1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:03,570 First of all, a very warm welcome to all of you. 2 00:00:04,680 --> 00:00:15,720 We all know why we're here, I think. But I just wanted to say just a few words of welcome to you and thank you to all of you for coming. 3 00:00:16,470 --> 00:00:21,210 I want to thank particularly one or two individuals and organisations. 4 00:00:22,140 --> 00:00:30,600 The first not withstanding is the other Norwegians who have very generously supported financially in this particular event. 5 00:00:31,530 --> 00:00:34,680 And we are very grateful for you for that support. 6 00:00:35,310 --> 00:00:42,780 There's also some unsung heroes, not least Ruth, Jeanette, Rosemary Oliver. 7 00:00:43,650 --> 00:00:48,719 You may not realise just how much effort has gone in behind the scenes to get all 8 00:00:48,720 --> 00:00:52,500 of you in the right place at the right time and to make this event take place. 9 00:00:52,510 --> 00:00:56,670 And I just want to say thank you very much indeed for your work. 10 00:00:57,900 --> 00:01:13,650 The we have been through a period of significant conflict and it's our interest at the moment has been very much on civil military relations. 11 00:01:14,430 --> 00:01:21,540 And I think that the emphasis of that is almost invariably on what the elites do. 12 00:01:21,780 --> 00:01:28,440 Governments talk to senior military, naval and air personnel and equally what advice they give back. 13 00:01:29,700 --> 00:01:35,759 But one of the things that's made Hugh Strong so different from the discussion we've had in the past, 14 00:01:35,760 --> 00:01:43,770 and that subject is really his insistence that we involve the other elements of the Trinity, 15 00:01:44,610 --> 00:01:54,480 the people, that there should be a public dialogue about defence, about security, about the native structure and about decision making. 16 00:01:55,020 --> 00:02:01,080 It is perhaps to our regret, so all of us, that the Chilcot inquiry has not yet been published. 17 00:02:01,590 --> 00:02:04,590 I think we are always in an interest to see what that's produced. 18 00:02:05,280 --> 00:02:15,390 But the fact that you are here and we are having a public discussion me is wonderful and the fact that we have huge speaking on it this evening. 19 00:02:16,290 --> 00:02:20,880 So thank you very much indeed. Professor said he thought I had to hand it to you. 20 00:02:34,380 --> 00:02:42,300 Rob, thank you very much. And, of course, I'm just thank all those that you've also thanked for making this possible. 21 00:02:42,330 --> 00:02:46,500 It is actually truly wonderful to see so many friends. 22 00:02:46,590 --> 00:02:54,569 Some are very longstanding indeed. Some of you know, things that I probably don't want you to repeat in our current context. 23 00:02:54,570 --> 00:03:01,680 And some of you, I hope, are not that old friends and therefore see me as the more respectable citizen, at least some of the time. 24 00:03:03,420 --> 00:03:08,040 It is. I hear the echo. Let me just say the acoustics. 25 00:03:08,040 --> 00:03:16,989 Okay. I think we we had Dave Petraeus change actual program, had Dave Petraeus here giving a lecture last year or he wasn't a lecture. 26 00:03:16,990 --> 00:03:20,220 It was a conversation with Nick Parker. And I said, it is a debating chamber. 27 00:03:20,580 --> 00:03:25,130 It must be okay to do it without any assistance on the audio side. 28 00:03:25,140 --> 00:03:30,150 And then afterwards, Paul Roof got a barrage of emails from people saying they couldn't hear. 29 00:03:31,170 --> 00:03:41,040 So this is erring on the side of caution. What I want to say and Rob Trail, it is a bit about strategy in democracy. 30 00:03:41,040 --> 00:03:45,010 I have to say I chose the title when Ali Ibrahim is said to me, What's your title? 31 00:03:45,030 --> 00:03:50,250 I said, No strategy in democracy. I said, I thought about it rather more recently. 32 00:03:51,750 --> 00:04:00,030 But I think, as Rob said, it is something which I feel one way or another has been close to my intellectual interests. 33 00:04:00,810 --> 00:04:10,980 And I want to begin with something that also reflects what I never expected to be doing when I came to Oxford in the end of 2001, beginning 2002. 34 00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:21,660 And that is talk about a visit to Afghanistan in June 2012 on the anniversary of Waterloo on the 18th of June. 35 00:04:22,110 --> 00:04:27,360 I went with a group of other academics and policy wonks and so on, 36 00:04:27,360 --> 00:04:33,780 from NATO member states to Kabul University to meet a class of law and politics students. 37 00:04:34,860 --> 00:04:40,730 And naively, we had imagined that with the election of President Karzai or not his election sorry, 38 00:04:40,920 --> 00:04:45,970 the election of his successor on the agenda, that that was what we were going to talk about. 39 00:04:45,990 --> 00:04:51,870 Indeed, I was rather looking forward to hearing what they would say about President Karzai's succession. 40 00:04:53,370 --> 00:04:58,200 In practice, the Afghans wanted to talk about the security position, 41 00:04:58,530 --> 00:05:06,180 about NATO's ongoing commitment to Afghanistan, and about the problems of Taliban safe havens in Pakistan. 42 00:05:07,890 --> 00:05:18,630 One particularly outraged, huge referred to President Obama's visit to Kabul just over six weeks previously on the 1st of May 2012. 43 00:05:19,470 --> 00:05:23,430 The President and the President of Afghanistan, Karzai, 44 00:05:23,760 --> 00:05:32,010 had signed the enduring strategic partnership between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America. 45 00:05:33,090 --> 00:05:44,760 The agreement included arrangements for a long term security partnership and for the possibility of U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan after 2014, 46 00:05:45,300 --> 00:05:52,140 as it said, for the purposes of training Afghan forces and targeting the remnants of al Qaeda. 47 00:05:53,700 --> 00:06:07,260 The agreement was trumpeted on Afghan television that day, both by Obama and by Karzai, but that agreement was not what agitated the Afghan students. 48 00:06:08,280 --> 00:06:13,380 What has outraged him was that in the early hours of the following morning, 49 00:06:13,680 --> 00:06:18,280 that was to say one minute passed for having just checked this on the Internet. 50 00:06:18,300 --> 00:06:22,140 One minute, Miles, four in the morning, Afghan time. 51 00:06:23,550 --> 00:06:30,570 President Obama had been on television again and on this occasion he had been speaking, 52 00:06:30,570 --> 00:06:36,180 not the Afghan people, but to the people of the United States from Bagram Airbase. 53 00:06:37,320 --> 00:06:41,460 And he told the American people, our troops will be coming home. 54 00:06:43,170 --> 00:06:46,290 Both statements are, of course, compatible. 55 00:06:46,770 --> 00:06:49,860 But for this Afghan, here was one voice. 56 00:06:50,190 --> 00:06:59,870 Earlier in the day, the previous day, saying the United States was saying and here was another voice saying, the United States are going. 57 00:07:02,640 --> 00:07:06,810 Famously in 2005. General Sir Rupert Smith, 58 00:07:06,990 --> 00:07:10,889 who's been a very good friend through changing character all program I'm sorry he can't be here 59 00:07:10,890 --> 00:07:17,160 today wrote a book which he called The Futility of Force The Art of War in the Modern World, 60 00:07:17,910 --> 00:07:22,290 in which he characterised today's wars as wars amongst the people. 61 00:07:22,650 --> 00:07:29,130 There are moments when I read essays and dissertations which quote that which just make me feel, you know, let's move on. 62 00:07:30,210 --> 00:07:33,230 But it was a fair enough observation. 63 00:07:33,350 --> 00:07:38,120 In that it reflected his experience in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia. 64 00:07:38,690 --> 00:07:47,660 And of course when he wrote it he caught the emerging concerns of British and American soldiers in Iraq and in Afghanistan. 