1
00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:04,500
Having been in the business today is obviously David Scott.

2
00:00:04,500 --> 00:00:09,450
Right, talking for us on technology advice about a smartphone if you don't have him.

3
00:00:10,620 --> 00:00:17,400
David is professor of International Security and the director of the Centre for War and Technology at the University of Oxford.

4
00:00:18,060 --> 00:00:23,640
It's great to know, David, that actually war is still in the title of some centres of research in this country.

5
00:00:24,840 --> 00:00:28,380
He's also a conflict theme centre for the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security.

6
00:00:29,160 --> 00:00:32,100
For anybody else who knows his research council and the DNC,

7
00:00:32,670 --> 00:00:42,030
he's working on as I think a research fellowship funded by agency, and also on how technology is shaping emergent warfare,

8
00:00:42,600 --> 00:00:50,700
relying on a variety of approaches, multidisciplinary, the same way we do here, science and technology studies, philosophy and war studies.

9
00:00:51,690 --> 00:00:54,870
He's just been just finishing some of the projects.

10
00:00:55,080 --> 00:01:01,650
There's one film about technological innovation in all forms of transformation Innovation First,

11
00:01:02,070 --> 00:01:07,920
and he's the former editor in chief for defence studies and European security and is an

12
00:01:07,920 --> 00:01:12,600
expert on perhaps say is the right environment for defence studies published this year.

13
00:01:12,690 --> 00:01:20,700
Julian Probably about five months ago, but I was also looking at the ranch defence space which will have Davis name on the front.

14
00:01:20,760 --> 00:01:24,180
David, thank you very much indeed. Function as well as both on the subject. Right.

15
00:01:24,240 --> 00:01:29,180
Thank you very much. I thank you very much for coming today.

16
00:01:29,190 --> 00:01:32,810
It's it's a full house. And as I said, my name is David.

17
00:01:32,820 --> 00:01:37,620
And what I'm going to talk to you today is about what I referred to as boundless warfare.

18
00:01:37,980 --> 00:01:43,920
And I think boundless warfare is going to be contentious. And I think the way that I'm going to talk about technology is going to be contentious.

19
00:01:43,920 --> 00:01:51,059
But but more than anything else, I think what I'm trying to do is to be you know, I'm trying to set out an idea, set our hypothesis.

20
00:01:51,060 --> 00:01:55,530
I'm not trying to necessarily talk about policy in this case,

21
00:01:55,530 --> 00:01:59,189
although it does have policy implications if you were to follow the argument all the way out.

22
00:01:59,190 --> 00:02:06,540
And so and I know in my experience, I know that some people have a very strong reaction to technological determinism.

23
00:02:07,230 --> 00:02:14,190
And and so if you do have a strong reaction to technological determinism, be prepared and so on, because it's coming.

24
00:02:14,310 --> 00:02:23,340
But the but but by and large, I want to start with with with three questions and the two questions I'm going to come to at the very end,

25
00:02:23,340 --> 00:02:26,160
but I want to put them out there early.

26
00:02:27,330 --> 00:02:38,400
And the one is, if we think about the impact that technology and I mean modern and emergent technology and some of those are actually quite old.

27
00:02:38,640 --> 00:02:44,219
But but but the way that we think about everything from UAV is to networked.

28
00:02:44,220 --> 00:02:53,340
And they enabled us to looking at interventions in physiological spaces and neurological spaces and things like this.

29
00:02:53,340 --> 00:02:58,379
If we think about all those things and what does it mean for other things?

30
00:02:58,380 --> 00:03:02,280
And so and one of the things so I ask the question, what does it mean for the state?

31
00:03:02,670 --> 00:03:04,590
So I talk about boundless warfare here.

32
00:03:04,950 --> 00:03:11,790
The state is very much a bounded entity, but both in terms it's got boundaries, but also it's bounded in lots of other ways.

33
00:03:12,150 --> 00:03:17,820
And we talk about who is we and who, who are they and things like this, who are we rather and who are they?

34
00:03:19,470 --> 00:03:28,560
The the second is so what role does a state have in terms of the way that future that future of war may happen, the way that it may happen?

35
00:03:28,980 --> 00:03:38,790
The second is, what role does or what is the changing relationship between the way that we talk about power and what we mean by security?

36
00:03:38,880 --> 00:03:42,060
How is that changing in the way that we think about security?

37
00:03:42,060 --> 00:03:47,850
I mean, we come to traditional security, strategic security, everything to human security and so on.

38
00:03:47,850 --> 00:03:53,490
And all of these are are what sociologists or some sociologists would refer to as governance mentalities.

39
00:03:53,910 --> 00:03:57,810
They tell us what's important and in some ways what we should do about it.

40
00:03:58,080 --> 00:04:04,020
And those change over time in a way. And so and I'm particularly interested in the way that they may to may change over time.

41
00:04:04,020 --> 00:04:10,310
And I'm particularly interested in arms control as a as a function of the relationship between power and security.

42
00:04:10,770 --> 00:04:20,430
So in the way that we talk about future the future arms control, or as I've argued in the past, at the end of arms control,

43
00:04:21,570 --> 00:04:26,820
the third and final is how does it shape the or how this war one technology or boundless warfare,

44
00:04:26,820 --> 00:04:29,790
how does it shape the relationship between security and defence?

45
00:04:30,360 --> 00:04:39,389
Because one of the things that's really quite striking to those so many of you here will have had witnessed this in one way or another.

46
00:04:39,390 --> 00:04:45,930
Is is that what we mean by what we mean by national defence, what we mean by what the military does,

47
00:04:45,930 --> 00:04:50,999
what we mean by what the Home Office does when it comes to counter-terrorism,

48
00:04:51,000 --> 00:04:59,970
when it comes to cyber, when it comes to public health, public safety, all these issues in a sense have some kind of security element.

49
00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:04,230
To them and, and, and increasingly they have a defence element to them in some way or another.

50
00:05:04,470 --> 00:05:14,160
Maybe that's to defend our infrastructures against, you know, chemical attacks or war or a cyber attacks or something like this.

51
00:05:14,490 --> 00:05:22,469
Or maybe it has something to do with with just the way that we think about what is the boundary of something like the

52
00:05:22,470 --> 00:05:30,810
Ministry of Defence and what is the boundary of something like the the something like the Home Office and things like that.

53
00:05:30,810 --> 00:05:34,710
And, and how does something like the Cabinet Office try to manage that boundary?

54
00:05:35,340 --> 00:05:38,370
And that's very specific, you know, in a way.

55
00:05:38,370 --> 00:05:40,649
But you can imagine that that's happening in many places,

56
00:05:40,650 --> 00:05:48,760
that the boundary between what we mean by security and what we mean by defence are in a sense kind of blurring in a way.

57
00:05:48,780 --> 00:05:54,360
And so and I'm going to talk about all three of these questions and and the way that I talk about this.

58
00:05:54,570 --> 00:06:01,680
Now, the one thing that I would say is that I'm going to some people have a strong reaction to this, too, but hopefully you'll stay with me.

59
00:06:01,950 --> 00:06:05,339
I'm going to read some and I'm going to talk some and I'm going to read some of them and talk some.

60
00:06:05,340 --> 00:06:08,549
And I'm going to do things like I'm going to do things like this as an American.

61
00:06:08,550 --> 00:06:14,640
It helps me to have a more sophisticated thing that I can read, because obviously my words are simple, right?

62
00:06:14,640 --> 00:06:18,150
So, you know, okay, the yeah.

63
00:06:18,540 --> 00:06:28,949
Okay. So I'm going to I'm going to to start and I'd be happy to in a sense, kind of engage with questions as we go along in some way.

64
00:06:28,950 --> 00:06:33,689
But I realise that that may throw some people off in terms of the way that I've tried to tie things together.

65
00:06:33,690 --> 00:06:40,950
So if you do have any questions in terms of what, what do you mean by that or could you say that again or something like that?

66
00:06:40,950 --> 00:06:44,100
Please do ask.

67
00:06:44,880 --> 00:06:47,880
But otherwise, if you could hold your questions to the end soon.

68
00:06:49,470 --> 00:06:54,570
So war. What is it good for war.

69
00:06:54,810 --> 00:06:58,799
And it's it's it's in our news. It's in our conversations.

70
00:06:58,800 --> 00:07:04,260
It's in our politics. It's in our gut reactions. It's in our film, television literature.

71
00:07:04,500 --> 00:07:12,570
It's in our language. You know, that war kind of proliferates through our entire and our entire essence, really, in some way or another.

72
00:07:13,290 --> 00:07:16,200
War is all around us. We can understand war is pejorative.

73
00:07:16,500 --> 00:07:24,360
And the way that we look at war saying in Syria as a stain on humanity, as an evil, as an ultimate sign of human chaos,

74
00:07:25,080 --> 00:07:29,459
we can also understand war as a human, as human expression, togetherness,

75
00:07:29,460 --> 00:07:33,570
order, exacting, you know something that would you accept some kind of order?

76
00:07:34,560 --> 00:07:39,330
War is a feature of our historical contemporary and will be our future societies.

77
00:07:40,140 --> 00:07:45,930
And in many ways it comes straight to the to the heart in terms of what we think of ourselves,

78
00:07:45,930 --> 00:07:51,569
in a way, comes straight to the heart, straight to our minds and what we think of as being important.

