1 00:00:00,990 --> 00:00:05,790 It is my pleasure to introduce Jason Clarke, Desert Fox speaker. 2 00:00:07,680 --> 00:00:15,690 He is an officer of the U.S. Army but is currently serving as an exchange officer of the British Army. 3 00:00:15,810 --> 00:00:21,900 Chief of the General Staff. Jason Clarke is not only a practitioner, he's also very much involved in academia. 4 00:00:22,380 --> 00:00:27,930 He has taught at West Point. He has a doctorate in history from Duke University. 5 00:00:28,680 --> 00:00:38,160 And later this year, Harvard University Press will publish his book, and I'm sure he will write more on that after the talks as well. 6 00:00:38,190 --> 00:00:47,430 It's called Preparing for War. For generations of the U.S. Army and the Peace Walk and Change from April 15 through 1974. 7 00:00:47,550 --> 00:00:51,810 Pleasure to have you here. As I speak of faith and I'm grateful. 8 00:00:51,810 --> 00:00:54,990 Thank you so much. So thank you all for coming. 9 00:00:55,020 --> 00:01:03,060 It's a delight to see anybody in the room, particularly having so many distinguished faces who I, Stephen, respect greatly. 10 00:01:04,020 --> 00:01:08,520 Thank you for having me. And also to Rob Johnson, who made the initial offer. 11 00:01:09,810 --> 00:01:14,160 You know what I mean? What a pleasure to be here at Oxford with CCW. 12 00:01:15,420 --> 00:01:19,290 In my role as an academic in the United States, of course, you know, 13 00:01:19,290 --> 00:01:23,760 very conscious of everything that was coming out as far as the scholarship out of here. 14 00:01:24,090 --> 00:01:30,989 But it wasn't until I came to the UK in the role of the practitioner that I started to see, I think, 15 00:01:30,990 --> 00:01:41,310 a difference and one that speaks well to the UK about how much there is the the interplay of, you know, academic inquiry and policy decision. 16 00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:52,350 I don't want to overstate it, but certainly people take that in Whitehall and take notice of what goes on in places like this. 17 00:01:53,280 --> 00:02:02,100 And and it's that spirit that I'm here today as both a drawing upon my historical research as an academic, 18 00:02:02,370 --> 00:02:08,730 but also looking to it's, you know, taking the insights to how that might be applied to to today's problems. 19 00:02:10,830 --> 00:02:19,930 I do have to have and have been get permission for the shameless plug the the publishers evil publishers have since changed the subtitle. 20 00:02:19,950 --> 00:02:23,760 It is now the emergence of the US Army 1852 1917. 21 00:02:24,180 --> 00:02:29,880 It's a little bit more than I would would like, but it should come out hopefully around December timeframe. 22 00:02:30,180 --> 00:02:34,320 The exact publication date will be decided here pretty frequently. 23 00:02:36,180 --> 00:02:43,499 And also I have to have the disclaimer that the views are my own do not the views of the US Department of Defence, 24 00:02:43,500 --> 00:02:47,280 or certainly not the British military and the Ministry of Defence either. 25 00:02:48,390 --> 00:02:50,190 So with that, let's launch straight into it. 26 00:02:51,390 --> 00:03:01,950 At first blush, you might wonder why the US army of the 19th century is even really worth paying to pay attention to in today's climate. 27 00:03:03,780 --> 00:03:06,960 You know, in 1898 it was 27,000 strong. 28 00:03:07,050 --> 00:03:11,370 And so with all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that we have currently about, you know, 29 00:03:11,370 --> 00:03:16,200 whether here in the UK, whether 82,000 is enough in the US, whether 450,000 is enough. 30 00:03:16,620 --> 00:03:21,210 It seems like such a bygone time that there might not be anything that we can necessarily learn from that. 31 00:03:22,380 --> 00:03:26,160 And also there is you know, 32 00:03:26,160 --> 00:03:34,649 it is that the military professionalism of the 19th century is easily parodied as being this proudly anti-intellectual bit. 33 00:03:34,650 --> 00:03:40,350 And so there might seem very little as far as even method that we could learn from from that group. 34 00:03:42,060 --> 00:03:50,520 And I would but I would remind everybody that while there is some merit in the the criticisms of that time, 35 00:03:51,540 --> 00:03:54,840 both here, where there's also a certain amount of amateurish, 36 00:03:55,020 --> 00:04:06,870 amateurish ness in the 19th century, the you know, the way that they were able to conquer an empire and the UK and then also a continent for the US. 37 00:04:06,870 --> 00:04:10,860 And so there was something that they were doing right and they were doing 38 00:04:11,040 --> 00:04:17,340 pretty good at it until they weren't and conditions changed and at that point, 39 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:23,850 you know, in the early 19th century actually, and surprisingly enough in both places about the same time, 40 00:04:24,660 --> 00:04:31,980 1898, 1900, you know, the limitations of that old professionalism were pretty viciously revealed. 41 00:04:34,890 --> 00:04:39,060 So which brings me to my question that I'd like you to keep in mind for today. 42 00:04:39,870 --> 00:04:43,189 So professionalism was good. Conditions changed. No longer. 43 00:04:43,190 --> 00:04:45,540 It was it no longer was quite sufficient. 44 00:04:46,320 --> 00:04:53,460 So our Iraq and Afghanistan leading indicators that our present military professionalism has also come up against the buffers, 45 00:04:54,630 --> 00:04:58,890 and we need some sort of new concept. If so. 46 00:04:58,890 --> 00:05:02,070 And I think the. We should at least entertain the possibility, whether you agree or not. 47 00:05:03,060 --> 00:05:08,850 Then perhaps the process by which the 20th century notion of professionalism supplanted that of the 19th 48 00:05:08,850 --> 00:05:15,840 century might have some lessons for us as we go to a post 20th century form of military professionalism. 49 00:05:17,370 --> 00:05:22,680 First, I should kind of outline what I view as the differences between the 19th and 20th century. 50 00:05:23,130 --> 00:05:27,540 So superficially, the differences in warfare are obvious in 1815. 51 00:05:27,900 --> 00:05:36,090 You have the armies arrayed and linear patterns, linear formations bristling with flintlock muskets and smooth bore cannon of the Napoleonic era, 52 00:05:37,080 --> 00:05:42,000 led by officers adorned with, you know, large hats and gold braid and whatnot. 53 00:05:43,140 --> 00:05:48,719 By 1917, armies look really different. Soldiers were one. 54 00:05:48,720 --> 00:05:53,610 They're armed with magazines, with rifles, still artillery, machine guns, tanks, aeroplanes. 55 00:05:55,230 --> 00:06:00,809 But also, you know, officers and soldiers alike wear these olive drab uniforms that, 56 00:06:00,810 --> 00:06:05,340 while infinitely more practical than all of the bread and whatnot, 57 00:06:05,760 --> 00:06:13,620 also suggest there's a loss of individual individuality within this undifferentiated mass for everybody. 58 00:06:14,340 --> 00:06:20,730 The machine, the big green machine. But that's superficial. 59 00:06:21,120 --> 00:06:28,679 The less obvious, equally stark change was the mode of command went from informal direction that was grounded in the 60 00:06:28,680 --> 00:06:34,330 person personality of the commander to a system of formal control using impersonal staff procedures. 61 00:06:34,350 --> 00:06:37,620 And so if we envision this on the one side, you have, you know, 62 00:06:37,620 --> 00:06:42,750 the general on horseback on the Hill with aides coming in and going frantically with with messages. 63 00:06:43,380 --> 00:06:49,350 Now, in 1917, you still might have the commander touring the front lines and giving direction. 64 00:06:49,590 --> 00:06:57,209 But really, most of where the command and control is back in the rear when you have a, you know, this large staff turning out large, 65 00:06:57,210 --> 00:07:03,120 complex orders based off of procedures that they had learned at staff colleges previously in peace. 66 00:07:05,440 --> 00:07:13,570 So that change is the methodological equivalent of the sartorial change, from gold braid to olive drab. 67 00:07:15,190 --> 00:07:22,540 Undeniably more functional, but an element of personality was sacrificed in the transition and individuals 68 00:07:22,540 --> 00:07:28,120 lost economy as they were subsumed within this larger organisational mass. 69 00:07:30,190 --> 00:07:35,080 But with that more restrictive professionalism came a huge increase in military effectiveness. 