Jeremy is one of this country's leading and finest historians.
He read history at Queen's Cambridge.
He studied at St John's in Oxford and immersed in Oxford before he became he did his Ph.D. at Durham and became a lecturer at that university.
He became a professor in 1994. He then took the chair at the university in 1996,
where he's been since the words which most often you ask around about Jeremy that come up are not just words prolific in terms of writing,
but also energy and ideas.
And I think that's one of the reasons why I was so determined that we would get you here this evening to give this annual lecture,
because you really do embody an enthusiasm,
a fierce enthusiasm and energy for the subject, which I think is unsurpassed in the profession,
but also ideas across an astonishing range of subjects.
He's published over 100 books and I think is well en route to surpassing Leopold von Rank as 180, allegedly,
not only in the field of military history for which he is well known, of course, but also in geopolitics.
In 18th century English and American history, empires talk cartography and even literature.
A method, a little known book you may not know about Jeremy.
He's written The Politics of James Bond. So there's few things that he's not thought of.
James and converted into really engaging text for us all to enjoy.
Of course, his big contributions,
I think to history and indeed to strategic studies and other subjects have been to reject the technological determinism,
the Kate argument about military history, as if somehow military history could be reduced to crossbows, bayonets and buttons and so on.
He's rejected all that as a causal mechanism and really embraced the idea of diversity within military studies.
It's no good only looking at operational history and tactical history if you want to understand the history of war.
He's also famously rejected a purely Western approach to understanding war, and his range is truly global.
And the detail of that range is quite astonishing for any single human being to remember the details of emperor beauty in China, for example,
how the Persians fought through different centuries and then spent place all that on a historical map,
and then to explain all the gaps in between is really very, very remarkable indeed.
He has a master detail and a great range. He's the editor of several publications, series, even those, and, of course, many, many books of his own.
He's teeming with original ideas, including the state of the art of our profession, which he may be tempted to say something about.
I don't know. And it's not just about the history profession, but about international studies more generally.
He's given us excellent assessments about the role of individual, a friction, bellicosity, revolutions in war,
and his most recent book is On Air Power, which you can get in bookshops, I think immediately if you haven't yet wrote the Full Jeremy collection.
He's also thought very carefully about the future of war and the future strategy and its strategy and war that he will speak on this evening.
Professor Jeremy Flint, it gives me great pleasure. Well, ladies and gentlemen, since I'm on the show before the reception,
I don't want to take up too much time before we have the Shackleton Champagne Oysters and Reclining Nubian slaves or whatever else.
Anyway. Can I first start by making a brief tribute to somebody who is a part of.
I first came to Pembroke as the guest of Piers Marchese.
Piers Marchese. Unless you're elderly, you probably won't recall.
He was the fellow appear in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the senior history fellow.
He's a man who most people treated, I'm afraid, without the credit he deserved.
He was a scholar of the old school. He was rather self-effacing.
And the joke about him. It's always interesting if you're a historian to think about the jokes that he told.
The joke about him was that he used to ask his students whether they wanted to take a special subject because of course,
they didn't want special subjects. They would be gentle and didn't really need much teaching.
But also, the maximum degree of that was a special of what people tended to underplay is that he was a fairly serious scholar.
He wrote a number of very large books at the time at Oxford.
Dons did not write large books, but didn't write any books in the case of many of the historians.
These were ones in which he considered strategy and operational history.
They were highly technical. They showed a mastery of the details of the subject.
He never wrote a textbook. He always wrote monographs, and they were truly excellent books.
He was largely ignored in his lifetime. He's dead now, but he was largely ignored in his lifetime.
But he was a very distinguished scholar. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, he's not got the fame of some of the other people who were here.
But he, in my view, is the best military historian this university of the last hundred years.
I would invite you to read his books on the American War of Independence,
on abercromby on the British strategy in the invasion of Egypt in 1881, on the Mediterranean of Volga.
And you will see a level of insight that was well ahead of this page.
What he suffered from, I'm afraid, apart from the lack of he wasn't a fashionable figure in his era,
but also in particular in the field of military history. He wasn't victorious in the war and society stage.
He suffered too much. And it's a great pity because the level of scholarship he offered was far greater
than that produced by anybody that's ever done work on the war and society for.
I don't know. If I might just briefly make sort of one or two methodological points.
There are all too many lectures of this type in which the speaker comes along and provides you with what he sometimes shoot.
But generally he provides is his interpretation which supposedly unlocks the subject, etc., etc., etc.
War, of course, is far too complex a subject for that, and the history as a whole is far too complex a subject for that.
Any time you ever see a book or a lecture described as definitive, you know there's something seriously wrong with the assessor.
I think with the hubris of the of the person giving you, what I want to do is to offer some ideas.
I would be delighted to hear either in person or subsequently in any format.
