176: Part II, interview with J. David Thompson

Brian Hancock hosts Major J. David Thompson, a Civil Affairs planner out of U.S. Africa Command, to discuss military campaigning, just war with post-modern conflict and avoiding civilian harm in conflict. 

One CA is a product of the civil affairs association 

and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.

We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations. 

To contact the show, email us at CApodcasting@gmail dot com

or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org

Special thanks to Relax Music for sampling "Trio Riberto's song "Yellow Summer." Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stpq54O2qO0

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Credits

Sponsor: Civil Affairs Association

Host: Brian Hancock

Showrunner / editor: Jack Gaines

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00:00:03    Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1CA is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com. or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.

00:00:38    BRIAN HANCOCK
Welcome. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Brian Hancock, and I will be your host for this session. Today, we're going to explore the concepts of military campaigning, civil harm mitigation, and how to align just war with postmodern conflict. To get after this, I have with me Major J. David Thompson. He's a civil affairs major assigned to the U .S. Africa Command. He holds a Juris Doctorate from Washington and Lee University School of Law. He is a Ph .D. candidate at King's College London, where he is researching the ethics of proxy warfare. Major Thompson, welcome to the show.

00:01:15    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Glad to be here, sir.

00:01:16    BRIAN HANCOCK
All right, before we begin, Dave, our quick disclaimer, a reminder to our audience that all remarks made are those of the presenters solely. All right, let's begin. Dave, can you tell me a little bit about your current positions and duties of what you're doing there at U .S. AFRICOM?

00:01:35    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Thank you. So I am a same military operations planner at U .S. AFRICOM. That's within the JFOLA. With same forward division, we have also the humanitarian assistance portfolio, largely, I think, the ODACA programs. We have a number of interagency representatives from the Health and Stabilization Office of the Department of State, foreign policy advisor from State Department, a public health advisor from DHEP. We also have a liaison from Pacific Disaster Center of PBC Global, and the PBC Global liaison works with California. That's a lot. Yes, that is a lot, but luckily we have really good leadership and good control. Arrow Division.

00:02:22    BRIAN HANCOCK
Fantastic. I was worried you were never going to get to sleep with all those duties on your plate. All right, let's jump into our first varsity -level question. You recently wrote an award -winning civil affairs issue paper. Let me read the exact title. Campaigning the Campaign Plan, Focusing on the Fundamentals at the Combatant Command by Assessing Civil Affairs Operations, Activities, and Investments. The famous OANI is there. Now, it feels to me that the Army's come full circle. When I started my career 18 years ago, military campaigns were a thing. They were discussed. And then suddenly the term fell out of vogue. I never understood quite why. But now it's back. So campaigns are back on the menu, huh?

00:03:16    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Afghanistan, partly with global war on terror. I had the opportunity to meet Joel Stane. He was talking to me and he was doing this battlefield circulation, was the commander, and I was telling him all the things we were doing about the Afghan security forces. And he said, what would you do if you hadn't stayed here until the war? And can you think that, well, I would... Probably spend a little bit more of a tele -focus on doing a partner for us so that way I could hand this off to somebody because I was doing it. And ideally, it needs to be somebody else for us to win. So that started me thinking of how my rotation fit into Baylor's attention. So then we changed our approach. And during that time, I made it a little, to use a sports analogy, the ball was on the 20 -yard line and I was going to try to get it to the 30 -yard line. And that will mean our soldiers doing more and us doing less. That's being within that advice in a such role.

00:04:21    BRIAN HANCOCK
That makes sense to me. And I love your analogy on incremental movements, right? When we're talking about all these very complicated systems and politics and economics where strategic objectives tend to lie, these are not things that are solved quickly, especially in areas where you've got deep sectarian violence and hatred. And, you know, at the end of the day, I think not only as civil affairs officer, but as military officers in general, you know, we need to keep moving that needle to the right. Love that anecdote that you mentioned with General McChrystal to one of the generals in, you know, the famous book, The Four Star. Very interesting individual. For the audience, I think that their experience with the word campaign is in a political sense rather than in a military sense. For clarification, how does the Department of Defense define that term? And if you don't mind, can you just explain how it's different from an operation, an engagement, or a theater plan, which are other terms we hear bantered about a bunch?

