Now I prefer that you should be doing research with Prospect.
Macaulay, come to University of York, where he's a mathematical physicist.
The more important literary part about that, it's the two of them around you, but has previously worked in a number of institutions,
including the other place, Durham, here in Sheffield, which is a publishing house.
It's good. Shepherd is the best and although there is some cheating by reading this book,
some, he has works with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and historians as well.
So even historians can be involved in mathematics on it,
because I'm trying to write about the relentless logic of mathematics as opposed to human decision making.
So I'm sitting here for you say no, because all the talk on construction, on symmetry, in combat.
Yeah, well, thank you very much and thanks for inviting me. Yeah, it was great collaboration.
I'm a mathematician in my day job because I talk about Ian and Chris,
the historians at York St John University, that we actually went pretty well together.
On the whole, they're interested in numbers and quantifying answers to questions, and I'm interested in military history.
The one way it doesn't work is that my talk is produced using latex.
Imagine PowerPoint. So actually there's going to be a disjunct between the talk where I switch to the history.
In fact, we normally give this talk in combinations of two or three of us, so I'll try to talk through the material,
which is principally Chris's events, and especially when we get to the Vietnam history.
Well, we'll get to ask you questions, but if I fall off and refer them back and onwards to in the original conception in this case,
was to say, well, what are the historical data?
Tell us about the nature of air power, air combat, and in particular about the nature of concentration in combat.
I'll talk about the embodiment of this word concentration and principles in war.
It's a slightly later stage. But first of all, I'm going to tell you something of the maths and the way that we play with the data.
Now, people don't mind math jokes,
so I would characterise it as high school math and I think it's perfectly reasonable for you not to like what I'm about to do for you.
50 minutes. If you really don't like equations, shut your eyes and see if you get something out of what I say.
And there are two points that which I might then tell you broken. And of course you might discover again after that the latter stages of the talk.
We'll try to tease out what the implications are, what we will have discovered from the data.
Okay. So we're not going to go into this line when you go in with some prejudices and, well, thinking about asking a lot of questions,
a natural assumption might be to tell you that the fighting strength of the force is in some way a
product of the number of units and say what you mean by unit and the effectiveness of those units.
Of course, the original, thought provoking alternative also no more for them at this point is Manchester's famous Square Law,
written down by Manchester in 19 1314 in a series of articles in Engineering magazine.
And this is where I want you to start from here. I want to remind you, I'll tell you what Manchester is all about.
And what he's trying to do is to understand the way in which the dynamics of combat might have changed as we go into the First World War.
And he says, well, what would happen if you had a situation in which each side could cause its opponents losses in proportion to their own numbers?
That seems an innocuous assumption, but actually it has significant implications.
So first of all, let's just think about what it might be true. What that says is that effectively both sides have a target rich environment.
Both sides find it easy to acquire targets. In that circumstance?
Well, if you know that high level calculus, you know, so I've written down here a rate of change,
which is a little change in green numbers divided by a little change in time.
And I've said that it's proportional to red numbers, capital R, with constant proportionality being a lower case constant for this purpose, this law.
If I divide that equation by the analogous right, then what I get is something that you might call the loss ratio in the casualty exchange ratio.
And it's that it matters as well is proportional to the force ratio.
And the trick you perform is to add up all the small changes in red and green numbers over the course of the battle.
And you discover something which has important and counterintuitive implications, which is that the difference between,
uh, for each side, it's individual effectiveness multiplied by the square of its units is constant.
That implies what Lanchester call the square law, because what it does is tell you how to combine numbers with effectiveness.
And there are two messages. The first is that numbers win.
So suppose there were twice as many events as Green's, but Green is three times as individually effective.
But what's happening is that the two get squared in this square or to square this form, which being three.
The other thing which is slightly less well known is that concentration is good.
So it was meant to divide its forces. So then you have equal numbers of red, white and green.
You know, green is three times the active green transpose red. And in fact,
green has enough force left over to beat the remaining half of the red force
easily and to finish off with about 60% of its original numbers remaining.
So essentially you could ask why it was such a simple model have at least some longevity.