People want to offer criticism of them.
I think historians proceed in certain faults in the debate with each other about each other and the past of each other, of the present.
And what I'm offering is a personal view that is it.
It is not intended as definitive. And I am truly troubled by the way in which so many, as it were,
alpha males got into military history to offer supposedly definitive accounts which are allegedly on mortgages.
I'm looking for and the last point, if I might make some comments and I'll host you said it's warm here.
I have to tell you, arriving at the railway station, I felt myself arriving in a really, truly cold place.
And I thought, what on earth I write about brought home. And secondly, the other point, everybody talks about Teutonic efficiency.
Best of my knowledge, the Germans lost both world.
And in fact, if you were to exclude the butchery of people in a selfless act procured in modern time terms,
saying that they haven't actually won a war since 1871.
So I don't think we should be talking about Teutonic efficiency. If we're military historians, it's very opposite.
The German track record was singularly bad and we've covered that up because people are fascinated by Clausewitz, they're fascinated by Moltke.
But on the whole, the Germans actually didn't do terribly well.
So now the question I was asked to speak about modern warfare and modern strategy, and I was thinking,
how do I provide a central image which to me sums up what has been most important about warfare in the last 30 years and the use of the military.
And I, I would like to start by focusing on just such an image.
It's a very famous image on. He made famous and it is probably the single most effective use of force in the last 30 years.
He liked to tell me what they think that might be. Question Time, as you know, he said, I wrote a book on James Bond.
If you got it wrong, I would press a little button here.
I seen the scene in the novel Thunderball repeated in the film.
You will get an electric shock, but because of health and safety can only be one that generally will be shot by a high profile.
Would anybody like to tell me what it is? We have no towns like nowhere.
It didn't produce any strategic victory for outcome.
I didn't know the classic Western obsession was, you know, the answer is the suppression in the Chinese reform movement in 1989.
The most famous image, of course, is of the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square,
the large scale use of force that was actually accompanied by what is much
less well reported with no large scale use of force across China as a whole.
And indeed, the government felt able to use that force because it already knew that the PLA,
People's Liberation Army, it already knew that the PLO was behind it.
Too often force is only used when governments know that the military is behind it.
So, for example, to go to Germany during the 1968 crisis in France, in Paris, because he wants the assurance of the French generals on the you know,
and the implication all made in Germany that they will actually back him if necessary.
China in 1999 captures the significance of military history, the use of force in the modern world,
because, of course, the use of force in China is directed against fellow citizens.
We tend to think of force in terms of power projection against other countries.
We tend to be most comfortable in those in those terms.
It's one in which you might say within the Western tradition, the military has been habituated to thinking that that's normative.
But if we want to really conceptualise the world in terms of the most populous countries,
in terms of where most people live, not quite the same thing, or in terms of just a large number of states.
You would actually of course realise that Western military history is in some respects quite tangential.
I don't think it's without consequence. You know, global perspective does not mean that you say that Western military history is without consequence
because it doesn't mean you necessarily force the world the world's four most populous states,
only one of them, the United States with the third largest population in the world, is a western state.
The other three, China, India and Indonesia all know. And if you look at China, India and Indonesia,
you will be aware that although they have used force to a certain extent against neighbours in practical terms,
they have not engaged in large scale foreign war.
The last large scale foreign war that China engaged in was the Korean War between 1950 and 1953.
Some considerable time ago there was a brief Chinese invasion of India very, very, very limited warfare.
Interestingly enough, for me, the best examples of running polluted water.
That was a brief Chinese attack on Vietnam, not a brilliantly successful one,
although it sent a strategic message to the Soviets that the Chinese were willing to act against one of their proxies.
And that's it. That's it. That's the world in some respects of most populous state.
It is a state where the military is very significant within the power structure,
and it's a state which have, of course, a long history in the 20th century of war.
Indeed, since World War two, the largest war in terms of the number of combatants is, of course, the Chinese civil war of 1946 to 1949.
But other than that, China's out of the picture, which is the use of force for internal control that is most important.
Well, what about India and your closest force number of foreign wars, principally three wars against Pakistan.
It's fought the abovementioned brief war against China.
It's going to be in a number of its neighbours, Sri Lanka, for example, and Nepal.
But all of these have been smaller in terms of the scale of troops deployed and in terms of the intensity of operations,
then the significance of internal affairs in India, if you will, really looking at totemic images of military activity.
The totemic image of military activity would be the storming of the Golden Temple,
the, you know, in order to deal with a Sikh extremist movement, systemic.
So that's a classic example. I always believe in non-PC remarks.
It's a classic. Example of the way in which history is constructed that Indians endlessly wax on about General Dyer.
And I'm sure in 1990 fewer people were killed in that operation than were actually killed in the storming of the Golden Temple.
The one apparently is unacceptable. The other apparently is acceptable.
