"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 33

In this episode: How to Beat the Russian Army

December 4, 2023

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 33

Episode 33: How to Beat the Russian Army

Hollywood may have portrayed him as a nerd, but Mike Vickers was the superstar architect of America’s covert war in the 1980s that drove the Soviet army out of Afghanistan. And this alum of the Green Berets and the CIA has some ideas about how to do the same thing in Ukraine today.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War:

Gust Avrakotos: Here's a test. You see the nerdy looking kid in the white shirt playing against the four guys at once?

Charlie Wilson: Yeah.

Gust Avrakotos: Which one of the guys do you think is a strategic weapons expert with the CIA?

Charlie Wilson: Oh, huh…

There's this great scene in the movie, Charlie Wilson's War, where this CIA operative takes a U.S. Congressman to a park in D.C. and points out this really nerdy looking kid in a white shirt, who’s simultaneously playing four games of chess against four different guys.

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War: Gust Avrakotos: That was a trick question, Charlie. It's the nerdy looking kid in the white shirt. No reason this can't be fun, you know.

The movie tells the mostly true story of how Congressman Charlie Wilson of Texas and this CIA operative helped fund and run the biggest covert war in American history: arming resistance fighters to defeat the Russian army in Afghanistan in the 1980s. And the movie uses this moment for the audience to meet that nerdy looking kid in the white shirt, who turns out to be… the CIA's ace in the hole. A brainy weapons expert by the name of Mike Vickers. And by many accounts in real life Vickers was the strategic architect of the whole secret Afghan war.

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War:

Charlie Wilson: This is the CIA's weapons expert? He's the most senior?

Gust Avrakotos: Mike!

Mike Vickers: Bishop to Queen's Knight, seven.

Gust Avrakotos: See, he's playing without even looking at the board.

Charlie Wilson: That's a useful skill. If Afghanistan's ever invaded by Boris Spassky.

Peter Bergen: Is that a real scene from your life or is that a little bit of a poetic license?

Mike Vickers: That's more than a little bit of Hollywood poetic license by the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin. But, you know, they were trying to create a visual of what a program strategist, running a covert action program would, what attributes they would have.

The real Mike Vickers had a slight build and wore an owlish pair of thick-rimmed glasses — but he never played much chess. He was more of a football and baseball guy growing up. And in his professional life, he pulled off one of the more epic careers imaginable in U.S. special operations, intelligence, and national security. He served with the Green Berets. He was a wonder kid at the CIA. And he later ascended to the highest ranks of the Pentagon retiring as an Under Secretary of Defense. Needless to say, quite a bit of this stuff escaped Hollywood's notice.

Mike Vickers: We got to go to the premiere, which was nice. And the thing I remember most from that was, being encouraged at one point to walk down this red carpet, and we were right behind Amy Adams who played Charlie Wilson's chief of staff. And all the paparazzi was, you know, 'Amy, look this way’ and, ‘Look this way.' And then one of them said to me, 'Who are you?' So that probably was worse than being portrayed as a nerd. But, such is life.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

But, in broad strokes at least, the film does lay out the story of the achievement that first put Vickers on the map: figuring out how to drive the Russian army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s — without deploying a single U.S. soldier into the field. Vickers did it by placing a massively funded, precisely calculated mix of weapons into the hands of some pretty motivated people fighting the invading army.

And we’re living through another moment now when America is again pouring weapons into the hands of people engaged in a deathmatch with Russia.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Russia invades Ukraine. President Putin delivering a warning. The U.S. quickly condemning the attacks.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Ukrainian President Zelensky calling on citizens to fight back, to defend our state with weapons in their hands.

Ukraine may have been bumped off the front pages — for now — by the war between Israel and Hamas. But President Biden has shown no signs of backing away from the United States’ commitment to Ukraine, insisting it’s in the country’s vital national interest … and calling for more than $61 billion in new aid for Ukraine — on top of the tens of billions of dollars already spent. And as that war drags on, a man with Vickers’ special expertise has much to teach us.

Mike Vickers: We're giving the Ukrainians essentially an impossible mission. We would not fight against this entrenched Russian enemy the way we're asking the Ukrainians to fight.

[THEME MUSIC BEGINS]

Join me in the room with someone whose detailed knowledge of arming a resistance runs from aerial strategy all the way down to the particular rifles and even bullets that grunts need to win on the ground.

