1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:04,710 Jeremy is one of this country's leading and finest historians. 2 00:00:05,580 --> 00:00:08,130 He read history at Queen's Cambridge. 3 00:00:08,160 --> 00:00:16,290 He studied at St John's in Oxford and immersed in Oxford before he became he did his Ph.D. at Durham and became a lecturer at that university. 4 00:00:16,770 --> 00:00:22,950 He became a professor in 1994. He then took the chair at the university in 1996, 5 00:00:23,580 --> 00:00:33,450 where he's been since the words which most often you ask around about Jeremy that come up are not just words prolific in terms of writing, 6 00:00:34,110 --> 00:00:37,050 but also energy and ideas. 7 00:00:37,200 --> 00:00:43,019 And I think that's one of the reasons why I was so determined that we would get you here this evening to give this annual lecture, 8 00:00:43,020 --> 00:00:46,020 because you really do embody an enthusiasm, 9 00:00:46,350 --> 00:00:51,480 a fierce enthusiasm and energy for the subject, which I think is unsurpassed in the profession, 10 00:00:52,320 --> 00:00:56,490 but also ideas across an astonishing range of subjects. 11 00:00:57,330 --> 00:01:03,810 He's published over 100 books and I think is well en route to surpassing Leopold von Rank as 180, allegedly, 12 00:01:04,590 --> 00:01:09,510 not only in the field of military history for which he is well known, of course, but also in geopolitics. 13 00:01:09,510 --> 00:01:16,559 In 18th century English and American history, empires talk cartography and even literature. 14 00:01:16,560 --> 00:01:20,490 A method, a little known book you may not know about Jeremy. 15 00:01:20,490 --> 00:01:26,069 He's written The Politics of James Bond. So there's few things that he's not thought of. 16 00:01:26,070 --> 00:01:31,700 James and converted into really engaging text for us all to enjoy. 17 00:01:32,880 --> 00:01:34,680 Of course, his big contributions, 18 00:01:34,680 --> 00:01:41,669 I think to history and indeed to strategic studies and other subjects have been to reject the technological determinism, 19 00:01:41,670 --> 00:01:49,170 the Kate argument about military history, as if somehow military history could be reduced to crossbows, bayonets and buttons and so on. 20 00:01:49,740 --> 00:01:57,990 He's rejected all that as a causal mechanism and really embraced the idea of diversity within military studies. 21 00:01:58,020 --> 00:02:04,080 It's no good only looking at operational history and tactical history if you want to understand the history of war. 22 00:02:04,800 --> 00:02:13,530 He's also famously rejected a purely Western approach to understanding war, and his range is truly global. 23 00:02:13,530 --> 00:02:21,630 And the detail of that range is quite astonishing for any single human being to remember the details of emperor beauty in China, for example, 24 00:02:22,170 --> 00:02:28,320 how the Persians fought through different centuries and then spent place all that on a historical map, 25 00:02:28,560 --> 00:02:33,000 and then to explain all the gaps in between is really very, very remarkable indeed. 26 00:02:33,630 --> 00:02:41,370 He has a master detail and a great range. He's the editor of several publications, series, even those, and, of course, many, many books of his own. 27 00:02:42,390 --> 00:02:48,750 He's teeming with original ideas, including the state of the art of our profession, which he may be tempted to say something about. 28 00:02:48,750 --> 00:02:54,780 I don't know. And it's not just about the history profession, but about international studies more generally. 29 00:02:55,500 --> 00:03:03,480 He's given us excellent assessments about the role of individual, a friction, bellicosity, revolutions in war, 30 00:03:04,140 --> 00:03:12,330 and his most recent book is On Air Power, which you can get in bookshops, I think immediately if you haven't yet wrote the Full Jeremy collection. 31 00:03:12,960 --> 00:03:20,250 He's also thought very carefully about the future of war and the future strategy and its strategy and war that he will speak on this evening. 32 00:03:20,580 --> 00:03:34,420 Professor Jeremy Flint, it gives me great pleasure. Well, ladies and gentlemen, since I'm on the show before the reception, 33 00:03:34,420 --> 00:03:42,460 I don't want to take up too much time before we have the Shackleton Champagne Oysters and Reclining Nubian slaves or whatever else. 34 00:03:43,500 --> 00:03:49,470 Anyway. Can I first start by making a brief tribute to somebody who is a part of. 35 00:03:49,990 --> 00:03:53,379 I first came to Pembroke as the guest of Piers Marchese. 36 00:03:53,380 --> 00:03:57,280 Piers Marchese. Unless you're elderly, you probably won't recall. 37 00:03:57,580 --> 00:04:02,830 He was the fellow appear in the sixties, seventies and eighties, the senior history fellow. 38 00:04:03,640 --> 00:04:10,580 He's a man who most people treated, I'm afraid, without the credit he deserved. 39 00:04:10,600 --> 00:04:15,610 He was a scholar of the old school. He was rather self-effacing. 40 00:04:16,300 --> 00:04:22,300 And the joke about him. It's always interesting if you're a historian to think about the jokes that he told. 41 00:04:22,630 --> 00:04:29,560 The joke about him was that he used to ask his students whether they wanted to take a special subject because of course, 42 00:04:29,650 --> 00:04:33,670 they didn't want special subjects. They would be gentle and didn't really need much teaching. 43 00:04:33,820 --> 00:04:42,310 But also, the maximum degree of that was a special of what people tended to underplay is that he was a fairly serious scholar. 44 00:04:42,640 --> 00:04:46,660 He wrote a number of very large books at the time at Oxford. 45 00:04:46,660 --> 00:04:51,910 Dons did not write large books, but didn't write any books in the case of many of the historians. 46 00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:58,000 These were ones in which he considered strategy and operational history. 47 00:04:58,270 --> 00:05:04,179 They were highly technical. They showed a mastery of the details of the subject. 48 00:05:04,180 --> 00:05:09,370 He never wrote a textbook. He always wrote monographs, and they were truly excellent books. 49 00:05:09,850 --> 00:05:15,370 He was largely ignored in his lifetime. He's dead now, but he was largely ignored in his lifetime. 50 00:05:15,370 --> 00:05:22,240 But he was a very distinguished scholar. And I think it's fair to say that, you know, he's not got the fame of some of the other people who were here. 51 00:05:22,420 --> 00:05:26,920 But he, in my view, is the best military historian this university of the last hundred years. 52 00:05:27,160 --> 00:05:31,330 I would invite you to read his books on the American War of Independence, 53 00:05:31,330 --> 00:05:39,610 on abercromby on the British strategy in the invasion of Egypt in 1881, on the Mediterranean of Volga. 54 00:05:39,700 --> 00:05:43,840 And you will see a level of insight that was well ahead of this page. 55 00:05:44,230 --> 00:05:51,550 What he suffered from, I'm afraid, apart from the lack of he wasn't a fashionable figure in his era, 56 00:05:51,610 --> 00:05:56,400 but also in particular in the field of military history. He wasn't victorious in the war and society stage. 57 00:05:56,780 --> 00:06:01,299 He suffered too much. And it's a great pity because the level of scholarship he offered was far greater 58 00:06:01,300 --> 00:06:04,600 than that produced by anybody that's ever done work on the war and society for. 59 00:06:04,600 --> 00:06:11,360 I don't know. If I might just briefly make sort of one or two methodological points. 60 00:06:11,620 --> 00:06:18,729 There are all too many lectures of this type in which the speaker comes along and provides you with what he sometimes shoot. 61 00:06:18,730 --> 00:06:25,660 But generally he provides is his interpretation which supposedly unlocks the subject, etc., etc., etc. 62 00:06:26,320 --> 00:06:31,490 War, of course, is far too complex a subject for that, and the history as a whole is far too complex a subject for that. 63 00:06:31,720 --> 00:06:38,140 Any time you ever see a book or a lecture described as definitive, you know there's something seriously wrong with the assessor. 64 00:06:38,280 --> 00:06:43,960 I think with the hubris of the of the person giving you, what I want to do is to offer some ideas. 65 00:06:44,080 --> 00:06:48,430 I would be delighted to hear either in person or subsequently in any format. 