One answer is because it confirms some prejudices and not just to set this alongside more easy and natural assumptions which do accord
with our first assumption that perhaps fighting strength is proportional to the product's simple product with effectiveness and numbers.
And he noted that if you have what we called ancient warfare, so the same numbers engaged on both sides,
or if you had effectively his model in fire, but with the aiming not very good and important some density of opposing units.
Either way, what happens is that the ratio of green losses to red losses is then constant
and the outcome of that is that you have what's called Manchester's linear.
The difference between effectiveness and numbers, not the numbers squared, is constant.
Now you can mix the two up. So this goes back to my judgement in 1962.
And so you said suppose Green's attacking and Red's defending so that red then
I can aim its fire but green can't and it's fires affected in proportion.
Some density then the outcome actually is that this is the conserved quantity is linear in red numbers, quadratic square in green numbers.
And the upshot is that green benefits more from numbers and concentration.
But you know, just an extra half turning up. That means that green means it's individual effectiveness is twice as great.
Or is initial numbers be two times as great as it would have done in a symmetrical situation?
Now summarise the slide by saying red in such circumstances has the defender's advantage.
And so we're going to use models analogous to this for generalising to Internet and returning data and see what we can find.
And this is the sort of assumption that an engineer would typically like.
What we've got is a scaling or the assumption that each size losses scale in some way with both their own and their opponents numbers.
And for that model, you could again divide, rearrange and sum up all the little increments.
That's called integrating and find that the importance of numbers and concentration for each side is captured by a single number.
I've written about numbers removed from red and green groups.
I'll call them the exponents, and the values of those numbers capture the tactical implications of the gross model.
In particular,
Green should concentrate its force if its exponent is bigger than one for the square ball it was two and it should actually divide its force.
If karma were found to be less than one further to the extent to which the exponent try symmetric, they will be equal one side or another.
The defender's advantage. Well,
often we talk not about spiritual progress of the battle of about the casualty exchange ratio or loss ratio and how it depends on the force ratio.
In this model, the casualty exchange ratio has over D also reached a little D as a small change in the small change in G divided by 14
because the ratio of the incremental losses is in some way dependent on red numbers and green numbers in the linear law,
you know, gamma to exponents on one. And then the casualty exchange ratio does not depend on numbers at all.
If the two explosions are two, then the casualty exchange ratio is proportional to the force ratio.
If you have the kind of asymmetry I talked about, then you would have that the casualty exchange ratio is 40 to 1 over.
In this case, three numbers, but more broadly, one over some measure of the number of units involved in the fight.
So John Gordon,
who is kind of the last great advocate of a massive ad campaign and behind the ads to fund the campaign of the first Mesopotamian punitive expedition,
said this. He said dependence with the casualty exchange ratio on the force ratio is not linear, it's exponential.
And I'm afraid that's the kind of use of exponential that people who don't know math should avoid.
He cites a 1970 study of Korea in World War Two, which I read later, and it's absolute rubbish.
His analysis of that in Fairbanks. Okay, now if you shut your eyes because of the equations, you might try opening them again.
Now, because I'm going to show you some plots of data and your opinion is almost as good as anybody's.
What I've done there is for the Battle of Britain to plot.
Actually, the logarithms have a detail that doesn't match up to your point of view and the casualty exchange ratio against the force ratio.
So if you believe in the swindle,
you have to convince yourself that the best explanation of that data is yet a straightforward diagonal line going from bottom left to top right.
And if you believe that and as a force planner, you wanted to make decisions on the basis of that,
I would say you would go very wrong and so would the statistical tests.
Do the same for the Pacific Air War, 1942.
To fight here on God's green is the Americans, ours, the Japanese.
Once again, you have to believe if you believe in the all that there is a diagonal line explaining a high proportion of that data, that fortune.
But it actually explains some of the R-squared is less than 5% for both of these plots, which is each data point is the result of a battle.
Yeah. Okay. So Battle of Britain is today's Pacific Air War.
It's sometimes day, sometimes it's periods of two or three days.
It's individual engagements, things. In this case, this is carrier engagements typically.
And there are a lot of something to do with aggregation of data, which I'm not going to have time to go into or talk with the appropriate audience,
but I can talk to anybody who's interested about what's really going on with the aggregation of data.
