First of all, a very warm welcome to all of you.
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.
I want to thank particularly one or two individuals and organisations.
The first not withstanding is the other Norwegians who have very generously supported financially in this particular event.
And we are very grateful for you for that support.
There's also some unsung heroes, not least Ruth, Jeanette, Rosemary Oliver.
You may not realise just how much effort has gone in behind the scenes to get all
of you in the right place at the right time and to make this event take place.
And I just want to say thank you very much indeed for your work.
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.
And I think that the emphasis of that is almost invariably on what the elites do.
Governments talk to senior military, naval and air personnel and equally what advice they give back.
But one of the things that's made Hugh Strong so different from the discussion we've had in the past,
and that subject is really his insistence that we involve the other elements of the Trinity,
the people, that there should be a public dialogue about defence, about security, about the native structure and about decision making.
It is perhaps to our regret, so all of us, that the Chilcot inquiry has not yet been published.
I think we are always in an interest to see what that's produced.
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.
So thank you very much indeed. Professor said he thought I had to hand it to you.
Rob, thank you very much. And, of course, I'm just thank all those that you've also thanked for making this possible.
It is actually truly wonderful to see so many friends.
Some are very longstanding indeed. Some of you know, things that I probably don't want you to repeat in our current context.
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.
It is. I hear the echo. Let me just say the acoustics.
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.
It was a conversation with Nick Parker. And I said, it is a debating chamber.
It must be okay to do it without any assistance on the audio side.
And then afterwards, Paul Roof got a barrage of emails from people saying they couldn't hear.
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.
I have to say I chose the title when Ali Ibrahim is said to me, What's your title?
I said, No strategy in democracy. I said, I thought about it rather more recently.
But I think, as Rob said, it is something which I feel one way or another has been close to my intellectual interests.
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.
And that is talk about a visit to Afghanistan in June 2012 on the anniversary of Waterloo on the 18th of June.
I went with a group of other academics and policy wonks and so on,
from NATO member states to Kabul University to meet a class of law and politics students.
And naively, we had imagined that with the election of President Karzai or not his election sorry,
the election of his successor on the agenda, that that was what we were going to talk about.
Indeed, I was rather looking forward to hearing what they would say about President Karzai's succession.
In practice, the Afghans wanted to talk about the security position,
about NATO's ongoing commitment to Afghanistan, and about the problems of Taliban safe havens in Pakistan.
One particularly outraged, huge referred to President Obama's visit to Kabul just over six weeks previously on the 1st of May 2012.
The President and the President of Afghanistan, Karzai,
had signed the enduring strategic partnership between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and the United States of America.
The agreement included arrangements for a long term security partnership and for the possibility of U.S. forces remaining in Afghanistan after 2014,
as it said, for the purposes of training Afghan forces and targeting the remnants of al Qaeda.
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.
What has outraged him was that in the early hours of the following morning,
that was to say one minute passed for having just checked this on the Internet.
One minute, Miles, four in the morning, Afghan time.
President Obama had been on television again and on this occasion he had been speaking,
not the Afghan people, but to the people of the United States from Bagram Airbase.
And he told the American people, our troops will be coming home.
Both statements are, of course, compatible.
But for this Afghan, here was one voice.
Earlier in the day, the previous day, saying the United States was saying and here was another voice saying, the United States are going.
Famously in 2005. General Sir Rupert Smith,
who's been a very good friend through changing character all program I'm sorry he can't be here
today wrote a book which he called The Futility of Force The Art of War in the Modern World,
in which he characterised today's wars as wars amongst the people.
There are moments when I read essays and dissertations which quote that which just make me feel, you know, let's move on.
But it was a fair enough observation.
In that it reflected his experience in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia.
And of course when he wrote it he caught the emerging concerns of British and American soldiers in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
They were engaged as armies in most counterinsurgency campaigns have been engaged in securing the loyalty of the local population.
Wars amongst the people have characterised the operating environment in which armies have often and especially recently found themselves.
My focus this evening is not with the operating environment but with the strategic context.
What does war among the people means in the making of national strategy?
My concern is not so much with the capacity, but the loyalties of people caught in the crossfire of a combat zone.
But with the role of peoples in mature democracies, in the formation of strategic decisions.
In May 2012, President Obama gave one message to the people of Afghanistan and another to the people of the United States.
He told each what he thought they wanted to hear, and in the process he caused confusion and disarray.
He's not alone. Our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, said in 2010 that Britain would end its war in Afghanistan by 2015.
Of course we ended it formally just before that and went on to explain that he had set a
clear withdrawal date because the British people expected it and they were right to do so.
He said nothing about the objectives of the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom's government
within Afghanistan or the potential consequences of the timing for the Afghan people,
or what a desirable outcome might look like for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.
Both the president of the United States and the prime minister of the United Kingdom
were effectively treating their electorates as partners in the decision making process.
That, for me is much more significant in the making of strategy than waging wars amongst the people in the latter.
The people are treated as the passive objects of influence in the former.
They become active participants in the formation of policy.