Woody, back to one side in Indonesia. In Indonesia.
Well, if you come from East Timor or Australia, you will know that Indonesia is not exactly always been benign in its international politics.
And the same thing could be said of the confrontation with Malaysia in 1960 366, or its attempt to overthrow Brunei in by similar sort of law.
But with these days, I think we call them hybrid operations with similar sort of thing in 1962.
But in practical terms, if you were looking at Indonesian military history,
Indonesia is the fourth most populous state in the world, the largest Muslim state, incidentally, by population.
If you were looking at Indonesia, you would have again a focus on internal affairs.
The Indonesian Government having taken part in this struggle against Dutch rule,
which has been very strongly described in the press and taking part in that struggle.
In fact, in practical terms, as a job and movement, they didn't need to use force to suppress opposition,
a reluctance to be removed from Java, particularly in small terms,
the way you see if we use surveys and also of course in western New Guinea,
the tradition of the Indonesians kicking around people in civil war has continued, of course with separatism in Asia.
And the biggest episode in Indonesian military history occurred in 1965 to 1966,
when the army overthrew the nationalist government and suppressed the communist movement.
That sounds all very anodyne, doesn't it? We used to think about when from 20,000 people were killed, you know, think about 200,000 were killed.
That's the largest use of the military by the Indonesians, far more consequential than anything we've ever done to threaten their neighbours.
So one of the things I'm trying to start off by looking at is the way in which
civil warfare is more salient in modern warfare than even if we try to put it,
say, in terms of Western perspective. And we can take that several stages further.
If we were looking, for example, perhaps distribution of population around the world,
roughly two thirds of the world's population lives in south east Southeast Asia.
All of those are areas which have been predominantly characterised by conflict within states rather than inter-state conflict or not.
So there's no conflict between states.
But if you compare, for example, Burma and Thailand, which, for example, fought major wars against each other in the 18th century,
today they have tensions, but they don't fight wars against each other.
They deal with minorities within their own countries but don't actually fight wars against each other and so on and so forth.
Or if you take on, again, on the global scale, the question if you exclude Antarctica, which is the continent, the populated continent in the world,
which has engaged least in state to state warfare, either within that continent or outside that continent since 1940,
although don't total shout at once all of the six continents to choose from.
I'm just going to try to help you. All right. So if I if we put our hands, which stops Asia and Australasia.
Q For Australasia, that's interesting because the Australasia's engaged in World War Two,
they were engaged in Korea, they were engaged in Vietnam, North America, South America, Africa.
Well, the answer is South America.
Since the great Choco war between Paraguay and Bolivia towards us to 95, there's been very little state to state warfare.
There was a little squabble between Brazil and Ecuador in 1940.
Brazil sent troops to Italy in World War Two.
No other Latin American American countries declared war on Germany, including Argentina, eventually in 1945.
But the only other one that sent any troops was Mexico, which sent some planes.
And other than that. Not much warfare since World War two.
I mean, obviously there's the war over the Falklands or Malvinas or whatever you want to call them.
But states like Chile and Argentina, which don't get along with each other, have managed to maintain their differences without fighting.
And yet, if you go to Latin America, you will know that in many respects, Latin America is a heavily militarised continent.
But the point about the militarisation is not to have high spec weaponry.
It is, in fact, to be able to use force at the behest of the state.
And sometimes the state acts at the behest of the military. The two could be coterminous often right wing governments, but sometimes, as in Bolton,
Venezuela or Cuba with governments for the hope that what is shared is the notion that
force can be legitimately exercised by the state and that the legitimate target of people
within the state who can be regarded as in some way not conforming to whatever is the
notion of incorporation of is of whether it is in terms of Latin American decent religion,
whether it's in terms of class, region or political agenda.
Some countries that seem to its in terms of religion.
Now, I've been asked to make some comments about how I see this moving forward.
Let me suggest as follows. I don't know what anybody else knows, but person to reasonable person comments.
Not least because militaries need to actually, in terms of procurement, doctrine and training,
think about the future where a civil society needs to consider how best to fund and support military activities and how best to plan for.
So let me make one or two suggestions. First, I think we are on an astonishing experiment, and I don't think that's a particularly attractive way.
And the experiment is part of a major rise and unprecedented rise in terms of both numbers and rate of the world population.
The if you a malthusian I'm not particularly Malthusian, but if you are about fusion,
you would argue that the salt market, the salt restraining mechanisms of all broken down,
whether the social manner, social habits don't get married until you have land,
or whether they are in terms of biosystems systems, whatever different ways they probably will keep this anyway.
Population is rising very rapidly. We're actually at 7.4 billion at the present moment.
It used to be believed, used to be all of you.
The classic argument is still repeated in liberal circles that as people became more educated,
particularly women became more educated, so family sizes would would fall.
