1 00:00:00,600 --> 00:00:03,540 Welcome to the CCW Lounge 27. 2 00:00:03,540 --> 00:00:12,390 Assuming someone wanted to make an arrest from here and I will work at the Training Centre for those of you who haven't been here before. 3 00:00:12,510 --> 00:00:16,620 This is our flagship seminar. It takes place every Tuesday. 4 00:00:16,790 --> 00:00:21,840 I'm here to offer and lead through the academic year. 5 00:00:22,170 --> 00:00:33,660 This year we have an exciting programme. I was speaker today but also with talks ranging from Logan Island over the Congo. 6 00:00:33,910 --> 00:00:38,069 Ethics on strategy, on future war, 7 00:00:38,070 --> 00:00:46,049 on coaches of new wars with serious UFOs transferred a little over May Carter Armstrong McFate, Michael Ross new person. 8 00:00:46,050 --> 00:00:51,480 So it's really an exciting program and we hope to see you not just today but throughout the trip. 9 00:00:52,680 --> 00:00:57,840 CCW is I think that's true. We have every Wednesday a seminar and also coach. 10 00:00:58,740 --> 00:01:04,140 It's a 515 and one week. It's history of war and the other week it's the future of warfare. 11 00:01:04,860 --> 00:01:12,320 We also have special events. The most important one this week you might have seen the flyers on the seats, 12 00:01:12,330 --> 00:01:21,390 I hope is the House of Lots panel, which takes place on Thursday in the Exam School on UK defence capability. 13 00:01:21,990 --> 00:01:23,570 So please join us for that event. 14 00:01:23,580 --> 00:01:30,570 It's chaired by an lot organised who was involved in the peace process and I'm sure it would be a very exciting event. 15 00:01:31,290 --> 00:01:39,960 We have another regular event which is the CCW Working Group on Armed Conflict and that takes place every other Friday. 16 00:01:40,260 --> 00:01:47,040 The first one is in week two at 10 a.m. in Lafayette College, and this is really for students, 17 00:01:47,040 --> 00:01:55,020 faculty visiting fellows to present work in progress and to discuss work from different disciplinary angles on armed conflict. 18 00:01:56,790 --> 00:02:03,659 Then we also are always there to provide information on other events not hosted by CCW but by other institutions. 19 00:02:03,660 --> 00:02:07,580 Centres across the university and some of them to take place. 20 00:02:07,590 --> 00:02:18,280 This week is the Oxford University Strategic Studies Group, which is usually on Tuesday evening at 830 and today at Aftershock Theta will be speaking. 21 00:02:18,300 --> 00:02:24,390 It's in the old libraries in all sorts. If you want to have more information on what is taking place, 22 00:02:24,390 --> 00:02:31,560 when exactly where you can sign up to our newsletter, which was more administrative, sends out every week. 23 00:02:31,890 --> 00:02:36,070 So you go on website, CCW or stop case. 24 00:02:36,420 --> 00:02:42,630 They can sign up for our newsletter to get all the information on our events and also on other related events. 25 00:02:43,230 --> 00:02:47,190 You can also follow us on Twitter. If you are interested in the events or otherwise, 26 00:02:47,190 --> 00:02:52,830 just come and talk to us and speak to us on what we're doing also in terms of such and such projects. 27 00:02:53,850 --> 00:03:02,610 Today, I am delighted to introduce our Speaker to the Director of the Changing Party for Cancer, Dr. Robert Johnson. 28 00:03:03,450 --> 00:03:08,909 He works on strategy and history of war on the Middle East and is the author of many publications. 29 00:03:08,910 --> 00:03:16,480 But just recent ones include The Great War and the Middle East, Africa Two Way of War and Tour to the South. 30 00:03:17,040 --> 00:03:21,720 And today he's going to speak on the end of peace and optimism. 31 00:03:22,530 --> 00:03:26,690 I have a bigger question mark, but to give us all the end of peace and optimism, 32 00:03:26,700 --> 00:03:31,049 assessing the changing character, what took you emotionally that first cold induction? 33 00:03:31,050 --> 00:03:34,440 And this feels like one of those awkward moments where, you know, 34 00:03:34,440 --> 00:03:39,990 you've got to kind of give a State of the Union address about the state of the art of where we are and, 35 00:03:40,620 --> 00:03:44,940 you know, war studies or armed conflict studies or like the change in culture war. 36 00:03:45,660 --> 00:03:52,800 And I'm very conscious that I'm being deliberately provocative with a statement about the end of peace and optimism. 37 00:03:52,810 --> 00:03:56,790 You know, you've got to be watching process to be able to go, do you mean the end of hope? 38 00:03:56,820 --> 00:04:04,200 And I hope it's not quite that bad, but we do have a problem in terms of optimism is a common problem. 39 00:04:04,200 --> 00:04:08,760 And it's not just relates to the idea of war. It's very interesting that a few weeks ago, 40 00:04:09,990 --> 00:04:15,910 when Jean-Claude Juncker had to give his sort of State of the Union address about the European Union, the Brexit score, 41 00:04:15,990 --> 00:04:23,580 just one mention very briefly and his entire speech was optimistic about ever closer union being now 42 00:04:23,580 --> 00:04:30,030 finally realised and the British one of the West aspects and that there would be a single foreign minister, 43 00:04:30,720 --> 00:04:37,260 a single currency would be enforced and then met with a sort of fairly muted response from many European leaders, 44 00:04:37,260 --> 00:04:43,829 I think probably because they heard the message before or because it just seemed perhaps to them self-evident. 45 00:04:43,830 --> 00:04:50,040 I don't know. And we're certainly used to political leaders and political elites making optimistic statements about the future. 46 00:04:50,730 --> 00:04:55,710 In British politics, for example, the end of austerity is now widely heralded, 47 00:04:55,920 --> 00:04:59,970 even though economists, even Labour Party economists, are saying it would actually. 48 00:05:00,030 --> 00:05:06,810 Heading towards another long term recession between 2018 and 2030, and that's beside Brexit. 49 00:05:07,590 --> 00:05:09,180 So we seem to have a problem. 50 00:05:09,180 --> 00:05:18,180 The past of this provocation on making gentle provocation has been inspired by Professor Dominic Johnson here in the department, 51 00:05:18,900 --> 00:05:26,130 who wrote a book in 2004 about this optimism bias in his book called Overconfidence and War. 52 00:05:26,580 --> 00:05:32,880 And what he argued was that overconfidence or confidence calculations aren't just 53 00:05:33,150 --> 00:05:37,820 something that occur because we misunderstand the conditions that we're observing, 54 00:05:38,070 --> 00:05:42,299 but we're almost sort of hardwired with this kind of human partiality. 55 00:05:42,300 --> 00:05:47,850 We've got some sort of problem that we want to see the, you know, the positives. 56 00:05:48,120 --> 00:05:55,440 And he refers to some good, positive illusions. And there are many writers who've suffered from this this particular problem. 57 00:05:56,070 --> 00:06:05,430 And it seems to be very prominent right now, because there's been a long period of wars, of choice by the Western world, lots of interventionism, 58 00:06:06,060 --> 00:06:12,630 often justified on grounds of humanitarianism or responsibility, an obligation to protect, 59 00:06:13,290 --> 00:06:22,830 and the sort of very strong faith in military power that militaries can indeed change things for the better. 60 00:06:23,880 --> 00:06:27,780 But that optimism isn't limited only to political leaders. 61 00:06:28,530 --> 00:06:34,709 It's also true of the way that military doctrine writers construct how militaries should actually 62 00:06:34,710 --> 00:06:40,470 operate and that senior military leaders are sometimes guilty of this sort of can do mentality, 63 00:06:40,470 --> 00:06:46,410 that there is a utility of force. And optimistically, when force is applied, there will be benefits. 64 00:06:46,950 --> 00:06:55,620 And it seems to me that this is more than just a weak ish view of history, that somehow, you know, civilisation is moving towards greater progress. 65 00:06:56,160 --> 00:07:04,319 But if you look at doctrines, they are very linear in the way that they articulate how military operations unfold. 66 00:07:04,320 --> 00:07:09,149 They move from phase zero where there's really nothing going on to phase one, 67 00:07:09,150 --> 00:07:13,620 a sort of combat phase, which is always going to be won by whoever's advocating these things. 