Welcome to the CCW Lounge 27.
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.
This is our flagship seminar. It takes place every Tuesday.
I'm here to offer and lead through the academic year.
This year we have an exciting programme. I was speaker today but also with talks ranging from Logan Island over the Congo.
Ethics on strategy, on future war,
on coaches of new wars with serious UFOs transferred a little over May Carter Armstrong McFate, Michael Ross new person.
So it's really an exciting program and we hope to see you not just today but throughout the trip.
CCW is I think that's true. We have every Wednesday a seminar and also coach.
It's a 515 and one week. It's history of war and the other week it's the future of warfare.
We also have special events. The most important one this week you might have seen the flyers on the seats,
I hope is the House of Lots panel, which takes place on Thursday in the Exam School on UK defence capability.
So please join us for that event.
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.
We have another regular event which is the CCW Working Group on Armed Conflict and that takes place every other Friday.
The first one is in week two at 10 a.m. in Lafayette College, and this is really for students,
faculty visiting fellows to present work in progress and to discuss work from different disciplinary angles on armed conflict.
Then we also are always there to provide information on other events not hosted by CCW but by other institutions.
Centres across the university and some of them to take place.
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.
It's in the old libraries in all sorts. If you want to have more information on what is taking place,
when exactly where you can sign up to our newsletter, which was more administrative, sends out every week.
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just come and talk to us and speak to us on what we're doing also in terms of such and such projects.
Today, I am delighted to introduce our Speaker to the Director of the Changing Party for Cancer, Dr. Robert Johnson.
He works on strategy and history of war on the Middle East and is the author of many publications.
But just recent ones include The Great War and the Middle East, Africa Two Way of War and Tour to the South.
And today he's going to speak on the end of peace and optimism.
I have a bigger question mark, but to give us all the end of peace and optimism,
assessing the changing character, what took you emotionally that first cold induction?
And this feels like one of those awkward moments where, you know,
you've got to kind of give a State of the Union address about the state of the art of where we are and,
you know, war studies or armed conflict studies or like the change in culture war.
And I'm very conscious that I'm being deliberately provocative with a statement about the end of peace and optimism.
You know, you've got to be watching process to be able to go, do you mean the end of hope?
And I hope it's not quite that bad, but we do have a problem in terms of optimism is a common problem.
And it's not just relates to the idea of war. It's very interesting that a few weeks ago,
when Jean-Claude Juncker had to give his sort of State of the Union address about the European Union, the Brexit score,
just one mention very briefly and his entire speech was optimistic about ever closer union being now
finally realised and the British one of the West aspects and that there would be a single foreign minister,
a single currency would be enforced and then met with a sort of fairly muted response from many European leaders,
I think probably because they heard the message before or because it just seemed perhaps to them self-evident.
I don't know. And we're certainly used to political leaders and political elites making optimistic statements about the future.
In British politics, for example, the end of austerity is now widely heralded,
even though economists, even Labour Party economists, are saying it would actually.
Heading towards another long term recession between 2018 and 2030, and that's beside Brexit.
So we seem to have a problem.
The past of this provocation on making gentle provocation has been inspired by Professor Dominic Johnson here in the department,
who wrote a book in 2004 about this optimism bias in his book called Overconfidence and War.
And what he argued was that overconfidence or confidence calculations aren't just
something that occur because we misunderstand the conditions that we're observing,
but we're almost sort of hardwired with this kind of human partiality.
We've got some sort of problem that we want to see the, you know, the positives.
And he refers to some good, positive illusions. And there are many writers who've suffered from this this particular problem.
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,
often justified on grounds of humanitarianism or responsibility, an obligation to protect,
and the sort of very strong faith in military power that militaries can indeed change things for the better.
But that optimism isn't limited only to political leaders.
It's also true of the way that military doctrine writers construct how militaries should actually
operate and that senior military leaders are sometimes guilty of this sort of can do mentality,
that there is a utility of force. And optimistically, when force is applied, there will be benefits.
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.
But if you look at doctrines, they are very linear in the way that they articulate how military operations unfold.
