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Now I prefer that you should be doing research with Prospect.

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Macaulay, come to University of York, where he's a mathematical physicist.

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The more important literary part about that, it's the two of them around you, but has previously worked in a number of institutions,

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including the other place, Durham, here in Sheffield, which is a publishing house.

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It's good. Shepherd is the best and although there is some cheating by reading this book,

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some, he has works with the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and historians as well.

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So even historians can be involved in mathematics on it,

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because I'm trying to write about the relentless logic of mathematics as opposed to human decision making.

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So I'm sitting here for you say no, because all the talk on construction, on symmetry, in combat.

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Yeah, well, thank you very much and thanks for inviting me. Yeah, it was great collaboration.

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I'm a mathematician in my day job because I talk about Ian and Chris,

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the historians at York St John University, that we actually went pretty well together.

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On the whole, they're interested in numbers and quantifying answers to questions, and I'm interested in military history.

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The one way it doesn't work is that my talk is produced using latex.

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Imagine PowerPoint. So actually there's going to be a disjunct between the talk where I switch to the history.

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In fact, we normally give this talk in combinations of two or three of us, so I'll try to talk through the material,

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which is principally Chris's events, and especially when we get to the Vietnam history.

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Well, we'll get to ask you questions, but if I fall off and refer them back and onwards to in the original conception in this case,

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was to say, well, what are the historical data?

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Tell us about the nature of air power, air combat, and in particular about the nature of concentration in combat.

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I'll talk about the embodiment of this word concentration and principles in war.

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It's a slightly later stage. But first of all, I'm going to tell you something of the maths and the way that we play with the data.

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Now, people don't mind math jokes,

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so I would characterise it as high school math and I think it's perfectly reasonable for you not to like what I'm about to do for you.

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50 minutes. If you really don't like equations, shut your eyes and see if you get something out of what I say.

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And there are two points that which I might then tell you broken. And of course you might discover again after that the latter stages of the talk.

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We'll try to tease out what the implications are, what we will have discovered from the data.

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Okay. So we're not going to go into this line when you go in with some prejudices and, well, thinking about asking a lot of questions,

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a natural assumption might be to tell you that the fighting strength of the force is in some way a

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product of the number of units and say what you mean by unit and the effectiveness of those units.

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Of course, the original, thought provoking alternative also no more for them at this point is Manchester's famous Square Law,

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written down by Manchester in 19 1314 in a series of articles in Engineering magazine.

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And this is where I want you to start from here. I want to remind you, I'll tell you what Manchester is all about.

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And what he's trying to do is to understand the way in which the dynamics of combat might have changed as we go into the First World War.

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And he says, well, what would happen if you had a situation in which each side could cause its opponents losses in proportion to their own numbers?

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That seems an innocuous assumption, but actually it has significant implications.

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So first of all, let's just think about what it might be true. What that says is that effectively both sides have a target rich environment.

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Both sides find it easy to acquire targets. In that circumstance?

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Well, if you know that high level calculus, you know, so I've written down here a rate of change,

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which is a little change in green numbers divided by a little change in time.

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And I've said that it's proportional to red numbers, capital R, with constant proportionality being a lower case constant for this purpose, this law.

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If I divide that equation by the analogous right, then what I get is something that you might call the loss ratio in the casualty exchange ratio.

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And it's that it matters as well is proportional to the force ratio.

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And the trick you perform is to add up all the small changes in red and green numbers over the course of the battle.

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And you discover something which has important and counterintuitive implications, which is that the difference between,

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uh, for each side, it's individual effectiveness multiplied by the square of its units is constant.

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That implies what Lanchester call the square law, because what it does is tell you how to combine numbers with effectiveness.

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And there are two messages. The first is that numbers win.

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So suppose there were twice as many events as Green's, but Green is three times as individually effective.

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But what's happening is that the two get squared in this square or to square this form, which being three.

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The other thing which is slightly less well known is that concentration is good.

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So it was meant to divide its forces. So then you have equal numbers of red, white and green.

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You know, green is three times the active green transpose red. And in fact,

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green has enough force left over to beat the remaining half of the red force

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easily and to finish off with about 60% of its original numbers remaining.

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So essentially you could ask why it was such a simple model have at least some longevity.

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One answer is because it confirms some prejudices and not just to set this alongside more easy and natural assumptions which do accord

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with our first assumption that perhaps fighting strength is proportional to the product's simple product with effectiveness and numbers.

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And he noted that if you have what we called ancient warfare, so the same numbers engaged on both sides,

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or if you had effectively his model in fire, but with the aiming not very good and important some density of opposing units.