68 00:07:13,980 --> 00:07:19,020 And then a sort of phase on 2 to 3 and eventually four of reconstruction, stabilisation and peace. 69 00:07:19,590 --> 00:07:26,970 Well, of course, it doesn't ever work out that way. The chaos of war is one reason why it doesn't work out. 70 00:07:27,270 --> 00:07:30,690 But one which has been brought home to me only last week I spent the last 71 00:07:30,690 --> 00:07:35,490 couple of weeks in Afghanistan is what you might call institutional friction. 72 00:07:36,090 --> 00:07:39,180 We are our own worst enemy is one way of characterising. 73 00:07:39,180 --> 00:07:46,610 That is that it seems incredibly difficult to force through even self-evident policies. 74 00:07:46,620 --> 00:07:52,049 You made a number of military or civilian officials in war zones who say, well, we know what the solutions are. 75 00:07:52,050 --> 00:07:54,090 We know you know what the problem is, we know what the solutions are, 76 00:07:54,330 --> 00:08:00,270 but we just can't get it to get through some sort of budgetary constraint or some sort of policy announcement. 77 00:08:00,870 --> 00:08:09,450 And that's a very interesting and unusual phenomenon. But in in doctrine, we've we've had a long period of suffering from, you know, 78 00:08:09,750 --> 00:08:18,810 catchall phrases which seem to cheer everyone up and create optimism, but seem to be so far misplaced from the ground realities of war. 79 00:08:19,440 --> 00:08:22,950 Those include, for example, full spectrum dominance. 80 00:08:23,250 --> 00:08:28,979 We were told in the 1990s that new technologies, particularly surveillance communication technologies, 81 00:08:28,980 --> 00:08:34,110 were going to iron out friction in the battle space and that this panopticon, 82 00:08:34,110 --> 00:08:38,939 this all seeing eye, would somehow have the opportunity to eliminate any problems. 83 00:08:38,940 --> 00:08:41,400 We would see where all the enemies were and our own people. 84 00:08:41,820 --> 00:08:48,540 People talked about shock and awe and the way that fires and the dislocation the enemy would mean 85 00:08:48,540 --> 00:08:53,580 that they were unable to function and simply would collapse and go belly up and be defeated. 86 00:08:54,180 --> 00:08:58,440 But the biggest one of all is always about technology itself. 87 00:08:59,130 --> 00:09:05,060 The technological solutions are often, you know, reached for in the near future. 88 00:09:05,080 --> 00:09:10,739 Somehow this is what's going to create for us the the decisive edge in wars of the future. 89 00:09:10,740 --> 00:09:16,980 And therefore, you know, we should be optimistic. Now, what's very exciting for me, coming from an historical background, 90 00:09:17,370 --> 00:09:24,480 is that it seems to me a lot of these statements are very rarely tested out against comparable historical versions. 91 00:09:24,960 --> 00:09:29,040 You know, let me give you an example of a more pessimistic assessment. 92 00:09:29,310 --> 00:09:35,190 Back in the 1990s, the UN secretary general talked about the future will be full of water wars. 93 00:09:35,190 --> 00:09:43,470 He said there were all the wars in the global south. The overriding feature will be this failure of water supply creating conflict. 94 00:09:44,010 --> 00:09:50,530 Well, actually, what's very interesting when you look at historical examples of where there is water failure, you don't often get conflict. 95 00:09:50,760 --> 00:09:55,680 What you get is migration, right? Big movements of peoples out of where there are problems. 96 00:09:55,680 --> 00:10:03,660 So give an example would be FATA border security the. While Mughal capital in South Asia it was abandoned. 97 00:10:04,230 --> 00:10:08,910 Not because of war, but because water unlocks and people simply moved to Delhi instead. 98 00:10:09,360 --> 00:10:13,260 In Central Asia and western China, there are a number of abandoned cities. 99 00:10:13,620 --> 00:10:19,860 Again, they were destroyed by war. They were destroyed by simply people moving out, abandoning them and migrating. 100 00:10:20,910 --> 00:10:28,380 Now, we know that land, of course, has been a sort of more constant source of violence through world history. 101 00:10:28,950 --> 00:10:37,740 You know, we know land is important from taxation point of view, from production, the ability to control population because it's a full property. 102 00:10:37,770 --> 00:10:43,410 So it seems to me that while, you know, in the 1990, as we talk about water wars, 103 00:10:43,890 --> 00:10:47,100 we stopped talking about land because we just assumed it wasn't important anymore. 104 00:10:47,280 --> 00:10:55,500 But actually, land conflicts have been extremely important across the Global South in the last 20 years or say, 30 years now. 105 00:10:55,980 --> 00:11:01,380 My optimism charge is not limited only as political leaders or indeed military writers. 106 00:11:01,680 --> 00:11:08,670 It's also a malaise. We've we've got hold of regard to the information age that we currently live in as well. 107 00:11:09,690 --> 00:11:14,760 The Information Age, we were told, was going to produce greater truth and clarity. 108 00:11:15,600 --> 00:11:19,590 If you remember back that far, actually, it's produced more complexity. 109 00:11:20,160 --> 00:11:27,930 It's given rise to greater readiness for fake news, for selective expectations, if you like, being reinforced. 110 00:11:27,930 --> 00:11:33,509 So harsh realities that exist in certain sections of society have been amplified 111 00:11:33,510 --> 00:11:37,830 and reinforced by the information age rather than being defeated by it. 112 00:11:39,090 --> 00:11:45,180 And expectations have increased when it comes to war by video footage of precise, 113 00:11:45,480 --> 00:11:52,350 precisely delivered munitions from the air because people feel that's desirable to have precise munitions delivered. 114 00:11:52,620 --> 00:11:55,859 Well, Stan, fast, those who argue that drone warfare should be banned. 115 00:11:55,860 --> 00:11:59,370 But, you know, it does seem to me that raised a certain type of expectation. 116 00:12:00,300 --> 00:12:05,460 And we know that actually precision comes at a far higher financial cost. 117 00:12:06,120 --> 00:12:10,940 You know, jokingly, I heard an Army officer say once he launched a missile, 118 00:12:10,980 --> 00:12:17,340 so a missile launched recently from an al indeed base in Qatar over a fish of war in Syria. 119 00:12:17,880 --> 00:12:19,560 He said that goes another Ferrari. 120 00:12:20,580 --> 00:12:27,090 Course, the analogy being these things are so expensive that really he was hoping that to find a cheaper source of ammunition, 121 00:12:27,090 --> 00:12:28,290 even if it would be precise. 122 00:12:28,860 --> 00:12:36,060 I think I don't think we acknowledge the shared costs of these wars when we talk about these information age expectations we have. 123 00:12:36,840 --> 00:12:45,360 But of course, what's happening now is that the adversaries of the West are also developing information age, responses to precise power. 124 00:12:45,630 --> 00:12:49,230 And where that is manifest itself is in hugging civilian populations. 125 00:12:49,710 --> 00:12:54,510 So now it's quite common to find insurgent groups from Palestine on one side, if you like, 126 00:12:54,510 --> 00:12:59,310 through to Afghanistan and beyond who are placing themselves amongst civilians, 127 00:12:59,550 --> 00:13:04,350 knowing that Western air forces would be much more reluctant to engage them. 128 00:13:05,700 --> 00:13:08,069 But I think we should look at ourselves here as well. 129 00:13:08,070 --> 00:13:14,550 The academic community is also guilty of this charge of overoptimism about conflicts in the future. 130 00:13:14,790 --> 00:13:18,179 And so this is really going to hurt. I know I'm conscious who I'm talking to the audience. 131 00:13:18,180 --> 00:13:21,660 So bear with me while I just unpack these problems for a moment. 132 00:13:22,230 --> 00:13:28,230 There's a great deal of faith, I think, in international institutions to prevent or to resolve war. 133 00:13:29,070 --> 00:13:32,160 And if you think about the way that we felt that democracy, 134 00:13:32,160 --> 00:13:39,000 the spread of democracy was somehow going to be one of the great solutions to the spread of violence were more democratised. 135 00:13:39,000 --> 00:13:43,710 People can't have peace. They're less likely to engage in war with other democratic societies. 