Looking at situations like this warden's dataset is actually months worth of data from Korea,
and once again, you have to be able to say a diagonal line. Well, maybe after last square, this next game is still, well, less than 10%.
So let me do something else. Now that me look at loss ratios again sources this time for the Battle of Britain.
That's a slightly better fit this time is this time I need if I believe that there is some asymmetry in this data,
I need to believe that that's a diagonal line down from top left to bottom. Right.
So I first up slightly differently so that I'm looking for exactly the same thing
and then a diagonal line from top left to right x just under 20% of the data.
Now, if you're used to statistical tests, you'll know this in medical situations,
you be quiet with a very small portion of the ask when explained, and you would believe above all in this number here, which is that okay?
At its simplest, it's the probability that you could have got a trend like that if actually if the
data were entirely randomly distributed without any such trap for the Pacific War,
it's slightly better this time, actually. A diagonal line top left to bottom right explains 30% of the variation.
You can't really do anything with the Korean case here that these months worth of data that Wharton is quoting now,
not good enough for us to do anything sensible. Before I could give you the plot of the through the same sort of trend that does not tell you
much the better things to do here is to ask what are the exponents for these various campaigns?
So here is the final score. Remember I said we can increase a number to reach five,
which I claim captures the tactical conditions which applied to the campaign for the Battle of Britain.
The Germans exponent is 1.3, so that says they do well out of concentrating my numbers for the Royal Air Force,
it's actually slightly less than one and one subtlety of the data aggregation issues.
Is that to the extent to which you are aggregating individual engagements in this take in this game?
So to some extent the news, to a greater extent, if you put together larger periods,
what you're doing is you're pushing these numbers towards war, so you're masking the effect.
But of course, the reverse of that is that if you observe any effects at all, sort of any effect at all.
So 1.3, the confidence interval is about 41 either way, and the same for the British.
And if you have any effect at all, then probably the true effect is greater than this.
For the Pacific Air War, Japanese come out slightly less than one, the Americans at 1.3.
For Korea, obviously, I don't really believe that 0.1 for the Koreans that the confidence intervals are much,
much worse because of the extreme aggregation that's going on in this.
And this takes us to the water users. Now, as I said, the differences are understated.
And of course, this is no mere academic question. I'll talk about this in more detail a little bit later.
But let's just remember that actually this was the crucial tactical controversy of the Battle of Britain,
which at the time was should the RAAF squadrons amass into wings of free squadrons or big wings of five or more before engaging?
And that's all other things being equal. Also sort other things.
They're not quite equal or could be as mere concentration of numbers advantageous for the RAAF equivalent.
Is the RAAF exponent bigger and more concern? No, it isn't so.
It's not so that this this this is potentially an important question.
Let's find out who could look at the data from Vietnam. This time we're going to look at the data from Rolling Thunder from 1960 568,
looking at a much wider level of data that we have from the previous campaigns.
What we have is real engagement level of data.
So individual engagements typically between single figures, typically four or five aircraft at most on each side.
And perhaps the way to frame this group for the Manchester model was to say, well,
what we really want to know is, does a sortie tend to lead to a kill, a loss or neither?
So the effective use of your resources,
civilians in sending planes up to do something to the enemy without getting something done for them, despite getting them to do so.
Now, this one, I got very nervous because even more timely than the Rolling Thunder data, which I haven't got previously.
And as I said, and I think finger hovering over the bottom, I would I suppose being a proper scientist could change my normal mathematical physics
life in that the results of the analysis had become immediately to make contact with us,
and then we would have to give up much of it. But I'm standing here today, so there's a effect.
In fact, it confirms the basic asymmetry that we saw earlier.
What I tried to do is clean up the data a bit.
And for the U.S. forces, I looked at F 1.5 on the sheet for the bombers and Air Force and the fighters, and as you might hope.
When officials sorted the numbers, they tended to cause more Vietnamese North Vietnamese losses.
U.S. bombing numbers tended to cause neither. So the US conclusion was actually pretty much the long history of war that you should construct
strike packages in which your bombers are well supported by good numbers of Air Force.
