that wasn't actually feasible. And so in my assessment, the US Military couldn't see beyond its own way that it wanted to fight, that it couldn't provide good advice to the Ukrainians on how to address that military problem. And as a result, they just impaled themselves against this wall and didn't generate any tangible outcome. And so when we think about advising partners or creating partners out of nothing or out of scraps of what used to be something, you have to look at the situation and what's actually required first, address the real concern first. And then after the fact, if you've, you know, if you've won, whatever that situation is, big picture, you can start saying, all right, now we think you should look, you know, if, if it does fit to look like you, then like, hey, maybe you need to do this and maybe you need to do that, but at the same time, like, that shouldn't be the starting position whatsoever. Right. So, yeah, I just think it's a. I don't think it's like a nefarious thing. I just think it's a. Almost like a mental lapse in judgment in terms of. Wait a second, let's look at the problem first. Let's not mirror image ourselves.
- [46:57]
A
Yeah, that's just the common issue, I find with a lot of the punditry about the war in Ukraine, it's always about, well, this just doesn't make sense from the US Perspective. But does it make sense from the Russian and the Ukrainian perspective? And it's almost like, well, you know, they're the ones fighting the war. They're the ones. The Ukrainians have lasted this long, but also the Russians are the ones making. Making gains, too. So obviously there is something to. To it. It may not be our way of doing it, but it. It is, you know, a way that they're. They're learning from their own experiences, all that. And it's just also, it's much more than just the TikTok videos of these drones taking out all these Russian soldiers who are just being dumb. But then some of the other experts are saying, yeah, there's that drone. But then you don't see the hundreds of other drones that didn't get through or got shot down or missed the target and whatnot. And then also, you don't see the video of the Russians successfully targeting the Ukrainians. It's just always, it's always the Ukrainian side. Now, naturally, the US is more sympathetic to Ukraine, but again, you're not seeing the full story here.
- [48:08]
B
Yeah, and that's part of the problem with a lot of the hype, especially you go back to, like Nagorno Karabakh, for instance, right? That, that the hype that came out from that conflict as a result of the lopsided victory of the Azeris was like, it was astounding to me because again, it was, it was, it was very much what you just described. It was all drone strikes, right? From the Aziri perspective, you didn't see any of the other context that went into that. And it felt, I know it was going to sound like, make me kind of sound like a jerk, but it felt like a lot of the people that were advocating for the drones, like the TB2 biraktars, the wave of the future, right? This is the future of war. And you've got seven seconds to die on the modern battlefield because these Biraktars are floating around. It felt like a paid endorsement from whatever the company is that makes that drone step back and take a chill pill. The other part of that too is you gotta understand the size of the conflict, right? If you're in a small theater war, like, that's going to affect how certain capabilities, right, Certain weapon systems, how well or unwell they are at generating an effect that they're trying to generate. When you look at that, so size, you then have to look within the size of the theater. Like, what's the terrain within the theater? If it's wide open terrain in a small theater that's gonna, you know, it's gonna facilitate certain weapon systems and war fighting techniques to be better than others. And if it's mountainous terrain, right, Very canalizing terrain, like you saw Nagorno Karabakh, right? It's gonna reward different types of systems and different types of war fighting, right? And so, like, that was like the perfect, perfect situation for drones to completely decimate a force that was predominantly a land force with old equipment that didn't have the capabilities to fight in the air in the same way that the adversary did. And so we stepped away from that. We didn't take the context into consideration. We just looked at the thing in the sky and said, hey, this is the future of war. And then a lot of that's carried forward. And I think you see a lot of that. Hey, but look at Nagorno Karabakh baked into the way MDO is written as well. It doesn't take. And again, it goes back to the point that there's not a threat identified, there's not a theater identified, there's not necessarily a size of theater identified. It's just this concept's going to work because it's going to work, right? Very similar to the drone argument out of, you know, Nagorno Karabakh. And then early again in 2022 when drones were doing really well for Ukraine, out the gate folks are like, look, this confirms everything out of Nagorno Karabakh. But then, you know, a few weeks into the conflict, the Biraktar completely disappears from the discussion. Different types of drones come to the fore and then disappear, then come to the fore and disappear. And like right now, the FPV drone is all the hotness, right? That first person viewer drone, wire guided drone. But you know, in five years that thing will probably not be discussed either and there'll be some other new form of drone that's replaced it. Because there's this cat and mouse dynamic, challenge and response dynamic that fundamentally undercuts any great innovation relatively quickly. And so again, Germans going to Poland quickly went in Poland, Germans going to France quickly went in France. They go into North Africa quickly went some stuff in North Africa. You know, the us The Brits go in, they get their face kicked in a couple times and then we learn, right? And then we start generating the same technology, you know, tanks and mobile war fighting doctrine and then it completely obviates that German advantage, right? And so like, that's one example. But that challenge response dynamic always exists and will always exist because again, whoever's on the back foot is always going to try and get, you know, stabilized, right? They're always going to try and survive and then once they're surviving, they're going to try and win. And so, you know, again, you can't have a doctor and a concept that's focused on the first punch and then doesn't have the resources to deliver a second punch and can't do any follow through and consolidation of gains and, or be agile enough to respond to bad situations on the ground quickly. So anyway, that was a long answer to the thing, to what you said. Sorry.