79
00:07:51,570 --> 00:07:58,140
And that's what Chris Hedges referred to and what Chris was trying to look at in in his his book around the,

80
00:07:58,350 --> 00:08:04,320
you know, what is this meaning as he was trying to say, why is war so brutal?

81
00:08:04,680 --> 00:08:12,419
You know, why is it why do we when we talk about war, why is it so carnal and the way that it deals with the human body in some way or another?

82
00:08:12,420 --> 00:08:16,560
What is it about war that that that that that is special.

83
00:08:17,730 --> 00:08:22,620
And he doesn't mean that in a good way. It just means that it sits outside of normal in some way.

84
00:08:23,370 --> 00:08:29,460
So and then he writes this this that he starts with this notion that war is important because it gives us meaning.

85
00:08:30,930 --> 00:08:43,230
And what I want to do is try to unpick that in some way and try to say how technology has the ability to interrupt this meaning fulness of war itself.

86
00:08:44,490 --> 00:08:49,379
Now, what I'm going to start with is this idea that what I the way that Rene Descartes

87
00:08:49,380 --> 00:08:55,710
talked about the the mental and the material and Descartes was particularly,

88
00:08:56,130 --> 00:09:03,990
you know, this this notion of Cartesian duality, that that what they court was particularly interested in this this idea that, you know,

89
00:09:04,170 --> 00:09:09,420
there's something on the outside and then there's the something on the inside and

90
00:09:10,080 --> 00:09:15,150
and they are somehow correlated kind of code produced in some way or another.

91
00:09:15,480 --> 00:09:22,950
And, and he talked quite a bit about that, not only in terms of the way that I'm talking about maybe tool use or technology,

92
00:09:23,520 --> 00:09:31,020
but he talked about it in other ways as well. But this distinction between in a sense, what is the on the on the inside and what is on the outside?

93
00:09:31,020 --> 00:09:34,830
This is particularly useful now.

94
00:09:36,360 --> 00:09:43,620
I think what my my in a sense, my travel to this point is characterised by several steps.

95
00:09:43,620 --> 00:09:51,530
In a way. About five years ago I was particularly interested in how technology was impacting on society and politics, and,

96
00:09:51,700 --> 00:09:59,640
and I was particularly interested in that not necessarily from a war studies perspective or, or, you know, what we're doing.

97
00:10:00,430 --> 00:10:02,559
I was interested in it in a very broad way.

98
00:10:02,560 --> 00:10:09,550
So I have a project for interesting for interest on on smart cities and the way that smart cities are interrupting

99
00:10:09,790 --> 00:10:17,200
the way that we do public policy for instance and that with a colleague get into you and in Singapore.

100
00:10:18,010 --> 00:10:19,209
So it's not only about war.

101
00:10:19,210 --> 00:10:26,650
I'm particularly interested in how that's shaping society, but in particular the route to me to it to war was trying to understand.

102
00:10:29,020 --> 00:10:35,580
Really how the shifts and the role of war, but not necessarily the operation of it,

103
00:10:36,250 --> 00:10:40,410
you know, the shifts in the sense how we why is war meaningful in some way or another?

104
00:10:40,420 --> 00:10:54,190
Not necessarily in saying that this is the way that we can think about it, too, in the area of access, denial and issues like this.

105
00:10:55,300 --> 00:11:02,350
Not necessarily in a sense, kind of very tactical operational elements about how you employ technology,

106
00:11:02,350 --> 00:11:07,390
but really, why how is war changing in terms of being meaningful, meaningful for us?

107
00:11:07,420 --> 00:11:15,940
And so the first is, is that I found Christian Decker's work on risk and complexity and the emerging global system.

108
00:11:16,150 --> 00:11:19,300
He wrote his his paper was called New Times for the Military,

109
00:11:19,630 --> 00:11:24,940
some sociological remarks on the changing role and structure of the armed forces of the advanced societies.

110
00:11:24,970 --> 00:11:29,770
Now, of course, as Robert and I were talking about just earlier, you know that, you know,

111
00:11:30,190 --> 00:11:35,330
Chris was writing this at a time to where what we talked about war meant something else entirely.

112
00:11:35,350 --> 00:11:45,429
You know, I mean, it was meaning something like what has been referred to as wars of the willing, you know, wars of choice in a way.

113
00:11:45,430 --> 00:11:48,490
It wasn't about existential defence.

114
00:11:48,910 --> 00:11:55,120
It wasn't about holding on to our ways of life or holding on to this alliance in some way or another.

115
00:11:56,140 --> 00:12:03,880
It was about, you know, intervention and sometimes, you know, more direct intervention.

116
00:12:04,270 --> 00:12:11,530
And and and so but in particular, what he was particularly what he was interested in and he was interested in the British military,

117
00:12:11,530 --> 00:12:16,420
and particularly as he was he was suggesting that there was a shift leading to risk.

118
00:12:17,260 --> 00:12:20,290
You know, that that in fact, you know, we before we did,

119
00:12:20,530 --> 00:12:28,360
we did defence and that increasingly now what we're doing is risk and and the military's responsibility in that.

120
00:12:28,370 --> 00:12:32,590
And again, it goes back to my final question, which is what's the relationship between security and defence?

121
00:12:33,070 --> 00:12:38,770
Then Dr. would have said in that article that, you know, that actually the reason why we're in this position is,

122
00:12:38,770 --> 00:12:44,800
is that because the existential nature of war is fundamentally changing.

123
00:12:45,160 --> 00:12:50,979
So, okay, maybe with the changes and the geopolitical changes and, you know,

124
00:12:50,980 --> 00:12:57,070
Trump's election and what that means for China and what that means for Russia and what that means for a little Estonia and things like that.

125
00:12:57,070 --> 00:13:01,330
Maybe war means something different to us now. But secondly,

126
00:13:01,330 --> 00:13:10,090
Tim and Edmonds in 2006 wrote What Our Armed Forces for the Changing Nature of military roles in Europe that was published in international affairs.

127
00:13:11,020 --> 00:13:17,409
And again, what he was trying to say is, is that, you know, that the notion of, you know, you know,

128
00:13:17,410 --> 00:13:21,800
I live in Somerset and you can drive around the roads of Somerset and you can see pillboxes everywhere.

129
00:13:21,830 --> 00:13:28,000
Right. I mean, that gives you a real sense of national territorial defence in some way or another.

130
00:13:28,360 --> 00:13:31,570
And what he was pointing to, what Tim Edmunds was pointing to this is that,

131
00:13:31,900 --> 00:13:36,220
well, we're not really asking militaries to do that sort of thing any longer.

132
00:13:36,460 --> 00:13:42,640
In a sense, there's been this disconnection between territorial defence and what we're asking our our militaries to do,

133
00:13:42,640 --> 00:13:47,350
even to the point to where we're even asking our militaries to go into Afghanistan and Iraq,

134
00:13:47,350 --> 00:13:52,060
and we're not even asking them to hold territory in the way that we would have traditionally have done.

135
00:13:53,170 --> 00:14:03,940
And then we we vacillate on that issue. But and then finally and Tony King, who some of you may know, he's at the University of Warwick now.

136
00:14:05,230 --> 00:14:10,750
He wrote a piece he wrote a book called The Transformation of Europe's Armed Forces From the Rhine to Afghanistan.

137
00:14:11,410 --> 00:14:17,610
And again, what he was trying to say is, is that there's something something changing about these armed forces.

138
00:14:17,620 --> 00:14:22,450
You know, the idea that increasingly they were kind of going in different directions.

139
00:14:22,690 --> 00:14:27,880
And he uses sociological ideas of production about the way that militaries do their business.

140
00:14:28,310 --> 00:14:33,310
And he was saying that, you know, that we'd see the split. His most recent book, The Combat Soldier, does this even more.

141
00:14:33,640 --> 00:14:42,370
And he talks about, you know, this idea that we go into this notion of of what we expect increasingly elite troops to do the production part.

142
00:14:42,610 --> 00:14:50,470
And then we we ask others to do the other bits of defence that we don't think as war any longer and things like that.

143
00:14:50,500 --> 00:14:57,820
So all this suggested to me that, you know, this this shift leading to risk was was particularly interesting.

144
00:14:58,150 --> 00:15:02,590
And one of the things that I thought that made it all possible was technology.

145
00:15:03,940 --> 00:15:07,020
Of course, you could say also globalisation and things like this made it possible.

146
00:15:07,030 --> 00:15:14,260
But for me what was particularly interesting, the role of technology in that and that and that change.

147
00:15:15,070 --> 00:15:21,140
Now, despite the fact that I probably the way that Chris and Tim and Tony talked about over this time,

148
00:15:21,190 --> 00:15:25,089
maybe they were talking about war in a slightly different age.

149
00:15:25,090 --> 00:15:31,920
And I have to say before I came here today. I don't think I'd really concretely thought about that era as a different era before.

150
00:15:31,930 --> 00:15:39,920
It's just as I talk, it just seems more and more the case. As I read this, it seems to be that they were in a different era and already here today.

151
00:15:39,940 --> 00:15:45,130
The shift leading to risk is technology and the rise of what I refer to here as boundless warfare.

152
00:15:45,790 --> 00:15:54,040
Now, the first thing to say is, is what I mean by technology, and I mean technology writ in a very large way.

153
00:15:54,550 --> 00:16:02,200
You know, the technology is not just about networks or about processors or about about some kind of mechanical thing.