65 00:07:48,650 --> 00:07:57,260 They were engaged as armies in most counterinsurgency campaigns have been engaged in securing the loyalty of the local population. 66 00:07:58,340 --> 00:08:08,390 Wars amongst the people have characterised the operating environment in which armies have often and especially recently found themselves. 67 00:08:10,190 --> 00:08:16,220 My focus this evening is not with the operating environment but with the strategic context. 68 00:08:17,060 --> 00:08:22,940 What does war among the people means in the making of national strategy? 69 00:08:24,000 --> 00:08:32,660 My concern is not so much with the capacity, but the loyalties of people caught in the crossfire of a combat zone. 70 00:08:33,530 --> 00:08:39,230 But with the role of peoples in mature democracies, in the formation of strategic decisions. 71 00:08:40,940 --> 00:08:48,740 In May 2012, President Obama gave one message to the people of Afghanistan and another to the people of the United States. 72 00:08:49,910 --> 00:08:58,130 He told each what he thought they wanted to hear, and in the process he caused confusion and disarray. 73 00:08:59,900 --> 00:09:08,690 He's not alone. Our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, said in 2010 that Britain would end its war in Afghanistan by 2015. 74 00:09:08,900 --> 00:09:15,229 Of course we ended it formally just before that and went on to explain that he had set a 75 00:09:15,230 --> 00:09:21,650 clear withdrawal date because the British people expected it and they were right to do so. 76 00:09:23,120 --> 00:09:27,649 He said nothing about the objectives of the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom's government 77 00:09:27,650 --> 00:09:33,470 within Afghanistan or the potential consequences of the timing for the Afghan people, 78 00:09:33,920 --> 00:09:39,140 or what a desirable outcome might look like for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. 79 00:09:41,740 --> 00:09:45,970 Both the president of the United States and the prime minister of the United Kingdom 80 00:09:46,210 --> 00:09:51,700 were effectively treating their electorates as partners in the decision making process. 81 00:09:53,200 --> 00:10:01,570 That, for me is much more significant in the making of strategy than waging wars amongst the people in the latter. 82 00:10:01,870 --> 00:10:06,820 The people are treated as the passive objects of influence in the former. 83 00:10:07,090 --> 00:10:10,360 They become active participants in the formation of policy. 84 00:10:13,000 --> 00:10:18,070 But as President Obama's mixed message on the 1st of May 2012 showed, 85 00:10:18,670 --> 00:10:25,180 the people in the face of war and the people at home are not so easily separated, 86 00:10:26,080 --> 00:10:30,580 especially if we follow the cliché which we don't seem to be able to avoid, 87 00:10:31,210 --> 00:10:35,620 and of which we are so often reminded that we live in an interconnected world, 88 00:10:36,340 --> 00:10:46,150 a world in which the transmission of news lies no longer in the hands of professional journalists, or can be so easily managed by governments. 89 00:10:48,130 --> 00:10:55,660 Today, the message given in the theatre of operations cannot in practice diverge from that given at 90 00:10:55,660 --> 00:11:03,400 home without running the risk of inconsistency at best and direct self-contradiction at worst. 91 00:11:04,750 --> 00:11:09,970 Both Obama and Cameron chose deadlines for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, 92 00:11:10,300 --> 00:11:15,370 which bore less relationship to the possible situation in Afghanistan, 93 00:11:15,790 --> 00:11:22,330 and much more to the political and electoral situations within the United States and the United Kingdom. 94 00:11:23,530 --> 00:11:27,750 Do I need to move this thing down of it? I can hear, you know, better. 95 00:11:28,990 --> 00:11:32,140 Good. I'm getting a note from Audrey, so must be all right. 96 00:11:33,730 --> 00:11:44,440 Their objectives were defined less in terms of identifiable objectives within Afghanistan and more in terms of what came to be called exit strategies. 97 00:11:45,490 --> 00:11:52,990 Exits are not strategies. Exits are perhaps means or possibly ways, but they're certainly not ends. 98 00:11:55,240 --> 00:11:58,750 But by admitting the role of democracy in strategy, 99 00:11:59,200 --> 00:12:06,849 the leaders of democratic states have put themselves between a rock and a hard place in order to explain 100 00:12:06,850 --> 00:12:14,080 to their nation why their own forces are engaged in faraway places of which their peoples know little. 101 00:12:14,770 --> 00:12:18,970 They used the vocabulary of mass mobilisation borrowed from the Second World War. 102 00:12:20,470 --> 00:12:28,450 They are ready to let these wars be called wars of choice, but they use vocabulary which suggests they are wars of necessity. 103 00:12:31,390 --> 00:12:38,530 To be fair to President Obama, he has been much more circumspect in this regard than George W Bush was. 104 00:12:39,610 --> 00:12:43,870 He was only too happy to cite Pearl Harbour after the 911 attacks. 105 00:12:44,680 --> 00:12:52,090 And, of course, Tony Blair compared the potential appeasement of Saddam Hussein with the appeasement of Adolf Hitler. 106 00:12:53,740 --> 00:13:00,700 But the consequence of Obama's circumspection has been a reputation for indecision, for lack of clarity, 107 00:13:01,090 --> 00:13:08,140 and for a failure to provide the strategic leadership required not just by the United States, but by NATO and the West as a whole. 108 00:13:09,940 --> 00:13:16,960 The alternative is no better. As David Cameron's record shows, three times as prime minister. 109 00:13:17,260 --> 00:13:23,890 He has spoken of an existential conflict of a generational war or of direct threats to the British way of life. 110 00:13:24,460 --> 00:13:34,390 In 2011 over Libya, in January 2013, over the Al Qaeda attack on the BP gas installation in Algeria and in June 2015, 111 00:13:34,660 --> 00:13:41,230 most recently, of course, of the ice inspired attack on British citizens in Sousse in Tunisia. 112 00:13:42,820 --> 00:13:48,040 What his words exposed is the gap between the rhetoric and his intent. 113 00:13:49,030 --> 00:13:56,020 He speaks big, but does little for a people engaged in so many existential wars simultaneously. 114 00:13:56,470 --> 00:14:02,590 You will look remarkably comfortable and secure, remarkably at peace and remarkably unconcerned. 115 00:14:03,010 --> 00:14:05,830 And in that, you reflect most of British society. 116 00:14:07,600 --> 00:14:15,399 The effect of democracy on strategic decision making seems to be that national leaders have to overpromise and then 117 00:14:15,400 --> 00:14:23,140 under-deliver or overdramatise and then underperform when they should be under promising and over delivering. 118 00:14:24,250 --> 00:14:30,280 If substance matched rhetoric, Britain will be doing much more than committing 2% of its GDP to defence. 119 00:14:30,700 --> 00:14:37,150 If indeed it is committing that, CDSs will probably put me right on whether I've got that right or not. 120 00:14:38,530 --> 00:14:48,720 There is a conundrum here. Democratic leaders are under pressure to hype the threat precisely because their electorates don't feel threatened. 121 00:14:49,860 --> 00:14:53,850 And yet, the more they do so, the less convinced the public seem to be. 122 00:14:55,110 --> 00:15:01,860 Gordon Brown, as prime minister, explained the war in Afghanistan in terms related to domestic security. 123 00:15:02,580 --> 00:15:08,280 He said British troops were fighting, killing and dying in Helmand to keep the streets of London safe. 124 00:15:08,670 --> 00:15:13,500 But the public was not convinced and nor were many of the soldiers. 