B (4:50)

Yeah. And I have to tell everyone I've read this book. It's not out yet, right, Mike? It's coming out soon, but I've actually had a chance to read it prior to it coming out, which is really excellent. And you make a big distinction, I think. Well, maybe not a big distinction, but as A distinction between grand strategy, which a lot of people have written about, and defense strategy. This book is more about defense strategy as opposed to grand strategy. Can you explain that a little bit?

A (5:26)

Yeah, that's a perfect point, Amy, to really start to get into this, because let me use the Cold War as an example. A lot of people will be familiar with it, although I guess your younger listeners may not be, but probably a lot of people who have studied that history of the period when the Soviet threat was greatest, roughly from, you know, right after World War II until 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. As you and I know that period, American grand strategy was described as one of containment. In other words, the big idea and how we were going to keep ourselves safe and keep ourselves powerful. That's sort of what grand strategy is. How does the nation have a theory of safety and power? And the grand idea was containment. It was to limit the ability of the Soviets working with their allies, including Communist China, starting 1949, after the Communists took over in China, to expand communist influence around the world. And then we tried very hard to stem that, to stop that. But the grand strategy was containment. The defense strategy was, okay, now that I've said I want to contain the Soviet Communist threat, what do I do about it?

B (6:32)

Right?

A (6:32)

Where do I position my forces? Which countries do I ally with? Where am I willing to fight in defense of freedom or even in defense of not so free countries that may be threatened by the Soviets or by Communism? And it's the nitty gritty of getting that right that leads to tough decisions about things like the Korean War and the Vietnam War. And so I would say the defense strategy debates within the Cold War period were more difficult. The containment idea was the right big idea, but it was not anything close to an implementation strategy. Right? Implementation was the defense strategy.

B (7:03)

How big should your military be? You know, all of those things. It's like we say we want to do something, but how do you implement it? And you make an argument in the book which I think is really compelling. And a lot of people are sort of looking at this differently right now. But you make this point that American grand strategy since World War II has really succeeded. But the defense strategy, maybe not so much, but the grand strategy, meaning this idea that the greatest generation won World War II and they wanted to then protect the United States and our allies, protect the sea lanes, make sure that we had this sort of world that was open for trade and where naked aggression against. From one country against another was maybe not tolerated so much, you know, that Kind of succeeded, but our defense strategy maybe hasn't been as successful. Successful.

A (8:04)

I do agree. And by the way, that's not, generally speaking, a criticism of the military. I do think there were times where the military didn't do as well as it could have, most clearly in Vietnam and to some extent in part of the Korean War. But for the most part, the challenge has been that we have asked our military to do nearly impossible things. For example, the kinds of conflicts that your generation was asked to participate in and carry out and risk your lives for in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't think those wars were unwinnable, but I think they were extremely difficult, given that they were not just military operations. They were complex political military stabilization and counterinsurgency efforts in countries that had been wracked by civil conflict, by, you know, ethnic and sectarian division, by horrible rule previously. Their institutions weren't strong. Their suspicions of each other were great. And the idea that we could go in and stabilize Iraq or Afghanistan, even though I was not adamantly against it at the time myself, I always thought it was going to be very hard at best. And so, yeah, we have lost two wars, two big wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, in the sense that the side we were fighting against wound up in power once the war was over. So in military terms, that's a defeat. We fought, I think, to more or less a stalemate in Korea and in Iraq, or maybe we should say in Iraq. It's just too soon to say what the ultimate verdict will be. But it certainly was very painful and much harder than expected. And yet, in the context of those military struggles, as well as smaller problems like the failed Iran hostage rescue of 1980, or the Beirut barracks bombing of 1983, or Black Hawk down in Somalia in 1993, despite all that, the world has remained devoid of great power war, knock on wood, democracies have stabilized. They were not all strong, as you know, after World War II. They've stabilized and become prosperous. Some impressive new democracies have joined the ranks, like, like South Korea. India is not aligned with us formally, but it's doing amazing things, and it's a democracy. And so the world has been safe for trade, for investment, for the movement of people, and we've prevented so far another great power war. So the grand strategy of containment, of stemming the Soviet threat through 1989 and then sort of keeping that open global order going since 1989, it hasn't been perfect by any means, and we've lost a bit of ground on some of the democracy movement. This century, but it's still a much better world than we ever saw the great powers maintain over any substantial period of time before.