For the North Vietnamese, well, their sorties tended to cause their own losses.
Now, this is not to say that from the individual effectiveness, it doesn't mean they should never sortie.
It means that the effect of putting numbers together is to accentuate their own losses.
You know, if you send out 20 planes, the message for the North Vietnamese is better,
send them off in five packages of four separately and send them up together.
So the North Vietnamese conclusion is sorties, apparently sorties to disrupt, try to avoid engagement.
And I'll say more than that, more about that in the later sections.
For the moment, let me try and summarise what we've got out of the rather limited data that we have.
If you just look at the course gross data, you might say as a starting hypothesis, e-commerce is just a sack of jewels.
It's random, it's lineal. Of course we know that most of what's going on is not random.
So you have that Rolling Thunder data that you can go down and look at what's happening in every individual engagement from the point of view,
the overall numbers. If we ask, is anything going on, what we see might as well be random, except that to the extent to which it comes from this.
Well, first of all, you must not believe the squiggle does not obey Manchester Square.
But I think it's reasonably safe to say that whilst there might be some lancastrian
advantage in numbers and concentration for the attacker of surface targets.
There is none for the defender. If we did reverse even and I guess my take home message for the military analysts would be to say that combat
is 80% linear and maybe 27 20% asymmetric is not going to win the battle for you if you're outmatched,
but it is at least something to think about. Okay, so at this point, we'll take a woman at break as I attempt to switch over to the first powerful.
I'm not used to Windows eight. How do I minimise that thing? No.
Okay. Not one yet. How did you get that cynical?
And is this going to be a lot more conservative? That's right. Okay.
Okay, great. So let's go back and think about what really to start with.
And for me, there was a nice historical study done that in Manchester thinking about annual fact in 19 3014,
but then publishing his conclusions as a chapter in a book on aircraft in warfare from 1916.
I think that just was a bit forgotten. That's how seriously people always talk about doing it as the first great proponent of strategic power.
But Lanchester has the concept of air superiority and as you can see there in his book, and then of course,
25 years later in the same nation, we had two pilots, the first great purely attritional and admiral.
And in the intervening time, you have 25 years for the RAF to develop its ideas and traditions.
I thought it seemed like rather nice study to go back to the gathering of papers and trying to look at how
the Orient formed its conceptions of what it had to do in the 20 years prior to the Battle of Britain.
And in fact, a key figure here is only fuller. So you may remember Fuller became out of the matter and was decisive.
And I that probably my favourite of his works is actually a 1926 book called Foundations of the Science of War.
There's all sorts of interesting stuff in it, but he frames it in this mad, cultish, mystical.
So but he wrote down some principles of war in 1960, and it was amazing the extent to which the various services adopted them quickly.
That's a minute. But let me say something about some things that you mentioned, the foundations of the science of war.
He was a friend of Manchester's and also decentralised.
So in the symmetrical aim fire model, the force of 50,000 will match to forces of 30,040 thousand reaching them sequentially.
And as he puts it, kind of ships a canal, for example, going to the bottom, not as an act of God, but as an act of mathematical certainty.
It's also true in Manchester mobiles that Manchester 85, when it's an outnumbered force, suffers an accelerating rate of loss.
One of the copious notes on that that's important. Important is that so far he's the only person writing in that time who understands.
He makes the point that the implication of Manchester's more is the concentration is no longer about mass.
It's about concentrating firepower. So if you have long range aiming weapons which give you the conditions of Manchester's war,
that everybody can find a target, then if a long range, we don't have to be together.
And of course, in the first place I saw this written down was by the Captain Warren Harding in the Naval Review in 1910,
who makes the point in the context of naval concentration that as gun range increases,
as it was doing rapidly at that time, actually concentration becomes a matter of geometry rather than of mass.
I guess, come to think of it like military history, another example would be to think of the two opposing conceptions of mass in Napoleonic
wars for the IS column for Wellington aligned with Fight for African Advance.
That's interesting. But anyway, so for those principles down the ways they went and first of all,
the field service regulations in Britain and also rather rapidly in the States,
straight from there into the operations of the first operations manual of the Royal Air Force.
