It gives me great pleasure to have dinner with Ruddy Milewski,
who is making a name for himself as an early career researcher in such a grand strategy.
What's useful about this is he's looking at both the theory and the practice, and we have very few national discussion already in quite some ways.
What is going to have the opportunity to share that with you without going through the full biography?
He was someone who studied with his doctorate under the old colleague.
Great need I say law and a degree of his work is brought off for you.
I would suggest it comes to politics. And what we're looking forward to very much is the new book coming out, which I didn't ask you, what is due out?
I don't have a contract yet, but the referees are keen to see it out.
Okay. So next year, early next year. But if you look for there will be a book on this book on this doctrine.
Essentially what evolution grants to do is I've got the same title,
I should probably have the same title as even most of the camp for Modern Evolution.
A Grand Strategic Thought. If you think your grand strategy is you, don't be prepared to be amazed.
And if you do what it is, then listen and learn because of who you are.
Well, just to paraphrase, I'm going to say I don't know grandfathers either.
So we're all in good company. So, yeah, that's the matter of which I'll be speaking.
Grand strategy, the evolution of it in theory and practice, which means change.
So we'll be talking a lot about the change, and this is effectively based on one and the third book projects, the first being my doctoral work,
which is currently under consideration on all UAP and the second is still in progress with what I'm doing at CCW.
So there's a lot to cover since we thought the history of the thought alone is about 200 years.
So in the presentation, the detail will be a bit superficial, but if you have any questions now, I'll be glad to go into more detail afterwards.
So what's the state of grand strategy today?
It's sexy. People like to talk about grand strategy, but because of this popularity, it is much abused as a term.
It has too many definitions.
There's probably five or six that I can think of off the top of my head that are in use now that I've just been developed in the past 30 years.
And that's not including historical definitions, of which there are probably another four or five major ones.
And frequently it is actually used without that definition, as if the readers are just meant to know which definition author wants to talk about.
And part of the reason for this is that there's no historical perspective on what grand strategy is.
There's just been continual assumptions by every scholar of grand strategy on what it should be.
This has been partly driven by a teleological understanding of grand strategy.
This is how we understand grand strategy. Therefore, the history of grand strategy, such as we understand it, naturally leads up to this point.
So it's a sort of purpose driven evolution.
And ranking high in this teleological understanding are the roles of two men, in particular Basil Little Hart and Edward Me, Earl.
If anyone's ever mentioning the history of gratitude, it is these two men.
Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Sometimes both. Usually based on what?
But this assumes that they are writing in the same context and for the same purpose.
They weren't. They had different definitions of grand strategy was derived from different concerns, different contexts and so on.
So they cannot be part of a single evolution.
But this evolution, or rather these evolutions could, because there are multiple strands of evolution,
have been unstudied, but they're historically verifiable.
And what's also verifiable is the importance of context.
In shaping these interpretations of grand strategy.
So with this in mind, I guess going to I should be going to talk about the history now,
the history of grand strategic thought or the use of the term grand stretching goes back to the early 1800s.
For for a bit of background, the word strategy itself was known in English from about 1800, and it was put in the OED around 1810.
So what's interesting therefore, is that grand strategy appeared appeared rather soon after its first use in English.
But I found it was in 1834, so not much more than 20 years after strategy itself was codified.
But grand strategy comes from French LA Grand Strategy,
and this was introduced to the English in 1805 at the height of Napoleonic Wars, the Year of Trafalgar and Austerlitz.
But this idea, la grand strategy, reflected French military thought at the time, which divided military thought into two basic components.
There was La Petite Gare, which is the war of the partisans, but at least skirmishes who'd be trusted to act on their own and not desert the army.
And then there's La Grande strategy, which is the actual art of generalship,
the war of the big battalions, as it's because it's due to this particular structure,
the grand strategy in the 19th century, what began as a military only concept, it was still poorly defined.
And there's no surprise there. But and but it was it was military only and this was verifiable.