00:05:25    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
So there is Champagne, as in Philippe, which is in J .F. Station, Rio. And I'm going to read a bit of the definition here.

00:05:45    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Now that differs from campaign plan and campaign, which comes from the joint publication final. So campaign is a series of laden operations with a given time and space, and a campaign plan is a joint operation plan. through a series of related major operations within its habit space. So ideally, you have the campaign plan, which lists LFP -CAN -8 objectives, the intermediate military objectives, and then the effects, subordinate to those IMOs or intermediate military objectives. Then you have the campaign formula, which provides TANAS to components. These TANAS generate operations, activities, and investments, or OAIs. So components can then have OAIs linked to tasks in the combatant command. It can have tasks linked to effects linked to IMOs linked to championing objectives. So if you think about it linearly, you should be able to draw a line between an operational activity or investment in OAI directly to the champion.

00:06:50    BRIAN HANCOCK
I know NATO talks a little bit about in -states as opposed to objectives, just a different way of looking at it. or desired conditions as you're moving towards things in a plan. It seems that based upon how DoD looks at a campaign, it's kind of on that cusp between operations and strategy with an ability to be broken down to tactical tasks and activities that support it. Let's go deeper into strategy and operations. In the paper that you published, you mentioned that the connection between strategy and operations is inherent. I know you've read Sean McFake's work. You're pretty well read. In that, he and other military scholars argue that America has actually lost every war since World War II, as measured by a failure to complete the strategic objectives of those conflicts. Now, given the potential connection between strategy and operations, what do you think went wrong? As a force, did we just suck at operations, and that in turn causes our strategy to fail in many of these wars? What do you think?

00:07:57    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
So first, one of the unique things about that paper was, it didn't call for any new .lltf piece, which just uses current dapering as what we have available. So anybody can go through and use it. Now the paper is published with the Silhouette Association as publicly available. Another kind of spent on looking at this, I talked to the OAIs and the campaign objectives. I forgot to mention maybe the measuring and assessments of those tasks, which are important and maybe lead to your point. You should be able to measure, both quantitatively and qualitatively, measure them with facts and measure the performance, if the OAIs are what people are being tasked to do for helping to reach the campaign objectives. If not, why not? Do there need to be new structures, new processes, more guidance? machine resources in the 40s. She must really do all of assessments comes into play. So he doesn't show McFay. So he wrote a book, The New Rules of War, about the same time that Richard Cox wrote, A World in Disarray. And they both looked at the same question broadly and approached it in two very different ways. And there were solutions to solving that. I think if you read those two books side by side, you can follow all conclusions.

00:09:23    BRIAN HANCOCK
Thanks for that. Obviously, these are hot political issues as well as military issues. To use an egregious example, if we take a look at the war in Iraq, I don't know if you read Mark Perry's book, The Pentagon Wars, but he makes a pretty cogent case that the Iraq War actually reduced security abroad, caused some chaos, empowered Iran. Russia and ISIS damaged relationships between the civil and the military, nearly bankrupt the nation, and of course got many, many Americans as well as Iraqis killed. And relative to the strategic objectives, it doesn't look like that is a victory. So going back to what you said about assessments, did we just... pick the wrong things to do, and then therefore the rosy assessments, which I saw were just measuring the wrong things. Yeah.

00:11:54    BRIAN HANCOCK
That's great. I think we could probably have an entire podcast on just talking about the different definitions of victory and competition. I think those are hot terms.

