I shouldn't have to introduce Rob Johnson.
I'm introducing Rob Johnson, who is known as the director of educational programs and is therefore an entirely familiar face.
Rob's most recent book is On the Afghan War.
And of course, he thinks that he's particularly in Central Asia and in other aspects of British overseas policy.
Well, thank you. His focus today is not.
Past, but future on his platform is planning future war and the graph of mathematical integrity.
Well, thank you. This was not my idea. I shouldn't really be here.
The speaker we had in mind, unfortunately, ten days ago told us that he was unable to come.
And as happens with the change capable program, because we are quite a thin organisation in terms of that.
It felt for me to have to come back to work that's been going on at the moment and I am on difficult terrain,
not least because I trained as historian.
And one thing you learn very quickly as an undergraduate and story and onwards is that you don't tinker with the future.
You don't attempt to make any kind of positive judgements about the future because you are going to lose your reputation pretty quickly.
So this is me sticking my neck out brass necked approach to try and assess and
understand not only not just the trends that people are very fond of to talk about,
but what the caveats and obstacles and problems are with even beginning to assess this particular subject.
Let me start, if I may, with with sort of three vignettes, because I think that illustrates the problem for me very dramatically.
The first is under the heading, essentially terrorism, we have all been very familiar not only with the imagery,
but also the detail of 911 of Bali, of Madrid, with attacks wholly on transport, infrastructures and finance.
And then there's the sort of Mumbai Westgate full of terrorism, which seems to threaten to become ever more frequent.
Look at what happened to Sharm el-Sheikh, for example, three years ago tonight.
There appears to be something of a pattern emerging there of swarm attacks by irregulars who
essentially already resigned themselves to their own destruction and the mass destruction,
essentially, of others. That's one vignette. Then if I can put another mental image in your mind of advocacy by the technologists, the idea that,
for example, in Japan and in the United States at the moment there is research going only to cloaking devices,
almost literally cloaking devices, creating technology that can project forwards by like a data projector of hundreds of small cameras,
which will project forward an image of what is on the back of a vehicle or a person.
So from a distance, it looks as if that person is not even there at all.
No developing system where that could be applied to a main battle tank.
So at least visually, I think the heat signature and one would not actually be able to see the objects that you were looking towards,
because also some of the technology body enhancement is being investigated by organisations
like the Sunlight Dawn who want to find out all of the ways of enhancing of a human being,
human physiology in such a way that we could enhance our endurance, possibly even replace body parts that have been blown away by IEDs and so on.
And even alongside our exoskeletons,
how can we create a structure around that human frame to give it greatest strength and agility than it has at the moment?
I think another one that we're all familiar with this is an on the technology heading is space technology.
People. I know that Virgin, as a group, a corporation,
are on the verge of launching a reusable A-frame that will be able to go to the upper atmosphere on the edge of space.
And ultimately, if we can develop the technology in the right way,
we'll be able to skip the upper atmosphere and make journey times from London to Beijing in the future, perhaps under 2 hours.
Extraordinary phenomenon with all sorts of military potential.
But there's also the absurdity of technology.
And I can't and very tempted to mention to you that piece of technology is being developed in the United States.
It's called Dog. Some of you are familiar with it, but it's a large mechanical horse like object without a head.
It's driven by engine, which is extraordinarily loud, like a giant lawnmower.
It can carry lots of water and ammunition behind a small unit as it approaches in urban spaces.
It goes in so that if you get a bit of fabric for which you need a great deal of ammunition and water normally and medical equipment.
I did sort of impotently point out to people the Taliban already have one of these pieces of technology.
So an American friend of mine. He was astonished and said, I don't believe Afghans will ever have anything approaching this degree of expertise.
I said, yes, it's called a mule. It is grass, it's silent and it goes up mountains.
There's also, of course, the other theme that in the photograph I want to put in your mind before we get underway with this,
which is one of traditional civil wars, as we turn on our televisions in the evening, every evening at the moment, what is.
With images of Syria. But of course, we've also been through a decade of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia.
I mean, I think we're all very familiar things that we familiar, frankly,
to facilities of the the unchanging nature of war, of which we're all very familiar.
On this program, it does seem, doesn't it, that perhaps in as we go into the future, the means and the ways are going to change significantly,
whereas the ends or the nature will somehow remain very familiar, very much the same.
So what am I going to try to do in the time, the half an hour or 40 minutes say that I've got?
Well, try to assess the planning, a future war, hopefully drawing attention to some of these caveats and obstacles and problems that we face.
Well, the sense you got there are three assertions I want to look at. Really. This is this is how an historic means factor with social science.
You know, I'm no longer talk about historical narrative and analysis. I'm not talking about assertions as something something you've done.
To me, the first decision is about is prediction is inherently problematic.