The Royal Air Force set up Staff College Andover, which came with essentially the same series of lectures for 20 years.
And one other encounters, Tommy Davis people, is coming.
Churchill has obviously been working through the same archives we have, but they didn't really seem terribly interested in ideas.
From the outside, it was more about entrenched, entrenching and being themselves out of position on how to use aircraft.
And of course, the usual discussion is about the use of the former, but actually there was a lot said about the use of fighters tactically.
Mallory Theorising About what, in 1929, for example,
and this reaches its culmination might for us in the lectures in 1939 and was enforced on collection.
And it's clear that I haven't quite decided what to do.
So you have wing commander Abbey Ellwood saying the ultimate aim of fighters is to stop enemy attacks.
Good to do this. They must obviously intercept and engage enemy bombers, if possible, before they reach their objectives.
Okay, good. But defenders might face multiple incoming raids against different targets.
How should we respond? An element says you should avoid nibbling at any every enemy formation,
as opposed to bringing maximum force to bear on certain raids with the objective of destroying them utterly.
Now, he doesn't say why that's what he thinks you should do.
And there's clearly at least tension with his previously stated aim of disrupting said enemy raids.
I'm so we find ourselves approaching the Battle of Britain as the dazzling map.
So you had 11 groups down here commanded by Kick-off and 12 group here.
Come on, the boys, preferably Mallory. And the attack was likely to come from France and Belgium, principally.
But of course, before the war, the conception was very different. The expectation was that the attack would come over the North Sea.
And then your organisation looks a lot more sensible.
This evil 13 group here that's hard to reach, but 12 and 11 and then ten in the rear, which we over in the southwest.
So tragically, Mallory, who is the commander of the group, would have expected to be very involved in the battle before the fall of France.
That's the German view of the situation. And let's have a let's look at the protagonists.
So Hugh Dowling, famous quote, The founding system of the Fight Command.
And Keith Park, the commander of 11th. Very much a pragmatist.
I guess if you don't know the doubting system, there's a lovely paper called The Information System Won the war.
Slightly hubristic, but the information system won the Battle of Britain. It's a reasonable position.
But you have to remember that no other Air Force was correct in 1939 had any such just the only conception of a system.
Radar was a small part of it, but you had radar and then the observer corps voting information.
You had the big votes and then sending the information out to the sector.
So it's a group and sector level that was very much down in the system.
And part was the guy in the 11th group who had to make it work.
And in the back fuming were travelling married in 12 group to the north and of course acting squadron leader Douglas Bonner Duxford at the time.
And they were the people who the maintenance of the big wing the idea that what you
should do is to master your fighters before putting them into action against the enemy.
Paul had a much more difficult situation to face because the Luftwaffe would send out
planes and I suspect they would begin accumulating planes on the ground to overcome.
That would not necessarily presage a raid.
So part had to do with many things and he had to be very sparing with his forces in order to be able to be sure of intercepting,
at least at a small force, every raid as a, I guess,
one way of thinking about it like this you think of Nathan Bedford Forrest smacks in that first of
the most if you come always to both you have to choose between the first and the most and part.
Very definitely chose first. He said in a memo to his squadron commanders,
It's better to have even one squadron of our fighters above the enemy than a wing of three flying up to meet them from beneath.
And I guess the tension between these opposing views began to come out most
when the Luftwaffe to switch this offensive to London on the 7th of September.
Is it usually portrayed as a mistake?
But I didn't really know what I had to do. And you can have to destroy the RDF.
I thought a bit more and you have to destroy things.
Command didn't really know whether that meant destroying the factories or the fields or bringing five command into the skies.
Going to London meant they felt they could be sure of bringing five command into the air.
And the first use of big wings was around this time 11.
We would typically complain that by the time the big win got itself sorted out and ready to attack again and again, he was already going home,
as Peter Townsend puts it, especially not mine, but in the intervening time because airfields had been bombed with bits.
Let me go to the data. So without thinking, it's all about the dates actually.
So you begin by going to look at the data and trying to see if there's any trend in the data, any lack of spatial narrative in the Time series.
In mathematical terms, there is a really but there are actually two phases to the Battle of Britain.