And the result would be that the population would top out at about 9.5 billion by the middle of the century.
The United Nations has now revised these just all projections of projections already that the United Nations
has lost confidence in that and is now anticipating probably 10.5 to 10.75 by the end of the century.
In other words,
what appears to be happening is that the restraints that used to be believed would allow people to limit family growth all becoming less effective,
not least because groups that are more religious, more devout for the better, you won't produce for them, have a higher birth rate.
And these do not seem to be being attenuated. Their practices don't seem to be being attenuated by social change.
Now, whether you think we're going to end up with 9.5 or 10.75 is actually somewhat immaterial.
What we are talking about now is a very significant rise in the world's population with the issues that will arise from that.
Now, again, we don't know what those issues all you care about populations that increase very rapidly without much of a sense of social disorder.
Zambia is a good example of a country whose population has risen very significantly.
Senegal is another one without there being actually significant rates of internal breakdown in social norms or political order.
So it is not the case that necessarily population rise causes chaos.
On the other hand, there are clearly both resource issues, and those resource issues are sometimes more pressing than others.
Water is the most pressing resource issue. There are resource issues, but there are also the question of people's perception,
their belief that they would be better if it wasn't for whichever other group is allegedly taking,
you know, land or water or food or opportunity or, you know, jobs in the state sector or whatever.
And that clearly is an issue of volatility.
I think it's fair to say that the issue that issue of volatility appears to be growing.
We can then assert a series of other factors to the mix.
Number one is the actual sociological shift.
If you would go back to 1850 and in much of the world to the facts, as late as 1950,
a lot of the population lived in areas that were under a degree of hierarchical control.
Social patterns were ones in which it was assumed that the young would be deferential towards their old elders.
There was an assumption that social norms didn't change, etc., etc. These were primarily the case with agrarian societies.
And where a society like this one, as early as 1851, the majority of British people lived in what was once majority English,
and Welsh people lived in what were defined as town or city.
It's fair to say that in many countries, including, for example, many European countries in Eastern Europe,
that change didn't occur to the second half of the 20th century.
And in some places like China at the present moment, the changes occurred at the present moment.
Moving to the towns and the cities appears to have been linked to the breakdown
of pre-existing patterns of of deference and hierarchy that does not again,
meaning the theory that if we don't have chaos,
there is no reason to believe that living in a large city is necessarily going to produce a lawless environment.
On the other hand, the stress and strain can be greater,
not least because the stress and strain could be later greater if there are fewer mechanisms to cope to cope with economic disorder.
I mean, if you want.
Example, where I lived in the 1920s and thirties, people who were poor and unemployed would just go out and it was miserable life for them,
but they would find patches of land and cultivate them and actually put pigs and chickens on them and grow vegetables.
But you can't do that if you're living in the centre of a big city where people do have pigs, of course, and in their backyards in London.
But on the whole, you can't do that in a big city.
Now, one of the aspects of the very local level of geopolitically, therefore, is we have these mega cities Karachi,
King Charles, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Lagos, etc., etc., which are in many senses under relatively limited control.
Karachi, for example, the largest city in Pakistan, not the capital, but the largest city in Pakistan,
is fundamentally run by some political groups which overlap with organised crime and which are grounded in particular ethnic sort of movements,
many of them from particular refugees, from particular areas in India who left during partition in the forties are
the extent to which the government actually controls Karachi is very limited.
Now again, you might say, does this matter? Does this not take us back to where we were before?
Who cares? And you could actually argue that lawlessness is a matter of perception.
I can well recall visiting Australia.
I'm fortunate to work in the Canberra and the archives there and I was sitting on a Sunday
morning reading The Australian and it had a two page spread of Murder Capital Australia.
A gangster had been murdered in Melbourne in broad daylight in the Marriott, and they were telling the shocked readers about,
you know, goings on in Melbourne, including the murder rate over the last five years.
At that point I think I was there in 2004.
Would anybody like to suggest to me how many people have been murdered in Melbourne in the previous five years?
Melbourne as the city of well over a million people. Anybody who had seen anybody else, five but actually was 25.
But nevertheless, you know, that's not the case, let's face it.
I mean, that really is absolutely nothing.
But nevertheless, it caused alarm and despondency. And as we all know, there is a degree to which assumptions it was.
A normative behaviour vary greatly. A murder rate in Johannesburg or Sao Paolo that would create two people who lived in Copenhagen.
The feeling that life was ending as they knew it, and that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrived simultaneously.
So there is a big degree of perception. But again, thinking ahead,
I think it's unlikely that we are going to find it so easy to manage the population rise of the current next
generation as we were able to manage the population rise during the so-called long boom from 1945 to 1973.
And if I might make a point that one of the factors that I've always thought has been
underrated when people have looked at the so-called whatever you want to call it,
the wars of national liberation, whatever you want to call them, and the colonial wars and the imperial wars of the late forties onwards.
