Framing Challenges, Testing Assumptions, and Integrating Strategies

>> H.R. McMaster: Hey, just tell me where you're from and maybe a little bit about yourself, too. Okay, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. How about the mic bearers make the decision? Okay, all right. Okay.

>> Audience 1: So, thank you for coming. My name is Kevin from Georgetown University. And my question for you is that from your years in the government, do you think people at the highest level are lack of framework of analysis you describe, or rather, they have different interpretation of historical evidence?

Or they have different metaphysical assumptions about how the world works or whether they just have to act in times of uncertainty based on imperfect intelligence?

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, hey, I think all of that is true. So I think what happens oftentimes in Washington is that those who are serving across the administration, maybe especially in the White House, they lose their long term focus and they get mired in reacting.

Reacting to what's happening in the world, or they get mired in tactics, right? And I think a lot of times, you get marred in tactical decisions and you centralize authorities and decision making, oftentimes as a poor substitute for strategy. And now, guess what? Now you're always short term.

You're dealing with tactics. You're dealing with authorities and discrete decisions instead of having a broad strategy that everybody understands and that allows you to implement that strategy and continue to assess it. So I'll give you an example. I'll tell you, first of all, I recognize that this was the case when I came into the White House.

The first thing I did is I inventoried all of the decisions and authorities that had been centralized by the previous administration. And then I prepared memoranda for the president to give those authorities and decisions back to the departments and agencies to just get us out of. People were asking me for permission to do stuff.

Well, can we sail these vessels through the South China Sea? I'm like, why are you asking me? You're the Department of Defense, man. I mean, maybe we should come up with a strategy for how to deal with China's laying claim to the ocean and then entrust you to do whatever the heck you wanna do that you think is consistent with that strategy and policy.

Another example I'll give you, though, is the support to Ukraine. So we hear this phrase as long as it takes. What is it? What is the objective in Ukraine? Is the objective that Ukraine is a viable state that is on its way to recovery economically, that can secure itself well into the future?

What is the end state we're trying to achieve? I think that's what it is. Okay, now, if that's the case, what has to happen to get to that political and economic end state? What has to happen militarily? Well, I think that Ukraine has to be able to take back all the territory that has been taken from it since 2014.

And I think at very least, the crimean peninsula needs to be neutered from a military perspective. Now, if that's the case, then you can start having a conversation about what is the capacity and capabilities that the Ukrainian military needs. And then you're not debating, well, should we give them tanks or not tanks?

What kind of tanks should we give them? Should we give them f 16s? Should we provide tiered and layered air defense? How about long range precision strike? How long range? It's just these tactical discussions are meaningless. Think about how many times in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, people kept talking about troop caps and troop numbers and is it 4500 or 7000?

I mean, really, why are we talking about that? Why aren't we talking about what is it we're trying to achieve and what is the strategy, right, that will allow us to achieve those objectives? And then, hey, what are the resources that we need? So I think to answer your question, we get mired in the short term and we get mired in tactics.

So what I did, and this was dismantled by my successor, but when I became national security advisor, we came up with 16 1st order challenges. And then we organized framing sessions around those challenges. Those framing sessions began with consideration of a five page paper. I limited to five pages, right?

Cuz you're at the executive level now, the intelligence agencies, they'll have like, huge annexes to it. Annex A is like 80 pages, but that's okay. The five page paper was framed in kind of the way that I've showed you, right? So it was a discussion of, hey, what's the challenge we're facing, right?

What's the nature of it? And these were all based on questions, right? The priority was communicated in the way of a question, how to stabilize Iraq and ensure that Iraq is not aligned with Iran, okay? Some of them were longer, right? I mean, how to stabilize Syria in a way that allows us to have the enduring defeat of ISIS, doesn't empower Iran, right?

And so you start thinking about, how do you frame the question? How to defend against Chinese economic aggression and other forms of aggression and prevent China from establishing exclusionary areas of primacy across the Pacific region. And undermining the security and economic frameworks that are critical to American security and prosperity.

