General David Petraeus on the New Rules of War

23:15General David Petraeus:I can assure you he'd love to have 10 ,000 drones a day to throw at the Iranians and blanket what they have on their shore or take a number of other actions that would be possible if we had learned more rapidly from what we see in Ukraine. And again, there are plenty of people that see the need. The problem is just galvanizing the kind of action that is required, noting that there are going to be forces that seek to frustrate it. Let me ask you quickly about the knock-on effects in the Middle East. You were the CENTCOM commander. You understand you spent a lot of time going back and forth to the region now.

23:55I'm wondering, do you believe the U.S. will have the same level of presence five years from now in the Middle East that it does today? Will our Gulf allies see this as a conflict that we initiated and that they're living with the bad consequences of? Spool that out for me a little bit.

24:11General David Petraeus:Well, a lot of this depends. It depends what the ultimate outcome of this is. I mean, there's a lot of people that want to prematurely declare this success or failure or whatever. It's too early. It depends whether or not we have the fortitude to continue our actions against Iran to the point that Iran finally realizes that they are going to have to cut a deal. And then the presence will depend on what the missions are that we see. I have long felt, though, that we have often been mistaken. Administrations of either party have constantly prematurely tried to leave the Gulf, reduce our force structure below what it should be in the interests of, you know, validly increasing the presence in the Pacific.

24:57General David Petraeus:The pivot to Asia, which is a terrible term because it scares people away. Which goes back to the Obama era. So we've been constantly pivoting unsuccessfully. Rebalance is a far better term. But look, I've often said there's three set-com truths. The first is that you have to be real clear who your enemies and your friends are. Iran is our enemy. Don't ever confuse Iran for a moderate or pragmatic or whatever. This is a very, very hardline regime. Israel and others, regardless of whatever differences may exist at political levels, these are our friends. The second is that Las Vegas rules do not apply in the Middle East.

25:36General David Petraeus:What happens there doesn't stay there. It tends to be violence, extremism, instability, and on occasion tsunamis of refugees, some of which went all the way into Europe and our most important NATO allies and caused enormous political domestic challenges for a number of them. And then third, trying to leave the Middle East or the United States is a little bit like Michael Corleone trying to leave the mafia. You just keep getting sucked back in. So you might as well acknowledge that you need a sustained presence. Obviously, it should be as efficient and economical. We should get our partners to do as much as they possibly can.

26:12General David Petraeus:But you have to sustain a presence that is adequate for the missions that you have. But by the way, there are already enormous implications of this for the Gulf states in particular. They are going to invest enormously, there already are, in hardening, resilience, defenses, even retaliatory capabilities, redundancy in every critical infrastructure, whether it's desalination, it's energy generation, storage management, transmission, a lot of it's going to go underground. around and by the way they already have some and they will invest in much more capacity to bypass the strait so watch Oman Oman this one particular port Dukum D-U-Q-M which is south of Muscat on the Gulf of Oman has enormous potential as a major port from which you could export crude oil if new pipelines are run there from the Gulf states, even potentially a natural gas pipeline there, say, from Qatar.

27:13General David Petraeus:But you're going to see much more of that. You'll see pipelines that run from perhaps Kuwait, Iraq, up through Syria to the Mediterranean. So the implications are already very, very clear for the future. They are very substantial. That's, I think, really important is to try to look over the horizon. Let's do that same exercise with Europe and NATO, given how the Russia-Ukraine conflict has changed significantly over just the last few months. I mean, just a couple years ago, we might not have anticipated Ukraine's ability to not only continue to inflict these enormous casualties on Russia, as you mentioned, but also to put Russia on the defensive, to strike deep inside Russia in ways that the Biden administration never wanted them to, to hit oil refineries and other targets, even to hit the Russian equivalent of Amazon facilities inside Russia.

28:08General David Petraeus:Amazon steroids, so the wild berries, they're called diesel logistical. Exactly, exactly. And the justification is they actually are used to resupply Russian forces in addition to facilitate civilian commerce. Well, that's right. So let's talk about what might Vladimir Putin do in this circumstance. There are new warnings, and I've been observing, you've been observing Putin over the last two decades. There's a sense that, you know, his default play, especially when backed into a corner, is to escalate. There's concerns that he's probing NATO's defenses. There was an explosive-filled unmanned drone in an airport in Germany.