B (10:39)

And it's interesting, you also, in the book, break up the defense strategies between wartime strategies and peacetime strategies, which I have never really considered before. I was in the military for 24 years, but I think sometimes when you're in the military, you always think you're at war, but you make a very good distinction between the two. And almost to the way I took it was the conclusion was we do fairly well on our defense strategy during peacetime, but maybe not so much during wartime. And probably because of the issues that you brought up earlier, where we're asking the military to do things that maybe the military isn't designed to do.

A (11:27)

Yeah. Well, even in our early history, when we did win most of our wars, we usually got off to a bad start. So Revolutionary War, George Washington having to flee New York after losing the Battle of New York, or several battles in New York, actually. And then, of course, he had to go through New Jersey and ultimately crossed the Delaware and, you know, down by Trenton. And things started to change, and he became more of a counterpuncher as opposed to trying to stand his ground with the young Continental Army. So he managed to find a better strategy, but it took a while. Got off to a bad start in the Civil War. The north, the Union, got off to a very bad start and only started to turn the corner around July 1863 in Vicksburg and Gettysburg, two big victories the same week, which then began to turn the tide. But even after that, it took a while. World War I, we didn't get in for a long time, and then we had trouble crossing the Atlantic because of the U boat threat. And we finally found a way to deal with that and then build up a big military, et cetera. So. So in a lot of our wars, even the ones we wound up winning, we often got off to a bad start. But we had the luxury of having sanctuary in North America to a large extent and having a big resource base, and so we could afford sometimes to lose in the early going. That may not always prove true, and let's hope there aren't too many wars in the future, which gets to your point. That and you would understand this much better than I, having worn the uniform. But we do. We have this challenge with our military because we have to train young men and women to be willing to risk their lives in combat and deterrence of war. Prevention of war only works if the American military is seen as competent, capable, and therefore adversaries don't challenge it. On the other hand, if we wind up fighting another nuclear armed state, I would say we've already lost. There are degrees of defeat. But the purpose of our military in dealing with other great powers that are nuclear armed must be to prevent war, not to win it. I mean, obviously if you get into it, you want to win it, but what you really need to do is stop it as soon as possible. Because in a nuclear exchange, it's going to be pretty hard to identify a winner. So that's why I make this distinction. And in peacetime or relative peacetime, because like you said, the American military has always been busy, even in periods when we called ourselves isolationists, like in Theodore Roosevelt's day, you know, we were busy in Central America and the Caribbean and Mexico. But even in those periods, the main purpose of our peacetime strategy, if you will, was often to win the small battles of the day at low cost, but then prevent ideally big wars from happening. So that's the purpose of peacetime defense strategy. The purpose of wartime defense strategy is to win the war, but also to end it as quickly as possible, especially in the nuclear age. So that's why I make that distinction.

B (14:12)

Except for the one time after World War I where that peacetime strategy, I think, I think was a bit of a failure in the sense that, you know, we had things like the Washington Naval Treaty, which, you know, limited the amount of ships we could build. Right. And we had some political defeats like the defeat of the League of Nations, the army downsizing, those types of things, I think probably really hurt us. Yes, I'm worried about us. I don't, I don't see us drawing down our military, but I do worry about us pulling away from our allies in a similar manner right now. I mean, do you, do you see that?

A (15:04)

Yeah, I worry too. And if you don't mind, come back to that by first addressing though your very good point about the 1920s and 1930s. First of all, I do think that was a period of genuine quasi isolationism. I mean, we were active still in the Caribbean and Central America in that period of time with smaller operations, but we were trying to basically keep our head in the sand about what was going on in Europe and Asia. I think our grand strategy was mostly about isolationism, or you could say perhaps Western hemisphere myopia. Yeah, we were only really watching what was happening close to home at the level of grand strategy. But here is where I give the military particular credit for having a better Defense strategy even in this period of withdrawal. Because in the 1920s and 30s, as you know very well, having spent time as a professor at Annapolis, the U.S. navy was getting very involved in a lot of war gaming and simulation prototyping on carrier warfare and amphibious warfare. And, of course, you've flown off carriers. You know what it was like. And I. I can only imagine, you know, how you would imagine. You flew amazing aircraft. Scary enough. Flying those and 89 combat sorties is pretty amazing, my friend, but I can't quite put myself back in the driver's seat of one of those aircraft from the 1930s.