But history can be a very useful guide in asking the right questions and in giving us some useful
experience on which we can then springboard our own analysis of the present and the future.
I think my second session is that the present is also a guide in the same way,
but we still face this problem of what to select from the present or even the recent past.
And I think what a lot, of course we've got, which is something that David Kilcullen,
as recent drawn attention to the difficult difficulty of conceiving, of an era of accelerating change.
How do we manage to understand that from the present?
And the third assumption is that the trends of war appear to be identifiable in some of them in part, or identifiable.
And it might be worth just having a look at some of those and testing those out.
And I should say this is this, you know, discussion. There isn't a PowerPoint presentation.
And even as I came upstairs, someone said to me, kind of have your PowerPoint slides back from today, please.
Yes, he was from North America. All I would say about that is that this is in the spirit of flying kites.
I genuinely I know speakers often say this when they haven't prepared properly.
But I actually believe that genuinely we can exchange a few ideas and test out some thoughts.
So let's start straightaway.
Because what I won't have time to I will not do today is talk about the implications for defence in terms of organisation, decision making structure.
I think that's really such a huge subject. But if we get to your question, answer if that's what you want to discuss.
By all means, let's do so in terms of implications. But I think we should really get to this first three assertions today.
Let's make a set assertion. One Predicting the future is problematic, but history is a sort of guide.
Let's take a look at that. I think it would be true for us to say that changes are very hard to identify at the time.
The period of history. You really are in the flux of history. It's very hard to pick things out.
And often when contemporaries in the past, when they were looking at their own situation, trying to imagine the future,
they always would select the the themes, what they thought about the future based on their own contemporary values and beliefs.
And that's perhaps not surprising, is it? So they could be quite narrow.
They could be their own norms that they thought would be important.
But we do know that we could look at some of those things. We try not to be selective.
We could look back at the past and say, well, let's look at we now know what happened.
We can take a broader view. We could also look at some enduring principles of strategy or international relations in the past and say,
look at how our historical forebears would invoke certain rules of the game of international relations.
For example, if you go back to the 19th century, many of the people in the mid-19th century predicting what it would be like by 1900
were saying there would need to be a balance of power between the great powers.
That was the concept of international relations of the mid-19th century.
So not surprisingly, they made use of it because they had no idea what was coming.
They didn't know that initially what was going to happen. For example, I'm not really talking about power maximisation or security maximisation.
That was all going to come later.
So we should bear that in mind of clearly the past is subject to variable conditions and changes in application technology and dynamics of conflict.
All of those made a difference to any accuracy that the people in the past could try and achieve.
And yet what's so surprising for me is that there were so many bold assertions made in the past, and indeed,
as they're being made in presence about the future, bold assertions that are usually extraordinarily dystopian.
You know, we're facing a world that's going down the tubes.
This Hobbesian world, we're told, is characterised will be characterised by multipolarity.
And why is that fearful? Because it implies the erosion of Western hegemony, increasing legal constraints which will affect operational efficiency.
Military commanders unable to make decisions because they'll be constrained by lawyers.
Population growth at an exponential scale, causing famine, war and disease.
You can almost hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping over the horizon towards us.
Competition for resources leading to war. Fear of the rise of military power of near rivals in the present day.
People fear that the rise of Chinese military power.
You may be flattered to hear that colonels and also another one of related resources running
in our own age is about oil and gas running and people talking about climate change.
Strangely enough, if you go back historically and look at people's projections of future war, many of those themes conceptually were also true.
People were afraid of the future because of its fundamental uncertainty.
And if you look at some of the writers we've had over the last few decades Robert Kaplan,
Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, David Kilcullen is outing himself to this list.
They've all had a pretty bleak view of many aspects of the future.
Martin Van Crutchfield talks about failure of state power being inevitable.
Failed states are going to be a feature of the future. We've been discussing and talking about predicting that for decades,
probably promises in most recent years by Rupert Smith's projections about war amongst the people because of state failure.
So that's what we've got. But in the past, prediction was a contradictory it is today,
because one of the interesting contradictions we're not guessing is if you go to Uppsala University and look at that War and Peace project,
one of things they'll tell you is that we've got confidence. They look at the drivers that cause war.
They say that we've we have predicted they said the next 50 years there's going to be a decline in both major and minor war.
And this has been picked up, of course, famously by Steve Pinker, Andrew Mac over Tigre in Norway.
All of them are pointing to the metrics which suggest there'll be less war by 2050 and certainly by the end of the century.
They've looked at the drivers that they calculate, particularly if you if you interests or population growth,
but particularly the youth bulge, you know, unemployed young men getting themselves engaged in warfare.
The history of conflict really was in a state or a region, has had conflicts in the recent past.