They move from phase zero where there's really nothing going on to phase one,
a sort of combat phase, which is always going to be won by whoever's advocating these things.
And then a sort of phase on 2 to 3 and eventually four of reconstruction, stabilisation and peace.
Well, of course, it doesn't ever work out that way. The chaos of war is one reason why it doesn't work out.
But one which has been brought home to me only last week I spent the last
couple of weeks in Afghanistan is what you might call institutional friction.
We are our own worst enemy is one way of characterising.
That is that it seems incredibly difficult to force through even self-evident policies.
You made a number of military or civilian officials in war zones who say, well, we know what the solutions are.
We know you know what the problem is, we know what the solutions are,
but we just can't get it to get through some sort of budgetary constraint or some sort of policy announcement.
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,
catchall phrases which seem to cheer everyone up and create optimism, but seem to be so far misplaced from the ground realities of war.
Those include, for example, full spectrum dominance.
We were told in the 1990s that new technologies, particularly surveillance communication technologies,
were going to iron out friction in the battle space and that this panopticon,
this all seeing eye, would somehow have the opportunity to eliminate any problems.
We would see where all the enemies were and our own people.
People talked about shock and awe and the way that fires and the dislocation the enemy would mean
that they were unable to function and simply would collapse and go belly up and be defeated.
But the biggest one of all is always about technology itself.
The technological solutions are often, you know, reached for in the near future.
Somehow this is what's going to create for us the the decisive edge in wars of the future.
And therefore, you know, we should be optimistic. Now, what's very exciting for me, coming from an historical background,
is that it seems to me a lot of these statements are very rarely tested out against comparable historical versions.
You know, let me give you an example of a more pessimistic assessment.
Back in the 1990s, the UN secretary general talked about the future will be full of water wars.
He said there were all the wars in the global south. The overriding feature will be this failure of water supply creating conflict.
Well, actually, what's very interesting when you look at historical examples of where there is water failure, you don't often get conflict.
What you get is migration, right? Big movements of peoples out of where there are problems.
So give an example would be FATA border security the. While Mughal capital in South Asia it was abandoned.
Not because of war, but because water unlocks and people simply moved to Delhi instead.
In Central Asia and western China, there are a number of abandoned cities.
Again, they were destroyed by war. They were destroyed by simply people moving out, abandoning them and migrating.
Now, we know that land, of course, has been a sort of more constant source of violence through world history.
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.
So it seems to me that while, you know, in the 1990, as we talk about water wars,
we stopped talking about land because we just assumed it wasn't important anymore.
But actually, land conflicts have been extremely important across the Global South in the last 20 years or say, 30 years now.
My optimism charge is not limited only as political leaders or indeed military writers.
It's also a malaise. We've we've got hold of regard to the information age that we currently live in as well.
The Information Age, we were told, was going to produce greater truth and clarity.
If you remember back that far, actually, it's produced more complexity.
It's given rise to greater readiness for fake news, for selective expectations, if you like, being reinforced.
So harsh realities that exist in certain sections of society have been amplified
and reinforced by the information age rather than being defeated by it.
And expectations have increased when it comes to war by video footage of precise,
precisely delivered munitions from the air because people feel that's desirable to have precise munitions delivered.
Well, Stan, fast, those who argue that drone warfare should be banned.
But, you know, it does seem to me that raised a certain type of expectation.
And we know that actually precision comes at a far higher financial cost.
You know, jokingly, I heard an Army officer say once he launched a missile,
so a missile launched recently from an al indeed base in Qatar over a fish of war in Syria.
He said that goes another Ferrari.
Course, the analogy being these things are so expensive that really he was hoping that to find a cheaper source of ammunition,
even if it would be precise.
I think I don't think we acknowledge the shared costs of these wars when we talk about these information age expectations we have.
But of course, what's happening now is that the adversaries of the West are also developing information age, responses to precise power.
And where that is manifest itself is in hugging civilian populations.
So now it's quite common to find insurgent groups from Palestine on one side, if you like,
through to Afghanistan and beyond who are placing themselves amongst civilians,
knowing that Western air forces would be much more reluctant to engage them.