- [52:38]
A
No, no, that was good. Well, it also reminds me, you know, as George S. Patton said During World War II, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. You have to be resilient, you have to be adaptive. And even on the drone side, yes, the Ukrainians had the advantage, but now even a lot of the analysts and experts are now the Russians have the advantage. So the Russians have learned, they've adapted, and I think sometimes we don't give the Russians credit for that. But also, furthermore, although the drones get most of the attention, most of the fighting, or much of the real hard punch, metaphorically speaking, is actually still the artillery, which would have been more comparable to World War I with its trench warfare than, you know, the, than the, the drones. But the drones are, you know, are kind of like the sexy new technology. And it also reminds me of another point, how it seems like it's always. Although the technology or the name of the technology changes, it's always the same narrative, at least on our end, because it seems like it's always like the same thing that we did with the first Gulf War in 91, where, you know, Norman Schwarzkopf is showing off all the, the sexy precision strikes with the, the laser guided munitions. Of course, most of them actually did not hit their target, but we just showed the, the one. There was also the one, the luckiest man in Iraq, where he drives over the bridge and then right. And then right in his rearview mirror. Then the, the ridge, the bridge blows up. So we're always showing that. Then even 1999, it's like, oh, yeah, all our munitions over Yugoslavia were just decimating them. And then of course, Iraq or Afghanistan in 2001, the early stages, you know, and then shock and awe. And I'm sure you're familiar with it, but it just seems like it's always the same narrative. It's always like, oh, this is the new technology. This is like unprecedented. And no enemy has any countermeasures, or no enemy could possibly stand up to this. But then the longer the war drags on, the less and less that becomes relevant.
- [54:50]
B
His book, Ground Combat, he does a good job of framing that argument and highlighting it as well. And it really seems to emerge during that early Vietnam period where technology becomes the thing that's going to save the day. And Ben does a good job of showing how McNamara and Westmoreland continually say, in 10 years, these technologies are going to fundamentally alter the way that wars are fought and America is going to have this decisive advantage that's going to, you know, make it, make it such that nobody's going to want to fight us. And then that narrative just reboots every 10 years or whatever the case may be. You know, you go back to Rumsfeld. You know, his big thing was transformation, and we're going to transform the US Military And I'm going to pull it kicking and screaming with me. And he was talking about all the threats that exist and that's the bureaucracy within the Pentagon. And you look at today and you see the exact same conversations going on. And for whatever reason we continually just wash, rinse and repeat with that same narrative. And really it has proven so far to not be justifiable. And I think that there's virtue in trying to innovate, obviously. But innovation has to be for a purpose and transformation has to be for a purpose. And the purpose can't be itself. You can't have a self referential innovation and transformation narrative, which is what we typically see. It has to be tied to something on the battlefield or strategically, which it does not seem to be doing. And the other thing too is the artillery thing you mentioned. Artillery is indispensable. I think drones are great and we have to have them. They have to be part of, part of the kit bag. Like I'm definitely not anti drone whatsoever, but artillery, you know, General Rainey, previous commander at Army Futures Command, he was fond of saying something to the effect of like toad, artillery is going to be obsolete in the next X amount of years. I forget the years, he said. And the problem is like I don't. It's not and it probably won't be, right? But the other part of that is we can't get this false narrative on artillery because a lot of people will hear that and they'll forget the toad part and that towed artillery will be, will be obsolete and they'll just hear artillery will be obsolete. But artillery is indispensable because it's all weather. It can fire in any condition, in any weather, at any time of day, regardless of cloud cover, regardless of rain, regardless of anything. As long as you have folks on the guns that can go out and load the ammunition, as long as you have the ammunition and the powder, artillery can fire anywhere, anytime, all the time. And so instead of trying to push artillery to the side and say, all right, instead we're going to buy a million drones, right? To replace the effect that artillery creates, we need to be finding ways to make artillery lighter and more mobile. You may have smaller caliber artillery, but if like you can put 105 millimeter howitzer on the back of a truck and that thing can shoot and move, right? That's far better than just completely getting rid of towed artillery and saying, well, we don't have artillery. We're saying The Paladin, the 109, 105 millimeter artillery, it's tracked, it's too slow, yada, yada yada, it gives off too much of a signature. Okay, well reduce the gun, right? Reduce the caliber, put it on the back of something that can move on wheels and make it something more mobile. So when we think about innovating for the future, we need to understand like what things, what military, what systems can do and what they can't do. And we can't get rid of one system, call it legacy, you know, with a negative connotation and say that this new thing, this drone is, you know, this high minded approach that's going to replace legacy systems when in reality a legacy, legacy system is still needed because it does things that new technology can't do. Yet. You know, now maybe we get to the point where drones can do all the things artillery can do. They can fly all weather, they can fly around the clock through cloud cover. All these different variables that affect it right now, Temperature, right, payload capacity, all that stuff. You know, we should continually be pushing the ball forward as it relates to that and trying to get drones to where they can do all that stuff. But in the interim, like, we can't just be like, nope, no more artillery or no more tubed artillery. But again, I think when you say tubed, that's something that doesn't resonate with a lot of people. Or not tube. Towed. When you say towed, that's a phrase that people will just cut off for expediency. Right? And they'll just say artillery. And then you've got this false bad narrative going on about artillery and its utility in the future.
- [59:42]
A
This kind of reminds me, does this still go on where they were saying, I think 20 years ago, like how track tanks were going obsolete, they were dinosaurs and they were all going to be like wheeled, like because of innovations in the civilian automobile, automotive sector. Is that kind of a similar.