So you have these first order questions, and then we would have this discussion around the framing. The first part of that meeting was only about the framing. Do we have this right. The second part of the meeting was about, okay, what can we do? What can we do to integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like minded partners to advance our objectives?

So the framework in this paper was, okay, nature of the problem, what we think the problem is. The second was, okay, given what are our vital interests that are at stake, why do we care? What's the so what? The third is, what is an overarching goal and what are more specific objectives?

Draft again, right? The fourth is, what are the assumptions under which this policy would be based? And then the final section was, what are the obstacles to progress, right? We know we wanna go there, but what's impeding us from getting to where we wanna go? And then what are the opportunities that we can exploit, right?

To accelerate progress toward objectives? And then the second part of the meeting was a question back to the principals. Hey, how do we? How do we overcome these obstacles and how do we take advantage of the opportunities? And then you get like that top down kind of guidance, and the policy coordinating committee, which is kind of the assistant secretary level, they're listening in the overflow room to the situation room, and they're taking it.

Now they've got something to go with. Then I had something to bring to the president and said, hey, Mr. president, here's the way we understand this challenge from China, from Russia, whatever it is in space, in cyberspace, cuz many of these were functional challenges. And here's what we think our goal ought to be.

Here are the assumptions we're kind of. What do you think? It's like, okay, general, so then you have something to send out to the government to say, okay, start changing course, right? We have the foundation for a new policy. Now, the next step then was I asked the team to develop multiple options for what would become an integrated strategy consistent with that framing and these ideas.

And I think that's an important step as well, is to show a president, any executive leader, multiple options, because that's the person who has to make the decision. And it's in the comparison of those options that you can draw out kind of the risks and the mitigating measures and The degree to which they compare to one another in terms of resource allocation, risk and so forth.

But sadly, that process doesn't happen very often in Washington. I'm gonna let the microphone bearers pick, and then how about, I think I can remember three questions in a row. How about if we'll just go across three questions, and then ask you to remind me after I answer the first one, probably?

Okay, go ahead. We'll go left to right, cross, whoever has a mic. Okay, we can go right to left.

>> Audience 2: My name is thank you for the talk. You mentioned inaction and indecision. I'm curious if you have a framework for getting through analysis paralysis and actually taking action.

>> H.R. McMaster: Getting through analysis and taking action?

>> Audience 2: Yes, analysis paralysis, and then actually getting to some sort of a decision and taking action.

>> H.R. McMaster: Yeah, right. Okay, all right, okay, does anybody have a pen up here? Let me borrow a pen, I'm just gonna write these down. Thank you, thanks a lot.

Appreciate it, okay.

>> Audience 3: Hi, I'm Jana. I'm from Liberty University. Thank you so much for your talk. Kind of one of the best books that I read to kind of understand the US China Hegemon race was 100-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury, and kind of his outline of China's strategy to kind of have global dominance.

And I was wondering your thoughts on, has the United States kind of made any headway or made any progress in disrupting China's mission to become the world hegemon? And maybe what strategies have contributed to that disruption?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, great.

>> Audience 4: My question is, what are your thoughts on the Biden administration abruptly backing out of Afghanistan?

Do you consider that strategic competence?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, all right.

>> Audience 5: Thank you, General. My name is Charles Stallzer, Georgia Tech, Hillsdale College, former Air Force. I recently watched the firing line episode where you discuss with William F Buckley your book, Dereliction of Duty. And I am wondering to what extent, if any, the same line of criticism you advanced towards the Vietnam generation of leadership also applies to the war on terror generation of leadership, and your assessment of civil military relations more generally?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, all right, great. Wow, amazing questions. Okay, so analysis, paralysis, and being paralyzed by kind of potential risks. That's always a danger in bureaucracies. And really the key thing is to always challenge your team to try to explore and describe the risk of inaction. Dr Kissinger said in Washington, there are always three options, right?

