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It gives me great pleasure to have dinner with Ruddy Milewski,

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who is making a name for himself as an early career researcher in such a grand strategy.

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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.

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What is going to have the opportunity to share that with you without going through the full biography?

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He was someone who studied with his doctorate under the old colleague.

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Great need I say law and a degree of his work is brought off for you.

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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?

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I don't have a contract yet, but the referees are keen to see it out.

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Okay. So next year, early next year. But if you look for there will be a book on this book on this doctrine.

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Essentially what evolution grants to do is I've got the same title,

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I should probably have the same title as even most of the camp for Modern Evolution.

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A Grand Strategic Thought. If you think your grand strategy is you, don't be prepared to be amazed.

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And if you do what it is, then listen and learn because of who you are.

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Well, just to paraphrase, I'm going to say I don't know grandfathers either.

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So we're all in good company. So, yeah, that's the matter of which I'll be speaking.

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Grand strategy, the evolution of it in theory and practice, which means change.

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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,

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which is currently under consideration on all UAP and the second is still in progress with what I'm doing at CCW.

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So there's a lot to cover since we thought the history of the thought alone is about 200 years.

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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.

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So what's the state of grand strategy today?

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It's sexy. People like to talk about grand strategy, but because of this popularity, it is much abused as a term.

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It has too many definitions.

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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.

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And that's not including historical definitions, of which there are probably another four or five major ones.

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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.

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And part of the reason for this is that there's no historical perspective on what grand strategy is.

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There's just been continual assumptions by every scholar of grand strategy on what it should be.

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This has been partly driven by a teleological understanding of grand strategy.

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This is how we understand grand strategy. Therefore, the history of grand strategy, such as we understand it, naturally leads up to this point.

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So it's a sort of purpose driven evolution.

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And ranking high in this teleological understanding are the roles of two men, in particular Basil Little Hart and Edward Me, Earl.

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If anyone's ever mentioning the history of gratitude, it is these two men.

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Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Sometimes both. Usually based on what?

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But this assumes that they are writing in the same context and for the same purpose.

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They weren't. They had different definitions of grand strategy was derived from different concerns, different contexts and so on.

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So they cannot be part of a single evolution.

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But this evolution, or rather these evolutions could, because there are multiple strands of evolution,

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have been unstudied, but they're historically verifiable.

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And what's also verifiable is the importance of context.

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In shaping these interpretations of grand strategy.

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So with this in mind, I guess going to I should be going to talk about the history now,

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the history of grand strategic thought or the use of the term grand stretching goes back to the early 1800s.

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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.

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So what's interesting therefore, is that grand strategy appeared appeared rather soon after its first use in English.

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But I found it was in 1834, so not much more than 20 years after strategy itself was codified.

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But grand strategy comes from French LA Grand Strategy,

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and this was introduced to the English in 1805 at the height of Napoleonic Wars, the Year of Trafalgar and Austerlitz.

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But this idea, la grand strategy, reflected French military thought at the time, which divided military thought into two basic components.

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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.

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And then there's La Grande strategy, which is the actual art of generalship,

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the war of the big battalions, as it's because it's due to this particular structure,

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the grand strategy in the 19th century, what began as a military only concept, it was still poorly defined.

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And there's no surprise there. But and but it was it was military only and this was verifiable.

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There are four interpretations of a grand strategy could be as they're used by various authors in four different ways.

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Three of these arguably starting from the experience of the Napoleonic Wars and from French military thought.

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The first identified grand strategy as manoeuvre.

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It was about getting the army to an advantageous position from which it took,

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from which it could engage the enemy, preferably without undue loss of life.

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And that's something that's fairly little hard to win. Then there's the idea of grand strategy as identifying the decisive point,

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which is something that both Clausewitz and Humani talk about in some detail.

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The third one is the idea of grand strategy as using military force to achieve

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political consequences effectively what we would consider classical thrashing today.

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The fourth interpretation is a product of the American Civil War.

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And it's worth mentioning here that during this time, grass strategy was mostly used by the Americans.

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The British barely used it, so. But the influence of American Civil War.

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What's the term grand strategy into multi theatre military strategy?

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Because at that at that time, without that level of technology, coordinating multiple sizeable armies in multiple theatres was a rather grand task.

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What's interesting is that throughout the entire subsequent history of the evolution of grass roots music thought these four interpretations endured.

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They changed a bit. Some got a bit more metaphorical or figurative.

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But effectively they remained the same, even though the logic underpinning grant structure changed.

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Even though the subject grass started described changed. Which is an interesting point of continuity amongst all the change.

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But clearly most people would not recognise these things as grand strategy today, except maybe ballpark.

