YouSaid · the spoken record

David Kilcullen

lines on the record: 51
first: 2020-05-14
most recent: 2020-05-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Rests on the back of two unbroken centuries of British and then American military supremacy, particularly naval supremacy, and unfortunately the military model that underpins our way of life is showing signs of strain and it looks like it's not really working anymore. So back to Trotsky, right? You might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you unless we can recover some kind of balance and figure out how to make that model work again. The world as we know it right now is probably not going to be around that much longer.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The modern world, as we like it, as it's existed since the Second World War, we don't like to think about this, but it actually rests on a military model that proved to be effective in 1945, that created the modern world as we know it, that proved to be effective again in 1991, that led to the world we all live in today. And even you could go further back and say that the modern Western democratic world order”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like a pitch invasion at Twickenham. The spectators are on the playing field now, or you might say the playing field has expanded to include the stands. So people are, it's not like you sit outside of a zone of war and you look in it at people on a battle space. We're all on the modern battle space, right? The concept of war has expanded to the point where it's actually affecting everybody. And this isn't the first time that happened during the blitz, civilians realized that they were now being targeted as part of a major conflict in the Second World War. So it's not necessarily a new thing, but the means by which it's happening are new. So I think that's one key lesson is to realize that you're not outside looking in. We're actually all in the battlefield environment. And then the other key lesson that I think that people should take from my book, but there are also many other books that are out there that talk about this is...”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very successfully winning battles, but continually failing to translate those battlefield successes into enduring political outcomes that our populations are happy with. And frankly, soldiers should, it's dangerous to leave decisions about that stuff to soldiers. This is one of these areas where I have my opinions, but it's not up to me or any other military person to say what the British people should decide or the American people should decide about what they want their military to do. has to be in a democracy. It has to be a conversation among ordinary people and their elected representatives. I think the role of military scholars and of a book like this is to sort of tee up the issues and say these are the things we need to be thinking about, but then to step back and let people have that conversation in the only way that's really legitimate, which is in a democratic society, it has to be elected leaders and voters that make those calls.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sycamore War, so we don't necessarily want to take all of his ideas to heart. But one of the things that Fuller said was that channeling St. Augustine, the object of war is not victory, but a better peace, right? And he was making the point that battlefield victory is the first step. You need to be translating that battlefield victory into some kind of enduring positive political outcome, or you're actually not winning. And what we've been doing is”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, war is fundamentally political, right? That's the difference between war and just random violence, you know, that it is political. And I think it was Clomosau, the French Prime Minister in World War I, who said war is too important to be left to the generals, right? And in a modern context, what that means is it's not a purely technological or technical activity that's just civil servants and bean counters and professional military people. Everyone has a role in being part of a national conversation about what do we want the military to do, what do we want it to be for, and how does it translate into better outcomes for us. At the end of the book, I quote General JFC Fuller, great British general, very innovative, one of the inventors of the tank corps and author of some really important concepts in the late period right after World War I also had a bit of a flirtation with Nazism in the”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead of invading and forcing democracy down their throats at the point of a gun, and maybe that would have worked out better. So in a modern environment, in some ways not being the top dog, not being the apex predator in the ecosystem might turn out to be a better space, not only for Western people, but for Western militaries as well.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I have mixed feelings about it, right? I mean, I think that on the one hand, it is a more complex and chaotic and potentially more dangerous world for the West. But I also look back on almost 30 years since the end of the Cold War. And it's kind of hard to paint that as a period of success for the world when we were the sole dominant military players. I mean, obviously there's been an enormous expansion in economic prosperity and in democracy and in things like women's reproductive freedom and child health and all sorts of stuff. So I'm not suggesting it's been bad in that sense. But I do think we found ourselves bogged down in a series of inconclusive unsuccessful conflicts that have just continued to soak up our capability. And, you know, you can imagine an alternative history where instead of deciding that we were going to be the sole superpower and projecting force everywhere and getting into everybody else's business and all that, instead of that, we'd focused on resilience, prosperity, social cohesion at home. We'd tried to set an example for others.