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Either way, what happens is that the ratio of green losses to red losses is then constant

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and the outcome of that is that you have what's called Manchester's linear.

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The difference between effectiveness and numbers, not the numbers squared, is constant.

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Now you can mix the two up. So this goes back to my judgement in 1962.

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And so you said suppose Green's attacking and Red's defending so that red then

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I can aim its fire but green can't and it's fires affected in proportion.

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Some density then the outcome actually is that this is the conserved quantity is linear in red numbers, quadratic square in green numbers.

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And the upshot is that green benefits more from numbers and concentration.

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But you know, just an extra half turning up. That means that green means it's individual effectiveness is twice as great.

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Or is initial numbers be two times as great as it would have done in a symmetrical situation?

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Now summarise the slide by saying red in such circumstances has the defender's advantage.

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And so we're going to use models analogous to this for generalising to Internet and returning data and see what we can find.

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And this is the sort of assumption that an engineer would typically like.

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What we've got is a scaling or the assumption that each size losses scale in some way with both their own and their opponents numbers.

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And for that model, you could again divide, rearrange and sum up all the little increments.

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That's called integrating and find that the importance of numbers and concentration for each side is captured by a single number.

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I've written about numbers removed from red and green groups.

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I'll call them the exponents, and the values of those numbers capture the tactical implications of the gross model.

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In particular,

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Green should concentrate its force if its exponent is bigger than one for the square ball it was two and it should actually divide its force.

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If karma were found to be less than one further to the extent to which the exponent try symmetric, they will be equal one side or another.

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The defender's advantage. Well,

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often we talk not about spiritual progress of the battle of about the casualty exchange ratio or loss ratio and how it depends on the force ratio.

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In this model, the casualty exchange ratio has over D also reached a little D as a small change in the small change in G divided by 14

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because the ratio of the incremental losses is in some way dependent on red numbers and green numbers in the linear law,

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you know, gamma to exponents on one. And then the casualty exchange ratio does not depend on numbers at all.

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If the two explosions are two, then the casualty exchange ratio is proportional to the force ratio.

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If you have the kind of asymmetry I talked about, then you would have that the casualty exchange ratio is 40 to 1 over.

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In this case, three numbers, but more broadly, one over some measure of the number of units involved in the fight.

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So John Gordon,

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who is kind of the last great advocate of a massive ad campaign and behind the ads to fund the campaign of the first Mesopotamian punitive expedition,

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said this. He said dependence with the casualty exchange ratio on the force ratio is not linear, it's exponential.

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And I'm afraid that's the kind of use of exponential that people who don't know math should avoid.

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He cites a 1970 study of Korea in World War Two, which I read later, and it's absolute rubbish.

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His analysis of that in Fairbanks. Okay, now if you shut your eyes because of the equations, you might try opening them again.

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Now, because I'm going to show you some plots of data and your opinion is almost as good as anybody's.

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What I've done there is for the Battle of Britain to plot.

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Actually, the logarithms have a detail that doesn't match up to your point of view and the casualty exchange ratio against the force ratio.

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So if you believe in the swindle,

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you have to convince yourself that the best explanation of that data is yet a straightforward diagonal line going from bottom left to top right.

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And if you believe that and as a force planner, you wanted to make decisions on the basis of that,

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I would say you would go very wrong and so would the statistical tests.

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Do the same for the Pacific Air War, 1942.

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To fight here on God's green is the Americans, ours, the Japanese.

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Once again, you have to believe if you believe in the all that there is a diagonal line explaining a high proportion of that data, that fortune.

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But it actually explains some of the R-squared is less than 5% for both of these plots, which is each data point is the result of a battle.

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Yeah. Okay. So Battle of Britain is today's Pacific Air War.

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It's sometimes day, sometimes it's periods of two or three days.

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It's individual engagements, things. In this case, this is carrier engagements typically.

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And there are a lot of something to do with aggregation of data, which I'm not going to have time to go into or talk with the appropriate audience,

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but I can talk to anybody who's interested about what's really going on with the aggregation of data.

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Looking at situations like this warden's dataset is actually months worth of data from Korea,

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and once again, you have to be able to say a diagonal line. Well, maybe after last square, this next game is still, well, less than 10%.

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So let me do something else. Now that me look at loss ratios again sources this time for the Battle of Britain.

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That's a slightly better fit this time is this time I need if I believe that there is some asymmetry in this data,

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I need to believe that that's a diagonal line down from top left to bottom. Right.

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So I first up slightly differently so that I'm looking for exactly the same thing

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and then a diagonal line from top left to right x just under 20% of the data.

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Now, if you're used to statistical tests, you'll know this in medical situations,

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you be quiet with a very small portion of the ask when explained, and you would believe above all in this number here, which is that okay?