I've always thought that people have ignored the actual extent to which population growth in
places like Algeria massively exacerbated the situation from the point of view of those trying to,
you know, control, suppress, suppress dissent.
I think the same is is true. Love is true of the present and likely to be true in the future.
Now, if you look at where population growth is hottest at the present moment, U.N. figures suggest that population growth is highest.
In which continent? Everybody in Africa.
Africa is projected to grow from 1 to 3 billion.
And again, there is much of Africa that is not heavily populated.
There is much of Africa which produces agricultural surpluses.
And indeed, much of the wealth in some places is being generated by producing cash crops to export beef to export elsewhere.
And the beef is flown to Saudi Arabia, for example. You know, flowers and vegetables go from Kenya to Waitrose and so on.
There is the potential to feed more people, but nevertheless,
to move from 1 to 3 billion is, quite frankly, going to be an enormous source of tension,
and not least because of the second issue we need to be thinking about, which is the weakness of modern societies as incorporating mechanisms.
Now, I don't want to imply that you just in the past would necessarily.
Or benign. But I would simply point out to you that modern societies find it very difficult to
actually maintain order if they are dealing with groups that are willing or able,
feel able to mate to, as it were, better behave in accordance with how the governmental system works.
Whether that governmental system is democracy or authoritarian state is less consequential from this point of view.
They just are not willing to accept it because after all,
if you think of democracy as a brutal system that is telling you to do what you don't want to do,
then you might just as much regard it as an illegitimate system, as a microcosm of authoritarian society, as an illegitimate system.
And I think, again, here we have problems and there are different ways you can look at it.
You could say it has always been us, that this hasn't changed with time, but there is no essential perceptual difference.
And it's always been difficult to get people to do what you want.
And you've always needed to decide whether you wanted to wave the stick around or have hearts and minds or a combination of the two.
Dr. Johnson, my favourite political thinker, greatly remarked in the 18th century that men are not hung for stealing horses.
They are hung so that horses may not be stolen.
And that kind of approach to political control is one that, you know, has generally happened across across history.
But there are other ways of looking at this.
You could argue that one of the effects of mass literacy has been to encourage people's sense of unease about their circumstances.
They might have been emboldened. In fact, I know I want to embarrass him by name.
And I know here there is a a member of the a member of this audience whose hobby and a recent hobby, which he only apparently was last five years,
was able to think it was normal to do it because he found other people did this on the web,
was to dress up as an owl and he would set the mood in full bloom.
Now, you know, if you are somebody who is not legal and they may I don't I don't think it's harmful, but I don't know.
And it's not me that does this. But I mean, that that if you if you do something like that, you will know that nobody else does that.
But then if on the web you find that you're part of a virtual community of 20 or 25 that does that,
then you might well regard it as a normal activity.
And this kind of normalisation of what we might regard as rogue activity, whether it's killing people in terrorist atrocities,
whether it's taking part in violence, assault on the nature of the governmental system because it doesn't do what you want to do, etc., etc.
And I was recently slightly badly behaved at the dinner party.
My host and hostess were telling me how marvellous the junior hospital doctors were because they believed in their cause.
And I said, Well, you know, let's go to an abortion clinic,
shoot a few pages and see whether we can beat up some people at night as if, you know, those are not not activities that we should do.
But the point I was trying to point to, I was trying to bring out is that all sorts of people might believe in the cause.
But the idea that your belief or your emotion legitimises your behaviour is
one that is truly troubling and truly dangerous in the political community.
And I actually think it gets more common because of sociological practices in the modern age.
Not only does that put the military, where does it put strategy?
Well, the same thing is to say, first of all, most states of the world,
but we should be looking if we want to understand military activity, we have to look at most states in the world, not atypical states.
In most states in the world, what it means is that the prime task of the military is maintaining order.
If you want to think of a typical military state of the last 50 years, think of Madagascar, Malagasy republic, if you like, of an apparent war.
These are states in which the military play a role, quite a significant role, a more significant role they play in this country.
They are not states which engage in state to state warfare, and they tend therefore to be ignored.
One of the problems, in my view, about the difficulties that has faced Western militaries,
operations in other parts of the world is because they don't understand that the
nature of the military in these states is a question of actually maintaining order.
They don't realise that occupying these states is nothing.
The question is how you then control them.
That is what's going to impress the locals. And if you can't control them, your local governments are terribly impressive.
I would put it to you that the Madagascan army might have done a better job than the Paraguay army might have given it done a better job.
Unit four unit through tirelessly through other means than some of our Western forces in some parts of the world.
So that's one aspect one needs. Think about second aspect.
You shouldn't necessarily assume from the point of view of civil control that the professionalised military,
whatever you call the army of the armed forces, is necessarily more significant than paramilitary forces.