125 00:15:15,750 --> 00:15:20,910 Democracy has so associated itself with material and personal security, 126 00:15:21,750 --> 00:15:26,340 with the functioning of liberal capitalism, that it has divorced itself from war. 127 00:15:27,390 --> 00:15:34,410 The identity of the state itself is weakened by its reliance on supranational organisations like the EU, 128 00:15:34,440 --> 00:15:43,530 NATO and the United Nations and by its passing of what used to be state functions to private companies or to multinational corporations. 129 00:15:44,550 --> 00:15:49,650 This process applies even within defence. With the growth of private military companies. 130 00:15:51,720 --> 00:15:56,070 Democracy has become associated with peace, not with war. 131 00:15:57,330 --> 00:16:07,320 Democracies are characterised as risk and casualty averse, and they are seen as reluctant to be taxed in order to provide funds for national security. 132 00:16:08,940 --> 00:16:14,160 Underpinning this set of assumptions is the master narrative of the democratic peace. 133 00:16:15,960 --> 00:16:19,830 In 1989, Jack Levi wrote that, to quote him, 134 00:16:20,400 --> 00:16:28,470 The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations. 135 00:16:30,500 --> 00:16:42,650 The belief in democratic peace argues that democracies rarely go to war with one another and that that is a consequence of the character of democracy. 136 00:16:43,940 --> 00:16:51,980 Of course, democratic peace theory does not rule out the probability or possibility of democracies fighting non democracies. 137 00:16:52,790 --> 00:16:58,790 But that in itself raises the question of what a democracy is and what is not a democracy. 138 00:17:00,110 --> 00:17:04,250 In 1914 and I got it right from the First World War, of course. 139 00:17:04,640 --> 00:17:12,770 In 1914, Britain had the lowest level of male suffrage of any of the belligerents, original belligerents except Hungary. 140 00:17:13,700 --> 00:17:17,570 About 60% of British males aged over 21 had the vote. 141 00:17:18,860 --> 00:17:21,800 In Germany, every male was able to vote. 142 00:17:23,230 --> 00:17:32,260 Even states that political scientists would classify as non democracies are not necessarily states without mass participation. 143 00:17:33,070 --> 00:17:39,790 A point. True. Not just as Germany in the First World War, but also of Germany in the Second World War. 144 00:17:41,230 --> 00:17:50,200 The assumption that things are otherwise is a product of the master narrative of liberalism, an inheritor of the weakened view of history, 145 00:17:50,620 --> 00:17:58,090 and an assumption that liberal democracy will produce not just domestic but also international harmony. 146 00:18:00,040 --> 00:18:04,750 Its logical corollary is that democracies find it hard to make war. 147 00:18:05,860 --> 00:18:12,790 There is, after all, in many minds, an inherent tension between the words I have chosen for my title this evening. 148 00:18:13,030 --> 00:18:18,850 Strategy and Democracy. Historically, this is absurd. 149 00:18:19,870 --> 00:18:28,330 From classical Athens to modern America. Democracies have waged war and done so through a participatory decision making system. 150 00:18:31,360 --> 00:18:37,329 Much of the city's history of the Peloponnesian War, I should say quickly, as I was leaving college just now, 151 00:18:37,330 --> 00:18:41,730 I saw Simon Hornblower as I was going out to Massachusetts to be in the eye. 152 00:18:42,040 --> 00:18:43,900 Well, I'm not this idiot in his. 153 00:18:44,200 --> 00:18:50,460 I thought I should stop and just check what I was going to say was okay, but I didn't have the time having left it too late. 154 00:18:50,470 --> 00:18:58,750 But I think the bit is pretty unexceptional. Much of the city's history of the Peloponnesian War is concerned with exactly this 155 00:18:59,560 --> 00:19:06,340 the problems of Athens as a democracy in waging war coherently and consistently. 156 00:19:07,720 --> 00:19:10,780 I'm not going to go back to ancient history. 157 00:19:11,080 --> 00:19:16,840 Instead, I'm going to begin this series of reflections with the Enlightenment and the 18th century. 158 00:19:19,420 --> 00:19:26,770 The idea of the Democratic piece, after all, takes its argument from Immanuel Kant essay on Perpetual Peace. 159 00:19:28,030 --> 00:19:34,390 Kant argued that republics would enjoy peace with other republics, and he wrote that in 1795, 160 00:19:34,750 --> 00:19:40,480 when Europe was still exploring the foothills of a series of wars which would last another 20 years, 161 00:19:42,100 --> 00:19:51,430 wars driven by the French Republic, fighting as it claimed for liberty, equality and fraternity against a league of absolute monarchies. 162 00:19:52,960 --> 00:19:56,710 Despite the horrors which the wars of the French Revolution brought to Europe, 163 00:19:57,220 --> 00:20:02,980 most French revolutionaries, at least in 1795, would not have disagreed with Kant. 164 00:20:03,730 --> 00:20:07,990 They, as they saw it, were waging war to bring perpetual peace. 165 00:20:09,490 --> 00:20:15,970 The reason that France found itself at war, they believed, was not the fault of France, 166 00:20:16,660 --> 00:20:21,639 but the fault of autocracies and absolute monarchies that failed to recognise the 167 00:20:21,640 --> 00:20:26,170 need to democratise the failed to recognise the need to give power to the people. 168 00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:31,240 But against this narrative ran a powerful alternative. 169 00:20:32,080 --> 00:20:37,840 The notion that democratisation was a tool for national mobilisation in a time of war. 170 00:20:40,480 --> 00:20:51,460 The French officer, the aristocratic and enlightened Kant to bear, first published his essay General The Tactic anonymously in 1770, 171 00:20:52,150 --> 00:20:58,150 but then under his own name in 1772 and in an English translation in 1781. 172 00:20:59,410 --> 00:21:07,510 Most of those who quote Quebecer do so by citing a passage which I too will quote partly because I want to come back to it later. 173 00:21:09,100 --> 00:21:11,860 Let us suppose in Europe be better, right? 174 00:21:12,310 --> 00:21:20,020 Let's suppose in Europe there was the spring of a vigorous people with genius with power and a happier form of government, 175 00:21:20,710 --> 00:21:29,680 a set of people that's a strict virtue. And the national soldiery joined a fixed plan of aggrandisement who never lost sight of that system, 176 00:21:30,250 --> 00:21:39,400 who knowing how to carry on the war with little expense and subsist by that conquests, was not reduce the necessity of laying down their arms. 177 00:21:39,610 --> 00:21:46,630 By the calculation of finances, Gilbert then proceeded to argue that for France, 178 00:21:46,990 --> 00:21:52,990 the first step to a successful exterior policy was domestic political reform. 179 00:21:54,930 --> 00:21:58,290 Interior politics, having thus prepared us things. 180 00:21:59,460 --> 00:22:07,470 He went on cable, went on with what facility external politics can resolve upon the system of her own 181 00:22:07,470 --> 00:22:13,080 interests in opposition to her foreign ones by the raising of a respect for military power. 182 00:22:14,220 --> 00:22:24,300 How easy it is, give our right to have armies invincible in a state where subjects are citizens, where they cherish and revere government, 183 00:22:24,810 --> 00:22:30,660 where they are fond of glory, where they are not intimidated at the idea of toiling for the general good. 184 00:22:32,910 --> 00:22:36,840 As an army officer, Gebauer was, of course, a servant of the king. 185 00:22:37,830 --> 00:22:41,670 But he dedicated his book not to Louis, but to my country. 186 00:22:42,810 --> 00:22:47,040 He included the king of France, his father, as he called him within that. 187 00:22:47,610 --> 00:22:52,079 But he also addressed the book to ministers, its administrators, that is, 188 00:22:52,080 --> 00:22:58,770 the administrators of France, to all ranks of the state, its members to the people, its children. 