The driver factor is that they are more suggestions that they are more likely to have war in the near future.
So if you were to look at years that a country has been at peace, it is more likely to remain at peace.
This is a general thesis that they've put forward state creation of this kind of violence,
they assume and state consolidation is normally a period of peace.
They argue, I would dispute the story personally. And also they look at poverty and they suggest that poverty is a driver of conflict.
I again, I think that requires some qualification personally. It seems to me that again, historically,
the disparities of wealth and relative deprivation compared with available resources, that seems to be important.
Why is it? I wondered to myself, why these great eminent writers who seem to attract greater attention,
particularly United States, leave out these contradictions?
Is it sensationalism? Is desire to sell books? What is what is really going on?
And I say I went back to have a look at the past and find the same sorts of contradictions exist in the past when people try to imagine the future.
It's clear that contemporaries held on to their values.
The forces and equipment tend to last a lot longer than perhaps they should have done because of some special value they put upon them.
You know, now I'm talking about cavalry.
For example, cavalry as a military force survived a lot longer than perhaps it should have done because of its investment of value,
about its mobility, shock of fact, its flexibility, its ability to operate in depth and so on, so it could find reasons why that should be.
In other words, what I'm suggesting is that techniques become and cultured technology sometimes to becoming cultured as well,
and therefore they're difficult to shift. They also, of course, preferred particular assumptions in the past because it's what they value the most.
Armies, for example, should be set up in a particular fashion.
That's how they think they conceived an army is how to take the structure and format and way of behaving.
And it's hard to move that the maxim that unpalatable truths can be downplayed, but equally that can be sensationalism.
One of my favourite things, Hobbes, for example,
when I'm exhausted or need to read something to entertain me and sees me is to look at invasion scale literature of the late 19th century.
It is extraordinarily hilarious and entertaining. And then you combine that with German spy literature.
British literature about German spies before the First World War. And you find yourself in fits of laughter.
You have a very entertaining Christmas invasion scare literature.
And of course, you know what great science fiction literature is, actually?
We have seen some very and some recent worked on the United States now suggesting that science
fiction grows the Enlightenment literature rather than actually out of invasion sky work.
But I remain that to be open minded about that.
If you look at H.G. Wells, for example, and in fact, all science fiction, of course you realise that nobody written about the future at all.
That's what combined anxieties of the present and the invasion of Martians in War of the Worlds.
It's actually got nothing to do with outer space at all.
It's all expressing fears of the European powers invading the United Kingdom or somehow overnight circumventing the power of the Royal Navy.
No, it's very easy, isn't it, to condemn absurdity in the past and to look at historical figures who've condemned absurd projects.
I haven't got the imagery, or perhaps I should have the pamphlet position, but I know that's not really the done thing.
There is amazing stuff engravings produced in the late 1790s in Britain that imagines French invasion barges coming to England.
And these are huge rockets driven by windmills bristling with cannon and of course but somehow
gets get to the 1820s people were already looking back at 1790s and say this was absurd.
You know how how absurd. Well, what is a military hovercraft if it isn't a raft driven by windmills bristling with cannon?
Equally, in the early 1800s, they were fearful in Britain about hot air balloons.
You know, obviously from the early experiments, the submarine notice coming over to England and dropping bombs out of hot air balloons.
Well, again, I would say, well, what is a Zeppelin in 1915 is if it isn't a hot air balloon dropping bombs.
So some of these things were eventually realised at the time.
They were dismissed as absurd and rantings of lunatics and beating apparently self-evidently wrong.
The difficulty we have, of course, is rather like the people in the past is assessing trends and deciding, you know,
which ones do we regard as having any legs and which pieces of technology or
which techniques appear to be utterly absurd and have no real purchase at all?
And we're not helped by the fact of the sheer variety of complex that we are studying don't make not easy.
I mean, urban terrorism one end through to the potential for a nuclear exchange.
The other. The difficulty I have with a lot of work that's being produced right now is the
assumption is that all wars in the future will look a lot like the ones we're in now.
So lots of people are talking about conflicts. The future will essentially be states waging war against irregular insurgent forces.
And that's, you know, again, not surprising that we've come to those sorts of conclusions, but I think we should go well beyond that.
Let me give an example of what I mean.
And, you know, forgive me that maybe people run with the sort of authors are architects or contributors to this particular document reflecting.
But I'm going to be fairly critical because we can be it's a post piece of work if the United Kingdom future character of conflict documents,
which is around 2009 and before, in other words, a document produced while the conflict in Afghanistan was ongoing, as it is today.
It's driven not just, of course, by this background of what was going on in Afghanistan, but also,
I have to say by personality politics, individuals involved in scheme wants to put themselves forward.
There was also some departmental inputs by departments eager to show that they were worthy.
