Having been in the business today is obviously David Scott.
Right, talking for us on technology advice about a smartphone if you don't have him.
David is professor of International Security and the director of the Centre for War and Technology at the University of Oxford.
It's great to know, David, that actually war is still in the title of some centres of research in this country.
He's also a conflict theme centre for the Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security.
For anybody else who knows his research council and the DNC,
he's working on as I think a research fellowship funded by agency, and also on how technology is shaping emergent warfare,
relying on a variety of approaches, multidisciplinary, the same way we do here, science and technology studies, philosophy and war studies.
He's just been just finishing some of the projects.
There's one film about technological innovation in all forms of transformation Innovation First,
and he's the former editor in chief for defence studies and European security and is an
expert on perhaps say is the right environment for defence studies published this year.
Julian Probably about five months ago, but I was also looking at the ranch defence space which will have Davis name on the front.
David, thank you very much indeed. Function as well as both on the subject. Right.
Thank you very much. I thank you very much for coming today.
It's it's a full house. And as I said, my name is David.
And what I'm going to talk to you today is about what I referred to as boundless warfare.
And I think boundless warfare is going to be contentious. And I think the way that I'm going to talk about technology is going to be contentious.
But but more than anything else, I think what I'm trying to do is to be you know, I'm trying to set out an idea, set our hypothesis.
I'm not trying to necessarily talk about policy in this case,
although it does have policy implications if you were to follow the argument all the way out.
And so and I know in my experience, I know that some people have a very strong reaction to technological determinism.
And and so if you do have a strong reaction to technological determinism, be prepared and so on, because it's coming.
But the but but by and large, I want to start with with with three questions and the two questions I'm going to come to at the very end,
but I want to put them out there early.
And the one is, if we think about the impact that technology and I mean modern and emergent technology and some of those are actually quite old.
But but but the way that we think about everything from UAV is to networked.
And they enabled us to looking at interventions in physiological spaces and neurological spaces and things like this.
If we think about all those things and what does it mean for other things?
And so and one of the things so I ask the question, what does it mean for the state?
So I talk about boundless warfare here.
The state is very much a bounded entity, but both in terms it's got boundaries, but also it's bounded in lots of other ways.
And we talk about who is we and who, who are they and things like this, who are we rather and who are they?
The the second is so what role does a state have in terms of the way that future that future of war may happen, the way that it may happen?
The second is, what role does or what is the changing relationship between the way that we talk about power and what we mean by security?
How is that changing in the way that we think about security?
I mean, we come to traditional security, strategic security, everything to human security and so on.
And all of these are are what sociologists or some sociologists would refer to as governance mentalities.
They tell us what's important and in some ways what we should do about it.
And those change over time in a way. And so and I'm particularly interested in the way that they may to may change over time.
And I'm particularly interested in arms control as a as a function of the relationship between power and security.
So in the way that we talk about future the future arms control, or as I've argued in the past, at the end of arms control,
the third and final is how does it shape the or how this war one technology or boundless warfare,
how does it shape the relationship between security and defence?
Because one of the things that's really quite striking to those so many of you here will have had witnessed this in one way or another.
Is is that what we mean by what we mean by national defence, what we mean by what the military does,
what we mean by what the Home Office does when it comes to counter-terrorism,
when it comes to cyber, when it comes to public health, public safety, all these issues in a sense have some kind of security element.
To them and, and, and increasingly they have a defence element to them in some way or another.
Maybe that's to defend our infrastructures against, you know, chemical attacks or war or a cyber attacks or something like this.
Or maybe it has something to do with with just the way that we think about what is the boundary of something like the
Ministry of Defence and what is the boundary of something like the the something like the Home Office and things like that.
And, and how does something like the Cabinet Office try to manage that boundary?
And that's very specific, you know, in a way.
But you can imagine that that's happening in many places,
that the boundary between what we mean by security and what we mean by defence are in a sense kind of blurring in a way.
And so and I'm going to talk about all three of these questions and and the way that I talk about this.
Now, the one thing that I would say is that I'm going to some people have a strong reaction to this, too, but hopefully you'll stay with me.
I'm going to read some and I'm going to talk some and I'm going to read some of them and talk some.
And I'm going to do things like I'm going to do things like this as an American.
It helps me to have a more sophisticated thing that I can read, because obviously my words are simple, right?
So, you know, okay, the yeah.
Okay. So I'm going to I'm going to to start and I'd be happy to in a sense, kind of engage with questions as we go along in some way.
But I realise that that may throw some people off in terms of the way that I've tried to tie things together.
So if you do have any questions in terms of what, what do you mean by that or could you say that again or something like that?
Please do ask.
But otherwise, if you could hold your questions to the end soon.
So war. What is it good for war.
And it's it's it's in our news. It's in our conversations.
It's in our politics. It's in our gut reactions. It's in our film, television literature.
It's in our language. You know, that war kind of proliferates through our entire and our entire essence, really, in some way or another.
War is all around us. We can understand war is pejorative.
And the way that we look at war saying in Syria as a stain on humanity, as an evil, as an ultimate sign of human chaos,
we can also understand war as a human, as human expression, togetherness,
order, exacting, you know something that would you accept some kind of order?
War is a feature of our historical contemporary and will be our future societies.
And in many ways it comes straight to the to the heart in terms of what we think of ourselves,
in a way, comes straight to the heart, straight to our minds and what we think of as being important.
And that's what Chris Hedges referred to and what Chris was trying to look at in in his his book around the,
you know, what is this meaning as he was trying to say, why is war so brutal?