189 00:22:59,760 --> 00:23:06,749 He looked forward to the day when all its members would be united, as he put it, may the ruler and his subjects, 190 00:23:06,750 --> 00:23:12,270 the high and low degrees of the community, feel themselves honoured with the title of citizens. 191 00:23:14,310 --> 00:23:18,540 Quebecers died after a short illness on the 6th of May 1790. 192 00:23:19,620 --> 00:23:24,600 By then, the French Revolution had not reached its apogee in the terror in the terror, 193 00:23:25,470 --> 00:23:34,350 nor had the transformation of the French state yet revolutionised the structure of the French army by 1795. 194 00:23:34,620 --> 00:23:37,830 Those developments, both of them were much more obvious. 195 00:23:38,640 --> 00:23:42,990 Revolutionary France treated those who opposed the logic of its own position. 196 00:23:43,470 --> 00:23:50,420 Its completion of the revolution with universal principles took it to conclude its right, 197 00:23:50,430 --> 00:23:55,290 to conclude that its enemies were politically backward in the day. 198 00:23:55,620 --> 00:24:00,660 Catholic counterrevolutionary peasants were not treated as naive and well-educated, 199 00:24:01,020 --> 00:24:07,110 but as part of a conspiracy against the revolution and its government, they were treated instead, therefore, 200 00:24:07,380 --> 00:24:11,400 as political actors and about quarter of a million men, 201 00:24:11,400 --> 00:24:20,130 women and children for a quarter of the population of the modern day were exterminated by the revolutionary armies in 1793 1794. 202 00:24:21,540 --> 00:24:28,140 Captain Dupuy of the French Revolution armies wrote from the von Date and his sister in January 1794. 203 00:24:29,010 --> 00:24:32,400 Wherever we go, we are bringing fire and death. 204 00:24:33,030 --> 00:24:39,900 A sex. Nothing is being respected. Yesterday, one of our detachments burned a village. 205 00:24:40,680 --> 00:24:43,830 One volunteer killed three women with his own hands. 206 00:24:44,970 --> 00:24:48,210 It is atrocious, but. And this is the crux. 207 00:24:48,990 --> 00:24:56,790 But the safety of the republic demands imperatively part of that urgency related to the 208 00:24:56,790 --> 00:25:02,490 fact that revolutionary France faced an external threat as well as an internal one. 209 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:14,819 It was simultaneously fighting the war of the first coalition against Britain, Austria and Prussia in 1797, a hanoverian serving in the Prussian army. 210 00:25:14,820 --> 00:25:18,300 The son of an NCO, Gerhart Scharnhorst, 211 00:25:18,720 --> 00:25:27,180 published his general reflections on the armies in the Revolutionary Wars and tried to provide some sort of explanation why 212 00:25:27,180 --> 00:25:34,380 the French Revolutionary Army had so surprised those of the old order and had formed with the fort with so much success. 213 00:25:35,400 --> 00:25:43,680 And his answer to that problem was that the French army had been transformed by the revolution, by the political impulse given to its army, 214 00:25:43,680 --> 00:25:53,730 as a result, by the identification of the soldier with the nation for scharnhorst as rather military reformers in the following decade and more. 215 00:25:54,330 --> 00:26:01,500 Citizenship created soldiers with a stake in the nation who were ready to fight and die because they had rights. 216 00:26:02,010 --> 00:26:12,510 Then with the soldiers, a pre 1789 monarchists in the wars against Napoleon Prussians were forced to sit on their hands 217 00:26:12,930 --> 00:26:21,150 between the end of that war to the first coalition in 1795 and the year in a campaign of 1806, 218 00:26:21,570 --> 00:26:27,000 and again to sit on their hands after the Treaty of Till said to be to 12th in 1808, 219 00:26:27,240 --> 00:26:31,650 beginning of 1808, and the war of so-called National Liberation in 1813. 220 00:26:32,940 --> 00:26:39,870 And the officers who were associated with Scharnhorst, including, of course, no Tanakh and Clausewitz, 221 00:26:40,350 --> 00:26:44,970 look to Spain and Italy for evidence of effective resistance against France. 222 00:26:45,390 --> 00:26:50,310 Resistance waged by guerrillas motivated as they saw it by national sentiment. 223 00:26:51,870 --> 00:26:59,030 Scharnhorst was a father figure to Clausewitz. And Clausewitz shared the frustration of his mentor and of knights. 224 00:27:00,030 --> 00:27:05,429 And together, they plotted a war of national liberation in defiance of the wishes of their own. 225 00:27:05,430 --> 00:27:05,790 King. 226 00:27:06,930 --> 00:27:15,030 In February 1812, Clausewitz sent a long three part memorandum to Nice Enough, which call on the German nation to wage a war of national liberation, 227 00:27:15,510 --> 00:27:21,720 mobilising the entire population, ready to use terror and prepare to die rather than to admit defeat. 228 00:27:22,710 --> 00:27:31,260 He specifically quoted an event going back to that first quotation from Baron, the most familiar one, even if, of course, being Clausewitz. 229 00:27:31,470 --> 00:27:39,030 He never acknowledged his sources. He called for a people with genius, with power, and a happy form of government. 230 00:27:41,100 --> 00:27:46,440 This was the clown prince who, when he wrote a book, chapter three of On War, 231 00:27:46,860 --> 00:27:55,050 identified the French Revolution as having put the state's mobilisation for war on a new and unprecedented level. 232 00:27:55,860 --> 00:28:01,740 To quote Michael Howard and Peter Praise translation suddenly war again. 233 00:28:02,130 --> 00:28:05,190 The last time had been Roman Republic. 234 00:28:05,460 --> 00:28:08,460 Suddenly, war again became the business of the people. 235 00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:13,200 The people of 30 millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens. 236 00:28:13,740 --> 00:28:19,170 The people became a participant in war instead of governments and armies as heretofore. 237 00:28:19,170 --> 00:28:25,500 The full weight of the nation as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. 238 00:28:27,780 --> 00:28:38,490 Clausewitz was clear about what had happened, and the question for him was whether that would be the pattern in the future from now on. 239 00:28:38,520 --> 00:28:39,090 He asked, 240 00:28:39,300 --> 00:28:47,430 Will every war in Europe we waged with the full resources of the state and therefore have to be fought only over major issues that affect the people? 241 00:28:48,300 --> 00:28:53,640 Or shall we again see a gradual separation taking place between government and people? 242 00:28:55,170 --> 00:29:05,940 Clausewitz was clear about the enormous contribution the heart and temper of a nation can make to the sum total of its political of of its politics, 243 00:29:07,140 --> 00:29:10,440 of its politics, its war potential, and its fighting strength. 244 00:29:12,120 --> 00:29:20,250 Robb's already referred to the Clausewitz in Trinity, and this is where the Trinity fits in, in book one of On War. 245 00:29:20,460 --> 00:29:27,870 Clausewitz described war as being made up of three parts passion, the play probability and chance and reason. 246 00:29:28,860 --> 00:29:38,040 He then associated each of those qualities with three particular groups of actors, with the passion, with people, 247 00:29:38,310 --> 00:29:43,950 the player, probability and chance, with the army and its commanders, and reason with the government. 248 00:29:45,150 --> 00:29:52,140 But he also made absolutely clear in a way which for too many modern, which only a way which too many modern readers neglect, 249 00:29:53,010 --> 00:30:01,020 that those relations, the relations between those three component parts over the primary trinity of the secondary trinity were not fixed. 250 00:30:01,950 --> 00:30:05,550 He did not rule out a people that was passionate and rational. 