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At its simplest, it's the probability that you could have got a trend like that if actually if the

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data were entirely randomly distributed without any such trap for the Pacific War,

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it's slightly better this time, actually. A diagonal line top left to bottom right explains 30% of the variation.

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You can't really do anything with the Korean case here that these months worth of data that Wharton is quoting now,

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not good enough for us to do anything sensible. Before I could give you the plot of the through the same sort of trend that does not tell you

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much the better things to do here is to ask what are the exponents for these various campaigns?

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So here is the final score. Remember I said we can increase a number to reach five,

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which I claim captures the tactical conditions which applied to the campaign for the Battle of Britain.

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The Germans exponent is 1.3, so that says they do well out of concentrating my numbers for the Royal Air Force,

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it's actually slightly less than one and one subtlety of the data aggregation issues.

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Is that to the extent to which you are aggregating individual engagements in this take in this game?

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So to some extent the news, to a greater extent, if you put together larger periods,

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what you're doing is you're pushing these numbers towards war, so you're masking the effect.

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But of course, the reverse of that is that if you observe any effects at all, sort of any effect at all.

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So 1.3, the confidence interval is about 41 either way, and the same for the British.

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And if you have any effect at all, then probably the true effect is greater than this.

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For the Pacific Air War, Japanese come out slightly less than one, the Americans at 1.3.

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For Korea, obviously, I don't really believe that 0.1 for the Koreans that the confidence intervals are much,

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much worse because of the extreme aggregation that's going on in this.

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And this takes us to the water users. Now, as I said, the differences are understated.

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And of course, this is no mere academic question. I'll talk about this in more detail a little bit later.

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But let's just remember that actually this was the crucial tactical controversy of the Battle of Britain,

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which at the time was should the RAAF squadrons amass into wings of free squadrons or big wings of five or more before engaging?

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And that's all other things being equal. Also sort other things.

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They're not quite equal or could be as mere concentration of numbers advantageous for the RAAF equivalent.

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Is the RAAF exponent bigger and more concern? No, it isn't so.

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It's not so that this this this is potentially an important question.

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Let's find out who could look at the data from Vietnam. This time we're going to look at the data from Rolling Thunder from 1960 568,

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looking at a much wider level of data that we have from the previous campaigns.

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What we have is real engagement level of data.

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So individual engagements typically between single figures, typically four or five aircraft at most on each side.

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And perhaps the way to frame this group for the Manchester model was to say, well,

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what we really want to know is, does a sortie tend to lead to a kill, a loss or neither?

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So the effective use of your resources,

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civilians in sending planes up to do something to the enemy without getting something done for them, despite getting them to do so.

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Now, this one, I got very nervous because even more timely than the Rolling Thunder data, which I haven't got previously.

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And as I said, and I think finger hovering over the bottom, I would I suppose being a proper scientist could change my normal mathematical physics

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life in that the results of the analysis had become immediately to make contact with us,

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and then we would have to give up much of it. But I'm standing here today, so there's a effect.

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In fact, it confirms the basic asymmetry that we saw earlier.

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What I tried to do is clean up the data a bit.

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And for the U.S. forces, I looked at F 1.5 on the sheet for the bombers and Air Force and the fighters, and as you might hope.

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When officials sorted the numbers, they tended to cause more Vietnamese North Vietnamese losses.

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U.S. bombing numbers tended to cause neither. So the US conclusion was actually pretty much the long history of war that you should construct

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strike packages in which your bombers are well supported by good numbers of Air Force.

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For the North Vietnamese, well, their sorties tended to cause their own losses.

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Now, this is not to say that from the individual effectiveness, it doesn't mean they should never sortie.

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It means that the effect of putting numbers together is to accentuate their own losses.

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You know, if you send out 20 planes, the message for the North Vietnamese is better,

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send them off in five packages of four separately and send them up together.

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So the North Vietnamese conclusion is sorties, apparently sorties to disrupt, try to avoid engagement.

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And I'll say more than that, more about that in the later sections.

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For the moment, let me try and summarise what we've got out of the rather limited data that we have.

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If you just look at the course gross data, you might say as a starting hypothesis, e-commerce is just a sack of jewels.

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It's random, it's lineal. Of course we know that most of what's going on is not random.

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So you have that Rolling Thunder data that you can go down and look at what's happening in every individual engagement from the point of view,

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the overall numbers. If we ask, is anything going on, what we see might as well be random, except that to the extent to which it comes from this.

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Well, first of all, you must not believe the squiggle does not obey Manchester Square.