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and unifying their system under a single pretty efficient governance and economic system. So I think there's lessons there, right? And obviously, as you can tell from the way I'm talking about it, I think that's the best option. I don't think it necessarily could work. I mean, it still could fail. But I think of all the options that are out there right now, that one's probably the most likely to work, even though it still might not.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As being different from the Roman Empire, but the Byzantines always sort of themselves as Romans, you know, and Rome collapsed in the fourth century. The Byzantine Empire survived for another 1100 years, right up until the 29th of May 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans. And you can ask yourself, how did they do that? How did they survive against an enormous range of increasingly strong enemies for more than a millennium? And there's some interesting things that they did. They copied selectively from their adversaries, they developed certain niche technologies that it was hard for their adversaries to match. They focused a lot less on going overseas in expeditionary conflicts to conquer people and instead focused on being agile and reactive to protect their own territory. And most importantly, they focused a lot on domestic resilience and social cohesion.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just accept that, deal with it, and manage the decline and look for kind of a soft landing. I also suggest that that's not probably going to work either. Reducing in strength and someone else taking over, there are examples, like, for example, the Greek city-states being succeeded by the Romans, where actually the Greeks had a pretty decent life under Roman control. It worked out pretty well for them. Or you can look at the British Empire sort of handing the baton to the Americans after World War II, and Britain then recovering from a period of overstretch. So certainly there are examples. The problem is if you survey the landscape now, it's pretty hard to see who we would hand over to that would be both strong enough to take over the mantle and friendly enough that it wouldn't be a disaster. It's also not clear that Russia or China wants to be the next United States. You know, they actually critique that model, you know, in itself. So I say that's probably not going to work either. And then I suggest a third option, which is what I call going Byzantine. So we think of the Byzantine Empire.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have to be ready for conventional warfare as we define it, but also ready to recognize that we're in a liminal conflict and be able to deal with it. So in the book, I sort of come up with three courses of action, you know, as the military say, things we could think about doing to deal with this. The first one's what I describe as doubling down, right? So just spending more, getting more stuff, paying more money, building more tanks, you know, and just sort of trying to overwhelm them with even more conventional military capability. And I argue that that's not going to work. If we're already at the point where adversaries have adapted to our traditional way of war, then doing more in that traditional space isn't going to help. It may in fact just accelerate the problem. The second one I talk about, and I use a military slang term here, is embracing the suck, right? So recognizing that we're probably going to decline that our adversaries are going to get more powerful.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we need to start buying, although there are militaries out there that do own those. But no, I think it's important to say that the adversaries that I'm talking about here aren't solely doing liminal and asymmetric. They're also doing conventional modernization, right? So the Chinese are building aircraft carriers. They've got a much bigger submarine fleet now. They've invented an entire new class of missile that can knock out a carrier at sea. So they are still in the conventional space. And that's true of the Russians too. They've got some of the most advanced armored vehicles on the planet. They've got extremely capable tactical nuclear weapons. They're a real conventional traditional threat also. So the issue here is we can't just completely get out of the game of conventional warfare or we're just leaving that space to potential adversaries. So we've all got to do both, right? And this is the point. You've got to do dragons and snakes. You don't get to pick one or the other anymore.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think they did. This is all described in Liakat Ali's book, Awards of Finance. But in the event, I don't think people had to pay up. But the point is that we often think that if we're economically integrated with someone, that means by definition we won't go to war.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Merchant fleet, do we have to pay up to German And the answer they got from the lawlords was yes, yes, you do, right? So we were very economically integrated immediately prior to the First World War, but it didn't stop us fighting each other. Did they actually?”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they'd be attacking themselves. A more aggressive way to make the same point would be China's created a whole series of vulnerabilities for itself by creating all this property ownership and infrastructure all over the world, but particularly in Europe. And at any point, any European government could just nationalize that property and punish China. So in fact, it's like they've exposed themselves to integration with the West and they potentially made it less likely that we'll see conflict. Now, this isn't the first time we've seen economically integrated systems. And in fact, they do sometimes go to war with each other. One of the classic cases is in the early 20th century, Lloyds of London, the big shipping insurance firm, actually insured approximately two thirds of the German merchant fleet, and they found themselves asking just before the First World War If we had a war with Germany, and the Royal Navy sinks the German”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Chinese in the case of Chinese. But, well, maybe you don't need to care, right? And this is the point about it being ambiguous. So I'm very careful to say in the book, I'm not suggesting there's anything nefarious about any of that. In fact, there's a way of thinking about it that says it could be protective, right? So let's imagine a cyber attack by China on the major port systems in Europe, for example, just a hypothetical example. Well, most of those ports are actually run by Chinese companies now. So China would be costing itself billions of dollars a week to shut down Western port systems with a cyber attack. So that actually suggests that by being economically integrated, we're less likely to see that stuff, right? So it actually may be a good thing to see that level of integration, right?”