251 00:30:06,420 --> 00:30:14,190 Indeed, much else that he wrote about 19th century warfare was conditioned on the realisation that 252 00:30:14,190 --> 00:30:20,280 European civilisation did not preclude the need to abandon moderation and embrace terror. 253 00:30:21,600 --> 00:30:26,100 Nor is the relationship between war and policy fixed in the Trinity. 254 00:30:26,430 --> 00:30:34,020 It too can fluctuate with the rational elements of policy of most by passion or by the contingencies of the battlefield. 255 00:30:35,670 --> 00:30:43,500 The problem with recent largely, predominantly Anglophone readings of John War is this determination to wrest it 256 00:30:43,830 --> 00:30:48,780 within a view of strategy that sees a linear relationship between policy and war, 257 00:30:49,500 --> 00:30:57,030 and an elite relationship between generals and politicians in the making of strategy and the making of strategy, 258 00:30:57,030 --> 00:31:04,800 which then excludes the people, the roles of the people, and possibly the passion becomes subordinated. 259 00:31:06,870 --> 00:31:12,690 To be fair, after the defeat from Napoleon, Clausewitz could be seen as colluding in this process. 260 00:31:13,710 --> 00:31:23,760 The French Revolution was seen to have wrought war protracted, destructive, and to use a neologism total to Europe. 261 00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:28,170 Preventing revolution could prevent war. 262 00:31:28,980 --> 00:31:37,510 And so separating revolution from war and war from revolution was high on the list of most monarchs when they met at Vienna in 1815. 263 00:31:38,820 --> 00:31:43,469 One of them was Friedrich Wilhelm, the third of Prussia, whose authority Clausewitz, 264 00:31:43,470 --> 00:31:50,100 had so directly challenged 1812 by appealing to the German nation rather than to the Prussian king, 265 00:31:50,520 --> 00:31:53,940 and by then resigning from the Prussian army and from the Royal Service. 266 00:31:54,400 --> 00:32:02,020 To serve in the army of Russia. By 1819, Clausewitz knew which side his bread was buttered if he wanted a job. 267 00:32:02,560 --> 00:32:11,260 And he realised that if he required and depended on preferment in post-war Prussia, he better moderate his proposals for military reform, 268 00:32:11,620 --> 00:32:17,110 specifically his proposals for the reform of the land that carried directly political implications. 269 00:32:17,350 --> 00:32:21,970 And said something about some small form of implicit citizenship. 270 00:32:23,650 --> 00:32:29,139 So the idealistic conflation of citizenship and military service of political awareness 271 00:32:29,140 --> 00:32:36,520 and the defence of the nation was moderated after 1815 and not just in Prussia. 272 00:32:37,360 --> 00:32:45,370 Armies became less instruments for national mobilisation and more tools of counterrevolutionary domestic order. 273 00:32:46,360 --> 00:32:56,350 The debate about democratisation of war became one bound up, above all, with the idea of the nation and arms of military service in its terms. 274 00:32:57,070 --> 00:33:02,620 And conscription became less a manifestation of liberation and political awareness. 275 00:33:03,340 --> 00:33:14,650 The full idealist idealised form it had had in the 1790s, and now more a mechanism for social control, broadly speaking. 276 00:33:14,830 --> 00:33:18,400 In 1848, armies remained loyal to their governments. 277 00:33:20,170 --> 00:33:29,319 By 1914, mass armies could be raised without too much attention being paid to the corollary that they 278 00:33:29,320 --> 00:33:34,810 should see themselves as politically aware partners in the making of national strategy. 279 00:33:36,190 --> 00:33:43,180 The debate hadn't gone away. Of course, it remained vibrant in France, not least thanks to John Jeu, as is La Nouvelle, 280 00:33:44,080 --> 00:33:49,570 and with socialists, of course, arguing that citizen soldiers would fight purely defensive wars. 281 00:33:50,800 --> 00:33:59,470 But in 1916, Britain could introduce conscription without simultaneously adopting universal military male suffrage. 282 00:34:00,340 --> 00:34:08,320 In 19 1718, Britain, France and Germany all addressed the issue of political education in their armed forces, 283 00:34:08,650 --> 00:34:12,520 believing it was important to reduce motivated bodies of men. 284 00:34:13,060 --> 00:34:16,270 But in none of them was that programme adequately fulfilled. 285 00:34:17,680 --> 00:34:19,300 Even in revolutionary Russia, 286 00:34:20,230 --> 00:34:28,060 where of course there were advocates for soldiers who should be political or work politically aware, most evidently frenzy. 287 00:34:28,570 --> 00:34:34,600 There were others who said professional qualifications to trump political ones, and for that reason, 288 00:34:34,780 --> 00:34:43,120 Trotsky argued that Tsarist officers should be included within the Revolutionary Army and in Germany at the war's end. 289 00:34:43,270 --> 00:34:51,070 Because Mikhail Geier has written Ludendorff called in October for national mobilisation for a nation in arms, 290 00:34:51,670 --> 00:34:59,260 but it remained an idea in embryo which others turned against and which indeed contributed to the loss of respect, 291 00:34:59,530 --> 00:35:04,120 which ludendorff experienced that in the period leading up to the armistice. 292 00:35:06,100 --> 00:35:11,890 I am not suggesting that the First World War ended the idea of the political but politicised soldier. 293 00:35:12,790 --> 00:35:20,560 The men who would fight because they were committed to a set of over arching values were still there. 294 00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:23,230 In the Second World War. 295 00:35:23,440 --> 00:35:32,830 Both the Weimar, as it's understood by Omer Berkoff at any rate, and the Soviet army would stress the value systems for which they fought. 296 00:35:33,580 --> 00:35:39,940 And as in the First World War, the armies of Western democracies again established programs of political education. 297 00:35:41,410 --> 00:35:48,340 But something much more profound began to happen, at least in the ideas of these Western democracies. 298 00:35:49,810 --> 00:35:58,180 Those who were motivated for political reasons to fight were more often seen to be insurgents, radicals and revolutionaries. 299 00:35:59,140 --> 00:36:07,030 The First World War changed the relationship of established democratic paths to revolution and its place within war. 300 00:36:08,830 --> 00:36:20,410 Popular mobilisation and political awareness, universal suffrage and a mass popular press made the people full participants in the war. 301 00:36:21,550 --> 00:36:32,470 But it also made the commitment of the people itself to the war and to the state a potential source of weakness in the Napoleonic Wars. 302 00:36:32,800 --> 00:36:36,310 Revolution had led to war in the First World War. 303 00:36:36,640 --> 00:36:48,610 War led to revolution. That was, of course, a fear which many national leaders expressed in July 1914 itself, including strip of grey in this country. 304 00:36:49,210 --> 00:36:53,050 Bettmann holding in Germany and Tsar Nicholas in Russia. 305 00:36:54,670 --> 00:37:02,080 Once the war broke out, Germany aimed to export revolution to the empires of its enemies to Britain, France and Russia. 306 00:37:02,800 --> 00:37:09,370 But it did so not just in a colonial context, but also in Dublin and ultimately in Petrograd. 307 00:37:10,570 --> 00:37:14,380 Britain did the same exporting revolution to the Ottoman Empire, 308 00:37:14,620 --> 00:37:21,520 and in 19 1718 the Allies were ready to promote revolution also within Germany and Austria-Hungary. 309 00:37:22,580 --> 00:37:28,610 Democracy has become a source of vulnerability as well as a strength. 310 00:37:29,240 --> 00:37:39,560 It was no longer just about its capacity for mass mobilisation, but also potentially a source of introspection and domestic concern. 