28:45There were drone incursions in the Baltics. How seriously do you assess the threat to NATO, and what do you think is Putin's move here?

28:53General David Petraeus:Well, Putin will escalate. He'll seek to escalate. Now, so what can he do to escalate? Well, more missiles at Ukraine and even less concern about what they're actually hitting, especially as Ukraine, this is their Achilles heel, is their lack of missile defenses and particularly the interceptors for the Patriots and the other systems that they have. So he's going to exploit that to the extent that he can. He's doing enormous damage to the civilian grain export facilities in the ports of Odessa and so forth in the southwestern part of Ukraine. he will increase mobilization to the degree that he can without resulting in real upset internally.

29:33General David Petraeus:Obviously, he has an ironclad grip on social media, on the press, and the rest of that, but still, he has to be careful here, especially as the war is really coming home to the Russian people for the first time. Every refinery within 3 ,000 kilometers of Ukraine has been hit, not all destroyed by any means. They put them back in that. But bottom line is they aren't exporting refined products at all anymore. It used to be a big element. And also there have been at various times very long gasoline lines. Crimea is being isolated by Ukraine. They're just taking out all of the ships and vehicles that are trying to get fuel and other requirements into Crimea.

30:17General David Petraeus:So the summer tourists that normally are on the beaches of Crimea, they've all long since gone home. You cannot buy gasoline in Crimea as a civilian. The Ukrainians are painstakingly taking out every electrical transmission site in the country. They took out dozens more just in the last 24 hours. Do you think they could get Crimea back? I mean, you know, at the beginning of the war, people thought that was impossible. I don't know about getting it back. They can make it uninhabitable. It can't be used for anything now. It's not unlike the way that our basing structure in the eastern parts of the Gulf states are no longer usable the way they were.

30:57General David Petraeus:They can't keep the lights on in Sevastopol at this point in time, and it's going to get worse. So it'll become, instead of the crown jewel in Putin's grip based on the occupation since 2014, it's going to become an albatross around his neck. They are also beginning a campaign to isolate the Russian forces on the front lines from their logistical support. They have longer-range drones now that enable them to get into the rear of the Russian forces that are supporting the front lines, and that can make a big difference. So this overall campaign, you have the Russians running out of money in their national welfare fund.

31:39General David Petraeus:That would have happened sooner had it not been for lifting the sanctions on their oil exports when we were concerned about Brent crude prices some months back. They're back on now. And if the U.S. sanctions package is finally approved first by the House Senate, it's already approved it, House now, and then the White House, and it's imposed, that will do a great deal to really clamp down, to crush the Russian war economy, noting that the The EU has really come through in this regard. They have had 21 rounds of sanctions. They've also, they agreed on a package of 90 billion euros for financial and economic support for Ukraine.

32:17General David Petraeus:It's about$105 billion, and that's been flowing in. So Ukraine is in a vastly different and stronger position now. Putin will do what he can, but it's not enough, I don't think. And I think that within six, 12 months or something like that, if all of this comes to pass, especially the US sanctions package, that it could be Putin who needs a cessation of hostilities and has to tell his population, well, we've had such great success on the battlefield, we've achieved our objectives, and now I'm going to magnanimously agree to a cessation of hostilities. It'll be somehow, what he will not do, I don't think, is use tactical nuclear weapons.

33:00General David Petraeus:Both the leaders of china and india publicly admonished him not even to talk about this uh some time back that is not in the cards i don't believe but a cessation of hostilities i think is very possible at which time uh ukraine will become the arsenal of democracy for europe and by the way each european country needs to undertake the same kind of urgent revolutionary institutional military change that I described that we need to embark upon. And NATO as a whole, the operational commanders of the NATO forces need to sketch out what they think the concept is for the future of war as well, because that will drive what the individual countries develop to provide to them.

33:49General David Petraeus:So that's even more complicated in a way than what it is that we need to do. But it sounds like you're discounting to a certain extent the idea that Putin's escalation would include actually attacking inside a NATO country, the Baltics. Oh, no, not at all. No, I think there will be continued probes. There will be violations of airspace. There will be – look, this is a guy who's carried out assassinations. In fact, there was just an arrest of someone in Poland who was going to assassinate a Ukrainian-American citizen. So, no, all of that, I think, will continue. And I think some of the European countries, I think at this point in time, they're all pretty clear-eyed about what Russia is willing to do, although I think there were some at the beginning, certainly prior to the full-on invasion in 2022, that perhaps did not give as much emphasis to that, discounted to some degree what it is and how ruthless Putin is willing to be.