But I think we should look at ourselves here as well.
The academic community is also guilty of this charge of overoptimism about conflicts in the future.
And so this is really going to hurt. I know I'm conscious who I'm talking to the audience.
So bear with me while I just unpack these problems for a moment.
There's a great deal of faith, I think, in international institutions to prevent or to resolve war.
And if you think about the way that we felt that democracy,
the spread of democracy was somehow going to be one of the great solutions to the spread of violence were more democratised.
People can't have peace. They're less likely to engage in war with other democratic societies.
Stands in total contrast to the writers of, for example, the late Professor Chris Bailey,
who studied democratised movements around the world through global history and
came to the rather startling conclusion that the more democratised the movement,
more likely they are to inflict very lethal punishments on large sections of the population.
In other words, democracy might just give rise to more passionate forms of democratised violence.
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,
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.
One is left feeling the, you know,
should we not question anew these international institutions and their ability to actually do what we we think they can do?
I think much of our international relations is a subject as a discipline is still focussed on institutions built after 1945,
which actually don't really seem to change the outcomes very much at all.
You invest with faith and scholarship in them and yet the record.
That performance has been pretty much under par. Now, people have said to me, well, what about, you know,
the fact that international institutions have given rise to a much greater awareness of the cost benefit rationalism of war.
That war is is very costly. And what international institutions have done is pointed out what these costs are likely to be.
I have to say that the tragedy of that is that this war is too costly argument is that unfortunately,
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,
which didn't do as terribly well when it came to the following few years.
The idea that somehow globalism will reduce conflict,
I think is something that needs to be tested very rigorously indeed against the evidence and against history.
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.
I'm actually able to come back to Oxford to speak.
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,
that globalisation was giving rise to a new form of motive for conflict through identity politics and that transnational violence was on the increase,
she said. But there will be an obsolescence of old war.
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.
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.
And if you remember, the photography of Daesh is rise that they were not just simply a group of insurgents like the Afghan Taliban,
they were driving in armoured vehicles, they were they had tanks,
they had their own mortar teams, they caught to some artillery from the Iraqis and so on.
So this was a kind of conventional war that we were seeing unfolding.
And to argue that somehow these new wars when I was just about identity politics seemed somehow misplaced.
And when Russia involved itself in the in the conflict in Syria in 2015, for example, again,
it didn't look like a so-called new war of war amongst the people, as Rupert Smith called it.
It looked like a pretty old fashioned war.
And if you look at the the footage, you know, the overflights of Mosul or Aleppo, you'll get some idea of that.
They look remarkably similar to Dresden in 1945 or Berlin in 1945.
So, of course, that the one that the one individual that we often referred to is the sort of ultimate optimist will be.
Steve Pinker, better angels of our nature. Much has been written about Steve's work.
The you know, he observed the overall global, you know, global history over many centuries.
There was something of a declining trend in in war.
And that, you know, people have made use of that work to show that actually we're much better off now that,
you know, maybe war is, after all, obsolete and so on. Now, of course, if you read Steve's work very carefully,
he does actually make the point that he's not he's not saying that this trend is a permanent condition.
He says it can change.
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,
you know, the kind of global institutions.
But he wasn't saying this is permanent now or an act of war here at Oxford has been to point out that sadly,
what's happened is a lot of the violence which would have been categorised once a state violence
has transferred itself into societies and the violence visited on individuals within societies,
if anything is constant, if not in some cases are on the rise.
And even when you come to people who should be more pessimistic, like Bob Jarvis, who, you know,
is a kind of realist of of the ultimate realist school with a capital R and dripping fangs,
he wrote in 2011 that he was very optimistic about the future.
Despite that, you know, his arguments about power maximisation, nothing else, that the world would be a mixed picture.
Ultimately, he says, we should be optimistic about the future. You know that things are getting better.
Now, why do we come to these conclusions? Why? Why have we fallen into this this trap?
And what are the measurements which we're using to make these kind of assessments about the future?