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So where does modern grand strategy come from?

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And that's a tricky question because there are multiple standards of modernity, which you can use to judge grand strategy.

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The first one is grand strategy as encompassing more than just the military instrument about non-military forms of power,

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economic, diplomatic, propaganda, so on. These stem from the maritime sphere because maritime strategy almost inevitably

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encompassed non-military instruments itself due to some particular circumstances.

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Those who wrote about maritime strategy at the turn of the 20th century wrote

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about the strategy of powers who are geographically peripheral to Europe,

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or indeed completely beyond Europe. Acting and acting on other continents.

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Because of this, the military instrument did not.

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It was not necessarily the only potent instrument you could buy strategically placed diamonds, for instance, or the seats up here.

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Well, arguably one of the most famous purchases of territory of their time,

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the Louisiana Purchase, an enormous tract of territory just paid for in cash.

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So the military was not necessarily the only potent instrument.

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So going on to particular personalities in what they wrote.

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Mahone did not use the term grand strategy, but it was implied in his broad idea of naval strategy.

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In his view, by his definition, effectively, naval strategy was both strategy and policy working in war and peace.

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It was effectively self-referential in every possible way.

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But he did kind of get the ball rolling on what might be termed a British School of ground strategy,

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which was strengthened by his contemporary Julian Stafford.

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Corbett, who was probably the superior thinker of Corbett, wrote about grand strategy or C ended up calling a major strategy.

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This was an idea which effectively grew out of a study of the Seven Years War,

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studying the seven years where he posited that every war effectively has breaks down to two phases.

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First is a phase where you go to the colonies and fight there, you win there, and then you've achieved everything you wanted.

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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.

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He probably has not accepted that he has lost in the colonies,

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but effectively the purpose of major strategy was to manipulate the boundaries of the war to

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your advantage and disadvantage by opening and closing fronts or entire theatres as necessary.

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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,

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but their likely enemies also had empires of varying global presence.

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Therefore, it was possible to open and close theatres because the enemy was effectively everywhere.

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Moving on from Corbett, but staying in Britain for the moment,

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we go to great strategic thought interwar Britain and this was mostly dominated by two men John Frederick,

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Charles Fuller and Basil Little Hakim of Fuller never really settled on a single idea of grand strategy.

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Indeed he has. He did profess to being uncomfortable with the term strategy in the first place.

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But what comes out of this work was that grand strategy was meant to limit war.

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What's interesting what's interesting here is the shift of emphasis Corbett was talking about to manipulating the boundaries of war,

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not just limiting it, but expanding it as necessary. After the First World War, it was about limitation.

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There's no sense in an expanded war so aggressive, just meant to limit war for the purpose of saving civilisation.

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So saving civilisation was a rather popular topic in those days.

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And the way this would be done would be by avoiding strain on the global economy, not just the national economy, the global economy.

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And Fuller drove this point home when he rhetorically suggested that if Britain

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had had the opportunity to kill 5 million Germans during the First World War,

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it should not take that opportunity because that would weaken the German economy after the war, which would redound badly on the British economy.

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But effectively, Fuller imagined that the way to avoid threatening a global economy was to fight short wars,

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what with elite units, effectively tank armies.

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Basically, the heart had similar ideas, which to some extent you did draw from Fuller.

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He also thought that grand strategy was meant to limit war, but the purpose here was to avoid casualties.

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He himself was a casualty of the first day of the Somme and that stuck in his mind quite a bit.

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But he also want to avoid strain on the national economy, and here we see a less global emphasis.

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It's simply about maintaining your economy in a decent enough state that you can deter war during peacetime.

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And his method of limiting war changed variably over the years.

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It began with air power. He jumped the tanks many times to the British wing warfare, which was the Royal Navy and economic pressure.

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And then he jumped to the to focus on defence as a more powerful instrument as opposed to fronts.

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Now, these were not the only two British thinkers on ground strategy.

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Geoffrey Sargeant was or Geoffrey West was journalist.

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Henry Anthony Sargeant is a pseudonym.

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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.

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So at the height of the First World War and they had a totally different idea of what grand strategy is,

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which isn't surprising given the complete change in context.

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Effectively, their interpretation of grand strategy was about how to organise the nation to wage war effectively.

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I won't go into more detail than that because that actually is a rather dubious conception of grand strategy that it was recognisably.

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So even at the time in reviews. Jumping to the US.

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A different context again will be you'll see different ideas for graph strategy.

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The first you could identify with the U.S. Navy captain, I'd like to say.

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Holloway. Halsted Frost, who wrote about national strategy, which is a well-known synonym now for grand strategy.