136 00:13:44,070 --> 00:13:49,740 Stands in total contrast to the writers of, for example, the late Professor Chris Bailey, 137 00:13:50,400 --> 00:13:55,740 who studied democratised movements around the world through global history and 138 00:13:55,740 --> 00:13:59,399 came to the rather startling conclusion that the more democratised the movement, 139 00:13:59,400 --> 00:14:04,770 more likely they are to inflict very lethal punishments on large sections of the population. 140 00:14:05,190 --> 00:14:09,690 In other words, democracy might just give rise to more passionate forms of democratised violence. 141 00:14:10,890 --> 00:14:21,360 And I think when you look at the performance of the UN in the Syrian war, Russia's vetoing when it carried out bombings of aid convoys, 142 00:14:22,050 --> 00:14:31,500 the abstentions by the People's Republic of China or the performance of the U.N. over the Sri Lankan civil war or the more recent Rohingya crisis. 143 00:14:31,950 --> 00:14:33,990 One is left feeling the, you know, 144 00:14:34,050 --> 00:14:41,970 should we not question anew these international institutions and their ability to actually do what we we think they can do? 145 00:14:42,510 --> 00:14:51,810 I think much of our international relations is a subject as a discipline is still focussed on institutions built after 1945, 146 00:14:52,170 --> 00:14:55,560 which actually don't really seem to change the outcomes very much at all. 147 00:14:55,650 --> 00:14:59,520 You invest with faith and scholarship in them and yet the record. 148 00:14:59,710 --> 00:15:05,020 That performance has been pretty much under par. Now, people have said to me, well, what about, you know, 149 00:15:05,020 --> 00:15:12,040 the fact that international institutions have given rise to a much greater awareness of the cost benefit rationalism of war. 150 00:15:12,070 --> 00:15:19,870 That war is is very costly. And what international institutions have done is pointed out what these costs are likely to be. 151 00:15:20,620 --> 00:15:26,649 I have to say that the tragedy of that is that this war is too costly argument is that unfortunately, 152 00:15:26,650 --> 00:15:34,510 that was the statement that you would have found in 1914. It's also the statements he would have found in the international community in 1935, 153 00:15:34,810 --> 00:15:38,830 which didn't do as terribly well when it came to the following few years. 154 00:15:40,180 --> 00:15:44,230 The idea that somehow globalism will reduce conflict, 155 00:15:44,680 --> 00:15:49,660 I think is something that needs to be tested very rigorously indeed against the evidence and against history. 156 00:15:50,680 --> 00:15:57,670 Well, institutions are one thing, but what else are we getting wrong? Well, we've invited Americans to come and speak on the program this year. 157 00:15:58,060 --> 00:16:00,280 I'm actually able to come back to Oxford to speak. 158 00:16:00,790 --> 00:16:07,360 And of course, her famous thesis, the 1990, has made a huge impact on the way that we think about what was changing in war, 159 00:16:08,680 --> 00:16:17,319 that globalisation was giving rise to a new form of motive for conflict through identity politics and that transnational violence was on the increase, 160 00:16:17,320 --> 00:16:20,350 she said. But there will be an obsolescence of old war. 161 00:16:20,350 --> 00:16:27,100 The, you know, the kind of wars which seem, you know, hitherto the 1990s were what she thought kind of a thing of the past. 162 00:16:27,400 --> 00:16:37,090 Well, of course, she wrote that work before the Iraq war, before the rise of Daesh in in Syria, and to some extent Iraq, too. 163 00:16:37,420 --> 00:16:44,380 And if you remember, the photography of Daesh is rise that they were not just simply a group of insurgents like the Afghan Taliban, 164 00:16:44,830 --> 00:16:47,620 they were driving in armoured vehicles, they were they had tanks, 165 00:16:47,620 --> 00:16:52,390 they had their own mortar teams, they caught to some artillery from the Iraqis and so on. 166 00:16:53,050 --> 00:16:57,910 So this was a kind of conventional war that we were seeing unfolding. 167 00:16:57,910 --> 00:17:03,310 And to argue that somehow these new wars when I was just about identity politics seemed somehow misplaced. 168 00:17:03,730 --> 00:17:09,820 And when Russia involved itself in the in the conflict in Syria in 2015, for example, again, 169 00:17:09,820 --> 00:17:14,200 it didn't look like a so-called new war of war amongst the people, as Rupert Smith called it. 170 00:17:14,470 --> 00:17:16,390 It looked like a pretty old fashioned war. 171 00:17:16,660 --> 00:17:24,309 And if you look at the the footage, you know, the overflights of Mosul or Aleppo, you'll get some idea of that. 172 00:17:24,310 --> 00:17:30,100 They look remarkably similar to Dresden in 1945 or Berlin in 1945. 173 00:17:31,540 --> 00:17:38,799 So, of course, that the one that the one individual that we often referred to is the sort of ultimate optimist will be. 174 00:17:38,800 --> 00:17:43,420 Steve Pinker, better angels of our nature. Much has been written about Steve's work. 175 00:17:44,620 --> 00:17:51,340 The you know, he observed the overall global, you know, global history over many centuries. 176 00:17:51,670 --> 00:17:55,480 There was something of a declining trend in in war. 177 00:17:56,230 --> 00:18:02,200 And that, you know, people have made use of that work to show that actually we're much better off now that, 178 00:18:02,200 --> 00:18:07,150 you know, maybe war is, after all, obsolete and so on. Now, of course, if you read Steve's work very carefully, 179 00:18:07,450 --> 00:18:13,120 he does actually make the point that he's not he's not saying that this trend is a permanent condition. 180 00:18:13,180 --> 00:18:14,500 He says it can change. 181 00:18:14,860 --> 00:18:20,679 It's just that he was making an observation about what had occurred insofar as he was concerned through psychology and through education and through, 182 00:18:20,680 --> 00:18:22,480 you know, the kind of global institutions. 183 00:18:23,140 --> 00:18:30,070 But he wasn't saying this is permanent now or an act of war here at Oxford has been to point out that sadly, 184 00:18:30,070 --> 00:18:34,870 what's happened is a lot of the violence which would have been categorised once a state violence 185 00:18:35,290 --> 00:18:42,010 has transferred itself into societies and the violence visited on individuals within societies, 186 00:18:42,640 --> 00:18:46,930 if anything is constant, if not in some cases are on the rise. 187 00:18:48,190 --> 00:18:54,180 And even when you come to people who should be more pessimistic, like Bob Jarvis, who, you know, 188 00:18:54,190 --> 00:18:59,470 is a kind of realist of of the ultimate realist school with a capital R and dripping fangs, 189 00:19:00,220 --> 00:19:03,820 he wrote in 2011 that he was very optimistic about the future. 190 00:19:03,820 --> 00:19:10,600 Despite that, you know, his arguments about power maximisation, nothing else, that the world would be a mixed picture. 191 00:19:10,690 --> 00:19:15,160 Ultimately, he says, we should be optimistic about the future. You know that things are getting better. 192 00:19:16,600 --> 00:19:21,700 Now, why do we come to these conclusions? Why? Why have we fallen into this this trap? 193 00:19:22,270 --> 00:19:28,150 And what are the measurements which we're using to make these kind of assessments about the future? 194 00:19:28,900 --> 00:19:36,549 Well, one things that we like to do in the change in control centre is to try to match together history with contemporary, 195 00:19:36,550 --> 00:19:43,030 with a few people who work on future studies. And we're trying to make those assessments of change through time. 196 00:19:44,080 --> 00:19:49,209 And I think, you know, one of the things that we're very aware of as we try to approach the qualitative 197 00:19:49,210 --> 00:19:54,910 and quantitative approaches and measurements through the CCW conflict platform, 198 00:19:54,910 --> 00:19:59,170 which which Nightcrawler is championing that we're aware of. 199 00:19:59,270 --> 00:20:02,239 The shortcomings of the different disciplinary approaches. 200 00:20:02,240 --> 00:20:11,570 All the difference for methodological approaches and some interesting problems have already emerged from the way that we have looked at this, 201 00:20:11,900 --> 00:20:17,860 this particular approach. Take, for example, last sediments work on the power law distribution. 202 00:20:17,870 --> 00:20:22,310 I know that sounds like a heading of an episode of Big Bang Theory, but bear with me. 203 00:20:22,580 --> 00:20:32,569 Power law distribution. The idea being that if you have a long period where you have no war, there is this kind of rather inversely proportional, 204 00:20:32,570 --> 00:20:36,049 rather perverse law that you're more likely to get by large conflicts. 