154
00:16:03,820 --> 00:16:09,729
I think I talk about it. I talk about is anything that enables for instance,

155
00:16:09,730 --> 00:16:16,840
if you read Michael Horowitz's book on the diffusion of military can remember the last power or something

156
00:16:16,840 --> 00:16:23,049
like that of our I can remember that final word but but what he's particularly interested in is why,

157
00:16:23,050 --> 00:16:27,400
you know, why do some states take on something like aircraft carriers and others don't?

158
00:16:28,060 --> 00:16:34,000
You know, why why is that the case? Is it about economics, why we can't afford aircraft carriers or on destined submarines instead?

159
00:16:34,750 --> 00:16:41,230
Or is it something else? And he argues that it's a it's a mix of things academics usually do.

160
00:16:41,680 --> 00:16:50,560
And but one of the things that he points to is the role of the U.S. Marine Corps as being a fantastic

161
00:16:50,980 --> 00:16:58,570
enabler for the U.S. military that allows it to do lots of things in a very flexible and agile way.

162
00:16:59,260 --> 00:17:01,540
And what he's particularly interested in is the war,

163
00:17:01,540 --> 00:17:07,660
the notion of the warrior ethos and what that means for the Marine Corps as an enabler for that in that way.

164
00:17:08,620 --> 00:17:15,210
So does that mean that Michael Horowitz was talking about soldiers as far as technology?

165
00:17:15,220 --> 00:17:20,320
In a way? I argue that that he is and that they are.

166
00:17:22,060 --> 00:17:28,390
But but technology also does other thing. You know, it it's about geolocation telling us where things are.

167
00:17:28,570 --> 00:17:32,950
It's about keeping boots off the ground. It's about tapping into your and my communications.

168
00:17:33,880 --> 00:17:41,020
Thank you. It's also allows for greater lethality, more pursuit and accumulation or the dispersal of power.

169
00:17:42,040 --> 00:17:47,710
Technology is satellite sets, networks, it's processors, personal computers, it's robots.

170
00:17:48,010 --> 00:17:51,130
All the stuff that we think of readily in terms of technology.

171
00:17:51,400 --> 00:17:56,110
But it's also the results of material, biological and chemical sciences, you know,

172
00:17:56,110 --> 00:17:59,220
the way that these are changing and the convergence of them in some way.

173
00:17:59,230 --> 00:18:01,560
So I was here maybe about eight months ago,

174
00:18:01,570 --> 00:18:07,300
and I was talking about this convergence of of of science and technology and what that meant for new technologies.

175
00:18:08,170 --> 00:18:12,399
Perhaps even more contentious is the combat soldier, as I said before, and Tony King's book,

176
00:18:12,400 --> 00:18:17,950
The Combat Soldier, is a very good example of how we have something like martial technology.

177
00:18:18,130 --> 00:18:25,360
And this martial technology is constantly developing. And what Tony does in that book is he looks at, in a sense,

178
00:18:25,360 --> 00:18:30,700
the way that militaries have evolved over time and the role of the combat soldier in that over time.

179
00:18:30,700 --> 00:18:40,870
It's an excellent book, and I recommended the concept of the soldier or the warrior and even what gender theorists would

180
00:18:40,870 --> 00:18:46,149
talk about in terms of something like the notion of the warrior as a man and things like this.

181
00:18:46,150 --> 00:18:54,210
That's a that becomes a technological construct in a way, something that you can employ, something that you can use to get people into the military,

182
00:18:54,220 --> 00:19:01,240
something that you can get them to do, in a sense, quite amazing things that otherwise rational human being would never want to do.

183
00:19:02,030 --> 00:19:11,530
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's it's quite an amazing discursive technique, you know, it's it's very, very useful.

184
00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:19,030
So here I want to talk about 10% space time in force, because I think these three things are going to be the way that we could talk about,

185
00:19:19,360 --> 00:19:23,020
the way that we could talk about the boundless warfare as being impactful.

186
00:19:23,980 --> 00:19:28,930
So space, we can understand this in terms of distance or dispersal or concentration.

187
00:19:29,440 --> 00:19:32,560
It's very open, you know, a simple discussion around space.

188
00:19:32,980 --> 00:19:38,680
But in particular, I'm not really talking about space always in terms of geographical space.

189
00:19:39,100 --> 00:19:47,620
So you can understand it in terms of you could understand it in terms of networks with the idea that a network is always, you know,

190
00:19:47,620 --> 00:19:51,040
nothing is at the centre of a network and that's why it's a network,

191
00:19:52,300 --> 00:19:58,780
but isn't necessarily you can imagine that there are distances within the network that make a difference sometimes.

192
00:19:59,260 --> 00:20:05,770
So so there's not a sense a centre periphery to a network, but there is a there are distances.

193
00:20:05,810 --> 00:20:13,780
So so space time we can think of, you know, the relationship between time long in time to again, that's very, very straightforward.

194
00:20:13,780 --> 00:20:17,319
I think we could get more sophisticated than what we'd like to talk about time.

195
00:20:17,320 --> 00:20:21,760
But I'm not going to do that today unless you want to ask questions and then finally force,

196
00:20:21,880 --> 00:20:26,260
you know, in the way that we talk about kinetic force, you know, mass and acceleration.

197
00:20:27,260 --> 00:20:34,940
All these things become increasingly interesting in the way that we talk about technology and current contemporary technology.

198
00:20:34,940 --> 00:20:45,950
And I recommend Peter Singer's 2012 book on Wired for War as a great example of of of of of just that.

199
00:20:47,420 --> 00:20:52,490
So let's we'll come back to this as we discuss kind of bounded an unbounded war in a way.

200
00:20:52,520 --> 00:21:00,079
So I use, I use, I use boundless warfare because I make a distinct point of whether bounded warfare can

201
00:21:00,080 --> 00:21:05,830
become unbounded or whether boundless warfare is something else entirely bounded warfare.

202
00:21:05,840 --> 00:21:12,400
What we would ordinarily understand is, say, the Second World War, the First World War, maybe even the Napoleonic Wars or something like that.

203
00:21:12,410 --> 00:21:19,320
We we understand that there's some kind of you know, we understand that there's some kind of start to some kind of end in a way.

204
00:21:19,360 --> 00:21:25,099
Now, if we think back to the 30 Years War or the Hundred Years War, we we think about the beginning and the end.

205
00:21:25,100 --> 00:21:29,810
But of course, the 30 Years War, 100 years war is not necessarily the best way to describe those wars,

206
00:21:30,620 --> 00:21:36,320
because the hundred years war lasted longer than 100 years. And so the 30 years war lasts longer than the 30 years.

207
00:21:39,200 --> 00:21:45,260
So, you know, but but historically, this is the way that we we think about war.

208
00:21:45,980 --> 00:21:51,800
Surely we only see this bounded like that because we look back from this point in history at the time.

209
00:21:51,830 --> 00:21:54,860
We'll come back to that. Yeah. No, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Thank you.

210
00:21:55,160 --> 00:21:57,020
Yeah. What, can we come back to that? Yeah.

211
00:21:57,230 --> 00:22:07,549
And but with the idea that what the important thing is, is that they become history historically important for us as bounded activities,

212
00:22:07,550 --> 00:22:11,030
you know, bounded notions and historical activities and time.

213
00:22:11,910 --> 00:22:15,760
And whether or not they were really like that or not, it's the how they mean.

214
00:22:15,920 --> 00:22:20,030
You know, they're meaningful in a way for us. And that's what I'm particularly interested in.

215
00:22:20,030 --> 00:22:25,820
This is how meaningful that bounded notion is, not whether or not it was really bounded that way.

216
00:22:27,020 --> 00:22:32,479
So, okay, so we can understand technology as applied, as used, as passive, you know,

217
00:22:32,480 --> 00:22:44,150
something that has some kind of agency in some way or another, you know, like a robot, a a a demining robot, for instance.

218
00:22:44,150 --> 00:22:49,400
It has agency. It's something that you can put into the field and it can it can do things in a way.

219
00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:55,730
Sometimes it can do things through remote control and sometimes it can do through things through artificial intelligence.

220
00:22:58,250 --> 00:23:01,520
But the technology does not have to be an agent itself.

221
00:23:01,520 --> 00:23:06,440
So many scholars are looking at the impact of technology on defence in the fashion such as UAV,

222
00:23:06,440 --> 00:23:15,260
such as the future of air power processing speeds, big data, networked enabled forces, you know, the way the command and control of C2 is done.

223
00:23:15,710 --> 00:23:23,630
These are all, in a sense, ways in which the humanness is or the soldier is becoming increasingly enmeshed in technological systems.

224
00:23:24,500 --> 00:23:33,320
Now, let me say here what I mean by by. Let me see what I mean here by technology is much in the way that a former researcher of

225
00:23:33,370 --> 00:23:41,660
mine brought Taguba talks about in his in his book on reimagining war in the 21st century.

226
00:23:42,920 --> 00:23:50,059
So we largely what he's doing is trying to understand technology as a system or a way of doing things and again,

227
00:23:50,060 --> 00:23:57,350
make that point as towards something like a governmentality. So the ways of understanding, the ways of knowing, the ways of seeing,

228
00:23:58,340 --> 00:24:04,850
the ways of governing, all these things are being impacted on on these sorts of systems.