There's always capitulation, you know, nuclear war, and the option that you want, right? But you try not to do that, you try to make all the options viable. And so I think it's often much easier, right, to kind of quantify or to understand the risk of action. And often, we don't talk about the risk of inaction.

I think that's one way systematically to do it. So the second, of course, cuz I didn't bring my glasses here, so I know I can't read my. Okay, 100-year marathon China competition. So, that's a great book, by the way. I think there's some others that are, for context on China, are really good to read.

Both of Elizabeth Economy's recent books are superb. I got Rosh Doshi's book called The Long Game, shows really the designs of the party over time. If you're looking for a quick beach read, there's a book called Spies and Lies about the United Front work department, and the big lie that China was gonna liberalize, and how this has really been a deliberate effort on China's part.

And then if you just want a magisterial work of America's relationship with China over the centuries, there's John Pomfret's book, which is phenomenal, called the Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom. But there's a lot of great work, there's plenty of others out there to read, too. In my book, I've got a recommended reading list actually, in the back of the book for many of these challenges.

But so what I think the assumptions were, as I mentioned, that underpinned our policy and strategy was this policy, the strategy that, or the assumption that China would liberalize. So we rejected that, and we put into place a transparent competition strategy, is what we called it, in 2017.

And that has carried through now across two administrations. I believe that it is effective and is starting to be effective in terms of recognizing the degree to which, especially China has weaponized its status mercantilist economic model against us. Because we had failed to recognize that for so long, we had vacated critical arenas of competition that China remained on and were able to gain advantages over us.

From technology theft, sustained industrial espionage, economic policies that were not reciprocal in terms of access to their market. The forcing of joint ventures for our companies, such as we had to transfer our know how and intellectual property to Chinese companies, which could then pick a winner from a Chinese company.

Subsidize that company, shut you out of the Chinese market, and then dump goods, hardware, equipment, whatever it is on the international market to drive you out of business completely, right? This is what Walray did, this is what solar panel manufacturers did, wind turbine manufacturers. It's about to happen to Elon Musk and Tesla, even though, apparently he hasn't figured that out yet, and he's a genius, I mean he should know better.

It happened within battery manufacturing already. So we finally acknowledged, I think, kind of the full range of this competition, including many other areas. So we characterized the competition with China, as China really using these strategies against us, of military civil fusion, made in China 2025. Belt and Road Initiative, as the three Cs, co-option, coercion, and concealment.

What China does is they co-opt you, right? With false promises of impending liberalization, right? And co-opt you by saying, well, if you turn a blind eye to what we're doing, like with this genocidal campaign against the Uighurs, maybe we can work with you on climate change. Well, who's the problem on carbon emissions?

It's China! I mean, so I just think that we deluded ourselves by allowing them to co-opt us. And then coercion. Once you're in, once they've got you, okay, now we are dependent on them for some critical supply chains, right? Germany, Europe, one of the big lessons is it's really bad, silly, dumb, whatever you say, to give an authoritarian, hostile power, coercive power over your economy.

We've done that with supply chains that are wholly dependent, critical supply chains on China. And then what China does is they conceal all this coercion, whether it's in setting debt traps for countries and so forth. This is just normal business practices, right? So there's nothing to see here in Xinjiang.

There's no forced labor, we don't have people in reeducation and concentration camps. So I think we allowed ourselves just to fall into that. Finally, we've woken up to it. Is what we're doing now adequate? No, to answer your question, there's much more that we need to do. Hard power matters in deterring China.

I think we have not done enough to invest in the military capacity and capabilities, to demonstrate clearly to the PLA they can accomplish their objectives through the use of force vis-a-vis Taiwan or in the South China Sea. We haven't done enough to compensate for the economic position of disadvantage we've been put in by vacating these critical battlegrounds.

We need A holistic approach to economic statecraft that doesn't surrender our advantages associated with our free market economy or our unbridled entrepreneurialism, but at the same time counters their mercantilist status model. And this is a combination of tools that should be used in a way that's integrated. And this is export controls.