- [60:00]
B
Yeah, the the tank is dead argument comes and goes all the time too. So at the beginning of the Ukraine war in 2022, shortly after that, when Ukraine started zapping all the Russian tanks, you know, there was a whole big push of people saying the tank was dead. And then the tank came back because the Ukrainians started using tanks effectively and folks were like, oh, but look, now the tank is back and it is useful. We just have to modify the tactics. And this goes to the whole point of combined arms operations and joint operations is you have to have a little bit of everything. Because if you don't, you're building in an inherent weakness to yourself that can be exploited by the other side. And if you have it, it provides you the ability to take advantage of weaknesses and exploit windows of opportunity that emerge on the battlefield that you may not have if you don't have that technology there. Right. If a, you know, a gap in a line emerges for whatever reason and you have something that's quick and protective, that can move fast to get through, that you can set a foundation with, to then reinforce with other capabilities like infantry and you know, fill in the blank. You know, if you don't have a tank for instance, they can quickly move through there and set that, that foundation for the follow on force. You just leave an opportunity sitting vacant on the battlefield. Right. You can have all the drones in the world, but they can't land and hold terrain. And that goes back to the point I was making earlier about taking, retaking, holding terrain. Right. You have to have that multi layered force structure that allows you to do all the different things. Right. And so again, when we think about innovating for the future, when we think about this thing is dead or that thing is dead, that's probably not the case. It's just, it's situational relevance has changed. Right. And so like again, I have a book coming out this summer called Maneuver is Dead. And that's the whole argument in the book is the way that we think about maneuver is no longer useful and we need to re imagine when and where maneuver is applicable and think about other ways of war fighting and where those actually fall and fit on the battlefield in time and space. And so we just have to approach all this smartly and quit ruling out things like the tank. The tank is dead, right? No, it's not. And neither are helicopters, you know, manned helicopters or any other host of things that we are starting to tag as legacy and trying to completely mothball.
- [62:28]
A
Yeah. And even Ukraine is showing they're using like old, what were considered obsolete tank models going back to the T55. And then we're even seeing World War II weapons, World War II and even World War I style weapons being used. And it's like, well, whatever works. And reminds me of what one of my previous guests, Patty Walker said. You know, good soldiers are going to always be good kit. You know, you need good soul, you need good soldiers who know what they're doing and officers who know what they're doing. And that's not to say kid is you know, irrelevant like equipment. But that is secondary to, you know, the, the infantry or the army, the system and your proper way of thinking and able to adapt to the situation. But it's almost like we're always thinking about. No, we're, we always got to have like the, the latest kit, we got to have the latest technology and yeah.
- [63:24]
B
Military should be a Swiss army knife, but we're always looking to have some sort of like lightsaber instead of a Swiss army knife, you know?
- [63:31]
A
Yes. And you know, Swiss army knife, I mean how, how old is that design? I mean at least a century I believe. But yeah, that's still going and still does what it's supposed to do. Now we've been talking a lot about Ukraine, but of course we did talk earlier about the Indo Pacific and how the Indo Pacific would be very different in terms of multi domain operations to what say we would do in Europe against Russia. What would be some of the dynamics or what would be some of the importance of the Indo Pacific in this conversation?
- [64:10]
B
So getting so a, what, you know, what's the objective? I think everybody's anchored on the idea that Taiwan would be the focal point of any conflict in the Indo Pacific. And so I think we assume that China is either moving on or has taken Taiwan. And so then the problem is how do you liberate Taiwan or foster some sort of resistance in Taiwan that prevents its takeover from China? So the problem, the first problem is getting to the theater, right? So we have forces in the area, but it's insufficient to fully address the problem. And part of the, part of the way of thinking as it relates to multi domain operations is that multi domain task forces are going to be there. I think it's two that are dedicated to the Indo Pacific. Maybe a third is going over there, but I think it may, I know it's two for sure, but again, so you've got this long range strike, you've got cyber capability, you've got sensing capability, all this stuff. But if you don't have forces that can go on the ground and help do the hard work on the ground, you're just an enabling force at that point for whomever in this case, maybe the Taiwanese plus whoever else is participating. So you've got that dynamic, right? But then also just getting there and that's the hard part. So if you do commit to providing land forces to help solve the problem. Now you've got marines in the area and that's a land force, right? But if you're trying to commit significant amounts of army land forces, they're going to have to get there and you've got a small force in Korea, rotational brigade, you've got some security force Assistance folks in the sfab. And I think fifth SFAB is staying in the Indo Pacific. We've shuttered, I think three of the SFABs. So that security force assistance capability within the army is significantly diminished. But you've got that, but that's still insufficient to help solve the problem. So you're going to have to cross the Pacific somehow or go some other way. Right. To get into theater with the land forces that you're going to need. And so the multi domain operations challenge become how do you neutralize Chinese sensing capability? How do you neutralize Chinese strike capability so that you can then allow yourself to get naval forces, air forces and land forces into theater to the degree that you can overcome the problem. Right. And that's not even taking into consideration the nuclear question. Right. That whole, that whole thing ends any argument like as soon as you start, you know, introducing nukes into the equation. So if you're just to set that aside for a moment, assuming that nobody's going to use nukes, right, then the question is okay, well nonetheless, China still has all these sensors and shooters that can completely, theoretically, completely pick us off if we tried to cross the Pacific and get over there. And so the multi domain operations problem is not one of land on the front end. It's far more a cyber, right. A cyberspace sensing question and then a long range strike question plus that naval and air component. So it's like very much everything minus the Lang domain on that front end there. And that's a very, very challenging problem to solve. And I know a lot of people obviously are working on it. It's like one of the hot things to talk about right now. So I'm not going to like drone on about that, but that's the real problem. And it switches, you know, it flips really from a land centric multi domain problem to a every everything else minus the land demand problem.
- [67:47]
A
Would there be any type of scenario akin to like the island hopping that we did in World War II against the Japanese in this type of scenario?