Well, one things that we like to do in the change in control centre is to try to match together history with contemporary,
with a few people who work on future studies. And we're trying to make those assessments of change through time.
And I think, you know, one of the things that we're very aware of as we try to approach the qualitative
and quantitative approaches and measurements through the CCW conflict platform,
which which Nightcrawler is championing that we're aware of.
The shortcomings of the different disciplinary approaches.
All the difference for methodological approaches and some interesting problems have already emerged from the way that we have looked at this,
this particular approach. Take, for example, last sediments work on the power law distribution.
I know that sounds like a heading of an episode of Big Bang Theory, but bear with me.
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,
rather perverse law that you're more likely to get by large conflicts.
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.
But there seems to be some sheer process at work that that laws are sort of examined.
Now, I'm aware, as in the story,
that when we look at these different qualitative and quantitative approaches to try to measure change and measure what's really going on,
and perhaps being a little bit more realistic that each age tries to reinterpret the past for its own interpretation,
including into its own present day values, that they try to say, Well, this is how we feel today.
Let's measure the past, present and future through that lens of what we think is important and valuable.
And I'll give you a couple examples of what I mean by that.
When played out in history in the 19 tens, prior to the First World War, Friedrich von Donati,
a German officer, wrote about the sort of the future war, what war was probably coming.
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.
But he said, fortunately, we Germans are more suited to govern Europe in the East because we are more resilient.
And so his entire thesis was based on some idea of a certain race or a certain culture was more suited to to war.
And if you think about United States in the 19th century, they, too,
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.
So the idea of, you know, American Manifest Destiny or exceptionalism of the 19th century,
its legacy of thinking goes on right the way into the 20th century.
And to some extent, you could argue is manifest in that President Donald Trump himself today.
And I think the problem is that we have come to the conclusion the Western world and our present day values,
that all wealth in the West has conferred certain obligations on the rest of the world to either intervene,
to improve or to secure the world, even though actually there's no real basis to that claim at all.
It's something that we have invented because of the values which we hold onto.
Now, you contrast that with China today.
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.
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.
Now, we are at the moment, when we come to measure conflicts, I think tend to look for either trends.
That seems to be a very common approach to conflict or perhaps inflection points like 911, rather like 1945.
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,
you know, perhaps war has not changed because of the way that it operates.
Now, if you if the reason why I'm slightly critical of these inflection points,
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,
for example, we might say the inflection points that are the invention of national debt by England in some 1693,
or the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694.
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.
But what I'm doing is I'm just pointing out to you that inflection points are very, very difficult.
911 seem to us to herald a new capability by terrorists.
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.
And this idea of violence, content of mass civilian casualties, you know, by non-state actors, again,
there are plenty of examples throughout global history of where non-state actors are engaged in mass murder.
It just the toolsets they had of the day were far less efficient as killing tools than the ones that we have now.
I think other inflection points that probably need more amplification and I guess amongst military circles, all the concerns of climate change,
global financial crises and mobilisation of individuals by social media, but perhaps will come to those later.
I think all the inflection points that way of looking at the world is problematic
because pretty much every inflection point you can find has an antecedent to it,
and they often look less imposing in hindsight than they look at the time.
Now, I would agree. I'm sure you were thinking. Yes, but what about the dropping of atomic weapons in 1945?
Yes, I think that still looks pretty imposing even to this end of the 21st century.
But what it does do, I think,
is raise very significant questions or should raise significant questions in our minds about trends or linearity of thinking about whether this,
you know, much faith as there is in economics about cyclical activities or whether we should start looking at constellations
of bursts of change clustered around certain technologies or ideas or improvements or organisational changes.
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,
you have to start from the basis that is a dynamic phenomenon.
The logic of violence is escalation of force.
And if you look at videos of street fights on a Saturday night in Britain,
in the major cities of this country, you'll get some idea of what I'm getting at,
that there is this sort of escalatory component,
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.
I think the other thing that's really quite significant right now is that the means of war
have changed and empowered individuals where one wants would have needed collective action.
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.