229
00:24:05,540 --> 00:24:08,890
And much of the way that we say we talk about fake news, for instance, you know,

230
00:24:08,900 --> 00:24:13,430
and and and what kind of impact that had on on elections and other things.

231
00:24:13,430 --> 00:24:19,969
So but but this raises some very interesting issues around the way that we think about technology and the way

232
00:24:19,970 --> 00:24:26,330
that Descartes talked about the love of the system and the way that Newton talked about the value of the system.

233
00:24:26,810 --> 00:24:32,719
And of course, you can see John Stuart Mill after that, you know, as being a and utilitarianism being an extension of that.

234
00:24:32,720 --> 00:24:41,690
But but this notion of love for the system versus value of the system as being well, it changes the way that you think about technology and this.

235
00:24:44,400 --> 00:24:54,120
So I'm going to move around a little bit. So let's take let's take a specific example for those that have followed me up to this point.

236
00:24:54,130 --> 00:24:56,100
Now, there's a few of you who have followed me up to this.

237
00:24:56,490 --> 00:25:03,000
You might see this as technological determinism, because I talked about technology having agency in some way, and if it has agency,

238
00:25:03,300 --> 00:25:10,320
then it has this ability to redirect outcomes in some way or another that if it weren't there,

239
00:25:12,240 --> 00:25:16,170
even human behaviour would arrive at the same endpoint in some way or another, right?

240
00:25:16,440 --> 00:25:24,480
It has some kind of time. Maybe it has some kind of constitutional ising element that changes reality as we know it.

241
00:25:25,680 --> 00:25:30,850
So in Ruth Miller's book can snarl. It's a it's a great it's a it's a great book.

242
00:25:30,870 --> 00:25:38,070
I can't talk about that enough. Ruth Miller, it's called Snarl in Defence of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks.

243
00:25:39,570 --> 00:25:45,270
Ruth is talking about. So she uses an interesting historical example to illustrate the power of technology once applied.

244
00:25:46,230 --> 00:25:51,840
So the example is interesting because it illustrates to us what we refer to as something like dual use.

245
00:25:52,200 --> 00:25:58,529
You know what? We talk about something having both civil and martial qualities in a way, so and so.

246
00:25:58,530 --> 00:26:05,580
In the 18th century, the city of Paris was covered in paving stones to cover what would ordinarily be dirty, muddy streets.

247
00:26:06,330 --> 00:26:12,330
Paris was not the first to do this by any means, nor obviously the last.

248
00:26:13,110 --> 00:26:19,470
But in this case, the martial qualities of the paving stones fundamentally changed the system in which prior political,

249
00:26:20,400 --> 00:26:26,180
political and power relations had once stood. So she shares a quote from a French civil servant at the time.

250
00:26:26,190 --> 00:26:33,870
So again, this is in the 18th century, paving stones, often the most suitable material for the construction of barricades in the moments of civil war.

251
00:26:34,770 --> 00:26:40,730
It was this that in June 1848 sorry, I said 1890.

252
00:26:41,220 --> 00:26:46,380
The streets of Paris was covered in a few hours with a series of citadels which cannonballs could hardly demolish.

253
00:26:46,920 --> 00:26:52,650
Much bloodshed would have been spared on both sides if such materials had not existed close to hand.

254
00:26:53,820 --> 00:26:57,420
The government of the French Republic, deeply impressed with the magnitude of this danger,

255
00:26:57,420 --> 00:27:02,549
called the serious attention of the engineers of the Paris roads to the necessity of replacing this ancient

256
00:27:02,550 --> 00:27:08,850
system of stone paving by some other which would not offer materials for the construction of barricades.

257
00:27:09,480 --> 00:27:12,890
So yeah, these it's these, it's these things, right?

258
00:27:12,960 --> 00:27:15,480
That caused the problem in some way.

259
00:27:16,770 --> 00:27:23,850
So Millet Miller argues that roads as a network technology, I mean, a road to network, a road to nowhere is useful to no one.

260
00:27:24,480 --> 00:27:35,340
Right. It's a it's a network technology. They roads connect must be understood to play a constitutional role or a constitutional izing role,

261
00:27:35,670 --> 00:27:38,820
a system role in which the world as we know it operates.

262
00:27:39,540 --> 00:27:48,420
So she states, our roads are at war regardless of the needs, desires and activities of class or of the human citizen subjects.

263
00:27:48,960 --> 00:27:55,290
You know that they've been built for that purpose. They're at war regardless of whether or not we're using them in that way.

264
00:27:55,740 --> 00:28:00,930
We can think about how the transformation of stone paving into barricades and weapons turns roads,

265
00:28:01,200 --> 00:28:05,370
regardless of the people on them in the physical environments of military activity.

266
00:28:07,340 --> 00:28:12,190
So this is particularly problematic, I would suggest, in the way that she's talking about.

267
00:28:12,200 --> 00:28:13,129
I mean, it's interesting,

268
00:28:13,130 --> 00:28:19,970
but it's particularly problematic in the way that she's saying that essentially technology in this case is just the you know,

269
00:28:19,970 --> 00:28:26,300
just the paving stone technology because something that fundamentally changes the progress of war following.

270
00:28:27,680 --> 00:28:34,430
You know, that's just. Now, of course, if we think about the, you know, the introduction of a firearm, for instance,

271
00:28:34,430 --> 00:28:43,670
into into war or or heavy infantry or something like that, we can say that obviously it had an impact on war in one way or another.

272
00:28:43,940 --> 00:28:48,620
Does that necessarily change the way that we talk about war as an extension of politics?

273
00:28:49,730 --> 00:28:56,510
Would it fundamentally change the way that could we talk about not only the character of war as being distinctly different,

274
00:28:56,510 --> 00:29:02,600
but we could could we even talk about the nature of war as being distinctly technological?

275
00:29:03,910 --> 00:29:07,000
That is in some way prior to the political.

276
00:29:08,440 --> 00:29:11,139
Yeah. And that's what that's the idea that she's putting forward.

277
00:29:11,140 --> 00:29:17,950
So, and that I'm relying on here to put forward this this notion so I can see that there's some discomfort.

278
00:29:17,950 --> 00:29:26,979
We're talking about Clausewitz in this way, but. Okay, so let's bring this back to the notion of bounded and boundless war for warfare.

279
00:29:26,980 --> 00:29:30,250
What do we mean by bounded warfare? We can think it through two lenses.

280
00:29:30,250 --> 00:29:35,380
The first is the political or the democratic lens, the relationship between war and states.

281
00:29:36,850 --> 00:29:42,790
And that relationship has been long studied. And, you know, with the idea that what you know, the the relationship between them,

282
00:29:43,510 --> 00:29:48,670
the conversation goes like the chicken and the egg which came first. Two states make wars or two wars make states.

283
00:29:49,120 --> 00:29:54,670
And the wars of France, revolutionary, Napoleonic and otherwise are fundamental to the way that we think about France today.

284
00:29:55,150 --> 00:30:02,590
And these wars fit as between two bookends, you know, the way that we could, the way that we could imagine, you know,

285
00:30:03,040 --> 00:30:08,859
the way that we can imagine wars as as being these wars between two bookends,

286
00:30:08,860 --> 00:30:13,599
they are bounded by beginnings and ends by epics or eras, by political narratives.

287
00:30:13,600 --> 00:30:18,130
We understand that wars against Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany are important for us.

288
00:30:18,160 --> 00:30:27,879
They give us meaning. Yeah. Even to the point to where it's very difficult for us to even understand narratives that in some way go against.

289
00:30:27,880 --> 00:30:31,810
You know, George Soros was called a Jewish Nazi today.

290
00:30:32,560 --> 00:30:38,110
Well, anybody who can remember the Second World War just I mean, how could you have how can you be a Jewish Nazi?

291
00:30:38,380 --> 00:30:41,620
It's just the two worlds kind of collide in that in some way or another.

292
00:30:42,880 --> 00:30:47,290
We just go back as you get your painting. STONE Sorry. Yeah, there's a 1948.

293
00:30:47,470 --> 00:30:52,870
Yes. Of having already by that time as a result of the Napoleon.

294
00:30:54,170 --> 00:30:59,870
The French designed the capital in such a way that the military could easily attack.

295
00:30:59,930 --> 00:31:03,500
Yes. Yes. On the bridges and things like that. Yes, absolutely.

296
00:31:03,530 --> 00:31:08,870
How does this picture. Well, I mean, I think madura. You are you're being more explicit than that.

297
00:31:09,110 --> 00:31:10,760
That I mean, as I should have been.

298
00:31:11,060 --> 00:31:17,990
In fact, the argument there is, is that these roads had already been redesigned for very marshal purposes and hadn't.

299
00:31:18,110 --> 00:31:24,230
And what's particularly interesting and and it's my apologies, I should have been more explicit about this,

300
00:31:24,650 --> 00:31:30,469
but the issue there becomes that there's something like the road itself becomes very not only is it commercial purposes,

301
00:31:30,470 --> 00:31:37,760
but it has this ability to bike back. And and she shows this over and over as this relationship between between that.

302
00:31:38,160 --> 00:31:47,630
And so the key thing is, is that if we think about if we think about this and we talk about the war on terrorism or the war against terrorism,

303
00:31:47,870 --> 00:31:50,929
and we can talk about the war against drugs.

304
00:31:50,930 --> 00:31:54,620
And in the case of the United States, do they give us much meaning?