- [67:56]
B
I think that would depend on what China's doing. Right. If they have, if they've taken other territories, other islands in the area, if they've put capabilities on those territories or they already have capabilities on those territories that we had to neutralize, then yeah, for sure. And if they've got, you know, naval bases in those areas or any other kind of basing on any of those islands in that area, whether it's islands they've taken or islands they've created, then yeah, absolutely, that would be another consideration. And this goes back to land forces, right? It takes land forces to get in the terrain, especially when the terrain is really rough like it is on a lot of those islands out there in the Pacific. And drones, long range strike, all these things that can strike from far. Precisely. They can't get in and dig people out that are hiding. And that's where you have to have land forces that can go in and do the, you know, that, that hard dirty fighting that, you know, long range strike, drones, precision capabilities just can't affect appropriately. So that's where I think, you know, big picture. If we zoom out, it's easy to say we don't need infantrymen. Right. We need to get rid of all these infantrymen so that we can make room for all these cool, cool toys that we want to buy. Okay, that's terrific. But you know, again, if the initial punch doesn't land appropriately and you've got to, you know, follow on and do several punches after that, and they've responded in a way that makes landing any other punch far more difficult. It's going to require land forces to go in and do that work.
- [69:37]
A
Now how about other, some of our allies in the region, like Australia and Japan, have they kind of considered their own concepts of multi domain operations or how are they considering these issues?
- [69:54]
B
Yeah, they've also adopted their own interpretations of multi domain operations which are slightly different. And again, if you talk to Australians, they say that their problem, their strategic concerns, national security concerns are all pointed north, whereas ours are pointed every direction. And for them it's a far more tangible problem than it is for the United States just because of proximity. And so, yeah, they've all adopted various forms of multi domain operations. If you look at the chapter in the book that we have on Japan in particular, it's actually really interesting. I thought it was really interesting because of the way that they frame multi domain operations as it fits within their culture and their approach to military operations. And so, you know, they've, they've all got a very slightly different version. And the question would be, if we have to come together, how do those concepts overlap? And then is there ways to create, you know, synergy, power, bringing those together, even though there's going to be, you know, potentially significant interoperability issues with those. And again, we have forces, you know, we have US Forces Japan, there's also in US Army Japan, we have all sorts of different forces all over that, that region that are helping facilitate that and doing partner training and events together to help bridge those gaps. But at the same time there's going to be gaps, there's going to be seams. And the question is, are those going to be such that we can't overcome them in a timely manner to generate the effects against the Chinese that we need to, or is that not going to be the case?
- [71:37]
A
Now we kind of go to the other side. Do some of our potential enemies like China and Russia, do they have their own versions of what we would call multi domain operations? I know, especially in the case of the Russians, you know, gray zone and hybrid warfare concepts have been floating around, but do the Russians have or and Chinese have their own versions of this concept?
- [72:00]
B
I think that the, the whole Chinese, I can't say the word correctly, informationized warfare really embodies that idea. And there are three warfares and a lot of what we've done with NDO mirrors some of that. And that's really, the Chinese is really focused on systems destruction. I think that their interpretation of systems going back to systems theory, I think is a bit more clear and refined than our own. And they actually understand how to take apart a system a little bit better than we do. So to me that's a concern. And then the Russians, I think it's like a different calculus for them. It's still far more, their concerns are far more land based and far more concerned on or they're far more likely to dedicate manpower to solve the problem as opposed to necessarily looking at applying different joint effects and joint services in the different domains. Now they are significant, they do have significant cyber capabilities, as you know, everybody's seen. And they do, I think the irregular warfare aspect of things fairly well. But in terms of like I just, for me looking at it and studying Russia, I still think that they're very much land land not first, but that's like the main punch within how they approach war and warfare. So to say they have a multi domain operations thing, I probably would have agreed with you back before they invaded Ukraine and then in the early, early part of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But having watched how they fight so since then, I would say maybe not. But they may also just be fighting not necessarily in a way that they would want to fight, but they're fighting in a way that's generating the outcome that they want. Right? They're grinding Ukraine down. They know that they've got more resources than Ukraine and time is on their side and so they can just continually apply weight in terms of manpower over time and they don't have to apply, you Know, all domain operations trying to win big battles quickly so that they can slap the table and say, we won, we're going home. They're trying to, you know, exhaust the Ukrainians, exhaust the international community and their willingness to support that conflict and hope that, you know, everybody gets bored and tired with it and just starts basically not paying attention. So I don't. Russia may have conceptually strategic concepts and military concepts that are multi domain operations, but in the applied sense, from what we've seen, that's not really been the case. Now again, the other part of that is people can come and say, well, they're doing cyber and they're doing this and that. Okay, sure, that's fine. Yeah. I mean everybody does that in every, every conflict, right. If they, they use the capabilities that they have available. So if you want to say, oh, it's multi domain operations, that's cool, you can. But I just, generally speaking, I think that they're far more interested on that land force exhaust, strategic exhaustion approach.
- [75:18]
A
Yeah. And the Russians have always kind of traditionally understood themselves as a continental land power and then they're often seeing themselves as in contest with a lot of the sea powers like England back in the 19th century and then us. So it's kind of like for them, it's kind of like how do we cancel out the advantages of the sea power but use our land power advantage quite a bit. And it seems like especially as we're seeing now in Ukraine, they're kind of doing that quite a bit in the military sense. Now what are some possible, we can't predict the future totally, but in your own view and based on your own research with the book, what, what does the future hold for conflicts in the 21st century and what role will multi domain operations have in that, in your own view, based on your own research and your own observations.
