Here’s What People Get Wrong About Modern Warfare | John Spencer

0:00The laws of war aren't a suicide pack. They aren't meant to handcuff every nation of the world and the outlaw war. War is not illegal. It is reserved for very special cases like self-defense. John Spencer is a retired US Army major, a combat veteran, and a leading global scholar on urban warfare. He recently wrote a book titled, 20 times I almost died, Life Lessons from the Edge of Survival. Name the war. You're probably going to mission a city as a battle you remember from War Two, Civil War, the American Revolution, you name it. You're going to talk about a city fight because that's where the decisive battles are. He joins me to discuss the intricacies of modern warfare, whether just war is possible today. And what people often get wrong when thinking about war. The genocide commission is two pages long. Everybody can read it, but they just want somebody to tell them what it says. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janie Kellek.

1:01John Spencer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Oh, thanks for having me. You open your book, which is about all these ways that you almost died, among other things, and the lessons from them, with a descent into a large tunnel, with nobody attacking. And tell me a little bit about that experience and what it taught you because I thought it was profound. Sure. So it starts about 150 meters underground deep in Gaza, actually. And you're right. On the surface, it's like, well, you weren't really facing death. Although sometimes people are facing danger. They just don't know it. So there was a little bit of a blissfulness of the people around me, as there were two IDF soldiers standing in front of us as we went into the opening of this tunnel. But I knowing underground warfare, like that I've studied, that what the soldiers regarding was the abyss, a fjord of us, that they had not cleared. That went all the way back to enemy-held territory, or Hamas-held territories,

2:03early in the Israel-Hamas war. I think it was December of 2023, so right after the October 7th attack. But what it taught me was one that it was a dangerous environment, because of being in tunnels, just the area you're breathing and the contaminants. Now tell me a little bit about this tunnel. This was a very unusual one by your estimation. It absolutely. It was one that was found that the IDF found quickly after the attack that was an invasion tunnel that led right up to the Israel-Ghazah border wall. It was called the Rez tunnel. So it was almost two miles long and it went from the right 100 meters really from the wall all the way back to Gaza City. It was more like one of the tunnels I've been into, like in North Korea, the invasion tunnels that found there, where you could actually could drive a truck through this one. So it was just a massive tunnel. And I talk about in the chapter the investment that had to go into building this thing. It had lights, comma wire, of course all the oxygen needed to not only breathe, but to drive a truck down

3:08and understanding underground warfare. I understood that. Everyone of my stories is a lesson. And what was really really hit me on being in that tunnel, with a few other people, actually, interesting people that didn't know what they were signing up for, like Deborah Mezzin from Will and Grace that was there with us, was that some of these things you can't understand in that story of all my war studies, unless you go walk the ground. So to really get a grasp of the over 600 miles of tunnels that Hamas built, there were a lot different ones like the ones that I was in that day or other days, some small, some large. That one was very unique that it was a meant to flow massive amounts of fighters and vehicles up to the border wall for an October 7th style invasion, although they didn't use it on the October 7th attack. How is it that you became, I guess, one of the preeminent experts in tunnel warfare about things? Some of it's a bit of a nobody else is doing it. So people consider me the

4:10world's leading expert in urban warfare and in leading scholar and underground warfare. It's a really interesting, almost PhD student dream to be in a field that there's very few other people doing. So over a decade of studying urban warfare and underground warfare and writing books and articles about it, but also traveling the world doing it, it's the scholarship that builds that expertise. And when we created the Modern War Institute at West Point, which I helped create, it would, I started to really focus on that. Actually, I was in a Pentagon project where I was in the Bio-Sertre Force, our general who told us, go look at something that we're not thinking about. And it was urban warfare and that was back in 2014. So I caught the bug, but also found that I'm an academic, I'm a war scholar by the very nature of it to find something that nobody else is doing. So it's really shocking when you dig into it. Where is the body of knowledge,

5:12the repository, the experts in both urban and underground? That's very few. I of course love the study of it and the history of it. And really it's the present and the future, even if you look at underground in Iran and the challenges of attacking Iran sites, really around the world, even Russia, Ukraine, they're going underground, building bigger and bigger underground because of surface is so dangerous. But I got into it over a decade ago starting to study it. Is the reason there's so few people studying this is to actually do it on the ground so to speak is risky? Is that the reason or why? It's a great question. We back in 2014 when we started studying it for the general, why isn't there a center school books? Because it seems like something that's been on the rise massively, right? This urban and underground warfare. Absolutely. I've found many reasons, sometimes the enemy is ourselves. One of the reasons that there is no true, I think, greater