00:12:23    BRIAN HANCOCK
from maybe a political lens or a socioeconomic lens, perhaps not. So I think that's one of the challenges, and you talk about it in some of your other papers, with the graying of modern warfare, our definitions just kind of haven't kept pace. Let's move on to the next question. You spent some time addressing assessments in your publication and referred to it earlier. Now, these are critical, and particularly as we move up echelon, they often direct... Now, in my experience, assessing non -lethal effects are challenging. Many of the things we're trying to affect are complex adaptive human systems, which have a relation to operations, activities, and investment. Now, to use an example of a difficult non -lethal assessment, one of the taskings we often get at U .S. Army, Europe, and Africa is for a civil affairs action team or a four -man cat team. to assess a tactical ODACA project. You talked about ODACA there earlier in your office. And typically that team has not been part of that project before and may not have contacts or baselines. And it is asked to assess how that typically tactical level project has advanced U .S. and NATO strategic objectives. And unfortunately, the team is usually only given a few days to accomplish this. Now, given math and science required to conduct a statistically valid assessment, how do you think we can do this better? Can we do this better?

00:14:16    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Perhaps I can put our CPM manager in touch and they can share some best practices. But I think one of the other things about this is looking when civil affairs forces are getting these very complicated tasks to do. I think that's one of the great things about being a civil affairs officer or soldier. We get tasks to do a hard thing. We don't solve easy problems. So we recruit and train. smart people when we put them through teams with other talented, smart people. And then we give them complex, challenging problems to solve. So, it's fascinating. And generally, they come out successful. Like, I would be hard -pressed to think of a time when I've seen a team take on a challenging problem and not come away with some ideas that were very creative and help solve it. They're really about success. So that's one of the great things about being a Civil Affairs soldier.

00:15:15    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
one of the great things about being a Civil Affairs soldier. If that appeals to anybody who's listening, who's not a Civil Affairs soldier, definitely get in contact with Colonel Hancock, myself, anybody in the Civil Affairs Association, I'm sure it's willing to help you. To the first part of the question about the assessment speech, right? So at the Geographic Combat and Command level, I think about assessments maybe a little bit different than like a tactical U .S. assessment. We want to know for assessments, are the things we're doing helping us reach our campaign objectives? So, great, let's keep doing. If not, again, what do we need? Do we need a new structure, process, guidance, resources? What is it that we need to do to help them achieve these campaign objectives? As far as the individual assessments of an evocative project, those are great, but at the command and command level, what I'm more interested in are all those assessments helping somebody else make a decision. I'm not so concerned about that decision, just that we have forces available working towards doing that and that they're informing people who are making decisions. The process of what we call civil knowledge integration.

00:16:25    BRIAN HANCOCK
I actually like your characterization of that, right? All models are wrong, but if it's useful, then it's worth investing in. in relation of a project to strategic impact is hard to measure. But if it moves the ball forward, if it teaches us something we didn't know, if it builds a valuable relationship we didn't have, then that is still useful in and of itself. All we're required to do as a government is conduct legal acceptance, which is more of an MLP, right? Let's say the project was to build a fuel pumping station, just making this up. Does it pump fuel? Does it hold fuel? Is it safe? Okay, yeah. And is the price what we agree? Then we accept that. But in terms of the value of that towards the campaign, the operational objective, that value could be shown in many different ways. And that's why we do both qualitative and quantitative assessments, right?

00:17:28    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Yeah, it's a good way to put it.

00:17:30    BRIAN HANCOCK
Okay. Let's keep talking about assessments. That's a real hot topic. You've worked at AFRICOM for a while, and one of the things that AFRICOM did is they held a civil affairs summit, which you participated in. One of the things that caught my eye in your write -up regarding the summit... was the extensive indicators that all the participants developed to attempt to capture CA impacts and garner useful measurements. Examples of these are number of episodic engagements, numbers of partners requesting civil military operations, embassies requesting civil affairs forces, and a number of others. Now, mathematically, these are obviously somewhat different concepts. These desperate factors get normalized, scored, and weighted to determine an accurate assessment framework.