311 00:37:40,790 --> 00:37:50,029 After Britain's after 1918, Britain's blockade of Germany became rationalised as the instrument that had persuaded the German 312 00:37:50,030 --> 00:37:55,880 people to turn against their Kaiser and to overthrow that government in the final stages of the war. 313 00:37:57,350 --> 00:38:04,970 In 1930 940. Britain planned to repeat the act to use economic warfare once more. 314 00:38:06,080 --> 00:38:10,640 But with the overrunning of most of Europe, that was no longer a possibility. 315 00:38:11,600 --> 00:38:22,940 Instead, by the winter of 1940 142, the strategic bombing offensive had been fashioned into an instrument designed to target German civilian morale. 316 00:38:24,140 --> 00:38:32,150 As Thomas Hitler shown in his study of doing the ideas of strategic bombing into his hands through their 317 00:38:32,150 --> 00:38:39,380 origins precisely from to raise awareness of the relationship between citizenship and modern war, 318 00:38:40,220 --> 00:38:49,850 and his readiness to argue that citizens were actually responsible political actors who were therefore regarded as potential targets. 319 00:38:50,990 --> 00:39:02,210 In 1944, after D-Day, Allied Intelligence was searching for the signs of another German stab in the back of another coup against Hitler. 320 00:39:02,600 --> 00:39:09,320 And on the basis of that, we're expecting the war to end by the by December 1944. 321 00:39:11,150 --> 00:39:16,880 Of course, in the Western narrative, their own populations were robust and loyal. 322 00:39:17,930 --> 00:39:22,100 It was the populations of authoritarian regimes which were vulnerable and fickle. 323 00:39:23,180 --> 00:39:28,759 The presumption here was that the offer of democratisation would call for people to 324 00:39:28,760 --> 00:39:35,480 turn against their own autocratic leaders and embrace support for their invaders. 325 00:39:36,380 --> 00:39:38,390 A presumption put to the test. 326 00:39:38,660 --> 00:39:48,440 Most recently, of course, in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found wanting, just as it was found wanting in Germany in 1940 445. 327 00:39:50,300 --> 00:39:53,780 Between 1945 and the end of the Cold War, 328 00:39:54,380 --> 00:40:04,220 the Western democracies did not have to engage with the role of the people in the making of strategy at any sustained and serious level. 329 00:40:05,600 --> 00:40:12,650 Their armed forces were actively engaged in the wars, fought as part of the withdrawal from Empire. 330 00:40:14,390 --> 00:40:21,560 The promoters of democracy were colonial resistance movements, not the powers of Europe or the United States. 331 00:40:22,730 --> 00:40:24,320 Students of my generation, 332 00:40:24,620 --> 00:40:31,340 I went up in May 68 know didn't go the nation state that my generation all maintained they'd been on the barricades in May 68. 333 00:40:31,640 --> 00:40:39,110 I went up in October 68. Students of my generation all read Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth. 334 00:40:39,660 --> 00:40:44,510 No, not all of them. Some less, and put posters of Che Guevara on their walls. 335 00:40:45,350 --> 00:40:55,610 These were the icons of the enemy, not of the constituent elements of the Trinity in the making of national strategy and at home. 336 00:40:56,060 --> 00:41:02,390 Nuclear weapons made the people potential targets of attack as they have been in the Second World War. 337 00:41:03,020 --> 00:41:07,850 But they were now perpetually bombed as hostages to deterrence. 338 00:41:08,990 --> 00:41:15,530 They became passive pawns more than potentially active participants whose loyalties 339 00:41:15,710 --> 00:41:22,310 might be affected when they protested against their role in the nexus of deterrence, 340 00:41:22,670 --> 00:41:28,940 as they did in some cases through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or through opposition to cruise missiles. 341 00:41:29,420 --> 00:41:38,090 They were identified with subversive influences, with the influences of the putative enemy seen as weakening the state. 342 00:41:38,330 --> 00:41:47,930 Not strengthening nuclear weapons had the effect of demobilising the democratic strength of Western governments. 343 00:41:48,530 --> 00:41:51,680 And they did so in two more direct ways. 344 00:41:53,360 --> 00:42:00,860 The first way in which they did so was that nuclear weapons acted as one element in the swing away from the mass army, 345 00:42:01,610 --> 00:42:12,800 a process directly linked here in Britain because the Sands White Paper of 1957 simultaneously embraced nuclear deterrence and rejected conscription. 346 00:42:13,880 --> 00:42:18,380 Other states did not do it quite so explicitly and did it much more slowly. 347 00:42:19,370 --> 00:42:23,530 But think where France the. Home of the nation at arms. 348 00:42:24,370 --> 00:42:30,920 The sponsor, if you like, above all of the citizen soldier, think where France is today. 349 00:42:31,840 --> 00:42:38,680 Nearly two decades on, from its own decision to abandon conscription and to embrace the idea of the professional army. 350 00:42:39,550 --> 00:42:48,340 Democracies no longer presume that going to war will require the active participation of their citizens as a body. 351 00:42:50,560 --> 00:42:58,600 And the second way in which nuclear weapons were attractive or had an effect in terms that they were attractive for this reason, 352 00:42:58,600 --> 00:43:05,620 but they also had an effect in demobilising democracy was that nuclear weapons were cheap option. 353 00:43:06,580 --> 00:43:07,690 This is all comparative. 354 00:43:07,690 --> 00:43:18,940 Of course, they were a way of maintaining a major military option after containable cost while not engaging in active hostilities. 355 00:43:19,360 --> 00:43:24,160 And the challenge of the Cold War was how to maintain a large military establishment 356 00:43:25,330 --> 00:43:30,970 while not actually fighting a major war to justify that large military establishment. 357 00:43:31,600 --> 00:43:36,400 Nuclear the beauty of nuclear weapons was that you were able to square that particular circle. 358 00:43:37,660 --> 00:43:48,010 But the corollary of that was that you maintained a large military establishment and comparatively low cost, relatively in the 19th century. 359 00:43:48,580 --> 00:43:58,780 Both Sir Robert Peel as a as a peacetime prime minister and his and even if another party, William Ewart Gladstone, 360 00:43:59,440 --> 00:44:07,330 had argued that income tax introduced of course originally in Britain as a war tax during the Napoleonic wars, 361 00:44:07,870 --> 00:44:14,050 would inhibit Britain's appetite for war. They argue that if Britain went to war, 362 00:44:14,140 --> 00:44:18,700 the rate of income tax would have to go up and that would actually give Parliament 363 00:44:18,700 --> 00:44:22,930 pause and might actually need it to reflect on the wisdom of doing this. 364 00:44:24,670 --> 00:44:31,870 The corollary of that was that taxation was a form of wider participation in the decision making process, 365 00:44:31,870 --> 00:44:36,550 which we all will require if going to war forced up the rate of income tax. 366 00:44:36,850 --> 00:44:41,230 Then there had to be a parliamentary debate about income tax as well as about going to war. 367 00:44:41,530 --> 00:44:42,070 And indeed, 368 00:44:42,730 --> 00:44:51,490 the argument about income tax will be rather more vociferous and rather more central to the running of the state than that of going to war. 369 00:44:52,780 --> 00:45:01,659 That relationship between the cost of war and the decision to embrace it was weakened during the Cold 370 00:45:01,660 --> 00:45:09,010 War by that reliance on nuclear weapons and seems to me to be have been almost completely broken. 