205 00:20:36,050 --> 00:20:41,090 Robock Plate tectonics and earthquakes. You know, if you don't have a series of small earthquakes, you are not to get a very, very large one. 206 00:20:41,840 --> 00:20:47,990 But there seems to be some sheer process at work that that laws are sort of examined. 207 00:20:49,190 --> 00:20:50,910 Now, I'm aware, as in the story, 208 00:20:51,350 --> 00:20:57,080 that when we look at these different qualitative and quantitative approaches to try to measure change and measure what's really going on, 209 00:20:57,410 --> 00:21:04,860 and perhaps being a little bit more realistic that each age tries to reinterpret the past for its own interpretation, 210 00:21:04,930 --> 00:21:09,230 including into its own present day values, that they try to say, Well, this is how we feel today. 211 00:21:09,410 --> 00:21:15,740 Let's measure the past, present and future through that lens of what we think is important and valuable. 212 00:21:16,460 --> 00:21:18,170 And I'll give you a couple examples of what I mean by that. 213 00:21:19,280 --> 00:21:25,549 When played out in history in the 19 tens, prior to the First World War, Friedrich von Donati, 214 00:21:25,550 --> 00:21:31,850 a German officer, wrote about the sort of the future war, what war was probably coming. 215 00:21:32,300 --> 00:21:41,480 And in it, he adopted those ideas which were prevalent in his day of social Darwinism so that the German race had to be fit for the hardships of war. 216 00:21:41,720 --> 00:21:47,360 But he said, fortunately, we Germans are more suited to govern Europe in the East because we are more resilient. 217 00:21:47,780 --> 00:21:59,060 And so his entire thesis was based on some idea of a certain race or a certain culture was more suited to to war. 218 00:22:00,440 --> 00:22:03,259 And if you think about United States in the 19th century, they, too, 219 00:22:03,260 --> 00:22:08,840 suffered from a sort of a way of looking at themselves and making assumptions about the rest of the world and the future to come. 220 00:22:09,260 --> 00:22:13,970 So the idea of, you know, American Manifest Destiny or exceptionalism of the 19th century, 221 00:22:14,390 --> 00:22:17,959 its legacy of thinking goes on right the way into the 20th century. 222 00:22:17,960 --> 00:22:22,730 And to some extent, you could argue is manifest in that President Donald Trump himself today. 223 00:22:23,510 --> 00:22:29,510 And I think the problem is that we have come to the conclusion the Western world and our present day values, 224 00:22:29,510 --> 00:22:37,010 that all wealth in the West has conferred certain obligations on the rest of the world to either intervene, 225 00:22:37,010 --> 00:22:44,690 to improve or to secure the world, even though actually there's no real basis to that claim at all. 226 00:22:44,960 --> 00:22:48,440 It's something that we have invented because of the values which we hold onto. 227 00:22:48,770 --> 00:22:50,780 Now, you contrast that with China today. 228 00:22:51,530 --> 00:23:01,640 China believes that its massive economic growth means it has now an imperative to secure resources in the future and to act as a global leader. 229 00:23:02,480 --> 00:23:09,110 And so it's beginning to suffer from the same kind of optimism, biases that the West itself, I think, has has been largely guilty of. 230 00:23:10,430 --> 00:23:18,560 Now, we are at the moment, when we come to measure conflicts, I think tend to look for either trends. 231 00:23:18,830 --> 00:23:27,409 That seems to be a very common approach to conflict or perhaps inflection points like 911, rather like 1945. 232 00:23:27,410 --> 00:23:34,969 It seems as a cut off point in which a new sort of international order is evident and seems to give rise to phrases that, 233 00:23:34,970 --> 00:23:38,810 you know, perhaps war has not changed because of the way that it operates. 234 00:23:39,140 --> 00:23:42,740 Now, if you if the reason why I'm slightly critical of these inflection points, 235 00:23:43,130 --> 00:23:50,660 ways of looking at changes in war and what's coming and or optimism is that if we chose a different discipline like global economics, 236 00:23:50,660 --> 00:23:59,090 for example, we might say the inflection points that are the invention of national debt by England in some 1693, 237 00:23:59,630 --> 00:24:02,540 or the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. 238 00:24:03,020 --> 00:24:08,900 Now, that would be an inflection point for global economics, but seems almost absurd to make that claim today because it seems so long ago. 239 00:24:09,170 --> 00:24:13,250 But what I'm doing is I'm just pointing out to you that inflection points are very, very difficult. 240 00:24:13,700 --> 00:24:18,630 911 seem to us to herald a new capability by terrorists. 241 00:24:18,680 --> 00:24:24,530 Actually, it wasn't a new capability had been perfectly possible to do this kind of thing before, which is it hadn't been done. 242 00:24:25,310 --> 00:24:32,150 And this idea of violence, content of mass civilian casualties, you know, by non-state actors, again, 243 00:24:32,360 --> 00:24:37,880 there are plenty of examples throughout global history of where non-state actors are engaged in mass murder. 244 00:24:38,360 --> 00:24:44,270 It just the toolsets they had of the day were far less efficient as killing tools than the ones that we have now. 245 00:24:45,200 --> 00:24:52,790 I think other inflection points that probably need more amplification and I guess amongst military circles, all the concerns of climate change, 246 00:24:53,090 --> 00:24:58,820 global financial crises and mobilisation of individuals by social media, but perhaps will come to those later. 247 00:25:00,680 --> 00:25:08,239 I think all the inflection points that way of looking at the world is problematic 248 00:25:08,240 --> 00:25:13,760 because pretty much every inflection point you can find has an antecedent to it, 249 00:25:14,060 --> 00:25:18,530 and they often look less imposing in hindsight than they look at the time. 250 00:25:18,890 --> 00:25:24,470 Now, I would agree. I'm sure you were thinking. Yes, but what about the dropping of atomic weapons in 1945? 251 00:25:24,830 --> 00:25:29,720 Yes, I think that still looks pretty imposing even to this end of the 21st century. 252 00:25:30,350 --> 00:25:31,880 But what it does do, I think, 253 00:25:32,210 --> 00:25:41,690 is raise very significant questions or should raise significant questions in our minds about trends or linearity of thinking about whether this, 254 00:25:42,110 --> 00:25:50,689 you know, much faith as there is in economics about cyclical activities or whether we should start looking at constellations 255 00:25:50,690 --> 00:25:57,560 of bursts of change clustered around certain technologies or ideas or improvements or organisational changes. 256 00:25:57,830 --> 00:26:06,139 And maybe we should look at those perhaps instead. But what we can say, and we, I think we all agree on is if you're going to try and understand war, 257 00:26:06,140 --> 00:26:10,160 you have to start from the basis that is a dynamic phenomenon. 258 00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:14,750 The logic of violence is escalation of force. 259 00:26:15,410 --> 00:26:19,730 And if you look at videos of street fights on a Saturday night in Britain, 260 00:26:20,390 --> 00:26:24,320 in the major cities of this country, you'll get some idea of what I'm getting at, 261 00:26:24,320 --> 00:26:27,110 that there is this sort of escalatory component, 262 00:26:27,120 --> 00:26:34,040 these things which are very difficult to control once they start to get out of hand and if we don't have law enforcement intervening. 263 00:26:35,810 --> 00:26:40,940 I think the other thing that's really quite significant right now is that the means of war 264 00:26:41,360 --> 00:26:46,370 have changed and empowered individuals where one wants would have needed collective action. 265 00:26:47,030 --> 00:26:53,990 So because we have lost faith in states to do things, we still think they will be the arbiters of the future for the use of force. 266 00:26:54,320 --> 00:26:58,879 But we seem to be very slow to pick up on the fact that individuals now can kill 267 00:26:58,880 --> 00:27:01,960 the same numbers that in the old days states would have been needed to do so. 268 00:27:02,780 --> 00:27:08,479 And I think, although, you know, people will query when we talk about the nature of war and they say, 269 00:27:08,480 --> 00:27:12,940 well, you know, this turf war, you know, it's pretty, pretty old fashioned in. 270 00:27:12,950 --> 00:27:16,160 Does it still really have any validity? 