00:18:26    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
That's really good. So we've got a quality assessment team at Capricorn. And also, anybody looking to replicate, I would point you to NXK of JP5 .0. In the paper, I basically just talked about our implementation of doctrine. Now, the actual indicators we developed are linked to our campaign objectives. We'll be jumping objectives across the slide. So the Peter I used thought was likely to be relevant to the Silver's audience. And then we're going to see as far as the indicators pointing exactly what we created during the summit is analogous. So using kind of tabular for the Silver line. Well, I think what we're going to share about is less about the actual indicators after column development and more of the process that we use. That's where I can preserve any listeners to focus. So what leads the tasks in the OEI is with the desired outcomes. Now, there were some pitfalls to avoid. Assessments don't inherently come with funding. And it creates work for Dell trade students. So we can have a perfect assessments framework, but we have to balance that with all the labor that goes into that with the operations piece. And then the assessments need to be full. Are we assessing things just for the sake of assessing them? Are we helping people make decisions moving forward? What are they helping to answer? Civil affairs doesn't exist in effect. So what are the strategic assessments helping to provide a comprehensive understanding to each other?

00:19:59    BRIAN HANCOCK
I think the assessments problem in non -lethal effects is one of those complicated things that probably drew you and I to civil affairs. And obviously, as you go up Aftalon, where you have more resources. One of the ways that we add value to our subordinate units is to help them with those assessments, right? Because we may have more ORSAs, more collection capabilities, more other things to do that. I don't think you and I are going to solve the assessment issues today, but I'm glad that we continue having that discussion. Let's keep going with Africa here. The National Defense Strategy in 2022 identifies China as the U .S. pacing threat and Russia as an acute threat. Through the One Belt, One Road initiative, China is conducting significant engagement in Africa, as are the Russians through their private military companies like the Wagner Group, and their recent media purchases. For additional context, in his book Factfulness, Dr. Hans Rossinger defines what he calls the pen code of the world. It's a very interesting idea. And that's how the 7 billion people on the planet are distributed. Now, at present, only 1 billion reside in Africa, while 4 billion reside in Asia. I suspect that's why PACOM has a lot of funding right now. Now, fast forward, though, to the year 2100. Dr. Rossinger points out that if demographic trends continue, Asia will only have grown to 5 billion inhabitants. But Africa will have drupaled its population to 4 billion. Given all this and other things you're aware of, it just seems to me that the U .S. military, particularly civil affairs, should be far more active in Africa.

 

00:01:25    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
fair economic trade issues. So we welcome PRC's cooperation on issues such as climate change, global health security, arms control, not proliferation, all issues that threaten the entire world. We get asking African states to choose between the U .S. and China. African countries or sovereign countries, they're seeing sometimes we may have a better offer and they may choose us, but we're not asking them to choose. Forcing fairness, forces in Africa. So they are doing a lot of great work. And they keep getting better. It's a testament to the professionalization of the force and their integration with components and culture teams. Seeing various forces constitute about 2 % of the rotational forces on Africa. And they use maybe 1 % of Egypt. But they execute 39 .5 % of all of Africa's OAIs. So that is a shattering trouble investment. But civil affairs, again, we don't, and so we sent it back. So we're a tool to help AFRICOL achieve this objective, but it's only worked with other tools. So these tools can be security cooperation programs, other special operations, foreign teams, country teams. Generally, we have AFRICOL as a combat commander. We're recently saying AFRICOL against Donald's when our interagency colleagues, State and USA, specifically with the special move settings, all over the field. And we, being DOD, are the Dutch. And that he reiterated such comments in his Senate and House testimony. Senator Armstrong's Committee, House Armstrong's Committee. And repeatedly brought up the holding government approach he's had to follow policy advisor and the senior development advisor sitting right behind him. And it is a testament to the holding government approach that we seek to do at AFRICON and how we do business. is the Global Fagility Act or the Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Composibility, SPCPS. Part of GFA or SPCPS is that we get on our own way to ruin business. We take a long -term approach and we think about how we get desperate together with our interagency colleagues. I think we had a lot of significant growth here and I think we've had a lot of positive benefits. And instead of thinking about civil affairs, again, as a standalone, GFA adds to think about how we collaborate. And for civil affairs, I think we do this pretty well. I think we'll live predisposition to thinking about other tools like government tower, even in countries that are not GFA.