66 00:06:48,430 --> 00:06:50,770 People want to offer criticism of them. 67 00:06:50,920 --> 00:06:57,730 I think historians proceed in certain faults in the debate with each other about each other and the past of each other, of the present. 68 00:06:57,910 --> 00:07:01,180 And what I'm offering is a personal view that is it. 69 00:07:01,240 --> 00:07:07,209 It is not intended as definitive. And I am truly troubled by the way in which so many, as it were, 70 00:07:07,210 --> 00:07:13,480 alpha males got into military history to offer supposedly definitive accounts which are allegedly on mortgages. 71 00:07:13,660 --> 00:07:19,120 I'm looking for and the last point, if I might make some comments and I'll host you said it's warm here. 72 00:07:19,120 --> 00:07:25,090 I have to tell you, arriving at the railway station, I felt myself arriving in a really, truly cold place. 73 00:07:25,270 --> 00:07:31,510 And I thought, what on earth I write about brought home. And secondly, the other point, everybody talks about Teutonic efficiency. 74 00:07:31,810 --> 00:07:34,000 Best of my knowledge, the Germans lost both world. 75 00:07:34,000 --> 00:07:42,280 And in fact, if you were to exclude the butchery of people in a selfless act procured in modern time terms, 76 00:07:42,280 --> 00:07:45,460 saying that they haven't actually won a war since 1871. 77 00:07:45,610 --> 00:07:50,710 So I don't think we should be talking about Teutonic efficiency. If we're military historians, it's very opposite. 78 00:07:50,920 --> 00:07:59,440 The German track record was singularly bad and we've covered that up because people are fascinated by Clausewitz, they're fascinated by Moltke. 79 00:07:59,680 --> 00:08:02,260 But on the whole, the Germans actually didn't do terribly well. 80 00:08:02,380 --> 00:08:12,970 So now the question I was asked to speak about modern warfare and modern strategy, and I was thinking, 81 00:08:13,090 --> 00:08:23,230 how do I provide a central image which to me sums up what has been most important about warfare in the last 30 years and the use of the military. 82 00:08:23,770 --> 00:08:27,399 And I, I would like to start by focusing on just such an image. 83 00:08:27,400 --> 00:08:38,950 It's a very famous image on. He made famous and it is probably the single most effective use of force in the last 30 years. 84 00:08:39,430 --> 00:08:45,670 He liked to tell me what they think that might be. Question Time, as you know, he said, I wrote a book on James Bond. 85 00:08:45,940 --> 00:08:48,970 If you got it wrong, I would press a little button here. 86 00:08:49,750 --> 00:08:53,320 I seen the scene in the novel Thunderball repeated in the film. 87 00:08:53,500 --> 00:08:58,960 You will get an electric shock, but because of health and safety can only be one that generally will be shot by a high profile. 88 00:09:02,080 --> 00:09:07,840 Would anybody like to tell me what it is? We have no towns like nowhere. 89 00:09:07,900 --> 00:09:10,560 It didn't produce any strategic victory for outcome. 90 00:09:10,570 --> 00:09:21,190 I didn't know the classic Western obsession was, you know, the answer is the suppression in the Chinese reform movement in 1989. 91 00:09:21,550 --> 00:09:25,660 The most famous image, of course, is of the line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, 92 00:09:26,210 --> 00:09:31,060 the large scale use of force that was actually accompanied by what is much 93 00:09:31,060 --> 00:09:34,930 less well reported with no large scale use of force across China as a whole. 94 00:09:35,470 --> 00:09:41,190 And indeed, the government felt able to use that force because it already knew that the PLA, 95 00:09:41,290 --> 00:09:44,769 People's Liberation Army, it already knew that the PLO was behind it. 96 00:09:44,770 --> 00:09:49,760 Too often force is only used when governments know that the military is behind it. 97 00:09:49,780 --> 00:10:02,020 So, for example, to go to Germany during the 1968 crisis in France, in Paris, because he wants the assurance of the French generals on the you know, 98 00:10:02,110 --> 00:10:06,880 and the implication all made in Germany that they will actually back him if necessary. 99 00:10:07,600 --> 00:10:16,270 China in 1999 captures the significance of military history, the use of force in the modern world, 100 00:10:16,510 --> 00:10:22,810 because, of course, the use of force in China is directed against fellow citizens. 101 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:30,009 We tend to think of force in terms of power projection against other countries. 102 00:10:30,010 --> 00:10:32,830 We tend to be most comfortable in those in those terms. 103 00:10:33,010 --> 00:10:40,210 It's one in which you might say within the Western tradition, the military has been habituated to thinking that that's normative. 104 00:10:40,810 --> 00:10:46,450 But if we want to really conceptualise the world in terms of the most populous countries, 105 00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:52,180 in terms of where most people live, not quite the same thing, or in terms of just a large number of states. 106 00:10:52,390 --> 00:10:58,240 You would actually of course realise that Western military history is in some respects quite tangential. 107 00:10:58,240 --> 00:11:05,830 I don't think it's without consequence. You know, global perspective does not mean that you say that Western military history is without consequence 108 00:11:05,830 --> 00:11:12,489 because it doesn't mean you necessarily force the world the world's four most populous states, 109 00:11:12,490 --> 00:11:17,470 only one of them, the United States with the third largest population in the world, is a western state. 110 00:11:17,860 --> 00:11:24,420 The other three, China, India and Indonesia all know. And if you look at China, India and Indonesia, 111 00:11:24,880 --> 00:11:33,580 you will be aware that although they have used force to a certain extent against neighbours in practical terms, 112 00:11:33,580 --> 00:11:37,540 they have not engaged in large scale foreign war. 113 00:11:37,690 --> 00:11:45,309 The last large scale foreign war that China engaged in was the Korean War between 1950 and 1953. 114 00:11:45,310 --> 00:11:51,520 Some considerable time ago there was a brief Chinese invasion of India very, very, very limited warfare. 115 00:11:51,520 --> 00:11:54,790 Interestingly enough, for me, the best examples of running polluted water. 116 00:11:55,150 --> 00:11:59,740 That was a brief Chinese attack on Vietnam, not a brilliantly successful one, 117 00:11:59,890 --> 00:12:06,160 although it sent a strategic message to the Soviets that the Chinese were willing to act against one of their proxies. 118 00:12:06,520 --> 00:12:13,990 And that's it. That's it. That's the world in some respects of most populous state. 119 00:12:14,200 --> 00:12:20,020 It is a state where the military is very significant within the power structure, 120 00:12:20,230 --> 00:12:26,230 and it's a state which have, of course, a long history in the 20th century of war. 121 00:12:26,290 --> 00:12:35,140 Indeed, since World War two, the largest war in terms of the number of combatants is, of course, the Chinese civil war of 1946 to 1949. 122 00:12:35,290 --> 00:12:41,170 But other than that, China's out of the picture, which is the use of force for internal control that is most important. 123 00:12:42,130 --> 00:12:49,060 Well, what about India and your closest force number of foreign wars, principally three wars against Pakistan. 124 00:12:49,360 --> 00:12:53,350 It's fought the abovementioned brief war against China. 125 00:12:53,500 --> 00:12:58,330 It's going to be in a number of its neighbours, Sri Lanka, for example, and Nepal. 126 00:12:58,540 --> 00:13:05,890 But all of these have been smaller in terms of the scale of troops deployed and in terms of the intensity of operations, 127 00:13:06,130 --> 00:13:14,500 then the significance of internal affairs in India, if you will, really looking at totemic images of military activity. 128 00:13:14,680 --> 00:13:19,569 The totemic image of military activity would be the storming of the Golden Temple, 129 00:13:19,570 --> 00:13:24,940 the, you know, in order to deal with a Sikh extremist movement, systemic. 130 00:13:24,940 --> 00:13:28,390 So that's a classic example. I always believe in non-PC remarks. 131 00:13:28,630 --> 00:13:37,970 It's a classic. Example of the way in which history is constructed that Indians endlessly wax on about General Dyer. 132 00:13:37,970 --> 00:13:45,020 And I'm sure in 1990 fewer people were killed in that operation than were actually killed in the storming of the Golden Temple. 