You know, why is it why do we when we talk about war, why is it so carnal and the way that it deals with the human body in some way or another?
What is it about war that that that that that is special.
And he doesn't mean that in a good way. It just means that it sits outside of normal in some way.
So and then he writes this this that he starts with this notion that war is important because it gives us meaning.
And what I want to do is try to unpick that in some way and try to say how technology has the ability to interrupt this meaning fulness of war itself.
Now, what I'm going to start with is this idea that what I the way that Rene Descartes
talked about the the mental and the material and Descartes was particularly,
you know, this this notion of Cartesian duality, that that what they court was particularly interested in this this idea that, you know,
there's something on the outside and then there's the something on the inside and
and they are somehow correlated kind of code produced in some way or another.
And, and he talked quite a bit about that, not only in terms of the way that I'm talking about maybe tool use or technology,
but he talked about it in other ways as well. But this distinction between in a sense, what is the on the on the inside and what is on the outside?
This is particularly useful now.
I think what my my in a sense, my travel to this point is characterised by several steps.
In a way. About five years ago I was particularly interested in how technology was impacting on society and politics, and,
and I was particularly interested in that not necessarily from a war studies perspective or, or, you know, what we're doing.
I was interested in it in a very broad way.
So I have a project for interesting for interest on on smart cities and the way that smart cities are interrupting
the way that we do public policy for instance and that with a colleague get into you and in Singapore.
So it's not only about war.
I'm particularly interested in how that's shaping society, but in particular the route to me to it to war was trying to understand.
Really how the shifts and the role of war, but not necessarily the operation of it,
you know, the shifts in the sense how we why is war meaningful in some way or another?
Not necessarily in saying that this is the way that we can think about it, too, in the area of access, denial and issues like this.
Not necessarily in a sense, kind of very tactical operational elements about how you employ technology,
but really, why how is war changing in terms of being meaningful, meaningful for us?
And so the first is, is that I found Christian Decker's work on risk and complexity and the emerging global system.
He wrote his his paper was called New Times for the Military,
some sociological remarks on the changing role and structure of the armed forces of the advanced societies.
Now, of course, as Robert and I were talking about just earlier, you know that, you know,
Chris was writing this at a time to where what we talked about war meant something else entirely.
You know, I mean, it was meaning something like what has been referred to as wars of the willing, you know, wars of choice in a way.
It wasn't about existential defence.
It wasn't about holding on to our ways of life or holding on to this alliance in some way or another.
It was about, you know, intervention and sometimes, you know, more direct intervention.
And and and so but in particular, what he was particularly what he was interested in and he was interested in the British military,
and particularly as he was he was suggesting that there was a shift leading to risk.
You know, that that in fact, you know, we before we did,
we did defence and that increasingly now what we're doing is risk and and the military's responsibility in that.
And again, it goes back to my final question, which is what's the relationship between security and defence?
Then Dr. would have said in that article that, you know, that actually the reason why we're in this position is,
is that because the existential nature of war is fundamentally changing.
So, okay, maybe with the changes and the geopolitical changes and, you know,
Trump's election and what that means for China and what that means for Russia and what that means for a little Estonia and things like that.
Maybe war means something different to us now. But secondly,
Tim and Edmonds in 2006 wrote What Our Armed Forces for the Changing Nature of military roles in Europe that was published in international affairs.
And again, what he was trying to say is, is that, you know, that the notion of, you know, you know,
I live in Somerset and you can drive around the roads of Somerset and you can see pillboxes everywhere.
Right. I mean, that gives you a real sense of national territorial defence in some way or another.
And what he was pointing to, what Tim Edmunds was pointing to this is that,
well, we're not really asking militaries to do that sort of thing any longer.
In a sense, there's been this disconnection between territorial defence and what we're asking our our militaries to do,
even to the point to where we're even asking our militaries to go into Afghanistan and Iraq,
and we're not even asking them to hold territory in the way that we would have traditionally have done.
And then we we vacillate on that issue. But and then finally and Tony King, who some of you may know, he's at the University of Warwick now.
He wrote a piece he wrote a book called The Transformation of Europe's Armed Forces From the Rhine to Afghanistan.
And again, what he was trying to say is, is that there's something something changing about these armed forces.
You know, the idea that increasingly they were kind of going in different directions.
And he uses sociological ideas of production about the way that militaries do their business.
And he was saying that, you know, that we'd see the split. His most recent book, The Combat Soldier, does this even more.
And he talks about, you know, this idea that we go into this notion of of what we expect increasingly elite troops to do the production part.
And then we we ask others to do the other bits of defence that we don't think as war any longer and things like that.
So all this suggested to me that, you know, this this shift leading to risk was was particularly interesting.
And one of the things that I thought that made it all possible was technology.
Of course, you could say also globalisation and things like this made it possible.
But for me what was particularly interesting, the role of technology in that and that and that change.
Now, despite the fact that I probably the way that Chris and Tim and Tony talked about over this time,
maybe they were talking about war in a slightly different age.
And I have to say before I came here today. I don't think I'd really concretely thought about that era as a different era before.
It's just as I talk, it just seems more and more the case. As I read this, it seems to be that they were in a different era and already here today.
The shift leading to risk is technology and the rise of what I refer to here as boundless warfare.
Now, the first thing to say is, is what I mean by technology, and I mean technology writ in a very large way.
You know, the technology is not just about networks or about processors or about about some kind of mechanical thing.