The first more intense and it's absolutely clear the first phase ends on the 15th of September 1940,
which used to be celebrated as Battle of Britain Day.
And by this time, I've been trying to make the military really believed that big wave was effective.
I'll say a bit more about why in a minute. But let me come, first of all, to the infamous AM industry meeting of 17th October 1940.
And if you thought a bit about Lanchester models and you've been through the archives,
then there are all sorts of ironies in what is said in this meeting, because the people clearly not are not as numerous as they need to be.
So it was agreed. Also the mismatch in the minutes that the more we can outnumber the enemy, the more we should shoot them.
Yes, but you've got to think about the exchange ratio. You've got to shoot them down in disproportionately greater numbers.
It's much more economical to put up 100 against 1200 against 112 against hunger.
Yes. But is it better to put the phone up at once or them sequentially and make lots of 12 straight and straight out?
It's not too clear. And that's a lot of this discussion.
And it's clear that, you know, it's infused with this sense that concentration means mass in numbers and part can be found.
It seems to us very hard to make it clear why they're more problematic and parsimonious approach might have been better.
And so, as I said, the analysis of the loss ratios reveals no British advantage.
When large numbers are, we have to engage. In fact,
the reverse and there's an interesting problem that if you've been an analyst and operations research analyst doing this analysis at the time,
you might have reached the reverse conclusions because an overstatement.
So both sides would tend to overstate the number of kills, but they would disproportionately oversleep over time as.
Higher power than one of the total numbers involved.
In other words, the the ratio of claimed kills to numbers engaged actually increased with numbers engaged.
And that false because if they had used claims numbers and done the analysis,
they would actually reach the reverse conclusion that the Army would have been doing better when large numbers of that were up.
Although of course, actually there's no excuse for claiming because the German people shot down,
it landed on the base and then you could check it wasn't actually happening. But they didn't seem to be very quick about doing that.
And there was still the impression that was getting the docs version in 12 group was that bad?
Big Wings had been very effective and they hadn't in the fact they caused more
people to die in 1941 when the matter was taking large quite a sweeps over France,
which again thought they had done well at actually getting shot down in large numbers by the looks of cold desert,
the British rose of flames in the autumn of so aggressive idiots.
And so that's natural Britain. Let me see if I can move on to thirds now.
Would you be able to answer a question? Absolutely. And you ask the question, what was the mechanism by which they're shooting down more planes?
When there's more than that, is it that it's quick to move to the next target, the World War?
They're not shooting down war planes, and they're more than they're not that big, he said.
And the Germans were able to shoot down the bigger wings disproportionately.
Oh, right. Okay. So the Germans had said so in a sense, and the idea of the importance of numbers through the twenties and thirties,
and especially the feebleness of the Ottomans, the fighters meant that you believed that what you had to do was to attack the bombers in,
uh, you got maybe in a line of three or four and go into them sequentially.
The Germans led to the Spanish Civil War very rapidly. The fact that didn't work was part of the reason it wasn't clear enough.
And they switched to using what they could from a perpetually loose force of fighters border.
Actually, it wasn't the same kind of tactic themselves independently. In the end, we in the fall.
And of course the US Navy evolved from similar ideas later on.
But in 1940 and 41, the manuals still said that what you should do is deploy information.
So okay for you, but also larger numbers. And so the RAAF would take these Spitfires over France in formation, the one in nine to be high up over.
They just go straight through, straight through them, go shoot down something on the way straight off.
Yeah. And then spend one pass and go oh maybe 1000 barrels.
Um hmm. Okay.
So moving on from the Battle of Britain, what we want to think about now is American doctrine,
because American doctrine, ever since the war likes to conflate concentration with mass.
It seems to me, especially U.S. Air Force doctrine. So, of course, the American experience in 44, 45 was a bit of a step up over its own territory.
But actually, there was a long history, which was, of course, very different from 1940,
which is that in 1940, Britain was outbuilding Germany in fighters.
Whereas the advantage in materiel of the Allies in 1944 to 45 was absolutely enormous.
Anyway, the American experience led them to set up a strategic air command on the coast of Somalia in 1946.