It's outbound investment screening, which we just had a very weak executive order on. It's invigoration of inbound investment to make sure that those investments don't result in the transfer of critical technologies, intellectual property. It is also a range of investments, maybe in critical sectors where we have to kind of catch up and get over some of the barriers to reentry into these markets.

This is especially in microprocessors, microelectronics. But there are other sectors affected by this as well. I mean, we don't make any magnets in the United States anymore. We have a real problem with battery supply chains, and it doesn't have to be in the United States, right? This could be just, we need an effort to make supply chains more resilient, right?

And then also we have to deal with human capital to try to invigorate our advantages there and this could be with the changes to immigration policy. I mean, I do think if you get a graduate degree in a critical area here in the United States, you ought to have a work visa, H-1B visa, staple to it.

But also, I think, educating our own people, I mean, I just think that there's a lot we need to do across all those areas. So I think it's happening, that competition is happening, but we haven't really taken it all with a sense of urgency that's required because we're just so far behind.

And then I think on Afghanistan, Afghanistan is heartbreaking for me. I mean, the ways I would describe it, is self defeat, we defeated ourselves in Afghanistan. A Pakistani ISI inter-services intelligence general agreed, right? He said, in the 1980s, I worked with the United States to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and now I've worked with the United States to defeat the United States in Afghanistan.

And what that shows you is how diluted we are on our strategies, strategy in Afghanistan and how we kidded ourselves about the nature of the enemy, which I mentioned. But just think about what you heard about Afghanistan all the time. Hey, there's no military solution in Afghanistan. Well, the Taliban came up with one, didn't they?

And then if you think about really what led up to the collapse in Afghanistan, it was actually the blows that we delivered to the Afghans on our way out. If we were gonna leave, why the heck didn't we just leave when President Obama made, I think, a really bad decision.

And it's clear in retrospect to leave completely Iraq militarily in 2010, we didn't negotiate with al Qaeda and say, is it okay with you if we leave on this timeline? I mean, what the heck were we doing? So we negotiated with the Taliban without the Afghan government. What does that do to legitimacy of the afghan government, right?

Cuts them out of it, what else did we do? We stopped supporting the Afghan security forces actively with intelligence collection and with air support and other means of support. We withheld logistic support from afghan security forces. We forced the Afghans to release 5000 of some of the most heinous people on earth and then do other prisoner releases during this negotiated, withdraw.

And then what did the Taliban do with all that, right? They went around to all the provinces and they went to all the military commanders. They said, hey, the Americans are leaving. The Taliban is part, they've got a huge back end here, right? They've got the ISI, they have donors in the Gulf.

They have the Haqqani network, the al Qaeda brigade that took over the airport in Kabul. And they said, here's how it's gonna go down. Either you accommodate with us when we give you the word, or we kill you and your whole family. What is it gonna be basically, right?

So we essentially helped defeat the Afghan government in security, we partnered with the Taliban against the Afghan government security forces. It was an astounding degree of moral failure and extraordinary incompetence. So in the final question, I wrote a book, dereliction of duty, how and why Vietnam became an American war?

And I do see a lot of parallels and failures that are similar to that, especially with a president. Presidents can get the advice they want, right? And I think the case maybe with President Trump, although I was no longer the administration, but I think it's quite clear from the accounts and the Biden administration's decision making.

The President Biden had made his decision and no matter what anybody told him, he wasn't gonna consider anything else. Basically, when he was vice president, he had said that the military was boxing in President Obama. How were they boxing him in with their advice? They were telling him advice that he didn't wanna hear, is that boxing in the commander in chief?

No, it's actually necessary to challenge predilections of decision makers and policymakers if you're gonna make the best decisions. So I think what he did is he said to the military when they said, well, do you really wanna evacuate the military before we evacuate civilians? Does it make sense to close Bagram airfield?

Because if we do that, we're in this single airport that's butted up right against an urban area and is utterly indefensible. All those questions were raised and military leaders were told, hey, shut up. This is what I told you to do and that's what we do in the military, right?