- [76:16]
B
So I think that there's a distinct character to wars in the 21st century. And if you go and look at the record, there's about 15 conflicts that you can point to that reinforce this. Wars in the 21st century are long, they're not short. You've got, you know, the Afghan war with the US was 20 years. OIF was eight. What was it? Eight years? Seven years? Eight years. Right. You've got the Libyan civil war, the Syrian civil war, the rise of isis. Right. That whole thing was about four years. And it's in the amount of time it was got the Operation Inherent Resolve. Right. So the counter ISIS fight, that was four to five years long. The Yemen civil war has Been going on for over a decade. You've got the Russia, Ukraine war, that's it, four years now. The Sudanese civil war, that's a newer one. The Gaza war is a newer one. But there's a whole list of these conflicts and they're long. The other thing with that is they're attritional. All right? So at the end of the day, death and destruction is the currency of winning and losing in these wars. And so that I think isn't going away. And exhaustion is the goal, right? You're trying to exhaust the other side to the point they just can't keep fighting. And so wars are long, they're attritional, and they're focused on exhaustion as part of that as well. They're positional. And because Tony King, as he's I think done a great job of articulating, they're becoming far more urban because urban areas are growing. Urban sprawl has become significant, right? Cities that were once, you know, mid sized cities have grown to large cities, but then other cities in the area have grown and the connective tissue in terms of road networks and suburbs have grown as well. So you've got these massive urban areas. And when you go back to the systems thinking approach to things, right, a system, a military state or non state, wants to survive. And so if fighting from a city is going to help increase its chances of survival, you're going to have that, right? So it's becoming increasingly more urban. And because of all that, control is really like what militaries are going for, whether it's state or non state, control of towns, control of politics, control of terrain, control of whatever the situation dictates. And then they're fought by armies. All the other services are, all the other capabilities, all the other domains support the fight on the ground because of the things that I've just outlined up to this point. And so that's another thing that has to not be forgotten as we continually look at the future of war and how war unfolds in the future, is if you're not taking considerable adherence to the fact that you're going to need an army, a land force to go do a lot of the hard fighting, you're going to be doing things wrong. The other thing is that the air ground littoral or the air littoral, that connective tissue between the land and what has traditionally been considered the airspace where air forces operate, that is a feature that I think is increasingly important and that there's insufficient work on as it relates to folks Thinking and studying and preparing for the future of war. And air ground littoral, or air littoral is a place that emphasis in terms of innovation really needs to be focused and thinking about what that thing is. Right. What is the air ground, the Toro and what's its role and how does it fit within multi domain operations and just warfare in general. And so those are really the big things that we have to think about and I think that are shaping the future of war. And then the last point on that is defeat. We seem to be caught up in this idea that we're thinking about just introducing a system and watching it do the thing it does and then patting ourselves on the back. And we're not focused on how do we generate defeat and whatever that adversary is that we're out there on the battlefield against. And we just get caught up. And again, you mentioned the videos earlier. Right. We just get caught up in watching the drone strikes on TV and saying, holy smokes, look at that. That's the wave of the future. We got to have more of that. But that's not contributing to winning or losing necessarily. And so we have to approach it from what's going to generate the situation required to win. And then we need to orient on that. And that gets back to all the points that I just mentioned. Right. The long wars, attritional wars, exhaustion, positional warfare, urban armies, air ground littoral. If we're not looking at those variables in the relation to how to generate defeat in our adversary and prevent our own defeat, then we're looking at innovating for the future of war. We're looking at the future of war incorrectly. Because I feel like, again, based off my own research, that those things, that that is the character of war in the 21st century.
- [81:16]
A
Yeah. As we kind of also explained earlier, it seems like a lot of the thinking or a lot of the leadership, they're still stuck in the a certain version of the 20th century where they're constantly thinking of France, 1940, never mind the fact that was just one campaign in the first part of World War II. But then like the Six Day War or even the first Gulf War where it was a massive coalition victory against Iraq, and then shock and awe in the, the early stages of Afghanistan. But then, you know, as both shock and awe and Afghanistan prove, it's like the longer it dragged out, that was just the first stage. That wasn't really the totality of it.
- [81:59]
B
Yeah. And that's again, we have to assume not that we're going to win with that initial punch. But that initial punch, whatever it is, will create windows of opportunity. A big window, a small window, but a window of opportunity that we have to then follow through and exploit and hopefully be able to quickly consolidate into tangible military outcomes that support, you know, strategic win conditions. Now, we also have to understand that even that follow through may be another blip on the radar in terms of generating the outcomes needed to win the war. So you mentioned France, right? If you look at Poland, Poland was the first punch, France was the second punch, right. But then Germany quickly was like, man, we're running out of the ability to punch and win and fight. Right? And so we have to not find ourselves in that situation where if we're fighting some sort of big conflict, we've got the first punch, we've got the second punch, and then we don't have the ability to keep fighting. Right. We need to assume that wars are going to be long, they're going to be attritional. The adversary is going to be trying to exhaust us and sidestep our ability to knock them out of the conflict quickly. And so, again, this is where reality, it's like, it's one of those. It legit drives me crazy. Like, we have to understand that, like winning quickly, that was great for Napoleon, but rarely does it happen in the course of military history in any, you know, verifiable way that you can point to and say, look, if we just orient this way and fight this way, we'll be able to do that in the future and win wars quickly. Ones aren't where wars aren't fought and won quickly, especially when the stakes are significant and. Or your adversary has a pride project going on, like with Putin. Right. There's a lot of pride that goes into this thing. He's not going to give up that fight easy. Right. And so to assume that you can just go out and knock out some generals and they're going to throw their hands up and be like, oh, you beat us. Right? That's not going to happen. And so we have to think realistically. And again, also when we talk about rational actors and rational decision making, the rationality, what's a rational decision for us may not be and isn't typically rational for somebody else, Right? And so Putin, Putin's not being rational, Right? That's one of the arguments that people always make. Well, it's not rational to us, but who cares that he's not being rational according to us? What's he doing? What's he going to do? And we need to prepare for that contingency. And that's where, again, I think wars are going to be long and attritional because you can't account for the decision making that goes on in somebody else's head, regardless of how much information you've pulled from their network. Right. At the end of the day, political decisions on whether to fight and stay engaged in a war resides typically in, like, one person's head. And you can't get into that head regardless of how much information dominance you may have. And so you need to offset that with, you know, I would say, a robust and redundant military. And the problem is today we've sold off so much of that redundancy and robustness for cool technology that's going to fall flat when that first punch goes. Right. And then we don't have the ability to follow through because we've sold off, you know, land forces and other things that we need.