70 00:07:35,830 --> 00:07:42,340 The US Army is a great example. 1898 General William Pecos Bill very colourful name. 71 00:07:42,350 --> 00:07:48,190 Their chapter struggled to command and control just three divisions within Cuba, 72 00:07:48,430 --> 00:07:54,340 and those were primarily made up of and a few batteries and those were primarily made up of regulars. 73 00:07:54,640 --> 00:07:59,590 And so there was no no question that this was, you know, citizen soldiers who weren't ready for war. 74 00:07:59,920 --> 00:08:05,170 It was a very well-drilled, well-organised, well equipped force, and he struggled with it. 75 00:08:06,280 --> 00:08:13,600 We fast forward just 20 years later and you look at the ADF and in there and I will be the first to say there are many problems with the ADF, 76 00:08:13,930 --> 00:08:20,559 but the ability of the ADF to take a group that was overwhelmingly made up 77 00:08:20,560 --> 00:08:25,240 of draftees and other recent civilians and move them around the battlefield. 78 00:08:25,630 --> 00:08:31,150 When you compare it to the struggle with just three divisions in Cuba, I mean, it's it's incredible shift. 79 00:08:33,340 --> 00:08:40,330 And so the development that underpinned that change was not technological, 80 00:08:40,960 --> 00:08:45,940 although certainly there was enabling, you know, technologies that went into that as well. 81 00:08:46,420 --> 00:08:54,730 But it was conceptual. And so the old professional professionalism was built upon the belief that military competence was a product of character, 82 00:08:55,120 --> 00:09:01,720 common sense and natural aptitude. These innate qualities might be refined through experience or study, certainly, 83 00:09:02,530 --> 00:09:06,010 but they were largely beyond the ability of the institution to manufacture. 84 00:09:08,500 --> 00:09:13,420 There was consequently little effort to train officers anything but technical skills like engineering and gunnery. 85 00:09:14,350 --> 00:09:20,440 And so the result was it was a guild like conception of professionalism that granted all members some degree of 86 00:09:20,440 --> 00:09:25,450 deference and left those at the middle or higher ranks largely unfettered in how they practised their trade. 87 00:09:26,530 --> 00:09:28,149 The new professionalism, by contrast, 88 00:09:28,150 --> 00:09:35,140 was built upon the premise that the military profession was a body of expert knowledge that could be codified, imparted and regulated. 89 00:09:36,340 --> 00:09:39,880 Umpired field training, professional education, tactical doctrine. 90 00:09:40,120 --> 00:09:46,000 Implicit to all of these activities that we just take for granted with the modern military 91 00:09:46,660 --> 00:09:52,270 is that the army can and indeed must shape the manner in which officers think and act. 92 00:09:54,700 --> 00:09:59,650 In hindsight, I mean, the benefits of all these things were so clear that we might think that it was the product of design, 93 00:10:00,490 --> 00:10:04,540 but the actual process was incremental, organic and resisted by many officers. 94 00:10:06,130 --> 00:10:12,340 Officers of 1815 were steeped in a romantic view of warfare and a overwrought sense of individualism. 95 00:10:12,700 --> 00:10:18,820 And they would have found the notion that the institution could manufacture generals or commanders would be misguided and offensive, 96 00:10:20,290 --> 00:10:22,450 like blacksmiths and telephone switch operators. 97 00:10:22,690 --> 00:10:29,470 You know, the officers of the 19th century did not want to give up cherished, cherished ways of organising themselves and thinking about themselves. 98 00:10:31,990 --> 00:10:37,360 But at some point, we get to this point where the late officers of the Industrial Age and the 99 00:10:37,600 --> 00:10:42,400 progressive era in America and being perhaps more accustomed to mechanical metaphor, 100 00:10:43,570 --> 00:10:47,290 they were more inclined to think of themselves as components within a larger apparatus. 101 00:10:48,640 --> 00:10:54,760 So let me kind of put a finer point on that by giving it some some substance and personality. 102 00:10:55,180 --> 00:11:02,980 So it's the difference between Winfield Scott, you know, the hero of 1812 and Mexican war, and George C Marshall, who, 103 00:11:03,010 --> 00:11:13,719 while we primarily think of him as his role to duty as chief of staff, was one of the star staff officers who made this big ADF machine go. 104 00:11:13,720 --> 00:11:18,670 And actually that was the beginning of his his rise. Well, I suppose again a little bit earlier, 105 00:11:18,670 --> 00:11:29,860 but still made his name and their useful contrast because both were exceptionally capable people and both were committed to the profession. 106 00:11:30,460 --> 00:11:36,300 So it wasn't that there was a lack of seriousness or weren't they stupid back then? 107 00:11:36,310 --> 00:11:42,400 These are both highly credible people, but the organisations they're a part of are so vastly different in what they can achieve. 108 00:11:44,490 --> 00:11:51,160 So get to the question of how do we get to Denmark? So the question today is how do we how do you go from Scott to Marshall? 109 00:11:53,740 --> 00:11:58,810 So much of the explanation for the difference between Scott and Marshall really has nothing to do with the military at all. 110 00:12:00,250 --> 00:12:03,670 To draw one more bit of contrast, in 1815, the United States was a. 111 00:12:03,690 --> 00:12:09,780 Agrarian candle lit, horse drawn and centred upon the eastern eastern eastern seaboard excuse me. 112 00:12:10,860 --> 00:12:17,250 In 1918 there was industrial electric powered, engine driven and spanned a continent and controlled bits elsewhere as well. 113 00:12:18,060 --> 00:12:21,660 And so in that way I'll tease this out a little bit later on, 114 00:12:21,670 --> 00:12:28,800 been that difference is where we start seeing the screen Marshall and Scott because they're both products of those two bits of America. 115 00:12:30,150 --> 00:12:37,740 So something to think about. Uh, what, how would we use, what adjectives would be used for America today? 116 00:12:37,740 --> 00:12:43,530 And are they so different than those adjectives of 1917 that is going to create an entirely new kind of officer. 117 00:12:47,150 --> 00:12:56,360 So. And just as the larger world continues to disprove the end of history thesis, military history is not done either and continues to march on. 118 00:12:57,440 --> 00:13:00,830 And so at the risk of seeming to curry favour with my hosts, 119 00:13:01,430 --> 00:13:05,300 I think that one of the most sensible subject statements on the subject comes from Rob Johnson, 120 00:13:06,110 --> 00:13:12,530 who in 2014 wrote The character of war and the future will change as frequently as it has in the past. 121 00:13:13,280 --> 00:13:14,750 But there will be many striking continuities. 122 00:13:16,370 --> 00:13:21,890 So for a host of reasons, military's are quite good at continuity, and sometimes they can actually be pretty good a change, too. 123 00:13:23,180 --> 00:13:27,110 But the degree to which they are successful in rationalising those two elements, 124 00:13:27,110 --> 00:13:31,400 continuity and change is often determined by what is precipitating that change. 125 00:13:31,850 --> 00:13:36,080 And so let's just do a brief look at the current literature. 126 00:13:36,530 --> 00:13:39,800 So we have to contend with Samuel Huntington and the soldier in the state. 127 00:13:39,830 --> 00:13:42,110 First, if you're talking about military change. 128 00:13:44,420 --> 00:13:50,780 So he's actually interesting because he's basically drawing upon the same source material that I am the army of the 19th century. 129 00:13:52,190 --> 00:13:59,990 And his argument was that military professionalism flourished because it was unhindered by the corrosive effects of civilian liberalism. 130 00:14:01,190 --> 00:14:10,069 Now, since then, 1957 is when sort of state came out of basically all of his historical arguments have been, 131 00:14:10,070 --> 00:14:14,780 you know, the props have been knocked out one by one about all of his characterisations, about the 19th century army. 132 00:14:15,890 --> 00:14:20,060 But, I mean, he is still he's very influential in his overall argument. 133 00:14:20,480 --> 00:14:23,700 But I would note that my own work actually finds the exact opposite. 