I think I talk about it. I talk about is anything that enables for instance,
if you read Michael Horowitz's book on the diffusion of military can remember the last power or something
like that of our I can remember that final word but but what he's particularly interested in is why,
you know, why do some states take on something like aircraft carriers and others don't?
You know, why why is that the case? Is it about economics, why we can't afford aircraft carriers or on destined submarines instead?
Or is it something else? And he argues that it's a it's a mix of things academics usually do.
And but one of the things that he points to is the role of the U.S. Marine Corps as being a fantastic
enabler for the U.S. military that allows it to do lots of things in a very flexible and agile way.
And what he's particularly interested in is the war,
the notion of the warrior ethos and what that means for the Marine Corps as an enabler for that in that way.
So does that mean that Michael Horowitz was talking about soldiers as far as technology?
In a way? I argue that that he is and that they are.
But but technology also does other thing. You know, it it's about geolocation telling us where things are.
It's about keeping boots off the ground. It's about tapping into your and my communications.
Thank you. It's also allows for greater lethality, more pursuit and accumulation or the dispersal of power.
Technology is satellite sets, networks, it's processors, personal computers, it's robots.
All the stuff that we think of readily in terms of technology.
But it's also the results of material, biological and chemical sciences, you know,
the way that these are changing and the convergence of them in some way.
So I was here maybe about eight months ago,
and I was talking about this convergence of of of science and technology and what that meant for new technologies.
Perhaps even more contentious is the combat soldier, as I said before, and Tony King's book,
The Combat Soldier, is a very good example of how we have something like martial technology.
And this martial technology is constantly developing. And what Tony does in that book is he looks at, in a sense,
the way that militaries have evolved over time and the role of the combat soldier in that over time.
It's an excellent book, and I recommended the concept of the soldier or the warrior and even what gender theorists would
talk about in terms of something like the notion of the warrior as a man and things like this.
That's a that becomes a technological construct in a way, something that you can employ, something that you can use to get people into the military,
something that you can get them to do, in a sense, quite amazing things that otherwise rational human being would never want to do.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it's it's quite an amazing discursive technique, you know, it's it's very, very useful.
So here I want to talk about 10% space time in force, because I think these three things are going to be the way that we could talk about,
the way that we could talk about the boundless warfare as being impactful.
So space, we can understand this in terms of distance or dispersal or concentration.
It's very open, you know, a simple discussion around space.
But in particular, I'm not really talking about space always in terms of geographical space.
So you can understand it in terms of you could understand it in terms of networks with the idea that a network is always, you know,
nothing is at the centre of a network and that's why it's a network,
but isn't necessarily you can imagine that there are distances within the network that make a difference sometimes.
So so there's not a sense a centre periphery to a network, but there is a there are distances.
So so space time we can think of, you know, the relationship between time long in time to again, that's very, very straightforward.
I think we could get more sophisticated than what we'd like to talk about time.
But I'm not going to do that today unless you want to ask questions and then finally force,
you know, in the way that we talk about kinetic force, you know, mass and acceleration.
All these things become increasingly interesting in the way that we talk about technology and current contemporary technology.
And I recommend Peter Singer's 2012 book on Wired for War as a great example of of of of of just that.
So let's we'll come back to this as we discuss kind of bounded an unbounded war in a way.
So I use, I use, I use boundless warfare because I make a distinct point of whether bounded warfare can
become unbounded or whether boundless warfare is something else entirely bounded warfare.
What we would ordinarily understand is, say, the Second World War, the First World War, maybe even the Napoleonic Wars or something like that.
We we understand that there's some kind of you know, we understand that there's some kind of start to some kind of end in a way.
Now, if we think back to the 30 Years War or the Hundred Years War, we we think about the beginning and the end.
But of course, the 30 Years War, 100 years war is not necessarily the best way to describe those wars,
because the hundred years war lasted longer than 100 years. And so the 30 years war lasts longer than the 30 years.
So, you know, but but historically, this is the way that we we think about war.
Surely we only see this bounded like that because we look back from this point in history at the time.
We'll come back to that. Yeah. No, that's good. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. Thank you.
Yeah. What, can we come back to that? Yeah.
And but with the idea that what the important thing is, is that they become history historically important for us as bounded activities,
you know, bounded notions and historical activities and time.
And whether or not they were really like that or not, it's the how they mean.
You know, they're meaningful in a way for us. And that's what I'm particularly interested in.
This is how meaningful that bounded notion is, not whether or not it was really bounded that way.
So, okay, so we can understand technology as applied, as used, as passive, you know,
something that has some kind of agency in some way or another, you know, like a robot, a a a demining robot, for instance.
It has agency. It's something that you can put into the field and it can it can do things in a way.
Sometimes it can do things through remote control and sometimes it can do through things through artificial intelligence.
But the technology does not have to be an agent itself.
So many scholars are looking at the impact of technology on defence in the fashion such as UAV,
such as the future of air power processing speeds, big data, networked enabled forces, you know, the way the command and control of C2 is done.
These are all, in a sense, ways in which the humanness is or the soldier is becoming increasingly enmeshed in technological systems.
Now, let me say here what I mean by by. Let me see what I mean here by technology is much in the way that a former researcher of
mine brought Taguba talks about in his in his book on reimagining war in the 21st century.
So we largely what he's doing is trying to understand technology as a system or a way of doing things and again,
make that point as towards something like a governmentality. So the ways of understanding, the ways of knowing, the ways of seeing,
the ways of governing, all these things are being impacted on on these sorts of systems.