133 00:13:45,020 --> 00:13:48,030 The one apparently is unacceptable. The other apparently is acceptable. 134 00:13:48,050 --> 00:13:52,010 Woody, back to one side in Indonesia. In Indonesia. 135 00:13:52,550 --> 00:14:00,590 Well, if you come from East Timor or Australia, you will know that Indonesia is not exactly always been benign in its international politics. 136 00:14:00,800 --> 00:14:11,000 And the same thing could be said of the confrontation with Malaysia in 1960 366, or its attempt to overthrow Brunei in by similar sort of law. 137 00:14:11,120 --> 00:14:15,470 But with these days, I think we call them hybrid operations with similar sort of thing in 1962. 138 00:14:15,740 --> 00:14:20,299 But in practical terms, if you were looking at Indonesian military history, 139 00:14:20,300 --> 00:14:26,570 Indonesia is the fourth most populous state in the world, the largest Muslim state, incidentally, by population. 140 00:14:26,810 --> 00:14:33,140 If you were looking at Indonesia, you would have again a focus on internal affairs. 141 00:14:33,680 --> 00:14:39,950 The Indonesian Government having taken part in this struggle against Dutch rule, 142 00:14:40,400 --> 00:14:45,240 which has been very strongly described in the press and taking part in that struggle. 143 00:14:45,260 --> 00:14:52,970 In fact, in practical terms, as a job and movement, they didn't need to use force to suppress opposition, 144 00:14:53,870 --> 00:14:57,190 a reluctance to be removed from Java, particularly in small terms, 145 00:14:57,200 --> 00:15:03,320 the way you see if we use surveys and also of course in western New Guinea, 146 00:15:04,250 --> 00:15:11,750 the tradition of the Indonesians kicking around people in civil war has continued, of course with separatism in Asia. 147 00:15:12,320 --> 00:15:19,280 And the biggest episode in Indonesian military history occurred in 1965 to 1966, 148 00:15:19,730 --> 00:15:25,430 when the army overthrew the nationalist government and suppressed the communist movement. 149 00:15:25,640 --> 00:15:33,380 That sounds all very anodyne, doesn't it? We used to think about when from 20,000 people were killed, you know, think about 200,000 were killed. 150 00:15:33,680 --> 00:15:42,290 That's the largest use of the military by the Indonesians, far more consequential than anything we've ever done to threaten their neighbours. 151 00:15:42,830 --> 00:15:47,870 So one of the things I'm trying to start off by looking at is the way in which 152 00:15:47,870 --> 00:15:53,590 civil warfare is more salient in modern warfare than even if we try to put it, 153 00:15:53,600 --> 00:15:59,420 say, in terms of Western perspective. And we can take that several stages further. 154 00:16:00,050 --> 00:16:05,630 If we were looking, for example, perhaps distribution of population around the world, 155 00:16:05,990 --> 00:16:11,720 roughly two thirds of the world's population lives in south east Southeast Asia. 156 00:16:13,220 --> 00:16:22,760 All of those are areas which have been predominantly characterised by conflict within states rather than inter-state conflict or not. 157 00:16:22,760 --> 00:16:25,280 So there's no conflict between states. 158 00:16:25,520 --> 00:16:33,560 But if you compare, for example, Burma and Thailand, which, for example, fought major wars against each other in the 18th century, 159 00:16:33,770 --> 00:16:37,400 today they have tensions, but they don't fight wars against each other. 160 00:16:37,970 --> 00:16:43,970 They deal with minorities within their own countries but don't actually fight wars against each other and so on and so forth. 161 00:16:44,420 --> 00:16:55,640 Or if you take on, again, on the global scale, the question if you exclude Antarctica, which is the continent, the populated continent in the world, 162 00:16:56,240 --> 00:17:08,630 which has engaged least in state to state warfare, either within that continent or outside that continent since 1940, 163 00:17:09,140 --> 00:17:12,910 although don't total shout at once all of the six continents to choose from. 164 00:17:12,920 --> 00:17:21,350 I'm just going to try to help you. All right. So if I if we put our hands, which stops Asia and Australasia. 165 00:17:22,980 --> 00:17:27,540 Q For Australasia, that's interesting because the Australasia's engaged in World War Two, 166 00:17:27,540 --> 00:17:35,970 they were engaged in Korea, they were engaged in Vietnam, North America, South America, Africa. 167 00:17:37,020 --> 00:17:38,520 Well, the answer is South America. 168 00:17:38,520 --> 00:17:48,120 Since the great Choco war between Paraguay and Bolivia towards us to 95, there's been very little state to state warfare. 169 00:17:48,210 --> 00:17:51,390 There was a little squabble between Brazil and Ecuador in 1940. 170 00:17:51,600 --> 00:17:56,160 Brazil sent troops to Italy in World War Two. 171 00:17:56,400 --> 00:18:02,580 No other Latin American American countries declared war on Germany, including Argentina, eventually in 1945. 172 00:18:02,880 --> 00:18:06,780 But the only other one that sent any troops was Mexico, which sent some planes. 173 00:18:07,410 --> 00:18:12,380 And other than that. Not much warfare since World War two. 174 00:18:12,420 --> 00:18:16,440 I mean, obviously there's the war over the Falklands or Malvinas or whatever you want to call them. 175 00:18:16,690 --> 00:18:23,460 But states like Chile and Argentina, which don't get along with each other, have managed to maintain their differences without fighting. 176 00:18:23,610 --> 00:18:31,230 And yet, if you go to Latin America, you will know that in many respects, Latin America is a heavily militarised continent. 177 00:18:31,860 --> 00:18:35,730 But the point about the militarisation is not to have high spec weaponry. 178 00:18:36,330 --> 00:18:41,549 It is, in fact, to be able to use force at the behest of the state. 179 00:18:41,550 --> 00:18:49,650 And sometimes the state acts at the behest of the military. The two could be coterminous often right wing governments, but sometimes, as in Bolton, 180 00:18:50,340 --> 00:18:56,340 Venezuela or Cuba with governments for the hope that what is shared is the notion that 181 00:18:56,340 --> 00:19:02,790 force can be legitimately exercised by the state and that the legitimate target of people 182 00:19:02,790 --> 00:19:08,410 within the state who can be regarded as in some way not conforming to whatever is the 183 00:19:08,430 --> 00:19:14,700 notion of incorporation of is of whether it is in terms of Latin American decent religion, 184 00:19:14,970 --> 00:19:18,570 whether it's in terms of class, region or political agenda. 185 00:19:19,110 --> 00:19:22,620 Some countries that seem to its in terms of religion. 186 00:19:22,800 --> 00:19:28,740 Now, I've been asked to make some comments about how I see this moving forward. 187 00:19:29,700 --> 00:19:36,960 Let me suggest as follows. I don't know what anybody else knows, but person to reasonable person comments. 188 00:19:37,170 --> 00:19:42,270 Not least because militaries need to actually, in terms of procurement, doctrine and training, 189 00:19:42,270 --> 00:19:51,420 think about the future where a civil society needs to consider how best to fund and support military activities and how best to plan for. 190 00:19:51,870 --> 00:20:00,930 So let me make one or two suggestions. First, I think we are on an astonishing experiment, and I don't think that's a particularly attractive way. 191 00:20:01,140 --> 00:20:08,520 And the experiment is part of a major rise and unprecedented rise in terms of both numbers and rate of the world population. 192 00:20:09,630 --> 00:20:14,220 The if you a malthusian I'm not particularly Malthusian, but if you are about fusion, 193 00:20:14,220 --> 00:20:19,710 you would argue that the salt market, the salt restraining mechanisms of all broken down, 194 00:20:19,920 --> 00:20:24,660 whether the social manner, social habits don't get married until you have land, 195 00:20:24,840 --> 00:20:32,040 or whether they are in terms of biosystems systems, whatever different ways they probably will keep this anyway. 196 00:20:32,130 --> 00:20:38,430 Population is rising very rapidly. We're actually at 7.4 billion at the present moment. 197 00:20:38,700 --> 00:20:41,860 It used to be believed, used to be all of you. 198 00:20:41,880 --> 00:20:47,610 The classic argument is still repeated in liberal circles that as people became more educated, 199 00:20:47,610 --> 00:20:54,330 particularly women became more educated, so family sizes would would fall. 200 00:20:54,480 --> 00:21:01,980 And the result would be that the population would top out at about 9.5 billion by the middle of the century. 