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But I think it's reasonably safe to say that whilst there might be some lancastrian

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advantage in numbers and concentration for the attacker of surface targets.

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There is none for the defender. If we did reverse even and I guess my take home message for the military analysts would be to say that combat

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is 80% linear and maybe 27 20% asymmetric is not going to win the battle for you if you're outmatched,

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but it is at least something to think about. Okay, so at this point, we'll take a woman at break as I attempt to switch over to the first powerful.

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I'm not used to Windows eight. How do I minimise that thing? No.

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Okay. Not one yet. How did you get that cynical?

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And is this going to be a lot more conservative? That's right. Okay.

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Okay, great. So let's go back and think about what really to start with.

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And for me, there was a nice historical study done that in Manchester thinking about annual fact in 19 3014,

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but then publishing his conclusions as a chapter in a book on aircraft in warfare from 1916.

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I think that just was a bit forgotten. That's how seriously people always talk about doing it as the first great proponent of strategic power.

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But Lanchester has the concept of air superiority and as you can see there in his book, and then of course,

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25 years later in the same nation, we had two pilots, the first great purely attritional and admiral.

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And in the intervening time, you have 25 years for the RAF to develop its ideas and traditions.

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I thought it seemed like rather nice study to go back to the gathering of papers and trying to look at how

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the Orient formed its conceptions of what it had to do in the 20 years prior to the Battle of Britain.

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And in fact, a key figure here is only fuller. So you may remember Fuller became out of the matter and was decisive.

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And I that probably my favourite of his works is actually a 1926 book called Foundations of the Science of War.

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There's all sorts of interesting stuff in it, but he frames it in this mad, cultish, mystical.

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So but he wrote down some principles of war in 1960, and it was amazing the extent to which the various services adopted them quickly.

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That's a minute. But let me say something about some things that you mentioned, the foundations of the science of war.

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He was a friend of Manchester's and also decentralised.

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So in the symmetrical aim fire model, the force of 50,000 will match to forces of 30,040 thousand reaching them sequentially.

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And as he puts it, kind of ships a canal, for example, going to the bottom, not as an act of God, but as an act of mathematical certainty.

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It's also true in Manchester mobiles that Manchester 85, when it's an outnumbered force, suffers an accelerating rate of loss.

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One of the copious notes on that that's important. Important is that so far he's the only person writing in that time who understands.

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He makes the point that the implication of Manchester's more is the concentration is no longer about mass.

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It's about concentrating firepower. So if you have long range aiming weapons which give you the conditions of Manchester's war,

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that everybody can find a target, then if a long range, we don't have to be together.

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And of course, in the first place I saw this written down was by the Captain Warren Harding in the Naval Review in 1910,

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who makes the point in the context of naval concentration that as gun range increases,

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as it was doing rapidly at that time, actually concentration becomes a matter of geometry rather than of mass.

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I guess, come to think of it like military history, another example would be to think of the two opposing conceptions of mass in Napoleonic

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wars for the IS column for Wellington aligned with Fight for African Advance.

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That's interesting. But anyway, so for those principles down the ways they went and first of all,

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the field service regulations in Britain and also rather rapidly in the States,

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straight from there into the operations of the first operations manual of the Royal Air Force.

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The Royal Air Force set up Staff College Andover, which came with essentially the same series of lectures for 20 years.

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And one other encounters, Tommy Davis people, is coming.

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Churchill has obviously been working through the same archives we have, but they didn't really seem terribly interested in ideas.

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From the outside, it was more about entrenched, entrenching and being themselves out of position on how to use aircraft.

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And of course, the usual discussion is about the use of the former, but actually there was a lot said about the use of fighters tactically.

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Mallory Theorising About what, in 1929, for example,

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and this reaches its culmination might for us in the lectures in 1939 and was enforced on collection.

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And it's clear that I haven't quite decided what to do.

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So you have wing commander Abbey Ellwood saying the ultimate aim of fighters is to stop enemy attacks.

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Good to do this. They must obviously intercept and engage enemy bombers, if possible, before they reach their objectives.

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Okay, good. But defenders might face multiple incoming raids against different targets.

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How should we respond? An element says you should avoid nibbling at any every enemy formation,

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as opposed to bringing maximum force to bear on certain raids with the objective of destroying them utterly.

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Now, he doesn't say why that's what he thinks you should do.

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And there's clearly at least tension with his previously stated aim of disrupting said enemy raids.

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I'm so we find ourselves approaching the Battle of Britain as the dazzling map.

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So you had 11 groups down here commanded by Kick-off and 12 group here.

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Come on, the boys, preferably Mallory. And the attack was likely to come from France and Belgium, principally.