6:18body of experts is that militaries don't want to fight in cities. Militaries don't want to fight underground. So they avoid it and actually we used to write into our books, avoid and bypass all urban areas. And it makes sense. But as the world grew, as in population growth, urbanization, but also even asymmetric enemies, when you rise in your strength, somebody tries to find a nasometric advantage. And a lot of the, especially non-state actors like Hamas and others, move into the urban areas and use the urban areas defensive nature, but also the civilian population to their advantage. So you just see it increasing around the world, but also even in places like Ukraine where the Battle of Kiev in the 1940s is the largest encirclement in military history, but it was a much smaller city than when Russia tries to attack in 2022. It's grown the nature of where the Perry urban is. It all changed. But really the big reason, I have a lot

7:20of job security because no matter how many people I tell from Congress to other militaries is that this won't dedicate people to studying and training for it, which is really weird if that's where all the fighting is occurring. Even in, I mean, name the war, you're probably going to mention a city as a battle we remember from War II, Civil War, the American Revolution, you name it, you're going to talk about a city fight because that's where the decisive battles are. But there's a cultural aspect of people's thoughts about war or even militaries. They plan for these big battles in the open, which does happen, like, trench warfare going on in Ukraine and Russia, but those decisive battles are happening in the cities. I want to dig into this a little more because it is really quite astonishing, especially since these terror type actors that use the civilian populations as kind of shields. They don't care about them as much as, let's say, the Western

8:21Force, which has some kind of moral boundary there. Is it true that this has become more and more prevalent? Is that the reason it's happening more and more in cities, aside from just their expansion? Yeah, absolutely. Even if we take the last 30 or 40 years, I mean, non-state actors, like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, others, using human shields, although Hamas is a very unique version of a human sacrifice, as their goal is to actually get the people killed according to them, and they need civilian deaths to achieve their political goals. You say according to them, just spell that out of it. How come according to them? The Hamas leadership, whether it was Hanir, Sinwar, or others, the ones that are giving the orders have many public statements, and actually, even recently, saying they need the blood of their women, children, and elderly to achieve their goals. They said they not only want it, they need it to achieve this goal of theirs in the afterlife,

9:26moderate them and everything. It's a really sick political strategy. We haven't seen it. Even the Japanese, the Nazis, nobody, while they accepted civilian casualties, that wasn't their strategy, was to get their own population killed in order to achieve this political goal in the afterlife. That's why I say in their words, because it's their public statements that anybody can reference that they have this human sacrifice strategy. Of course, there are actions. There's 600 miles of tunnels in Gaza. As one example, there's a 2.2 million people. All of them could fit in their tunnels with ease and escape the surface, what's going on in the surface. But Hamas actually makes written and public statements saying these are not for civilians and civilians are not allowed, and you don't see civilians trying to get in the underground. Where if I go to Ukraine, where I've been many times, as in while we're talking, the civilians go into the subways to seek refugees from the bombings that are happening on the surface. That's a very unique thing. Why do people keep using

10:29human shields strategy? It is because there are those that follow the law of armed conflict. There's a history of this post-war war two, your Portuguese conventions, things that even the all nations said, we won't do this anymore. We won't target civilians, we're just one of the fundamentals of the law of war. But actually built this thing that we call law fair, which is when a non-state actor or a state actor actually says, not only do I not care about the laws of war, I'm going to use them against that Western democracy that is following the laws. That's where you get Hamas occupying hospitals, schools, mosques, all of it because they know that those are protected sites. In order to strike them, there are special things that have to be done. That's a war crime in and of itself, but it's this reverse engineering of the rules of war, which I believe in actually that these non-state actors have done in many locations. ISIS did it as well,

11:30Al-Qaeda, but there is a variation two of some of these non-state actors needing the population, like a Maoist, you know, fish in the sea, to hide amongst the population. Then you get an account of a certain theory, which is, of course, some of my experiences in Iraq, in separating the people from the population, but most people don't want to have it. That's separating the people from the population, what do you mean? So if you're engaged in an urban combat, I mean one of the goals is to, of course, one of the fundamentals of the law of war is don't target civilians. Yes. Target the enemy. Yes. And there's proportionality where there's a collateral damage assessment. In a counter-insurgency, we have an insurgent within a population, and it may be 10% 1% of the population, like we faced in Iraq, the goal is to they're relying on the population's support to hide amongst the population. So not only do you want to, of course, separate civilians, non-combatants from those that you're targeting combatants, in order to win in counter-insurgency, you also have to separate the insurgent from the population that it relies on for support, so that they start reporting on them,

12:34they don't give them ammunition, refuge, all of these things. You know, the other thing that strikes me, you know, where I want to get back in some of the amazing lessons you have in the book, but you know, a centra, an increasing feature, there's always been information war as part of warfare, obviously, right, messaging and so forth. But it seems as technology has changed, as social media has risen, as the ability to kind of, I don't know, create memes, viral memes around issues and things like that has increased. If that's this seem to have become much more of a part of warfare, I don't know if that's actually accurate, but it seems to me like it has. And that somehow changes the dimensions about these decisions, like if it's a counter-insurgency, do you how to use the civilian population? If you are this non-state actor, or even state actor in some cases, in case of China, or something like this, how does the information warfare work fit in here? Absolutely. I mean, it's in the book,