201 00:21:03,060 --> 00:21:09,060 The United Nations has now revised these just all projections of projections already that the United Nations 202 00:21:09,060 --> 00:21:16,860 has lost confidence in that and is now anticipating probably 10.5 to 10.75 by the end of the century. 203 00:21:17,130 --> 00:21:17,670 In other words, 204 00:21:17,670 --> 00:21:26,520 what appears to be happening is that the restraints that used to be believed would allow people to limit family growth all becoming less effective, 205 00:21:26,520 --> 00:21:34,350 not least because groups that are more religious, more devout for the better, you won't produce for them, have a higher birth rate. 206 00:21:34,560 --> 00:21:42,120 And these do not seem to be being attenuated. Their practices don't seem to be being attenuated by social change. 207 00:21:42,290 --> 00:21:49,050 Now, whether you think we're going to end up with 9.5 or 10.75 is actually somewhat immaterial. 208 00:21:49,350 --> 00:21:58,620 What we are talking about now is a very significant rise in the world's population with the issues that will arise from that. 209 00:21:59,280 --> 00:22:10,110 Now, again, we don't know what those issues all you care about populations that increase very rapidly without much of a sense of social disorder. 210 00:22:10,440 --> 00:22:15,690 Zambia is a good example of a country whose population has risen very significantly. 211 00:22:15,690 --> 00:22:22,890 Senegal is another one without there being actually significant rates of internal breakdown in social norms or political order. 212 00:22:23,250 --> 00:22:29,130 So it is not the case that necessarily population rise causes chaos. 213 00:22:30,270 --> 00:22:38,430 On the other hand, there are clearly both resource issues, and those resource issues are sometimes more pressing than others. 214 00:22:38,460 --> 00:22:45,750 Water is the most pressing resource issue. There are resource issues, but there are also the question of people's perception, 215 00:22:46,020 --> 00:22:53,310 their belief that they would be better if it wasn't for whichever other group is allegedly taking, 216 00:22:53,580 --> 00:23:00,450 you know, land or water or food or opportunity or, you know, jobs in the state sector or whatever. 217 00:23:01,260 --> 00:23:04,530 And that clearly is an issue of volatility. 218 00:23:04,860 --> 00:23:09,570 I think it's fair to say that the issue that issue of volatility appears to be growing. 219 00:23:10,620 --> 00:23:15,540 We can then assert a series of other factors to the mix. 220 00:23:16,350 --> 00:23:19,680 Number one is the actual sociological shift. 221 00:23:20,850 --> 00:23:26,130 If you would go back to 1850 and in much of the world to the facts, as late as 1950, 222 00:23:26,430 --> 00:23:34,470 a lot of the population lived in areas that were under a degree of hierarchical control. 223 00:23:34,770 --> 00:23:41,970 Social patterns were ones in which it was assumed that the young would be deferential towards their old elders. 224 00:23:42,210 --> 00:23:49,260 There was an assumption that social norms didn't change, etc., etc. These were primarily the case with agrarian societies. 225 00:23:49,440 --> 00:23:56,370 And where a society like this one, as early as 1851, the majority of British people lived in what was once majority English, 226 00:23:56,370 --> 00:24:00,360 and Welsh people lived in what were defined as town or city. 227 00:24:01,110 --> 00:24:06,330 It's fair to say that in many countries, including, for example, many European countries in Eastern Europe, 228 00:24:06,780 --> 00:24:11,670 that change didn't occur to the second half of the 20th century. 229 00:24:11,760 --> 00:24:17,130 And in some places like China at the present moment, the changes occurred at the present moment. 230 00:24:18,270 --> 00:24:23,280 Moving to the towns and the cities appears to have been linked to the breakdown 231 00:24:23,280 --> 00:24:28,680 of pre-existing patterns of of deference and hierarchy that does not again, 232 00:24:28,740 --> 00:24:31,080 meaning the theory that if we don't have chaos, 233 00:24:31,950 --> 00:24:39,330 there is no reason to believe that living in a large city is necessarily going to produce a lawless environment. 234 00:24:40,050 --> 00:24:43,530 On the other hand, the stress and strain can be greater, 235 00:24:44,040 --> 00:24:53,130 not least because the stress and strain could be later greater if there are fewer mechanisms to cope to cope with economic disorder. 236 00:24:53,520 --> 00:24:54,210 I mean, if you want. 237 00:24:54,580 --> 00:25:03,790 Example, where I lived in the 1920s and thirties, people who were poor and unemployed would just go out and it was miserable life for them, 238 00:25:03,970 --> 00:25:10,260 but they would find patches of land and cultivate them and actually put pigs and chickens on them and grow vegetables. 239 00:25:10,270 --> 00:25:17,049 But you can't do that if you're living in the centre of a big city where people do have pigs, of course, and in their backyards in London. 240 00:25:17,050 --> 00:25:20,050 But on the whole, you can't do that in a big city. 241 00:25:21,190 --> 00:25:30,040 Now, one of the aspects of the very local level of geopolitically, therefore, is we have these mega cities Karachi, 242 00:25:30,040 --> 00:25:40,120 King Charles, Sao Paolo, Johannesburg, Lagos, etc., etc., which are in many senses under relatively limited control. 243 00:25:40,210 --> 00:25:46,180 Karachi, for example, the largest city in Pakistan, not the capital, but the largest city in Pakistan, 244 00:25:46,330 --> 00:25:59,220 is fundamentally run by some political groups which overlap with organised crime and which are grounded in particular ethnic sort of movements, 245 00:25:59,380 --> 00:26:06,070 many of them from particular refugees, from particular areas in India who left during partition in the forties are 246 00:26:06,070 --> 00:26:10,600 the extent to which the government actually controls Karachi is very limited. 247 00:26:10,840 --> 00:26:15,940 Now again, you might say, does this matter? Does this not take us back to where we were before? 248 00:26:16,150 --> 00:26:23,710 Who cares? And you could actually argue that lawlessness is a matter of perception. 249 00:26:24,490 --> 00:26:27,520 I can well recall visiting Australia. 250 00:26:27,520 --> 00:26:34,929 I'm fortunate to work in the Canberra and the archives there and I was sitting on a Sunday 251 00:26:34,930 --> 00:26:42,280 morning reading The Australian and it had a two page spread of Murder Capital Australia. 252 00:26:42,640 --> 00:26:51,070 A gangster had been murdered in Melbourne in broad daylight in the Marriott, and they were telling the shocked readers about, 253 00:26:51,070 --> 00:26:55,120 you know, goings on in Melbourne, including the murder rate over the last five years. 254 00:26:55,300 --> 00:26:57,880 At that point I think I was there in 2004. 255 00:26:58,060 --> 00:27:04,570 Would anybody like to suggest to me how many people have been murdered in Melbourne in the previous five years? 256 00:27:04,570 --> 00:27:12,639 Melbourne as the city of well over a million people. Anybody who had seen anybody else, five but actually was 25. 257 00:27:12,640 --> 00:27:15,820 But nevertheless, you know, that's not the case, let's face it. 258 00:27:16,000 --> 00:27:19,120 I mean, that really is absolutely nothing. 259 00:27:19,540 --> 00:27:27,669 But nevertheless, it caused alarm and despondency. And as we all know, there is a degree to which assumptions it was. 260 00:27:27,670 --> 00:27:35,760 A normative behaviour vary greatly. A murder rate in Johannesburg or Sao Paolo that would create two people who lived in Copenhagen. 261 00:27:35,770 --> 00:27:41,740 The feeling that life was ending as they knew it, and that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse arrived simultaneously. 262 00:27:42,130 --> 00:27:47,230 So there is a big degree of perception. But again, thinking ahead, 263 00:27:47,860 --> 00:27:57,489 I think it's unlikely that we are going to find it so easy to manage the population rise of the current next 264 00:27:57,490 --> 00:28:06,010 generation as we were able to manage the population rise during the so-called long boom from 1945 to 1973. 265 00:28:06,340 --> 00:28:12,219 And if I might make a point that one of the factors that I've always thought has been 266 00:28:12,220 --> 00:28:18,120 underrated when people have looked at the so-called whatever you want to call it, 267 00:28:18,120 --> 00:28:24,730 the wars of national liberation, whatever you want to call them, and the colonial wars and the imperial wars of the late forties onwards. 