00:04:02    BRIAN HANCOCK
I appreciate how you frame that. It seems like in the military, we sometimes have a tendency to think in zero -sum or binary terms. You know, we're at war, we're not at war. We're this country's partner or we're not. I think reality is more complicated than that. You know, for instance, with China, Dr. Brodigan, in her book, The Gift of the Dragon, talks a lot about how pieces of the One Belt, One Road initiative came to be in that the traditional international community and IMF typically does not like to loan money for large infrastructure projects, but China was willing to. So they found a niche, and they stepped into that. But we have some capabilities to offer, too. Just one example. China is a very traditional patriarchal society, so for them to have an aggressive women, peace, and security program, for instance, would be very difficult for them to offer that, whereas we're in a good position to do something like that. My read of the National Defense Strategy is that it's kind of all about Africa. I'm not sure our resources have followed that, but I imagine that we'll be talking a lot more about Africa in the future. Now, let's turn to your 2021 publication. in Volume 13, Issue 2 of Liaison. One of the focuses in that article is civilian harm mitigation. Given the recent creation of the Department of Defense Civil Protection Center, which actually published its first civil harm mitigation response plan in 2023, do you think that civil affairs may be losing some of its traditional core mission set as established by our famous progenitor, General Winfried Scott?

00:05:48    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
I had a great opportunity just recently. I got to meet with the director of the Swing Production Center of Excellence, Blake, and some members of his team. He has assembled an all -star team, and I think they're going to do some fascinating work. And they really love what we had to offer. They wanted us to work together. So, you know, the establishment of all of the CPCOE, the Swing Production Center of Excellence, is what it is. So I'm not saying we're losing grain. DLD and Army have given us guidance. And as professionals, it's not us to do our best. We could approach it, kicking and screaming, but we would like to lose opportunities. I think if we just do our best in public succeeding, we're going to bring a lot of possibilities. And I think that's what the narrative follows how we engage it. It's one of the things I appreciate about this show. So there's an opportunity for this to be a growth industry for us. As you know, there's not an MLS, a military occupational specialty, in a non -Orlean listeners that strictly focuses on site -owned mitigation.

00:06:51    BRIAN HANCOCK
You know, in civil affairs, we're trying to get civilians out of harm's way. So if I'm hearing you correctly, you see these roles as complementary, right? And they've got additional resources. And, you know, if we work together, we can potentially save more civilians caught in the line of fire.

00:07:05    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Yeah, that's the key piece of it. It's also important for class. This understanding all of the ways civilians are armed by military operation. So we're not talking just air civilian passages. We're looking at armies that civilians could be learned and developing more of a comprehensive understanding through that, looking for ways to mitigate or respond to it. In the paper with movies, Alder highlighted five military justifications for a spying or mitigation. So I say it's our loan to enforce protection. It allows our tactical victories to become strategic successors. It doesn't ask us to do any more than what we're already doing. It just asks us to get hurt. It allows us partners to engage in multinational efforts, even the kinds of effects and the information. A paper I just had accepted in conflict research societies that I'll present in September, I do address some of the shortcomings in my argument, and mainly how I approach it. So through big moral philosophy, Connick says humans should always be the end and never be the end of the second world. Same right, so. So they have heard mitigation, as I looked at the military justifications for it, or using the protection of civilians to help achieve the main trade. So I would say that argument is not without its flaws. It does, and the moral philosophy of culture does have some shortcomings, but ultimately civilians are being protected, and I think that's overall a good thing.