B (16:24)

Yeah, forget it. No way. No way. I mean, that's crazy.

A (16:29)

Yeah. And yet they got us ready for World War II, even when political leadership and the country writ large didn't and couldn't. So grand strategy in that period was poor. Defense strategy was developing some ideas and concepts and technologies that got us prepared for World War II, even when we didn't really want to be, if you will. And then once we got drawn in, we were able to gin up American manufacturing very quickly, really, you know, enlarge the military very quickly, and start doing pretty well in World War II already in 1942, it didn't take us that long to start to swing the momentum. So, coming to today. Yeah, I mean, there's so much we can talk about with today. And when I look at what's going on around the world, I certainly do worry about our alliances. And I do not support much of President Trump's foreign policy, especially on the trade front and the Doge front and some of what he's done in those areas. I'm a little more encouraged and a little more hopefully about some of his behavior towards allies and alliances. You know, making note of the fact this is September 29, 2025, and things could change tomorrow. In fact, tomorrow is when Secretary Hegseth has convened this huge meeting, and I guess by the time the podcast goes live, we'll know what happened there. But every day is a new drama, partly by the intent of the Trump administration, because that's how they operate. And I think it's fair to say even their supporters would acknowledge that they like drama and they like to disrupt, but also the world, of course, is tumultuous and challenging. And so I don't know where we're going to be in a few months. But I am encouraged that President Trump went to the NATO summit in June and wound up taking credit for pushing European allies to do more for their own defense, and therefore started to view NATO as something that he believed in more than he had before. And Secretary Hegseth, even though I'm a critic of a lot of what he's done, he has had a couple of big trips to Asia where he's reaffirmed the importance of the U.S. japan, U.S. philippines, U.S. korea, alliances. And so that gives me some hopefulness. But, yeah, no doubt these are turbulent and fragile times.

B (18:32)

I agree with you. I think any time our president or secretary of defense, secretary of war, whatever you want to call it, anytime they go and talk to our allies and show that resolve, that we're still with them, I think is really important. I do want to come back to something, though, that, that both the secretary of war and our current president have talked about in the past, which is they make this argument that the United States doesn't know how to win wars anymore, that somehow the fact that we don't have enough maybe warrior ethos, that has been the reason why. I mean, they never come right out and say it. They may have come out right out and say it, but that's always implied that somehow that there's a problem with our ethos in the military, and that's why these wars have been so difficult for us. And just wanted to get your take on that based on history and the book that you just wrote.

A (19:31)

Yeah, thanks, Amy. I strongly disagree with Secretary Hegseth on that idea. And again, you know better from firsthand experience. But I've known a lot of people like you in my career. Well, actually, not that many like you, but I've known a lot of amazing American men and women in uniform, and they're smart and thoughtful about the use of force, and they recognize the importance of avoiding war when possible and shortening war, ending it quickly when it does happen. But they are very good warriors, and I've watched them. I've watched you. I've watched others in training, in combat, been to Iraq and Afghanistan a bunch, gone to Quantico and seen what people do when they're training and, you know, had the pleasure once of going on a carrier. Unfortunately not with you as my pilot, but nonetheless, when I see what the American men and women of the armed forces do in training and everything else, I see a very tough, gritty warrior culture. And when I look at the battlefield record, let's say, of the last 25 years, the first quarter of the century, what I see is the American military overthrowing the Taliban in two months with an improvised battle plan that civilians didn't really have any hand in shaping. That was sort of invented on the fly. But the excellence of our Special forces working with the Northern alliance, working with American air power, working with the CIA, they were able to overthrow the Taliban in about two months. Quite amazing. Saddam Hussein was overthrown in three and a half weeks in a war that, of course, many doubt the wisdom of. And what happened after that really tested us as a nation. And maybe we gave our military an impossible job, but the technical, tactical fighting ability, the lethality, the ability to win was there for all to see. And Saddam fell, you know, like I said, just over three weeks after the invasion began. It was the CIA and the Navy seals and others who tracked down Osama bin Laden and also had decimated a lot of Al Qaeda leadership prior to that in wars in and around Afghanistan. And then, you know, Kosovo War, 1999 was one with only two American fatalities. And we forced the Serbian strongman Milosevic to capitulate and allow for stability and freedom for the people of Kosovo. And so I could go on, but one more. I'll just give one more example. People like you, I don't know that you were involved in the counter ISIS campaign. I think by that point you were at Annapolis teaching. But the 2014-2019 counter ISIS campaign, which was primarily American air power, American special forces, and American trainers and some NATO trainers working with the Iraqis and certain parts of the Syrian opposition, we ultimately defeated ISIS in an extremely lethal operation that killed just hundreds and hundreds of ISIS fighters after the world saw the horrors of what they had done, you know, the beheadings and everything else. So I see a lot of lethality in the modern American military. I really don't see any waning of the warrior ethos.