13:35too, is one of the reasons that I've had my character tested is when I was willing to go to war zones report on what I was seeing against what would be the popular opinion. So, was I going to stand up against for the truth, and in many times I've had to take personal liability almost to say things that matter, and I think we should live in that world. You're right, though, information warfare has always been a part of war. I mean, the reason we run marathons is because a guy was running back from a battle to explain what had happened, and even Roman times, you know, the senators would hear how a battle is going, he's sack a general, that aspect's always been there. But we live in a different world, and even some of the past wars, whether it was war two, Korean war, or whatever, had we had this algorithm driven social media instant access to the battlefields? I think wars might have gone differently. It's a present. So, that aspect of anybody fighting a war, especially in an urban area, where there's all the cell phones,

14:38and we saw this in Gaza, where Hamas would actually create content based on what was trending, and try to use that towards the other aspect of information warfare as narrative warfare. So, who's controlling the narrative? Where I cover wars like between India and Pakistan, where the what the world took from it is almost the opposite of what actually happened. That is a new nature of warfare that nations and populations have never had to deal with. That instant ubiquitous, but also algorithm driven content, where of course wars is hell, wars awful. It's death and destruction. So, to get fed the brutality of war to every phone of a population, if it's the United States, it's our population, or others, and you write China developing the tools of information warfare in order to be able to do that, to influence a population. And it's not new, Vietnam war, you can win every battle, but you can lose the war. Well, so, I thought back as I was thinking

15:41about this, I mean, some people would argue that Vietnam was lost on the information war. That's true. I mean, that's astonishing in a sense, right? I mean, there's many reasons that we lost. I mean, basically, you know, fighting a war where the state of your goals would be hard to achieve, whether it's to stand up a nation, a legitimate nation. But Vietnam is what we call the Cronkite effect, right? So, the most trusted American journalist goes to Vietnam, happened to be during what was launched to the TED offensive, and comes back and say, there's no way we can win this war. It was at the time, because he was trusted. It was a different opinion than what the government in the military was saying. I mean, the president said if we lost Cronkite, we lost the war, and it was the start of that information warfare, because all wars, the context of wills, that includes the two militaries fighting the two governments, but also their population. So, especially in democracy, if the population doesn't believe that it's a just war, that it's a good reason to fight it, or that

16:45there's a foreseeable way to achieve the state of the goals going back to ancient war for you, you won't be able to continue the war. The layer that's new, though, is that information warfare, or in all the tools of social media, people are talking directly to the populations, a lie can spread around the world. And we've seen this in many cases in wars today, where something happens, it spreads around the world as a lie, on who did it, what, how many people died, if civilians died, and no matter what you do, you can't put that back into the bottle, and people are convinced that that's what's happened, as much so as, and when I thought strongly against this, the entire idea is about a war, and where somebody gets driven, something about a single war every day, like the false claim of Israel creating genocide in Gaza, when it's all, I've seen mountains of evidence to the opposite, literally fields of food, and soldiers doing the opposite of genocide,

17:46but the world spreads it. When you mean the opposite of the truth, do you mean like warning the civilian population that there's going to be action, or things of this nature, what do you mean by the opposite? By the literal definition of genocide, it's trying to destroy, and hole in part, a group of religious groups, all of that, both by intention and by action. So the opposite of genocide is your intent, is the opposite of destroying the people, and that's what I've seen in my, now, eight trips to Israel, seven in the Gaza, probably the only person outside of the IDF that's been in the Gaza so much, is that I've actually interviewed all the political leaders, all the generals, everything, like what are you trying to do here, to answer the intent question? Are you trying to destroy the people, or are you trying to get to the hostages and destroy the enemy, which is not a killing the enemy in wars, is sometimes the goal, it's not a war crime. The other part is the actions that you talked about, so if you can't prove the intent is to destroy all of the people, like in this case,

18:49Gaza, then people will look at the actions, like in Russia, Ukraine, Russia steals thousands of babies and gives them the Russian parents. That's a genocidal act, according to the genocyte convention. You can prove it through actions, and what Israel has done to try to protect civilians, right? These are those things you just mentioned that, thanks to my, you know, war scholarship before October 7th, we have, how do you prevent civilian casualties in wars, a big field of study, we call it civilian harm mitigation measures, and Israel has implemented more of these civilian harm mitigation measures, things trying to prevent civilians from getting hurt, like evacuations, you know, phone calls, flyers, all that, but also daily pauses to allow civilians to get out of harm's way, giving out their maps, tracking civilians by their cell phones, not taking air strikes, they've actually done more of these than any militaries ever tried in war, but then are accused of targeting civilians when all of the evidence, real evidence, actually there's no cases of Israel