268 00:28:24,880 --> 00:28:30,550 I've always thought that people have ignored the actual extent to which population growth in 269 00:28:30,550 --> 00:28:35,740 places like Algeria massively exacerbated the situation from the point of view of those trying to, 270 00:28:36,470 --> 00:28:39,820 you know, control, suppress, suppress dissent. 271 00:28:39,880 --> 00:28:45,750 I think the same is is true. Love is true of the present and likely to be true in the future. 272 00:28:46,150 --> 00:28:54,490 Now, if you look at where population growth is hottest at the present moment, U.N. figures suggest that population growth is highest. 273 00:28:54,490 --> 00:28:58,210 In which continent? Everybody in Africa. 274 00:28:58,450 --> 00:29:01,510 Africa is projected to grow from 1 to 3 billion. 275 00:29:02,320 --> 00:29:06,880 And again, there is much of Africa that is not heavily populated. 276 00:29:07,120 --> 00:29:10,599 There is much of Africa which produces agricultural surpluses. 277 00:29:10,600 --> 00:29:20,709 And indeed, much of the wealth in some places is being generated by producing cash crops to export beef to export elsewhere. 278 00:29:20,710 --> 00:29:30,370 And the beef is flown to Saudi Arabia, for example. You know, flowers and vegetables go from Kenya to Waitrose and so on. 279 00:29:31,000 --> 00:29:34,450 There is the potential to feed more people, but nevertheless, 280 00:29:34,450 --> 00:29:41,080 to move from 1 to 3 billion is, quite frankly, going to be an enormous source of tension, 281 00:29:41,260 --> 00:29:50,020 and not least because of the second issue we need to be thinking about, which is the weakness of modern societies as incorporating mechanisms. 282 00:29:50,710 --> 00:29:54,160 Now, I don't want to imply that you just in the past would necessarily. 283 00:29:54,510 --> 00:30:03,719 Or benign. But I would simply point out to you that modern societies find it very difficult to 284 00:30:03,720 --> 00:30:11,430 actually maintain order if they are dealing with groups that are willing or able, 285 00:30:11,430 --> 00:30:17,640 feel able to mate to, as it were, better behave in accordance with how the governmental system works. 286 00:30:17,790 --> 00:30:23,670 Whether that governmental system is democracy or authoritarian state is less consequential from this point of view. 287 00:30:23,790 --> 00:30:26,370 They just are not willing to accept it because after all, 288 00:30:26,550 --> 00:30:31,470 if you think of democracy as a brutal system that is telling you to do what you don't want to do, 289 00:30:31,680 --> 00:30:37,740 then you might just as much regard it as an illegitimate system, as a microcosm of authoritarian society, as an illegitimate system. 290 00:30:38,430 --> 00:30:42,780 And I think, again, here we have problems and there are different ways you can look at it. 291 00:30:43,290 --> 00:30:50,550 You could say it has always been us, that this hasn't changed with time, but there is no essential perceptual difference. 292 00:30:50,730 --> 00:30:53,790 And it's always been difficult to get people to do what you want. 293 00:30:53,970 --> 00:31:01,050 And you've always needed to decide whether you wanted to wave the stick around or have hearts and minds or a combination of the two. 294 00:31:01,290 --> 00:31:08,069 Dr. Johnson, my favourite political thinker, greatly remarked in the 18th century that men are not hung for stealing horses. 295 00:31:08,070 --> 00:31:10,170 They are hung so that horses may not be stolen. 296 00:31:10,440 --> 00:31:17,460 And that kind of approach to political control is one that, you know, has generally happened across across history. 297 00:31:18,450 --> 00:31:21,690 But there are other ways of looking at this. 298 00:31:22,410 --> 00:31:31,860 You could argue that one of the effects of mass literacy has been to encourage people's sense of unease about their circumstances. 299 00:31:32,070 --> 00:31:36,350 They might have been emboldened. In fact, I know I want to embarrass him by name. 300 00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:46,380 And I know here there is a a member of the a member of this audience whose hobby and a recent hobby, which he only apparently was last five years, 301 00:31:46,500 --> 00:31:50,580 was able to think it was normal to do it because he found other people did this on the web, 302 00:31:50,790 --> 00:31:54,660 was to dress up as an owl and he would set the mood in full bloom. 303 00:31:54,900 --> 00:32:01,240 Now, you know, if you are somebody who is not legal and they may I don't I don't think it's harmful, but I don't know. 304 00:32:01,240 --> 00:32:09,500 And it's not me that does this. But I mean, that that if you if you do something like that, you will know that nobody else does that. 305 00:32:09,510 --> 00:32:14,910 But then if on the web you find that you're part of a virtual community of 20 or 25 that does that, 306 00:32:15,150 --> 00:32:17,760 then you might well regard it as a normal activity. 307 00:32:18,180 --> 00:32:26,310 And this kind of normalisation of what we might regard as rogue activity, whether it's killing people in terrorist atrocities, 308 00:32:26,460 --> 00:32:36,530 whether it's taking part in violence, assault on the nature of the governmental system because it doesn't do what you want to do, etc., etc. 309 00:32:36,530 --> 00:32:40,170 And I was recently slightly badly behaved at the dinner party. 310 00:32:40,290 --> 00:32:46,500 My host and hostess were telling me how marvellous the junior hospital doctors were because they believed in their cause. 311 00:32:46,800 --> 00:32:50,700 And I said, Well, you know, let's go to an abortion clinic, 312 00:32:50,700 --> 00:32:57,480 shoot a few pages and see whether we can beat up some people at night as if, you know, those are not not activities that we should do. 313 00:32:57,660 --> 00:33:05,400 But the point I was trying to point to, I was trying to bring out is that all sorts of people might believe in the cause. 314 00:33:05,700 --> 00:33:11,579 But the idea that your belief or your emotion legitimises your behaviour is 315 00:33:11,580 --> 00:33:15,210 one that is truly troubling and truly dangerous in the political community. 316 00:33:15,360 --> 00:33:21,060 And I actually think it gets more common because of sociological practices in the modern age. 317 00:33:21,270 --> 00:33:25,290 Not only does that put the military, where does it put strategy? 318 00:33:26,730 --> 00:33:29,910 Well, the same thing is to say, first of all, most states of the world, 319 00:33:30,330 --> 00:33:37,230 but we should be looking if we want to understand military activity, we have to look at most states in the world, not atypical states. 320 00:33:37,440 --> 00:33:42,300 In most states in the world, what it means is that the prime task of the military is maintaining order. 321 00:33:43,050 --> 00:33:53,770 If you want to think of a typical military state of the last 50 years, think of Madagascar, Malagasy republic, if you like, of an apparent war. 322 00:33:54,420 --> 00:34:00,000 These are states in which the military play a role, quite a significant role, a more significant role they play in this country. 323 00:34:00,330 --> 00:34:05,940 They are not states which engage in state to state warfare, and they tend therefore to be ignored. 324 00:34:07,200 --> 00:34:12,950 One of the problems, in my view, about the difficulties that has faced Western militaries, 325 00:34:12,960 --> 00:34:17,670 operations in other parts of the world is because they don't understand that the 326 00:34:17,670 --> 00:34:23,220 nature of the military in these states is a question of actually maintaining order. 327 00:34:24,120 --> 00:34:27,540 They don't realise that occupying these states is nothing. 328 00:34:27,720 --> 00:34:30,990 The question is how you then control them. 329 00:34:31,140 --> 00:34:36,930 That is what's going to impress the locals. And if you can't control them, your local governments are terribly impressive. 330 00:34:38,550 --> 00:34:45,450 I would put it to you that the Madagascan army might have done a better job than the Paraguay army might have given it done a better job. 331 00:34:45,690 --> 00:34:51,450 Unit four unit through tirelessly through other means than some of our Western forces in some parts of the world. 332 00:34:52,290 --> 00:34:55,840 So that's one aspect one needs. Think about second aspect. 