B (22:24)

The military has always been lethal. We've never had a problem with that. But the lethality doesn't equal winning the politics of a war in the modern era. And so I think that's where. Where the disconnect is.

A (22:43)

Yep. And we saw that, you know, even though it's a very hard thing to do, we saw the US Military could succeed in state building counterinsurgency. Call it what you will, to an extent, under General Petraeus, with the surge in Iraq, where violence was brought down by more than 90% over the course of roughly a calendar year. And that was because we use proper techniques, not just the lethality, but also the patrolling, building up intelligence, keeping people safe on the ground, Iraqi civilians, so they would want to work with us, not against us. And it was a remarkable testament to the. What General Petraeus calls the pentathlete or even the decathlete ability of American men and women in uniform. They do more than just one thing. They can be lethal. They can also do other things. But these missions, as you know, are hard. Yeah. And, you know, and there's not that many General Petraeus out there either, in terms of just the ability to synthesize everything and direct and supervise a strategy that works. So when you're trying to build up a country where there are so many hatreds, grievances, and so much distrust within the population, that's an awfully daunting proposition to ask people carrying guns to carry out.

B (23:49)

Well, talking about patrolling and the US Military trying to tamp down violence and crime, I want to ask you about what's happening under this current administration with the use of our military, particularly our National Guard, but also our active duty military in domestic policing. Do you have concerns about this or what are your thoughts here?

A (24:13)

I definitely have concerns. My hair is not yet on fire about it, but I'm worried. I. And you mentioned ice. I'm a little more troubled about some of the tactics they're using. And to the extent that the military is drawn in and to the extent that some of those tactics can hurt innocent people and maybe even innocent American citizens, then you start to threaten the bond between the military and society. So that's one set of worries. And of course, we saw that in the 1960s and then 1970 Kent State with the killing of four students. And we don't want to go back there. We want to preserve the fact that, I think it's fair to say, within our society, the military is very well regarded. Most of us don't serve. We depend on people like you inordinately to, you know, the 1% or the few percent who wind up serving in their lives are really doing huge work for the rest of us, keeping us safe. And most of us are grateful for that. And I think that's healthy. I remember when John Petraeus and I were doing an interview once, and he said he saw a bumper sticker during the Iraq war, and it said, hate the war, Love the soldiers. And General Petraeus said, well, one out of two ain't bad because I remember Vietnam. And that's when he joined West Point was 1970. And so in that period of time, people hated the war and questioned the military and whether we were even showing decency and showing proper ethics and how we fought that conflict. So I think that's how I bring it all together. I don't want to jeopardize the way in which our military is held in very high regard. Having said all that, when I go around Washington, and again, it's as of today, September 29, things could change on a moment's notice. But I see guardsmen maintaining presence around subway stations and sports stadiums, and it doesn't really bother me. I think they're very capable of doing what they're doing. They're not doing that much, at least the ones I see. They're generally just maintaining presence and therefore reassurance, I suppose, is the mission. They're not really fighting crime. They're doing a little bit of crime prevention, perhaps, and they look often quite bored. But I think that if they work with cities and localities and police forces who should always remain in charge, there may be certain specific things they can do at certain moments in certain places to help at the margin. I don't see them as the core of the solution to our ongoing crime problem in the United States. Crime's been trending downward for most of my adult life, but it's still too high. And I don't have any problem with President Trump saying that our cities should be safer. I just question whether the National Guard or certainly the active force is the best instrument. And of course, there are legal challenges and legal complexities to all this.