If you look at India, the paramilitary frontier force, for example,
is more important in some respects in controlling dissent in areas like Assam or facing the big Naxalite Rising,
which is going on has been going on for a long time in the reserve in central India,
probably the biggest insurrection in terms of scale numbers, both in the sense of civilians affected and duration.
Again, one that just people just ignore because it's within a state and it doesn't involve foreign troops rather than actually regular use.
And of course, this is true of other countries as well as, you know, the idea that you would have one single military force,
the kind of efficiency we would see rather than a multiplicity of armed forces, reflects our idea of functional functionality,
but not the idea of functionality you might have in fewer authoritarian regimes where
you might deliberately establish an army as opposed to a Revolutionary Guard and army,
as opposed to a National Guard or several different army forces vying against each other.
Because what that does is give more authority to the person or group at the centre.
The Rule of rule house of self in Saudi Arabia until the late Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a classic example.
And of course, then militaries are pretty effective in suppressing internal disorder, the Shia in Iraq in 1991.
They're not fit for purpose. If you're dealing with foreign threats and you say I'm an idiot,
go to war with Iran because he's army, which was perfectly fine for its purpose of internal control.
And indeed, you want to therefore promote people within that system for that political loyalty because they are a member of your clan,
because they've taken part with you in acts of butchery, and therefore you feel you can trust them.
Well, you don't really concerned about whether they understand what logistics means or something like that.
So one's got to think about is the idea that the more you view that the prime purpose of the military will be control internally?
In the case of the European powers,
I think that actually the likelihood is that that is going to be seen on a European scale in the sense that, you know,
the British army or the French army is going to find itself having to deal with sort of fireman duty in the Balkans,
which would be nasty and unpleasant and in fact will be probably presented as internal control within Europe.
I noticed Mr. Juncker this morning is saying that, you know,
the European Union will not allow itself to be derailed by the equivalent of what really happened in Austria.
Well, that may well involve the equivalent of what happens in the United States in the mid-fifties.
They always have a sense in the the first Airborne into Arkansas in order to displace the National Guard and to enforce civil rights.
Luckily, from his point of view, you know, there wasn't any fighting.
If it had been fighting, it would have been different. And that specific point about America is worth bearing in mind.
One of the reasons the Americans downplay the significance of civil control is that since 1865,
there has been very little use of federal troops as opposed to National Guard units,
which are obviously of the state, individual states of federal troops for civil control within the United States.
There have been some as I've said, the airport was sent into Arkansas.
There was no fighting. George H.W. Bush actually sent troops into Los Angeles during the 1992 riots.
He never used them. I think if he had used them, he might have had quite a different reputation, which might have helped.
It might indicate that that might have helped in the 1982 election.
Practicality is that in the United States, where there have been riots, as in Newark or Detroit in the 1960s, Kent State,
it was National Guard units that went to National Guard units that shot fellow citizens because the federal army hasn't done it.
The Americans tend to downplay the significance of that as a potential task,
because often it's the case in the military system when we're thinking about war that we tend to think about the paradigm in power,
the most significant power in the system, that we tend to assume that that sets the norms when it doesn't.
It may well set the norms for the United States role for the United States is, you know,
a culture of pretending to be a country that has no regional separatist movement.
It has, you know, Democrats and Republicans all over the place, even areas which are seen as Democratic or Republican.
The other side usually gets 40% of the vote.
The presidential race is the largest area with the separatist movement, which is in fact, only a tiny one, is not a record.
So, you know, America is very successful from that point of view, but that does not describe most countries.
Most countries don't have that.
And many countries have the problems of the U.S. needing to use force, thinking they need to use force in order to control regional separatism,
which helps them to make force normative within that political structure.
So in the case of India, the world's largest democracy, one can see that in Punjab, in a side of Kashmir, in the case of University of California.
So that's in Northern Ireland and so on and so forth. In some countries you use paramilitaries.
France, for example, has used paramilitaries in Corsica and in the French Basque country rather than the regular army.
Although if you go to France at the moment,
you will notice I was seeing this when several times last year there were quite a lot of French troops on deployments in the French cities,
in places like Paris and Lille. And the same thing is not just true in France or in Belgium.
I noticed Naples the year before last that Berlusconi had sent the of the army onto
the streets in order to reassure citizens that law and order was being maintained,
which in effect was also an attempt politically to make waves for himself,
but also to control law and order and take it out of the hands of local governments in that particular area.
So what one has got, in my view,
is a question about the sustainability of current methods of civil control in the face of large scale population increase,
large scale migration, migration linked to that and also associated resource pressures.
Rob is also asked me though to bring in to that question geopolitics in terms of tensions between states.
I mean, geopolitics is rather interesting. It's like strategy in some respects.