134 00:14:23,720 --> 00:14:29,750 So it's not simply that he's a little bit wrong about saying that the Army was more geographically isolated than it was. 135 00:14:30,320 --> 00:14:38,330 But I argue that as professionalism, at least in the way that he defined it, of institutions like staff colleges and the general staff, 136 00:14:39,530 --> 00:14:47,809 that actually the change happened later and it was because these ideas were percolating in from society rather 137 00:14:47,810 --> 00:14:55,700 than they were driven by some sort of military functional imperative to fast forward with ideas to more standard, 138 00:14:55,700 --> 00:15:06,679 which we don't get to propose in the 1984, who argue that military change is driven by outsiders. 139 00:15:06,680 --> 00:15:14,419 And so the politicians within the title of this talk that militaries are so resistant to change, 140 00:15:14,420 --> 00:15:23,330 you have to have some sort of outside influence comes in, perhaps aided by some mavericks internal to the military. 141 00:15:23,540 --> 00:15:34,430 And they impose change based off of a neorealist sort of impetus of some strategic threat arises a couple of years later. 142 00:15:34,790 --> 00:15:43,490 Stephen Peter Rose challenged that. He noted that it's really hard for an outsider to make the military change against its will. 143 00:15:43,850 --> 00:15:52,969 So he spoke about generals and usually some sort of general has both a vision and then also has the organisational bureaucratic war 144 00:15:52,970 --> 00:16:01,780 fighting skills in order to create a certain critical mass of younger officers with good career paths that can then take forward this, 145 00:16:01,790 --> 00:16:05,090 this vision instituted across the organisation. 146 00:16:06,230 --> 00:16:10,910 And he said, Yeah, okay, maybe this all could be in response to some new strategic threat that arises, 147 00:16:11,630 --> 00:16:19,940 but it also might simply be driven by, you know, internal competition for resources or even for prestige amongst different arms. 148 00:16:21,630 --> 00:16:28,190 Substance subsequent scholarship has modified these contending views, some at summarising some of this work very nicely. 149 00:16:28,190 --> 00:16:34,490 Theo Farrell and Terry Tarif note that cultural, political and technological factors also modify the course of change. 150 00:16:35,360 --> 00:16:40,190 And importantly, they also note that an external shock might be what drives change. 151 00:16:41,060 --> 00:16:42,950 And so, in summary, 152 00:16:43,730 --> 00:16:51,140 the current scholarship and military adaptation offers three broad causes for change external direction that overcomes military conservatism, 153 00:16:51,950 --> 00:16:55,730 internal direction likely emanating from some visionary, general or admiral, 154 00:16:56,360 --> 00:17:00,920 or an institutional reaction to an external shock such as defeat or new technology. 155 00:17:02,060 --> 00:17:06,230 And so I refer to these by the somewhat simplified shorthand of politicians, generals and events. 156 00:17:08,060 --> 00:17:14,210 And these explanations do very well when we're trying to explain some discrete instance of change. 157 00:17:14,960 --> 00:17:18,860 You know, why was this field manual revised in such a way? 158 00:17:19,190 --> 00:17:25,760 Or why did we reorganise the military in relation to this new technology that was coming in, all of those sorts of things? 159 00:17:25,960 --> 00:17:34,460 So it's not that there's no merit in those. Such bounded events are usually a combination of those three factors, 160 00:17:35,060 --> 00:17:40,670 but sometimes the overall magnitude of the change is greater than the sum of such small increments. 161 00:17:41,900 --> 00:17:45,490 And I think the case of Arthur Wagner. Neatly illustrates this point. 162 00:17:46,600 --> 00:17:54,370 So Wagner was commissioned in 1875 at a West Point in 1890. 163 00:17:54,670 --> 00:17:57,969 He was one of our innovators in military education. 164 00:17:57,970 --> 00:18:02,890 And so he essentially kind of created the foundation for later State College out of a 165 00:18:02,890 --> 00:18:07,750 school that was really just meant to teach lieutenants to be able to mount a proper guard. 166 00:18:09,310 --> 00:18:14,590 He also was hailed as the master of manoeuvres in the early 20th century. 167 00:18:14,920 --> 00:18:20,320 And so he was one who really, as we were trying to take European style grand manoeuvres, 168 00:18:20,890 --> 00:18:26,200 introduce large scale, realistic field training, and very importantly with the didactic element. 169 00:18:26,620 --> 00:18:31,510 And so at the end of it, an umpire was going to say, General, you did this right or you did that wrong. 170 00:18:32,530 --> 00:18:37,750 And so that learning element, as opposed to what they had before, which was just everybody going out and having a good time firing off blanks. 171 00:18:39,130 --> 00:18:43,540 And also, he was the foremost tactical theoretician of the age. 172 00:18:43,960 --> 00:18:47,650 And his books were were kind of man toward reading. 173 00:18:48,040 --> 00:18:53,590 So in 1904, he becomes essentially the head of training and education and doctrine within the general staff. 174 00:18:54,160 --> 00:18:57,819 And so everybody expected that Wagner coming into this new position, 175 00:18:57,820 --> 00:19:02,800 general staff had just been created the year before, would make his ideas, would put him into regulations. 176 00:19:03,250 --> 00:19:07,360 And then this was his chance to make his his ideas law. 177 00:19:08,080 --> 00:19:13,570 But he insisted that this would be improper because for him, when his ideas were in a textbook, 178 00:19:14,320 --> 00:19:17,420 they weren't binding and somebody could disagree with them. 179 00:19:17,440 --> 00:19:22,569 Now, he thought his ideas were right, but he wanted the regional commander, the colonel, 180 00:19:22,570 --> 00:19:32,110 to be able to do what he wanted to do unbidden by this overweening hand of the central doctrine and indoctrination or linked towards. 181 00:19:34,730 --> 00:19:42,680 But it still is striking that the individual most responsible for creating the tools of indoctrination schools you know, theory, field manoeuvres. 182 00:19:44,520 --> 00:19:53,190 He shrink from the logical implication, logical ends of his own work and say, no, no, no, you got to yell out, keep their autonomy alive. 183 00:19:55,530 --> 00:20:01,080 So for him, these tools were just means of crafting a better version of the old profession, not create created entirely new one. 184 00:20:02,220 --> 00:20:04,980 Just a few years later that had been turned on its head. 185 00:20:05,850 --> 00:20:14,670 The he was since died and in 1910 the president of the Army War College explicitly rejected the individualism of the 19th century. 186 00:20:15,450 --> 00:20:20,099 The main object of the school, he said, was, quote, to develop a safe school, 187 00:20:20,100 --> 00:20:25,050 of safe leadership for officers and not to encourage unusual and extraordinary methods. 188 00:20:25,830 --> 00:20:33,389 Uniformity of thought, uniformity of procedure in solving problems of war are of the utmost importance. 189 00:20:33,390 --> 00:20:36,660 And we can safely leave the development of genius to chance. Unquote. 190 00:20:37,560 --> 00:20:43,980 So in other words, the army would make individuals into the kinds of army kinds of officers and commanders that it wanted. 191 00:20:45,880 --> 00:20:52,650 Then the American experience would have one solidified this view, because for the first time in U.S. military history, 192 00:20:52,860 --> 00:20:58,770 the War Department was given control over the training and commissioning of all of the citizen soldiers coming in. 193 00:20:59,640 --> 00:21:06,880 And so they were given the keys and they felt like they had stamped and they didn't think they'd done a great job. 194 00:21:06,900 --> 00:21:12,090 There's things they want to do differently in hindsight, but they had created this mass produced army. 195 00:21:12,120 --> 00:21:19,110 So the officer corps started thinking of itself in terms of making people into the kinds of commanders they wanted. 196 00:21:20,760 --> 00:21:27,600 And so in the 1923 lecture at the Army War College, then Colonel George C Marshall told the assembled members of the general staff that they had, 197 00:21:27,600 --> 00:21:30,990 quote, the power and the duty to indoctrinate the army. 198 00:21:31,830 --> 00:21:35,610 So he fully embraced the this new idea that the institution could make a 199 00:21:35,610 --> 00:21:40,590 commander a thought that would have offended his predecessors not long before. 