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But of course, before the war, the conception was very different. The expectation was that the attack would come over the North Sea.

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And then your organisation looks a lot more sensible.

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This evil 13 group here that's hard to reach, but 12 and 11 and then ten in the rear, which we over in the southwest.

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So tragically, Mallory, who is the commander of the group, would have expected to be very involved in the battle before the fall of France.

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That's the German view of the situation. And let's have a let's look at the protagonists.

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So Hugh Dowling, famous quote, The founding system of the Fight Command.

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And Keith Park, the commander of 11th. Very much a pragmatist.

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I guess if you don't know the doubting system, there's a lovely paper called The Information System Won the war.

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Slightly hubristic, but the information system won the Battle of Britain. It's a reasonable position.

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But you have to remember that no other Air Force was correct in 1939 had any such just the only conception of a system.

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Radar was a small part of it, but you had radar and then the observer corps voting information.

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You had the big votes and then sending the information out to the sector.

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So it's a group and sector level that was very much down in the system.

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And part was the guy in the 11th group who had to make it work.

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And in the back fuming were travelling married in 12 group to the north and of course acting squadron leader Douglas Bonner Duxford at the time.

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And they were the people who the maintenance of the big wing the idea that what you

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should do is to master your fighters before putting them into action against the enemy.

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Paul had a much more difficult situation to face because the Luftwaffe would send out

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planes and I suspect they would begin accumulating planes on the ground to overcome.

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That would not necessarily presage a raid.

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So part had to do with many things and he had to be very sparing with his forces in order to be able to be sure of intercepting,

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at least at a small force, every raid as a, I guess,

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one way of thinking about it like this you think of Nathan Bedford Forrest smacks in that first of

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the most if you come always to both you have to choose between the first and the most and part.

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Very definitely chose first. He said in a memo to his squadron commanders,

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It's better to have even one squadron of our fighters above the enemy than a wing of three flying up to meet them from beneath.

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And I guess the tension between these opposing views began to come out most

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when the Luftwaffe to switch this offensive to London on the 7th of September.

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Is it usually portrayed as a mistake?

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But I didn't really know what I had to do. And you can have to destroy the RDF.

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I thought a bit more and you have to destroy things.

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Command didn't really know whether that meant destroying the factories or the fields or bringing five command into the skies.

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Going to London meant they felt they could be sure of bringing five command into the air.

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And the first use of big wings was around this time 11.

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We would typically complain that by the time the big win got itself sorted out and ready to attack again and again, he was already going home,

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as Peter Townsend puts it, especially not mine, but in the intervening time because airfields had been bombed with bits.

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Let me go to the data. So without thinking, it's all about the dates actually.

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So you begin by going to look at the data and trying to see if there's any trend in the data, any lack of spatial narrative in the Time series.

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In mathematical terms, there is a really but there are actually two phases to the Battle of Britain.

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The first more intense and it's absolutely clear the first phase ends on the 15th of September 1940,

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which used to be celebrated as Battle of Britain Day.

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And by this time, I've been trying to make the military really believed that big wave was effective.

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I'll say a bit more about why in a minute. But let me come, first of all, to the infamous AM industry meeting of 17th October 1940.

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And if you thought a bit about Lanchester models and you've been through the archives,

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then there are all sorts of ironies in what is said in this meeting, because the people clearly not are not as numerous as they need to be.

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So it was agreed. Also the mismatch in the minutes that the more we can outnumber the enemy, the more we should shoot them.

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Yes, but you've got to think about the exchange ratio. You've got to shoot them down in disproportionately greater numbers.

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It's much more economical to put up 100 against 1200 against 112 against hunger.

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Yes. But is it better to put the phone up at once or them sequentially and make lots of 12 straight and straight out?

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It's not too clear. And that's a lot of this discussion.

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And it's clear that, you know, it's infused with this sense that concentration means mass in numbers and part can be found.

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It seems to us very hard to make it clear why they're more problematic and parsimonious approach might have been better.

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And so, as I said, the analysis of the loss ratios reveals no British advantage.

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When large numbers are, we have to engage. In fact,

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the reverse and there's an interesting problem that if you've been an analyst and operations research analyst doing this analysis at the time,

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you might have reached the reverse conclusions because an overstatement.

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So both sides would tend to overstate the number of kills, but they would disproportionately oversleep over time as.

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Higher power than one of the total numbers involved.

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In other words, the the ratio of claimed kills to numbers engaged actually increased with numbers engaged.

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And that false because if they had used claims numbers and done the analysis,

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they would actually reach the reverse conclusion that the Army would have been doing better when large numbers of that were up.