271 00:27:17,210 --> 00:27:25,820 We think it does in CCW because it is does still capture something about this elemental, dynamic nature of the phenomenon. 272 00:27:26,420 --> 00:27:32,450 It allows us to talk about the environment of war, which is, I think, different from, say, 273 00:27:32,450 --> 00:27:38,480 civil conflict or maybe, you know, low level, low intensity violence in cities, for example, or criminal networks. 274 00:27:39,320 --> 00:27:45,560 I think it allows us to take to be realistic about the anatomy of a conflict, 275 00:27:46,160 --> 00:27:50,629 the actors involved in it, the component parts, if you like, the functioning of it. 276 00:27:50,630 --> 00:27:58,170 How actually works is not an armed conflict functions the same way as what we once called a war. 277 00:27:58,190 --> 00:28:02,180 There is no real difference when you get down on the ground and start to study it. 278 00:28:02,540 --> 00:28:08,030 And I think its essence, therefore its core meaning its core purpose sadly is very, very unchanged. 279 00:28:08,450 --> 00:28:12,019 And I don't need to go through all the lists of the nature of war, you know, what we're talking about. 280 00:28:12,020 --> 00:28:17,300 But it's pretty visceral stuff. It's full of what I call terror and error. 281 00:28:17,690 --> 00:28:24,110 Lots of mistakes and lots of fear. It's still about the transmission of power or the attempted transmissions of power. 282 00:28:24,590 --> 00:28:29,150 And of course, it still involves really very difficult ethical questions for us to grapple with. 283 00:28:29,450 --> 00:28:34,820 Well, the very taboo of killing itself, which even military professionals don't talk about very often with enough. 284 00:28:35,930 --> 00:28:40,100 So I think none of the nature of war is gone. This whatever we call this phenomenon. 285 00:28:40,580 --> 00:28:48,110 And I think if you if you do not believe what I'm saying, again, I would refer you back to Islamic State, so-called, in Syria and Iraq, 286 00:28:48,710 --> 00:28:56,240 that use of chemical weapons and becoming weapons by the regime against them to the crucifixion of prisoners, widespread torture, 287 00:28:56,270 --> 00:29:04,790 murders of prisoners of war, on mass destruction of urban spaces, religious sites, refugees despite the law of armed conflict, 288 00:29:05,150 --> 00:29:12,410 the conventions that attempt to regulate war and the presence of international institutions and even great powers on the ground amongst them. 289 00:29:13,670 --> 00:29:19,430 One of the things that is going on is this greater civilian participation in war, 290 00:29:20,120 --> 00:29:26,750 and that has real implications for how we look at the future of the law of armed conflict and in how we even begin to understand war itself. 291 00:29:29,240 --> 00:29:33,469 Another significant change that is underway that is, I think, 292 00:29:33,470 --> 00:29:38,660 should causes far graver concern that we're giving it because we're a bit too optimistic and we still believe in the idea that 293 00:29:38,660 --> 00:29:45,740 you can have a separate binary peace and war is this disaggregating effect and reordering effects of the information age. 294 00:29:46,820 --> 00:29:51,860 In many ways, it's making violence more likely, not less. 295 00:29:52,190 --> 00:29:59,060 Let me try and justify a little bit what I mean by that. If we look to the comparable historical model of the spread of an information. 296 00:29:59,900 --> 00:30:04,430 We could take us back to the Reformation and the printing revolution of the early 16th century in Europe. 297 00:30:05,390 --> 00:30:11,390 Old authorities were being questioned. Violent reactions to attacks on existential beliefs or identities. 298 00:30:11,900 --> 00:30:16,670 Wars waged by mass forces with increasing regulation to harness finance and effects. 299 00:30:17,030 --> 00:30:24,350 And yet the outcomes, the products of that war with the destruction of entire cities, some German cities were razed to the ground. 300 00:30:24,650 --> 00:30:28,610 Large numbers of civilian casualties, an entire continent engulfed by war. 301 00:30:29,030 --> 00:30:36,080 And it was significant enough that conflict to attract some of the most important scholars of that war, 302 00:30:36,320 --> 00:30:44,990 including Charles Tilly Parker and all the others who then tried to interpret what had happened this great conflagration as a military revolution. 303 00:30:45,710 --> 00:30:48,740 But I think what we should go back to is not so much the military revolution debate, 304 00:30:49,190 --> 00:30:52,400 but actually look instead at the disaggregation of religious authority, 305 00:30:52,670 --> 00:30:57,530 which had been the driving force, the elemental, dynamic elements in that conflict. 306 00:30:57,860 --> 00:31:00,080 We should look at the emergence of new political systems, 307 00:31:00,320 --> 00:31:09,950 some of which co-existed so dynastic and old empires coexisted republics and other progressive political experiments. 308 00:31:11,650 --> 00:31:22,490 But I think what this period of the 16th century and other wars do is create for us a collection of overlapping trends. 309 00:31:22,850 --> 00:31:26,270 It's not that history operates in a linear fashion, after all. 310 00:31:26,510 --> 00:31:29,239 It's just that we find assessment very, very difficult. 311 00:31:29,240 --> 00:31:38,629 And we fall in the trap of looking for patterns and optimism, because we find it very difficult to discern change when all the trends, 312 00:31:38,630 --> 00:31:42,440 if you like, are overlapping and interrupting each other in a dynamic way. 313 00:31:43,670 --> 00:31:52,190 I think there are currently some indicators that conflicts of considerable scale are likely in the future, 314 00:31:52,190 --> 00:31:58,220 despite the preference, the optimistic preference for only saying the future full of limited wars and smaller conflicts. 315 00:31:59,150 --> 00:32:02,520 And the reason why I feel that way is because if we did a bit of a study of war 316 00:32:02,520 --> 00:32:06,499 strivers and I didn't bring all the graphs and the numbers that to put in front of you, 317 00:32:06,500 --> 00:32:08,659 but you would agree, 318 00:32:08,660 --> 00:32:17,630 I think that the numbers of wars that have occurred over borders and territory are now less significant than they were 100 or 200 years ago. 319 00:32:18,020 --> 00:32:20,920 Some argue that actually they're about 70% less likely. 320 00:32:20,930 --> 00:32:26,780 I'm more reluctant personally to put percentage figures on things, but I would acknowledge that, yes, 321 00:32:26,780 --> 00:32:31,760 compared to the 18th and 19th century, territorial, the border wars seem less common than they were. 322 00:32:32,060 --> 00:32:37,580 But let's remember the context, by the way, the 18th, 19th century, that was the period of great estate formation. 323 00:32:37,910 --> 00:32:41,630 Right. So it would not surprise me that there were wars about tariffs and borders. 324 00:32:42,170 --> 00:32:51,350 What we are seeing, though, if we care to look for it, is the number of wars over government time in another country is extraordinarily high. 325 00:32:51,830 --> 00:32:58,850 Now, if you were to use that yardstick, the number of conflicts or of wars over government type in another country and apply that to history. 326 00:32:59,390 --> 00:33:04,520 I knew much that I could do on a graph, but I thought it was very much that against other kind of wars, like, 327 00:33:04,520 --> 00:33:12,620 you know, wars over resources, resource control, which is moderately high, wars for pre-emption or wars over borders. 328 00:33:12,830 --> 00:33:16,760 What you find is that wars over government type and government type in another country are 329 00:33:16,760 --> 00:33:21,030 extraordinarily high on the frequency of those conflicts seems to be pretty important. 330 00:33:21,170 --> 00:33:28,520 Why is that important? Because many of the demographers will tell you and futurists will tell you that now are going to be bigger 331 00:33:28,520 --> 00:33:35,100 resource constraints over the next 30 years or so unless we can develop certain ameliorating technologies. 