I won't name them. And there are also some compromises made, not least on the as the document identifies.
Now, I don't say these things just to sort of point the finger at colleagues and say, you know, have certain perhaps they should have done it better.
But I think we should be aware that in the formulation of all documentation of that type,
that is normal documents of doctrine so intensely political, it seems to me.
And if we're going to imagine the future, I think we all have to be just conscious of the fact that that's going to happen.
There's going to be contemporary pressure on the documentation itself.
Let me go further. What are assumptions in the future?
Character of conflict document was that warfare would become more an emphasis on the word, more congested, cluttered, constrained.
No, it seems, you know, not in doubt if you're looking at some of the conflicts going on in the recent experience of Iraq for Western forces,
the conflict was more congested. It's often constrained.
And if you look at, you know, unmanned aerial vehicle sort of operations would say, well, actually, I don't think they've been terribly constrained.
If you look at the fact that there have been missile strikes from UVs in Yemen or Pakistan outside of operational areas.
That was never a constraint. And I don't think, you know, we can say that every battlespace in Afghanistan has been congested or cluttered.
In fact, one of the surprising things about the dust of southern Afghanistan is it's so open.
I mean, there's very little to see. It's the opposite of congested or cluttered.
And I think the other the other words that were used to describe future will be they should be more connected and more contested.
Well, all battlefields and battle spaces are connected and all of them are contested.
That's the point, isn't it? I mean, the idea if it's not contested, it's not a war.
So I was surprised essentially what was going on.
Then what is really expressed as this document is the legitimacy and utility and
value of force nowadays is not really about future cultural conflict at all.
It's about something else, and it's also about the value of allies.
At a time when it was great to the criticism of what the United Kingdom forces were doing and who they were working with.
The criticism, to remind you, was over Iraq that the United Kingdom was too closely aligned to the policy of George W Bush
and was not making independent judgements about its own strategic and national interests.
Now, there are lots of things in this topic which I kind of briefly want to refer to,
because they all are they have some influence on what we do next. And there's a great deal of emphasis on decision.
No surprise that perhaps influenced by our culture of understanding and obeying Clausewitz,
the sort of concepts that there was this emphasis on getting decision.
But it also expresses this document fear, fear of time,
particularly fear that time would run out because there's too little strategic patience amongst governments and that the public,
the British public, to quickly exhaust their reservoir of tolerance of war.
And therefore, if you can get decision, if you have decisive campaign, you avoid this problem, this fear of time.
Of course, what it ignores is that you can achieve effect strategically, militarily, politically, by slow burn, by more protracted policy.
I mean, an erosion of your adversary by by these means is one way.
People are constantly saying to me about the campaign in Afghanistan that actually
hasn't gone very well because this is happening d'expression about the you know,
we've got all the watches and they go all the time. I totally disagree. If you vote in stabilisation, nation building your horizons 30 years out.
So you need time. It's not it's not a shortage of time.
That's the problem. There's no emphasis or very little emphasis in this document on deception, soft effects and other alternative ways.
It's very much about the use of force. It assumes that the decision will always happen on the ground, which I think is very strong,
land based sort of way of approaching a problem, ignoring, for example,
the, you know, what comes out of atomic warfare 1945 is that dropping two atomic bombs
essentially does make a decision for Japan is not about a land invasion at all.
There's a lot of emphasis on threats that are almost exclusively in document about extremist non-state irregulars.
But there is a passing reference to state failure. What that might mean.
I find that curious in light of the fact that even before the document was written in the United Kingdom,
terrorism was coming from within the seven seven bombings.
2005 were from home-grown terrorists.
And indeed, only this week, a newspaper warnings that some jihadists, British jihadis now currently in Syria,
are being encouraged to come back to the United Kingdom to wage a war against an infidel government in the United Kingdom.
Home-grown Terrorism didn't really appear in this document.
There's also a problem of conflation.
There's a blurring of warfare between any wars, conventional and irregular, and those word, hybrid and chaotic, is used.
I think this was just obfuscation of essentially what was an expression of uncertainty.
People didn't know what future was going to look like. So simply called a chaotic could it hybrid.
You can't define it. It's too nebulous. And therefore that that's your expression of uncertainty.
It ignores a lot of things missing in the document internal security, border integrity against a mumbai style attack.
Nothing about cyber or bio warfare, nothing about blockades, selective targeting,
dispersed battle spaces where opportunities like the opportunities afforded by social media,
which David Kilcullen has most recently drawn attention to. And we can talk about another time, if you like.
Most of all, the document expresses fear fear of weaker, less civilised enemies, proxies,
hidden enemy forces with good equipment that break the law of armed conflicts almost seemingly powerless against it.
There's a fear of media, largely because the bad press at the beginning of the Iraq campaign and the uncontrollable wild nature of the world's media.