And much of the way that we say we talk about fake news, for instance, you know,
and and and what kind of impact that had on on elections and other things.
So but but this raises some very interesting issues around the way that we think about technology and the way
that Descartes talked about the love of the system and the way that Newton talked about the value of the system.
And of course, you can see John Stuart Mill after that, you know, as being a and utilitarianism being an extension of that.
But but this notion of love for the system versus value of the system as being well, it changes the way that you think about technology and this.
So I'm going to move around a little bit. So let's take let's take a specific example for those that have followed me up to this point.
Now, there's a few of you who have followed me up to this.
You might see this as technological determinism, because I talked about technology having agency in some way, and if it has agency,
then it has this ability to redirect outcomes in some way or another that if it weren't there,
even human behaviour would arrive at the same endpoint in some way or another, right?
It has some kind of time. Maybe it has some kind of constitutional ising element that changes reality as we know it.
So in Ruth Miller's book can snarl. It's a it's a great it's a it's a great book.
I can't talk about that enough. Ruth Miller, it's called Snarl in Defence of Stalled Traffic and Faulty Networks.
Ruth is talking about. So she uses an interesting historical example to illustrate the power of technology once applied.
So the example is interesting because it illustrates to us what we refer to as something like dual use.
You know what? We talk about something having both civil and martial qualities in a way, so and so.
In the 18th century, the city of Paris was covered in paving stones to cover what would ordinarily be dirty, muddy streets.
Paris was not the first to do this by any means, nor obviously the last.
But in this case, the martial qualities of the paving stones fundamentally changed the system in which prior political,
political and power relations had once stood. So she shares a quote from a French civil servant at the time.
So again, this is in the 18th century, paving stones, often the most suitable material for the construction of barricades in the moments of civil war.
It was this that in June 1848 sorry, I said 1890.
The streets of Paris was covered in a few hours with a series of citadels which cannonballs could hardly demolish.
Much bloodshed would have been spared on both sides if such materials had not existed close to hand.
The government of the French Republic, deeply impressed with the magnitude of this danger,
called the serious attention of the engineers of the Paris roads to the necessity of replacing this ancient
system of stone paving by some other which would not offer materials for the construction of barricades.
So yeah, these it's these, it's these things, right?
That caused the problem in some way.
So Millet Miller argues that roads as a network technology, I mean, a road to network, a road to nowhere is useful to no one.
Right. It's a it's a network technology. They roads connect must be understood to play a constitutional role or a constitutional izing role,
a system role in which the world as we know it operates.
So she states, our roads are at war regardless of the needs, desires and activities of class or of the human citizen subjects.
You know that they've been built for that purpose. They're at war regardless of whether or not we're using them in that way.
We can think about how the transformation of stone paving into barricades and weapons turns roads,
regardless of the people on them in the physical environments of military activity.
So this is particularly problematic, I would suggest, in the way that she's talking about.
I mean, it's interesting,
but it's particularly problematic in the way that she's saying that essentially technology in this case is just the you know,
just the paving stone technology because something that fundamentally changes the progress of war following.
You know, that's just. Now, of course, if we think about the, you know, the introduction of a firearm, for instance,
into into war or or heavy infantry or something like that, we can say that obviously it had an impact on war in one way or another.
Does that necessarily change the way that we talk about war as an extension of politics?
Would it fundamentally change the way that could we talk about not only the character of war as being distinctly different,
but we could could we even talk about the nature of war as being distinctly technological?
That is in some way prior to the political.
Yeah. And that's what that's the idea that she's putting forward.
So, and that I'm relying on here to put forward this this notion so I can see that there's some discomfort.
We're talking about Clausewitz in this way, but. Okay, so let's bring this back to the notion of bounded and boundless war for warfare.
What do we mean by bounded warfare? We can think it through two lenses.
The first is the political or the democratic lens, the relationship between war and states.
And that relationship has been long studied. And, you know, with the idea that what you know, the the relationship between them,
the conversation goes like the chicken and the egg which came first. Two states make wars or two wars make states.
And the wars of France, revolutionary, Napoleonic and otherwise are fundamental to the way that we think about France today.
And these wars fit as between two bookends, you know, the way that we could, the way that we could imagine, you know,
the way that we can imagine wars as as being these wars between two bookends,
they are bounded by beginnings and ends by epics or eras, by political narratives.
We understand that wars against Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany are important for us.
They give us meaning. Yeah. Even to the point to where it's very difficult for us to even understand narratives that in some way go against.
You know, George Soros was called a Jewish Nazi today.
Well, anybody who can remember the Second World War just I mean, how could you have how can you be a Jewish Nazi?
It's just the two worlds kind of collide in that in some way or another.
We just go back as you get your painting. STONE Sorry. Yeah, there's a 1948.
Yes. Of having already by that time as a result of the Napoleon.
The French designed the capital in such a way that the military could easily attack.
Yes. Yes. On the bridges and things like that. Yes, absolutely.
How does this picture. Well, I mean, I think madura. You are you're being more explicit than that.
That I mean, as I should have been.
In fact, the argument there is, is that these roads had already been redesigned for very marshal purposes and hadn't.
And what's particularly interesting and and it's my apologies, I should have been more explicit about this,
but the issue there becomes that there's something like the road itself becomes very not only is it commercial purposes,
but it has this ability to bike back. And and she shows this over and over as this relationship between between that.
And so the key thing is, is that if we think about if we think about this and we talk about the war on terrorism or the war against terrorism,
and we can talk about the war against drugs.