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Although of course, actually there's no excuse for claiming because the German people shot down,

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it landed on the base and then you could check it wasn't actually happening. But they didn't seem to be very quick about doing that.

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And there was still the impression that was getting the docs version in 12 group was that bad?

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Big Wings had been very effective and they hadn't in the fact they caused more

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people to die in 1941 when the matter was taking large quite a sweeps over France,

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which again thought they had done well at actually getting shot down in large numbers by the looks of cold desert,

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the British rose of flames in the autumn of so aggressive idiots.

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And so that's natural Britain. Let me see if I can move on to thirds now.

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Would you be able to answer a question? Absolutely. And you ask the question, what was the mechanism by which they're shooting down more planes?

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When there's more than that, is it that it's quick to move to the next target, the World War?

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They're not shooting down war planes, and they're more than they're not that big, he said.

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And the Germans were able to shoot down the bigger wings disproportionately.

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Oh, right. Okay. So the Germans had said so in a sense, and the idea of the importance of numbers through the twenties and thirties,

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and especially the feebleness of the Ottomans, the fighters meant that you believed that what you had to do was to attack the bombers in,

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uh, you got maybe in a line of three or four and go into them sequentially.

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The Germans led to the Spanish Civil War very rapidly. The fact that didn't work was part of the reason it wasn't clear enough.

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And they switched to using what they could from a perpetually loose force of fighters border.

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Actually, it wasn't the same kind of tactic themselves independently. In the end, we in the fall.

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And of course the US Navy evolved from similar ideas later on.

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But in 1940 and 41, the manuals still said that what you should do is deploy information.

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So okay for you, but also larger numbers. And so the RAAF would take these Spitfires over France in formation, the one in nine to be high up over.

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They just go straight through, straight through them, go shoot down something on the way straight off.

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Yeah. And then spend one pass and go oh maybe 1000 barrels.

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Um hmm. Okay.

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So moving on from the Battle of Britain, what we want to think about now is American doctrine,

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because American doctrine, ever since the war likes to conflate concentration with mass.

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It seems to me, especially U.S. Air Force doctrine. So, of course, the American experience in 44, 45 was a bit of a step up over its own territory.

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But actually, there was a long history, which was, of course, very different from 1940,

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which is that in 1940, Britain was outbuilding Germany in fighters.

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Whereas the advantage in materiel of the Allies in 1944 to 45 was absolutely enormous.

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Anyway, the American experience led them to set up a strategic air command on the coast of Somalia in 1946.

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And this conception of the importance of mass wasn't really dented by their experience in Korea, where B-29s were shot down in large numbers,

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they rationalised that it has been due to the rather to the relative technological backwardness of the B-29.

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Which meant that they came into the Vietnamese Vietnamese war believing that a massed air campaign

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directed to North Vietnam would sap the political will of the North Vietnamese to win the war.

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This turned out not to be quite right. The first thing to say, perhaps, is that the North Vietnamese have an integrated air defence system.

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The Americans have faced ground fire of all kinds, surface to air missile guns, everything, and lost a lot of bombers,

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especially the North Vietnamese, with using apparently outdated planes make 17 some 1921 was much faster than matched country's speed with.

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But actually at low levels and with a lot of wing and quite good manoeuvrability.

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The older mates were pretty good. They never had a kill ratio.

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Anything like is like 1 to 1. The Americans were always ahead, but they could be effective if used, right?

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The North Vietnamese had a ground control intercept system which made sure that they could be parsimonious

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with their forces and get them into the places where they were needed only and minimally to disrupt.

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And what tends to happen as we saw that the US Air Force would have reached the correct conclusion

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in thinking that it had to escort its strike packages properly with plenty of air force.

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But there was great attritional strain placed on U.S. air forces.

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And the fact that the logic of saying that the U.S. Air Force should make sure that it is bombers are properly escort,

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it meant that this additional strain is going to be all the greater.

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And as I say, they never beat the North Vietnamese Air Force, that particular ratio.

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But the North Vietnamese Air Force was never destroyed, was always able to contest attacks on its own airspace.

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So here I'm looking more hesitant because I'm wondering whether my colleague in Hollywood

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goes for a straight read story and style paper that one commissioner has good points and.

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So as we said from Rolling Thunder, at least 1965 to 68, the square law was not going on.

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There was clearly some asymmetry in what was happening for the North Vietnamese.

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The best thing to do is to sort of passing parsimonious leads to disrupt the F, one and five as well.

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It was supersonic in principle, but actually it had rather inferior performance and tended to get shot down a lot.

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My grandfather, I think I won't try and perhaps my dad,

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if I tried to describe in detail what actually went into US strike packages over North Vietnam.

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But you can see here what's going on.