There are four interpretations of a grand strategy could be as they're used by various authors in four different ways.
Three of these arguably starting from the experience of the Napoleonic Wars and from French military thought.
The first identified grand strategy as manoeuvre.
It was about getting the army to an advantageous position from which it took,
from which it could engage the enemy, preferably without undue loss of life.
And that's something that's fairly little hard to win. Then there's the idea of grand strategy as identifying the decisive point,
which is something that both Clausewitz and Humani talk about in some detail.
The third one is the idea of grand strategy as using military force to achieve
political consequences effectively what we would consider classical thrashing today.
The fourth interpretation is a product of the American Civil War.
And it's worth mentioning here that during this time, grass strategy was mostly used by the Americans.
The British barely used it, so. But the influence of American Civil War.
What's the term grand strategy into multi theatre military strategy?
Because at that at that time, without that level of technology, coordinating multiple sizeable armies in multiple theatres was a rather grand task.
What's interesting is that throughout the entire subsequent history of the evolution of grass roots music thought these four interpretations endured.
They changed a bit. Some got a bit more metaphorical or figurative.
But effectively they remained the same, even though the logic underpinning grant structure changed.
Even though the subject grass started described changed. Which is an interesting point of continuity amongst all the change.
But clearly most people would not recognise these things as grand strategy today, except maybe ballpark.
So where does modern grand strategy come from?
And that's a tricky question because there are multiple standards of modernity, which you can use to judge grand strategy.
The first one is grand strategy as encompassing more than just the military instrument about non-military forms of power,
economic, diplomatic, propaganda, so on. These stem from the maritime sphere because maritime strategy almost inevitably
encompassed non-military instruments itself due to some particular circumstances.
Those who wrote about maritime strategy at the turn of the 20th century wrote
about the strategy of powers who are geographically peripheral to Europe,
or indeed completely beyond Europe. Acting and acting on other continents.
Because of this, the military instrument did not.
It was not necessarily the only potent instrument you could buy strategically placed diamonds, for instance, or the seats up here.
Well, arguably one of the most famous purchases of territory of their time,
the Louisiana Purchase, an enormous tract of territory just paid for in cash.
So the military was not necessarily the only potent instrument.
So going on to particular personalities in what they wrote.
Mahone did not use the term grand strategy, but it was implied in his broad idea of naval strategy.
In his view, by his definition, effectively, naval strategy was both strategy and policy working in war and peace.
It was effectively self-referential in every possible way.
But he did kind of get the ball rolling on what might be termed a British School of ground strategy,
which was strengthened by his contemporary Julian Stafford.
Corbett, who was probably the superior thinker of Corbett, wrote about grand strategy or C ended up calling a major strategy.
This was an idea which effectively grew out of a study of the Seven Years War,
studying the seven years where he posited that every war effectively has breaks down to two phases.
First is a phase where you go to the colonies and fight there, you win there, and then you've achieved everything you wanted.
So what you have to do now is go back to the continent, the European continent, and escalate in the main theatre to impose your will on the enemy.
He probably has not accepted that he has lost in the colonies,
but effectively the purpose of major strategy was to manipulate the boundaries of the war to
your advantage and disadvantage by opening and closing fronts or entire theatres as necessary.
But Corbett was quite explicit. This was meant to suit modern imperial conditions, conditions in which not only do the British have a global empire,
but their likely enemies also had empires of varying global presence.
Therefore, it was possible to open and close theatres because the enemy was effectively everywhere.
Moving on from Corbett, but staying in Britain for the moment,
we go to great strategic thought interwar Britain and this was mostly dominated by two men John Frederick,
Charles Fuller and Basil Little Hakim of Fuller never really settled on a single idea of grand strategy.
Indeed he has. He did profess to being uncomfortable with the term strategy in the first place.
But what comes out of this work was that grand strategy was meant to limit war.
What's interesting what's interesting here is the shift of emphasis Corbett was talking about to manipulating the boundaries of war,
not just limiting it, but expanding it as necessary. After the First World War, it was about limitation.