And in the case of the United States, do they give us much meaning?
You know, they do. They you know, do they do they say the same that when we look back to the war on terror and think about it in the
same way that we thought about defeating that in Nazi Germany or Napoleon or something like that,
you know, the likelihood is we won't. Yeah.
Maybe because they're not extensible in the same as extension,
in the same way terrorism or drugs will wipe us off the map, exterminate Starbucks, then.
That is not to say that they're not politically important.
You know, that we don't need to be protected from terrorist activities and and things like that.
You know, it's but they are not wars because they do not give us meaning.
Is that the way that we can define wars, even the wars when they give us meaning, the war on terror doesn't give us meaning in the same way.
That's not to say that they don't have strategies, deployments, tactics, operations, casualties and so on.
So what is meant by boundless warfare? Warfare needs an enemy.
Warfare has a start and an end warfare has discernible action and reaction.
War has ideology. These are three boundaries of war that are becoming eclipsed by technology.
Yeah. So, you know, we need an enemy. We need to start in an end.
We need discernable action and reaction. And we need ideology.
That's for. Actually, I miscounted in my notes. You. So in 1994, George Orwell imagined war bounded by enemy and boundless by time.
Oceania was always at war with other, with either Eurasia or East Asia.
The enemy changed, but the action did not. If we hold Chris Hedges quote that war is a force that gives us meaning,
then we can see why the government in the Oceania and presumably Eurasia and East Asia would have used more as a means of control.
The key thing is, is if you read 1984, you realise that it doesn't give any meaning to Winston Smith.
You know, it's lost its meaning. And this is particularly interesting because what we see in something like Mary Dunn's book, Wartime,
is an example of the way that this notion of peacetime versus wartime and the
vacillation between what you would see in peacetime and what you would see in wartime.
And and she's a legal scholar, but she's particularly interested in the way that civil liberties are impacted by peacetime and by and by wartime.
And what she argues is that, as you can see, and she's just looking at the 20th century in the United States even, and her argument is that,
as you can see, that you see something like wartime civil liberties go down and then peacetime civil liberties go up.
And then you can see this vacillation like a seesaw between wartime in peacetime.
But our argument is, just as you go throughout the Cold War,
you get introduce introduced to the Cold War and the notion between peace and war, but starts to become confused in a way.
And then eventually you get to the point to the post-Cold War period to where, well, largely we're not even sure what peace and war are any longer.
But needless to say, we don't see the same vacillation. We don't see the same return to what we would see in peacetime.
She's arguing that actually we live in a period of eternal wartime now,
and that's why we can have really quite radical restrictions that perhaps we would not have allowed before.
And also very recently, the the government has now the ability to to look in our communications like never before.
I mean, I'm not saying whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but what I am saying is,
is that's a level of that's a a level or that's a an issue around civil liberties
that perhaps wouldn't have been allowed at any other time other than wartime.
That's Mary. That's the argument more than it is mine. But it's a well worth.
But again, Mary. Mary is fantastic.
I'd never met Mary, but her work is fantastic. So what do we know?
So when it comes to something like this, you know, and a radar, you know, the you know, when we're trying to find the enemy in this.
What if we don't know who who is attacking us?
And, you know, if you're thinking about something like cyber situational awareness, the idea of identify identification,
and that becomes actually really quite down the list of actions, because what you really need to do is to respond.
You know, you need to you need to control the damage.
You need to see what you need to identify the damage. You need to control the damage.
You need to do react in that in some way. And then only then can you start to see who has attacked me.
You know, the the the issue there and and maybe we do have an idea of who did attack us in a way.
You know, we're Sony, for instance, and we maybe we have an idea about who attacked us.
Maybe it was the North Koreans or something like that. Right. But maybe we don't.
You know, in particular,
we could imagine how something like cyber attacks are increasingly being are increasingly difficult to not only are they difficult to pin down,
but the issue of plausible deniability comes online.
And the Russians say, well, I didn't know about this fancy bears thing, but it really doesn't have anything to do with us.
And and the United States says, no, you intervened and you you hacked the, you know, the DNC accounts and then, you know, you publicise this.
I had a big impact on our elections.
And so the idea is then becomes it becomes maybe there is you know, maybe there's a person in Whitehall that knows who has done that.
Whether that's politically significant or not or whether it's used as a a matter of fact or truth, is neither here nor there.
And so the issue of the enemy, you know, or the the other who's attacked us becomes problematic.
So let us think of it. And that becomes. So let's return to Clausewitz, if you allow me.
So let us think of this relationship and how we think about war itself as an extension of politics.
So Carl von Clausewitz states that war is a continuation of politics.
Okay. Others, including Christopher Coker, talks about war as a function of human nature.
That sounds very similar to me in a way, you know, and and and Christopher Cox.
But Warrior Geeks. Great book and I recommend I've said that to all the books about the.
But in war you get to know he asks himself the question of whether we ever imagined that robots would do all the fighting for us.
And eventually what we can do is just kind of sit back, let other people do the fighting and and we can they destroyed all of our machines.
But by and large, we can just remain quite cosy where we where we are, in a way.
And he argues that, no, that that's not going to happen. And the reason it's not going to happen is because war is part of human nature itself,
that the more and more you take humans out of war itself, the more and more that war will try to pull humans back into it again.
And that that's just the nature of of human nature.
So, okay, I, I don't know that I'm making that argument today, but I think it's an interesting argument.