200 00:21:41,820 --> 00:21:45,629 So, you know, this is not politicians or generals or events. 201 00:21:45,630 --> 00:21:51,120 There's something a little bit deeper that is going on there that is creating this difference in outlook. 202 00:21:53,250 --> 00:22:02,879 And it really what had happened was generational changes had accumulated with each different viewpoint on what it is to prepare for war, 203 00:22:02,880 --> 00:22:04,200 which is how I define a generation. 204 00:22:04,230 --> 00:22:11,850 Essentially what defines a professional generation as it is how it conceives of war, and therefore what it concludes, how it should prepare for it. 205 00:22:13,290 --> 00:22:19,710 And as they have different notions of that, that creates a slightly different aperture for what the institution can do. 206 00:22:21,360 --> 00:22:29,280 But simply observing that generation's think differently doesn't really help us that much, and it really isn't all that profound. 207 00:22:31,530 --> 00:22:37,560 But one thing we should zero in on is, is if you look at Prussia at the same time as Winfield Scott, 208 00:22:38,190 --> 00:22:48,540 so the the change that is exemplar is embodied as Marshall had kind of in a way had come about in Prussia at the same time as Scott. 209 00:22:48,720 --> 00:22:54,030 So there wasn't any technological barrier to it. And typically, 210 00:22:54,030 --> 00:22:58,740 most American military historians would say that what happened was that it was 211 00:22:59,610 --> 00:23:03,930 civilian ideological hostility to a standing army that kept everybody back. 212 00:23:04,080 --> 00:23:07,380 And certainly there was going to be large reorganisations. 213 00:23:07,950 --> 00:23:14,040 And also they weren't going to be able to undertake anything that was resource intensive in time of peace because they really had no money. 214 00:23:15,540 --> 00:23:19,110 But there's still a whole lot. And if you look at, you know, the example of Wagner, 215 00:23:19,620 --> 00:23:25,560 that was a deliberate choice not to go down the road of standardisation, of military professionalism. 216 00:23:26,310 --> 00:23:37,230 So there was a lot that though simply Dr. Ford didn't want to do until for some reason they certainly wanted to in the early 20th century. 217 00:23:38,730 --> 00:23:44,080 So what explains that sort of give some think some structure to our thinking about generational change? 218 00:23:44,100 --> 00:23:50,070 I propose that we we think of this that professional generations are the products of three different categories of influence. 219 00:23:50,970 --> 00:23:55,980 The first of these categories is made up of all the institutional mechanisms that deliberately shape the profession. 220 00:23:56,880 --> 00:24:05,610 West Point Military Schools. Most are obvious examples, but it also includes policies that govern the selection of officers, systems of promotion, 221 00:24:05,910 --> 00:24:10,170 methods of organising and giving preference to certain functional specialities over the others, 222 00:24:10,470 --> 00:24:15,270 the way that the institution can consciously craft itself into a certain way. 223 00:24:17,550 --> 00:24:21,780 The second category is are all those elements of military service that shape 224 00:24:21,780 --> 00:24:25,110 perceptions that are outside of the ability of the institution to control. 225 00:24:26,430 --> 00:24:31,110 So this a company that encompasses everything from informal norms within subunits, 226 00:24:31,110 --> 00:24:40,860 like with that regimental system to the simple lived experience, you know what officers actually see in peace and war. 227 00:24:41,970 --> 00:24:43,680 These indirect influences that can. 228 00:24:43,980 --> 00:24:52,440 Are almost always more important in determining the character of the profession than the formal inputs, simply by sheer weight of numbers. 229 00:24:52,860 --> 00:25:02,170 Four years at West Point, early in the career versus for decades in a certain regiment or, you know, the regulations say one thing. 230 00:25:02,190 --> 00:25:08,970 But yet, you know, you look at the Civil War and four years of warfare taught you this other thing, whatever the drill regulations say. 231 00:25:09,360 --> 00:25:11,160 And so all of those lived experiences, 232 00:25:11,760 --> 00:25:18,720 although you also could just be simple the effect of having incredibly slow promotion throughout most 19th century. 233 00:25:19,350 --> 00:25:22,530 Usually it took about 30 years of service before you start getting to be a major. 234 00:25:23,610 --> 00:25:28,930 And so those things have impacts. The third category is essentially everything else. 235 00:25:28,950 --> 00:25:31,440 And so everything that is not strictly military. 236 00:25:31,950 --> 00:25:40,620 So it's the values, concepts and outlooks inherited from civilian society which also outweighs the formal inputs. 237 00:25:41,340 --> 00:25:49,770 As with like West Point as example, people have been socialised for a good 18 to 22 years before they even arrive at the gates of West Point. 238 00:25:50,730 --> 00:25:53,970 And then society continues to act upon them even after they're commissioned, 239 00:25:55,140 --> 00:26:00,780 which is why, you know, officer quarters are recognisably members of their own society. 240 00:26:01,830 --> 00:26:06,510 They have attitudes about things. But it's not just well, if that's the civilian attitude. 241 00:26:06,510 --> 00:26:13,290 And I feel military attitudes, civilian attitudes of class can influence the way that officers and enlisted interact. 242 00:26:14,310 --> 00:26:20,490 Racial attitudes can certainly have a huge impact on operational decisions when operating in foreign countries. 243 00:26:21,540 --> 00:26:28,680 And then also a notion, a nation's sense of where it is in the world can also influence questions of strategy. 244 00:26:29,910 --> 00:26:39,360 So when we have all three of these factors combined, there's this they create the social and military milieu you that forms a generation. 245 00:26:39,360 --> 00:26:46,860 And I'm not saying that generations are monolithic. In fact, and this is something that I've taken very much from from Brian Lin's work. 246 00:26:47,880 --> 00:26:56,220 You know, disagreement has been the norm. And so you can almost define a generation as much by the points of disagreement as its points of consensus. 247 00:26:56,880 --> 00:27:01,680 And so, as an example, for those of you who might know, you know, John Nagl, you know, 248 00:27:01,680 --> 00:27:06,810 the famous coined minister, John Gentille, the famous, I guess anti coined minister. 249 00:27:08,550 --> 00:27:12,060 Historians in the future will look back at that as being defining. 250 00:27:12,180 --> 00:27:15,690 You can't take that argument between those two, 251 00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:22,050 whatever side you come down on and transplanted into the 1930s isolationist America just it doesn't make sense. 252 00:27:22,680 --> 00:27:26,670 And so what you choose to fight about really kind of defines a generation. 253 00:27:29,340 --> 00:27:35,460 But so the context doesn't dictate a single set of views, but it does provide a common pool of ideas, 254 00:27:35,640 --> 00:27:39,630 values and experience that bound the diversity that you can have. 255 00:27:40,620 --> 00:27:46,500 So as historian Daniel T Rogers notes, because most individuals are users rather than shapers of ideas, 256 00:27:46,770 --> 00:27:52,740 our thoughts and actions are defined by the constellation of life, accessible ways of looking at society. 257 00:27:54,510 --> 00:27:58,890 Each generation of army officers was similarly defined by its own particular constellation of ideas 258 00:27:59,160 --> 00:28:03,540 that provided the raw material from which its members assembled their own method of preparing for war. 259 00:28:04,260 --> 00:28:10,110 When the compass in you changed, so did the outlook of the officers, and a new generation was born. 260 00:28:13,020 --> 00:28:16,350 And so that helps explain how we got from Scott to Marshall. 261 00:28:18,150 --> 00:28:21,930 But as puzzlement and look at some of the conceptual implications for this trinity. 