Mike Vickers: People focus on weapons, but ammunition ends up determining how intense you fight.

You'll hear about unintended consequences that can come when the United States uses its guns and money to change the world. And how winning the war can sometimes be a lot easier than winning the peace.

Mike Vickers: If you say, 'Well, not only do I not want to continue to support Ukraine, but I really don't want to rebuild them. I don't want to give them the deterrent force to prevent Russia part II,” then you're really heading for trouble down the road.

I'm Peter Bergen and this is… In The Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

Peter Bergen: You were cited for valor in the Grenada invasion. You helped push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. You targeted al-Qaeda. You helped take down bin Laden. President Obama once said you spent a 40 year career always managing to be, quote, "precisely where our nation needed you most." That sounds like maybe half a dozen careers. Too many for one guy, at least. I mean, you're like the Zelig of American national security is my, is my…

Mike Vickers: My friend General Stan McChrystal has called me Forrest Gump. So I think, I don't know if I like Zelig better or Forrest Gump, but, uh...

Peter Bergen: And the book, which was written by George Crile, Charlie Wilson's War, at one point says you're a military and tactical genius with an IQ of 160. Do you have an IQ of 160?

Mike Vickers: Well, I had an army test that said so. I don't know that I do, but at least one army test said so. [BOTH LAUGH]

Peter Bergen: Well, good enough. But let's begin at the beginning. You started as a Green Beret. Tell us about that.

Mike Vickers: Well, my original dream was to be a baseball or football player, and I realized at age 19 that I had the passion but not the talent for that. And as it turned out, a high school teacher for a international relations seminar I took my last year in high school put a copy of The New York Times in front of me when we were sitting in the library researching term papers one day. And it was an article about CIA's big paramilitary operation during the Vietnam War in Laos supporting the Hmong tribesmen. And he said, you might be interested in this. And I didn't know why he said that, but it turns out I was. I thought about secret armies, and so when I was ready to make the move, I thought, how would I pursue this kind of career? And it seemed to me, to become a, the kind of CIA officer I thought I wanted to be, going into the Green Berets first would be a natural fit.

Peter Bergen: And what do the Green Berets do?

Mike Vickers: Green Berets. They're Special Forces. Uh, primary mission is unconventional warfare, part of which is guerrilla warfare, supporting resistance movements or insurgencies against either an occupying force or, a hostile government.

Peter Bergen: I think after 9/11, I think a lot of people thought that Special Forces were sort of door kickers. That actually is really not the original role of Special Forces. It was to do what?

Mike Vickers: So they were founded in 1952, and it was really to wage guerrilla warfare in Eastern Europe. And so it was really that European, Soviet focus, unconventional warfare focus, which I spent more than five years doing, that really prepared me for what I would do in CIA. You know, extensive training in unconventional warfare, how to wage guerrilla warfare, all the tactics involved, raids, ambushes, harassing attacks, sabotage, subversion, et cetera. And then, mines and booby traps and sniping and other things. And,

Peter Bergen: Was that fun?

Mike Vickers: Yes. And then proficiency in all kinds of foreign weapons, from surface to air missiles down to Soviet AK assault rifles, demolitions and sabotage training. I went to an advanced mountain warfare course with the German army learning how to conduct war in the mountains — Alps in that case, but a reasonable substitute for the Hindu Kush. And then I had separate training in things like, backpack nuclear weapons, atomic...

Peter Bergen: Tell us about that, because that sounds pretty, uh, unusual.

Mike Vickers: So that didn't come in handy in Afghanistan, and hopefully never would have had to do it, but, a few of us in the Special Forces in the 1970s and ‘80s, and the SEALs, were trained on very small, low yield nuclear weapons that we could parachute in with. And so the idea was to cut off the reinforcing forces in the event of a conflict, to blow a key bridge or tunnel or something that would give our front line forces more favorable odds. And gallows humor in the Special Forces at the time thought that, you know, as soon as we accomplish that part of the mission and turn that dial, that would have been it. [VICKERS LAUGHS]

Peter Bergen: [PETER LAUGHS] So that was a “no return” mission, if indeed that had ever…

Mike Vickers: It would have been a dangerous mission, but any mission going into Eastern Europe, to do reconnaissance or work with resistance forces would have been pretty tough.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

After serving as a Green Beret for a decade, Vickers joined the CIA at age 30 and landed in the South Asia Operations Group. His initial job there was to review the work of a task force that was arming Afghans fighting against the Red Army. They'd been putting up a fierce but seemingly doomed resistance since the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Vickers spent weeks going over every aspect of the Afghan program. The first problem he identified was high-altitude and strategic.

