“JSOC is an industrial level killing machine, but do you want to apply it to every problem? The answer, of course, is no. And people in JSOC know that as much as anybody else.”
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition · October 2026
Bergen was asked which counterterrorism reforms since 9/11 worked and should be kept. He put Joint Special Operations Command at the top of the list, then added this caution. Later in the same answer he criticised treating drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
Transcript
Yeah, yeah. I mean, a big story in Syria just recently is you're not going to use credit cards there, which I mean, it's something we take for granted, but it hadn't happened for a long time. So Syria is in the process of joining the kind of slightly somewhat functional Middle Eastern states, right? I mean, that's the hope.
Let me try to put a few silver linings into our conversation. Your book also discusses obviously individual successes like killing of terrorist leaders, including bin Laden, but also significant institutional reforms. And you mentioned the crystal earlier, the kind of, I'll say, how JSOC has really kind of blossomed as a counterterrorism machine over time. What would you look at and say this one worked really well and should be continued? This was keep this particular capability or approach.
JSOC worked well. Special Forces worked well. Advise and assist worked well. NSA, I talk in the book about Real Time Regional Gateway, which has recently declassified. A young lieutenant colonel named Jen Easterly was in Iraq sort of managing that. And the insurgents who were very reliant on cell phones, they had no idea that we understood the content of a million phone calls a day in Baghdad, in Iraq in 2005. And we understood who was calling who, 100 million of those calls every day in Iraq. They had no idea. When I read Stanley Crystal's book, My Share of the Task, it was like a revelation because basically all the stuff that JSOC was doing, JSOC itself was not a well-known entity, but suddenly we had this other history. And then NSA has declassified the real-time regional gateway, which is NSA's ability to listen to a lot of calls. And obviously that's gone on and there's problems with too much surveillance and that can be a double-edged sword. And JSOC is an industrial level killing machine, but do you want to apply it to every problem? The answer, of course, is no. And people in JSOC know that as much as anybody else. What else worked? TSA worked, I think. It's annoying to go through TSA checkpoints, but in terms of keeping us safe, it's mostly done that. DHS, I think, is sort of a mixed bag because it's sort of like behamless. I think the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the Office of Director of National Intelligence, has actually worked pretty well. The Office of Director of National Intelligence is kind of very personality dependent. As you know, those were two recommendations of the 9-11 Commission. They happened. Like anything that's new, like I remember when NCTC was set up, the National Counterterrorism Center, no one wanted to work there. It was like, if you were, it was like seen as the kind of not go for your career, but like, but now that that's not true at all. And I think they do a good job. So 30 terrorists, joint terrorism task forces on 9-11, more than 100 now. As long as they're directed at the right targets, I think these are all good reforms. If we suddenly start saying, well, drug cartels are essentially foreign terrorist organizations, DEA has that pretty covered. So does U.S. customs. I think we're wasting a lot of effort and we're kind of devaluing what it means to be a terrorist organization. There are terrorist organizations that engage in drug trafficking, the FARC in Colombia and the Taliban in post-9-11 Afghanistan, but they were designated anyway. So you don't need to designate these low-level, well, these drug cartels who are not, I mean, we're scholars of terrorism. By definition, a criminal group is not a terrorist organization. I mean, it'll be fascinating a few years from now, Dan, to see the underlying Office of Legal Counsel rationale for this particular new approach. I mean, I hate to be cynical about lawyers, but you can usually find a lawyer to kind of write the policy brief that you need to carry out an action that really, on the face of it, doesn't make a lot of sense.
I want to close by asking you a couple, I'll say, forward-leaning sort of questions. One is, of course, the war the United States is currently engaged in, which is Iran. And you discuss this a little bit in your book. This question of kind of what to do about Iran is a very difficult one. I shouldn't say in your book, in other writings you've done. You've talked about Iran, the Iran war. And this question of, are there lessons from the 25 years of the war against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State that we should be thinking of as we're in this kind of on-again, off-again conflict with Iran today?
I think there are that, Dan. I mean, what would you want at the beginning of a war? You'd want a congressional authorization in favor. You'd want public buy-in. You'd want NATO allies. You want maybe a UN resolution in favor. You'd want a plan for the day after, and you'd want a strategy. And other than sending large numbers of troops into Iran, and I just did an interview with General Votel, who commanded CENTCOM. It's a public interview. And I asked him, what would it take to take COG Island, which is something, you know, the island 12 miles off the coast of Iran? I mean, anybody who's interested can go and see that discussion. But, you know, it turns out it would take a lot. So we haven't made that mistake, but we've made every other mistake. And I, you know, well, if I was President Trump and I'm not, but I would just take the win and just sort of say, yeah, we did obliterate their program. Yeah, unfortunately, they're going to have a little more control of the straight of Hormuz than we would like, but not be, you know, now, you know, I said in an interview on CNN, I was with Om with Beth Sanner, I don't know, it would probably be like 12 weeks ago now. And I said, you know, the big card that the Iranians could play is if the Houthis get in the game, and, you know, they're not, it's not that Iran ordered the Houthis. Of course, they're aligned, but their strategic interests are even more aligned. And now we've got the straits, you know, leading into the Suez Canal essentially closed down. So 13% of global shipping goes through the Suez Canal, and 20% of global oil and gas go through the Strait of Hormuz. We have really snookered ourselves, and we don't really seem to have a really good plan to get out. And bombing the Houthis, which the Saudis did 20,000 airstrikes during the first anti-Houthi war that MBS, the Glibday Factor Peter of Saudi Arabia, ended realizing that there wasn't much, he wasn't really getting much from it. Well, now the Saudis are back at war with the Houthis. We're at war with Iran. I see that the Fed just raised interest rates for the first time in a while. Brent crude was at $108 a barrel just like a few days ago. I mean, this is going to be really messy. And if you are not an expert on any of this, but if you look at the private credit market, people are trying to get their money out, but they're not really succeeding because they're kind of caps on what you can take out. So there is the real possibility that all these things will be a disharmonic convergence that will be very damaging to the American economy and the global economy because the Trump administration seems paralyzed and doesn't seem to have a real plan to try and stop this. I mean, there's only two ways you can make peace with your enemies. You can either get them to surrender or you can make peace with them. And peace is a, you know, classically is a mutual recognition of a hurting salemate, which is where we are. And then it becomes, you know, what's the least bad deal we can make? And what's the least bad deal the Iranis feel they can make somewhere in there? But I have no faith that I every time I read about, I don't believe very much what the administration says about this anymore because they've said a bunch of different things. And it would be in their interest to wrap this as fast as possible. The Iranians would get some oil sanctions relief. You know, it would be painful, but we would have to, I think, allow them some greater control over the strait than they have now. You can make up some face-saving things where they get fees for environmental damage or whatever it is. So it's not a sort of fee for passage. There is a way out. I mean, look, Dan, you could construct a way out. You and many other people that you've worked with in the past. It will be less good than the 2015 deal we did with the Iranians. And the original sin in this case was Trump pulling out of a deal that was working in 2018. It was a completely unforced error, as the Iran war is, as an own goal and in soccer terms.
Last question for you. Let's imagine a bad future. There is another massive attack on the American homeland. It emanates from abroad. We could say Somalia or Mali, someplace where al-Qaeda-type groups are active that currently some have links to the Al-Corp de Corps or what remains of it. What would you be advising the president? And here, let's take aside this particular administration and just say, you know, in general, you're writing a memo and saying, here are some things that we're going to act because the political impetus is so overwhelming from the tragedy. But how should we act smarter than we did in hindsight the first time around?
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