And this conception of the importance of mass wasn't really dented by their experience in Korea, where B-29s were shot down in large numbers,
they rationalised that it has been due to the rather to the relative technological backwardness of the B-29.
Which meant that they came into the Vietnamese Vietnamese war believing that a massed air campaign
directed to North Vietnam would sap the political will of the North Vietnamese to win the war.
This turned out not to be quite right. The first thing to say, perhaps, is that the North Vietnamese have an integrated air defence system.
The Americans have faced ground fire of all kinds, surface to air missile guns, everything, and lost a lot of bombers,
especially the North Vietnamese, with using apparently outdated planes make 17 some 1921 was much faster than matched country's speed with.
But actually at low levels and with a lot of wing and quite good manoeuvrability.
The older mates were pretty good. They never had a kill ratio.
Anything like is like 1 to 1. The Americans were always ahead, but they could be effective if used, right?
The North Vietnamese had a ground control intercept system which made sure that they could be parsimonious
with their forces and get them into the places where they were needed only and minimally to disrupt.
And what tends to happen as we saw that the US Air Force would have reached the correct conclusion
in thinking that it had to escort its strike packages properly with plenty of air force.
But there was great attritional strain placed on U.S. air forces.
And the fact that the logic of saying that the U.S. Air Force should make sure that it is bombers are properly escort,
it meant that this additional strain is going to be all the greater.
And as I say, they never beat the North Vietnamese Air Force, that particular ratio.
But the North Vietnamese Air Force was never destroyed, was always able to contest attacks on its own airspace.
So here I'm looking more hesitant because I'm wondering whether my colleague in Hollywood
goes for a straight read story and style paper that one commissioner has good points and.
So as we said from Rolling Thunder, at least 1965 to 68, the square law was not going on.
There was clearly some asymmetry in what was happening for the North Vietnamese.
The best thing to do is to sort of passing parsimonious leads to disrupt the F, one and five as well.
It was supersonic in principle, but actually it had rather inferior performance and tended to get shot down a lot.
My grandfather, I think I won't try and perhaps my dad,
if I tried to describe in detail what actually went into US strike packages over North Vietnam.
But you can see here what's going on.
You have things like wild weevils, the chaff plagues, the attempts to try to disrupt the Vietnamese system before the bomb attack.
Bombing packages escorted by Air Force.
So we would say that not only was the ad campaign unsuccessful in terms of achieving American strategic objectives,
the American conception of a mass terror campaign was the right way to defeat the enemy in its homeland.
Failed in this case because of the fear that these air forces ability to continue to challenge and to attract as opposed to is the American forces.
And we would say that politically that contributed to American defeat in Vietnam because it wasn't the major factor.
Certainly contributed. So let me now come on to that vicious civil war that happened in the Balkans three years ago,
where actually surprising echoes of the same kinds of things going on.
We were I was struck by the memoir of Nigel Sharkey Ward.
He's very combative in every sense.
That's a striking echoes of what happened to Punk's approach in 1940 and also parks approach over mortar in 1942 to the conception of how 81 Squadron,
the Sea Harriers Invincible should operate in attempting to prevent Argentinian attacks on a naval task force.
And of course, what happened was that the task force, when in the Falklands found also had missile surface to air missile systems,
which did not work as well as they might have hoped in all cases.
But the point that's generally being made is that you don't necessarily need numbers.
And of course, that remember, the British task force did not have numbers, large numbers, disparity areas.
They had to decide how to use very small numbers effectively and absolutely minimise losses.
So the traditional view of concentration would have been to minimise losses.
You've got to sortie in large numbers. But that wasn't the way it worked.
Usually you could quite happily have just a package of two shot of two scenarios which proved tense enough to disrupt Argentinian attacks,
partly because certainly the Argentinean mirages tended to refuse combat, but often early stage not and involved all.
And then you come on now back to the American experience in the Gulf War in 94, and we get back our old friend, John Warden.
So John Warden, it was a great proponent of the master campaign.
If. Okay. He considered that he was drawing lessons from history, including maps of the Battle of Britain.
But in his book, The Air Campaign,
he doesn't really explain why it is that the British did well in the Battle of Britain without committing their full force.