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But here's another thing to think about if you're the Norwegian government and you want to actually make the threat real for the Norwegian people I would suggest a soap opera is a pretty good way to do that right so I think governments are going to have to find different ways to communicate what the threat is in this new kind of world where there's a contested information space”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you live in any of the Baltic states or in Scandinavia, you'll be seeing publications coming out from your own government talking about if war comes and how to organize resistance. There's a thing called the Estonian Defence League, which has people in every village that are preparing for the potential of resistance warfare if Russia comes in. A Swedish government just published a series of things on this. So up on the Russian frontier in Eastern Europe and in the north, this very much front of mind that you might start to see this kind of stuff. If people have the opportunity, I'd recommend a wonderful Norwegian soap opera called Occupied, which is about the Russians invading Norway and what happened. And in the first episode, you know, spoiler alert, the Russians invade Norway and basically nobody notices, right? They do it in a sub-threshold way.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A short-term temporary Russian operation back in 2016. And I'm sure there are people slapping each other on the back right now in some Dutcher outside Moscow and saying, hey, this thing's been going for four years. Amazing. And it's because we've been amplifying it for our own reasons. I certainly think that's one of the key areas. I also think this idea of national resilience is an area that does confront a lot of people. Perhaps not here in the UK, but...”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Right. Well, so I think it was This stuff doesn't matter to the ordinary person until suddenly it does. The shooting of some minor Austro-Hungarian duke in a Balkan city in June 2014, 1914 didn't matter to anyone until suddenly it did, you know, and started the First World War. I think that for sure information warfare is the area that's most in people's faces that they can see fake news and trolls and bots and all this kind of ridiculous Manchurian candidate conspiracy theory about. I mean, it's become a media obsession, hasn't it? Absolutely. And I think we have to recognize that, in fact, that obsession is being deliberately stoked by these actors who are trying to encourage CNN and Fox and MSNBC to just keep on going with this conspiracy theory. It reminds me of that. Remember that NASA Mars rover that was supposed to last for 90 days and it ended up running for 10 years? I did, yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like that. I think this was supposed to be.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ink, and it's about how the modern media business model pushes media outlets to exacerbate conflict. And that's understandable from an economic standpoint. But when you have an actor like Russia or China that's deliberately set about to exploit those divisions, they can pick up on differing opinions and exacerbate them and amplify them and drive it more into a conflict space than otherwise it would be. If you look at Russian interference in the US election in 2016 as an example, it's very clear that they were finding the most extreme points of view at different groups and amplifying those and pushing them further and further apart.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The coronavirus by ordinary Chinese who no longer believe what they're seeing on the stone media. So I think if you are If you are authoritarian and you want to control the information flow, you can't afford any mistakes, right? And it's very hard to do that in a way that maintains credibility. If you're a democracy, well, you're not actually trying to control it in the same way. And so people sort of accept mistakes and differences of opinion and the fact that sometimes people get things wrong and it's not all undermining the credibility of your political system. It's just, you know, that's how it is. It's messy. And so I think there is actually some advantages in the information space to being a democracy. But I do think that what we're seeing now is a deliberate targeting of social cohesion and political unity by these actors who are trying to push us into corners where we all hate each other. There's a great book by a guy called Matt Taby, who's a journalist for Rolling Stone. I don't know him, but his book is awesome. It's about it's called Hate.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To them was they made it so that in order to figure out what was going on, you had to go out on the street. You couldn't just log on and see what was happening. So it actually massively backfired, right? The Syrians learned from Mubarak's experience. So Syria used to, during the height of the civil war, selectively shut down parts of the internet and parts of the cell phone system to see who would jump from one system to another and try to track people. And they created an electronic army to counter the rebels in Syria. But they also had a bit of a struggle in terms of losing credibility, nobody believing what they said anymore. People trying to organize in ways that would get away from the government narrative. And I think we've seen something rather similar in Hong Kong, and we're seeing something right now in China where there's a pretty serious collapse of public confidence in the Chinese government's communications around”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually have a