The 24 hour rolling news. There's also a fear of the future.
By 2039, the document states, the United Kingdom will no longer have the ability to overmatch or even parity over near rivals middle sized powers.
The solutions the document proposes are very, again, very vague reference to mobilising more levers of national power.
Sort of like a sort of total war, kind of hints, I suppose, when actually probably more precise, more calibrated responses might be better.
Why was all this express necessary? I think this has got a lot to do with a Clausewitz and sort of reading going on here, culture sort of view,
if you want, and very specific issues in the context when that document was written.
Now it's true to say. Prediction is necessary.
Policymakers, practitioners have expensive equipment programs, long term training programs to think about.
And they've got to get it roughly right, because the costs and efficiencies are so demanding on them.
But the changing hands war is always conditional, it's context and it evolves.
Things evolving in a conflict. But also we all know that can be these sheer events where you can get a
breakthrough technology or breakthrough technique that will shift pretty quickly,
pretty dramatically. What's going on. We don't have, as of calling them, revolutions in military affairs in recent decades.
But I think that you can go back in history and find these sorts of events pretty readily, and we should be aware that they they happen.
We also might observe in terms of this need for longer term planning and accurate planning,
that business links to defence, not just in the United Kingdom but in in the whole world and in particular Western world.
Business links to defensive are strong, procurement programs are expensive.
There needs to be a good sort of sense of understanding between both sides.
But what I do object to and people who know me well here will know as I do, just this this business jargon.
This is language which has crept in because of this industrial connection.
I know you're familiar with competitive strategies, network centric warfare, full spectrum dominance of text based operations,
and upstream engagement is just a handful of examples, most of which are vacuous and sometimes intrinsically self-contradictory without levers.
Let's let's go to assertion number two. Let's leave the past for a moment and go to assertion to note is that war in the present can indicate trends,
but it's difficult to conceive of accelerating change. Let's start with China.
The overwhelming success of Chinese manufacturing and capital ventures has
allowed China to develop its export economy and engage in rapid urbanisation.
The assumption that falls out of that is that the world will be more multipolar, multi-polar.
And you often hear this expressed, sometimes not always on paper,
but I hear conversations with senior American colleagues who expressed some concern, rising anxiety about this great take off of China.
Ironic, of course, because in the 1950s, the United States wanted China to join the rest of world in the capitalist economy.
But I would argue that the American unipolar moment of the 1990 was never absolute and was pretty short lived even when it was there at all.
And I think it's also we need to bear in mind that the rise of the People's Republic of China, economically speaking,
does not automatically mean the relative economic decline of the West, even those expressed that way.
Let me give you some idea to two things in particular, which I, you know, I would point to make us think about.
One is that the vast population of China who live a standard living, which is below Western standards, could potentially,
with the rising price of food over the next 40 years, arrest the further development of China quite significantly.
And Chinese economists are very exercised by the idea that that might happen and they want to keep the momentum up.
It's also true that most of the dot com growth, much of the world growth is occurring in the Western world at the moment, not in China.
And that if we're to believe McKinsey statistics on this, that projection is that currently global GDP is about $50 trillion,
is going to increase by 2050 to $150 trillion of global GDP,
whereas most of that, well, it's going to go a significant proportion will go to this huge take off in China,
but the majority of that money will remain in the West.
So these people are saying the rise of China threatens the automatic decline of the West in relative terms.
I'm afraid it doesn't seem to agree with some of the statistics being put forward by economists.
None of this is absolute, of course. Another one that always amuses me is that people talk about an ageing population as being a
burden on the globe and the Western world is going to suffer the most with ageing population.
Well, the solution to me is very simple. You make sure you teach everyone over the age of 60 how to do finance based on systems.
Does that make sense to you? Because, of course, they can then be at home making an enormous sum of money through the dot com kind
of phenomenon rather than actually necessarily going to work place in 95 basis.
We have another is an industrial manufacturing mentality about how we use our workforces
and we release of people over the age of 60 as if somehow that no longer productive.
That may not be the case. Actually, an ageing population will always experience may be much more valuable to us than we think.
There is, of course, a reason why this anxiety about China, this is rising military potential will come in.
How many aircraft carriers have been launched by China in the next 12 months?
But it's significant, I think,
and there is enormous ambiguity over China's long term plans because it creates suspicion and there is a regular prediction of a collision,
which you could almost argue has some sort of self-fulfilling prophecy to it.
And I'm conscious that curiosity in front of me here as this phenomenon of the First World War studies,
but at least my own saying this is that from my you know,
my old it was undergraduate Kabir Khan is telling me that actually the more you talk about something as inevitable,
a collision between two countries, the more it seems to happen because you're reinforcing misunderstanding.