There's no sense in an expanded war so aggressive, just meant to limit war for the purpose of saving civilisation.
So saving civilisation was a rather popular topic in those days.
And the way this would be done would be by avoiding strain on the global economy, not just the national economy, the global economy.
And Fuller drove this point home when he rhetorically suggested that if Britain
had had the opportunity to kill 5 million Germans during the First World War,
it should not take that opportunity because that would weaken the German economy after the war, which would redound badly on the British economy.
But effectively, Fuller imagined that the way to avoid threatening a global economy was to fight short wars,
what with elite units, effectively tank armies.
Basically, the heart had similar ideas, which to some extent you did draw from Fuller.
He also thought that grand strategy was meant to limit war, but the purpose here was to avoid casualties.
He himself was a casualty of the first day of the Somme and that stuck in his mind quite a bit.
But he also want to avoid strain on the national economy, and here we see a less global emphasis.
It's simply about maintaining your economy in a decent enough state that you can deter war during peacetime.
And his method of limiting war changed variably over the years.
It began with air power. He jumped the tanks many times to the British wing warfare, which was the Royal Navy and economic pressure.
And then he jumped to the to focus on defence as a more powerful instrument as opposed to fronts.
Now, these were not the only two British thinkers on ground strategy.
Geoffrey Sargeant was or Geoffrey West was journalist.
Henry Anthony Sargeant is a pseudonym.
I have no idea who that bloke is, but they actually wrote and published the first book dedicated to Grand Strategy, published in 1941 1942.
So at the height of the First World War and they had a totally different idea of what grand strategy is,
which isn't surprising given the complete change in context.
Effectively, their interpretation of grand strategy was about how to organise the nation to wage war effectively.
I won't go into more detail than that because that actually is a rather dubious conception of grand strategy that it was recognisably.
So even at the time in reviews. Jumping to the US.
A different context again will be you'll see different ideas for graph strategy.
The first you could identify with the U.S. Navy captain, I'd like to say.
Holloway. Halsted Frost, who wrote about national strategy, which is a well-known synonym now for grand strategy.
However, he used national strategy in the in the way that the German theorist, military theorist Komar Vanderbilts used,
which is to say not a separate level of decision making, but rather a nationally specific strategy.
So as a nationally specific strategy, Frost discussed the use of all instruments of power military,
economic, diplomatic, political to achieve victory in war.
He incorporated these because he believed that non-military factors had grown in importance after the Napoleonic wars.
But despite this, he did reconfirm the primacy of force.
At the same time, George Mayor and a little later, Edward Nidal came to a different appreciation of grand strategy.
And here comes a second standard of modernity, because these two men assume that grand strategy operated in both peace and war and peace.
It was to deter or otherwise to prevent war. And if war were to occur, it would be to marshal all of the obvious policies to win the war decisively.
And this is one of the more well-known definitions of grass strategy.
But there are also other notions of graft.
I just don't time. Implicit notions of grand strategy.
For instance, the U.S. war planners during a interwar period, they never used the term grand strategy, but in the course of their war planning,
they they seem to have assumed, if you assume that graph strategy is about using all the tools of market power.
They assume that it is circumstantial. There are circumstances when all the tools are necessary.
There are circumstances where they are not necessary.
And there are circumstances where they might be counterproductive, which is an interesting nuance which has been lost since.
And then, of course, there's the airpower proselytiser, such as Billy Mitchell and Alexander to subversive, who in their enthusiasm for airpower,
have suggested that all of their instruments are unnecessary, which implicitly derides the entire concept of graph strategy.
Finally, Edward Nidal actually had a second definition of grand strategy as well,
one which comes out in this correspondence trying to organise a conference on grand strategy in 1942.
The conference never happened.
But if you look at the correspondence about the conference, it was effectively about linking military means with political ends.