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You have things like wild weevils, the chaff plagues, the attempts to try to disrupt the Vietnamese system before the bomb attack.

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Bombing packages escorted by Air Force.

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So we would say that not only was the ad campaign unsuccessful in terms of achieving American strategic objectives,

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the American conception of a mass terror campaign was the right way to defeat the enemy in its homeland.

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Failed in this case because of the fear that these air forces ability to continue to challenge and to attract as opposed to is the American forces.

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And we would say that politically that contributed to American defeat in Vietnam because it wasn't the major factor.

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Certainly contributed. So let me now come on to that vicious civil war that happened in the Balkans three years ago,

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where actually surprising echoes of the same kinds of things going on.

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We were I was struck by the memoir of Nigel Sharkey Ward.

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He's very combative in every sense.

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That's a striking echoes of what happened to Punk's approach in 1940 and also parks approach over mortar in 1942 to the conception of how 81 Squadron,

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the Sea Harriers Invincible should operate in attempting to prevent Argentinian attacks on a naval task force.

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And of course, what happened was that the task force, when in the Falklands found also had missile surface to air missile systems,

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which did not work as well as they might have hoped in all cases.

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But the point that's generally being made is that you don't necessarily need numbers.

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And of course, that remember, the British task force did not have numbers, large numbers, disparity areas.

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They had to decide how to use very small numbers effectively and absolutely minimise losses.

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So the traditional view of concentration would have been to minimise losses.

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You've got to sortie in large numbers. But that wasn't the way it worked.

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Usually you could quite happily have just a package of two shot of two scenarios which proved tense enough to disrupt Argentinian attacks,

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partly because certainly the Argentinean mirages tended to refuse combat, but often early stage not and involved all.

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And then you come on now back to the American experience in the Gulf War in 94, and we get back our old friend, John Warden.

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So John Warden, it was a great proponent of the master campaign.

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If. Okay. He considered that he was drawing lessons from history, including maps of the Battle of Britain.

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But in his book, The Air Campaign,

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he doesn't really explain why it is that the British did well in the Battle of Britain without committing their full force.

381
00:40:08,990 --> 00:40:14,660
So he says that typically you don't you should make sure that all your possible sorties are floating.

382
00:40:14,660 --> 00:40:20,330
You should not, you know, keep forces in reserve or keep possibilities in reserve.

383
00:40:21,620 --> 00:40:24,050
Whereas I guess we would say that actually in the Battle of Britain,

384
00:40:24,170 --> 00:40:29,570
we could perceive the matter being rather like a reverse defence of Wellington Waterloo,

385
00:40:30,680 --> 00:40:35,749
trying to keep your forces as a force in being largely out of range of the enemy forces.

386
00:40:35,750 --> 00:40:43,700
And in order to be able to optimise the use against heavy forces by fighting in your

387
00:40:43,700 --> 00:40:46,850
own preferred part of the flight envelope and on your you of your own territory.

388
00:40:49,040 --> 00:40:54,260
So Rawdon, based on his experiences in Vietnam, said, well, no, let's do something different.

389
00:40:54,280 --> 00:40:59,509
Let's try and take out the functionality of the Iraqi state by going straight

390
00:40:59,510 --> 00:41:03,829
through these levels of application through field in military population,

391
00:41:03,830 --> 00:41:06,830
infrastructure, but above all, try to get to the leadership.

392
00:41:07,700 --> 00:41:17,120
And of course, it worked very well, if you recall, but the Iraqi air force did not make any serious attempt to contest its airspace.

393
00:41:18,530 --> 00:41:27,800
We would say that this is not a campaign from which to learn or reinforce the lesson that mass intrinsically is a good thing in tactics.

394
00:41:29,840 --> 00:41:35,890
So in terms of lessons for the near future. Well, as a drone, is it?

395
00:41:35,910 --> 00:41:45,560
No. Let's think about about unmanned combat aerial vehicles and how we might use them optimally.

396
00:41:46,730 --> 00:41:51,980
And you might say, well, they have a live performance, which absolutely does not match that of mankind at the moment.

397
00:41:52,910 --> 00:42:02,630
But if they can be deployed and disrupt and make it difficult for attacking forces to stick to their plans.

398
00:42:04,910 --> 00:42:09,980
If they can somehow begin to approach realising the concept of the missile here.

399
00:42:10,280 --> 00:42:12,740
Nobody remembers that missile here from 1958.

400
00:42:13,550 --> 00:42:18,320
The American conception of the time was perhaps you didn't really need fighters, which could not fight anymore.

401
00:42:18,320 --> 00:42:21,640
What you would do is you send up a big, low flown capsule. It was a.