- [85:20]
A
Well, yeah, this was even an issue in Ukraine, where in some ways we were selling off all our stockpiles of weapons to Ukraine. And then now it's like, okay, well, our stockpiles are going to be low, so what happens if we need it in another scenario? And then even going back to Napoleon, yeah, he made some real great victories, like at Austerlitz, most famously.
- [85:41]
B
But.
- [85:41]
A
But then at the end of the day, he lost the war twice. 1814. And then he made a final stand at Waterloo, but again, he lost the throne twice in the end.
- [85:55]
B
Yeah. The other point on that, too, is that you said something at the beginning that I wanted to highlight. What was it that you said at the very beginning of that?
- [86:03]
A
Oh, that we were selling about Napoleon.
- [86:07]
B
No, it was the. Before Napoleon.
- [86:09]
A
Oh, the. That we were just selling off our stockpiles to Ukraine. And eventually it was like, yeah, so. So eventually the war was taking up more of our stockpiles than we anticipated.
- [86:22]
B
Yeah. And this is part of the rub, too, when we think about precision strike technology and precision. Precision strike munitions, either, like, extremely expensive. I assume over time, as we continue to do more R and D on these things, we'll figure out ways to. To make them cheaper. Right. But at the same time, they're still expensive and they're finite because they're expensive. And we saw to your point on running out of munitions in Iraq in 2017, towards the tail end of the battle in Mosul, we found ourselves running out of precision munitions during that. During that conflict. And if you looked big picture, right, if you stepped back and said, okay, why. Why is that the case? Well, you Also had the war in Afghanistan going on where precision strike was the primary method of engagement. You had everything going on in Syria where the US Was fully invested as well. You had the Battle of Marawi going on in the Philippines at the same time, right, where we essentially flattened the city with precision strike munitions. And so, you know, if you take that, right, I mentioned Mosul, Afghanistan, Morawi, Syria, you've got four places where a significant amount of precision guided munitions are being used. Well, if you take that idea, okay, and you think, let's say we're fighting Russia and Europe somewhere, there's probably going to be four places where there's significant big fights going on. Pick your city, right? You're fighting the battle of fill in the blank city and fill in the blank country in central or Eastern Europe, you're going to have four big battles. So you're going to find yourself running out of precision strike munitions really fast. And so that's the other part of all this. And I know a lot of people have talked about it, but the depth in terms of the industrial base to produce the things that are required. This also goes back to the point on artillery, right? Like, artillery is relatively cheap. If you mass produce a lot of just straight artillery, you'll be able to offset a lot of that precision strike. And the other thing too is ballistic artillery. Regular tube artillery today is pretty precise in its own right, you know, and so we also can't forget that it's not just a, you know, a shell flying out and hopefully landing somewhere close to the objective. If you've got good data on the target and where you're at and the environmental factors that affect the flight of the round, you're going to be hitting pretty, pretty dang close to what your target is. And so again, that goes back to the point of advocating for the artillery and keeping that on hand and in stock, because a lot of these other things are just super, super expensive and they don't really deliver the effect in any greater way than what something like artillery would too, right? And the other question, the other part of that I've written about this too, call it the precision paradox. Like if the end, the end state of using precision still generates a flat in the city like we saw in Mosul, then what does it really matter if you're using highly expensive precision guided munitions or ballistic artillery, Right? And I would always, I've said this before, if you could, like, simulate this battle, right, if you could go back and, and run the simulation with what happened and then do a cost Comparison have the same effect on the battlefield, but fight it with ballistic artillery and see what the cost differential is and see which one really gives you, like the bigger, no pun intended, the bigger bang for the buck. You know, I would be interested in seeing that because I think that you would find some pretty fascinating information there that could help inform. All right, well, if the end of the, at the end of the day, if the city's still flattened, but it's, you know, X million dollars cheaper to do it this way with ballistic artillery than precision guided munitions, and maybe we would approach things differently. The same thing too. You look at casualties like, what are the casualties associated with all this? The casualties are lower with ballistic artillery or higher. Right. That would be another variable that would be interesting to pull out of that simulation. So if anybody's out there who knows how to do these sorts of simulations, look me up because I got all sorts of great ideas that I would love to dig into. I don't. I couldn't. I can barely turn on Zoom to do meetings like this. So anyway, keep going. Sorry.