19:53targeting civilians, of course there's been civilians that have died going back to our conversation about Hamas' strategy, but also collateral damage is unfortunate, but the law says you do everything you can to minimize it, and from the genocyte claim, if Israel's intent has misstated by their political military leaders, like we are targeting Hamas, and then all of their actions to include putting their own soldiers at risk in order to give these notifications and take all these actions, it's the opposite of genocide, and actually has, which is a lot of people that just don't know a lot about war, it's protracted the war, what they've done, but also, you know, something can be brutal and a lot of death and also be the opposite of genocide, I think that, I think in our that term has started, it's something that I've studied quite a bit as well, and I understand, thank you for defining it, so, you know, I guess officially, because it's very, you know, that more official definition than I've heard from most people, of course the war in Gaza was brutal,

20:56a lot of people did die, and they say, well that's genocide, but you're saying something like that can still be the opposite of genocide, even though it's horrible, and of course the Palestinian people have suffered greatly. Absolutely, and that's why I'm fighting for not allowing the name, I mean, it's a very important classification, right, we have war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, genocide being the ultimate, created after the Holocaust to define like the worst human thing you could ever do, which is trying to eliminate an entire race religion, you name it, I don't want that word to just be synonymous with bad, like war is bad, war is hell, war is killing, it's awful, but we can't redefine a term trying to say, well it's really bad, yeah it's really bad for many reasons, and I could talk for a long time about why is it so bad in Gaza, well Hamas prepared the ground for 20 years, they are trying to get their civilians killed, Egypt wouldn't allow the civilians out, which I've never seen in a war that I've ever studied, where one country could save thousands by

21:58just creating a humanitarian zone outside of the main combat area that the enemy doesn't then use to its advantage, but you're right, some people would just say, well I mean really bad, like a number, and I, there's three types of lies in my work, lies, damn lies, and statistics, and I've had to try to fight against these, it's a really good book actually, that I read in my master's degree, that neighborhood, I need so much, about your sticks and more, like how many people died, who was, how many civilians died, and this has been the very unique thing that I don't want to continue to other wars, where I can just say a number, and then associate it to a term like genocide, like okay 70,000 people have died in Gaza, according to the Hamas Gaza Health Ministry, so that means this genocide, and that's what, as a war scholar, I don't want to see happen, because that's almost a strategy for all those people that don't want to adhere to the laws of armed conflict, and say well we just kill enough people, then everybody will be against it, and we'll

23:02achieve our goals, which is not the goal, the armed conflict either. And this is, so you know it's interesting how our conversation is developing, but this is something, you know I struggle with personally, because there is a lot of horror, you know in war, and so on and so forth, the point is the moment, it's almost like the sharing of that has been democratized through social media, that's not a problem, I think that's actually a somewhat positive thing, because you know in the past there's a lot of this stuff could be done under Shad of secrecy, and so forth, and who knows, you know how many you know millions of people died, and you know Soviet Russia, and communist China is uncountable, but it's you know massive and massive and as because of that Shad of secrecy, but the flip side is that like you said you can, a falsehood can see that seems very real, can be unbelievably powerful in hitting the will of a country or a very powerful

24:05ally, right, in terms of, and how to solve these things, right, becomes a lot more difficult I guess is that's what I'm saying, because of that the nature of it. Yeah this is the, I mean it gets into like the double standard, there is like you said it's great, I want people to understand what are the rules of war, because I believe in them, the laws of armed conflict, especially post war two, where awful things happened, so that war should be detoured, we don't want war, but there are reasons why we do believe that war is just like defending yourself, which I believe all wars are wars of choice, you can either choose to defend yourself like Ukraine did, and then Ukraine instant up and say they want to be Russian, they want to be invaded, or even Israel after October 7 saying we're going to defend our nation, it's a choice, but there are rules, because we don't want anybody's wars, the civilians being the brunt of wars, and that's why not targeting civilians, like Hamas did on October 7, is what we don't want to see

25:11in order to uphold that, then you have to take action to stop it, which is the danger here, I want people to understand, but we also live in this, don't trust anybody kind of place COVID world, where you have interpreters of war, what they're seeing, whether it's a video going, look clearly those people were innocent, that spreads really rapidly, because people want to believe certain things, or they trust podcasters or things, interpreting the law of war, like about what's legal, what's not, who's a combatant, who's not, how do numbers work, that is the dangerous space again going back to, if you create a double standard for Israel and war, then it will be applied against the United States later, for US and China. I'm sure I'm sure it will. Yeah, having studied this long enough, I've seen it already tried with the United States during the two battles of Fallujah in 2004, where international human rights activists were saying that we were doing war crimes,

26:14that people were coming up with numbers of civilians that weren't true, it was like a mini situation, and it actually had repercussions on the ground, but it didn't stick as much, because of course the Israel kind of concept of everything they do is wrong, everything that they say is not true, very few people actually have information, they just have access to these influencers and interpreters of war. Tell me about your background, how is it that you got to be doing the work that you do? Sure, I mean, the book is just a bunch of stories that I ended up putting, that did shape me, because I've had an amazing career. I was, some people, whether it's fortunate, I had 20 times almost died or unfortunate, I viewed as fortunate. I joined the army at 17, you know, a single mom with three kids working three jobs. There wasn't much for me after high school. Joining the military had an amazing 25 year career from serving as a commander in Iraq twice to my education that I got