But we seem to be very slow to pick up on the fact that individuals now can kill
the same numbers that in the old days states would have been needed to do so.
And I think, although, you know, people will query when we talk about the nature of war and they say,
well, you know, this turf war, you know, it's pretty, pretty old fashioned in.
Does it still really have any validity?
We think it does in CCW because it is does still capture something about this elemental, dynamic nature of the phenomenon.
It allows us to talk about the environment of war, which is, I think, different from, say,
civil conflict or maybe, you know, low level, low intensity violence in cities, for example, or criminal networks.
I think it allows us to take to be realistic about the anatomy of a conflict,
the actors involved in it, the component parts, if you like, the functioning of it.
How actually works is not an armed conflict functions the same way as what we once called a war.
There is no real difference when you get down on the ground and start to study it.
And I think its essence, therefore its core meaning its core purpose sadly is very, very unchanged.
And I don't need to go through all the lists of the nature of war, you know, what we're talking about.
But it's pretty visceral stuff. It's full of what I call terror and error.
Lots of mistakes and lots of fear. It's still about the transmission of power or the attempted transmissions of power.
And of course, it still involves really very difficult ethical questions for us to grapple with.
Well, the very taboo of killing itself, which even military professionals don't talk about very often with enough.
So I think none of the nature of war is gone. This whatever we call this phenomenon.
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,
that use of chemical weapons and becoming weapons by the regime against them to the crucifixion of prisoners, widespread torture,
murders of prisoners of war, on mass destruction of urban spaces, religious sites, refugees despite the law of armed conflict,
the conventions that attempt to regulate war and the presence of international institutions and even great powers on the ground amongst them.
One of the things that is going on is this greater civilian participation in war,
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.
Another significant change that is underway that is, I think,
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
you can have a separate binary peace and war is this disaggregating effect and reordering effects of the information age.
In many ways, it's making violence more likely, not less.
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.
We could take us back to the Reformation and the printing revolution of the early 16th century in Europe.
Old authorities were being questioned. Violent reactions to attacks on existential beliefs or identities.
Wars waged by mass forces with increasing regulation to harness finance and effects.
And yet the outcomes, the products of that war with the destruction of entire cities, some German cities were razed to the ground.
Large numbers of civilian casualties, an entire continent engulfed by war.
And it was significant enough that conflict to attract some of the most important scholars of that war,
including Charles Tilly Parker and all the others who then tried to interpret what had happened this great conflagration as a military revolution.
But I think what we should go back to is not so much the military revolution debate,
but actually look instead at the disaggregation of religious authority,
which had been the driving force, the elemental, dynamic elements in that conflict.
We should look at the emergence of new political systems,
some of which co-existed so dynastic and old empires coexisted republics and other progressive political experiments.
But I think what this period of the 16th century and other wars do is create for us a collection of overlapping trends.
It's not that history operates in a linear fashion, after all.
It's just that we find assessment very, very difficult.
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,
if you like, are overlapping and interrupting each other in a dynamic way.
I think there are currently some indicators that conflicts of considerable scale are likely in the future,
despite the preference, the optimistic preference for only saying the future full of limited wars and smaller conflicts.
And the reason why I feel that way is because if we did a bit of a study of war
strivers and I didn't bring all the graphs and the numbers that to put in front of you,
but you would agree,
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.
Some argue that actually they're about 70% less likely.
I'm more reluctant personally to put percentage figures on things, but I would acknowledge that, yes,
compared to the 18th and 19th century, territorial, the border wars seem less common than they were.
But let's remember the context, by the way, the 18th, 19th century, that was the period of great estate formation.
Right. So it would not surprise me that there were wars about tariffs and borders.
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.
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.
I knew much that I could do on a graph, but I thought it was very much that against other kind of wars, like,
you know, wars over resources, resource control, which is moderately high, wars for pre-emption or wars over borders.
What you find is that wars over government type and government type in another country are
extraordinarily high on the frequency of those conflicts seems to be pretty important.
Why is that important? Because many of the demographers will tell you and futurists will tell you that now are going to be bigger
resource constraints over the next 30 years or so unless we can develop certain ameliorating technologies.