262 00:28:22,530 --> 00:28:26,849 So I think there are three critical, critical lessons that we should draw from this. And to do this, 263 00:28:26,850 --> 00:28:33,210 I'll draw from the wonderful Christopher Bartlett I cite as he goes into explaining 264 00:28:33,510 --> 00:28:39,239 the positive trinity and he has you know the of the magnetic are know going in 265 00:28:39,240 --> 00:28:45,420 between you know three different other magnetic poles and it kind of just swings around 266 00:28:45,420 --> 00:28:50,250 crazily as the different forces of those three magnetic influences play upon it. 267 00:28:50,670 --> 00:28:57,990 So using that image, the first implication is that efforts to change the profession will always yield unexpected results. 268 00:28:58,980 --> 00:29:06,629 So let's imagine we have the magnetic arm. We've taken it back to that institutional apex that I draw on. 269 00:29:06,630 --> 00:29:13,500 And so there's going to be a firm hand that's going to say, we're going to reform the military and it sends that arm along a path. 270 00:29:14,700 --> 00:29:24,299 Now, even though it's a straight and true force acting upon it, as soon as it goes out, it's going to start deviating into our efforts. 271 00:29:24,300 --> 00:29:27,000 That reform are always going to change because on one side you're going to 272 00:29:27,000 --> 00:29:31,800 have military experiences are going to work against the institutional force. 273 00:29:32,580 --> 00:29:38,219 That's because of maybe just old habits of mind and the way that the that the officer 274 00:29:38,220 --> 00:29:43,260 corps thinks of that it has to do things or inter-service rivalry or whatever it is. 275 00:29:43,820 --> 00:29:49,820 But also culture, cultural notions of fairness, of propriety, of prestige. 276 00:29:50,030 --> 00:29:57,820 All of those will also act upon it. So that initial course of reform is going to sway around a little bit. 277 00:29:57,830 --> 00:30:02,630 And so we should expect that formal efforts to alter the profession will deviate from the intended course. 278 00:30:04,460 --> 00:30:08,340 There's a corollary, and that takes us to the the second application. 279 00:30:08,360 --> 00:30:15,290 This is my favourite. Institutional efforts to remain the same are also destined to fail for the exact same reasons. 280 00:30:16,040 --> 00:30:19,099 So let's use the thought experiment. 281 00:30:19,100 --> 00:30:25,880 So let's imagine the Chief of Staff of the US Army in 2040 he or she is currently serving. 282 00:30:27,830 --> 00:30:32,479 Well, let's imagine that General Mark Milley, the current chief of staff, had been able to say, 283 00:30:32,480 --> 00:30:36,230 I want to produce somebody just like me to be the chief of staff in 2040. 284 00:30:37,100 --> 00:30:41,180 And so we had frozen all of our institutional inputs in place. 285 00:30:41,930 --> 00:30:47,450 There is no change to our our commissioning sources, no changes to our staff, college, our war colleges. 286 00:30:47,750 --> 00:30:53,640 All the training systems have been the same, accounting for a difference of personality, of course. 287 00:30:53,660 --> 00:31:01,160 Would we have the same output in 2040? Of course not. You know, Milley was commissioned in only check my notes. 288 00:31:01,880 --> 00:31:11,600 Early 1980s, Cold War Army served in a motorised division in the 1980s to play the deployed to Haiti as a brigade operations officer in 1994, 289 00:31:12,230 --> 00:31:15,530 commanded brigades in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Afghanistan and Iraq, 290 00:31:15,830 --> 00:31:19,850 and then returned to Afghanistan as both a brigadier general and then again as lieutenant general. 291 00:31:21,020 --> 00:31:25,759 So the unknown future chief of staff is obviously hypothetical, but they're real. 292 00:31:25,760 --> 00:31:29,990 We just don't know who it is. Was commissioned roughly around 2005. 293 00:31:31,070 --> 00:31:36,860 So that person has likely had multiple deployments as a company grade officer to either Iraq or Afghanistan or both. 294 00:31:38,180 --> 00:31:41,120 But even while they served in the same campaigns as General Milley, 295 00:31:42,770 --> 00:31:49,310 he was a brigade commander with over two decades of commissioned service service that he's filtering his inputs from. 296 00:31:50,090 --> 00:31:56,380 That was probably their first operational deployment, maybe as platoon leader in Iraq during the surge. 297 00:31:56,390 --> 00:31:57,260 Quite a different view. 298 00:31:58,310 --> 00:32:06,980 And then maybe in Afghanistan as a company commander and the future chief of staff is probably just promoted or soon to be to promote 299 00:32:06,980 --> 00:32:16,480 to major still has many formative experiences to come in the years ahead then also being a millennial as opposed to a baby boomer, 300 00:32:16,490 --> 00:32:22,160 you know, there's all sorts of very different inputs and [INAUDIBLE] be a very different person even if we wanted to freeze the institution in place. 301 00:32:24,050 --> 00:32:30,830 The third implication is that while the institution can either command nor resist change, it can aid it by direct, 302 00:32:30,830 --> 00:32:41,780 redirecting the forces of experience and culture into what it views as positive outcomes that in fact, you know, increase military effectiveness. 303 00:32:42,680 --> 00:32:48,890 And I think a good example of this. Although as somebody who's written pretty persuasively about the subject, 304 00:32:49,640 --> 00:32:57,440 the root reforms of the early 20th century, so 1899 to 1903, they didn't create George C Marshall. 305 00:32:58,310 --> 00:33:02,270 I think he probably would have had the same sort of systems orientated thinking no matter what, 306 00:33:02,480 --> 00:33:04,790 because that was just pervasive in Progressive Era America. 307 00:33:06,020 --> 00:33:12,379 But he was certainly much, much better for it, for having gone to Leavenworth and served there for four years and gone through all these big, 308 00:33:12,380 --> 00:33:18,020 large training camp camps that allowed him the opportunity to be a staff officer directing thousands, 309 00:33:18,020 --> 00:33:23,180 which were the U.S. Army at the time, was a big number, and it helped hone his experiences. 310 00:33:23,600 --> 00:33:29,749 And so this combination of the institutional aspect and the cultural aspect working so 311 00:33:29,750 --> 00:33:36,920 powerfully in combination was what helped make things work out as well as they did. 312 00:33:37,730 --> 00:33:40,340 I'll leave you to, to judge how good the ADF did. 313 00:33:41,180 --> 00:33:47,180 And this is this isn't surprising because Root was the epitome of the progressive era corporate New York lawyer, 314 00:33:47,180 --> 00:33:56,210 good friends with Theodore Roosevelt, one of the leading members in the professionalisation of the legal profession. 315 00:33:56,420 --> 00:34:01,489 He was a member of the New York Bar. I mean, he he had the zeitgeist. 316 00:34:01,490 --> 00:34:06,650 And so what he was doing was taking the institution the way that society was taking it anyway. 317 00:34:07,790 --> 00:34:12,860 So with those three insights in mind, what are the exact implications for today? 318 00:34:13,880 --> 00:34:17,930 So I think first we should talk about what the current generations are. 319 00:34:18,380 --> 00:34:23,570 And as we do so, to remain tentatively, at least within my area of military expertise, 320 00:34:24,110 --> 00:34:29,090 such as it is, I'll talk about only the British, the US Army that I feel that British culture, 321 00:34:29,570 --> 00:34:37,100 army, organisation and recent military experiences are similar enough that much of what is to follow would also apply to Her Majesty's forces. 322 00:34:38,120 --> 00:34:43,730 But there are some very interesting potential differences the impact of the regimental system, the legacy of Northern. 323 00:34:43,810 --> 00:34:50,530 Ireland and the different demographics from which the officer corps are drawn from just to be some of the most obvious ones. 324 00:34:50,530 --> 00:35:00,190 And maybe that's that's what we can discuss in questions. I also should say I'm going to confine this to the officer corps in the 19th century. 325 00:35:00,700 --> 00:35:06,010 Certainly, the military profession was synonymous with the officer corps. Today you can make an argument against it. 326 00:35:06,370 --> 00:35:11,950 Officially, the US Army includes the enlisted and army civilians as members of the army profession. 327 00:35:13,480 --> 00:35:19,629 Perhaps they are professionals, but their systems of socialisation are so different that you can't speak in any 328 00:35:19,630 --> 00:35:23,140 meaningful way of them as being part of the same boat as the officer corps. 