305
00:31:55,640 --> 00:32:01,940
You know, they do. They you know, do they do they say the same that when we look back to the war on terror and think about it in the

306
00:32:01,940 --> 00:32:08,120
same way that we thought about defeating that in Nazi Germany or Napoleon or something like that,

307
00:32:08,480 --> 00:32:11,720
you know, the likelihood is we won't. Yeah.

308
00:32:13,070 --> 00:32:15,750
Maybe because they're not extensible in the same as extension,

309
00:32:15,750 --> 00:32:21,260
in the same way terrorism or drugs will wipe us off the map, exterminate Starbucks, then.

310
00:32:21,530 --> 00:32:23,989
That is not to say that they're not politically important.

311
00:32:23,990 --> 00:32:28,970
You know, that we don't need to be protected from terrorist activities and and things like that.

312
00:32:30,020 --> 00:32:33,920
You know, it's but they are not wars because they do not give us meaning.

313
00:32:34,130 --> 00:32:41,660
Is that the way that we can define wars, even the wars when they give us meaning, the war on terror doesn't give us meaning in the same way.

314
00:32:42,320 --> 00:32:47,630
That's not to say that they don't have strategies, deployments, tactics, operations, casualties and so on.

315
00:32:48,680 --> 00:32:53,240
So what is meant by boundless warfare? Warfare needs an enemy.

316
00:32:53,780 --> 00:32:58,940
Warfare has a start and an end warfare has discernible action and reaction.

317
00:32:59,510 --> 00:33:07,190
War has ideology. These are three boundaries of war that are becoming eclipsed by technology.

318
00:33:07,970 --> 00:33:11,360
Yeah. So, you know, we need an enemy. We need to start in an end.

319
00:33:12,140 --> 00:33:16,100
We need discernable action and reaction. And we need ideology.

320
00:33:16,100 --> 00:33:28,080
That's for. Actually, I miscounted in my notes. You. So in 1994, George Orwell imagined war bounded by enemy and boundless by time.

321
00:33:29,520 --> 00:33:35,010
Oceania was always at war with other, with either Eurasia or East Asia.

322
00:33:36,360 --> 00:33:44,099
The enemy changed, but the action did not. If we hold Chris Hedges quote that war is a force that gives us meaning,

323
00:33:44,100 --> 00:33:51,570
then we can see why the government in the Oceania and presumably Eurasia and East Asia would have used more as a means of control.

324
00:33:53,100 --> 00:33:58,680
The key thing is, is if you read 1984, you realise that it doesn't give any meaning to Winston Smith.

325
00:33:59,550 --> 00:34:08,520
You know, it's lost its meaning. And this is particularly interesting because what we see in something like Mary Dunn's book, Wartime,

326
00:34:09,210 --> 00:34:14,490
is an example of the way that this notion of peacetime versus wartime and the

327
00:34:14,490 --> 00:34:19,320
vacillation between what you would see in peacetime and what you would see in wartime.

328
00:34:19,360 --> 00:34:30,720
And and she's a legal scholar, but she's particularly interested in the way that civil liberties are impacted by peacetime and by and by wartime.

329
00:34:31,140 --> 00:34:37,550
And what she argues is that, as you can see, and she's just looking at the 20th century in the United States even, and her argument is that,

330
00:34:37,560 --> 00:34:44,100
as you can see, that you see something like wartime civil liberties go down and then peacetime civil liberties go up.

331
00:34:44,460 --> 00:34:48,570
And then you can see this vacillation like a seesaw between wartime in peacetime.

332
00:34:48,780 --> 00:34:51,270
But our argument is, just as you go throughout the Cold War,

333
00:34:51,300 --> 00:34:57,600
you get introduce introduced to the Cold War and the notion between peace and war, but starts to become confused in a way.

334
00:34:58,350 --> 00:35:06,690
And then eventually you get to the point to the post-Cold War period to where, well, largely we're not even sure what peace and war are any longer.

335
00:35:07,590 --> 00:35:13,850
But needless to say, we don't see the same vacillation. We don't see the same return to what we would see in peacetime.

336
00:35:14,010 --> 00:35:18,360
She's arguing that actually we live in a period of eternal wartime now,

337
00:35:18,990 --> 00:35:27,450
and that's why we can have really quite radical restrictions that perhaps we would not have allowed before.

338
00:35:28,210 --> 00:35:38,490
And also very recently, the the government has now the ability to to look in our communications like never before.

339
00:35:42,530 --> 00:35:45,659
I mean, I'm not saying whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but what I am saying is,

340
00:35:45,660 --> 00:35:52,649
is that's a level of that's a a level or that's a an issue around civil liberties

341
00:35:52,650 --> 00:35:56,340
that perhaps wouldn't have been allowed at any other time other than wartime.

342
00:35:57,870 --> 00:36:01,890
That's Mary. That's the argument more than it is mine. But it's a well worth.

343
00:36:01,900 --> 00:36:05,040
But again, Mary. Mary is fantastic.

344
00:36:05,670 --> 00:36:09,540
I'd never met Mary, but her work is fantastic. So what do we know?

345
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:17,250
So when it comes to something like this, you know, and a radar, you know, the you know, when we're trying to find the enemy in this.

346
00:36:18,240 --> 00:36:20,880
What if we don't know who who is attacking us?

347
00:36:22,380 --> 00:36:28,890
And, you know, if you're thinking about something like cyber situational awareness, the idea of identify identification,

348
00:36:28,890 --> 00:36:35,610
and that becomes actually really quite down the list of actions, because what you really need to do is to respond.

349
00:36:35,850 --> 00:36:38,940
You know, you need to you need to control the damage.

350
00:36:39,360 --> 00:36:42,870
You need to see what you need to identify the damage. You need to control the damage.

351
00:36:43,440 --> 00:36:48,270
You need to do react in that in some way. And then only then can you start to see who has attacked me.

352
00:36:49,830 --> 00:36:57,790
You know, the the the issue there and and maybe we do have an idea of who did attack us in a way.

353
00:36:57,840 --> 00:37:02,400
You know, we're Sony, for instance, and we maybe we have an idea about who attacked us.

354
00:37:03,030 --> 00:37:10,040
Maybe it was the North Koreans or something like that. Right. But maybe we don't.

355
00:37:10,050 --> 00:37:11,190
You know, in particular,

356
00:37:11,190 --> 00:37:21,360
we could imagine how something like cyber attacks are increasingly being are increasingly difficult to not only are they difficult to pin down,

357
00:37:21,360 --> 00:37:24,540
but the issue of plausible deniability comes online.

358
00:37:25,170 --> 00:37:30,150
And the Russians say, well, I didn't know about this fancy bears thing, but it really doesn't have anything to do with us.

359
00:37:30,930 --> 00:37:41,150
And and the United States says, no, you intervened and you you hacked the, you know, the DNC accounts and then, you know, you publicise this.

360
00:37:41,160 --> 00:37:42,510
I had a big impact on our elections.

361
00:37:43,620 --> 00:37:51,960
And so the idea is then becomes it becomes maybe there is you know, maybe there's a person in Whitehall that knows who has done that.

362
00:37:52,710 --> 00:38:00,190
Whether that's politically significant or not or whether it's used as a a matter of fact or truth, is neither here nor there.

363
00:38:00,210 --> 00:38:06,930
And so the issue of the enemy, you know, or the the other who's attacked us becomes problematic.

364
00:38:09,470 --> 00:38:14,660
So let us think of it. And that becomes. So let's return to Clausewitz, if you allow me.

365
00:38:14,690 --> 00:38:20,750
So let us think of this relationship and how we think about war itself as an extension of politics.

366
00:38:21,500 --> 00:38:25,310
So Carl von Clausewitz states that war is a continuation of politics.

367
00:38:25,890 --> 00:38:31,370
Okay. Others, including Christopher Coker, talks about war as a function of human nature.

368
00:38:31,970 --> 00:38:36,740
That sounds very similar to me in a way, you know, and and and Christopher Cox.

369
00:38:36,740 --> 00:38:44,140
But Warrior Geeks. Great book and I recommend I've said that to all the books about the.

370
00:38:44,930 --> 00:38:51,259
But in war you get to know he asks himself the question of whether we ever imagined that robots would do all the fighting for us.

371
00:38:51,260 --> 00:38:59,540
And eventually what we can do is just kind of sit back, let other people do the fighting and and we can they destroyed all of our machines.

372
00:38:59,540 --> 00:39:04,130
But by and large, we can just remain quite cosy where we where we are, in a way.

373
00:39:04,430 --> 00:39:11,960
And he argues that, no, that that's not going to happen. And the reason it's not going to happen is because war is part of human nature itself,

374
00:39:12,470 --> 00:39:18,500
that the more and more you take humans out of war itself, the more and more that war will try to pull humans back into it again.

375
00:39:18,980 --> 00:39:21,150
And that that's just the nature of of human nature.

376
00:39:21,170 --> 00:39:25,700
So, okay, I, I don't know that I'm making that argument today, but I think it's an interesting argument.

377
00:39:26,270 --> 00:39:30,230
So we can refer to to we can refer to both, you know,

378
00:39:30,240 --> 00:39:38,450
notion of of politics as an extension of politics and as an extension of human nature as something like,

379
00:39:38,900 --> 00:39:46,559
you know, at the centre there you get the political human. Human is kind of fundamental to that in some way or another, a social, you know,

380
00:39:46,560 --> 00:39:49,850
it becomes a social function, you know, political function becomes social function.