27:19in the military, and then towards the end of my career as I transitioned into the Pentagon, working for that four-star general, started studying urban warfare, but of course in the military you got to move on to your next job, and I moved to West Point where I was teaching strategy, and I created the Modern War Institute at West Point, which is a research center for wars. That really points to like, how did you get into this business of, I've seen more war after my military career than I did in my military career, because my job is now to go into war zone, study them, and I've been, and this is many of the stories in very near-death situations by the very nature of the knowledge that I'm pursuing, which I do believe that you have to go get, and we actually don't have war watchers anymore. We used to have them in our, just a long time ago, if you even think back to the American Civil War, there was the Germans were here, the French were here, the English were here, just observing the changing character of warfare,

28:23all of this, and for political reasons we stopped doing it. But after I finished my military career, I continued this war research, a war scholar, but I also believe that continuing to study this urban underground warfare is really important for our own country, but I think for any anybody to understand and be able to stand up whether it's for a political leader, for an in-news to say, just so you're clear here, what people are saying about what is happening is not right, or what is the history of this operation because they start doing, you know, going back to those numbers, false statistics of what's happening compared to anything else. That's how I got into it, great military career, analog great post-career, writing books and articles about the war zones, and I have a bunch in the pipeline right now and really exciting research as it kind of grows on itself, the more I study war, the more unfortunately there's more things to study.

29:27No, we were speaking earlier and you were telling me you have a book coming soon about Ezra, Ezra by John and Armenia about that conflict. It's something I've been thinking about recently, I just had the ambassador on from Armenia, just talking about the impacts of this, you know, peace agreement and this corridor, you know, created for Armenia, well for both for everyone, but with Armenia and great interest, right? Yeah. But we don't, there's so many of these conflicts that we don't, like how much do we really know about that? I mean, I followed Goro Karabakh a little bit and what happened in there and Armenia has to deal with the reality. Can you just just tell me a little bit about what you found there? Sure, so it was another one of these aha moments I think in studying wars and what we understand in the west of what's happening, it actually isn't the reality of what happened, so I became interested because there was,

30:29of course there's a war over this region between Ezra by John and Armenia called Karabakh. Long history is covered in the book and in the late 1990s Armenia takes it in 2020 though during the COVID period really, there's this massive war that's way undercovered and the only thing that kind of the west takes from it is that it's a drone war, that the the the new drones are the future of war, it's what won the war, all of this, and now having walked every battle of that war with almost every general and both sides understanding what happened and what it was a massive war over this region that ended and now there's a possibility for a very strong peace between the two countries in this region, the book that comes out in October actually will detail unlike anything is ever before what happened in the 2020 war but also there's a 2023 kind of resolution

31:33of it and how did Ezra by John achieve a victory even in Armenia and if he talked in Armenians like yeah they had a victory militarily but actually linked to strategy and thoughts about that region and the politics of it, fascinating case study but for me as an outsider, as a worst scholar, as everybody took this aspect of the drones and how did we get that wrong through open source intelligence? Well, just in a word what is it we're the we're going to learn what was the reality? It wasn't drones or absolutely not it was men and women on the ground tanks preaching mind, wire obstacles or artillery, it was a combination like we understand if you understand war even in Ukraine there is not one thing that wins a war it's not actually those that have the coherence of capabilities and having better equipment definitely helped in this war especially even for Ezra by John they had better equipment but it was how they integrated everything on the battlefield

32:36human decisions where the the war could have been lost at a single moment human decisions that led to a breakthrough or a city falling and at one point they scale 400 feet of cliffs to infiltrate the city that ends the 2020 war that's human thinking and surprise all these elements of war that are enduring that isn't what the world took from it which is we just got to have these drones that the Ezra by John he's had right yeah absolutely fascinating now I was thinking the the last I was hearing about the Russia Ukraine war of course there's a lot of drone innovation and drone warfare and so forth it's fascinating to kind of follow that but but really it's the sort of the raw sort of traditional artillery battery you know that it seems to be seems to be making the difference is that right like that like it's just the the old stuff right

33:39that just just bombs yeah I think we all warfare is a combination of the old and the new it's really when bad assumptions which we could talk about whether it's in Iran Lebanon or whether where you have these bad assumptions of the futurist or ever imagines the feature of war without the old so in like in Ukraine yeah we learned that artillery is really still important a ground army infantry in order to take ground hold ground armor to breach you know mobile protective firepower all of it and Ukraine teaches you that all the things you thought you don't need anymore even with their amazing things they've done with drones and robotics even ground vehicle robotics aren't the decisive elements that's going to win the war it gives them advantages here and there but it's actually all the old stuff that you need as well like artillery but there's not one thing and that's where everybody we actually call it the the vampire fallacy general um hr mcmaster kind of coined what we call the vampire fallacy that's