371 00:45:09,460 --> 00:45:17,410 After 2003, one of the most remarkable aspects of the wars waged by Western democracies 372 00:45:17,410 --> 00:45:23,200 since 911 is that they are effectively presented to their publics as cost free. 373 00:45:24,640 --> 00:45:32,800 Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made this point in relation to the United States in their book, The $3 Trillion War. 374 00:45:33,550 --> 00:45:40,390 3 trillion was then their estimate of the eventual overall costs, including indirect costs, including medical costs, 375 00:45:40,660 --> 00:45:48,460 including opportunity costs, including interest payments for the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 376 00:45:50,110 --> 00:45:55,090 The point they were making could apply equally well in the United Kingdom. 377 00:45:55,330 --> 00:46:00,580 We don't actually know what the cost of our participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan 378 00:46:00,580 --> 00:46:05,500 will turn out to be because we're still living with those costs and we're still absorbing them. 379 00:46:05,800 --> 00:46:15,070 Many of them incurred indirectly. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown mobilised the people of Britain for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 380 00:46:15,280 --> 00:46:21,040 and a particularly did not mobilise them for the war in Iraq in 2003 by asking them to fund 381 00:46:21,040 --> 00:46:26,380 Britain's military effort through increased taxation all through that incredibly fashionable word, 382 00:46:26,620 --> 00:46:36,100 austerity. Instead, the democracies hid the costs of war and struggled to answer direct questions designed to elicit them. 383 00:46:37,960 --> 00:46:41,640 When the economic crash came in 2008 nine. 384 00:46:42,100 --> 00:46:50,350 Nobody suggested that the waging the protracted war had any role in creating national deficits or in causing the crash. 385 00:46:51,310 --> 00:46:56,080 I'm not suggesting they did, but it still seems to me remarkable that nobody made the links, 386 00:46:58,480 --> 00:47:04,210 both directly and indirectly, that for the place of democracy in the making of strategy, 387 00:47:04,750 --> 00:47:13,930 through the active participation of the citizen soldier all through the enduring contribution of the enfranchised taxpayer has become marginalised. 388 00:47:15,640 --> 00:47:20,920 The effect is that the making of strategy today is no longer Trinitarian. 389 00:47:21,430 --> 00:47:23,500 We're not over. Working that world. 390 00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:33,770 And we have adopted a model of civil military relations designed to reflect that, designed effectively to exclude the people. 391 00:47:35,690 --> 00:47:40,080 In 1957, Sam Huntington wrote The Soldier and the State. 392 00:47:41,420 --> 00:47:50,330 It was a book designed to address the specific, specific problems within civil military relations for the United States in the era of the Cold War. 393 00:47:51,380 --> 00:48:01,220 In comparison with its earlier experiences, a major war, the US after 1945 did not simply demobilise and go back home. 394 00:48:02,330 --> 00:48:12,319 Instead, it maintained large armed forces in peacetime and that the Huntington introduced into the making a policy a significant 395 00:48:12,320 --> 00:48:23,150 new active one which might require an over mighty and preponderant influence in the United States of the Revolution. 396 00:48:24,380 --> 00:48:34,310 Of the War of Independence, like the France of 1789, had embraced what Huntington called subjective military control. 397 00:48:35,390 --> 00:48:43,370 The idea that the citizen soldier would, by virtue of his combination of civic rights and military obligations, 398 00:48:43,760 --> 00:48:52,400 become the symbol of a national will, and that politicised intent and military capability could be fused in one. 399 00:48:53,660 --> 00:48:57,889 The malicious central position in 18th century American political thought is, 400 00:48:57,890 --> 00:49:01,970 of course, the justification for the constitutional right to bear arms today. 401 00:49:03,860 --> 00:49:08,960 Instead, Huntington stressed what he called objective military control. 402 00:49:09,710 --> 00:49:12,890 The idea that armed forces are controlled by their governments. 403 00:49:14,150 --> 00:49:22,340 The focus here is not on the people, but on the relationship between elites, between the government and their chiefs of staff. 404 00:49:24,020 --> 00:49:26,870 This is the model of civil military relations, 405 00:49:27,290 --> 00:49:35,750 which required President Obama to sack General Stanley McChrystal in 2009 because he criticised the president's strategy in Afghanistan. 406 00:49:36,890 --> 00:49:40,970 And this in the United Kingdom is the model of civil military relations, 407 00:49:41,240 --> 00:49:47,300 which produced in 2010 a National Security Council, but a National Security Council, 408 00:49:47,510 --> 00:49:53,210 which is actually reluctant to engage in external consultation on national strategy and 409 00:49:53,420 --> 00:49:58,640 is reluctant to have a national debate about such issues as Trident and nuclear weapons, 410 00:49:59,210 --> 00:50:06,140 neither of which is currently intended to be included within the 2015 National Security Strategy. 411 00:50:09,140 --> 00:50:19,400 British views on the renewal of Trident are, according to opinion polls, just about equally divided, with a small majority in favour of having them. 412 00:50:20,000 --> 00:50:23,570 A small majority? I think I'm right in saying that of course these fluctuate. 413 00:50:23,780 --> 00:50:28,370 Even in Scotland. Although Nicola Sturgeon doesn't believe that's true. 414 00:50:29,810 --> 00:50:35,959 This has not stopped Alex Salmond arguing in a speech given on the 11th of September, 415 00:50:35,960 --> 00:50:43,340 just the other day that the unilateral UK government decision to renew Trident could be one of four conditions 416 00:50:43,520 --> 00:50:49,310 which would justify the Scottish Government in calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence. 417 00:50:51,200 --> 00:51:01,430 So the third largest party in today's UK Parliament, the SNP, is opposed to nuclear weapons and the second largest party, the Labour Party, 418 00:51:01,670 --> 00:51:10,040 is not caught in a debate on nuclear weapons also, although it seems as though it could resolve itself in terms of sticking to its current position. 419 00:51:10,520 --> 00:51:15,140 But it's causing debate by virtue of Jeremy Corbyn's election as its party leader. 420 00:51:16,130 --> 00:51:22,790 If both the second and third ranking parties in the country are concerned about the future of nuclear weapons, 421 00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:26,600 it seems to me very odd that we do not have a national debate about them. 422 00:51:27,860 --> 00:51:35,570 The public debate about deterrence in Britain today is frankly infantile, and it treats its publics as infants. 423 00:51:38,330 --> 00:51:43,190 Those in favour assert we do not know what threats may emerge in 50 years time. 424 00:51:44,330 --> 00:51:49,640 True, but a pretty hopeless argument if you're trying to explain the relevance of deterrence today. 425 00:51:50,990 --> 00:51:56,990 Those against nuclear weapons assert that nuclear weapons will not deter suicide bombers. 426 00:51:57,470 --> 00:52:02,180 That is also true, but is a pretty hopeless argument with regard to every other sort of threat. 427 00:52:03,470 --> 00:52:09,800 If the electorate of a democratic state is not implicated in the making of national strategy, 428 00:52:10,190 --> 00:52:14,990 it cannot be expected to identify with the objectives of that strategy. 429 00:52:16,680 --> 00:52:20,010 It's belief that soldiers are victims, not victims. 430 00:52:20,670 --> 00:52:28,950 The perception that it is as a society, casualty averse itself will themselves weaken deterrence. 431 00:52:31,390 --> 00:52:34,060 It inhibits national leaders from action. 