slightly different point of view. I actually think that autocracies do rather badly in the information space. Classic example would be Hosi Mubarak, who just died recently, who was the president of Egypt. When the Arab Spring began to get going in early 2011, there was a series of sort of days of rage where people would come out on a Friday and protest on the street. And in late January of 2011, in response to that, being an autocratic government, they had the ability to do this, the Egyptian government just shut down the internet and turned off the cell phone system. And what happened was five times as many people as before came out on the street. And if you talk to people about what happened then, they'll say, well, before the regime did that, it was just a bunch of protesters and we didn't really think much about it. But then they took our fucking internet, right? And they took our cell phones away. And that pissed everybody off, right? And the second thing they said to my research team when we were talking.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“cyber space they're all integrated and you've got people who are both simultaneously shooting people using space systems and targeting your information”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The worst thing I could do to you with a cyber attack was to screw with your data. Now I can turn the gas on in your apartment and then turn your toaster on and blow you up, or I can open the drawbridge as your car's driving across it, or I can take down the electrical system and knock out your ability to ventilate a building. What we call skater systems, right? The little microcontrollers that run modern infrastructure. They're on the internet. In many cases, they're talking to other devices on the internet. And we've seen the emergence of what you might call cyber kinetic warfare, where you're doing cyber attacks that have a direct lethal kinetic effect, and you're simultaneously doing kinetic attacks to target a cyber system. So it's become much more blended, right? So back in the day, we used to talk about cyber warfare as if it was going to be a standalone thing. What we find now is it's just an adjunct maneuver space alongside air, land, sea.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a very important turning point, and I'll make two points. One is that we're now in an environment of what you might call fragmented reality, where it's not that we all agree on what reality is and we disagree on whether that's good or bad. We are all in our own echo chambers where our version of reality may be completely incompatible with somebody else's and the facts that we're relying on that we have no doubt are true might be completely different from somebody else's to coin a phrase alternative facts, right, that are out there. That's one issue. The other issue is that with urbanization and smart systems and the emergence of sort of GPS connected and internet connected microcontrollers that run a lot of the information systems but also the hardware and the infrastructure of modern life, we're now at a point where you can actually do lethal kinetic damage to somebody with just a cyber attack, right? So in the old days it used to be that”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Segment on CNN anytime in the last four years, and you'll see talking heads shouting at each other about some supposedly historical Russian operation to hack the American election, and you almost want to shake them and say, no, the operation is ongoing, and you now are the operation, right? You're actually creating the effect that you guys are complaining about”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Described as a cyber superpower because they have enormously capable hacking networks that they employ to punish their adversaries, to generate money and so on. So information warfare is very much part of the game now. One of the things I talk about in the book is this Russian idea of reflexive control, which is about understanding what your adversary wants to believe and what they would prefer to be true and manipulating their perception so that rather than trying to convince them that you're the good guy or they're going to lose in a sort of advertising style of information warfare, which is the Western way, you're putting them instead in a cognitive box where it doesn't really matter whether they like you or not, they're thinking about the situation in a particular way that suits your interest. Best example of that is the Russian manipulation of interference in the twenty sixteen election. You can look at any random three minute”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, his short answer is yes, right? And there's been the concept of information war for a very long time. The capabilities to put that into place didn't really begin to emerge until we had very widespread social media and WhatsApp and Signal and all those kind of tools. We've seen non-state actors doing that. We've seen countries like the Assad regime in Syria and others creating the so-called electronic army to support their goals. The Russians created a thing called the information troops of the Russian Federation after the war in Georgia, which involves information warfare, cyber warfare, but also like hardware, like the ability to take down a data system and a fiber optic cable network and put in place your own, right? Or EMP weapons that can knock out electronic systems. So the Russians probably have the most comprehensive in terms of a battlefield information warfare capability. But there are others, like, for example, North Korea, which you wouldn't consider a major player in some ways.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wants to actually fight each other, but they are sort of talking themselves into a conflict because of the way they've defined conflict differently. And I think that's the big risk here. I mean, if you look at China and you look at the United States, for example, it's pretty clear neither one wants to fight the other, but the risk here is that we misinterpret each other or that we see actions by a potential adversary as aggressive and then we start treating them that way and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and we end up in a war that nobody really wants.