34:41it's present going back to like war one that if I just had this one piece of technology I'll win the war and I'll you know no soldiers will have to die nobody will have to die and that's it it's a fallacy that people pursue you need it all and there are revolutions and military affairs where there is a cost like the cost difference right now that we see with drones right where if I can flood you with drones and it that are cheap to make ten thousand forty thousand dollars and you have to use an interceptor that's two or three million there's that um economic sub war that's present that's always been present as well that you have to stay on top of but it's when nations get complacent and believe that they don't need things that you find them uh wanting on the battlefield when you're faced as a normal person with the you know battery of social media and news and you know in legitimate skepticism against government messaging from wherever however much you

35:43may like a government or not or um how do you actually figure out some some points of reality yeah this is the and I have young kids and you know towards the end of my book it's really about a code that I created for I leave my life by I want my kids to leave by but it's a crisis in my work especially of critical thinking but it's in other fields as well as like how do we know what we know I talk a lot about in my book why am I facing danger so much because I truly believe you have to go there and see it and in some places even what I thought with all my study uh and then I go there and like I didn't know anything um there is a crisis of critical thinking that is being eroded by the the aspect of I can have any information I want right now but it's it's almost like digital literacy needs to be started in primary school like well how do you know what you're seeing is the truth and there is because because most people you know either don't want to go because they

36:49don't want to take the risk or can't you know fast fast majority right so that's that so they're not going to have that opportunity yeah right absolutely but everybody I cut you off a digital literacy so tell me about that because you know some people are we'll even say well digital literacy you're just telling me I need to sort of condition myself to a particular type of propaganda aren't you John no you know I I'm truly and I do this for myself because I I love I love access to information I could assume information of course we could get into what what our artificial intelligence does or doesn't do for us but in this world of don't trust any information you almost have to come you become your own investigative journalist as in somebody's telling you something when I actually find that they're telling you one thing but they don't they're not connecting the dots for you they're like like look I've done the research just believe what I'm saying whatever it's true for me it's like law of war or like the genocide convention the genocide convention is two pages

37:51long everybody can read it but they just want somebody to tell them what it says and a digital literacy which is whatever the topic is it isn't that hard to find the information that makes a an insertion in the evidence for an insertion true and because I of the research that I fell into even I when I was just growing up in the military wasn't my my thing to do that I had to learn okay what is research what is evidence how do if you have a hypothesis then how do you prove that and that's the critical thinking that everybody can do now with the access to information but they they want their their trusted person to tell them what is true because they don't have the time whether it's politics or war to do that themselves and in this day to nays if it's the emotion that people connect as well to their belief like you're so emotional about something that you actually haven't taken the time to connect the evidence to the assertion whether to allow for the fact you

38:53might be wrong to allow to write or that who who you're trusting which I just I don't know I guess I'm just I'm more discerning than I just have one voice I trust that person's position daily on the news or whatever it is that they've done the work because fact checking and I'm a writer too I mean where I mean for example in New York Times putting a baby with cerebral palsy on the front page of the the the paper of record and saying that that's because of malnutrition and starvation when the person has a congenital disease that's the fact checking that is the critical thinking right that we used to trust some people for and now we're trusting your comedians or others to do that for us when um and what I teach my kids is like you can do that you can what is it that you heard now do a little homework even if it's two more minutes to say well how do we know if that's true whatever the topic is I see and so there's because there's the information might be

39:56out there just might not be front and center this right not and you're saying often it is out there absolutely fascinating well that's kind of I guess what we do as a media but I don't know if everyone is gonna be doing it I mean this is the speed which is it goes back to our question about war is there ever because of the traditional information trusted cronkites are are gone and more people get the information from X and any other source there is that wanting to be the first to get out there so in more we we always say that just so you know the first report is always wrong so in this age of wanting to get to the story quicker wanting to get to that assertion quicker it actually is more wrong than right because it's the first report because they want to be the first well there's true or not they just want to be the first which gets you to the sad state of affairs that we're in and the need for every individual to have that critical thinking before they get emotional like let me dig into a little bit more how do we know this how long is this information new

41:02or things like that what would you say is the reality that you discovered that was the most distant from what you thought you were going to see in a war zone that's a tough one I mean I've studied everything from why the Russians failed to take key which was a surprise to me unlike the fact the human factors that prevented it to of course every visit to Gaza the dystopian reality of how much effort the soldiers were making to protect civilians and to mean criticize around the world probably there's nothing that compares to that really the scale of that as in going to to Israel going into Gaza watching IDF soldiers try to protect civilians while trying to get their horses in the entire world I mean umpteen countries around the world saying that they're not and that I don't I don't I hope I never have to face anything like that again