Nobody elects generals to make policy that policymaking responsibilities with the commander in chief and with secretary of defense in your chain of command. And so once you gave the US military a number of troops and a date, there was no option but to close Bagram. There was no option to kind of set ourselves up for what is an ongoing catastrophe is what I would say it is.

And then you also heard there were no viable alternatives, right? A sustained military commitment in Afghanistan would probably be about 5000 troops, maybe 10,000. But how significant would that be? About $22 billion a year, that was sustainable. We've incurred much more cost, I think, in many different forms than what a sustained commitment would have cost there.

And of course, you'll hear the argument, Afghanistan, we failed. It's not Denmark yet, it wasn't Denmark. It didn't need to be Denmark, Afghanistan just needed to be Afghanistan. It was gonna still be a violent place, but a violent place with the government and security forces who were hostile to the enemies of all humanity.

So that's my perspective on it. But I think there are parallels to the failures of maybe of decision making and making decisions, in this case on Afghanistan on a flawed set of assumptions, really self delusion.

>> Audience 6: Retooled a lot of its bureaucracy and re-examined the sort of intelligence community, looked at its development sector as well.

And there was a lot of bureaucratic change that took place in response to sort of a new strategic challenge that was identified. Now that we're sort of moving into this era of great power competition, is there additional sort of bureaucratic change that needs to happen to sort of retool.

Our bureaucracy for this challenge, or do you think it's sort of everything's all set and we just need to reset the strategy?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, all right, yeah, really interesting question. I think what we've done is we've said, okay, we're just never, we're just not going to do this stuff again, in terms of sustained commitments abroad, like in Afghanistan or in Iraq.

Where we still are, and in Syria, because we just got tired of it, but our enemies haven't gotten tired of it. Wars don't end when one side disengages. And we are fighting enemies who do wanna inflict tremendous harm on us at a time when I think they are becoming a greater danger.

Maybe even these groups are becoming more dangerous than they were on 911. And the reason why we haven't had another 911 is because we are sustained engagement abroad. Mainly working through partners who keep these terrorist organizations from being able to gain control of territory, populations and resources that they can use to become much more effective.

If you really look at the situation now, you have a terrorist organization in charge of a nation state. Haqqani is the minister of interior in Afghanistan, he's the person issuing passports. Just that the territory and the resources available to them and in Pakistan and through Gulf donors and others are significant and are making those organizations much more potent.

And by those organizations, I mean those that are sponsored directly by the Pakistanis, like Lashkari Taiba. But also Tariqi Taliban Pakistan, which has kind of turned against the government, the Taliban. The Qani network, al Qaeda and ISIS Khorasan, which is tied to ISIS, groups that now go all the way across the Maghreb and into North Africa and into West Africa.

And these groups are networked, which makes them more dangerous. They're able to transfer know how in terms of destructive capabilities. And you have this dynamic kind of what some people have called the democratization of destruction, where non state actors are gaining access to destructive capabilities previously associated only with nation states.

And Audrey Cronin's book is quite good on this, called Power to the People, in which she looks at the technologies and the degree to which they are transferable to jihadist terrorist organizations. But I think because of the debacle in Afghanistan, the narrative of the Middle east just being a mess to be avoided, we're in a period of profound retrenchment and disengagement.

Which I think is gonna make those groups much more dangerous. I think the situation that we're in is analogous to the post Vietnam period. We said, okay, we just never wanna do that again. There's a very good essay by a historian, Conrad Crane, called avoiding Vietnam. And I think what we're doing now is we're just avoiding really what we have learned, what we should have learned in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we're just erasing that from our memory.

And now we're gonna go to something we're much more comfortable with great power competition, and even myopically defined as happening, really, from the Straits of Malacca to northeast Asia. This is the bridge Colby argument that we should all go play little kids soccer and just run over to the Indo Pacific region and forget that this competition is happening actually in the Middle east.