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However, he used national strategy in the in the way that the German theorist, military theorist Komar Vanderbilts used,

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which is to say not a separate level of decision making, but rather a nationally specific strategy.

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So as a nationally specific strategy, Frost discussed the use of all instruments of power military,

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economic, diplomatic, political to achieve victory in war.

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He incorporated these because he believed that non-military factors had grown in importance after the Napoleonic wars.

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But despite this, he did reconfirm the primacy of force.

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At the same time, George Mayor and a little later, Edward Nidal came to a different appreciation of grand strategy.

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And here comes a second standard of modernity, because these two men assume that grand strategy operated in both peace and war and peace.

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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.

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And this is one of the more well-known definitions of grass strategy.

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But there are also other notions of graft.

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I just don't time. Implicit notions of grand strategy.

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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,

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they they seem to have assumed, if you assume that graph strategy is about using all the tools of market power.

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They assume that it is circumstantial. There are circumstances when all the tools are necessary.

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There are circumstances where they are not necessary.

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And there are circumstances where they might be counterproductive, which is an interesting nuance which has been lost since.

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And then, of course, there's the airpower proselytiser, such as Billy Mitchell and Alexander to subversive, who in their enthusiasm for airpower,

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have suggested that all of their instruments are unnecessary, which implicitly derides the entire concept of graph strategy.

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Finally, Edward Nidal actually had a second definition of grand strategy as well,

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one which comes out in this correspondence trying to organise a conference on grand strategy in 1942.

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The conference never happened.

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But if you look at the correspondence about the conference, it was effectively about linking military means with political ends.

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Again, just simply strategy or other in the way it was written at the time to connect military studies with political science,

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which at that time had nothing to do with strategy whatsoever.

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Now, after the Second World War, other topics grew in importance, especially nuclear strategy.

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Obviously a rather new idea and a rather significant idea, and then also limited war theory.

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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

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strategy and therefore pushed class strategy largely out of the debate crept in.

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Some people still used it. They didn't talk about.

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And it was during this time that the synonym national strategy became more popular.

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But there are no new major definitions of graph started in this period and no one associated themselves with grand strategy.

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George Kennan, for instance, never used the term grand strategy.

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And actually in 1946 at the National War College in DC,

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he had been fielding the question about grand strategy, and even then he didn't use the term grand strategy.

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And also Bernard Brody, well known as a nuclear strategist and general strategic thinker, also disapproved of grand strategy.

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However, Brody Brody also Henry Kissinger employed the term national strategy.

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But this is seems to be arguably in Vondra Goltz meaning of not only specific strategy.

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But in the mid seventies, early mid seventies, grass gradually re-emerged.

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There are certain contextual pressures, including the Vietnam War and the failure of the Vietnam War,

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which led to a recognition that throughout history studies had to book to think of big ideas again.

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And Grand Strategy was one of the concepts that stepped forward to take the place

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there of strategic culture also carried and and geopolitics military bands.

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But these again were different interpretations constructed from what came before and also from each other.

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But John Collins in 7172 wrote the first American volume on Grand Strategy,

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in which he posited that grand strategy was effectively a post Clausewitz in search for security.

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He thought that the notion of grand strategy in fact debunked Clausewitz in the Clausewitz and idea of strategy.

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Edward Luttwak of course, during this time, wrote and published his book,

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The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, in which he used grand strategy effectively as military statecraft.

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He was concerned about the political utility of force, which isn't a surprise,

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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.

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He still is still considered a grass dragon who remained fundamentally military.

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It was the highest level of strategy and where all non-military instruments did influence strategy.

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But they themselves were not actually a part of grand strategy.

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Barry Posen also posited a rather well-known definition that is effectively a

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multi-level concept to achieve security multi-level in that it encompasses tactics,

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operations, doctrine, strategy, even foreign policy, and also not just military, but economic, political tools and so on.

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So it was effectively an unlimited concept, not helped by his use of the word security, which itself ballooned in meaning.

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But it was the fact that we have unlimited concept in every single dimension.

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So it's hard to see how that concept would be useful. Now, Paul Kennedy.

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Propose the rather unique interpretation of grand strategy,

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one which could be seen actually as a sort of culmination of the British School of gratitude in.

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He defined strategy as of a long term concept whose purpose was the husband.

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National strength over the state's entire lifetime is possible.

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It was. And here's another standard of modernity. It's moderated policy.

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It managed policy. It was no longer subservient to policy.

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And the continuity here between Kennedy and the previous such little heart was a little hard in particular to want to limit war,

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but never recognise that sometimes policy might demand escalation of war.