329 00:35:23,170 --> 00:35:29,500 So I will will move my discussion to that. So three generations today. 330 00:35:29,950 --> 00:35:36,430 The first is, well, I'll call it the super power generation OC commissioned in the mid 1980s to earlier. 331 00:35:37,360 --> 00:35:42,190 So right now these are senior brigadiers and then two stars and higher. 332 00:35:43,270 --> 00:35:46,390 They came into the army that was configured postured for the Cold War. 333 00:35:47,500 --> 00:35:58,180 Their operational experiences were Grenada, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, the Balkans, and also their baby boomers. 334 00:36:00,490 --> 00:36:07,180 The long war generation is the second, and this encompasses a very large span, all the way from brigadier to captain. 335 00:36:07,930 --> 00:36:12,190 The upper boundary is drawn. And so those commissioned in the late 1980s. 336 00:36:12,940 --> 00:36:19,090 Which difference differentiates those who experienced Iraq and Afghanistan at the company or battalion level, 337 00:36:19,960 --> 00:36:25,030 or as more junior staff officers in the higher staffs from the super power generation, 338 00:36:25,030 --> 00:36:29,079 which would have commanded nothing lower than the brigade level and provided the staff, 339 00:36:29,080 --> 00:36:33,550 directors or division chiefs of the large operational and strategic theatre headquarters. 340 00:36:34,960 --> 00:36:39,970 So that's the long war generation was more at the whip end of events in Iraq and Afghanistan 341 00:36:40,390 --> 00:36:44,890 and also entered those conflicts with little or no previous experience of combat experience. 342 00:36:46,210 --> 00:36:50,380 Now I've set the lower boundary somewhere around the early part of this decade, 343 00:36:51,430 --> 00:36:57,249 so the youngest members of this group are still very much in their formative period of their careers in the history of Iraq, 344 00:36:57,250 --> 00:37:02,050 and Afghanistan is still being written. So the boundary I reserve the right to shift it at some later time. 345 00:37:04,480 --> 00:37:07,480 And this might be just because Iraq and Afghanistan continue to drag up, 346 00:37:07,480 --> 00:37:15,070 but also could be could shift earlier if, say, next year, there's some seismic event that, 347 00:37:15,070 --> 00:37:22,930 as we look at it, you know, is so much more influential within their cohort because now there's only, 348 00:37:23,110 --> 00:37:27,580 you know, the numbers in Afghanistan and in Iraq are much smaller. 349 00:37:27,790 --> 00:37:31,629 And so there could be something that's just around the corner that will have 350 00:37:31,630 --> 00:37:35,710 a huge influence upon this group when you look back at it retrospectively. 351 00:37:36,520 --> 00:37:40,690 And so I don't have any hard and fast rules as far as the generation is going. 352 00:37:40,690 --> 00:37:43,390 It's really about the experiences and there's still some game to be played. 353 00:37:47,230 --> 00:37:53,440 And then culturally, you know, Gen Xers and maybe some millennials, depending upon how you draw those boundaries. 354 00:37:54,490 --> 00:37:59,410 So that brings us to the most intriguing element, I think, which is what I'll call the nascent generation. 355 00:37:59,410 --> 00:38:04,540 And so I present lieutenants, cadets, but many are still out there, still in school. 356 00:38:05,170 --> 00:38:09,250 And so what influences will shape the professional worldview of this group? 357 00:38:09,550 --> 00:38:17,170 They'll be our colonels and generals in the 2013 and 2014 because really that is, you know. 358 00:38:17,890 --> 00:38:24,190 S.G. Yes. That's that's who he's trying to form right now, that that far out group in terms of institutions, 359 00:38:24,820 --> 00:38:29,530 despite a chorus of outside voices calling for radical change to officer education personnel systems, 360 00:38:29,860 --> 00:38:32,890 there are no indications that the military is going to change anytime soon. 361 00:38:34,420 --> 00:38:38,680 So we have a socialisation system with a school system that was put in place 362 00:38:39,190 --> 00:38:43,089 after World War Two that goes from a commissioning source at West Point or, 363 00:38:43,090 --> 00:38:48,760 you know, a civilian university, ROTC up through war colleges and a couple of general officers courses. 364 00:38:48,760 --> 00:38:56,500 But those are actually fairly light touches. And so every few years, there's a sense that we have to we have to kind of regrouping, 365 00:38:56,550 --> 00:39:00,550 instil some knowledge into these officers so they can proceed to the next level. 366 00:39:01,990 --> 00:39:06,190 Evaluation forms, I mean, have changed quite dramatically in the actual form, 367 00:39:06,520 --> 00:39:09,910 but the actual substance of how officers are evaluated has changed very little. 368 00:39:11,140 --> 00:39:17,260 And very just just recently the US Army rejected the notion of 360 degree evaluations as being too disruptive, 369 00:39:19,510 --> 00:39:27,370 and then also the system obsessions, sessions, promotions and career development, which is based upon the pre-World War two upper out system, 370 00:39:28,240 --> 00:39:35,229 interestingly introduced by Marshall, has weathered a determined assault by Undersecretary of Defence for Personnel and Readiness, 371 00:39:35,230 --> 00:39:40,750 Brad Carson, who initially at least had the support of SecDef Ash Carter. 372 00:39:42,820 --> 00:39:50,300 But despite that. Seemingly overwhelming high level support for the initially much touted force of the future initiative. 373 00:39:51,020 --> 00:39:55,190 The service chiefs were reportedly successful in fending off most of the proposals, 374 00:39:56,000 --> 00:40:00,800 which has been considered a disappointing result for the reformers. And in light of such a defeat. 375 00:40:01,400 --> 00:40:05,720 I'll be interesting to see when somebody's going to try to pick that country up again. 376 00:40:06,020 --> 00:40:10,250 Might be quite a while before they wants to make huge changes to the personnel system. 377 00:40:11,240 --> 00:40:19,310 So in some institutions are probably going to remain fairly much like they are now, pending some out of the blue reformer. 378 00:40:22,880 --> 00:40:26,840 But then we still have the military experiences and the culture inputs. 379 00:40:28,190 --> 00:40:35,089 So let's explore the matter of experience first. Now, obviously, this is still history to be written, but as a thought experiment, 380 00:40:35,090 --> 00:40:38,540 let's suppose that there will be no all consuming war in the next two decades. 381 00:40:39,770 --> 00:40:41,300 Instead, there'll be many. 382 00:40:41,330 --> 00:40:49,580 I'm not saying there'll be peace, but many different, smaller operational uses of the army, disaster relief at home, building partner capacity, 383 00:40:50,780 --> 00:40:55,700 some more challenging and dangerous train and advise efforts that look a whole lot like combat to people on the ground. 384 00:40:55,700 --> 00:41:02,269 And then some things that also are undoubtedly combat, but only in small scale crises. 385 00:41:02,270 --> 00:41:09,200 And so they don't impact the whole institution. Now, for historians, you know, in the few, in the future, 386 00:41:09,200 --> 00:41:13,790 they might pass over these because they only a fraction impact a small fraction of the military. 387 00:41:14,120 --> 00:41:22,010 But for the people who are involved in those kinds of events, that is a very significant event and influences the way they think. 388 00:41:24,620 --> 00:41:32,660 But so some members of the nascent generation would have multiple of those experiences, some maybe one or two, some might have nothing at all. 389 00:41:32,750 --> 00:41:40,010 I would just be peacetime training and garrison routine. And so you'd have this generation with a lot of very disparate, diverse experiences. 390 00:41:43,220 --> 00:41:47,680 And so, uh, and then also there's functional differences as well. 391 00:41:47,690 --> 00:41:52,070 Infantryman, Aviator, Logistician, also all have different views of the world. 392 00:41:54,350 --> 00:41:59,239 So I think that they'd be far less cohesive in terms of their experience in the long war generation, 393 00:41:59,240 --> 00:42:04,940 which and I don't want to say that there was a, you know, unified experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. 394 00:42:05,030 --> 00:42:12,500 I mean, just in Mosul, if you were there 23 versus 26 versus 2010, those are very different sorts of experiences. 