When he arrived, the CIA’s strategy was to keep the Russian Army bogged down and bleeding and sending a lot of body bags back to Russia. Vickers believed the U.S. could do better, and actually drive the Russian Army out of Afghanistan. He was fortunate that right around this time, President Ronald Reagan's administration had also come to the same view.

Mike Vickers: The Reagan White House, National Security Council changed our goal from imposing costs on the Soviets to driving them out, eventually out of Afghanistan. And so that gave the big hunting license to really change the program.

And that meant Vickers could tackle the second problem with the Afghan war. The CIA wasn't giving the Afghans the right weapons, or enough of them, to get the job done. In the movie, the nerdy looking kid in the white shirt puts it like this:

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War: Charlie Wilson:What else do they need?

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War: Mike Vickers:Same thing you give us. AK-47s, AK-74s, AKMS. Soviets didn't come into Afghanistan on a Eurorail pass. They came in T-55 tanks. The fighters need RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launchers, Katyusha 107mm rockets, wire mines, plastic mines, bicycle bombs, sniper rifles, ammunition for all the above, [fading down and under following lines]

That sounds like a lot of nerdy detail but, if anything the movie script kind of understates the vast scale and microscopic precision of the blueprint that the real Mike Vickers drew up for the war.

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War: Charlie Wilson: Send a copy of it to me by secure courier right away.

In Vickers’ recently published memoir, By All Means Available, there are long sections about the 1980s Afghan war where it sounds like Vickers is laying out a precise recipe for anyone who might need to do EXACTLY the same thing again…

Peter Bergen: You do a lot of math about the amount of ammunition, the precise guns that are gonna be needed, to defeat the Soviets.

Mike Vickers: Yeah, and I did it with a little hand calculator. We didn't even have computers. We were just getting word processors in those days, but literally with a yellow legal pad and a hand calculator.

Peter Bergen: I mean, in a sense, you were the quartermaster, also of this war, right?

Mike Vickers: That's right.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Besides just needing better guns and more ammunition, another huge problem the Afghan fighters faced was the fact that deadly, armored Soviet helicopters owned the skies above the battlefield.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF A HIND HELICOPTER]

Mike Vickers: The particularly most dangerous weapon was a thing called the Mi-24 ‘Hind’ attack helicopter, which the Afghan resistance called Shaitan Arba or Satan's Chariot because very powerful weapon that could attack insurgent columns.

That didn't really change until late in the war when the U.S. gave the Afghans a shoulder fired, surface-to-air missile called the Stinger.

Mike Vickers: So I set out with a number of objectives to shift the air balance mainly by lots of surface to air missiles, but other heavier anti-air machine guns as well, to improve the insurgents' ability to really take the fight to the Soviet armored columns through more combined arms warfare, and a mix of heavier weapons, mortars, anti tank weapons, etc. And then to be able to harass Soviet garrisons with long range rockets or sniper weapons or others.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF VARIOUS WEAPONS VICKERS MENTIONS BEING USED IN COMBAT IN THE SOVIET-AFGHAN WAR]

Mike Vickers: And then finally to be able to take the fight into Soviet bases or cities through demolitions and sabotage. We tried to increase all those and did it by a factor of 12 within, within 12 months.

[MUSIC FADES]

Peter Bergen: But the real game changer was the U.S. Stinger missile.

Mike Vickers: Well, It was a game changer in terms of its performance on the battlefield. It was introduced in September 1986, and it had an 80 percent kill rate and accounted for almost 150 shootdowns.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: The American-made Stinger anti-aircraft missile is credited with turning the tide of battle. Armed with the Stinger, the Mujahideen neutralized Soviet air power.

Mike Vickers: So it was phenomenally successful. Strategically, its effect was more to convince... The Soviets had already made the decision that they were going to withdraw.

Peter Bergen: Did you know that at the time?