It seems to me that the priority in terms of security for the People's Republic of China in the next 30 to
40 years will be domestic security and will potentially be border integrity and not unreasonable assumption.
If you imagine that the China's had to defend its borders vigorously in 1951, 1969, 62, and in 1979 or within the recent post.
And China is now a significant trip to peacekeeping.
And it may be that some rather than seeing a confrontation of Pacific going forward, what we might see, for example,
is what Britain and the United States achieved in the Atlantic from the late 19th century into the early 20th century,
which is closer cooperation and joint working.
There are other aspects of this that some of this assertion about the present and trends we read and which ones we don't.
John, let's move on to I'm to China for a moment, if I may. That's possible.
And we just deal with a couple of the thoughts that come up. One is about legal constraints.
We've mentioned that already. It does seem that there's a huge misunderstanding here about the role of international
law and the role of armed conflicts in future conflicts is not that there will be,
you know, legal handcuffs put on military officers and our officers or naval officers,
but actually more that there's a sort of risk aversion culture which is evolving for which
international law is held up as the sort of the reason why we have this risk aversion.
It was law has been blamed for quite normal political fears about consequences and unwillingness to be engaged in certain issues.
For example, I'll give you a couple examples. PSYOPS or psychological operations, surveillance and targeting, none of which are illegal,
but, you know, tend to produce politicians in the cold sweat whenever they're mentioned.
Another area under our heading of the present is the urban environment.
We are warned by the likes of David Kilcullen that in the future, vast, dense,
vulnerable populations are subject to climatic and resource pressures are going to overwhelm the security forces of states.
And that, you know, we are we are in danger of facing, I say, this sort of Hobbesian dystopian future of collapse and catastrophe.
What is interesting, of course, is that if you look at the way that cities in the past and the present I deal
with kind of pressures like this is they quite often seek alternative markets.
If your resources are pressure from one direction, they diversify and they continue to grow and develop.
It's very rare to find cities entirely abandoned. Yes, there are historical examples, not least from ancient history, but the fear of a mob,
the fear of the unknown masses lurking in the back streets of urban spaces can be traced right back to the Roman era, if not before.
And there's a sort of sense of which, you know, what is suspicion about determinism about urban spaces is that we fear cities
and we've forgotten that in ancient history and indeed in early modern history,
cities were the great paragons of civilisation.
They were literally the civic tasks. That's where you became civilised.
No longer the barber, the barbarian, the Greeks talked about.
I think we should rediscover the sweetness of urban life as opposed to just fearing the mob.
But that takes its course, doesn't neatly to irregulars and proxies.
And again, we hear lots expressed about the fear of irregular forces with the threats to diaspora populations,
expatriate communities, to vulnerable embassies, vulnerable infrastructures.
And therefore, I would make about that is that is what characterises these sort of targets of
these irregular forces that they're all very much non-military and conventional
military forces seem to be extraordinarily badly equipped and set up and structured
to protect these very vulnerable civilian structures in civilian populations.
And then finally, I should just mention, in terms of the present technologies,
because they are so, so much discussed into robotic warfare, space, weaponry,
terrorists acquiring new hybrid forms of weapons of mass destruction, e warfare,
drones and UAV doing battle with each other in the skies above the cities of the West or the world.
Well, it does seem, doesn't it, that these new security environments require new types of defence.
And I'm a very advocate of perhaps there being a new kind of form of civil defence forces set up in different countries.
But people forget that these new technologies are themselves subject of our traditional problems of operator morale for the frictional force.
How many of you in the last 12 months have had a computer problem where you switch and it can
be so it's frozen or it's crashed or it's gone wrong or it hasn't done what you want to do.
Somebody has experienced that. Why would it be any different in the stress of a combat environment?
I suppose for me then, ending this particular session to say the irony for me is that we want this kind of security of prediction,
which is why we focus on things like certainty and decisiveness and rapidity.
But actually war is indecisive, often protracted, and it doesn't sort of fit our expectation of what we want it to be like.
We seem to be constantly disappointed that it's not not that way.
Conscious of time, I'm going to just not go into these sort of forced structures on you.
I wouldn't really have time for that, so I won't.
But there are some interesting, real Western concerns which any future planner of war would need to put quite high up on their list.
And I don't all see military doctrine documents, which I think is quite worrying what is protecting economies?
The Western world, particularly in the world, is so large,
has been through and is going through still one of the most far reaching recessions since the 1930s, certainly since 1870s.
And it's quite clear that a critical national infrastructure is based around the economy.
William Pitt once said, Trade is your last entrenchment. You must defend it or perish.
And I think that would be true. The new interconnectedness of global commerce.
Surely something should loom large in any future war planning doctrine.