332 00:33:35,360 --> 00:33:40,070 And demography is on the rise. And where you have these high demographic profiles, 333 00:33:40,340 --> 00:33:48,650 you tend to have greater incident of conflict over government type within a territory or in another another territory nearby. 334 00:33:49,880 --> 00:33:57,500 So there is a a strong possibility that a likely driver of the future, if we look to the past a lot to drive the future, 335 00:33:58,010 --> 00:34:01,670 which we don't tend, doesn't tend to get the the air time or the attraction. 336 00:34:02,330 --> 00:34:06,710 But this one looks as if it may well be part of what's coming towards us. 337 00:34:07,730 --> 00:34:15,140 But another aspect, though, the information age is this disaggregation or deregulation of warfare, which I'm I am particularly anxious about. 338 00:34:15,560 --> 00:34:22,340 Now, people like to use phrases like hybrid, ambiguous, grey zone war, or all these other phrases get used a lot at the moment. 339 00:34:22,760 --> 00:34:25,909 But I think what we're talking about is a series of violent actions that are 340 00:34:25,910 --> 00:34:31,400 below the threshold of norms that would normally initiate a state's retaliation. 341 00:34:32,210 --> 00:34:38,920 And these are part of an historical pattern. They've not been invented with the charism of doctrine, which self is a fallacy. 342 00:34:39,650 --> 00:34:40,770 They've existed for a long time. 343 00:34:40,770 --> 00:34:49,579 And give you a get a couple of historical thoughts on this 17th century buccaneering a state sponsored piracy was a form 344 00:34:49,580 --> 00:34:55,880 of hybrid warfare in the sense that it was below the threshold of norms that would initiate a state state's retaliation. 345 00:34:56,270 --> 00:35:03,990 Spanish guerillas in the Peninsula War. If you could say foreign backed forces that were operating against an occupation, 346 00:35:04,650 --> 00:35:10,050 anti-slavery, anti-slavery, naval operations and their enforcement of a new norm. 347 00:35:10,620 --> 00:35:18,330 A government led series of operations will be another example of how things were conducted below state retaliation levels in many cases, 348 00:35:19,230 --> 00:35:25,890 or the Russian government denial of expansionist policies over Central Asia in the 19th century, which I did my Ph.D. on many, many moons ago. 349 00:35:26,670 --> 00:35:32,340 The certain government departments denied that they were actually involved in any sort of form of expansion, 350 00:35:32,610 --> 00:35:35,610 and the actual Russian government was genuine. They really were not involved. 351 00:35:35,850 --> 00:35:42,540 But the military and one department, what the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry was all pushing the agenda forward. 352 00:35:42,750 --> 00:35:49,710 So you get this differential there as well. The point of all this is to say that deregulation, disaggregation is not new. 353 00:35:50,370 --> 00:35:55,349 But actually, in many ways the information age is making it more likely we're going to see more of this atomisation, 354 00:35:55,350 --> 00:36:01,710 if you like, and that's going to be a particularly problematic feature for us to deal with. 355 00:36:02,100 --> 00:36:03,990 And that's why I'm not very optimistic about the future. 356 00:36:04,560 --> 00:36:08,910 Now, there's another aspect to this, an information age, and that is that war is a form of theatre. 357 00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:13,410 War has often been about ritual and display. 358 00:36:14,250 --> 00:36:20,280 If you look at some of the warrior cultures of Central Africa in the 18th century, which for which we have records, 359 00:36:20,940 --> 00:36:27,510 the idea of dressing up and demonstrating your prowess through some sort of feat of arms was very, very common. 360 00:36:28,140 --> 00:36:30,060 I think about medieval, chivalric culture. 361 00:36:30,060 --> 00:36:37,110 It was this sort of ritualised version, a very theatrical, usually played out front of a large audience of display, of courage, 362 00:36:37,110 --> 00:36:46,709 skill and indeed mercy and the street culture that you might see in some of the British to American cities today of being in a gang, 363 00:36:46,710 --> 00:36:54,750 been to prove yourself by series of rites of passage are part of this whole psychology of how war is a form of theatre. 364 00:36:56,820 --> 00:37:07,260 But I think one of things that's now different is the fighting or combat before the mid-20th century at least was fairly episodic. 365 00:37:08,130 --> 00:37:16,980 Now it's far more persistent, and the new forms of surveillance and communication is constant. 366 00:37:16,980 --> 00:37:20,520 Surveillance has given rise to sort of form of constant readiness. 367 00:37:20,910 --> 00:37:25,319 And it's sort of a readiness and a readiness not just to respond to something, 368 00:37:25,320 --> 00:37:30,420 but a readiness to be involved and to use force far more than I think before. 369 00:37:30,420 --> 00:37:34,050 So we're now in a period of like constant display. 370 00:37:34,320 --> 00:37:37,980 It's not as if we're dressing up for war. We're constantly dressed for war. 371 00:37:38,460 --> 00:37:41,820 And that deterrence, for example, is part of that antecedent, 372 00:37:41,820 --> 00:37:50,820 part of the idea that you can maintain a continuous sort of front and it's all theatrical, it's all about how you signal to your opponent. 373 00:37:51,810 --> 00:37:58,290 So I think the Information Age has highlighted values we currently attach to information data. 374 00:37:59,340 --> 00:38:06,270 Much of it seems to be amplifying stuff that already exists, but the implications of it are actually much more serious. 375 00:38:06,660 --> 00:38:10,230 The sheer volume of it, the ability to manipulate it, 376 00:38:10,500 --> 00:38:16,110 the level of access which is making confidentiality a thing of the past is really very problematic indeed. 377 00:38:17,520 --> 00:38:26,640 Another development that I think we need to look at is how domains of conflict or war have extended in this information age. 378 00:38:27,150 --> 00:38:36,930 I mean, in the old days, we could talk about, you know, ground war and sea war and air war, and now we have a multi domain issue to deal with. 379 00:38:37,350 --> 00:38:45,960 So surveillance and military power in the ground, in the land environment has pushed war out to peripheries, 380 00:38:46,530 --> 00:38:51,870 into deep urban spaces and into places primarily where civilians can be used as cover. 381 00:38:51,870 --> 00:38:59,639 As I mentioned earlier on in the sea in the subsurface world now it seems that new technologies that 382 00:38:59,640 --> 00:39:05,190 are emerging are beginning to challenge a phenomena which has existed for lots of 20 years or so, 383 00:39:05,490 --> 00:39:09,870 and that was that the information age had left the maritime environment relatively untouched, 384 00:39:09,870 --> 00:39:17,340 I say relatively untouched, and that it was possible, for example, in submarine warfare to remain undetected, out of view, 385 00:39:17,610 --> 00:39:21,470 and therefore to maintain the sort of presence which had been, you know, 386 00:39:21,510 --> 00:39:25,020 largely unchanged since the sort of Cold War and before during the Cold War itself. 387 00:39:25,710 --> 00:39:29,190 Some of that has changed with the operations off the coast of Somalia, you know, 388 00:39:29,190 --> 00:39:37,169 emphasis now on piracy or humanitarian relief of migrants trying to get across the Mediterranean Sea or the Aegean or hurricane relief efforts. 389 00:39:37,170 --> 00:39:39,840 Yes, that has provided more profile. 390 00:39:40,260 --> 00:39:46,560 But so what I'm saying is that the maritime environment now, the information age is changing, even an environment which seem to be relatively immune. 391 00:39:47,280 --> 00:39:52,829 The air environment, the air domain, what we've experienced, I think, 392 00:39:52,830 --> 00:39:58,350 over the last 20 or 30 years is that the global and the local are now linked very much through the air environment. 393 00:39:59,080 --> 00:40:05,860 In the old days, you could still operate in in the air relatively unseen without information environment play much part in what you were 394 00:40:05,860 --> 00:40:13,540 doing now is far more important and it's become the the sort of domain of choice because it offers flexibility and access, 395 00:40:13,900 --> 00:40:16,840 limited risks and great information effects. 396 00:40:16,840 --> 00:40:23,440 People can demonstrate an attack and then come back to an audience to say, look, we all we've we've dealt with the adversary. 