First of all, it is a discourse as much as a analytical description,
but you can use them as analytical descriptions, but they tend to also be discourses,
languages which involve contention and in particular questions of what are and are not reasonable strategies,
reasonable assessments of geopolitical situation.
Now, to me, the most important geopolitical challenge of the last 15 years is the breakdown of the Nixon achievements.
The Nixon achievement was obviously the way in which the Cold War changed direction in the seventies.
We are talking about I mean, basically, if you look at the Cold War in 1960,
it looked really, really serious from the point of view of Western policymakers.
And that was very true.
Policymakers could write things down because they didn't think they were going to be revealed by Mr. Snowden or some Senate committee or whatever.
The assumption that if you look at the you can see this incident, if you're interested.
Even after the heat of Halliburton in the early fire plans for British nuclear submarines,
those nuclear submarine first nuclear submarines didn't come through till the late sixties, but the fire plans were already in place before that.
And the British assumption was that there might well be a Chinese attack on India, a large scale one, not one in 1962.
And the British fire plans that they were going to be firing their intercontinental
ballistic missiles at the pulses through the Himalayas in against advancing Chinese forces.
Classic kind of what Patrick Porter would call classical fear of horns, of Asian horns.
Anyway, the perception at that point was of real seriousness, that the communists have done extremely well, not just in Europe, but also in Asia.
They had taken out of China, they had taken over North Vietnam, had taken over North Korea, and they were going to spread.
Indonesia was moving in the wrong direction. India was weak.
This was extraordinarily dangerous. Well, by 1980, it's all fine.
Absolutely fine. I mean, it doesn't you know, if you're a strategist, being strategist is brutal front, really brutal.
If you want to do the job professionally, most people can't do it. Repression.
So the line of once you toppled the Suharto star regime, it did not matter what happens in Vietnam.
The Americans have got strategic depth of they you know, Indonesia gives you a large area which is pro-EU.
It gives you the oil resources. Vietnam's got something that's got very little to offer a quick.
Once you've got China with Mr. Nixon going off to China,
once you've got China on your side and half the Soviet intercontinental concerns also pointed against
China and the Chinese are willing to try and kick the whatever out of the Vietnamese in 90 and 1979.
It doesn't really matter that you messed up the Vietnam War.
I mean, the problem we've got at the moment in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we don't value.
People often do not because we haven't got a strategic end game that's going to work for us.
The the difference in Vietnam is that the Americans had a strategic end game.
They couldn't really discuss stuff in public, but they did have a strategic engagement was going to work.
Now, what has gone wrong in the last 15 years is, of course, that there has been a china-russia reconciliation,
which means that if the Chinese choose to be difficult in the South or East China Sea,
there is no suggestion that they are going to have to divert military resources, diplomatic strength in order to keep the Russians on the spot.
If the Russians wish to be difficult in the Black Sea or on the Baltic, exactly the same.
That is why we're in a mess. On top of that is because it doesn't work.
It doesn't help that there is an enormous difficulty in funding the Western state policies
and social welfare so that we are all dependent on regular foreign inflows of money.
And of course, that's why today what counts in Asia is significant.
We're looking at creditor nations with American assets.
Obviously, China has a lot, but so also does Taiwan.
If the Chinese were to lean on Taiwan or take over Taiwan, that is really significant in terms of how we cope with American assets.
Compared to that, you know, who cares what happens in Afghanistan?
I remember when I was a student, we had to buy a hidden salary and Hensley would been in British spy foreign policy policy making
invaded occasionally or experts and his career as a distinguished old man of Cambridge politics,
head of John's College. And anyway, he was talking about the Cold War.
And I said to him, you know, doesn't it doesn't matter.
He said, Africa doesn't matter. And I said, don't you fall to the map? And I said, No, pinko doesn't count.
I said, What about the oil? He said, You would buy milk from somebody else and you to want that kind of approach.
Kissinger Of course I have the same approach to South America, you know, famously remarked that he was just pointing towards Antarctica.
We don't necessarily need to go that far.
We don't need to go that far. But to point out that all some areas that are more significant, the values and the geopolitics and politics of that,
it's in part about the prioritisation between differing commitments.
And the difficulty is that you cannot now engage in that prioritisation in public.
Now, I think there's a number of Americans who you will know, if you're an American senior policymaker,
you will know that there are all sorts of very crudely, very crudely.
For years, the Navy has been saying waste of time, focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan.
The key strategic challenge is China. And that's what we ought to focus on.
And obviously, that interpretation has had a lot of pushback, I think it's fair to say, from the other services.
Now, whether you agree with one or the other, that is a problem that to some extent there is a public manifestation of it.
But it is largely a private debate because if you are public going to say, well,
some of these things really don't count, okay, we've lost troops, but it really doesn't count.
That's not the way to make yourself popular.