432 00:52:35,320 --> 00:52:45,010 And if our opponents believe that there is no national appetite to use force, then our deterrence posture is itself built on sand. 433 00:52:46,630 --> 00:52:54,010 That, I would argue, is at least one conclusion President Putin drew after the Syria debate in August 2013, 434 00:52:54,820 --> 00:53:03,550 drawing a red line and then deciding that the red line had disappeared, created a permissive environment within which he could act. 435 00:53:05,350 --> 00:53:09,340 Since 2009 and the election of President Obama, 436 00:53:09,880 --> 00:53:17,320 we have seen the adoption of more limited means for waging what is still presented as a long war and even 437 00:53:17,320 --> 00:53:24,340 some respect in some respects still presented as a global war on terror instead of boots on the ground. 438 00:53:24,970 --> 00:53:34,210 Western democracies prefer a mix of air attacks and weaponized drones, supplemented by special forces and by training teams. 439 00:53:36,220 --> 00:53:42,310 The purpose of those training teams, of course, is to impart the necessary military skills to local proxies. 440 00:53:43,990 --> 00:53:47,740 This is a set of solutions which elevates means to end, 441 00:53:48,730 --> 00:53:56,770 which makes viable tactical options special forces, drones and so on into a strategy in its own right. 442 00:53:58,000 --> 00:54:06,040 One most visible today in northern Iraq and in Syria, but developed regionally in the context, of course, is Pakistan and of Yemen. 443 00:54:07,780 --> 00:54:12,640 The trouble is, it doesn't really seem to be working, of course. 444 00:54:16,430 --> 00:54:25,100 The of course, one reason that it doesn't work is because it fails to address the war among the people in Rupert's medicine. 445 00:54:26,480 --> 00:54:33,260 And now those people, as we all know, are leaving the theatre of war to come here to Europe and specifically, 446 00:54:33,260 --> 00:54:41,210 of course, some of them to the United Kingdom. But as importantly, it also does not work for the people at home, 447 00:54:41,570 --> 00:54:46,190 the people here in the United Kingdom, for our own population and for our electorates. 448 00:54:47,600 --> 00:54:50,810 And that is so, it seems to me, for four reasons. 449 00:54:52,430 --> 00:54:58,339 The first reason is this the articulation of the idea of limited war, because that, 450 00:54:58,340 --> 00:55:03,410 after all, is what we tend to be engaged in at the moment is totally inadequate. 451 00:55:04,580 --> 00:55:13,640 Western governments approved the means of limited war, but our national leaders do not embrace, at least overtly, a strategy of limited war. 452 00:55:13,910 --> 00:55:17,630 And so means and ends stand in direct contradiction to each other. 453 00:55:18,410 --> 00:55:21,140 Instead, they use the vocabulary of major war, 454 00:55:21,470 --> 00:55:33,830 which in turn carries the expectation or generates the expectation in the public mind that there will be an unequivocal and quick outcome to that war. 455 00:55:35,180 --> 00:55:43,100 Limited wars tend to end rather less satisfactorily and with rather less clear outcomes, even if they are waged successfully. 456 00:55:44,840 --> 00:55:56,480 The second reason is this In the Cold War, governments could engage in limited wars, often indeed using proxies or special forces, 457 00:55:57,530 --> 00:56:02,929 but could do so under the radar without the full consciousness of the public on his behalf. 458 00:56:02,930 --> 00:56:06,260 They were engaging those operations today. 459 00:56:06,530 --> 00:56:10,700 The change in digital communications or the development of digital communications, 460 00:56:10,700 --> 00:56:16,400 the mobilisation of mass media and so on, make this effectively impossible. 461 00:56:17,360 --> 00:56:20,720 The result is a paradox democratic governments, 462 00:56:21,110 --> 00:56:27,860 confronted with one of the most powerful agents for mass mobilisation and indeed precisely for democratisation, 463 00:56:28,280 --> 00:56:38,420 seemed to stand transfixed in the headlines. Headlines under the headlines probably too unable to embrace what is now called the strategic narrative, 464 00:56:39,530 --> 00:56:49,880 a narrative which extraordinarily is much more clearly articulated by the opponents of Western democracy, whether those opponents are Russia or ISIS. 465 00:56:51,920 --> 00:56:56,570 Thirdly, our model of civil military relations is broken. 466 00:56:57,740 --> 00:57:06,140 Subjective military control has to sit alongside objects of military control, not be relegated to the margins. 467 00:57:07,530 --> 00:57:13,319 Heads of state cannot have one conversation with their electorates saying the 468 00:57:13,320 --> 00:57:17,580 boys are coming home and a totally different one with their military advisers. 469 00:57:19,410 --> 00:57:28,350 The military, despite being professional forces, find themselves very often against their own wishes, much more in the public spotlight. 470 00:57:28,500 --> 00:57:34,140 And of course, here in this country, movements like Help for Heroes and so on have contributed to that. 471 00:57:34,800 --> 00:57:40,140 The result is they need to have their own conversation with the public so that the latter can 472 00:57:40,140 --> 00:57:47,640 understand better the challenges that face the armed forces and the considerations that drive strategy. 473 00:57:48,450 --> 00:57:55,800 A Trinitarian relationship assumes not only that all three components are participants in national strategy, 474 00:57:56,280 --> 00:58:01,170 but that all those three components can talk to each other in a three way relationship. 475 00:58:03,420 --> 00:58:09,690 And the fourth reason is this. For those of you who believe I can't be on three, I'm just about to prove that's not true. 476 00:58:10,770 --> 00:58:20,729 The fourth reason is this We have become bogged down partly through a proactive use of force in Kosovo in 1999, 477 00:58:20,730 --> 00:58:25,290 in Libya in 2011, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan. 478 00:58:26,220 --> 00:58:37,650 We have become bogged down in a debate on strategy and democracy, which focus very largely on the initiation of war and not on its continuation. 479 00:58:38,070 --> 00:58:41,950 The debate is all about why do we go to war in the first place? 480 00:58:41,970 --> 00:58:45,210 And of course, that is a crucially important discussion to have. 481 00:58:46,930 --> 00:58:52,719 In the United States. The president is locked in an arm wrestle with Congress on exactly these issues. 482 00:58:52,720 --> 00:58:58,480 And the Constitution, of course, is designed to create that that wrestling match in the United Kingdom. 483 00:58:58,480 --> 00:59:07,300 We have no such constitutional constraints, but we have now come to believe that we cannot go to war without parliamentary approval. 484 00:59:09,490 --> 00:59:19,270 The Prime Minister, naturally enough, perhaps responding to the shadow of Iraq, acts as though if Parliament says no, he cannot act. 485 00:59:20,980 --> 00:59:25,840 The effect is further to weaken the deterrent capacity of democratic states, 486 00:59:26,530 --> 00:59:33,670 both because it makes it hard for the head of state to act and act with speed, which he may often have to do. 487 00:59:34,270 --> 00:59:44,170 And also because of course, it creates another element in the state which is uncertain and which putative opponents recognise. 488 00:59:46,360 --> 00:59:54,490 Now those four reasons are of course challenges to the strategy democracy nexus, 489 00:59:55,510 --> 01:00:07,150 but they also carry their own implicit solutions a coherence approach to limited war, a more effective management of media and communications, 490 01:00:07,810 --> 01:00:10,840 a more sophisticated system of civil military relations, 491 01:00:12,130 --> 01:00:20,680 and a readiness to accept the Congress and Parliament are acting as strategic inquisitors, which very often they are. 492 01:00:21,550 --> 01:00:29,260 All those might produce fresh approaches, but to open the door to better making, 493 01:00:29,620 --> 01:00:35,980 to the better making of strategy, and to the better making of strategy in democratic states in the 21st century. 494 01:00:37,150 --> 01:00:37,930 Thank you very much.