The other one is protecting the people,
which has perhaps been higher on the agenda because of counterinsurgency campaigns waged by Western powers recently.
But I suppose there are questions about, you know, how we do it in future, what methods are used, how do you enemies?
I would say, I guess, how do you sort of, you know, Western militaries or military of the world get their enemies to the negotiating table?
You often read doctrines about future war that talk about the need for the fact of the need for an outcome different end state.
But what's missing is how you get your opponent to come and talk to you.
And yet, most wars of the 18th century, as far as I understand,
my own history books seem to suggest to me that negotiated settlements were normal, and we've got to get that back in to our understanding.
What would you be future war? What do military forces do with a like footprint or a UAV led force?
How do they get their opponents the negotiating table? And.
There's also these issues in Social Security, which, again, I'm not we can pick up perhaps with or, you know, discussion later on.
But some day Kilcullen has made a pretty bold, tough assertions that many of you came to the talk that he gave last term.
His his real concern is to acknowledge whether there were there aren't continuities.
He seems to think that we are going to be overwhelmed by this new collectivity and by these new megacities.
His big concern is that we are unable to manage, even mentally, this race of accelerating change,
either economically or through large numbers of the Global South, challenging the leading powers of the world.
So this brings me to sort of the final segments, if you like, of this,
the third and final assertion about the trends of war that might be identifiable from the past into the present, through the future.
I'm going to put these out literally as possibilities for you to feed back to me.
First of all, I'm. That if we do have irregular war in urban areas, that will attempt to exploit our infrastructural vulnerability,
and that infrastructural vulnerability might be in forms of transport systems, it might be in forms of information management.
But that does seem to be quite a likely trend.
And actually, in a sense, it's not very futuristic at all,
because if one looks back at Britain's experience in conducting operations against terrorist groups in Northern Ireland,
one would be very quickly aware that the targets chosen by those fighters of the armed struggle,
if I'm being polite about them, was usually soft targets individuals.
And after a period of initial popular protest in the mid 1970s, a long, low intensity,
protracted campaign of terrorism against often non-military targets in the future,
we are concerned that the militias or groups like that will be better armed with antiaircraft weapons,
surface to air missiles, anti-tank capabilities, chemical weapons, maybe in waves.
And people have already points to the fact that Hezbollah as a movement, have this capability of UAV or sort of version of it.
People also start to talk about contamination and huge dislocation of our infrastructure caused by these irregular forces.
Another trend is, well, I I'm debating what words use.
I mean, I'm tempted to use the word porosity and porousness, if you will.
I've been advised that perhaps the word permeability would be more accurate from a geological point of view.
But the only thought of infiltration, sabotage, discrediting the recruitment of diaspora populations, causing mayhem internally.
For sure, conventional border security and border controls have no defence is a possibility.
Two of the themes that I should mention here also are dispersal and depth.
We know that warfare is often compelled dispersal for survival or concealment.
And we know that since the mid-19th century in terms of modern warfare, there's been greater involvement of depth.
And I'm often happy to cites in my American colleagues in the Battle of Gettysburg happens across a campus of a few miles.
The depth of a few miles by time gets the Second World War.
We're talking about entire continents being sucked into a conflict, a battle space.
China, notwithstanding the mobilisation of economies and ideas on a global scale.
And we now know, of course, if you take in the present that international terrorism will be broadcast beams
into the living rooms of people around the world within hours of it taking place.
Another theme will be stealth. I'm always amused by the fact there's such a lot of money and time spent on
getting the right kind of digital camouflage in American military uniforms.
Missing the point entirely that camouflage is about consider yourself and your environment,
not impressing other people unless you believe that by James Lever you are in uniforms around impressing the other sex.
But anyway, I said, I sometimes wonder if he really understood the full implications of what stealth means because it makes them comfortable reading.
If military force in the future are truly stealthy, they will be amongst us all the time.
And that then raises enormous questions about the legality of the legal position and so on.
Another thing would be the miniaturisation of combat power,
which is a sort of slightly pompous way of saying that you can kill more people with smaller devices.
And that's been a trend that's been going on, as you know, for many hundreds of years now,
getting to the stage where we can create atomic devices and the size of a small suitcase or Semtex,
a piece the size of my hand, which could destroy this room and everyone in it without too much difficulty.
We've also got the problem of the trend of devolution, which many people, military electorates try to resist.
We know that technology since the second war, if not since the First World War,
was given the ability to devolve command and decision making to smaller and smaller call zones.
And on the streets of Fallujah. Individuals and small groups of four teams of four men were making their own judgements.
But being able to communicate that judgement or that situational awareness with each other,
that devolving of command and control seems to me to be important.
I would exploit at least the idea, the Small Unit Cohesion Research, which has been going on again since the 1950s to more noble, systemic trends.