34:52We're going to take a quick break, and when we return with General David Petraeus, what's happening on the home front with the American military? The political scene from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

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36:23That's PolicyGenius.com. I'm Jessi Sefcik. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. and we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.

37:00And this month, we're making plum cheesecake karpatka. It is a spectacle of a giant Polish dessert and it is so fun. Head on over to ba.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us here on the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.

37:35The uncertainty to a large extent at this point is about the United States. You know, what you might call the home front aspect of all this, the Washington clock aspect of this revolution in war that we're seeing unfold in real time. The conflict with Iran is extremely unpopular with the American public. In fact, more unpopular, reminiscent almost of at the height of the Vietnam War in terms of how many Americans across the political spectrum don't support it. But also you have a leadership, civilian leadership of the Pentagon and of the country that sees the military itself as having been an obstacle.

38:13I think something like two dozen or more general officers have been fired over the last couple years since President Trump returned to office. There's a secretary who thinks woke garbage dominates. You know, you understand very well, not only from your own personal experience, what it takes to be a general officer. If we get one question on this podcast more frequently than any other, it is this fear about the politicization that possibly is taking place with the leadership of the nonpartisan American military. You know, what do you make of all these firings? And do you think that this tradition of leadership that sees itself as reporting to the Constitution and not to an individual, that that can survive this kind of challenge to it?

38:59General David Petraeus:I think it can. I think that the professional ethos of the U.S. military, particularly its senior commissioned officer leadership, is very, very solid. I think there is a general recognition that those in the senior ranks need to be nonpolitical. By the way, I actually stopped voting when I was promoted to two stars, and I never resumed. I've actually felt that even retired military should be not just bipartisan, but actually nonpartisan. Now, actually, I don't want to go that far for everyone, but, you know, I always ended up as a very, very high-profile guy. In fact, I was sometimes probably pejoratively described as a celebrity general, which carried with it a certain amount of baggage, including fear by some of our most senior elected officials that I would actually run for office against one of them.

39:53General David Petraeus:And it was good that I was able to say, I don't even have a party. I don't even vote. And I still, again, don't support candidates or anything. And by the way, I can uniquely engage with Republicans and Democrats openly on Capitol Hill. So I think there is a very solid recognition and appreciation that the senior military in particular, again, that's who matters in this kind of endeavor and throughout the ranks. that there is a commitment to a professional military in the ethos of, say, as Sam Huntington described military professionalism. That said, obviously, there's a very big effort to try to avoid being pulled into any kind of political issue.

40:42General David Petraeus:And there have been, indeed, early retirements, people pulled off promotion lists. By the way, the promotion list, this is a meritocratic process. This is not a process that says we want this many that look like this or look like that or believe this or what have you. And again, there should be explanations for this kind of activity requested by Congress. So when the secretary said, quote, for too long, we've promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts, you don't agree with that characterization? There was a policy of affirmative action years back.

41:27General David Petraeus:And I frankly, I agreed with that. You know, it starts with whether or not you think that if you have a diverse population in uniform, should you have a leadership of that that at least looks something like those in the ranks? You're not going to quite get to that in some cases for various reasons, perhaps. But I believed in the military and as the director of the CIA, number one, that our missions were actually facilitated by having a diverse population, especially at the agency. I mean, we needed people that spoke this dialect of Arabic or Farsi or what have you. So, and again, how do you get that?

42:06General David Petraeus:And then that you probably should have leadership that, again, looks reasonably like those who are in the ranks. And by the way, there's also value in that because you avoid the so-called groupthink of everybody having gone to the same schools and the same clubs and the almost intellectual inbreeding that can result if you don't, again, have folks from the island. It's publicly known that when I went back to command the surge in Iraq, I took people with me who were known as naysayers, who were known as, you know, H.R. McMaster, who's a national asset and hugely significant roles in a variety of capacities over the years, ultimately as the National Security Advisor, but was seen as someone by some in our ranks as never leaving something left unsaid.