Again, just simply strategy or other in the way it was written at the time to connect military studies with political science,
which at that time had nothing to do with strategy whatsoever.
Now, after the Second World War, other topics grew in importance, especially nuclear strategy.
Obviously a rather new idea and a rather significant idea, and then also limited war theory.
I won't go into this into too much detail, but suffice to say that these new concepts usurped many of the old functions of grand
strategy and therefore pushed class strategy largely out of the debate crept in.
Some people still used it. They didn't talk about.
And it was during this time that the synonym national strategy became more popular.
But there are no new major definitions of graph started in this period and no one associated themselves with grand strategy.
George Kennan, for instance, never used the term grand strategy.
And actually in 1946 at the National War College in DC,
he had been fielding the question about grand strategy, and even then he didn't use the term grand strategy.
And also Bernard Brody, well known as a nuclear strategist and general strategic thinker, also disapproved of grand strategy.
However, Brody Brody also Henry Kissinger employed the term national strategy.
But this is seems to be arguably in Vondra Goltz meaning of not only specific strategy.
But in the mid seventies, early mid seventies, grass gradually re-emerged.
There are certain contextual pressures, including the Vietnam War and the failure of the Vietnam War,
which led to a recognition that throughout history studies had to book to think of big ideas again.
And Grand Strategy was one of the concepts that stepped forward to take the place
there of strategic culture also carried and and geopolitics military bands.
But these again were different interpretations constructed from what came before and also from each other.
But John Collins in 7172 wrote the first American volume on Grand Strategy,
in which he posited that grand strategy was effectively a post Clausewitz in search for security.
He thought that the notion of grand strategy in fact debunked Clausewitz in the Clausewitz and idea of strategy.
Edward Luttwak of course, during this time, wrote and published his book,
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, in which he used grand strategy effectively as military statecraft.
He was concerned about the political utility of force, which isn't a surprise,
given that he was right at the time of the Vietnam War, even by the armies of after the scars of Vietnam War began to fade slightly.
He still is still considered a grass dragon who remained fundamentally military.
It was the highest level of strategy and where all non-military instruments did influence strategy.
But they themselves were not actually a part of grand strategy.
Barry Posen also posited a rather well-known definition that is effectively a
multi-level concept to achieve security multi-level in that it encompasses tactics,
operations, doctrine, strategy, even foreign policy, and also not just military, but economic, political tools and so on.
So it was effectively an unlimited concept, not helped by his use of the word security, which itself ballooned in meaning.
But it was the fact that we have unlimited concept in every single dimension.
So it's hard to see how that concept would be useful. Now, Paul Kennedy.
Propose the rather unique interpretation of grand strategy,
one which could be seen actually as a sort of culmination of the British School of gratitude in.
He defined strategy as of a long term concept whose purpose was the husband.
National strength over the state's entire lifetime is possible.
It was. And here's another standard of modernity. It's moderated policy.
It managed policy. It was no longer subservient to policy.
And the continuity here between Kennedy and the previous such little heart was a little hard in particular to want to limit war,
but never recognise that sometimes policy might demand escalation of war.
Kennedy arguably solves the problem by placing grand strategy above policy.
Therefore, grand strategy moderates policy to moderate war. In a post-Cold War era, grass roots are became even more popular.
Both primary purpose became prescriptive.
It was about we should interact with the world this way or this way, with this way and primacy through active engagement and so on.
Because of this, most grass strategy starts above the policy level.
Effectively, it made the jump from instrumental logic to explanatory logic.
It became ideology explaining who we are in the world, what our purpose is in the world.
But an arguably why? Why do we want to do that or be that way?
But that's about it. But when you talk about ideology, you can't say anything useful.
That said, John, those guys did propose a new definition of grass stretching this time.
Now, on the face of it, it's a reasonable this seems a reasonable definition.
We calculate a relationship of means alone against large ones.
But if you read around it, it's basically multi theatre statecraft.