395 00:42:12,950 --> 00:42:22,160 Much less Baghdad, much less Kandahar. But still, the long war generation is a little bit more bounded than the hypothetical nascent generation. 396 00:42:24,050 --> 00:42:29,030 Now, the other aspect of that is what what might effect culture might have on the nascent generation. 397 00:42:29,810 --> 00:42:35,600 So all the officers who will be commissioned in this decade in the next are already alive. 398 00:42:35,600 --> 00:42:44,780 So we at least know some of the cultural inputs that they, you know, will have influence, but still they have long lives ahead of them. 399 00:42:44,780 --> 00:42:49,220 And so there's there's much to be said, as much that it hasn't been seen yet either. 400 00:42:49,300 --> 00:42:54,530 But let's imagine two different paths. One, a little bit more kind of cultural continuity, one of change. 401 00:42:56,720 --> 00:43:06,050 Now, I submit that since the upheaval of the 1960s, cultural continuity has kind of been has been the the norm. 402 00:43:06,500 --> 00:43:12,200 So the baby boomers flow into the Gen-Xers, flowing to the Millennials, or generation wise, whatever you want to call them. 403 00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:22,910 And so if this continues, then the military result might be something very much like the post-Civil War generation, which had something very similar. 404 00:43:24,500 --> 00:43:31,730 They also went through West Point that looked a lot like everything that had existed since 1820s, and so they had the same professional socialisation. 405 00:43:32,300 --> 00:43:39,530 They also served in the shadow of this great conflict, in their case, the Civil War, but lacked a unifying experience of their own time. 406 00:43:40,850 --> 00:43:47,780 And so going back to Arthur Wagner, the innovator who I mentioned, that was his experience. 407 00:43:48,800 --> 00:43:53,330 And culturally there was a lot of continuity with the 19th century America as well. 408 00:43:53,600 --> 00:43:56,810 Certainly it wasn't static, but, you know, 409 00:43:56,840 --> 00:44:05,900 there was a bit that with the individual was was very strong and and can be seen as a link in between the different generations. 410 00:44:06,890 --> 00:44:13,550 So if that's the case for the nascent generation, they'll be different than the long war generation, the superpower generations. 411 00:44:14,120 --> 00:44:15,049 But for the most part, 412 00:44:15,050 --> 00:44:24,080 they will probably be content with the same understanding of their professionalism and the way that they react with the institution. 413 00:44:26,210 --> 00:44:29,300 What happens if cultural change predominates? 414 00:44:30,200 --> 00:44:31,580 And I think this notion is plausible. 415 00:44:31,820 --> 00:44:38,930 So if we look at the extraordinary political turmoil within and among the political parties in both the U.S. and the UK, 416 00:44:39,740 --> 00:44:43,310 the dislocation of economic sectors and the potentially unsustainable. 417 00:44:43,360 --> 00:44:44,380 Distribution of wealth, 418 00:44:45,070 --> 00:44:51,580 the dissatisfaction with social structures manifested in such quite different forms as Black Lives Matter and nativist militias. 419 00:44:52,330 --> 00:44:57,580 All of this occurring within a technological environment that allows us to organise politically, 420 00:44:57,580 --> 00:45:01,180 economically and socially in different ways than we were able to do before. 421 00:45:02,830 --> 00:45:09,430 I can't possibly hope to unpick all of that, but I only just raised those points to observe that when political, 422 00:45:09,430 --> 00:45:16,030 economic and social organisations are all undergoing a simultaneous and significant change, 423 00:45:16,900 --> 00:45:23,050 it seems like that will have a significant impact on culture. That will, in turn inevitably manifest itself in the military. 424 00:45:25,260 --> 00:45:33,780 And so that kind of shift would be what we saw in moving from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era right around the turn of the century. 425 00:45:34,860 --> 00:45:38,370 And that was the same change that resulted in the difference between Scott and Marshall. 426 00:45:42,330 --> 00:45:47,520 So what do we what do we make all of this for the super power generation? 427 00:45:48,600 --> 00:45:54,780 You know, they're there past the point of standardised career progressions and everything like that. 428 00:45:55,920 --> 00:46:02,560 And but to their credit, they realise that they're different and that the junior officers and soldiers of today benefit. 429 00:46:02,790 --> 00:46:07,800 Invariably they're going to be some misunderstandings in how they approach it, even though they're trying to do so in good faith. 430 00:46:10,050 --> 00:46:15,990 I remember a couple of years ago in the Pentagon I was working on a project were 431 00:46:15,990 --> 00:46:19,550 led by super power generation general officers who were talking about say, 432 00:46:19,560 --> 00:46:24,960 how do we transition from Afghanistan to a more generalised, you know, threat? 433 00:46:26,250 --> 00:46:29,940 Now, these are all people who have been brigade commanders or battalion commanders in the 1990s. 434 00:46:30,690 --> 00:46:39,750 And so they talked about using Ree as a prefix. They wanted to restore, you know, the lost art of garrison leadership. 435 00:46:40,140 --> 00:46:45,060 They wanted to regain fundamentals. And with little success, 436 00:46:45,060 --> 00:46:52,980 the younger officers kept on trying to warn them off this because the post-9-11 generation had this horrible image in their mind of the Army, 437 00:46:52,980 --> 00:46:57,090 the 1990s, as an endless round of small minded, 438 00:46:57,090 --> 00:47:01,200 pointless tasks, you know, painting rocks and whatnot, 439 00:47:02,580 --> 00:47:10,950 that just and so that the differences in perspective led to a lot of miscommunication and a lot of pushback within the Air Force. 440 00:47:11,370 --> 00:47:17,699 And the lesson to be drawn from this is that it's always a fraught situation when one party is referring 441 00:47:17,700 --> 00:47:23,070 to what they experienced and what was real for them versus what another party is really an abstraction. 442 00:47:25,440 --> 00:47:28,889 And then so you have to wonder what's going to be the difference in the way that the long 443 00:47:28,890 --> 00:47:33,870 war generation sees the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan versus the nascent generation, 444 00:47:34,170 --> 00:47:43,320 which draws their understanding of it from a combination of youthful impressions, history, books, war stories, and perhaps The Hurt Locker. 445 00:47:45,420 --> 00:47:53,610 So The Long War Generation, my research has suggested that wartime generations generally are not very good at adaptation. 446 00:47:55,050 --> 00:48:01,910 They tend to adapt very poorly. And it's not simply that generals want to refight the last war as they've been accused of doing. 447 00:48:01,920 --> 00:48:06,570 Instead, it's because that is that experience is the shared. 448 00:48:07,200 --> 00:48:11,520 It's it's the war is the lingua franca for professional discourse. 449 00:48:12,300 --> 00:48:16,950 Everybody can go back to it. And so even though we might have our own ideas about what we should have done differently, 450 00:48:17,220 --> 00:48:24,900 that same set of shared experiences is the medium through which all discussion about what the profession should be follows. 451 00:48:26,190 --> 00:48:34,320 So there's a shared understanding difficulty. But also, I mean, there's, you know, war is visceral and so it's also within individuals. 452 00:48:34,440 --> 00:48:42,780 And the example I used from the scholarship is all of these young officers who were at Fort Leavenworth in the early part of the century, 453 00:48:43,110 --> 00:48:47,460 most of them had seen combat in the Philippines where the Filipinos were. 454 00:48:49,080 --> 00:48:52,800 It's embarrassing to say this defensively. Who's written the book on the the war? 455 00:48:53,550 --> 00:48:58,980 But, you know, the Filipinos preferred to have trenches. 456 00:48:59,340 --> 00:49:06,209 They would fire off a few volleys. As soon as the Americans start counterattacking, they would go right away because the weapons were very good. 457 00:49:06,210 --> 00:49:09,570 They were very well led. And also they didn't need to be kind of achieve their purpose. 