381
00:39:50,210 --> 00:39:59,150
And within this political dynamic, we can think of three determinants of of war itself and something that I've already kind of pointed to in a way.

382
00:39:59,180 --> 00:40:07,310
One, this is the way that we think about information. Another is the way that we think about citizenship or individual relationships to the state.

383
00:40:08,510 --> 00:40:19,120
And finally, is the notion of decision making. So for Clausewitz, the political function exists within what he refers to as the Trinity.

384
00:40:19,170 --> 00:40:28,470
I'm suspect that, you know, this relationship between state and society and in the military and so on.

385
00:40:29,190 --> 00:40:35,969
And it can be seen in particular, is this the notion that war must remain subject to the action of a what he refers

386
00:40:35,970 --> 00:40:40,860
to as superior intelligence and has a political purpose in some way or another.

387
00:40:41,250 --> 00:40:51,300
And that's why, even though we're particularly worried about people having the ability to say 3D print handguns, we're not overly worried about it.

388
00:40:51,330 --> 00:40:53,370
I mean, we're worried about it, but we realise it.

389
00:40:53,370 --> 00:40:58,230
Not everybody has an interest in going home and printing their 3D handgun and going out and killing people.

390
00:40:58,650 --> 00:41:04,110
And since there's some kind of political element there that actually restricts people from being murderers.

391
00:41:04,380 --> 00:41:08,970
Right. I mean, there's there's a there's a there's there's a there's a political something there

392
00:41:08,970 --> 00:41:13,920
that stops people from just being self-destructive or destructive towards some.

393
00:41:15,020 --> 00:41:20,329
So maybe that's the case. Maybe politics really does make a difference.

394
00:41:20,330 --> 00:41:27,920
So maybe maybe I'm not overturning Clausewitz, but but herein lies a problem for us and the paving stones in particular.

395
00:41:28,430 --> 00:41:37,840
What role does technology have and political purpose? Surely a rioter has to choose to pick up the rock in order to throw it right.

396
00:41:37,850 --> 00:41:41,030
You know, I mean, that's a political that's a that's a human action, if you will.

397
00:41:42,380 --> 00:41:51,290
You know, that a human action to throw to throw a rock at the police or or an RPG or something, you know, I mean,

398
00:41:51,290 --> 00:42:02,749
to talk about I mean, to to take it from street violence to toward the the political purpose is the factor.

399
00:42:02,750 --> 00:42:05,480
The driver that leads the rioter to make the choice.

400
00:42:05,930 --> 00:42:15,050
You know, that to be an agent of violence, the conception of violence or warfare in our case requires a political human,

401
00:42:15,320 --> 00:42:21,470
you know, the political activism of another. So at the moment, that stays right within what we would imagine Clausewitz will tell us.

402
00:42:23,090 --> 00:42:26,750
But but but in particular, this.

403
00:42:27,260 --> 00:42:33,440
Let's assume that our conception of the political human, or at least the agency that he or she poses is limited.

404
00:42:34,010 --> 00:42:41,030
That actually that that there's a limit to how much going to be explained by politics in this conception of the political human.

405
00:42:41,030 --> 00:42:46,579
We can only have technical objects, right? We have the human who's the key agent or actor.

406
00:42:46,580 --> 00:42:52,610
And then we have these technological objects and the political, you know, the human cannot see well enough.

407
00:42:52,610 --> 00:42:56,210
So what? He gets an object, which is you've come blurry glasses.

408
00:42:56,620 --> 00:42:59,630
He's taken on the on the tool.

409
00:43:01,600 --> 00:43:09,770
So. This is interesting for us because we realised that the political and the human has to stop somewhere.

410
00:43:10,550 --> 00:43:15,110
You know that that in my case it's the glasses are the watch or the thumb or something like that.

411
00:43:16,160 --> 00:43:22,040
And so in this conception of the political human, we we only have technical objects, not technical agents.

412
00:43:22,640 --> 00:43:28,910
The technical agents of war, like roads, like it networks like UAV are themselves enablers or agents.

413
00:43:30,140 --> 00:43:33,680
And this reminds me of Lori Calhoun's book, We Kill Because We Can.

414
00:43:34,610 --> 00:43:37,940
And and it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting book.

415
00:43:38,970 --> 00:43:42,620
I mean that and the British way of interesting as opposed to the American way because I.

416
00:43:43,310 --> 00:43:50,660
It's a it's an interesting book. And and this argument largely is almost a technological determinist argument that we have this

417
00:43:50,660 --> 00:43:57,350
ability to to hover and to kill people at will through the use of drones anywhere in the world.

418
00:43:57,560 --> 00:44:02,960
And because we have this ability, we will continue to see threats in that way.

419
00:44:03,890 --> 00:44:10,190
We see threats in that way because we have the drones not but it's not that we see the threats first and then we develop the drones.

420
00:44:10,550 --> 00:44:14,030
And so. So but it's interesting.

421
00:44:14,180 --> 00:44:21,079
Controversial book I say but less so information as it is comes into being when data

422
00:44:21,080 --> 00:44:25,190
is processed you know when it's given meaning when it's appropriated in some way,

423
00:44:25,910 --> 00:44:30,410
its relationship to bounded warfare is is quite, quite pronounced.

424
00:44:30,410 --> 00:44:36,230
You know, that this idea that information becomes fundamental to the way that we did war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

425
00:44:36,620 --> 00:44:42,469
Information was fundamental to the way that we looked at PowerPoint presentations in the morning or the way that

426
00:44:42,470 --> 00:44:50,990
intelligence work was done or the way that we understood human terrain information was going to be what the army delivered.

427
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:56,390
Right. The revolution in military affairs. It was an information revolution.

428
00:44:58,370 --> 00:45:03,190
Citizenship, as it is, determines the political you know, what what is what's important?

429
00:45:03,200 --> 00:45:06,319
You know, it sustains the political. We know who we are.

430
00:45:06,320 --> 00:45:07,580
We know what is sacred.

431
00:45:07,700 --> 00:45:16,939
You know, this notion of decision making and we can think about in way in ways that are referred to as decision making as much in the way that.

432
00:45:16,940 --> 00:45:24,140
Q strong talks about strategy, about in the sense making sense of the political you know, about what is to be done in some way.

433
00:45:24,830 --> 00:45:30,050
So boundless warfare challenges a political theory of warfare and this of Clausewitz's ideas.

434
00:45:30,890 --> 00:45:36,410
And in terms of trying to posit something like a technological theory of war.

435
00:45:37,760 --> 00:45:43,160
Now, what if we think about of warfare not as a political behaviour, but as a technological behaviour?

436
00:45:43,790 --> 00:45:47,570
Where does this leave the human in this? Can we transpose that?

437
00:45:47,720 --> 00:45:51,860
The political human with the political with the technological, the human?

438
00:45:53,360 --> 00:45:59,690
What do we even mean by this? Because it may be politics as technology and technology is politics, but what do we mean by this?

439
00:46:00,110 --> 00:46:08,360
We don't mean cyborgs are robots. You know, this idea that we take out a 100% human and we add a bit of kit to them and they become a cyborg in a way.

440
00:46:08,360 --> 00:46:12,680
But we mean something else. Let's let's go back to Ruth Miller.

441
00:46:13,700 --> 00:46:17,450
She charts how English metaphors began to change from 19th, the 20th century.

442
00:46:17,450 --> 00:46:25,790
And I have to say, if you've read Tom Rhett's book on the history of cybernetics, you will have the same ideas.

443
00:46:26,420 --> 00:46:30,680
So she indicates where before we had biological metaphors for human behaviour.

444
00:46:30,680 --> 00:46:43,400
And if you do read Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy, you'll see much more a biological reference to the way that we as societies work.

445
00:46:45,230 --> 00:46:50,870
But she says that as we go more and more towards the middle of the 20th century, our language begins to change.

446
00:46:51,320 --> 00:46:57,110
And more and more it starts to be changed not by biological systems, but by information systems.

447
00:46:57,860 --> 00:47:07,280
So the organism human in our case, was no longer being understood as a single point or single agent, but instead was being understood as a message.

448
00:47:08,240 --> 00:47:12,290
So the way that we thought about town planning, the way that we thought about public administration,

449
00:47:12,440 --> 00:47:23,839
the way that we thought about being doing big policy, grand policy became much more about about obscuring the human and less so as communication.

450
00:47:23,840 --> 00:47:28,640
In other words, human value becomes increasingly roped into the system of communication.

451
00:47:29,660 --> 00:47:34,129
It becomes a it becomes a different it becomes nothing biological at all.

452
00:47:34,130 --> 00:47:41,660
It becomes an information system. So others have talked about this in terms of the impact on shopping networks had on a wide range of discourses.

453
00:47:41,840 --> 00:47:47,870
Again, Tom Ricks book's great example that if anything, information theory allowed us to think about how the system works together,

454
00:47:48,080 --> 00:47:52,520
about how you can do big policy, and these things come to come come together.

455
00:47:52,880 --> 00:47:58,760
And we're talking about policy that actually we've never had to, you know, with with this increase of information,

456
00:47:59,960 --> 00:48:05,660
with the way that we think about millions and millions of people living in London or something like this,

457
00:48:05,660 --> 00:48:11,090
all of a sudden, the way that we do, the way that we do things just fundamentally has to change.