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think if you have an environment where your adversary has a much broader definition of warfare than you do, then two really dangerous things can happen, right? On the one hand, your adversary can be engaging in warfare, but you don't realize it because your definition of warfare is so much more narrow. And so until before you know it or before you realize it, you're already in a major conflict and it's too late to adapt. That's one problem. I think even worse is if you have a much narrower definition of warfare than your adversary, you can be doing things that you think are perfectly normal peacetime interaction, like trade wars, for example, or locking up executives from a phone company because you don't like their relationships. These are all things that we've been doing lately to China. If your adversary has a much broader definition, they can interpret these things as acts of war. So you can actually end up with two powers fighting each other when neither”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has pretty strong links to the PLA, the Chinese military. And the US got very upset about that because that's also a US marine base. I think my best, or my favorite example, though, is in the northern Marianas, in the Pacific, which is a little American Commonwealth Territory. Chinese junkets, you know, so gambling syndicates from Macau and Hong Kong and Shanghai have funded the construction of a major casino, which people fly in and out of and spends or pays vast amounts of tax into the”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, indeed. And part of the issue here is that all this stuff is unproven and at some level kind of unprovable, right? Because it's ambiguous. It isn't covert. So in the US case, the US decided that China buying the hotel Dell, which is in Coronado in Southern California, was a threat to the US national security because it's the hotel's right in the middle of a very dense concentration of naval power, and so they blocked that purchase. In a similar situation in the UK, Chinese company bought a hotel that's right on the choke point that every nuclear submarine has to go through to get out of Fazlane in Scotland. But the British government, I'm sure, did due diligence and the Royal Bank of Scotland lending the money. So obviously there was nothing nefarious there. In the Australian case, Australia sold the entire port of Darwin to a Chinese company that”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anything to do with warfare. So, the short answer to that is we don't really know, right? And I ask that question, what's going on here? Actually, in the US,”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think probably for a European audience, one of the big blind spots is Chinese economic and industrial penetration of Europe, right? So eight out of ten major ports are owned by the Chinese or have a major Chinese investor. The largest port in Europe, Rotterdam, the port operator is Chinese state-owned enterprise. China owns the port of Piraeus, which is the American fleet base in the Mediterranean. They own the port of Darwin in Australia. They've attempted to buy hotels right on the edge of very major naval bases in the UK and in the US and elsewhere. You've got”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If our adversaries are adapting, in the ways they are adapting because of our military dominance, then they're reacting in a sort of fitness landscape that we've created, so can we maybe direct their evolution in a different way by changing what we do? And I ask that question towards the end of the book.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it has, and I think we've, in some ways, we've stretched the concept of war to the point where it's kind of hard to get your arms around, hard to grasp exactly what you're talking about, right? If everything's warfare, then nothing is. But another way of thinking about it is that Western countries tend to have a particularly narrow, battlefield centric, kinetic view of what warfare is. And our adversaries have realized that we're extraordinarily dominant in that space. So it's sort of avoidance behavior. They're looking for other ways to expand the envelope so that they can confront us without drawing a major destructive response. So I think that's true of the Russians. It's true of the Chinese. I talk a bit about Iran and about North Korea in the book as well. And they, in their own way, have also been adapting in the same fashion. I guess the meta conclusion in the book is”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“more or less the infancy of the internet and pre-social media, but they were already thinking ahead and thinking, how do we get outside of the American focus and the Western sweet spot into areas where maybe Western planners won't even realize they're at war, but certainly by the time they do it, it'll be too late.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the Chinese case, you see something different. You see the Chinese defining our way of war, and there's a great book called The Unrestricted Warfare, which I quote at length, that two Chinese senior colonels wrote in 1999, which later formed the basis for a Chinese warfighting doctrine that's called Three Warfares. They basically had analyzed the Western way of war and identified a number of weaknesses in the way we operate, and said, let's not compete directly with the West in that area, let's go outside the boundaries of what they consider to be warfare, so things like strategic real estate acquisition, manipulating drug smuggling, acquiring technological capabilities that allow them to define global technological systems, acquiring economic, political, and informational tools, cyber warfare. All these things are all laid out in this book in 1999, and you think how long ago that was.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Subthreshold, we could say, right? I mean, there is a significant difference between the Russian and the Chinese approach. The Russian approach is about riding the edge of detectability, making what you do incredibly ambiguous so that you can always deny what you're doing and you can achieve political goals without actually exposing yourself to a major military retaliation. So the way they ran the seizure of Crimea, for example, or the way they've operated in Syria, many times they've avoided going sort of right up into the extremely kinetic level of warfare. They've stayed down in the shaping kind of threshold level.