458 00:49:09,960 --> 00:49:16,560 And so American officers learned that infringements are not effective, firepower is not effective. 459 00:49:16,620 --> 00:49:25,319 Now, if you had asked any of them explicitly, can you take that those lessons and apply them over to German Grenadiers? 460 00:49:25,320 --> 00:49:26,930 They said, of course not. They call it savage warfare. 461 00:49:27,150 --> 00:49:35,010 You can't take savage warfare, but as they are at Fort Leavenworth in the staff college and they're studying German textbooks, 462 00:49:35,700 --> 00:49:38,670 talking about, you know, basically a Franco-German war. 463 00:49:40,140 --> 00:49:48,840 Those deeply held beliefs were manifested in the way that they they saw the effectiveness of infantry and firepower. 464 00:49:49,620 --> 00:49:53,280 Now, of course, the doctrine of the offensive was very prevalent in Europe as well. 465 00:49:53,640 --> 00:49:54,959 So it's not just the Philippines, 466 00:49:54,960 --> 00:50:06,240 but what was uniquely American was the hubris from 1914 to 1917 that caused no revision of doctrine in the entire period. 467 00:50:07,020 --> 00:50:10,500 Verdun and Somme made no impression. 468 00:50:11,040 --> 00:50:15,060 So when the first doughboys went over the top in May 1918, 469 00:50:15,420 --> 00:50:21,630 the Infantry Tactical Manual still said that weapon, that machine guns, were weapons of emergency only. 470 00:50:22,620 --> 00:50:25,920 And that rifle. Fire was more important than artillery. 471 00:50:28,540 --> 00:50:33,550 So could the long war generation similarly be prisoners rather than beneficiaries of our experience. 472 00:50:35,980 --> 00:50:44,800 We will see, but I think we need to maintain some humility in how we go about this so that the nation for a generation. 473 00:50:44,890 --> 00:50:52,000 Finally wrapping up here, if they do not experience an all consuming conflict, I certainly hope they don't. 474 00:50:52,600 --> 00:50:55,329 Then maybe they're like the post-Civil War generation, 475 00:50:55,330 --> 00:51:03,120 in which case we should probably try to use systems of training and education to give them a holistic view. 476 00:51:03,130 --> 00:51:10,480 So rather than sniping and saying, Well, that's not the real army over there, you know, I'm an infantryman, you know. 477 00:51:10,880 --> 00:51:14,260 You know, focussed on like fights and there is a tanker focussed on heavy warfare. 478 00:51:14,260 --> 00:51:22,420 That's not the real fight. We need to create a more of a sense of we rather than parochial and provincial us in them. 479 00:51:23,590 --> 00:51:29,889 Also very wide ranging education and wide ranging training rather than having 480 00:51:29,890 --> 00:51:33,820 everybody go through the exact same scenario at the National Training Centre. 481 00:51:34,780 --> 00:51:38,110 It probably doesn't help expand our horizons. 482 00:51:40,480 --> 00:51:45,700 But then the other thing will be what happens if they are just so far different that they really are a different sort of culture, 483 00:51:47,530 --> 00:51:51,550 much like Marshall was from from Wagner. They're going to be huge. 484 00:51:52,000 --> 00:51:57,550 Just simple, you know, inter-generational tensions that arise from that. 485 00:51:57,940 --> 00:52:04,959 But for more substantive things, a recent Army War College study noted the tendency of general officers to use intuition, 486 00:52:04,960 --> 00:52:08,470 which is exactly the wrong way of going about this. In the US Army, 487 00:52:08,470 --> 00:52:14,110 we very recently had a massive problem where a well-meaning sergeant major who was put in 488 00:52:14,110 --> 00:52:21,549 charge of reforming the uniform in appearance regulations said You can't have tattoos, 489 00:52:21,550 --> 00:52:27,520 it's on military, which if you actually look back at history in tattooed warrior societies, 490 00:52:27,520 --> 00:52:30,940 probably it's the other way around that, you know, the attitude is military. 491 00:52:31,420 --> 00:52:37,420 But this had very real consequences because we wrote off a massive part of an already shrinking recruiting base. 492 00:52:38,170 --> 00:52:43,420 So we need to make sure that we use evidence to guard against our biases and make decisions. 493 00:52:43,420 --> 00:52:43,780 But also, 494 00:52:43,780 --> 00:52:51,400 we should follow the advice of the chief of the air staff who said It is absolutely imperative that I do not build an Air Force for a 56 year old man. 495 00:52:52,090 --> 00:52:55,900 It is there, the young airmen of today's Air Force, not martial. 496 00:52:59,010 --> 00:53:08,160 But I think that the the final point that I'll make and this is the one that it's very hard for me to get my mind wrapped around. 497 00:53:10,080 --> 00:53:13,979 But the difference between 19th century, the 20th century, 498 00:53:13,980 --> 00:53:18,360 was this conception of the individual and organisation and how they they interacted with it. 499 00:53:18,960 --> 00:53:29,370 As we see the gig economy where people tend to be moving around and expertise is kind of commoditized and corporations 500 00:53:29,370 --> 00:53:37,079 are making very hard and hard news decisions about what sort of expertise we keep within the organisation. 501 00:53:37,080 --> 00:53:46,020 And then using in-sourcing outsourcing, you know, freelance labour people are viewing the way that they react with their employer, 502 00:53:46,020 --> 00:53:50,880 which is in some ways a way to deal with their role in society very differently. 503 00:53:51,600 --> 00:53:55,499 And expertise is viewed differently and we've already started seeing this a little bit within 504 00:53:55,500 --> 00:54:02,910 the military of bringing in people from the outside to advise us on corporate type of things, 505 00:54:03,120 --> 00:54:06,180 acquisitions, management of the estate, all of this. 506 00:54:07,320 --> 00:54:15,570 But if you follow that to its logical conclusion, and then the next step then is to bring them in not as lieutenants but at the mid-grade model entry. 507 00:54:15,570 --> 00:54:21,990 And both armies are considering that very seriously. Well, if you are, you know, a great H.R. expert, 508 00:54:21,990 --> 00:54:24,479 we'll just bring you in and we'll have you running out for us and we'll make you 509 00:54:24,480 --> 00:54:31,060 a major write off or maybe a general as those sorts of practices go right now. 510 00:54:31,080 --> 00:54:33,840 Just like Wagner said, I don't I only want to go this far. I don't want to go any further. 511 00:54:33,840 --> 00:54:38,610 We say, well, okay, but repeat the military functions are going to be sacrosanct and we're not going to get into that. 512 00:54:39,630 --> 00:54:43,110 But if you follow the logic of the whole force approach that we think is so important, 513 00:54:43,830 --> 00:54:53,550 if we're in a stabilisation operation that is 90% governance and economics and all these other sorts of things, like 10% kinetic, 514 00:54:54,930 --> 00:55:00,180 what's to say that we don't have a diplomat or development expert or maybe even 515 00:55:00,180 --> 00:55:06,360 a CEO who seems to want to get things done coming in as a commander that would, 516 00:55:06,630 --> 00:55:10,020 you know, make a lot of heads explode in the officers mess. 517 00:55:11,400 --> 00:55:18,750 But there is a certain logic to it. And people view the, you know, expertise as being portable and being used for specific tasks. 518 00:55:19,530 --> 00:55:21,780 And they're just not used to these top up structures. 519 00:55:21,780 --> 00:55:26,820 When you go to work for TV and you're, you know, in the give way and you go up through the ranks, 520 00:55:27,630 --> 00:55:35,490 then maybe that won't seem as far fetched as it does to me being a product of my own generation. 521 00:55:38,310 --> 00:55:42,030 So with that, I would say, would all that come to pass? 522 00:55:42,300 --> 00:55:47,190 And if it does, nothing says that the cultural change is good for military effectiveness. 523 00:55:47,820 --> 00:55:51,900 It could be negative, but I make no firm predictions on either count. 524 00:55:52,110 --> 00:55:57,900 Well, whatever does come will be driven by larger forces and not the needs and certainly not the wishes of the military. 525 00:55:58,740 --> 00:56:03,000 I am confident, however, that at some point in the future society will undergo some change. 526 00:56:03,000 --> 00:56:07,290 That will make my own notions of military professionalism seem quaint and antiquated. 527 00:56:08,130 --> 00:56:08,670 Thank you.