So he says that typically you don't you should make sure that all your possible sorties are floating.
You should not, you know, keep forces in reserve or keep possibilities in reserve.
Whereas I guess we would say that actually in the Battle of Britain,
we could perceive the matter being rather like a reverse defence of Wellington Waterloo,
trying to keep your forces as a force in being largely out of range of the enemy forces.
And in order to be able to optimise the use against heavy forces by fighting in your
own preferred part of the flight envelope and on your you of your own territory.
So Rawdon, based on his experiences in Vietnam, said, well, no, let's do something different.
Let's try and take out the functionality of the Iraqi state by going straight
through these levels of application through field in military population,
infrastructure, but above all, try to get to the leadership.
And of course, it worked very well, if you recall, but the Iraqi air force did not make any serious attempt to contest its airspace.
We would say that this is not a campaign from which to learn or reinforce the lesson that mass intrinsically is a good thing in tactics.
So in terms of lessons for the near future. Well, as a drone, is it?
No. Let's think about about unmanned combat aerial vehicles and how we might use them optimally.
And you might say, well, they have a live performance, which absolutely does not match that of mankind at the moment.
But if they can be deployed and disrupt and make it difficult for attacking forces to stick to their plans.
If they can somehow begin to approach realising the concept of the missile here.
Nobody remembers that missile here from 1958.
The American conception of the time was perhaps you didn't really need fighters, which could not fight anymore.
What you would do is you send up a big, low flown capsule. It was a.
Something like a dog is certainly subsonic.
Loaded up with missiles and then use those at a distance.
In a sense, the the Tomcat Fenix combination of the seventies is uh, uh, pushing in the same direction.
Then maybe you can certainly reinforce your ability to contested enemy attacks
on your base by using unmanned aerial vehicles and you put a typhoon there.
Something that often strikes us is that attempts to combine roles in a single combat aircraft can be
slightly dangerous in that you really want to put an expensive typhoon where it can get hit by gunfire.
Um. So let me try and draw things together.
We would say that during the Battle of Britain in Vietnam, of course, technology move the balance of forces in the direction of the defence.
You have a genuinely integrated air defence, but information systems became much better than surface to air missiles came into existence.
But the same principle of an economy of force achieved by the public in the Battle of Britain was
certainly manifested by the North Vietnamese encountering the most powerful aircraft in history.
And the American advantage, apparently regained by the massive offensive during the Gulf War,
was effectively another example of architecture of overwhelming force in which the this sort of very slight,
subtle, systemic mathematical example advanced to the defence, did not come close to offsetting the material advantage of the attacking force.
Said the Iraqi Air Force really made no serious attempt to contest the offensive.
But we can certainly say if there were any planes in the sky, a lot of them are already.
But there is no advantage in mere concentration of numbers in single engagements.
And it is certainly still true that U.S. Air Force doctrine, to a large extent, reflects concentration of mass media, saying that's wrong.
We pulled out the primacy of mass. Now, of course, in our days we like to think about warm temperatures always already having changed.
But we would say that in a defensive air battle, well, at some point in the near future, we hope distant future,
the air forces of some of the developed nations might have to face contested air space again,
and the lessons of history might have to be relearned yet again.
And the lesson in 1940, 65, 68, and to that extent 82 is an effective defensive concentration does not depend on mass.
The effective units of concentration can be as small as an individual aircraft.
And the development of tactics and strategy for future air war certainly requires
a clear and detailed understanding of the evolution of the principles of war.
So one can understand how we arrive at the position we have from their inception to the present day.
And, of course, as my historian colleagues would say, has a historical process.
And certainly there are great difficulties from the metaphorical maps interpreted
by people who whose attempts to understand the dynamics of combat goes so far.
But I think there's a great doctrinal emphasis on the offensive in airpower and certainly in the USA.
I guess the way I would say it is for the moment to have ten propositions confirmed.
And he says that was always offensive. Yes, but what should the force do this just trying to frustrate and empower various propositions?
It's not so obvious. And the assumption of symmetry between the forces and the incorporation of reason and power theory,
we think deflects from the need to think about, to conceptualise what defensive power can and should do.
So that.