Mike Vickers: We had inklings of it because, Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Soviet Union, he started saying publicly, that Afghanistan was this bleeding wound…

ARCHIVAL Mikhail Gorbachev: … кровоточащую рану Афганистан…

Mike Vickers: …and they needed to extricate themselves. And so, basically he started withdrawing forces in the summer of ‘86 and then Stinger and other weapons convinced them that they needed to do it and they continued.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 1: It was the beginning of the end of the war the Soviet Union did not win.

Mike Vickers: The last forces they had withdrew February ‘89.

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster 2: Almost a decade of Soviet bloodshed and battle ended five minutes ahead of schedule as the Soviet army completed its retreat.

[MUSIC PICKS UP]

Not long after the Russian withdrawal, the United States abandoned Afghanistan to its own fate. A fate that included civil war, and a takeover by religious extremists.

The Charlie Wilson's War movie was based on a well-received non-fiction book by the same title by the journalist George Crile. Crile argued that the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan's war against Russia had nurtured a generation of well-armed mujahideen — holy warriors — who ended up later pursuing a jihad that was far less friendly to U.S. interests. Here's a talk show host interviewing Crile about it back in 2003:

ARCHIVAL Talk Show Host: In arming the Afghans and their mujahideen colleagues, it led to the conflict in Afghanistan that led to the Taliban that led to providing a haven for Osama bin Laden.

ARCHIVAL George Crile: It did. And, uh, after 9/11, you would think that it would be relevant to know that your government had very recently armed and supported and trained 150,000, uh, holy warriors.

Peter Bergen: Is there any connection between the U.S. arming and training of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the events of 9/11?

Mike Vickers: Only a very loose connection, a psychological connection, in the sense that the Afghan Arabs, those who went to the border region to help out with the resistance, they got a big psychological victory from the defeat of the Soviets and then set their sights on defeating the sole remaining superpower, you know, and al-Qaeda was formed in 1988 at the very end of the war but… there's too much history in between 1989 and, September 11th, 2001 to draw a straight line.

Vickers does believe that one of America's biggest errors at the end of the Soviet-Afghan war was thinking Afghanistan and the region had lost its strategic significance. The movie version of Charlie Wilson’s War put it like this:

ARCHIVAL Charlie Wilson’s War: Charlie Wilson: This, this is what we always do. We always go in with our ideals and we change the world. And then we leave. We always leave. But that ball, though, it keeps on bouncing.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

So now it's three decades later. And once again, Russia has invaded a neighboring country.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: An unprovoked Russian invasion into Ukraine on a massive scale.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: The bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War Two.

And America's watching another nation trying to hold off an invading Russian Army.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Russian forces began hitting targets across Ukraine overnight.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: [SOUND OF EXPLOSION] A missile striking an industrial park in western Ukraine. [SOUND OF EXPLOSION] A helicopter assault on an airport outside of Kyiv. Close, intense fighting…

Peter Bergen: What would you be recommending today if the Biden administration or any other American administration was serious about basically ending the war in a way that the Russians would say, okay, we'll come to the negotiating table and we will concede enough so the Ukrainians will also be happy about the outcome of the war.

Mike Vickers: Yeah, so there's similarities to Afghanistan in the ‘80s, but also important differences. You know, So there, you had an insurgency fighting an army spread out across Afghanistan. You know, the difference with Ukraine is obviously it's an overt, conventional war. And the battle space is more confined to established lines in the east. And we would not fight against this entrenched Russian enemy the way we're asking the Ukrainians to fight. Unless we think the Russians are just a house of cards that are going to collapse, um, we're giving the Ukrainians essentially an impossible mission to do it without longer range missile artillery, more ammunition, and most importantly, air superiority. You know, America hasn't fought without air superiority since, uh, early World War II. So things like the F-16s, and in sufficient quantities, but also, things like Army Tactical Missile System are all — no one weapon system would be decisive to win the war — but it's hard to see how you could do a counteroffensive to break those, uh, Russian lines without, greater quantities and quality of weapons.

Peter Bergen: Well, you said something fascinating, which is if this was the U.S. Army, and they were fighting this war in Ukraine against the Russians, there's no way that they would be conducting the war in the way that we are allowing the Ukrainians to conduct it.

Mike Vickers: That's right.

Peter Bergen: Because it would be a guarantee for failure or a guarantee for stalemate or what?

Mike Vickers: Yeah, it'd be a guarantee for stalemate or failure. That you wouldn't be able to penetrate those lines without, essentially winning the battle of the air and winning the deep battle to stop reinforcements.