333 00:34:56,080 --> 00:35:04,420 You shouldn't necessarily assume from the point of view of civil control that the professionalised military, 334 00:35:04,690 --> 00:35:11,230 whatever you call the army of the armed forces, is necessarily more significant than paramilitary forces. 335 00:35:11,860 --> 00:35:16,000 If you look at India, the paramilitary frontier force, for example, 336 00:35:16,330 --> 00:35:24,729 is more important in some respects in controlling dissent in areas like Assam or facing the big Naxalite Rising, 337 00:35:24,730 --> 00:35:29,660 which is going on has been going on for a long time in the reserve in central India, 338 00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:37,420 probably the biggest insurrection in terms of scale numbers, both in the sense of civilians affected and duration. 339 00:35:37,510 --> 00:35:47,630 Again, one that just people just ignore because it's within a state and it doesn't involve foreign troops rather than actually regular use. 340 00:35:47,650 --> 00:35:56,980 And of course, this is true of other countries as well as, you know, the idea that you would have one single military force, 341 00:35:57,220 --> 00:36:07,090 the kind of efficiency we would see rather than a multiplicity of armed forces, reflects our idea of functional functionality, 342 00:36:07,330 --> 00:36:12,280 but not the idea of functionality you might have in fewer authoritarian regimes where 343 00:36:12,280 --> 00:36:18,249 you might deliberately establish an army as opposed to a Revolutionary Guard and army, 344 00:36:18,250 --> 00:36:24,760 as opposed to a National Guard or several different army forces vying against each other. 345 00:36:25,000 --> 00:36:31,520 Because what that does is give more authority to the person or group at the centre. 346 00:36:32,770 --> 00:36:39,670 The Rule of rule house of self in Saudi Arabia until the late Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a classic example. 347 00:36:39,970 --> 00:36:48,940 And of course, then militaries are pretty effective in suppressing internal disorder, the Shia in Iraq in 1991. 348 00:36:49,090 --> 00:36:55,650 They're not fit for purpose. If you're dealing with foreign threats and you say I'm an idiot, 349 00:36:55,720 --> 00:37:02,530 go to war with Iran because he's army, which was perfectly fine for its purpose of internal control. 350 00:37:02,800 --> 00:37:10,480 And indeed, you want to therefore promote people within that system for that political loyalty because they are a member of your clan, 351 00:37:10,660 --> 00:37:15,130 because they've taken part with you in acts of butchery, and therefore you feel you can trust them. 352 00:37:15,370 --> 00:37:19,930 Well, you don't really concerned about whether they understand what logistics means or something like that. 353 00:37:21,220 --> 00:37:32,140 So one's got to think about is the idea that the more you view that the prime purpose of the military will be control internally? 354 00:37:32,290 --> 00:37:34,330 In the case of the European powers, 355 00:37:34,570 --> 00:37:43,389 I think that actually the likelihood is that that is going to be seen on a European scale in the sense that, you know, 356 00:37:43,390 --> 00:37:49,629 the British army or the French army is going to find itself having to deal with sort of fireman duty in the Balkans, 357 00:37:49,630 --> 00:37:56,860 which would be nasty and unpleasant and in fact will be probably presented as internal control within Europe. 358 00:37:57,160 --> 00:38:01,209 I noticed Mr. Juncker this morning is saying that, you know, 359 00:38:01,210 --> 00:38:06,760 the European Union will not allow itself to be derailed by the equivalent of what really happened in Austria. 360 00:38:06,880 --> 00:38:12,310 Well, that may well involve the equivalent of what happens in the United States in the mid-fifties. 361 00:38:12,550 --> 00:38:22,390 They always have a sense in the the first Airborne into Arkansas in order to displace the National Guard and to enforce civil rights. 362 00:38:22,840 --> 00:38:27,250 Luckily, from his point of view, you know, there wasn't any fighting. 363 00:38:27,610 --> 00:38:33,400 If it had been fighting, it would have been different. And that specific point about America is worth bearing in mind. 364 00:38:33,580 --> 00:38:43,389 One of the reasons the Americans downplay the significance of civil control is that since 1865, 365 00:38:43,390 --> 00:38:50,290 there has been very little use of federal troops as opposed to National Guard units, 366 00:38:50,290 --> 00:38:56,410 which are obviously of the state, individual states of federal troops for civil control within the United States. 367 00:38:57,340 --> 00:39:00,440 There have been some as I've said, the airport was sent into Arkansas. 368 00:39:00,490 --> 00:39:06,010 There was no fighting. George H.W. Bush actually sent troops into Los Angeles during the 1992 riots. 369 00:39:06,010 --> 00:39:12,549 He never used them. I think if he had used them, he might have had quite a different reputation, which might have helped. 370 00:39:12,550 --> 00:39:17,050 It might indicate that that might have helped in the 1982 election. 371 00:39:18,070 --> 00:39:26,260 Practicality is that in the United States, where there have been riots, as in Newark or Detroit in the 1960s, Kent State, 372 00:39:26,410 --> 00:39:34,030 it was National Guard units that went to National Guard units that shot fellow citizens because the federal army hasn't done it. 373 00:39:34,060 --> 00:39:40,540 The Americans tend to downplay the significance of that as a potential task, 374 00:39:40,930 --> 00:39:47,799 because often it's the case in the military system when we're thinking about war that we tend to think about the paradigm in power, 375 00:39:47,800 --> 00:39:53,470 the most significant power in the system, that we tend to assume that that sets the norms when it doesn't. 376 00:39:54,220 --> 00:40:00,540 It may well set the norms for the United States role for the United States is, you know, 377 00:40:00,610 --> 00:40:04,560 a culture of pretending to be a country that has no regional separatist movement. 378 00:40:05,170 --> 00:40:13,420 It has, you know, Democrats and Republicans all over the place, even areas which are seen as Democratic or Republican. 379 00:40:13,420 --> 00:40:15,680 The other side usually gets 40% of the vote. 380 00:40:15,680 --> 00:40:22,390 The presidential race is the largest area with the separatist movement, which is in fact, only a tiny one, is not a record. 381 00:40:22,630 --> 00:40:30,940 So, you know, America is very successful from that point of view, but that does not describe most countries. 382 00:40:31,780 --> 00:40:33,490 Most countries don't have that. 383 00:40:33,700 --> 00:40:42,940 And many countries have the problems of the U.S. needing to use force, thinking they need to use force in order to control regional separatism, 384 00:40:43,060 --> 00:40:47,100 which helps them to make force normative within that political structure. 385 00:40:47,110 --> 00:40:54,999 So in the case of India, the world's largest democracy, one can see that in Punjab, in a side of Kashmir, in the case of University of California. 386 00:40:55,000 --> 00:40:59,920 So that's in Northern Ireland and so on and so forth. In some countries you use paramilitaries. 387 00:41:00,820 --> 00:41:07,630 France, for example, has used paramilitaries in Corsica and in the French Basque country rather than the regular army. 388 00:41:07,720 --> 00:41:09,880 Although if you go to France at the moment, 389 00:41:10,060 --> 00:41:17,379 you will notice I was seeing this when several times last year there were quite a lot of French troops on deployments in the French cities, 390 00:41:17,380 --> 00:41:22,630 in places like Paris and Lille. And the same thing is not just true in France or in Belgium. 391 00:41:23,290 --> 00:41:29,769 I noticed Naples the year before last that Berlusconi had sent the of the army onto 392 00:41:29,770 --> 00:41:35,080 the streets in order to reassure citizens that law and order was being maintained, 393 00:41:35,230 --> 00:41:40,450 which in effect was also an attempt politically to make waves for himself, 394 00:41:40,630 --> 00:41:46,540 but also to control law and order and take it out of the hands of local governments in that particular area. 395 00:41:47,170 --> 00:41:49,690 So what one has got, in my view, 396 00:41:49,720 --> 00:41:58,660 is a question about the sustainability of current methods of civil control in the face of large scale population increase, 397 00:41:58,870 --> 00:42:04,750 large scale migration, migration linked to that and also associated resource pressures. 