402
00:42:23,110 --> 00:42:27,190
Something like a dog is certainly subsonic.

403
00:42:27,760 --> 00:42:31,390
Loaded up with missiles and then use those at a distance.

404
00:42:32,140 --> 00:42:40,900
In a sense, the the Tomcat Fenix combination of the seventies is uh, uh, pushing in the same direction.

405
00:42:41,860 --> 00:42:48,579
Then maybe you can certainly reinforce your ability to contested enemy attacks

406
00:42:48,580 --> 00:42:56,080
on your base by using unmanned aerial vehicles and you put a typhoon there.

407
00:42:56,470 --> 00:43:04,600
Something that often strikes us is that attempts to combine roles in a single combat aircraft can be

408
00:43:05,080 --> 00:43:09,670
slightly dangerous in that you really want to put an expensive typhoon where it can get hit by gunfire.

409
00:43:10,390 --> 00:43:28,890
Um. So let me try and draw things together.

410
00:43:30,180 --> 00:43:35,489
We would say that during the Battle of Britain in Vietnam, of course, technology move the balance of forces in the direction of the defence.

411
00:43:35,490 --> 00:43:42,900
You have a genuinely integrated air defence, but information systems became much better than surface to air missiles came into existence.

412
00:43:45,810 --> 00:43:50,070
But the same principle of an economy of force achieved by the public in the Battle of Britain was

413
00:43:50,070 --> 00:43:54,060
certainly manifested by the North Vietnamese encountering the most powerful aircraft in history.

414
00:43:55,260 --> 00:44:00,060
And the American advantage, apparently regained by the massive offensive during the Gulf War,

415
00:44:00,900 --> 00:44:07,440
was effectively another example of architecture of overwhelming force in which the this sort of very slight,

416
00:44:07,440 --> 00:44:14,760
subtle, systemic mathematical example advanced to the defence, did not come close to offsetting the material advantage of the attacking force.

417
00:44:15,450 --> 00:44:19,890
Said the Iraqi Air Force really made no serious attempt to contest the offensive.

418
00:44:21,910 --> 00:44:26,200
But we can certainly say if there were any planes in the sky, a lot of them are already.

419
00:44:26,770 --> 00:44:31,480
But there is no advantage in mere concentration of numbers in single engagements.

420
00:44:32,110 --> 00:44:39,189
And it is certainly still true that U.S. Air Force doctrine, to a large extent, reflects concentration of mass media, saying that's wrong.

421
00:44:39,190 --> 00:44:48,170
We pulled out the primacy of mass. Now, of course, in our days we like to think about warm temperatures always already having changed.

422
00:44:48,210 --> 00:44:55,920
But we would say that in a defensive air battle, well, at some point in the near future, we hope distant future,

423
00:44:56,520 --> 00:45:02,639
the air forces of some of the developed nations might have to face contested air space again,

424
00:45:02,640 --> 00:45:05,580
and the lessons of history might have to be relearned yet again.

425
00:45:06,730 --> 00:45:14,910
And the lesson in 1940, 65, 68, and to that extent 82 is an effective defensive concentration does not depend on mass.

426
00:45:15,420 --> 00:45:19,200
The effective units of concentration can be as small as an individual aircraft.

427
00:45:19,980 --> 00:45:24,360
And the development of tactics and strategy for future air war certainly requires

428
00:45:24,360 --> 00:45:27,450
a clear and detailed understanding of the evolution of the principles of war.

429
00:45:27,450 --> 00:45:31,770
So one can understand how we arrive at the position we have from their inception to the present day.

430
00:45:32,010 --> 00:45:34,920
And, of course, as my historian colleagues would say, has a historical process.

431
00:45:36,770 --> 00:45:42,169
And certainly there are great difficulties from the metaphorical maps interpreted

432
00:45:42,170 --> 00:45:48,550
by people who whose attempts to understand the dynamics of combat goes so far.

433
00:45:48,560 --> 00:45:57,020
But I think there's a great doctrinal emphasis on the offensive in airpower and certainly in the USA.

434
00:45:57,710 --> 00:46:02,060
I guess the way I would say it is for the moment to have ten propositions confirmed.

435
00:46:02,060 --> 00:46:09,380
And he says that was always offensive. Yes, but what should the force do this just trying to frustrate and empower various propositions?

436
00:46:09,810 --> 00:46:17,330
It's not so obvious. And the assumption of symmetry between the forces and the incorporation of reason and power theory,

437
00:46:18,050 --> 00:46:24,830
we think deflects from the need to think about, to conceptualise what defensive power can and should do.

438
00:46:25,580 --> 00:46:25,980
So that.