00:08:33    BRIAN HANCOCK
Yeah, I think we need to do even more of that. Having the moral high ground, I think, is very important in conflict. And I think how the civilian population is treated and perceives conflict has very direct impacts on whether we achieve those strategic objectives going forward, making that sacrifice of blood and treasure worthwhile. And I think there's a little bit of a shortcoming in our traditional targeting methodologies where To put a round on a target, we do a collateral damage estimate, but that estimate focuses just on the first order effects, right? Not what's going to happen in the second and third order, which are potentially significantly much greater than the initial fires mission. So I suspect that's going to be a growth industry for us and for civil affairs for some time.

00:09:22    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Yeah, the civilian situation is going to be interested in bringing your perspectives on that and Flinders City and how they could do it better. I want to return to your article on Liaison.

00:09:35    BRIAN HANCOCK
return to your article on Liaison. You referenced Army Doctrinal Publication 3, Tax Zero. And specifically, you said that understanding the human context that enables the enemy's will, which includes culture, economics, and history, not just their hard power kinetic capabilities. is as important as understanding the enemy's military capabilities. Now, that reads very well, probably politically very palatable to decision makers. But let me ask, in your experience, does the U .S. military actually do this, put equal emphasis on those soft power factors? For instance, When is the last time that you saw an actual civil common operating picture on the command post computing environment or the tactical mission data platform? And how often do combat arms units resource civil analysis to the extent that they resource the S2G2 and military analysis? It seems to me that in most circumstances, there's actually relatively little analysis and certainly not understanding. which is up the information value chain of the human context in which the conflict is occurring. I've seen frequently staffs produce PAMISI A -scope crosswalk during the military decision planning process, and that's it. And then it kind of goes away, doesn't get briefed, and then we end up with a lot of tactical kinetic victories, but potential friction in the civil space.

00:11:18    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Last deployment was with the Special Forces. And they had outstanding leadership. Colonel Giles and Sam Major Zito. Fantastic service. Everybody from the ODAs all the way up to the sort of leadership. Totally on board collaborating. And we're very interested in the civil picture. Because the languages are focused very heavily on the friendly forces. Then you have the S -2 superflowers very heavily on the Kennedy forces. And we provide that context to the intelligence and the context changing the situation. In civil affairs, we have civil knowledge integration. If we stand alone systems or stand alone reporting, they're going to, by definition, stand alone. So we can force decision makers. In the military, it's through information intelligence reports, or IIRs. And the diplomatic side is through cables. But if we integrate our civil knowledge through the cables or the IIRs in the serialized traffic, it helps to inform those innovators. And then we're not standalone. We are fully integrated into the systems that are already established to help inform people who are making these decisions. As a captain in Afghanistan, it's one of my first soft rotations that I have this great detail of war. mentoring me in this process. I had a very long exploration of this previously, being like, well, the president's not going to be interested. But what he told me, or the people who were talking to me, or these IARs. So I started using the IAR process in the civil affairs, and again, to clarifying with the black -collections, through this pattern of information, but we can pass that information off to people who can write IARs or tables or whatever. It can go forth and help inform whoever, right? And I like to focus on the integration aspects of that. And again, if you want to talk about the civilian protection center of excellence or the goals from civilian for mitigation or response, understanding the civilian landmings don't have achieved requirements of that. So I think there's a lot to be done for civil affairs forces here.