42:02that really the opposite of reality despite the evidence on the ground that everybody else has access to like some people say well we didn't have access to go there but the everything from the number of the amount of food that was going in the vaccinations the the numbers all of this stuff everybody had the same access I did of course I could validate because I was watching somebody do something that what they're doing and the steps they were taking but hopefully I never had the face that again in my studies where the entire world is pushing every day the opposite of reality on the ground even with access to the same information that gets revealed later right like the you know the IPC's famine you know famine in Gaza it gets revealed later but it's too late when them but the reality on the ground was but just just explained to me the reality of that situation because there might be people watching that don't know would tell me what do you mean by the famine yeah so yeah in 2024 the I one of the groups that would determine famine around the

43:08world so this is the the problem with like who do you trust well this institution said this that's the UN said this and you got to dig a little bit deeper like who in the UN and what's their history of reporting but early in 2024 the IPC did this study of nutrition in Gaza and had reported that there was nearing famine conditions because they had changed their own metrics of the the number of deaths related to starvation that would equate to famine and now the same organizations providing the data that they had showing that there was none of it was true there weren't cases of death by malnutrition and starvation that would equate to the famine marker again words have meaning and what what we saw was actually they had changed the meaning of the word because everybody thought there was just awful things and here's just another piece of evidence despite the actual number the amount of food that was going in and the lack of deaths from malnutrition

44:13and starvation that were happening actually it what the new data that comes out of course now is too late a year later is that the actual data provided from Gaza during a war had nutrition higher than other parts of the Middle East where there is no war so it's the the amazing amount of reality where everybody could have gone and seen the amount of food that was going in and actually looked at the data but that wasn't there was legitimacy put to a report saying the this institution says there's nearing famine so all of it just needs to stop when we talk about this right this is the the challenge in these and this isn't is I think Israel Gaza is one is a very very stark example but if that's not to say that the idea was perfect or something like that or everything about it is right or or even the strategy is correct or any of all all of this right this it's sort of the the way these things are painted is it's just

45:17you know it's this one monolith versus another yeah then they get to because if you yes but then they get to the demonization that they're trying to do something bad so they take the information to have available and then all the interpreters are saying well clearly they're trying to kill civilians they're trying to starve civilians they're trying to do that when the actual reality is the opposite and like you said I thankfully I studied war before this and I'm studying other war zones where this what has actually happened on the ground is the opposite of the West takes and while I love my job even in like the the four-day war between India and Pakistan last year for some reason the world believes that Pakistan knocked a bunch of Indian aircraft down so they they achieved this victory and it just permeates across especially English speaking media when the reality is almost the complete opposite of what happened during that four-day war and but what is that opposite reality just for the record yeah for the record yeah so

46:19another book that I'm working on is a book on the war that happened between India and Pakistan in 2020 last year it's four days Indians called Operation Sindoor the Western media focused on one aspect of the war about whether aircraft were knocked down or not they didn't focus on the fact that India this who had you know modernized its military was able to strike any target it wanted across all of the country of Pakistan and did in a very constrained manner and achieved the political goal which is basically an end to the to the the actions that Pakistan was taking and attacking India so it was literally that like one of the strongest cases of military dominance to achieve a political goal rapidly that you have in a modern era but for some reason the West just said well a Pakistan really got them and knocked down some planes and one that's not the measure of war but it's really interesting what media or numbers were we fixated when this is such a

47:19compelling taste because in the opening days of this four-day war India strikes you know nine terrorist camps and not a single target is stopped from hitting those terrorist camps and then after Pakistan retaliates with a bunch of drones like hundreds of drones and missiles India then strikes eleven air bases and is able to just strike all of them without any of them being stopped like that's military dominance but that's that but that's not the story that most people understand which is that information it's not that it's not the story I definitely understood right which is moment which is I'm gonna have to go do my fact checking it out it's crazy right fascinating what would you say was the moment when you were doing your research I mean you're basically embedding yourself with military forces like in many cases in live situations in other cases you're going in after the fact what is is there an instance in your mind where you know it was I mean there's 20 times you almost tied it here but what's the example where you know you

48:25has there been a time where you thought yourself maybe I'm spending a little bit too much interest in being on the ground here because of an incident there's actually been a few that's why there's 20 although this is covering everything from when I was released from killer B African killer B's in Panama my own combat deployments to now I would there's been a couple times in in my pursuits you know I'll give you two course going into Gaza oh very dangerous but I thought very important and at one point I went to where the US peer used to be along the the coast of Gaza through what's called the Netrion corridor saw where the peer used to be saw actually the field of aid that was being waited to be picked up which is known challenge and on the drive back about an hour after I had driven back into Israel now two soldiers died on the same road I was on

49:25which was a route and I wasn't able to go in another day that was another like realization of of going into an active combat zone versus like you said like I did in Kiev after the Russians had withdrawal although I got a lot closer to Chernobyl than I ever wanted to get following the Russian withdrawal from Kiev and how close it is to Kiev the other example though is when I went into to study that the Azerbaijan Armenia were after 2020 I went in really rapidly after because again that war ended in a city fight and I was alone traveling through a lot of checkpoints with a Russian checkpoint near me and at one point I'm like this is probably a bit too far because I had no cell service I was totally reliant on my host to get me into this through minefields and everything that that was a moment in the book and I'm like okay note to self this is a little bit too much in the pursuit of gaining the knowledge that I got from that which was amazing.