So we can refer to to we can refer to both, you know,
notion of of politics as an extension of politics and as an extension of human nature as something like,
you know, at the centre there you get the political human. Human is kind of fundamental to that in some way or another, a social, you know,
it becomes a social function, you know, political function becomes social function.
And within this political dynamic, we can think of three determinants of of war itself and something that I've already kind of pointed to in a way.
One, this is the way that we think about information. Another is the way that we think about citizenship or individual relationships to the state.
And finally, is the notion of decision making. So for Clausewitz, the political function exists within what he refers to as the Trinity.
I'm suspect that, you know, this relationship between state and society and in the military and so on.
And it can be seen in particular, is this the notion that war must remain subject to the action of a what he refers
to as superior intelligence and has a political purpose in some way or another.
And that's why, even though we're particularly worried about people having the ability to say 3D print handguns, we're not overly worried about it.
I mean, we're worried about it, but we realise it.
Not everybody has an interest in going home and printing their 3D handgun and going out and killing people.
And since there's some kind of political element there that actually restricts people from being murderers.
Right. I mean, there's there's a there's a there's there's a there's a political something there
that stops people from just being self-destructive or destructive towards some.
So maybe that's the case. Maybe politics really does make a difference.
So maybe maybe I'm not overturning Clausewitz, but but herein lies a problem for us and the paving stones in particular.
What role does technology have and political purpose? Surely a rioter has to choose to pick up the rock in order to throw it right.
You know, I mean, that's a political that's a that's a human action, if you will.
You know, that a human action to throw to throw a rock at the police or or an RPG or something, you know, I mean,
to talk about I mean, to to take it from street violence to toward the the political purpose is the factor.
The driver that leads the rioter to make the choice.
You know, that to be an agent of violence, the conception of violence or warfare in our case requires a political human,
you know, the political activism of another. So at the moment, that stays right within what we would imagine Clausewitz will tell us.
But but but in particular, this.
Let's assume that our conception of the political human, or at least the agency that he or she poses is limited.
That actually that that there's a limit to how much going to be explained by politics in this conception of the political human.
We can only have technical objects, right? We have the human who's the key agent or actor.
And then we have these technological objects and the political, you know, the human cannot see well enough.
So what? He gets an object, which is you've come blurry glasses.
He's taken on the on the tool.
So. This is interesting for us because we realised that the political and the human has to stop somewhere.
You know that that in my case it's the glasses are the watch or the thumb or something like that.
And so in this conception of the political human, we we only have technical objects, not technical agents.
The technical agents of war, like roads, like it networks like UAV are themselves enablers or agents.
And this reminds me of Lori Calhoun's book, We Kill Because We Can.
And and it's a it's an interesting it's an interesting book.
I mean that and the British way of interesting as opposed to the American way because I.
It's a it's an interesting book. And and this argument largely is almost a technological determinist argument that we have this
ability to to hover and to kill people at will through the use of drones anywhere in the world.
And because we have this ability, we will continue to see threats in that way.
We see threats in that way because we have the drones not but it's not that we see the threats first and then we develop the drones.
And so. So but it's interesting.
Controversial book I say but less so information as it is comes into being when data
is processed you know when it's given meaning when it's appropriated in some way,
its relationship to bounded warfare is is quite, quite pronounced.
You know, that this idea that information becomes fundamental to the way that we did war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Information was fundamental to the way that we looked at PowerPoint presentations in the morning or the way that
intelligence work was done or the way that we understood human terrain information was going to be what the army delivered.
Right. The revolution in military affairs. It was an information revolution.
Citizenship, as it is, determines the political you know, what what is what's important?
You know, it sustains the political. We know who we are.
We know what is sacred.
You know, this notion of decision making and we can think about in way in ways that are referred to as decision making as much in the way that.
Q strong talks about strategy, about in the sense making sense of the political you know, about what is to be done in some way.
So boundless warfare challenges a political theory of warfare and this of Clausewitz's ideas.
And in terms of trying to posit something like a technological theory of war.
Now, what if we think about of warfare not as a political behaviour, but as a technological behaviour?
Where does this leave the human in this? Can we transpose that?
The political human with the political with the technological, the human?
What do we even mean by this? Because it may be politics as technology and technology is politics, but what do we mean by this?
We don't mean cyborgs are robots. You know, this idea that we take out a 100% human and we add a bit of kit to them and they become a cyborg in a way.
But we mean something else. Let's let's go back to Ruth Miller.
She charts how English metaphors began to change from 19th, the 20th century.
And I have to say, if you've read Tom Rhett's book on the history of cybernetics, you will have the same ideas.
So she indicates where before we had biological metaphors for human behaviour.
And if you do read Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophy, you'll see much more a biological reference to the way that we as societies work.
But she says that as we go more and more towards the middle of the 20th century, our language begins to change.
And more and more it starts to be changed not by biological systems, but by information systems.
So the organism human in our case, was no longer being understood as a single point or single agent, but instead was being understood as a message.
So the way that we thought about town planning, the way that we thought about public administration,
the way that we thought about being doing big policy, grand policy became much more about about obscuring the human and less so as communication.
In other words, human value becomes increasingly roped into the system of communication.
It becomes a it becomes a different it becomes nothing biological at all.
It becomes an information system. So others have talked about this in terms of the impact on shopping networks had on a wide range of discourses.
Again, Tom Ricks book's great example that if anything, information theory allowed us to think about how the system works together,
about how you can do big policy, and these things come to come come together.