- [90:38]
A
No, you're fine. No, no, no, this is fine. This has been a very fascinating discussion. Now you actually host your own podcast, Revolution in Military affairs, and that's a whole. And that's like a whole nother concept that keeps flying up, which is part of the whole transformation that we were talking about. But anyways, could you just introduce our, our listeners to your podcast? I listen to it. I really like the recent discussion you had with Christopher Tuck, I believe. Yeah, Christopher Tuck, who wrote Modern Land War, Land Warfare. I've been meaning to read that book myself, but there was a very interesting discussion.
- [91:19]
B
Yeah, that's. So that's my favorite episode of the whole podcast. I republished it. So I've actually. So that was one of the first episodes I recorded when I first started the podcast back in 2023. But I love it so much that every so often I rerun it and I went through and I re edited it before I ran it this last time a few weeks ago because I had a different editing system back then and I was able to go in and clean up a lot of. A lot of issues with the initial recording. So if you go back and look and just you can find it multiple times, I think I've run it like four times now total over the two years that the podcast has been running. But the podcast, it's Revolution and Military affairs. The name somewhat tongue in cheek because it's not about the revolution and military affairs per se. It's about strategy, war, conflict, and then everything that basically touches that. And I've done some interesting stuff too. I've tried to get some different perspectives on certain things as well. Like one episode, I had the head football coach at the University of Houston on the podcast to talk about strategy because we get caught up and we get almost in an echo chamber when we think and talk about strategy. So I wanted to hear a completely different perspective on strategy and what is strategic thinking, how to different fields approach strategy. So that's definitely an outlier. But by and large, it's academics, it's military professionals, it's analysts, all talking about different things as it relates to war. This season, the season eight, and it's been going on for a couple months now, I have a new episode out every Monday, and this one accidentally has been focused a lot on land warfare for whatever reason. That's just how the guest and the schedule has unfolded. And so, like, the focus has really been on that quite a bit, with some Russia, Ukraine tied in there as well. The season started with Mike Kaufman, and then we had Franz on. And then it gradually evolved. There's a really good episode on cyber warfare on there as well with John Lindsey, who's a professor at Georgia Tech. So anyway, it's wide ranging. It covers anything and everything under the sun. I've had all sorts of folks on. I had Dave Petraeus on a couple, early, early it was like 2024. So if you dig back through that, you can hear, you know, Dave Petraeus or Ben Hodges. Mike Kaufman's on all the time. And so there's just a bunch of great hosts. Ed, Beatrice Heuser on a few episodes ago as well, which was terrific. If you're into strategy and strategic history and strategic theory, there's almost nobody better to talk to. Had Frank Hoffman on a couple times. And so it's just, it's fun. I think it's really fun because you get to just nerd out with people who write stuff that you read. And you're like, man, this is fascinating. I'd love to talk to this person. And you hit them up and you're like, hey, I'd love to talk to you about this. You want to come on my show? And they're like, oh, yeah, you know, because they want to talk about it too. That's part of the thing. People write stuff, you know, A couple times I've been asked by people, hey, what is your this paper about or that paper or that book about? And I'm like, well, I wrote it for you. To read. So go read it. I'm not going to tell you. You know, and people are like, oh, what? I'm like, yeah, you know, people write these things because they want people to read them. And so the other part of that is people want to talk about the things that they've written after you've read them. Right. And so that's what I've found too is guests typically are like, happy to come talk about the book that they've published or the paper that they've published, because it's the ideas they want to share and socialize with folks, whether it's introducing something new that they thought through and come up with, or just bouncing ideas and saying, hey, tell me where I'm wrong, or let's discuss this topic. And so that's the approach I take to it. It's very under edited, if you will. Like, it's. I don't put a ton of time into editing it because it's. I just have a lot going on. So it's a little rough around the edges. I don't cut out a lot of stuff. I try and keep it as true to the original recording as possible. So if you like, I always phrase it it's a bit of a gorilla podcast and that there's not a lot of production to it. It's very cut to the bone, if you will. So that's it.
- [95:37]
A
You know, I can relate so much to what you said and it's like, yeah, I just, that's always my approach. It's like, yo, you wrote this very interesting book or this very interesting article, and it's like, you know, tell us about it. You know, just share your thoughts. And then sometimes I can, I'll try to bounce ideas or if, as I'm sure you just experienced, like, if you say something interesting, it's like, oh, that brings up a thought and then I add to the discussion. But it's just, no, no, no, it's more about like an invigorating discussion with people about some of these topics that don't get a lot of perspective. Like, just as we were talking about, like, you see in a lot of the media a lot of the punditry about these types of topics, like the war in Ukraine, for example. But then what is, like, really happening? Because you get the punditry, that's more about like, you know, the flashy headlines or the clickbait, as we often call it. But then what's really going on? What's the real story behind the headlines, so to speak. And that's where I kind of look on. And that's one reason why I especially pay attention to Mike Kaufman, especially when he's on your podcasts, because he usually will get deep within this. And also he's just like, well, I don't know what's going on. This is just my opinion. And yeah. So forth. Whereas, you know, some people are like, oh, the Russians, they're gonna collapse in, you know, three minutes because, you know, they're too drunk to do anything. Right? It's like, okay, you said that four years ago. So when are they actually going to collapse?
- [97:06]
B
That's. Yeah, that's one of the things that drives me crazy too, about listening to a lot of the talk. It's, you know, the economy, the Russian economy is on the verge of collapse. We've been hearing that since March of 2022. You know what I mean? The Russian war machine is going to fall apart because the Russian economy is about to collapse. It's like every four months, five months, that argument comes back to the fore. And, you know, early on, I'm not an economist, I'm a political scientist. I don't like economy. Okay, you're telling me it's going to collapse, I'll believe you. I'll buy it. You know, and so early on, I'm sitting there waiting, I'm waiting for the Russian economy to collapse and I'm like, all right, when's it coming? It never collapses. The Russian war machine doesn't collapse. It just adapts. Right? So going back to system, system adapt, because I want to survive. And, you know, that's that argument. Every time I hear it, I just shake my head now and I'm like, get, get out of here with that. You know, and not only that, but.