50:29Earlier in our conversation you talk about you know believe in waging just war you know following rules it the landscape has changed there's so many actors again can name you know communist China you know expressly figuring out how to leverage our kind of rules of are the way our the way our society works against us as a form of war fighting absolutely right it's sort of like throwing the rules out the window anything goes the sanctity of human life not enshrined at all or no attempts to to value that at all um is it even possible to to to just worry do we do we have to even if the enemy doesn't doesn't that put us at a disadvantage I know this these are topics people discuss right absolutely a lot and and I don't even know what to think about it because it's to me personally it's unimaginable

51:34to say okay I forget it no standards because the enemy has no standards and otherwise we'll lose but this that means we're gonna lose yeah is a great question I get it in various forms having again argued and what's interesting is that like we talked about the expertise of urban warfare one of the reasons the military is avoided because it is the greatest place where there's going to be constraints on the use of military force where you can't do what it you want um there's protected populations protected sites and people often ask me do what do we need more laws of war I actually don't believe we do I think we need better understanding of what the laws of war mean and there's an echelon like you said um having studied the laws of war in taught military history strategy laws of war for so long I know what the without the rules looks like um if you go back into ancient warfare uh it it's gruesome and I understand why the how the laws of war evolved because they they're constantly evolving um even you know outline

52:40you know like biological and chemical weapons things that are really important they evolve and how important they are because I know what it looks like if you don't have them um and after World War 2 which is the greatest you know the the most awful human experience in our history how important it was to come back together as nations especially the great powers and say look um we're going to evolve these to be even stronger because we never want to what happened or during World War 2 to happen again I believe it's still possible uh there is accountability that has to happen and it's really bad when you have you know there are multi-international organizations like the UN Security Council that really matter and when you have one of the voting veto members violating the laws of war it becomes a problem well but just to give an example right there's you know non-polluclearnon proliferation treaties which you know major actors just simply say yeah whatever

53:41or you know we're not supposed to be using biological weapons but frankly everybody's developing biological weapons right I mean this as far as I can tell right so you know people wonder like what meaning does this have is this really uh you you can become despondent but I I'm trying to understand you make a good case I think and things I've read from you that you need this you need these boundaries but how do you face the fact that you have these enemies that seek to subvert you at the best it not destroy you at worst that just are not don't have those constraints at all yeah it's hard um and then we're actually counting for this the law of war actually counts for whether it's an international armed conflict or a non-international armed conflict whether it's an intra-war or entrusted war uh it it can it tries to argue with and this is the scholarship of the laws of war but the laws of war aren't a suicide pack um they aren't meant to handcuff

54:44every nation of the world and the outlaw war war is not illegal um it is reserved for very special cases like self-defense which is you know article 51 of the UN charter like they're all the great nations I'm a realist so I believe in nation states sovereign borders and the the laws of war even non-nuclear appropriation like you said there I mean there's there's not a nuclear armed countries I don't want anymore I definitely don't want a terrorist state who says it wants one to destroy the United States to have one um this this is the aspect of getting especially those that don't study were um quickly informed on where are the rules uh but what what's worth fighting for and I believe non-nuclear appropriations worth fighting for I believe freedom of navigation um because I understand how much the United States economy and the global economy relies on freedom of navigation I also know when we've got a war about that in the past um but this is the

55:45the debate that we get to have in democracy but unfortunately is that I deal in the space where there's a lot of people that are just anti-war which is fine war is horrible I'm but I'm not okay when people are anti-fact or even anti um common sense I'm trying to redefine words like the many of the ones we talked about I want informed populations and I want war reserved for when it's needed but I also believe that war uh there are cases where war is necessary where military action is necessary of course you use all forms of national power and then I understand when the rules whether it's the global international order uh or the rules of war are really important and that's why for us we elect political leaders to fight for those things now we could have a big long discussion about deterrence next but um I think we're gonna have to finish up as much as I would love to talk to you for another hour maybe a quick final thought

56:47as we finish up and we'll definitely have you back uh after your book comes out sure I'm affirmly believe in to Terri and taught it um the way that you prevent wars is to prepare for war especially if you're the only superpower in the world I believe in strong strong nations and strong militaries that deter war because just what you talked about is if you don't deter war if there's no consequences for any actions then those that want more power want more land want more populations or resources will take it by force in violation of all the rules because nobody's gonna do anything about it and now we believe we're so handcuffed by our own rule set that we just allowed it all the way down to what you talked about which is of course China's waging war against us both economic warfare information warfare intellectual property warfare they're doing it and if we don't do anything about it they'll win well John Spencer it's such a pleasure to have had you on thank you thank you all for joining

57:52John Spencer in me on this episode of American Thought Leaders I'm your host Yanya Kellek