397 00:40:24,100 --> 00:40:27,970 But as I said earlier on, the adversary is adapting if that's what they are. 398 00:40:28,840 --> 00:40:37,840 There was a incident which I was able to look at where a a tarpaulin had been hauled over a street in in Raqqa, 399 00:40:38,890 --> 00:40:45,940 and it was painted with the image of a street on the top of it to make sure that Western air power would not detect what was going on underneath, 400 00:40:45,940 --> 00:40:50,170 which was a bomb making factory, suicide, IED factory and so on. 401 00:40:50,770 --> 00:40:54,880 Actually, luckily, human intelligence revealed what it was and it was dealt with appropriately. 402 00:40:55,540 --> 00:40:58,089 But what we're seeing far more common, though, 403 00:40:58,090 --> 00:41:05,380 than this idea of old fashioned deception is deliberately misleading information operations by people who are confronting the West. 404 00:41:05,740 --> 00:41:11,440 So, for example, if an air strike is conducted very precisely, very cleanly with a great deal of attention to these reports, 405 00:41:11,440 --> 00:41:14,530 to make sure that no civilian casualties are going to be inflicted, 406 00:41:14,950 --> 00:41:21,730 Daesh have been dragging in bodies which they have executed, placing the site of the explosion and saying that Western air forces did this. 407 00:41:22,310 --> 00:41:26,469 And because people can't react quickly enough to the information age, they find them dead themselves, 408 00:41:26,470 --> 00:41:33,780 getting caught out by these kind of issues, other domains that are emerging or that the re-emerging in many ways is space. 409 00:41:33,790 --> 00:41:38,680 Of course, surveillance, navigation, communications are dependent upon the space environment. 410 00:41:39,730 --> 00:41:47,020 But I think we are rediscovering through the information age, the importance of information and primarily psychology, 411 00:41:47,800 --> 00:41:55,900 that what we are able to do is to use intelligence to sort of penetrate far more 412 00:41:55,900 --> 00:42:01,660 deeply into governments and societies than I think is ever before been possible, 413 00:42:02,020 --> 00:42:06,700 that we're very worried about the sabotage of critical infrastructure by cyber threats. 414 00:42:07,480 --> 00:42:15,250 And, of course, we're very aware that mass communications can weaken the resolve of a population to resist any kind of enemy threats. 415 00:42:16,090 --> 00:42:22,750 But in studying these things in isolation, we're missing the point because people come up with solutions to every single one of these. 416 00:42:23,320 --> 00:42:28,840 The point is that the effects will be achieved across all these domains together. 417 00:42:29,230 --> 00:42:31,390 It's a multi-domain environment, 418 00:42:31,720 --> 00:42:40,299 and there are a lot of people at the moment looking at how they would combine cyber interdiction of space assets to reprogramme 419 00:42:40,300 --> 00:42:46,990 their navigation systems or to interrupt their communications without even the U.S. being aware that that's been done and that, 420 00:42:46,990 --> 00:42:52,569 you know, counter-terrorism requires a variety by civil and military tools and information is 421 00:42:52,570 --> 00:42:56,890 providing this sort of is the centre of gravity and like in the middle of all of those. 422 00:42:58,390 --> 00:43:03,610 So, I mean, I'm no, I'm short a time, so I'm going to sort of stop bring this to a conclusion. 423 00:43:03,610 --> 00:43:08,259 But I didn't say any more about the way that the information age is also affecting the ability 424 00:43:08,260 --> 00:43:13,210 of groups like Daesh to propagate their ideas and to recruit people in the Western world. 425 00:43:14,680 --> 00:43:21,310 All in all, I think there are three major schools of thought looking at the kind of the future and where we're going. 426 00:43:21,320 --> 00:43:24,850 There are those people who emphasise that more warfare in the future will be about terrorism. 427 00:43:25,450 --> 00:43:27,879 Most of the literature is about weapons of mass destruction. 428 00:43:27,880 --> 00:43:33,760 They're going to be used in terrorism, although actually that is negligible the amount of WMD that's ever been used in terrorist attacks. 429 00:43:35,200 --> 00:43:41,979 Others are very focussed on technologies and if you talk to anyone involved in the Western military industrial complex, 430 00:43:41,980 --> 00:43:47,260 they'll all tell you about the newest round of often the wonder weapons that they're developing, 431 00:43:47,950 --> 00:43:56,440 which as in the past was seen as a panacea for all problems but actually usually did not live up to their reputation at all. 432 00:43:57,310 --> 00:44:01,390 Frank Hofmann, who is very famous, having worked on hybrid war, for example, 433 00:44:01,690 --> 00:44:12,249 is now saying that the technological changes going on through this information age are could make some alterations to the very nature of war itself, 434 00:44:12,250 --> 00:44:15,400 although he himself is not entirely convinced by that yet. 435 00:44:16,060 --> 00:44:19,810 And when it comes to robotics and automation, 436 00:44:19,810 --> 00:44:25,330 which everyone loves to sort of talk about because it's kind of novel and it's very interesting and we're we're obsessed by novelty. 437 00:44:25,750 --> 00:44:32,740 I mean, let's not forget that the human machine interface began at the very latest with the invention of the machine gun in the 1860s. 438 00:44:32,890 --> 00:44:37,420 And it is hardly a new idea, really. And the okay. 439 00:44:37,570 --> 00:44:45,610 Unmanned robotic development does seem to be new, except that the first, you know, unmanned aerial systems were used in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. 440 00:44:45,940 --> 00:44:53,770 So again, I would challenge this idea that somehow these are completely new ideas and these people are saying, well, yes, but what about information? 441 00:44:53,950 --> 00:44:58,380 Sorry, artificial intelligence. Some writers are now saying like Chris cake. 442 00:44:59,190 --> 00:45:02,790 This is actually the greatest threat to humankind. 443 00:45:03,690 --> 00:45:11,280 But there seems to be some doubts, even amongst experts now about whether this optimistic idea that we can use A.I. to orchestrate 444 00:45:11,280 --> 00:45:15,570 all our weapons systems and run all our communications for us so we can just sit back. 445 00:45:16,560 --> 00:45:24,930 There's actually a lot of doubts about the ability of AI ever to capture human consciousness or sense making. 446 00:45:25,560 --> 00:45:33,390 If you think about this experiment, if I if I was to lift one eyebrow, you know, as a human being, you might interpret that in a dozen different ways. 447 00:45:33,780 --> 00:45:38,490 Now, for a computer to work through every single algorithm and work out the context and the social nuance, 448 00:45:38,820 --> 00:45:44,730 it's almost, I think, beyond even the greatest of the computers. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that that's very unlikely. 449 00:45:45,030 --> 00:45:48,600 The greatest threat to humankind is not that A.I. will replace humans, 450 00:45:49,020 --> 00:45:56,190 but rather humans and A.I. and machinery will combine that will be looking enhanced. 451 00:45:56,190 --> 00:46:01,799 Human beings with different AI, body functions and intelligence, I think, will remain human. 452 00:46:01,800 --> 00:46:08,340 But we may have a very different type of human by the end of the century. An emotion, persistent information, intelligence, 453 00:46:08,340 --> 00:46:11,880 surveillance and reconnaissance will actually be something that every human being will be like a sensor. 454 00:46:12,870 --> 00:46:17,040 Another area when we I am getting pessimistic about is synthetics, 455 00:46:17,040 --> 00:46:22,949 because most people talk about future synthetics or presently synthetics as material objects. 456 00:46:22,950 --> 00:46:26,160 And yes, they're all fantastic material objects being produced, which are synthetic. 457 00:46:26,550 --> 00:46:28,320 But I'm talking about synthetic realities. 458 00:46:29,100 --> 00:46:35,730 I'm very worried about the way that there's a greater oscillation in public responses to conflict, either for or against. 459 00:46:36,690 --> 00:46:44,100 And it seems to me that if you can create synthetic realities, which is much more likely in the next few years, 460 00:46:44,550 --> 00:46:52,590 that the objective in war of different belligerents will be to exploit the short term effect of that altered reality. 