B (27:02)

And it's expensive and it's expensive, right.

A (27:04)

And these guardsmen have jobs and lives. They, they're being pulled away, you know, and it's. They signed up for that at one level, but they really expected the problems to be either foreign conflicts or maybe natural disasters at home, not really backing up police over an extended period.

B (27:20)

There's some other things that are happening right now which I think are worrisome. We may not have time to get into them all. One of them is the fact that the Pentagon is now restricting the press from reporting on things going concerning the military to some degree, which I worry about, because I worry about the fraying trust between the American people and the military. When you're. Now the perception is that, you know, the. The American people are only going to be given whatever the military or Department of Defense tells them is happening. I think that's probably a bad thing in our democracy. But there's also this stuff happening down in the Caribbean where we don't even know. I don't know if it was US Navy, US Air Force, but it was some sort of our military taking out speedboats that the administration claims have drug runners on these speedboats and they're calling them narco terrorists. And so therefore we can destroy them. There's lots of issues with that. I'm somebody that thinks, wow, it's really good. We should be going after people who are illegally distributing drugs and dealing drugs. That's really important. But I also look at that as a crime and not something that United States military should be executing people on the high seas for. But I'm wondering your take on this.

A (28:51)

Yeah, I largely agree. I would just add the additional point that, you know, I do, I do think Secretary Hegseth is not wrong when he says a fentanyl crisis that's causing close to 100,000American deaths a year is a major problem for the country and even verging into national security territory. So I'm prepared to have that conversation or to see him invoke that premise. But I also learned, watching some other great American military leaders, like Stan McChrystal and Bill McRaven, who were involved in special operations, that it's better usually to arrest people rather than kill them. Not because we're just trying to be nice guys and trying to make sure we don't kill innocent people. But also, you get more intelligence when you detain and interrogate. You obviously don't get a lot of intelligence from dead people. You might find some stuff on their boat if you can go, you know, salvage what's left of it. But it's generally going to be better to arrest those people and see what they'll tell us about their affiliates, their sources of drugs, their destination. And they're not all going to talk. But if we want to use the military, I would say let's invoke some of the interrogation methods that we're developed so effectively against much of Al Qaeda and ISIS by American intelligence and the American military. And maybe they can share some of their tradecraft with elements of DEA or other parts of the US Government. And I'm sure there could be mutual learning. I'm sure DEA knows a lot of this stuff already, but I still want a. I still want a suspect to be alive rather than dead for the humanitarian reason, but perhaps just as much for the intelligence gathering purpose. And that's why I don't really like the idea of executing people first and then proving their guilt later.

B (30:38)

You taught me a course 10 years, over 10 years ago now, almost 11 years ago at Johns Hopkins, when I was getting my master's degree in international security or global security. The name of the course was who will rule the 21st century. I don't know if you remember that course, but one of the things that I really remember about it. First of all, you made us read a lot of books, and I'm sure that I read every single one of them, maybe, but we talked a lot about the elements of national power, and that there wasn't just the military is just one piece of power. And there are other elements. There's the element of energy. There's the element of economic power and population and geography and all these other things, natural resources. And we took an assessment 11 years ago of where the United States was at on some of these elements of national power, and it was really informative for me. The conclusion I came to 11 years ago was that the United States is doing pretty well. There's some things that we should be working on, but in all fairness, we're doing okay with economic power, at least at that time. One of the things that I was worried about then was our debt, and I'm still worried about that today. But there are other things now, 11 years later that I really worry about that I was sort of mildly worried about back then. And I'm curious as to your assessment of all the elements of national power. Where from 10 years ago, what do you see as a worry? Where do you see while we're doing a lot better or a lot worse?