Happening in the Black Sea region, happening in our hemisphere, in the western hemisphere, so across Africa. So I do think that there's an analogy to that post Vietnam period, and it's gonna be a setup, right? I mean, it's going to be a setup, I think, for more strategic surprises that we'll have to adapt to again and say, I'll guess, Benji, we really do have to stay engaged.

But if you look at really even we disengaged from Somalia and said, wow, maybe, I think we may have to go back, we went back, right? You saw the recent strikes in Yemen, for example. I mean, these groups are not just gonna give up. And that doesn't mean that that's the long term solution is the military engagement.

There's a whole cycle that we have to break that we could talk more about if you want, but I think that we're talking ourselves out of having to remain engaged against jihadist terrorist organizations. That are a threat to us and all humanity.

>> Audience 7: Firstly, I would like to thank you for that wonderful presentation, my name is Salvador Reyes.

I am from the University of the Pacific here in Stockton, California. So during your presentation, you were talking about uncertainties with intelligence and logistics. From my understanding of the situation, the United States made plans to leave Afghanistan during the Trump administration, and then that motive was carried over during the Biden administration.

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts about this question. Did the United States have the capabilities to get most or all of our military equipment out of Afghanistan during the rough exit of American forces outside of the country?

>> H.R. McMaster: Okay, the answer to that question is no, because there was a vast amount of equipment there.

And when you surrender, that's what happens to your equipment, I mean, that's what we did. And I think you're right to point out that this occurred over two administrations. The Trump administration presided over. I don't know what else to call it, but a surrender ceremony, in Doha Gutter in February of 2020, right?

No, 2021, I can't remember. Anyway, and this is where Secretary Pompeo went to Doha Gutter. And I think that the Biden administration, though, said, well, we had to stick to that agreement. Okay, well, they went back into the JCPOA, the rand nuclear deal, right? They rejoined the Human Rights Council.

They reversed a lot of Trump policies, they could have reversed that one. So I think the after action reports from the Biden administration are profoundly embarrassing, they're just a whitewash effort. Nobody's really paying any attention to it. But the responsibility, as you point out, is shared across both administrations.

And again, there's a point at which kind of Republican Party, I don't even know how to describe it, all right, I don't know what that means, really. But there's a neo isolationist wing of the Republican Party, of conservatives that at some point, right, and this is kind of a nativist retrenchment movement.

There's a point where it meets kind of the self loathing ideology of the far left, and their arguments are often indistinguishable. I mean, I think that really the argument ought to be for sustained engagement. We're not gonna be the world's policemen, solve problems in the world. But I think what we should have learned from 911 is that, problems and challenges to our security that develop abroad can only be dealt with at an exorbitant cost once they reach our shores.

I think that's true for terrorist organizations, it's true for great power rivalries in terms of the strategic forces that China's building up now. If you look at the threat of nuclear war, for example, the people are concerned about escalation on the Black Sea or vis Ukraine. We wouldn't be talking about it if that war was prevented to begin with, right?

If Putin had been deterred by maybe a forward presence of more capable Ukrainian forces, certainly. And then it's true for pandemics, right? I mean, why do we have the pandemic? Because the epidemic grew into a pandemic thanks to the Chinese communist party and everything they did to obstruct any efforts to identify it early and maybe contain it.

So I just think that the argument that we need to have is against the sort of impulse toward retrenchment and disengagement and what a sustained internationalist approach to foreign policy looks like, right? We know that the soft headed cosmopolitanism, and this idea of an international community, right? I mean, I don't wanna burst anybody's bubble, but it doesn't exist.

There's no such thing as international community. Like whenever you hear that, you should just say that's the figment of somebody's imagination, right? We are in a competitive global environment and that doesn't mean that has to lead to conflict, but it means that if you don't compete, right? I mean, if you don't mind me using the vernacular, if you don't compete, you get your ass kicked.

You know what I mean? So it's important to recognize the nature of the competitions and to be able to integrate all elements of national power in a sensible way. And that's I think the essence of strategic competence. Thanks everybody.