458
00:48:11,090 --> 00:48:20,570
And it changes as information. Information grows. So if you a great example of that is Caesar Dawkins book on Why Information Grows.

459
00:48:21,830 --> 00:48:27,830
So in fact, Ruth Miller illustrates how they continue to view information theory through a subjective humanist perspective.

460
00:48:28,340 --> 00:48:35,210
You know, in many ways it was about an information system. It was about the cybernetic system, you know, the networked system.

461
00:48:35,570 --> 00:48:43,550
But she argues that the human was an increasing you know, it was part of that in a way that we can talk about the battlefield, the space.

462
00:48:43,820 --> 00:48:50,300
But we have these reference points, these individual reference points, which are soldiers within that in some way or another.

463
00:48:51,140 --> 00:48:56,540
And they and as much as we would like to talk about it as being networked and something like that, the argument is,

464
00:48:56,540 --> 00:49:02,030
is that by and large, we still talk about networked enabled, missed or networked centric warfare.

465
00:49:02,420 --> 00:49:05,180
The human is still a fundamental part of that in some way or another,

466
00:49:05,180 --> 00:49:11,210
and which is one of the big critiques of Networked Central Network centric warfare.

467
00:49:12,390 --> 00:49:19,080
So what does this mean for him and this mean in terms of the the political frameworks?

468
00:49:19,860 --> 00:49:26,430
So she argues they were transforming the machine into a human, if a digitised human and the physical network into a communications network.

469
00:49:26,820 --> 00:49:29,730
They were obliterating the machine, but actually rhetorically,

470
00:49:29,940 --> 00:49:34,739
just as the machine was taking on a greater and greater role in the city or in the battlefield,

471
00:49:34,740 --> 00:49:42,840
its it was becoming they they were essentially re positing the human in that and as much as we were understanding that essentially

472
00:49:42,840 --> 00:49:49,710
what was you know as we were going to having lines and lines of men with guns spacing with one another and converging,

473
00:49:50,070 --> 00:49:57,300
and as more and more the human in a sense, came behind what was fundamentally a a tank battle or an area of aerial battle,

474
00:49:57,720 --> 00:50:01,560
we had big machinery, too, in a sense, to change the dynamics of war itself.

475
00:50:02,220 --> 00:50:08,910
But the way that we thought about war and the way that we thought about politics became much more about the human.

476
00:50:09,150 --> 00:50:13,650
She has this very interesting notion of of of traffic.

477
00:50:14,400 --> 00:50:19,890
You know, that tradition before we had before traffic as a word existed, before we had cars.

478
00:50:20,700 --> 00:50:24,030
So the idea traffic used to mean people.

479
00:50:24,630 --> 00:50:32,190
There's too much traffic on this pavement. You know, where in a sense, once we had cars, it started to be applied to cars.

480
00:50:32,460 --> 00:50:35,430
And the reason that started being applied to cars is that you had too much traffic,

481
00:50:35,670 --> 00:50:41,790
so you needed to move the traffic out to the sides, onto the pavements, off the streets of the roads and let cars drive on them.

482
00:50:42,240 --> 00:50:46,890
But then all of a sudden, cars started doing the same thing that actually humans used to do.

483
00:50:47,070 --> 00:50:51,860
They found it difficult to use the road network and and and the argument there.

484
00:50:51,990 --> 00:51:05,400
And so this notion of what used to used to be a human category, traffic became applied to to the machines themselves, to the network itself, in a way.

485
00:51:06,120 --> 00:51:09,210
But fundamentally, we still understand that traffic is affecting us.

486
00:51:09,570 --> 00:51:15,420
You know, it's a human agent, you know, I mean, it's people get in their cars and they decide to drive in some way or another.

487
00:51:15,780 --> 00:51:19,200
Forget about the car. The car is neither here nor there. It's tied to the road.

488
00:51:19,410 --> 00:51:23,969
Forget about the road. The idea is that people decided to get in the car and drive on that road.

489
00:51:23,970 --> 00:51:31,140
And she's arguing, wait a second, the car and the road fundamentally change your options and reconstitute.

490
00:51:31,350 --> 00:51:38,820
Is this reality for you in some way or another? Maybe that says something about Lorry Calhoun's arguments around We Kill because we can.

491
00:51:39,510 --> 00:51:46,320
If we have the technology, it repurposes our reality in some way, it resets our reality.

492
00:51:48,120 --> 00:51:52,649
So I realise I'm going over time, so I'm going to try to move forward.

493
00:51:52,650 --> 00:51:56,190
Okay, let's talk about known knowns.

494
00:51:57,570 --> 00:52:02,340
Remember the known knowns and the known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And so, okay, known knowns.

495
00:52:02,790 --> 00:52:05,880
We live in a world where networks continually take over our world.

496
00:52:06,990 --> 00:52:12,570
They are seen as being applicable to everything, you know, Iot and things like that.

497
00:52:13,590 --> 00:52:21,629
And does anybody have an Alexa yet? So I mean, as an example of that, hopefully all of you know, Amazon's Alexa,

498
00:52:21,630 --> 00:52:27,600
what I'm referring to actually be great if most of you didn't know but anyway so they they

499
00:52:27,600 --> 00:52:31,469
are seen as being absolutely about everything but not just information technology networks,

500
00:52:31,470 --> 00:52:37,620
but road networks as we've discussed, but also community networks, body networks, you know, everything that you know,

501
00:52:37,620 --> 00:52:43,140
the measure, the society, everything is being, in a sense, talked about in terms of networks.

502
00:52:45,010 --> 00:52:49,360
Complexity is key to our understanding of emergent warfare and the way that we talk

503
00:52:49,360 --> 00:52:55,419
about data science and how that fits into a notion of complexity and nonlinear

504
00:52:55,420 --> 00:53:00,040
causality is the way that we talk about everything from the impact of pharmaceuticals

505
00:53:00,040 --> 00:53:04,270
to the way that we talk about the way to get smart cities working and so on.

506
00:53:04,930 --> 00:53:08,890
We talk about them through a networked discourse.

507
00:53:09,640 --> 00:53:16,330
The applied technologies that make networks possible are fibre optics, mobile batteries, processor size and speed,

508
00:53:16,690 --> 00:53:24,070
low orbit satellites and fundamentally us, you know, where we're a fundamental part of that network.

509
00:53:24,820 --> 00:53:28,780
We have become mechanised ourselves in the way that we seek to network our task.

510
00:53:29,200 --> 00:53:38,950
We tap in. We add on. We hack and interview with small children who who do play on iPads or Xboxes or something like that.

511
00:53:39,460 --> 00:53:44,110
You realise that they call everything a glitch. You know, the bus hasn't got here yet.

512
00:53:44,200 --> 00:53:54,940
There's a glitch. The bus is not here yet. It's a very interesting kind of transfer of what is an IT language into into, well, material reality.

513
00:53:55,590 --> 00:53:59,050
You know that it's a glitch that I'm going slightly over.

514
00:54:00,700 --> 00:54:06,000
So what are the known unknowns? So we know that in a sense, a lot of things are changing in a way, you know,

515
00:54:06,100 --> 00:54:12,490
that the impact of networks is going to be it's impacting on the way that we we do normal things.

516
00:54:14,350 --> 00:54:21,070
And Moore's Law tells us that the number of transistors on a dense, integrated circuit board will double every two years.

517
00:54:21,370 --> 00:54:23,649
And that was seen like Moore's Law was going to come to an end.

518
00:54:23,650 --> 00:54:30,970
And all of a sudden now we have new materials, material sciences that allow us to continue Moore's Law going even further.

519
00:54:31,780 --> 00:54:38,230
History has shown that law, the Moore's Law is apt and anticipate anticipating process power.

520
00:54:38,620 --> 00:54:42,970
But what was particularly interesting, even though that we realise that process power is important,

521
00:54:43,270 --> 00:54:50,140
we still can't have a vision in the future of what that process power is going to mean for the future of our technology in any way.

522
00:54:51,040 --> 00:54:55,600
We can't say, let's talk about Moore's Law as it exists in 20 years time.

523
00:54:56,710 --> 00:55:00,580
What is technology? What are we going to be able to do with that kind of processing power?

524
00:55:01,900 --> 00:55:06,040
You know, the ability for us to forecast in that way is what's difficult.

525
00:55:08,420 --> 00:55:12,300
So Christopher Coker is illustrating this in this in his book for you geek.

526
00:55:12,320 --> 00:55:16,910
And he's talking about science fiction as being a rich source of how we might use technology in the

527
00:55:16,910 --> 00:55:22,460
future and how science fiction tells us that this type of processing power is going to be applied.

528
00:55:22,820 --> 00:55:30,890
Christopher Coker is telling you to go look in science fiction and in that processor speeds, going to allow greater artificial intelligence,

529
00:55:31,250 --> 00:55:35,770
whether it's like us or whether it's like the Hoover robot, you know,

530
00:55:36,590 --> 00:55:41,660
which in turn relies on autonomous decision making and or arithmetic decision making.

531
00:55:42,290 --> 00:55:52,010
The change in genetic material sciences macro engineering also opened up a world of distinctly bespoke, tailored, altered applications.

532
00:55:52,880 --> 00:55:57,050
Gene therapy is one thing, but gene warfare is quite another.

