This is the podcast of the Modern War Institute at West Point, an integrative look at war policy and leadership.

I'm Captain Jake Moraldi of the Modern War Institute.

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This week on the podcast, we're talking to Eric Schmidt, New York Times reporter and

author of CounterStrike.

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the War Council blog at Modern War Institute.org.

Eric Schmidt, welcome to the podcast.

We're talking about articles that you've written recently about Libya and Boko Haram.

In both of those cases, the U.S. response is sort of in the process of evolving. And both Libya and Boko Haram. In both of those cases, the U.S. response is sort of in the process of evolving.

And both Libya and Boko Haram as case studies seem to be evolving in similar ways, where we're

moving into a more aggressive stance as far as deploying special operations troops and supporting

local forces with air support, whether it's manned or unmanned, armed or unarmed.

Can you comment based on talking to the people you have in writing these articles about how that

evolution is going and why it's happening that way?

Sure, sure.

And I think it really dates back to the president's West Point speech where he talks about

this shift away from, you know, large land wars, places like Iraq and Afghanistan,

where he had well over 100,000 U.S. troops on the ground.

And how can we help protect American interests, guarantee our interests, without having to commit, you know,

large ground forces, A, that are now politically unpopular here at home, B, quite costly, and C,

...