EP 197: When War Doesn’t Look Like War — Dr John Pennell, Former Senior US Diplomat, Explains Grey Zone Warfare

Of all the things that you've done in your career in the Foreign Service, what is the one thing that you look back on and you say, actually, that was a key defining moment for me and why?

That's a great question.

I certainly think that 18 months I had in Iraq were probably the most intense 18 months of my life.

And that's saying a lot.

Maybe it's not going to be surprising to any listeners, given that I also spent time in Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine and other places.

But it was such a difficult situation security-wise, but also Not mentally, because it really required you on a 24-7 basis to be mentally prepared for anything and everything.

Not just because of the security environment, but because of demands from our administration back in Washington, D.C. for information, for achieving certain results, impacts that were set out for us.

And it made it extremely demanding and exhausting, not surprisingly.

But I think that helped me later on in my career to learn how to be more resilient, to learn how to not overdo it, when to take a break, when I need to get more rest, when I need to exercise, when I need to eat better, and these types of things, which later on in my career, I think was really, really helpful.

And I learned a lot from that.

I think they'll stay with me, you know, for the rest of my life.

It sounds like resilience... has been a key theme throughout your personal journey.

And even now, I know that resilience is something that I pride myself on having quite a high resiliency score.

But even lately, I've been a bit like, why does that have to change? Why do I have to change that? Oh, why do I have to change stuff all the time? And then I realized that I have obviously layers of resiliency or tolerance.

But if all the things that you've done talk to me tell me a story about why it was the resilience that you have that carried you through

certainly so uh in afghanistan where i served from 2009 to 10 i think in my view that's probably the one year in my career where i demonstrated the most resilience um obviously related to my attempts at being resilient when i was in iraq but um The difficulties and the challenges I faced in Afghanistan were, of course, it was a difficult security environment, but at that time, Kabul, our embassy, that environment was relatively safer than it had been later on during the war in Afghanistan.

But the difficulties were more on the demand from Washington and the fact that Prior to the election of President Obama, Iraq had been the focus, obviously, on the first George W. Bush or the first two terms of his administration.

And then things shifted under the Obama administration, mostly from prioritizing Iraq to Afghanistan.

And then within that, a strategy unfolded.

on counterinsurgency.

And then within that, civilians like myself and many others across the US government who were working in Afghanistan had a very, very central role.

Not that we didn't before, obviously, NATO, US and all particularly countries who are NATO partners and even non-NATO partners who were fighting in Afghanistan, played a critical role.

But civilians had to take on more of the load, if you will, in terms of thinking about counterinsurgency, what we could do with soft power, what we could do to support Afghan farmers, to potentially focus on alternatives, agricultural production beyond opium and poppy, which was the main source of income for the Taliban and their activities.

What I learned in that environment was how to operate effectively where the national focus of the country is solely on this one country, more or less.

And then within that, what civilians were doing.