42:54General David Petraeus:I want that kind of person. I want him not to leave it unsaid. But that had precluded him from being selected for one star up until that point in time. It is publicly known that, perhaps coincidentally, I was the president of the one star board, which did, in fact, pick him to be a one star. And he went on then and contributed very substantially. So there's a little bit of a philosophy here that should be underpinning this. It should be the intellectual foundation for your actions. And again, back when, to correct for historic issues in the past, there were policies. Those policies are long since gone.

43:35General David Petraeus:This is a bureaucratic process that lays out, we need so many officers with these skills, this background, this expertise, et cetera. And then the board, in a very, very clear way, is out to pick those. So if at the end of that process, names are removed, there should, I think, probably be, in the past, we've always known why that took place. Usually it's because some investigation turned up something that had not been available to the board and needed to be resolved before the name was sent to the White House and Congress for confirmation. Yeah, but when these generals are being fired because they're female or they're people of color, you know, there's not been an explanation for this and there's been...

44:21General David Petraeus:concern, without question. Sure. But again, at the end of the day, our senior military leadership, I think, is absolutely committed to the oath they take to the Constitution and recognize the importance of professionalism in all respects, including staying out of politics. Again, if someone after leaving the service wants to run for office, more power to that individual, but then recognize that you can't then have the reflected glory of those still in uniform, if you engage in that, you're going to get all the slings and arrows of partisan primaries, and good luck. Well, just one final question on this, because I think it's very top of mind, understandably, for many listeners.

45:13You know, one retired military officer who was very supportive of Donald Trump, Mike Flynn, said after the 2020 election that he thought Donald Trump should impose something which I think doesn't really exist called partial martial law and that he should impound voting machines and somehow prove that he won the election he lost. I only raise this because of a very striking comment by the president himself in an interview with the New York Times. He said that one of his great regrets was that he didn't take Flynn's advice and seize these voting machines in 2020. And as people look ahead, you know, there's no crystal ball here.

45:53I think the assurances of someone like you mean an awful lot to people who are wondering at a moment of disruption. But what happens if there is some kind of a challenge by the president of the United States to voting? If he uses the National Guard that he has stationed in Washington, D.C., and other cities, if he says that there is some need for military presence in our domestic politics, I know this would be a nightmare scenario for you or for anyone.

46:25General David Petraeus:No, Susan, I think the military will do the right thing. Look, I think there is a track record, a long track record. The president himself repeatedly acknowledges his negotiating style. He's constantly trying to shape opinion, debate, and influence it to a degree by what he says. It's not always serious. You know, he's the one that says that before you negotiate with someone, before you even sit down at the table, punch the other guy in the nose. And this is serious. And he does this. And again, to the extent that that is metaphorically possible in this. So, you know, this is where I come back to that.

47:01General David Petraeus:I'm sure you've heard this many times before as well, but the admonition to take President Trump seriously, but not literally in all respects. And that's where I think I would situate this particular discussion.

47:20Well, General Petraeus, this has really been such an incredible conversation. I feel like the Washington clock, the Tehran clock, the Moscow clock are fully represented in your thinking. Thank you again for taking the time.

47:34General David Petraeus:Pleasure.

47:39This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Susan Glasser. We had research assistance today from Alex Dillian. Our producer is Nora Ritchie. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer. And our theme music is by Alison Leighton-Brown. Thank you for listening.

48:08I'm Jessi Sepchak. And I'm Shilpa Oskokovic. And we're senior test kitchen editors at Bon Appetit and the hosts of the Bon Appetit Bake Club podcast. Bake Club is Bon Appetit's community of confident and curious bakers. We love to bake. Some might even call the two of us obsessive. And we love to talk about all the hows and whys and what didn't work that come with it. Every month, we publish a recipe on bonappetit.com that introduces a baking concept that we think you should know. Then you'll go bake, send us any questions you have. And we'll get together here on the podcast to talk about the recipe.

48:41And this month, we're making plum cheesecake karpatka. It is a spectacle of a giant Polish dessert, and it is so fun. Head on over to BA.com and come and bake along with us. Send us your questions, pictures, and any thoughts to bakeclub at bonappetit.com or find us on Substack. Join us here on the first Tuesday of every month as we debrief about our latest bake. Find BA Bake Club wherever you get your podcasts. Happy baking.