398 00:42:05,980 --> 00:42:12,250 Rob is also asked me though to bring in to that question geopolitics in terms of tensions between states. 399 00:42:12,910 --> 00:42:16,990 I mean, geopolitics is rather interesting. It's like strategy in some respects. 400 00:42:17,410 --> 00:42:22,960 First of all, it is a discourse as much as a analytical description, 401 00:42:23,080 --> 00:42:27,760 but you can use them as analytical descriptions, but they tend to also be discourses, 402 00:42:27,760 --> 00:42:35,139 languages which involve contention and in particular questions of what are and are not reasonable strategies, 403 00:42:35,140 --> 00:42:37,540 reasonable assessments of geopolitical situation. 404 00:42:38,260 --> 00:42:46,299 Now, to me, the most important geopolitical challenge of the last 15 years is the breakdown of the Nixon achievements. 405 00:42:46,300 --> 00:42:52,900 The Nixon achievement was obviously the way in which the Cold War changed direction in the seventies. 406 00:42:53,560 --> 00:42:58,840 We are talking about I mean, basically, if you look at the Cold War in 1960, 407 00:42:58,990 --> 00:43:03,790 it looked really, really serious from the point of view of Western policymakers. 408 00:43:04,150 --> 00:43:05,010 And that was very true. 409 00:43:05,020 --> 00:43:11,950 Policymakers could write things down because they didn't think they were going to be revealed by Mr. Snowden or some Senate committee or whatever. 410 00:43:12,430 --> 00:43:16,299 The assumption that if you look at the you can see this incident, if you're interested. 411 00:43:16,300 --> 00:43:23,230 Even after the heat of Halliburton in the early fire plans for British nuclear submarines, 412 00:43:23,230 --> 00:43:30,070 those nuclear submarine first nuclear submarines didn't come through till the late sixties, but the fire plans were already in place before that. 413 00:43:30,460 --> 00:43:38,200 And the British assumption was that there might well be a Chinese attack on India, a large scale one, not one in 1962. 414 00:43:38,380 --> 00:43:42,220 And the British fire plans that they were going to be firing their intercontinental 415 00:43:42,220 --> 00:43:48,670 ballistic missiles at the pulses through the Himalayas in against advancing Chinese forces. 416 00:43:48,670 --> 00:43:54,250 Classic kind of what Patrick Porter would call classical fear of horns, of Asian horns. 417 00:43:54,460 --> 00:44:05,380 Anyway, the perception at that point was of real seriousness, that the communists have done extremely well, not just in Europe, but also in Asia. 418 00:44:05,560 --> 00:44:14,830 They had taken out of China, they had taken over North Vietnam, had taken over North Korea, and they were going to spread. 419 00:44:14,870 --> 00:44:18,370 Indonesia was moving in the wrong direction. India was weak. 420 00:44:18,610 --> 00:44:24,250 This was extraordinarily dangerous. Well, by 1980, it's all fine. 421 00:44:25,210 --> 00:44:32,950 Absolutely fine. I mean, it doesn't you know, if you're a strategist, being strategist is brutal front, really brutal. 422 00:44:32,950 --> 00:44:35,500 If you want to do the job professionally, most people can't do it. Repression. 423 00:44:35,510 --> 00:44:45,880 So the line of once you toppled the Suharto star regime, it did not matter what happens in Vietnam. 424 00:44:46,690 --> 00:44:54,549 The Americans have got strategic depth of they you know, Indonesia gives you a large area which is pro-EU. 425 00:44:54,550 --> 00:45:00,070 It gives you the oil resources. Vietnam's got something that's got very little to offer a quick. 426 00:45:01,600 --> 00:45:05,290 Once you've got China with Mr. Nixon going off to China, 427 00:45:05,290 --> 00:45:10,239 once you've got China on your side and half the Soviet intercontinental concerns also pointed against 428 00:45:10,240 --> 00:45:17,080 China and the Chinese are willing to try and kick the whatever out of the Vietnamese in 90 and 1979. 429 00:45:17,230 --> 00:45:20,020 It doesn't really matter that you messed up the Vietnam War. 430 00:45:20,350 --> 00:45:25,340 I mean, the problem we've got at the moment in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we don't value. 431 00:45:25,570 --> 00:45:30,640 People often do not because we haven't got a strategic end game that's going to work for us. 432 00:45:31,270 --> 00:45:35,820 The the difference in Vietnam is that the Americans had a strategic end game. 433 00:45:35,830 --> 00:45:39,910 They couldn't really discuss stuff in public, but they did have a strategic engagement was going to work. 434 00:45:40,210 --> 00:45:48,280 Now, what has gone wrong in the last 15 years is, of course, that there has been a china-russia reconciliation, 435 00:45:49,030 --> 00:45:53,920 which means that if the Chinese choose to be difficult in the South or East China Sea, 436 00:45:54,400 --> 00:46:02,860 there is no suggestion that they are going to have to divert military resources, diplomatic strength in order to keep the Russians on the spot. 437 00:46:03,190 --> 00:46:07,180 If the Russians wish to be difficult in the Black Sea or on the Baltic, exactly the same. 438 00:46:07,420 --> 00:46:11,140 That is why we're in a mess. On top of that is because it doesn't work. 439 00:46:11,260 --> 00:46:18,219 It doesn't help that there is an enormous difficulty in funding the Western state policies 440 00:46:18,220 --> 00:46:24,550 and social welfare so that we are all dependent on regular foreign inflows of money. 441 00:46:24,910 --> 00:46:30,520 And of course, that's why today what counts in Asia is significant. 442 00:46:30,650 --> 00:46:33,910 We're looking at creditor nations with American assets. 443 00:46:33,910 --> 00:46:37,690 Obviously, China has a lot, but so also does Taiwan. 444 00:46:37,750 --> 00:46:46,450 If the Chinese were to lean on Taiwan or take over Taiwan, that is really significant in terms of how we cope with American assets. 445 00:46:46,450 --> 00:46:49,590 Compared to that, you know, who cares what happens in Afghanistan? 446 00:46:49,600 --> 00:47:03,159 I remember when I was a student, we had to buy a hidden salary and Hensley would been in British spy foreign policy policy making 447 00:47:03,160 --> 00:47:08,980 invaded occasionally or experts and his career as a distinguished old man of Cambridge politics, 448 00:47:09,310 --> 00:47:13,750 head of John's College. And anyway, he was talking about the Cold War. 449 00:47:13,990 --> 00:47:17,799 And I said to him, you know, doesn't it doesn't matter. 450 00:47:17,800 --> 00:47:22,240 He said, Africa doesn't matter. And I said, don't you fall to the map? And I said, No, pinko doesn't count. 451 00:47:22,450 --> 00:47:29,350 I said, What about the oil? He said, You would buy milk from somebody else and you to want that kind of approach. 452 00:47:29,830 --> 00:47:35,710 Kissinger Of course I have the same approach to South America, you know, famously remarked that he was just pointing towards Antarctica. 453 00:47:35,890 --> 00:47:39,730 We don't necessarily need to go that far. 454 00:47:40,270 --> 00:47:49,760 We don't need to go that far. But to point out that all some areas that are more significant, the values and the geopolitics and politics of that, 455 00:47:50,020 --> 00:47:55,480 it's in part about the prioritisation between differing commitments. 456 00:47:55,780 --> 00:48:02,110 And the difficulty is that you cannot now engage in that prioritisation in public. 457 00:48:02,760 --> 00:48:08,620 Now, I think there's a number of Americans who you will know, if you're an American senior policymaker, 458 00:48:08,680 --> 00:48:15,160 you will know that there are all sorts of very crudely, very crudely. 459 00:48:15,460 --> 00:48:22,270 For years, the Navy has been saying waste of time, focusing on Iraq and Afghanistan. 460 00:48:22,480 --> 00:48:27,220 The key strategic challenge is China. And that's what we ought to focus on. 461 00:48:27,880 --> 00:48:34,600 And obviously, that interpretation has had a lot of pushback, I think it's fair to say, from the other services. 462 00:48:34,990 --> 00:48:40,750 Now, whether you agree with one or the other, that is a problem that to some extent there is a public manifestation of it. 463 00:48:40,930 --> 00:48:46,450 But it is largely a private debate because if you are public going to say, well, 464 00:48:47,260 --> 00:48:52,210 some of these things really don't count, okay, we've lost troops, but it really doesn't count. 465 00:48:52,540 --> 00:48:55,330 That's not the way to make yourself popular. 