A (32:34)

Thank you, Amy. And you're also making me feel very lucky that I think other professors would agree with me that when we have amazing students like you who are destined for great things, and we don't necessarily deserve much of the credit, but we can sort of bask in your glory a little bit and feel like maybe we contributed just a little and probably learned, learned more from you than you learned from us. That's a professor's dream. So thank you for making my teaching career feel special to me and for all you've done. Also, many of my students have done throughout their careers, but to get to this idea of who will rule the 21st century. And I taught that course at either Hopkins or Syracuse or once or twice, University of Denver and Georgetown over a period of about a dozen years. And I remember that you and I were in the classroom together somewhere in the ballpark of 2011, 12, 13, I believe it was towards the end of President Obama's first term, beginning of his second term. We had started to pull out of the Great Recession. We were still struggling in Afghanistan. We hadn't yet had the ISIS crisis of 2014 or the Russian seizure of Crimea or China's decision to militarize the South China Sea. And I think, on balance, people were feeling okay. The Arab Spring was not going so well, but America was starting to come back from the economic woes of the Great Recession and then of course, from the very divisive experience of the Iraq conflict. And as we went into the 2000 teens further, and you were off doing great things at Annapolis and then moving back to Kentucky, but I was still teaching some variant of that course someplace. What I noticed was that people, my students, tended to stay relatively bullish on the future of the United States. Or sometimes they would define the answer to the question who will rule as democracies? Or, you know, some other lofty ideal that we seem to believe in and we're trying to advance around the world, except around 2016. And it wasn't all, I'm not just going to scapegoat President Trump because that was, of course, the election year and things were nasty between him and Secretary Clinton and a lot of the country. But students didn't like the cleavages they saw in American society. And yeah, I think some people invoked the debt and some people invoked the declining middle class or working class dream in America and the fact that if you're born here, you no longer feel an automatic confidence that you're going to keep doing better than your parents. And so these kinds of political and economic and societal woes from within were what caused my students around that time that year where I taught both at Denver and at Syracuse, as I recall, to be a little bit more wary and a little bit more concerned about our future. I'm not teaching that course anymore. I wish I were because I love to compare the students answers to that of your earlier period and generation, even though it's only been a dozen years. And so I think, to summarize, yeah, I'm worried, but I'm primarily worried about what's going on within our country. And again, I'm not blaming at all on President Trump, but he certainly is a manifestation of it. And you see it in the angry rhetoric. And it's not all on one side or the other. But I think our technological, military, economic underpinnings, even though they're sometimes weakened by things like the national debt, are still pretty solid. I wouldn't trade them for any other country's fundamentals. But I'm worried about our democracy and about our society.

B (36:08)

Yeah, I agree 100% because I feel like this grand strategy that has been somewhat successful since World War II is at risk. And that is so important because it's literally the fate of the world when you're talking about alliances and you're talking about nuclear weapons, we have managed to keep the peace. And I worry without an America that is strong, based on democracy at home, that that will start to fray and fall apart. And so that is my big concern. It's one of the reasons I think people need to stay engaged in American politics and domestic politics and try to work on that.

A (36:55)

Very well said. And I think that your great state of Kentucky is showing the way in a number of cases right now. And so I want to give a shout out. There are a number of you doing amazing things out there. So thank you. And keep it up, please.

B (37:08)

Well, it's wonderful to talk with you today, Mike. It's great to see you again. For everybody listening, Michael Hanlon has written just an enormous amount of books. I've read most of them. They're all great. His most recent one is called To Dare Mighty Things, US Defense Strategy since the Revolution. And I gotta tell you, one of the things I love about your books, Mike, is you're an academic, but you're so smart and you bring these things that we've all read about throughout our. If you're somebody that listens to American history or reads American history, you bring it down to a level that makes sense, where you connect the dots in ways that other people don't. And that's why I love your books. I read them all. And so for everybody that that is listening, they should go out and get Mike's books.

A (38:03)

Yeah. Be a late Christmas present coming out in January, but still. That's really nice, Amy. Thank you so much. And it's a privilege to be on the podcast with you.

B (38:12)

Awesome. Well, thanks for being with us, Mike. Have a great day.

A (38:15)

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