533
00:55:58,850 --> 00:56:02,300
It feels as if we are on the birth of the new kind of molecular science.

534
00:56:02,330 --> 00:56:09,680
You know, that's why the scientists are talking sciences that will allow us to interact with physical world in a totally different way.

535
00:56:10,760 --> 00:56:16,819
You know, any of you that have experienced VR and to think, Oh, this is amazing virtual reality,

536
00:56:16,820 --> 00:56:23,200
this is an amazing kind of way that we could experience things that we never thought we could experience before.

537
00:56:23,210 --> 00:56:29,030
And you know that the notion of individual, you know how things kind of suck you into it in some way or another.

538
00:56:29,330 --> 00:56:31,730
I'm veering off to the matrix, so I'll I'll leave that.

539
00:56:32,630 --> 00:56:40,080
Let's talk about the unknown unknowns where the losses to anticipate those technologies and whose science has yet to be discovered or engineered.

540
00:56:40,100 --> 00:56:47,180
We know that techno scientific changes have a tendency to support existing networks and fundamentally to eventually overcome them.

541
00:56:48,350 --> 00:56:53,569
So we understand that roads, you know, the traffic, the human traffic was a problem.

542
00:56:53,570 --> 00:56:58,010
So we pushed out to the side to let roads, cars go faster than cars become a problem.

543
00:56:58,250 --> 00:57:02,959
So we started looking at alternatives to the road network and then we start and you know,

544
00:57:02,960 --> 00:57:08,060
we what we do is we establish networks and then we try to transgress networks and

545
00:57:08,060 --> 00:57:12,020
then those networks get transgressed and then those networks get transgressed.

546
00:57:12,290 --> 00:57:15,740
Maybe that's a function of human nature in some way or another.

547
00:57:16,540 --> 00:57:20,420
So but drones are a typical example of that, as you know.

548
00:57:20,570 --> 00:57:24,050
How do we defeat space and time in a way that makes a difference?

549
00:57:24,710 --> 00:57:28,760
Finally, let's go to something that Zizek refers to as unknown knowns.

550
00:57:30,290 --> 00:57:36,350
Yeah, we know that there are lots of things happening out there, that there are quite amazing things happening out there.

551
00:57:36,650 --> 00:57:41,150
We know that the Chinese military are doing some quite amazing things and sometimes

552
00:57:41,150 --> 00:57:44,720
we even know that they refer to them as something like the assassin's mace.

553
00:57:45,670 --> 00:57:52,160
But we have ideas of what we think the assassin's May says, but we're not 100% sure about what that is.

554
00:57:53,390 --> 00:57:58,940
So we know that it exists. We know that over 4 million people in the United States have security clearance.

555
00:58:00,410 --> 00:58:04,700
Now, there's a lot of people in the United States that know things.

556
00:58:05,360 --> 00:58:10,160
And sometimes as we see, that comes back to haunt but Edward Snowden and so on.

557
00:58:10,550 --> 00:58:14,240
Right. So this has an impact in the way that we would talk about now.

558
00:58:14,600 --> 00:58:17,120
I'm not going to go into this. But what's particularly interesting is,

559
00:58:17,120 --> 00:58:25,640
is that Ruth Miller tells us that it has all these things to say about what we talk about in terms of vitality, liberty and and mobility.

560
00:58:26,300 --> 00:58:30,830
You know that we're giving things life vitality that never had life before.

561
00:58:31,340 --> 00:58:39,620
So we're creating, you know, in many ways that may be artificial intelligence, but maybe in some cases that shaking a bottle of fizzy water.

562
00:58:40,370 --> 00:58:43,580
You know, you're adding information to that bottle.

563
00:58:44,390 --> 00:58:53,990
You know that you can imagine that bread in different ways, written in different ways and mobility, this ability to go beyond our boundaries.

564
00:58:53,990 --> 00:59:03,500
You know, that fundamentally, you know, what's important in mobility is not the ability to get there, to cross boundaries, to to move fast and so on.

565
00:59:03,500 --> 00:59:13,190
But more importantly, what's really fundamental is the ability to stay there, permanence, you know, what was not and, you know,

566
00:59:13,310 --> 00:59:21,590
Stuxnet was fantastic, not because it actually zoomed from Israel and the United States and so on and hit something.

567
00:59:21,980 --> 00:59:25,490
But Stuxnet was important because it just set down.

568
00:59:26,860 --> 00:59:36,040
You just had Stuxnet on a USB and it just sat there for ages and we were just waiting for someone to plug in that USB with Stuxnet on it.

569
00:59:36,430 --> 00:59:43,240
Stuxnet was important for shutting down that run Iranian fuselage.

570
00:59:44,170 --> 00:59:53,740
Not because not because it was in some kind of kinetic way being shot at the fuselage, but because it had the ability to just stay there, to hang out.

571
00:59:54,130 --> 00:59:56,590
And of course, that's what drone operators say. What's important is,

572
00:59:56,620 --> 01:00:01,479
is that you can sit there for days and watch someone's behaviour and be able to really

573
01:00:01,480 --> 01:00:06,670
verify the things that actually you've never been able to verify in the same way before.

574
01:00:10,260 --> 01:00:18,030
Okay. So what does this mean for our questions? Well, the role of the state is interesting because it has an impact on the way that we may talk about,

575
01:00:18,240 --> 01:00:21,360
you know, something that's increasingly bounded.

576
01:00:22,590 --> 01:00:28,200
You know, something like the state is being is encountering something that's increasingly unbounded.

577
01:00:28,860 --> 01:00:33,020
So we could think about something like the power of production. You know, it's being distributed.

578
01:00:33,660 --> 01:00:39,149
You know, the ability for additive manufacturing or 3D printing is quite amazing.

579
01:00:39,150 --> 01:00:42,590
You know, the future and how that's impacting different companies is quite amazing.

580
01:00:42,600 --> 01:00:47,459
Lockheed Martin says, no, we're still going to make things, but says we're going to print things.

581
01:00:47,460 --> 01:00:50,760
Actually, we're going to give you you're going to buy the ideas from us and you're going to print them.

582
01:00:51,390 --> 01:00:56,520
We don't want to be in the material making business any longer. And here I've brought some examples.

583
01:00:57,420 --> 01:01:03,569
You know, that's the way that value systems are talking about totally different business models because they realise

584
01:01:03,570 --> 01:01:10,230
that the power of production is is becoming greater while at the same time information is becoming cheaper.

585
01:01:12,860 --> 01:01:14,429
And that's that's that's interesting.

586
01:01:14,430 --> 01:01:20,300
And many of you will have seen The Matrix films, and you remember that one of the characters doesn't know how to fly a helicopter.

587
01:01:20,310 --> 01:01:25,620
So she asks, Could you please download how to fly this helicopter? I think it's in the matrix.

588
01:01:25,620 --> 01:01:30,609
And can you please download how and then you know takes on a downloading the buffer speed and the matrix

589
01:01:30,610 --> 01:01:36,120
is is is slow but it's almost there and finally it downloads and now she knows how to find this,

590
01:01:36,580 --> 01:01:41,250
this, this, this, this, this, this helicopter.

591
01:01:41,970 --> 01:01:45,300
That's quite amazing. Same thing in Rogue and Rogue One. You saw that?

592
01:01:45,480 --> 01:01:48,780
The robot? No. I mean, you know, how does he know where to go?

593
01:01:48,810 --> 01:01:55,620
He goes in and he plugs in and he downloads it and away. So information is becoming increasingly cheaper as it expands.

594
01:01:57,810 --> 01:02:00,780
Those two things have a big impact on the way that we talk about, in a sense,

595
01:02:00,780 --> 01:02:05,850
the power of the state to be able to make decisions about research and development,

596
01:02:06,120 --> 01:02:10,840
about the way that economies grow or don't grow and things like this.

597
01:02:10,870 --> 01:02:15,540
So in many ways maybe that's talking about globalisation from a different perspective.

598
01:02:15,540 --> 01:02:18,990
You know, it's not about international trade agreements, but it's about this,

599
01:02:19,410 --> 01:02:24,420
this notion of information and production power coming from a different direction.

600
01:02:24,690 --> 01:02:30,600
Now the reason I mention that is because it has a big impact on the way that we talk about power and security or arms control.

601
01:02:31,620 --> 01:02:39,540
So the way that we talk about cyber, the way that we talk about biochem, the way that we talk about robotics is being fundamentally challenged.

602
01:02:41,150 --> 01:02:45,210
And then finally, this relationship between security and defence, you know,

603
01:02:45,390 --> 01:02:51,180
what role do militaries have within this military's complaint that the convergence of security and defence makes their job

604
01:02:51,180 --> 01:02:57,930
more difficult because it thins out what they can do well with issues that are shared by other agencies and departments.

605
01:02:58,380 --> 01:03:08,310
Not only that, but it forces them to take on logics that don't put them at the centre, you know, and that's particularly difficult for them.

606
01:03:08,760 --> 01:03:16,919
So but fundamentally, it poses a problem. It fundamentally poses a problem, as I suggest here,

607
01:03:16,920 --> 01:03:21,959
for all of us in terms of coming to terms with what technology means for society and

608
01:03:21,960 --> 01:03:25,750
fundamentally what it means for the future of war and the way that I've explained it.

609
01:03:25,770 --> 01:03:26,520
Thank you very much.