Retired 4-star General John Allen on Iran, AI hyperwar, and Taiwan’s future

**Auren Hoffman** (0:00)
Hello, fellow data nerds, welcome to Summation. My guest today is John Allen. John is a retired four-star Marine Corps general who commanded 150,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and built a 65-nation coalition as special envoy to the Global Coalition Against ISIS. After retiring, he led Brookings Institution as its president. He co-invented the term hyperwar, holds five AI patents, and co-authored Turning Point, the Policymaking in an Era of Artificial Intelligence. And he currently serves as a strategic advisor to Microsoft. John, welcome to Summation.

**John R. Allen** (0:36)
It is great to be with you, Auren.

**Auren Hoffman** (0:38)
Now, we're taping this conversation literally in the middle, as the US is in this operation in Iran. By the time this conversation comes out in a few weeks, probably a lot has changed. But walk us through what somebody who wasn't in leadership in the military wouldn't appreciate about the operation thus far.

**John R. Allen** (1:00)
Well, if I were someone who was watching this from the outside, I think my first question would be, why did we do this? And I would want to demand what the government's political objectives are with respect to this outcome. And we're not getting a clear explanation. We've already had six Americans killed in action. Six Americans have been killed in action. Last week, they were writing home to their parents. They might have been a father playing with their child in the yard. They're dead now. Now, tell me why that happened. Tell me why we had to go to war today to bomb the Iranians in conjunction with the Israelis, which has now initiated a regional conflagration. We have Americans by the hundreds, maybe the thousands, accumulating in very vulnerable areas around the region because we now told Americans to leave the Middle East. Imagine that. We've told Americans to leave the Middle East. So if I'm a spectator to all of this, perhaps a member of your audience who is not steeped in this environment, I'd want to know what the political objectives were of the United States that sent us to war. Now, we're obviously in decisive operations right now. I talked about that a little while ago. Nobody does this better than the United States. I keep hearing that we did this because it was clear that the Iranians were close to having a nuclear weapon. Wait a minute, last year we said we obliterated their nuclear program. So what happened in the meantime? Or that the Iranians were going to attack Americans across the region? Well, we've got pretty good force protection and the kinds of self-defense capabilities that have kept us at peace and generally provided good security for our troops. So why did we do this? And I'm not sure I know why we did this, but I'm watching these decisive operations going and we're expending a lot of ordinance.
We're dropping a lot of ordinance and we're expending a lot of interceptor ordinance to try to defend our allies. Our allies actually are doing pretty well themselves. And I say allies in the context of our partners in the Middle East. Many years ago, when I was the Deputy Commander of Central Command, one of our objectives was to create a region-wide network of command and control and equipping our partners in the region with the kinds of interceptors necessary to defend themselves. And I think they're doing pretty well at this point. What's changed since the time I was working this, which is a few years ago, is the emergence of hundreds and hundreds of drones in the hands, maybe thousands of drones, in the hands of the Iranians. And they're sending them all across the region. And in the absence of a clear capacity to counter drone warfare, we end up having to use highly sophisticated, very expensive interceptors to bring these down. Or we put fighters in the air, F-35s, F-16s in the air, to hunt down these air-breathing, slow-moving drones to shoot them down. So again, tell me why we did this. Tell me what our objectives are. Is it regime change? Well, you're not going to get regime change from the Iranians. You're going to kill a lot of people at the top. But the rot of that organization goes deep, deep, deep into the society. So what's going to happen is...

**Auren Hoffman** (4:10)
The most likely scenario is it's still run by some sort of IRGC system, right? It might look a little different or it might have a different name or something like that. But if you had the polymarket on it, it would probably be that's the most likely scenario a year from now or something, right?