And it seems the Biden administration made a similar assessment about Ukraine's need for additional long range missiles. Not long after I spoke with Vickers, this happened:

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: We have some breaking news now out of Ukraine, where U.S.-supplied long range missiles have been used against Russian forces for the first time. Ukraine had long asked for the weapons and President Biden gave the green light last month.

Vickers says the commitment required of the United States in Ukraine is broader and deeper than any single weapon on a wishlist. Just as the Stinger missile alone wasn't enough to win the Afghan war, no single weapon system will guarantee victory in Ukraine.

Mike Vickers: Right now the Ukrainians just don't have enough of stuff. That was a problem the Afghan resistance faced whether it's ammunition or guns to achieve superiority. They don't have certain capabilities like air superiority or deep strike weapons, but they're not magic bullets. It really is the mix and how you employ them and whether you have gaps in your mix that matter. So it's not that something is a silver bullet, it's that it's a necessary bullet at some point. It's not going to win the war for you if you don't have the other parts.

And the bit about ammunition is worth emphasizing. Whether you're talking about a plane, a missile launcher, or a gun in the hands of some guy on the ground… none of these weapons are worth anything unless you've got stuff to shoot out of them.

Mike Vickers: Yeah, your big problem in sustaining a war, quickly, people focus on weapons, but once you have enough weapons, it's ammunition that determines how intense you fight.

Peter Bergen: We have this election coming up, there are a bunch of people running, who, on the Republican side, and even on the Democrat side, who want a different Ukraine policy, and surely Putin's aware of all that. So, do you think that what the United States has done so far in Ukraine is enough to get a sort of favorable outcome for the Ukrainians? I think the answer is, you're saying no. And do you think that the situation could get worse as the politics in America change because neo-isolationism is popular on the left and the right in this country now.

Mike Vickers: So, it could get much worse. You know, it depends what you mean by a favorable outcome. If the objective is for Ukraine to regain most or all of its territory, it's not feasible with what we've given them right now. We would need to give them more of what we just talked about: aircraft and long range artillery — and more artillery in general — and more time to build up the sufficient mass. And so next year, a counter offensive might succeed if we did those things. But, those things take time and we've already lost a year. So, you know, the clocks are ticking and in conflicts, there's always different clocks.

Mike Vickers: There's a Moscow clock that's looking at the U.S. elections. There's a Ukrainian clock about the sacrifices people are willing to bear, and there's political clocks in the U.S. and Western capitals. And if then your objective were to have Ukraine successfully defend itself, but if you concluded for whatever reason you couldn't do this counter offensive, and I don't know why that would be, but, lack of political willingness obviously, then the question is are you going to help Ukraine secure itself and rebuild itself in whatever armistice or whatever comes out of this?

The endgame that Vickers has in mind for Ukraine looks a lot like what happened at the end of the Korean War. The armistice agreement signed between North Korea and South Korea in 1953 allowed for hostilities to cool off but it didn't formally end the war. Technically the war is still ongoing, and there are more than 25,000 U.S. troops still stationed on the Korean Peninsula to make sure things don't heat up again.

Mike Vickers: That, to me, is the most likely political outcome, of, just a cessation of hostilities rather than some peace negotiations.

Peter Bergen: A cold, a cold peace.

Mike Vickers: A cold peace. There, if Ukraine is going to have a deterrent force, it's going to need a lot of the same stuff, plus security guarantees. So then if you back up and you say, ‘Well, not only do I not want to continue to support Ukraine, but I really don't want to rebuild them. I don't want to give them the deterrent force to prevent Russia Part II,’ then you're really heading for trouble down the road.

And as Vickers sees it, the trouble down the road won't necessarily confine itself to the situation in Ukraine. Other rivals of the West are watching the war on the edge of Europe with an eye toward their own regional ambitions.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: What do you think the lessons the Chinese are deriving from the Ukraine conflict?

Mike Vickers: I think mixed lessons. One of them, I think, is the operational failure of the Russian Army to take Kyiv. And so I think as they look at Taiwan, they're looking at what would it take to assuredly take Taipei. What amount of force, and then more force to make sure that they achieve that political objective.