And we're talking about policy that actually we've never had to, you know, with with this increase of information,
with the way that we think about millions and millions of people living in London or something like this,
all of a sudden, the way that we do, the way that we do things just fundamentally has to change.
And it changes as information. Information grows. So if you a great example of that is Caesar Dawkins book on Why Information Grows.
So in fact, Ruth Miller illustrates how they continue to view information theory through a subjective humanist perspective.
You know, in many ways it was about an information system. It was about the cybernetic system, you know, the networked system.
But she argues that the human was an increasing you know, it was part of that in a way that we can talk about the battlefield, the space.
But we have these reference points, these individual reference points, which are soldiers within that in some way or another.
And they and as much as we would like to talk about it as being networked and something like that, the argument is,
is that by and large, we still talk about networked enabled, missed or networked centric warfare.
The human is still a fundamental part of that in some way or another,
and which is one of the big critiques of Networked Central Network centric warfare.
So what does this mean for him and this mean in terms of the the political frameworks?
So she argues they were transforming the machine into a human, if a digitised human and the physical network into a communications network.
They were obliterating the machine, but actually rhetorically,
just as the machine was taking on a greater and greater role in the city or in the battlefield,
its it was becoming they they were essentially re positing the human in that and as much as we were understanding that essentially
what was you know as we were going to having lines and lines of men with guns spacing with one another and converging,
and as more and more the human in a sense, came behind what was fundamentally a a tank battle or an area of aerial battle,
we had big machinery, too, in a sense, to change the dynamics of war itself.
But the way that we thought about war and the way that we thought about politics became much more about the human.
She has this very interesting notion of of of traffic.
You know, that tradition before we had before traffic as a word existed, before we had cars.
So the idea traffic used to mean people.
There's too much traffic on this pavement. You know, where in a sense, once we had cars, it started to be applied to cars.
And the reason that started being applied to cars is that you had too much traffic,
so you needed to move the traffic out to the sides, onto the pavements, off the streets of the roads and let cars drive on them.
But then all of a sudden, cars started doing the same thing that actually humans used to do.
They found it difficult to use the road network and and and the argument there.
And so this notion of what used to used to be a human category, traffic became applied to to the machines themselves, to the network itself, in a way.
But fundamentally, we still understand that traffic is affecting us.
You know, it's a human agent, you know, I mean, it's people get in their cars and they decide to drive in some way or another.
Forget about the car. The car is neither here nor there. It's tied to the road.
Forget about the road. The idea is that people decided to get in the car and drive on that road.
And she's arguing, wait a second, the car and the road fundamentally change your options and reconstitute.
Is this reality for you in some way or another? Maybe that says something about Lorry Calhoun's arguments around We Kill because we can.
If we have the technology, it repurposes our reality in some way, it resets our reality.
So I realise I'm going over time, so I'm going to try to move forward.
Okay, let's talk about known knowns.
Remember the known knowns and the known unknowns and unknown unknowns. And so, okay, known knowns.
We live in a world where networks continually take over our world.
They are seen as being applicable to everything, you know, Iot and things like that.
And does anybody have an Alexa yet? So I mean, as an example of that, hopefully all of you know, Amazon's Alexa,
what I'm referring to actually be great if most of you didn't know but anyway so they they
are seen as being absolutely about everything but not just information technology networks,
but road networks as we've discussed, but also community networks, body networks, you know, everything that you know,
the measure, the society, everything is being, in a sense, talked about in terms of networks.
Complexity is key to our understanding of emergent warfare and the way that we talk
about data science and how that fits into a notion of complexity and nonlinear
causality is the way that we talk about everything from the impact of pharmaceuticals
to the way that we talk about the way to get smart cities working and so on.
We talk about them through a networked discourse.
The applied technologies that make networks possible are fibre optics, mobile batteries, processor size and speed,
low orbit satellites and fundamentally us, you know, where we're a fundamental part of that network.
We have become mechanised ourselves in the way that we seek to network our task.
We tap in. We add on. We hack and interview with small children who who do play on iPads or Xboxes or something like that.
You realise that they call everything a glitch. You know, the bus hasn't got here yet.
There's a glitch. The bus is not here yet. It's a very interesting kind of transfer of what is an IT language into into, well, material reality.
You know that it's a glitch that I'm going slightly over.
So what are the known unknowns? So we know that in a sense, a lot of things are changing in a way, you know,
that the impact of networks is going to be it's impacting on the way that we we do normal things.
And Moore's Law tells us that the number of transistors on a dense, integrated circuit board will double every two years.
And that was seen like Moore's Law was going to come to an end.
And all of a sudden now we have new materials, material sciences that allow us to continue Moore's Law going even further.
History has shown that law, the Moore's Law is apt and anticipate anticipating process power.
But what was particularly interesting, even though that we realise that process power is important,
we still can't have a vision in the future of what that process power is going to mean for the future of our technology in any way.
We can't say, let's talk about Moore's Law as it exists in 20 years time.
What is technology? What are we going to be able to do with that kind of processing power?
You know, the ability for us to forecast in that way is what's difficult.
So Christopher Coker is illustrating this in this in his book for you geek.
And he's talking about science fiction as being a rich source of how we might use technology in the
future and how science fiction tells us that this type of processing power is going to be applied.
Christopher Coker is telling you to go look in science fiction and in that processor speeds, going to allow greater artificial intelligence,
whether it's like us or whether it's like the Hoover robot, you know,
which in turn relies on autonomous decision making and or arithmetic decision making.
The change in genetic material sciences macro engineering also opened up a world of distinctly bespoke, tailored, altered applications.