- [98:02]
A
Not only that, but also China and just India are strengthening their economic ties with Russia. And it's like, okay, so obviously they see an advantage with. Yeah, because India is getting, like, cheaper oil now because they've been. Because Russia's been kicked out of the Western economy. And then, then it was also funny. But then people were complaining like, well, gas prices are going up. I'm like, well, you just kicked out one of the biggest oil producing countries from your economy, so what the hell did you expect?
- [98:32]
B
Right? Yeah, that's the other part of it too, that I find a bit frustrating is. And again, I said this the other day in my podcast. But part of the problem that I have when I listen to people talk about war and conflict is so many people that talk about it haven't experienced it. And so they don't truly understand the dynamics that occur within militaries and how militaries operate. And so they may have done like a math problem to support a PhD thesis that says this is going to happen. Because this really cool math problem I did shows this, you know, this, this output. But in reality, like, if you're not, if you haven't experienced things on the ground and you don't necessarily know the dynamics that occur. And that's why, again, part of the thing, part of the reason that I highlight this issue with drones in particular and precision strike is at the end of the day, and this is why I say positional warfare is on the rise, is because having been on the receiving end of artillery action rockets, more so than artillery, like, you go to ground and you hide, right? And you wait until it's safe to come out or you've got your own cover to where you can come out and move while you're under contact from the sky. And folks that don't necessarily have that experience just assume, oh man, like these are going to eviscerate everything and everybody, right? All you need is, you know, attack EMS and it'll flatten everything and kill everybody and you'll win. And that's just not the case. So that's part of the perspective I bring with my podcast as I try and inject that sense of what it's like having been a soldier, but then also pulling in people that have served or either or are serving to help provide a bit of ballast to the uninformed, but data rich arguments for or against one thing or the other.
- [100:23]
A
Well, this has been a fascinating discussion and we could probably talk all day or all week about these topics because there's so many nuances, even with the military history and all that. But do you have any final thoughts, maybe anything covered in the book that we didn't cover in the main discussion?
- [100:40]
B
Yeah. So the last thing for the book, and just the last thing in general, is that when we think about developing concepts, and I think Tim Sways and Davis Ellison do a really good job in their chapter in the book, it's called Warfaring Concepts in the State of MDO Development, they highlight the point that concepts have to be driven by an idea first, right. An approach, and then everything else follows that. And you don't start with the technology and then say, we've got this technology now, let's construct a concept around it that's doing things backwards. You have to start with the idea, which also begins with a Clear understanding of the character of the conflict or the character of warfare at that period of time and then move from that. You also have to start with the threat and the theater in which you think you're going to be involved, because all those provide variables that have to be accounted for. And you can't just hand wave a general concept and say this applies everywhere to everything, which is what MDO currently does. And so big picture like MDO is a very incomplete concept, a very incomplete doctrine. I think it's more just a general principle of thinking about warfare as opposed to any kind of doctrine. And it's going to have to be severely scoped down into specific theaters and threats for it to be something that's tangible. And so just I would offer folks, you know, provide some caution when they hear people talk about multi domain operations or cross domain operations or joint all domain operations or things along that line. Because there's variations of the term multi domain operations that are floating out there and it isn't in its current state. The answer, it is more a principle that must be considered when we think about the current wars and the future of war.
- [102:37]
A
Well, we always like to end by asking our guests, what are you working on now? And you did make a comment about this earlier that you are working on a few books. One I believe, Maneuver is Dead. And then there was another one you mentioned.
- [102:51]
B
Yeah, so Maneuver's Dead is complete. It's like I just sent the final proofs in a week ago at the beginning of January or end of January and that'll be out in June. You can already get it, it's being public or it's published by Bloomsbury Academics. So if you go on their Studies and Contemporary Conflict series under Bloomsbury Academic, it's available there, it's cheaper. It's like 20 bucks cheaper there right now than it is on Amazon. But you can also find it on Amazon and so that's available for pre order now A couple weeks ago it was the number eight new release and military Strategy. So that was cool. But it's since fallen off. So get out there and get it so it pops back up on the list. And then I got, as I said earlier too, I've got a book on systems thinking as it applies to military, but I don't have the title worked out yet. I had a title when I submitted the proposal, but that's not going to be the title of the book. But essentially it's on systems theory, systems thinking and how it applies to militaries and how we got it wrong in that 90s era up until today as well. Like that 90s era, thinking about systems is fully enmeshed in MDO and we have to rethink and re understand it. And so the book goes into that in great detail. And so that'll be out. That's with Rutledge. That'll be published sometime next year. Depends on how quickly I get the book turned in. But right now it's earmarked for June of 2027. Depending on when I get it turned in. Could be sooner. Hopefully it will be sooner. I think it will be. But we'll see how that goes. But those are the two big things. And then, you know, like anybody, there's probably six papers I've got in various states of either with a journal or on my computer being finished up. So those are the big things. And I'm coaching youth basketball eight and under. So if anybody wants to watch that, let me know.
- [104:48]
A
Well, you're always welcome to come back on. We always love sharing thoughts together about these things, but Amos Fox, thank you for joining us on the New Books Network.
- [105:02]
B
Thanks for the opportunity, Steven. I appreciate it. It's been great. Thank you.
- [105:05]
A
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. Until next.