466 00:48:55,810 --> 00:49:05,710 And one of the difficulties I see it is that policy making at the present moment, educating people in strategic debate is getting harder, 467 00:49:05,830 --> 00:49:13,540 not easier, because people essentially in motion move around that in around their strategic choices. 468 00:49:13,540 --> 00:49:16,540 At the present moment, they say X is really significant. 469 00:49:16,690 --> 00:49:24,909 We can't let this go down. I went to a talk given by the government's chief medical officer, recently closed session talk, 470 00:49:24,910 --> 00:49:33,160 and she was saying the chief threat to Britain was that she'd been very and she was very concerned the government was antibiotics, 471 00:49:33,160 --> 00:49:36,400 antibiotics coming in and breathing resistance. 472 00:49:37,330 --> 00:49:42,400 And she went on like this. And I said to her, you know, what kind of figures are you talking about? 473 00:49:43,060 --> 00:49:50,620 And she told me that she went to the pharmacy, took. Seem a lot to shoot, very worried about 20,000 people dying potentially in Sierra Leone. 474 00:49:50,800 --> 00:49:55,360 I said seem a lot to you and I never want to sound foolish in comparison to the numbers that there. 475 00:49:55,390 --> 00:49:58,690 This is nothing. This is really has nothing. 476 00:49:59,770 --> 00:50:03,910 And, you know, you can't say that sort of thing in public because you see that sort of thing in public. 477 00:50:04,120 --> 00:50:07,720 People think you're an ogre. They think you're an awful person. 478 00:50:08,620 --> 00:50:16,510 And I do feel that at the moment we're in a very difficult situation that we're expecting as a state, as a society. 479 00:50:16,690 --> 00:50:27,009 We expect, for example, the military and police to maintain order in all societies that we don't actually give them the kind of legal, 480 00:50:27,010 --> 00:50:33,070 cultural, intellectual and ideological framework within which they can make the often difficult decisions involved. 481 00:50:33,370 --> 00:50:38,829 And those of you who are British will notice that the police in Britain are finding very many police 482 00:50:38,830 --> 00:50:44,890 officers reluctant to take part in firearms training because they fear that if they shoot somebody, 483 00:50:45,430 --> 00:50:48,760 they will then be hung out to dry, which I think is probably true. 484 00:50:49,000 --> 00:50:56,230 So there's that element of it and there's the element, of course, if you look abroad that the way in which sentiment plays a key role, 485 00:50:56,710 --> 00:51:01,900 I think sentiment, for example, plays a key role in our response to the beer crisis in 2011. 486 00:51:02,380 --> 00:51:11,050 Now, I fear I've used up my hour, but what I want to close over one or two general reflections on the subject, 487 00:51:11,050 --> 00:51:15,980 which Robin asked me if I would like to to make. 488 00:51:16,050 --> 00:51:17,920 Well, these are general reflections. 489 00:51:17,920 --> 00:51:25,030 And as I said, if you go out thinking he's wrong for the following three reasons, that's great, because the purpose of education is not that. 490 00:51:25,030 --> 00:51:31,000 You go out thinking, Oh gosh, he's in Germany, right? He's wrong, but no one is wrong. 491 00:51:31,270 --> 00:51:34,870 So let me let me just make one or two reflections. 492 00:51:35,290 --> 00:51:42,249 First, yes, it is important to look at the global dimension, but one needs to do that carefully. 493 00:51:42,250 --> 00:51:48,040 It doesn't mean that all parts of the world are necessarily of equal significance, nor can one do all of it. 494 00:51:48,280 --> 00:51:52,960 Nor does it mean that one has to prove it to by so many areas by taking a cultural 495 00:51:53,080 --> 00:51:59,319 interpretation of what Patrick Porter is make fun of in his account of what has to be very, 496 00:51:59,320 --> 00:52:04,990 very careful how one does it. But at the present moment, it is necessary. 497 00:52:05,620 --> 00:52:14,290 There is too often a failure to understand other parts of the world, and that matters if we're going to project our force. 498 00:52:14,560 --> 00:52:17,050 It doesn't matter if you know nothing about that gas, 499 00:52:17,100 --> 00:52:21,490 because military affairs is we're not going to be sending our troops there, which is not going to do. 500 00:52:21,820 --> 00:52:28,780 We sent troops there in 1942 because we were worried that the Japanese might have a base of Drager Suarez. 501 00:52:28,930 --> 00:52:32,200 Since that, we're not going to send them. The French aren't going to send in the Americans. 502 00:52:34,210 --> 00:52:38,620 But there are parts of the world where you do have to worry and you need to think about it. 503 00:52:39,190 --> 00:52:51,780 Next, in terms of one of our interests, which is strategy, too much of the work on strategy is work about the strategic thought of strategic thinkers. 504 00:52:52,450 --> 00:52:59,530 This is hopeless. What we have to concentrate on is strategic actors, which is their focus. 505 00:53:00,340 --> 00:53:12,160 And often those are not expressed in terms of full importance of literature, the type of Clausewitz or geometry or the Corvette or whatever. 506 00:53:12,790 --> 00:53:20,619 We need to think much more about the often tangential, episodic way in which we can recover. 507 00:53:20,620 --> 00:53:25,420 That strategic thought often involves looking at military planning, and I think that's important. 508 00:53:25,660 --> 00:53:36,520 Linked to that, at least my first point, of course, almost all the discussion of strategic thinking has been in the of strategic interest 509 00:53:36,520 --> 00:53:41,900 in the West or very crude accounts of strategic thinkers in the Northwest generally. 510 00:53:41,920 --> 00:53:49,149 Now, if you're looking at the last 100 years and there's been a number of books that have come out on strategy recently, 511 00:53:49,150 --> 00:53:52,990 they're interesting books, but I think they're deeply flawed because of that point. 512 00:53:53,590 --> 00:54:00,650 Deeply flawed for those few students as I'm sorry. 513 00:54:00,760 --> 00:54:08,790 And the last point the last point that I would like to make, I think that there is this in a sense loops back to Maxi. 514 00:54:08,980 --> 00:54:14,380 I think that there is an obligation to try and understand the subject. 515 00:54:14,410 --> 00:54:19,330 Marcus sees himself, as you may know, that the reason he was never knocked out about it. 516 00:54:19,660 --> 00:54:27,010 Marcus He himself was in a way obsessed about the fate of his father, his father being a general in no way campaign. 517 00:54:27,010 --> 00:54:35,920 In 1940, he took part of the blame for the failure of the campaign and was disgraced by Churchill and Marcus. 518 00:54:35,980 --> 00:54:42,640 You write a book about his father, Luke, about that campaign was interested in combined operations partly because of that. 519 00:54:42,850 --> 00:54:45,850 And in a way he possibly put it too took it to. 520 00:54:46,520 --> 00:54:50,900 But nevertheless he captured this sense of the trust between the generations. 521 00:54:51,170 --> 00:54:59,149 In my view, one of the reasons why military history is important is not just because war is and the potential of war 522 00:54:59,150 --> 00:55:05,150 and force as a whole of absolutely crucial to Cuban society and to the human society we are making. 523 00:55:05,420 --> 00:55:07,170 But also, it is a trust, you know, 524 00:55:07,200 --> 00:55:14,330 people in the past who have given their lives or risked their lives to think about and to make this to make the world we live in. 525 00:55:14,480 --> 00:55:20,150 It's a trust that we have on us to think about that and to try and understand what they did. 526 00:55:20,540 --> 00:55:27,520 I actually fear very much that the modern academic world, with its obsession with British history, 527 00:55:27,650 --> 00:55:32,900 which you can see both this university I mean, I'm afraid to say in my university, I have no responsibility for this one. 528 00:55:33,110 --> 00:55:39,740 But on the street, the same is also true of my one. I think that has been singularly dangerous from my point of view. 529 00:55:40,070 --> 00:55:46,790 And I also think more generally in terms of civic society, I think the way in which in civic society, 530 00:55:47,090 --> 00:55:52,430 war and force are simply not understood by the vast bulk of people is a deeply 531 00:55:52,430 --> 00:55:57,799 troubling nature of our society and one I fear it's going to cause us great problems, 532 00:55:57,800 --> 00:56:01,160 not just in the future, but in the present as well. Thank you very much.