Gene therapy is one thing, but gene warfare is quite another.
It feels as if we are on the birth of the new kind of molecular science.
You know, that's why the scientists are talking sciences that will allow us to interact with physical world in a totally different way.
You know, any of you that have experienced VR and to think, Oh, this is amazing virtual reality,
this is an amazing kind of way that we could experience things that we never thought we could experience before.
And you know that the notion of individual, you know how things kind of suck you into it in some way or another.
I'm veering off to the matrix, so I'll I'll leave that.
Let's talk about the unknown unknowns where the losses to anticipate those technologies and whose science has yet to be discovered or engineered.
We know that techno scientific changes have a tendency to support existing networks and fundamentally to eventually overcome them.
So we understand that roads, you know, the traffic, the human traffic was a problem.
So we pushed out to the side to let roads, cars go faster than cars become a problem.
So we started looking at alternatives to the road network and then we start and you know,
we what we do is we establish networks and then we try to transgress networks and
then those networks get transgressed and then those networks get transgressed.
Maybe that's a function of human nature in some way or another.
So but drones are a typical example of that, as you know.
How do we defeat space and time in a way that makes a difference?
Finally, let's go to something that Zizek refers to as unknown knowns.
Yeah, we know that there are lots of things happening out there, that there are quite amazing things happening out there.
We know that the Chinese military are doing some quite amazing things and sometimes
we even know that they refer to them as something like the assassin's mace.
But we have ideas of what we think the assassin's May says, but we're not 100% sure about what that is.
So we know that it exists. We know that over 4 million people in the United States have security clearance.
Now, there's a lot of people in the United States that know things.
And sometimes as we see, that comes back to haunt but Edward Snowden and so on.
Right. So this has an impact in the way that we would talk about now.
I'm not going to go into this. But what's particularly interesting is,
is that Ruth Miller tells us that it has all these things to say about what we talk about in terms of vitality, liberty and and mobility.
You know that we're giving things life vitality that never had life before.
So we're creating, you know, in many ways that may be artificial intelligence, but maybe in some cases that shaking a bottle of fizzy water.
You know, you're adding information to that bottle.
You know that you can imagine that bread in different ways, written in different ways and mobility, this ability to go beyond our boundaries.
You know, that fundamentally, you know, what's important in mobility is not the ability to get there, to cross boundaries, to to move fast and so on.
But more importantly, what's really fundamental is the ability to stay there, permanence, you know, what was not and, you know,
Stuxnet was fantastic, not because it actually zoomed from Israel and the United States and so on and hit something.
But Stuxnet was important because it just set down.
You just had Stuxnet on a USB and it just sat there for ages and we were just waiting for someone to plug in that USB with Stuxnet on it.
Stuxnet was important for shutting down that run Iranian fuselage.
Not because not because it was in some kind of kinetic way being shot at the fuselage, but because it had the ability to just stay there, to hang out.
And of course, that's what drone operators say. What's important is,
is that you can sit there for days and watch someone's behaviour and be able to really
verify the things that actually you've never been able to verify in the same way before.
Okay. So what does this mean for our questions? Well, the role of the state is interesting because it has an impact on the way that we may talk about,
you know, something that's increasingly bounded.
You know, something like the state is being is encountering something that's increasingly unbounded.
So we could think about something like the power of production. You know, it's being distributed.
You know, the ability for additive manufacturing or 3D printing is quite amazing.
You know, the future and how that's impacting different companies is quite amazing.
Lockheed Martin says, no, we're still going to make things, but says we're going to print things.
Actually, we're going to give you you're going to buy the ideas from us and you're going to print them.
We don't want to be in the material making business any longer. And here I've brought some examples.
You know, that's the way that value systems are talking about totally different business models because they realise
that the power of production is is becoming greater while at the same time information is becoming cheaper.
And that's that's that's interesting.
And many of you will have seen The Matrix films, and you remember that one of the characters doesn't know how to fly a helicopter.
So she asks, Could you please download how to fly this helicopter? I think it's in the matrix.
And can you please download how and then you know takes on a downloading the buffer speed and the matrix
is is is slow but it's almost there and finally it downloads and now she knows how to find this,
this, this, this, this, this, this helicopter.
That's quite amazing. Same thing in Rogue and Rogue One. You saw that?
The robot? No. I mean, you know, how does he know where to go?
He goes in and he plugs in and he downloads it and away. So information is becoming increasingly cheaper as it expands.
Those two things have a big impact on the way that we talk about, in a sense,
the power of the state to be able to make decisions about research and development,
about the way that economies grow or don't grow and things like this.
So in many ways maybe that's talking about globalisation from a different perspective.
You know, it's not about international trade agreements, but it's about this,
this notion of information and production power coming from a different direction.
Now the reason I mention that is because it has a big impact on the way that we talk about power and security or arms control.
So the way that we talk about cyber, the way that we talk about biochem, the way that we talk about robotics is being fundamentally challenged.
And then finally, this relationship between security and defence, you know,
what role do militaries have within this military's complaint that the convergence of security and defence makes their job
more difficult because it thins out what they can do well with issues that are shared by other agencies and departments.
Not only that, but it forces them to take on logics that don't put them at the centre, you know, and that's particularly difficult for them.
So but fundamentally, it poses a problem. It fundamentally poses a problem, as I suggest here,
for all of us in terms of coming to terms with what technology means for society and
fundamentally what it means for the future of war and the way that I've explained it.
Thank you very much.