And demography is on the rise. And where you have these high demographic profiles,
you tend to have greater incident of conflict over government type within a territory or in another another territory nearby.
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,
which we don't tend, doesn't tend to get the the air time or the attraction.
But this one looks as if it may well be part of what's coming towards us.
But another aspect, though, the information age is this disaggregation or deregulation of warfare, which I'm I am particularly anxious about.
Now, people like to use phrases like hybrid, ambiguous, grey zone war, or all these other phrases get used a lot at the moment.
But I think what we're talking about is a series of violent actions that are
below the threshold of norms that would normally initiate a state's retaliation.
And these are part of an historical pattern. They've not been invented with the charism of doctrine, which self is a fallacy.
They've existed for a long time.
And give you a get a couple of historical thoughts on this 17th century buccaneering a state sponsored piracy was a form
of hybrid warfare in the sense that it was below the threshold of norms that would initiate a state state's retaliation.
Spanish guerillas in the Peninsula War. If you could say foreign backed forces that were operating against an occupation,
anti-slavery, anti-slavery, naval operations and their enforcement of a new norm.
A government led series of operations will be another example of how things were conducted below state retaliation levels in many cases,
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.
The certain government departments denied that they were actually involved in any sort of form of expansion,
and the actual Russian government was genuine. They really were not involved.
But the military and one department, what the Asiatic Department of the Foreign Ministry was all pushing the agenda forward.
So you get this differential there as well. The point of all this is to say that deregulation, disaggregation is not new.
But actually, in many ways the information age is making it more likely we're going to see more of this atomisation,
if you like, and that's going to be a particularly problematic feature for us to deal with.
And that's why I'm not very optimistic about the future.
Now, there's another aspect to this, an information age, and that is that war is a form of theatre.
War has often been about ritual and display.
If you look at some of the warrior cultures of Central Africa in the 18th century, which for which we have records,
the idea of dressing up and demonstrating your prowess through some sort of feat of arms was very, very common.
I think about medieval, chivalric culture.
It was this sort of ritualised version, a very theatrical, usually played out front of a large audience of display, of courage,
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,
been to prove yourself by series of rites of passage are part of this whole psychology of how war is a form of theatre.
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.
Now it's far more persistent, and the new forms of surveillance and communication is constant.
Surveillance has given rise to sort of form of constant readiness.
And it's sort of a readiness and a readiness not just to respond to something,
but a readiness to be involved and to use force far more than I think before.
So we're now in a period of like constant display.
It's not as if we're dressing up for war. We're constantly dressed for war.
And that deterrence, for example, is part of that antecedent,
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.
So I think the Information Age has highlighted values we currently attach to information data.
Much of it seems to be amplifying stuff that already exists, but the implications of it are actually much more serious.
The sheer volume of it, the ability to manipulate it,
the level of access which is making confidentiality a thing of the past is really very problematic indeed.
Another development that I think we need to look at is how domains of conflict or war have extended in this information age.
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.
So surveillance and military power in the ground, in the land environment has pushed war out to peripheries,
into deep urban spaces and into places primarily where civilians can be used as cover.
As I mentioned earlier on in the sea in the subsurface world now it seems that new technologies that
are emerging are beginning to challenge a phenomena which has existed for lots of 20 years or so,
and that was that the information age had left the maritime environment relatively untouched,
I say relatively untouched, and that it was possible, for example, in submarine warfare to remain undetected, out of view,
and therefore to maintain the sort of presence which had been, you know,
largely unchanged since the sort of Cold War and before during the Cold War itself.
Some of that has changed with the operations off the coast of Somalia, you know,
emphasis now on piracy or humanitarian relief of migrants trying to get across the Mediterranean Sea or the Aegean or hurricane relief efforts.
Yes, that has provided more profile.
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.
The air environment, the air domain, what we've experienced, I think,
over the last 20 or 30 years is that the global and the local are now linked very much through the air environment.