And in the past couple of years, we have seen a new direction in strategic scholarship, such as that by all brands of Peter Leighton,
which keeps the expansiveness of grant strategy but reduces it technically to a type of decision making.
So what are the implications of this history, of this evolution?
First, the history of gratitude is a history of unexamined assumptions.
People simply assume this is all graph study should be.
Therefore, that is what it is without ever engaging with past definitions of grand strategy,
or indeed with even with contemporary definitions of grand strategy. And this this has occurred in multiple disciplines.
So there's been a resultant muddle in the meaning of grand strategy.
So the strategy and arguably also strategy itself has tended to become universal instrumental logic,
if not actually explanatory logic, but without any subject to anchor it.
So certain assumptions. And I was talking with Rob about this at lunch.
Certain assumptions that underpinned classical strategy and certain classical definitions of the graph strategy no longer apply or seem not to.
So as I said, I don't know, I just I'm agnostic about the term.
So arguably it might be a worthless concept, worthless term, but it does admittedly raise one important question at least one.
And this goes back to the first standard of modernity about encompassing also non-military instruments.
And that questions how does military power actually interact with non-military forms of power?
So many grass roots scholars accept this definition, but they don't actually examine this interaction,
which is a curious gap in the literature that has persisted for a century.
So to go on quickly to the practice. My idea here was to take certain of the definitions.
Surprisingly, a good example of this. Britain opened and closed fronts and entire theatres in Africa,
in the Middle East and Southern Europe and southeastern Europe before finally escalating in France.
So it actually follows Corbett's formula pretty closely.
So if you if you look at what this practice reveals, obviously the importance of the power of shipping logistics,
which as a maritime strategist you would expect from port but also of the manipulation of the boundary border is not a unilateral act.
It still obeys the adversarial logic of war, which is to say the enemy will try to manipulate, manipulate that boundary as much as you will.
And like all strategy, is a balancing act between policy and politics at home and tactics and operations abroad.
Sometimes politics might demand an expansion which tactics cannot provide.
Sometimes, sometimes tactics demands expansion, which policy does not like.
Moreover, and finally, it requires an understanding of how disparate theatres and concerns indirectly relate to one another.
So again, we come back to multiple theatre strategy. The second case of structure and practice is Fuller's first definition strategy.
Now, what's interesting here is that Fuller's first definition was unique,
completely unique among all definitions of grand strategy, past and present, and that it was a piece type only concept.
As soon as war started, grass strategy ended and effectively set the ground strategy was defence planning.
So that seems like a worthwhile lens through which to look at Interwar Britain.
And it seems that if you look at the interwar period in detail, Britain's defence efforts seem to fall into up to five phases.
First is the immediate post-war disarmament, which everyone would expect.
But early twenties Britain realises that it's gone a bit too far down that road.
And so three arms ordered so that it could at least match imperial commitments more or less.
Then comes the Treaty of Locarno and what kind of spirit?
So finally, we have peace in Europe and at least all sorts of disarmament nonsense, but all falls flat.
So there's rearmament, and then Chamberlain comes to power.
So even though there's still rearmament, it's it's more for the purposes of appeasement,
of deterrence and limited liability, which is to say no army on the continent.
So if you look at what this seems to mean in practice. Fuller's definition is implausibly technocratic.
It fails to account for politics because if you go back to the phases.
All these phases we're covering effectively by politics. Politics changed.
Threat assessments changed because of politics. Therefore, there was more efforts to prepare a or not.
But by being technocratic, Fuller glosses over all those difficulties.
Moreover, the role of individuals, especially in creating defence systems.
Is significant. And a good example of this would be Hugh Dowding,
who not entirely singlehandedly created the defensive system that saved the day during the Battle of Britain.
Hugh Dowding wasn't there. Britain probably wouldn't have had that air defence system.
And thirdly, and related to the first point, the character of peace can change.
Peace is malleable because it is a product of politics.
And the malleability of peace itself influences defence planning and policy.
And I don't you have conclusion beyond that. So at the end.