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so if in the 90s you were focusing on a variety of snakes after the invasion of Iraq, we really narrowed our gaze to just one snake, right? International Islamic terrorism. And while we had tunnel vision on dealing with that threat and on sort of digging ourselves out of a hole of our own making in Iraq, we were so bogged down and focused on that that we didn't really have the bandwidth to think about anything else. Now, I should say people were trying to think about it. They were just so overly committed to all the problems of Iraq and Afghanistan and so on that we just didn't have time. While we were bogged down like that, China, Russia, North Korea, Iran were not bogged down. They were much free, freer to think about how to react and adapt. And there was a process of conscious adaptation that went on in...”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That were just designed to take on. The big strength that an insurgent or a terrorist group has is it's really hard to see. The big weakness it has is it doesn't have a lot of firepower. In the last 20 years, we've seen increasing access to lethality, you know, firepower for individuals. And at the same time, the very flood of connectivity and massive amounts of internet traffic and cell phones and so on actually makes it easier for these groups to hide in the clutter of social media networks and in big cities. So it's a different environment now and you've got a more lethal but also harder to see adversary out there.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the final thing I think that's worth pointing out is this idea of leaderless resistance, which is an idea that actually comes out of the far right racist world in the United States in the 1980s. And it's the idea that when you're going up against an adversary that's constrained by the rule of law, you can have a legal group that's out there that doesn't break the law, that doesn't engage in violence itself, that through like the freedom of speech just puts out targeting lists and techniques and ways to operate, and then individuals can just self-generate and carry out their own attacks as they like. And that's been really something that we've seen, particularly in Europe, in the last five to ten years.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I call the urban siege technique where because of urbanization and the fact that the cover now is in the cities, not in the countryside, you see deliberate attempts to actually shut down an entire city through a terrorist attack. So rather than a traditional bombing, you know, or a hostage situation, you have people taking over entire city blocks and hotels and disrupting megacities through deliberate action.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they've decentralized a lot back in the day, groups like Al-Qaeda were actually quite centralized and structured and had training camps and committees and they were pretty overt since 9-11 and really since about the time of the London 7-7 bombing, we've seen them become much more cell-based, amorphous individual, ad hoc, self-generating individuals carrying out terrorist attacks, this radical decentralization, which is enabled by things like cell phones and social media, but it's also an effect of the way we crushed these terrorist groups after 9-11. We've also seen the emergence of guerrilla terrorism where instead of kind of coming in with the team from the outside, like an expeditionary terrorist attack, people are reaching in with social media and growing guerrilla terrorist teams close to the target. We've seen the emergence of a lot of what...”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The terraced as we do that. Another example is in Iraq where we almost completely destroyed al Qaeda in Iraq and all that was left of it at the end of the surge was this very small remnant of highly experienced, extremely pissed off radical hard-bitten combat veterans and that became the core from which ISIS emerged a couple of years later, right? So almost like sort of drug-resistant bacteria. And you've got to be very careful about using biological metaphors against an adversary. It has a very ugly history. The only reason I'm willing to do that in the book is that it's not like we're peering in from the outside of the ecosystem, like we're in the same combat Darwinism processes them. And it's not to dehumanize the adversary. It's to say, actually, we're all on the same boat here. We're all adapting and evolving in a combat ecosystem that's shaped by, you know, a variety of pretty pitiless.”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What happens is if you put enough pressure on an adversary group, a terrorist group, to make it adapt, but not enough to destroy it, you actually improve that group. And I use the example of the Pakistani Taliban, where we have killed at a distance of about four years apart three successive leaders of the Pakistani Taliban, and each time that leader has been replaced by a better, more experienced, more respected, more capable, more ideologically extreme leader. So we're actually improving the”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second mechanism is natural selection, so sort of combat Darwinism, right, where the lucky and the smart and the sort of well-adapted survive and those that have maladaptive traits just get wiped out like literally. And I use a number of examples to illustrate how that actually works in practice in the kinds of conflicts we're dealing with now. The third mechanism is what Charles Darwin called artificial selection, where we are sort of inadvertently breeding a better class of terrorists by the way we've conducted the war on terrorism, for example. And I use a few examples for that. And then the final one is institutionalization. And that's through kind of”
2020-05-14 · Intelligence Squared · The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, with David Kilcullen and Carl Miller · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source