In the old days, you could still operate in in the air relatively unseen without information environment play much part in what you were
doing now is far more important and it's become the the sort of domain of choice because it offers flexibility and access,
limited risks and great information effects.
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.
But as I said earlier on, the adversary is adapting if that's what they are.
There was a incident which I was able to look at where a a tarpaulin had been hauled over a street in in Raqqa,
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,
which was a bomb making factory, suicide, IED factory and so on.
Actually, luckily, human intelligence revealed what it was and it was dealt with appropriately.
But what we're seeing far more common, though,
than this idea of old fashioned deception is deliberately misleading information operations by people who are confronting the West.
So, for example, if an air strike is conducted very precisely, very cleanly with a great deal of attention to these reports,
to make sure that no civilian casualties are going to be inflicted,
Daesh have been dragging in bodies which they have executed, placing the site of the explosion and saying that Western air forces did this.
And because people can't react quickly enough to the information age, they find them dead themselves,
getting caught out by these kind of issues, other domains that are emerging or that the re-emerging in many ways is space.
Of course, surveillance, navigation, communications are dependent upon the space environment.
But I think we are rediscovering through the information age, the importance of information and primarily psychology,
that what we are able to do is to use intelligence to sort of penetrate far more
deeply into governments and societies than I think is ever before been possible,
that we're very worried about the sabotage of critical infrastructure by cyber threats.
And, of course, we're very aware that mass communications can weaken the resolve of a population to resist any kind of enemy threats.
But in studying these things in isolation, we're missing the point because people come up with solutions to every single one of these.
The point is that the effects will be achieved across all these domains together.
It's a multi-domain environment,
and there are a lot of people at the moment looking at how they would combine cyber interdiction of space assets to reprogramme
their navigation systems or to interrupt their communications without even the U.S. being aware that that's been done and that,
you know, counter-terrorism requires a variety by civil and military tools and information is
providing this sort of is the centre of gravity and like in the middle of all of those.
So, I mean, I'm no, I'm short a time, so I'm going to sort of stop bring this to a conclusion.
But I didn't say any more about the way that the information age is also affecting the ability
of groups like Daesh to propagate their ideas and to recruit people in the Western world.
All in all, I think there are three major schools of thought looking at the kind of the future and where we're going.
There are those people who emphasise that more warfare in the future will be about terrorism.
Most of the literature is about weapons of mass destruction.
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.
Others are very focussed on technologies and if you talk to anyone involved in the Western military industrial complex,
they'll all tell you about the newest round of often the wonder weapons that they're developing,
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.
Frank Hofmann, who is very famous, having worked on hybrid war, for example,
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,
although he himself is not entirely convinced by that yet.
And when it comes to robotics and automation,
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.
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.
And it is hardly a new idea, really. And the okay.
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.
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?
Sorry, artificial intelligence. Some writers are now saying like Chris cake.
This is actually the greatest threat to humankind.
But there seems to be some doubts, even amongst experts now about whether this optimistic idea that we can use A.I. to orchestrate
all our weapons systems and run all our communications for us so we can just sit back.
There's actually a lot of doubts about the ability of AI ever to capture human consciousness or sense making.
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.
Now, for a computer to work through every single algorithm and work out the context and the social nuance,
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.
The greatest threat to humankind is not that A.I. will replace humans,
but rather humans and A.I. and machinery will combine that will be looking enhanced.
Human beings with different AI, body functions and intelligence, I think, will remain human.
But we may have a very different type of human by the end of the century. An emotion, persistent information, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance will actually be something that every human being will be like a sensor.
Another area when we I am getting pessimistic about is synthetics,
because most people talk about future synthetics or presently synthetics as material objects.
And yes, they're all fantastic material objects being produced, which are synthetic.
But I'm talking about synthetic realities.
I'm very worried about the way that there's a greater oscillation in public responses to conflict, either for or against.
And it seems to me that if you can create synthetic realities, which is much more likely in the next few years,
that the objective in war of different belligerents will be to exploit the short term effect of that altered reality.
I'd love to see more of that prompt, as far as I'm aware, that surely if I sit in the audience,
so I'm going to just wait to you ask me a question about that.