00:13:24    BRIAN HANCOCK
I think you hit the nail on the head on using the IIR process. While this is information rather than intelligence, We have to admit the intelligence community with ISAM M3 and many other enterprise architecture systems have high level visibility to senior decision makers. And trying to get civil information in front of the right people is essential for our value add to the larger military operation. I think that's a fantastic way to get about it. I'm not sure. if the complexity of the civil environment easily lends itself to the kind of tactical cops that you see in our online systems. You know, we're not just moving units over geography. You know, we're doing very complicated analysis, but that's definitely a great way to add value to the systems. Appreciate you sharing that. Let's talk a little bit about, you've done actually quite a bit of work on Just War. And you did publish an article titled, Renegotiating Just War Tradition in Irregular Warfare. As a qualified attorney, I suspect this topic is near and dear to your heart. Let's start with what constitutes warfare. I think this gets back to that discussion we have earlier, what constitutes victory, what constitutes competition. I think warfare now in modern terms be in the same category. Does warfare, for instance, have to be kinetic to be war? Is there such a thing as economic or political or legal warfare? And if those things do exist, how would we apply the just war tradition to all of those things?

00:15:03    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Thanks. So that paper hasn't been published yet. It's hopefully coming out here soon. But yes, be on the lookout. I will be sure to flag it to the sole Arab community. JP 1, Volume 1, identifies two types of warfare, conventional and regulatory within. This is Lars, we want to work in a way, dissertation about, so I'm going to try not to go too in -depth here, because that would be a series of podcast discussions as opposed to a 35 -minute discussion on a series of topics. I hear you. So, I think just more tradition, or also called just for a theory, is a great job providing a framework to analyze the ethics of conventional warfare. And there are multiple ways to approach just war tradition. I'm not going to get into these because that is probably more apt for a philosophical community focused on just war that most listeners probably don't. But if anybody does, reach out to me. Happy to have that chat. So just war tradition, of all of its approaches, gives a great framework and vocabulary to discuss conventional warfare. You set a bell. Where we're writing to war, use to follow, write to conduct in war, use to postpone ending wars justly. We can think about that very clearly than conducting a war. It does a less good job than the radio warfare and particularly while looking at this proxy warfare. So what I'm trying to do is build that framework and build that vocabulary to allow people making decisions about going to war, people conducting wars, and then also ending to wars justly. Because it doesn't necessarily provide a great framework, but it doesn't mean we need a lot of the pathway. Just war traditions that were evolving, and this re -negotiation of just war tradition, to give the framework and vocabulary on the ethics of the regular warfare, proxy warfare, is not unfortunate. Now, some people may not accept this argument that just war shouldn't have an evolving notion that it's relevant. I will say that the definitions of regular warfare... Undergold numerous changes. The 2018 and 2024 National Defense Authorization Act set different definitions for irregular warfare. The Department of Defense recently changed this definition of irregular warfare. The Joint Chiefs of Staffs recently changed their definition of irregular warfare. And that's beyond done or being created as old name. Wow. With all these definitions, I would not say that a random warfare is irrelevant. So, ending this as a far structure. One of the potential weaknesses of my argument is that some people say that a regular warfare isn't a warfare at all. Now,

00:17:52    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
if your publication disagrees with you, and even if that is your position, okay, so what? We're still left without this ethical framework to think about it. So, just for tradition, again, you said it all, the right to war relating to all the criteria in the just authority, just cause, which Trimality, necessity, being in the head of the exhaustive peaceful alternatives, right intention, and reasonable chance of success, use in the bill, proportionality, discrimination, and then use post -battle with ending or just rights and responsibilities owed to each party. Thinking about a regular wheelchair helmet measures short of conventional wheelchair. Dr. Danny Wessel -Maxine's College London has a great favorite called All We Fight Yet. Actually, I'm familiar with that paper.