Peter Bergen:As a strategist, I mean, amphibious landings over a hundred miles of water, it's not an easy thing to do…

Mike Vickers: It's not an easy thing to do even if the U.S. doesn't oppose it, ‘cause Taiwan can oppose it enough. But right, it's one of the most difficult military operations. And now there's other ways through bombardment or blockade or other things, they might prevail. Taiwan is an island nation. But I think on the flip side, Xi has to be worried about whether he's getting the straight skinny from his military leaders, and if Putin was misled, and I don't know if he was or wasn't, but does he worry that he's being misled about their capabilities? Because time is generally on China's side, and one of the things they don't want is to have a failed war. They've got to be successful, if they do it, politically. And so I think that gives him a note of caution.

Peter Bergen: But if I'm a Chinese strategist, sort of Chinese version of Mike Vickers, one of the lessons of the Ukraine war to me would be, okay, it took the United States and its allies months to even remotely begin to get their act together. If we do a successful invasion of Taiwan that we can get done in, say, a week or two, we get inside their decision cycle because there's democracies, there's going to be disagreement, and then there's basically a fait accompli. Is that one of the lessons that you would derive if you were a Chinese strategist?

Mike Vickers: Yes, the Chinese even before Ukraine, well before Ukraine, have always thought the key is to win quickly before the U.S. can bring combat power to bear. But Xi has to have taken note. Putin certainly took note of it at the time. And I think Xi does too, to reinforce your point about, a difference between Taiwan and Ukraine is that American intervention would be more important to the outcome in Taiwan than it would be necessarily to a successful outcome in Ukraine, where we could win indirectly. And therefore, the prospect of American casualties or winning before they can do something has to be part of the strategic calculus.

Peter Bergen: Another part of the strategic calculus is the so-called porcupine strategy in Taiwan. What is the porcupine strategy?

Mike Vickers: So porcupine strategy, it's basically hardening up an ally, not to have them have offensive combat power, but to make them very tough to conquer, you know, like a porcupine, you know, hard to attack and digest because of its defenses. And porcupine strategies are most applicable to very vulnerable, small, frontline states. So think the Baltic states, again, where they could be overrun. And so you want to make that as hard as possible by having forward things in those states as members of NATO or Taiwan or others like that.

Peter Bergen: So for, as a practical matter, the Biden administration is now arming the Taiwanese, which is, that seems like a new development in American foreign policy, right? So what are the kinds of weapon systems that, that would actually work as a porcupine strategy?

Mike Vickers: So mixture of things, you want continuity of government, communications and the plans for that, and then you want to engender a whole-of-nation national resistance and the capabilities that would go with that. So even if you take the city, you haven't taken the island. But if there is to be an amphibious invasion, the capabilities that can hit those ships, longer range precision missiles, unmanned aircraft for surveillance, things that can make that amphibious landing very costly, would all be part of that.

One of my big takeaways from Vickers is that he seems to embrace a policy of vigilant, intelligent, highly-focused aggression. Listening to his reflections on these conflicts where the United States has to ponder the risk of its involvement… I realize Vickers doesn't just see these situations as risks. They're also opportunities.

In the Afghan Soviet war, a dangerous U.S. rival had overextended itself and was therefore vulnerable. Vickers saw that as a great time to strike. And certainly it’s not a coincidence that the same year that the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall fell. Because the message that Eastern Europeans derived from the pullout of Afghanistan was — if the Russians can’t defeat a lightly-armed guerilla force on their own border, what does that mean for our freedom? And within two years, the Soviet Union itself imploded.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

But whether you're talking about Afghanistan in the ‘80s or Ukraine now, or maybe Taiwan in the future, Vickers believes that there are also plenty of risks that come from doing nothing.

Mike Vickers: You make errors in strategy not surprisingly, by overextending yourself, wasting a lot of resources on something peripheral and depleting your political capital and other things, but also in terms of, underreach.

Peter Bergen: Not making a decision is a form of making a decision.

Mike Vickers: Yeah, sure, sure.

Peter Bergen: I'm paraphrasing you, but you said, better punch than wait.

Mike Vickers: So even if you're risk averse, you're not eliminating it, you're just shifting it somewhere else to some other problem. One of the things you learn about risk is what you really do is move it around.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the issues and stories in this episode, I recommend, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy, by Mike Vickers. It’s available on Audible.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Erik German, with help from Luke Cregan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes, Alexandra Salomon, Laura Tillman, Holly DeMuth, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson.

Theme music is by Joel Pickard

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.