But let me just draw stumps and with these sort of final concluding sort of points, if I may bring it all together,
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.
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.
With what's going on at the tactical street level is is throwing up all sorts of
new challenges which the American military are trying to understand and deal with.
And the most important that he talks about is the speed and ubiquity of information,
that transmission information is now so rapid that real time sensors and shooting tools,
if you like, all are seemingly co-located and worked together.
What that seems to suggest is the large scale formations may not survive unless they're so large.
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.
But the idea that you can have long range, rapid and precise munitions sensed by machine and delivered very,
very, very quickly may actually make conflict more more likely rather than less.
People are talking about more system dependencies which make them more vulnerable. I think that's absolutely the case.
Commanders will have less time to decide and are finding themselves increasingly overloaded.
They're having to stay mobile, which means they suffer from exhaustion.
And the solution that lots of be reaching for is this human machine integration with a great deal
of emphasis on information technology to provide these tools to get them through the problems.
But what I wanted to really end with was I've just spent the last couple of weeks in in Afghanistan,
and I thought it might be worth all this wonderful sort of theoretical constructions about what war might or might not be and
why we should or should not be optimistic and why peace may be suffering a great deal as a result does somehow get grounded.
When you go back out to a war zone and you experience it first hand, you know the things that really matter.
And it may be worth knowing that after two years of total disaster,
it seems to me for the Afghan government that they've suffered catastrophic losses since 2014,
after the withdrawal of the combat missions of the Western armed forces.
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.
And that is that the Afghan National Army moved away from being totally fixed and in single locations they've begun.
A new generation of officers, all of whom were trained by the West,
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.
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.
And rather than the spike of violence going up, as it does every summer through the so-called fighting season,
there's been a plateauing and then a dropping away.
And in the sport this fall, which no one expected at all, and it's led right given rise to a new optimism.
The Afghan government that actually may be now the pathway to reconciliation is finally open.
If I tell you that the in social movements are also fracturing right now.
So Islamic State, which got themselves gripped into the very eastern portion of Afghanistan in Nangarhar province,
have fought a tooth and nail battle with the Taliban and indeed overrun lots of areas run by formerly by the Afghan army.
They've been driven back up into the hills and they say threatens the Taliban,
that a temporary truce has been put together by the Taliban locally in Nangarhar with Islamic State.
Now, that seems to me to be really significant that all the studies show of long term insurgencies,
that they decline very, very slowly and very gradually.
And when they do that, characterised by splintering a fracturing of their movements, and that is going on at the moment.
Now, the Afghan government is still very much dependent upon the United States for its funding.
And we know that, you know, largely Afghans believe that their own government is pretty much a proxy for the United States.
But the insurgents are finding that it's getting increasingly difficult to operate a safe haven of Pakistan than in the past,
and that the Afghan National Army,
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.
And there's a new effort now for economic regeneration of the country led by the Afghan government of Ashraf Ghani,
which I hope will I'm optimistic in this sense, not against the theme of my own talk.
I'm optimistic that could potentially provide a sovereign wealth fund for the future.
But although I just want to take the opportunity of just showing the things are changing there as well.
War is this dynamic process and certainly it's not a big American defeat, as many journalists like to say.
Well, response in much complicating that and i might even. Quote zero nine.
So it's far too early to tell what the outcome is anyway. So optimism has been misplaced.
I think optimism is misplaced. The abolition of war as a legal instrument.
You know, we're coming up to the anniversary of 1928 for that.
All those promises that were made by international institutions,
that the war was going to be rendered obsolete and illegal, and that would end the end of history.
So theses that we've been promised in the past, well, sadly, none of those have come true,
that in many ways the thresholds of the use of violence are shortening.
Violence, it seems to me, is becoming more common and more likely under the technologies of today and indeed the near future.
It to me to make it more likely to be more conflicts in the future rather than less.
And it will be messy and dynamic and untidy, producing, I think, unsatisfactory and quite often unexpected results.
So the end of peace will hope not, but the end of optimism, certainly.
Thank you.