00:18:43    BRIAN HANCOCK
familiar with that paper. It's fantastic, and it raises a lot of important questions that we need to answer. For the audience, I suspect we can't dismiss irregular warfare. Our partners in the ground combat element, the Marine Corps, they've actually just moved to make irregular warfare a core competency of their entire force. So this problem is not going away. In fact, I suspect it's going to... get worse as more and more nations get access to weapons of mass destruction and more non -state actors continue to rise. Now, I doubt the listeners are surprised that our traditional definitions of just war, you know, defined by that tradition, have not kept pace with the frameworks imposed by modern operational operations exercised not only by nation states with whole government efforts, but also these non -state. actors with their own individual agendas. And this harkens back to our previous discussion of the difficulty of defining terms like competition. But I think we need to talk about that because we're going to be in competition 99 % of the time. Now, I don't think 99 % of our resources are designed to making us win without fighting in competition. But given that reality and the importance of it, And we just published at the joint level the joint concept for competing in February 10, 2023. That document leaves out a number of the most important questions. They're still not answered, especially as we start getting into some of the ethical implications of what we're looking at here. Now, based on your research, though, where you'll be writing your dissertation at some point, how does just war tradition apply? to military operations, in competition specifically, to include special forces activities.

00:20:39    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Again, if we're talking competition, I have to ask, are we using it? And as a little very clear, I would have questions on talking to you, like who, what, why, very basic global questions. If we're using it as prescribing activities, then they're told. Then I think we're a tad bit better, and I think we can analyze who is affecting these. Is competition a proportionate? Has it exhausted peaceful alternatives? Is it in line with the exhaustive alternatives? And do these prescribed activities have a reasonable chance of success? If we're using it restrictively, I think adjustable provides a pretty good frame note for thinking about it. But if we're using it descriptively, then... I think we have to kind of go back and pass some more summable questions. This does highlight the ambiguity, and some of this I've put it out before, is that states take advantage of ambiguity to shift risks, so it's tactical, strategic, and political, as to what actors chill and what makes them chill. Looking at these risks, you could say, like, what rules apply really apply to?

00:21:56    BRIAN HANCOCK
Let me ask one final question about just war tradition. Now, the DoD Law of War Manual, I'm not an expert on this, but taking a quick look at it and how they define a party to a conflict, let's take a look at our role in Ukraine, certainly as a stakeholder, and probably more than that. Does our level of involvement in Ukraine, in your opinion, rise to the level of us potentially being considered a party to that conflict.

00:22:31    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
Now, what's the duty law, or what international law? More broadly, just because one violates the law of neutrality does not necessarily mean that the person has become a belligerent to the conflict. See, there is a gap between violent law of neutrality and then before you become a belligerent to the conflict. So that, I do find interestingly enough what the duty law for me does have. is it does provide a bit of thinking about the gesture of tradition. Chapter 1 looks at the use of Bellum. Chapter 2, a little bit more, the use of Bellum. It follows the orthodox approach that was popularized by Mike Walzer. But interestingly enough, it doesn't include chance of success as one of the use of Bellum criteria. So I do find that interesting. But I think when we're talking about how states take advantage of impugnability, let's go back to what I was just saying a second ago about violating neutrality to When violating neutrality is not so ambiguous, we tell it a little bit into a conflict. It was a little bit more ambiguous. So I do think states take advantage in that.

00:23:35    BRIAN HANCOCK
All right. Sounds like we have more work to do in that area so that we have a working definition. Obviously, Russia is going to attempt to portray not only the United States, but NATO and others as direct parties to that conflict. if nothing else, for face -saving, given the losses they've experienced without actually having to fight NATO forces. So that one's not going away. We'll probably revisit it. We're approaching our time here. Let me give you the floor one last time. Is there anything else you'd like to say to our community?

00:24:09    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
First, thank you, Sarah, for having some discussion, and thank you to the Civil Affairs Association of the 1CA podcast for continuing the professional education and involvement of civil affairs forces, and I look forward to doing it again sometime.

00:24:22    BRIAN HANCOCK
Thanks, Dave. This is very stimulating for me. I was really looking forward to your interview here. I appreciate you sharing the gift of your time with us today.

00:24:30    J. DAVID THOMPSON.
You take care.

00:24:30    BRIAN HANCOCK
All right. Out here.

00:24:33    Close
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