461 00:46:53,640 --> 00:46:56,610 I'd love to see more of that prompt, as far as I'm aware, that surely if I sit in the audience, 462 00:46:56,610 --> 00:46:59,970 so I'm going to just wait to you ask me a question about that. 463 00:47:01,170 --> 00:47:10,530 But let me just draw stumps and with these sort of final concluding sort of points, if I may bring it all together, 464 00:47:10,540 --> 00:47:19,380 because I'm at the moment in the United States, there's a great deal of work going on about what they're calling the Multi-domain battle. 465 00:47:21,000 --> 00:47:30,060 General Milley, the head of the Army, has been talking about a fundamental change in the character of war and the compression of the political level. 466 00:47:30,270 --> 00:47:35,399 With what's going on at the tactical street level is is throwing up all sorts of 467 00:47:35,400 --> 00:47:40,770 new challenges which the American military are trying to understand and deal with. 468 00:47:41,040 --> 00:47:45,419 And the most important that he talks about is the speed and ubiquity of information, 469 00:47:45,420 --> 00:47:52,770 that transmission information is now so rapid that real time sensors and shooting tools, 470 00:47:52,770 --> 00:47:56,490 if you like, all are seemingly co-located and worked together. 471 00:47:57,750 --> 00:48:03,600 What that seems to suggest is the large scale formations may not survive unless they're so large. 472 00:48:03,600 --> 00:48:10,400 Like the North Korean army can simply absorb the losses and or maybe be a drone swarm that can absorb lots and lots of losses. 473 00:48:11,310 --> 00:48:19,950 But the idea that you can have long range, rapid and precise munitions sensed by machine and delivered very, 474 00:48:19,950 --> 00:48:26,660 very, very quickly may actually make conflict more more likely rather than less. 475 00:48:28,110 --> 00:48:32,790 People are talking about more system dependencies which make them more vulnerable. I think that's absolutely the case. 476 00:48:33,180 --> 00:48:37,140 Commanders will have less time to decide and are finding themselves increasingly overloaded. 477 00:48:37,590 --> 00:48:40,680 They're having to stay mobile, which means they suffer from exhaustion. 478 00:48:41,550 --> 00:48:46,950 And the solution that lots of be reaching for is this human machine integration with a great deal 479 00:48:46,950 --> 00:48:51,450 of emphasis on information technology to provide these tools to get them through the problems. 480 00:48:52,650 --> 00:48:57,750 But what I wanted to really end with was I've just spent the last couple of weeks in in Afghanistan, 481 00:48:58,440 --> 00:49:04,290 and I thought it might be worth all this wonderful sort of theoretical constructions about what war might or might not be and 482 00:49:04,650 --> 00:49:12,450 why we should or should not be optimistic and why peace may be suffering a great deal as a result does somehow get grounded. 483 00:49:12,450 --> 00:49:18,150 When you go back out to a war zone and you experience it first hand, you know the things that really matter. 484 00:49:19,200 --> 00:49:22,889 And it may be worth knowing that after two years of total disaster, 485 00:49:22,890 --> 00:49:28,560 it seems to me for the Afghan government that they've suffered catastrophic losses since 2014, 486 00:49:29,220 --> 00:49:32,190 after the withdrawal of the combat missions of the Western armed forces. 487 00:49:32,730 --> 00:49:38,430 That actually something changed this spring, which the media don't report because it's not a bad news story and therefore not very interesting. 488 00:49:39,030 --> 00:49:46,140 And that is that the Afghan National Army moved away from being totally fixed and in single locations they've begun. 489 00:49:46,380 --> 00:49:49,440 A new generation of officers, all of whom were trained by the West, 490 00:49:49,860 --> 00:49:58,410 have begun to pick up on the idea that need to kind of get this war finished by taking it back towards their officers not being stuck in. 491 00:49:58,540 --> 00:50:06,940 On fixed locations. And in the spring of this year, the Taliban suffered very, very heavy losses indeed, such they couldn't regenerate quickly enough. 492 00:50:07,390 --> 00:50:12,670 And rather than the spike of violence going up, as it does every summer through the so-called fighting season, 493 00:50:13,240 --> 00:50:15,170 there's been a plateauing and then a dropping away. 494 00:50:15,170 --> 00:50:21,060 And in the sport this fall, which no one expected at all, and it's led right given rise to a new optimism. 495 00:50:21,080 --> 00:50:25,810 The Afghan government that actually may be now the pathway to reconciliation is finally open. 496 00:50:26,820 --> 00:50:30,670 If I tell you that the in social movements are also fracturing right now. 497 00:50:31,000 --> 00:50:37,840 So Islamic State, which got themselves gripped into the very eastern portion of Afghanistan in Nangarhar province, 498 00:50:38,410 --> 00:50:43,900 have fought a tooth and nail battle with the Taliban and indeed overrun lots of areas run by formerly by the Afghan army. 499 00:50:44,110 --> 00:50:49,060 They've been driven back up into the hills and they say threatens the Taliban, 500 00:50:49,720 --> 00:50:55,300 that a temporary truce has been put together by the Taliban locally in Nangarhar with Islamic State. 501 00:50:56,200 --> 00:51:01,419 Now, that seems to me to be really significant that all the studies show of long term insurgencies, 502 00:51:01,420 --> 00:51:03,910 that they decline very, very slowly and very gradually. 503 00:51:04,150 --> 00:51:10,270 And when they do that, characterised by splintering a fracturing of their movements, and that is going on at the moment. 504 00:51:11,350 --> 00:51:15,190 Now, the Afghan government is still very much dependent upon the United States for its funding. 505 00:51:16,300 --> 00:51:24,100 And we know that, you know, largely Afghans believe that their own government is pretty much a proxy for the United States. 506 00:51:24,820 --> 00:51:31,600 But the insurgents are finding that it's getting increasingly difficult to operate a safe haven of Pakistan than in the past, 507 00:51:32,620 --> 00:51:35,080 and that the Afghan National Army, 508 00:51:35,710 --> 00:51:42,340 a, come up with ideas, modifications of how they operate, which are going to reduce costs and make them more sustainable over the long term. 509 00:51:42,820 --> 00:51:48,310 And there's a new effort now for economic regeneration of the country led by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani, 510 00:51:48,520 --> 00:51:53,200 which I hope will I'm optimistic in this sense, not against the theme of my own talk. 511 00:51:53,800 --> 00:51:57,580 I'm optimistic that could potentially provide a sovereign wealth fund for the future. 512 00:51:57,820 --> 00:52:02,130 But although I just want to take the opportunity of just showing the things are changing there as well. 513 00:52:02,180 --> 00:52:07,810 War is this dynamic process and certainly it's not a big American defeat, as many journalists like to say. 514 00:52:08,200 --> 00:52:11,409 Well, response in much complicating that and i might even. Quote zero nine. 515 00:52:11,410 --> 00:52:18,370 So it's far too early to tell what the outcome is anyway. So optimism has been misplaced. 516 00:52:19,180 --> 00:52:24,100 I think optimism is misplaced. The abolition of war as a legal instrument. 517 00:52:24,100 --> 00:52:28,180 You know, we're coming up to the anniversary of 1928 for that. 518 00:52:29,110 --> 00:52:31,989 All those promises that were made by international institutions, 519 00:52:31,990 --> 00:52:38,160 that the war was going to be rendered obsolete and illegal, and that would end the end of history. 520 00:52:38,170 --> 00:52:43,360 So theses that we've been promised in the past, well, sadly, none of those have come true, 521 00:52:44,140 --> 00:52:48,340 that in many ways the thresholds of the use of violence are shortening. 522 00:52:48,670 --> 00:52:55,150 Violence, it seems to me, is becoming more common and more likely under the technologies of today and indeed the near future. 523 00:52:55,420 --> 00:52:58,930 It to me to make it more likely to be more conflicts in the future rather than less. 524 00:52:59,350 --> 00:53:07,030 And it will be messy and dynamic and untidy, producing, I think, unsatisfactory and quite often unexpected results. 525 00:53:07,720 --> 00:53:12,820 So the end of peace will hope not, but the end of optimism, certainly. 526 00:53:13,090 --> 00:53:13,480 Thank you.