And one of the difficulties I see it is that policy making at the present moment, educating people in strategic debate is getting harder,
not easier, because people essentially in motion move around that in around their strategic choices.
At the present moment, they say X is really significant.
We can't let this go down. I went to a talk given by the government's chief medical officer, recently closed session talk,
and she was saying the chief threat to Britain was that she'd been very and she was very concerned the government was antibiotics,
antibiotics coming in and breathing resistance.
And she went on like this. And I said to her, you know, what kind of figures are you talking about?
And she told me that she went to the pharmacy, took. Seem a lot to shoot, very worried about 20,000 people dying potentially in Sierra Leone.
I said seem a lot to you and I never want to sound foolish in comparison to the numbers that there.
This is nothing. This is really has nothing.
And, you know, you can't say that sort of thing in public because you see that sort of thing in public.
People think you're an ogre. They think you're an awful person.
And I do feel that at the moment we're in a very difficult situation that we're expecting as a state, as a society.
We expect, for example, the military and police to maintain order in all societies that we don't actually give them the kind of legal,
cultural, intellectual and ideological framework within which they can make the often difficult decisions involved.
And those of you who are British will notice that the police in Britain are finding very many police
officers reluctant to take part in firearms training because they fear that if they shoot somebody,
they will then be hung out to dry, which I think is probably true.
So there's that element of it and there's the element, of course, if you look abroad that the way in which sentiment plays a key role,
I think sentiment, for example, plays a key role in our response to the beer crisis in 2011.
Now, I fear I've used up my hour, but what I want to close over one or two general reflections on the subject,
which Robin asked me if I would like to to make.
Well, these are general reflections.
And as I said, if you go out thinking he's wrong for the following three reasons, that's great, because the purpose of education is not that.
You go out thinking, Oh gosh, he's in Germany, right? He's wrong, but no one is wrong.
So let me let me just make one or two reflections.
First, yes, it is important to look at the global dimension, but one needs to do that carefully.
It doesn't mean that all parts of the world are necessarily of equal significance, nor can one do all of it.
Nor does it mean that one has to prove it to by so many areas by taking a cultural
interpretation of what Patrick Porter is make fun of in his account of what has to be very,
very careful how one does it. But at the present moment, it is necessary.
There is too often a failure to understand other parts of the world, and that matters if we're going to project our force.
It doesn't matter if you know nothing about that gas,
because military affairs is we're not going to be sending our troops there, which is not going to do.
We sent troops there in 1942 because we were worried that the Japanese might have a base of Drager Suarez.
Since that, we're not going to send them. The French aren't going to send in the Americans.
But there are parts of the world where you do have to worry and you need to think about it.
Next, in terms of one of our interests, which is strategy, too much of the work on strategy is work about the strategic thought of strategic thinkers.
This is hopeless. What we have to concentrate on is strategic actors, which is their focus.
And often those are not expressed in terms of full importance of literature, the type of Clausewitz or geometry or the Corvette or whatever.
We need to think much more about the often tangential, episodic way in which we can recover.
That strategic thought often involves looking at military planning, and I think that's important.
Linked to that, at least my first point, of course, almost all the discussion of strategic thinking has been in the of strategic interest
in the West or very crude accounts of strategic thinkers in the Northwest generally.
Now, if you're looking at the last 100 years and there's been a number of books that have come out on strategy recently,
they're interesting books, but I think they're deeply flawed because of that point.
Deeply flawed for those few students as I'm sorry.
And the last point the last point that I would like to make, I think that there is this in a sense loops back to Maxi.
I think that there is an obligation to try and understand the subject.
Marcus sees himself, as you may know, that the reason he was never knocked out about it.
Marcus He himself was in a way obsessed about the fate of his father, his father being a general in no way campaign.
In 1940, he took part of the blame for the failure of the campaign and was disgraced by Churchill and Marcus.
You write a book about his father, Luke, about that campaign was interested in combined operations partly because of that.
And in a way he possibly put it too took it to.
But nevertheless he captured this sense of the trust between the generations.
In my view, one of the reasons why military history is important is not just because war is and the potential of war
and force as a whole of absolutely crucial to Cuban society and to the human society we are making.
But also, it is a trust, you know,
people in the past who have given their lives or risked their lives to think about and to make this to make the world we live in.
It's a trust that we have on us to think about that and to try and understand what they did.
I actually fear very much that the modern academic world, with its obsession with British history,
which you can see both this university I mean, I'm afraid to say in my university, I have no responsibility for this one.
But on the street, the same is also true of my one. I think that has been singularly dangerous from my point of view.
And I also think more generally in terms of civic society, I think the way in which in civic society,
war and force are simply not understood by the vast bulk of people is a deeply
troubling nature of our society and one I fear it's going to cause us great problems,
not just in the future, but in the present as well. Thank you very much.