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Kennedy arguably solves the problem by placing grand strategy above policy.

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Therefore, grand strategy moderates policy to moderate war. In a post-Cold War era, grass roots are became even more popular.

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Both primary purpose became prescriptive.

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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.

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Because of this, most grass strategy starts above the policy level.

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Effectively, it made the jump from instrumental logic to explanatory logic.

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It became ideology explaining who we are in the world, what our purpose is in the world.

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But an arguably why? Why do we want to do that or be that way?

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But that's about it. But when you talk about ideology, you can't say anything useful.

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That said, John, those guys did propose a new definition of grass stretching this time.

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Now, on the face of it, it's a reasonable this seems a reasonable definition.

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We calculate a relationship of means alone against large ones.

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But if you read around it, it's basically multi theatre statecraft.

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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,

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which keeps the expansiveness of grant strategy but reduces it technically to a type of decision making.

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So what are the implications of this history, of this evolution?

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First, the history of gratitude is a history of unexamined assumptions.

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People simply assume this is all graph study should be.

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Therefore, that is what it is without ever engaging with past definitions of grand strategy,

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or indeed with even with contemporary definitions of grand strategy. And this this has occurred in multiple disciplines.

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So there's been a resultant muddle in the meaning of grand strategy.

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So the strategy and arguably also strategy itself has tended to become universal instrumental logic,

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if not actually explanatory logic, but without any subject to anchor it.

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So certain assumptions. And I was talking with Rob about this at lunch.

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Certain assumptions that underpinned classical strategy and certain classical definitions of the graph strategy no longer apply or seem not to.

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So as I said, I don't know, I just I'm agnostic about the term.

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So arguably it might be a worthless concept, worthless term, but it does admittedly raise one important question at least one.

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And this goes back to the first standard of modernity about encompassing also non-military instruments.

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And that questions how does military power actually interact with non-military forms of power?

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So many grass roots scholars accept this definition, but they don't actually examine this interaction,

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which is a curious gap in the literature that has persisted for a century.

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So to go on quickly to the practice. My idea here was to take certain of the definitions.

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Surprisingly, a good example of this. Britain opened and closed fronts and entire theatres in Africa,

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in the Middle East and Southern Europe and southeastern Europe before finally escalating in France.

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So it actually follows Corbett's formula pretty closely.

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So if you if you look at what this practice reveals, obviously the importance of the power of shipping logistics,

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which as a maritime strategist you would expect from port but also of the manipulation of the boundary border is not a unilateral act.

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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.

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And like all strategy, is a balancing act between policy and politics at home and tactics and operations abroad.

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Sometimes politics might demand an expansion which tactics cannot provide.

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Sometimes, sometimes tactics demands expansion, which policy does not like.

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Moreover, and finally, it requires an understanding of how disparate theatres and concerns indirectly relate to one another.

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So again, we come back to multiple theatre strategy. The second case of structure and practice is Fuller's first definition strategy.

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Now, what's interesting here is that Fuller's first definition was unique,

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completely unique among all definitions of grand strategy, past and present, and that it was a piece type only concept.

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As soon as war started, grass strategy ended and effectively set the ground strategy was defence planning.

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So that seems like a worthwhile lens through which to look at Interwar Britain.

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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.

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First is the immediate post-war disarmament, which everyone would expect.

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But early twenties Britain realises that it's gone a bit too far down that road.

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And so three arms ordered so that it could at least match imperial commitments more or less.

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Then comes the Treaty of Locarno and what kind of spirit?

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So finally, we have peace in Europe and at least all sorts of disarmament nonsense, but all falls flat.

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So there's rearmament, and then Chamberlain comes to power.

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So even though there's still rearmament, it's it's more for the purposes of appeasement,

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of deterrence and limited liability, which is to say no army on the continent.

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So if you look at what this seems to mean in practice. Fuller's definition is implausibly technocratic.

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It fails to account for politics because if you go back to the phases.

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All these phases we're covering effectively by politics. Politics changed.

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Threat assessments changed because of politics. Therefore, there was more efforts to prepare a or not.

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But by being technocratic, Fuller glosses over all those difficulties.

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Moreover, the role of individuals, especially in creating defence systems.

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Is significant. And a good example of this would be Hugh Dowding,

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who not entirely singlehandedly created the defensive system that saved the day during the Battle of Britain.

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Hugh Dowding wasn't there. Britain probably wouldn't have had that air defence system.

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And thirdly, and related to the first point, the character of peace can change.

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Peace is malleable because it is a product of politics.

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And the malleability of peace itself influences defence planning and policy.

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And I don't you have conclusion beyond that. So at the end.