We know that systems are important. Ever since modern state in Iraq, we need a system of systems to defend ourselves.
But we know that nodes are important. In the past, a node might have been a commander.
He might have been the key figure you try and kill off or neutralise or discredit in some way.
Sunset talks about the need to work out what makes your opponent come on attack because he was alive today.
Loads are in all sorts of different systems, in vehicles, in communications and information technology that are everywhere.
And I think the disruption or infiltration or Neutralisation device will become more important if only precision.
We know that more precise weaponry has been characteristic of the last 30 years in warfare.
If one can afford it, what appears to be the challenge now is acquiring new targets more precisely and faster.
And that will be very difficult to do by huge urban space and looking for one individual.
How will you achieve that degree of surveillance and target acquisition?
There are also huge opportunities which don't get mentioned in any kind of construction of a future war.
And that is. So let me give you just a couple examples.
As we get towards the end, part one is that we're told that the urban space is going to become a sort of haven for terrorist organisations,
and there's very little can do about them.
It has all the sort of residents of Che Guevara, Carlos Malik, you know, kind of this it's fear of these cells embedded in these cities.
Well, in a more connected world, terrorists will still need safe havens.
And in the more connected world,
it's more likely that they will be informed upon by loyal citizens who do not want to get themselves killed in mass casualty terrorism.
So actually you could look at the other way. You can say more white societies are less vulnerable to this form of warfare.
I mean, it poses to you as an alternative way of looking at the same problem rather than simply all fall into line with the group,
think that cities are bad and all terrorism will flourish and cities come together.
And Che Guevara actually near the end of their lives.
Both admitted that actually city warfare, urban warfare,
urban guerrilla warfare flight was extraordinarily vulnerable and called us Pentagon, actually,
despite a mini manual for urban guerrilla warfare, later disowned the concept and said it was far too vulnerable, which should not be done that way.
Social media, again, is something that people fear a great deal.
And I've been very impressed with some individuals who able to say actually is a great deal of benefit.
It can be brought in terms of surveillance and control. I was even introduced to the concept of astroturfing by someone who works in government.
I've heard of astroturfing in the social media space. Now I can't really.
Astonishment is probably what happens is if you know that you've got a story coming up which is going to be pretty bad for your reputation,
you and your party is concerned. What you can do is you can activate all your social media loyalists and get them to tweet retweets, retweets,
retweets endlessly, hundreds of messages so that you actually overwhelmed by mass the other person's message.
Astroturfing It's like you laid out a new surface that's so comprehensive and artificial that it's overwhelming.
Well, that's astroturfing, simulation, situational awareness with new technologies, new apps in the modern language seems to be very likely.
The spread of international norms in terms of international law and law of armed conflict would might
mean less freedom of action for criminals and terrorists games than people fear about the future.
Now, there are many of these sort of things that one could do and say, Gosh,
look at all these opportunities we actually have, which are alternative way of thinking about central problem.
Let me conclude by these kind of thoughts. The real vulnerability, it seems to me, for the world with global and regional economies.
And I would like to see in any future war planning kind of thinking that the
economists or real economics are part and parcel of discussions about future.
The failure, for example, of the economy of China over the next 30 to 40 years would not only affect the West very badly,
I think it would cause a global financial meltdown.
Globally, we are interdependent. And that actually may be more of a to use an old expression, a good thing than a bad thing.
They're also huge opportunities.
Rather than only fearing the pandemic's the future brought on by climate change, as occurred in certain documents I saw only four or five years ago.
Medical advances now are so rapid that they offer the opportunity of nipping these things in the butt.
Genome sequencing, according to some statistics by McKinsey, it seems a few years ago,
back in the early 2000, this costs about $50 million and would take several years to complete.
Now we're told it can be completed in 24 hours and cost less than $4,000.
Each individual human genome sequence. Imagine the implications for that.
We are also told that there would be no new amplified grievances through social media and new media.
But it also seems to me that solutions are being found a lot faster as well.
So what am I saying to you? What I'm saying, I suppose, in the conclusion of these three assertions is the world has got some significant challenges,
and I'm not going to tell you that it hasn't.
But I am concerned that our past, our inculturation of certain ideas is becoming almost a sort of form of groupthink.
And we must break out of that way of thinking.
We must contemplate alternatives, however absurd they may seem today, because that has been the experience of the past.
And that seems to me to be the lesson. If we are being taught one of the present and its most recent phenomenon,
now I'm conscious I've not done any sort of great resounding one liner conclusion way that perhaps someone like Colin Grey would tell you.
But you know, I'm not into that kind of thing.
I would rather leave this with a sort of an ellipse of three dots, rather full stop, so as to offer the opportunity for you to come back to me.
What I got wrong. Well, thank you very much indeed.