But as President Obama's mixed message on the 1st of May 2012 showed,
the people in the face of war and the people at home are not so easily separated,
especially if we follow the cliché which we don't seem to be able to avoid,
and of which we are so often reminded that we live in an interconnected world,
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.
Today, the message given in the theatre of operations cannot in practice diverge from that given at
home without running the risk of inconsistency at best and direct self-contradiction at worst.
Both Obama and Cameron chose deadlines for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan,
which bore less relationship to the possible situation in Afghanistan,
and much more to the political and electoral situations within the United States and the United Kingdom.
Do I need to move this thing down of it? I can hear, you know, better.
Good. I'm getting a note from Audrey, so must be all right.
Their objectives were defined less in terms of identifiable objectives within Afghanistan and more in terms of what came to be called exit strategies.
Exits are not strategies. Exits are perhaps means or possibly ways, but they're certainly not ends.
But by admitting the role of democracy in strategy,
the leaders of democratic states have put themselves between a rock and a hard place in order to explain
to their nation why their own forces are engaged in faraway places of which their peoples know little.
They used the vocabulary of mass mobilisation borrowed from the Second World War.
They are ready to let these wars be called wars of choice, but they use vocabulary which suggests they are wars of necessity.
To be fair to President Obama, he has been much more circumspect in this regard than George W Bush was.
He was only too happy to cite Pearl Harbour after the 911 attacks.
And, of course, Tony Blair compared the potential appeasement of Saddam Hussein with the appeasement of Adolf Hitler.
But the consequence of Obama's circumspection has been a reputation for indecision, for lack of clarity,
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.
The alternative is no better. As David Cameron's record shows, three times as prime minister.
He has spoken of an existential conflict of a generational war or of direct threats to the British way of life.
In 2011 over Libya, in January 2013, over the Al Qaeda attack on the BP gas installation in Algeria and in June 2015,
most recently, of course, of the ice inspired attack on British citizens in Sousse in Tunisia.
What his words exposed is the gap between the rhetoric and his intent.
He speaks big, but does little for a people engaged in so many existential wars simultaneously.
You will look remarkably comfortable and secure, remarkably at peace and remarkably unconcerned.
And in that, you reflect most of British society.
The effect of democracy on strategic decision making seems to be that national leaders have to overpromise and then
under-deliver or overdramatise and then underperform when they should be under promising and over delivering.
If substance matched rhetoric, Britain will be doing much more than committing 2% of its GDP to defence.
If indeed it is committing that, CDSs will probably put me right on whether I've got that right or not.
There is a conundrum here. Democratic leaders are under pressure to hype the threat precisely because their electorates don't feel threatened.
And yet, the more they do so, the less convinced the public seem to be.
Gordon Brown, as prime minister, explained the war in Afghanistan in terms related to domestic security.
He said British troops were fighting, killing and dying in Helmand to keep the streets of London safe.
But the public was not convinced and nor were many of the soldiers.
Democracy has so associated itself with material and personal security,
with the functioning of liberal capitalism, that it has divorced itself from war.
The identity of the state itself is weakened by its reliance on supranational organisations like the EU,
NATO and the United Nations and by its passing of what used to be state functions to private companies or to multinational corporations.
This process applies even within defence. With the growth of private military companies.
Democracy has become associated with peace, not with war.
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.
Underpinning this set of assumptions is the master narrative of the democratic peace.
In 1989, Jack Levi wrote that, to quote him,
The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations.
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.
Of course, democratic peace theory does not rule out the probability or possibility of democracies fighting non democracies.
But that in itself raises the question of what a democracy is and what is not a democracy.
In 1914 and I got it right from the First World War, of course.
In 1914, Britain had the lowest level of male suffrage of any of the belligerents, original belligerents except Hungary.
About 60% of British males aged over 21 had the vote.
In Germany, every male was able to vote.
Even states that political scientists would classify as non democracies are not necessarily states without mass participation.
A point. True. Not just as Germany in the First World War, but also of Germany in the Second World War.
The assumption that things are otherwise is a product of the master narrative of liberalism, an inheritor of the weakened view of history,
and an assumption that liberal democracy will produce not just domestic but also international harmony.
Its logical corollary is that democracies find it hard to make war.
There is, after all, in many minds, an inherent tension between the words I have chosen for my title this evening.
Strategy and Democracy. Historically, this is absurd.
From classical Athens to modern America. Democracies have waged war and done so through a participatory decision making system.
Much of the city's history of the Peloponnesian War, I should say quickly, as I was leaving college just now,
I saw Simon Hornblower as I was going out to Massachusetts to be in the eye.
Well, I'm not this idiot in his.
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.
But I think the bit is pretty unexceptional. Much of the city's history of the Peloponnesian War is concerned with exactly this
the problems of Athens as a democracy in waging war coherently and consistently.
I'm not going to go back to ancient history.
Instead, I'm going to begin this series of reflections with the Enlightenment and the 18th century.
The idea of the Democratic piece, after all, takes its argument from Immanuel Kant essay on Perpetual Peace.
Kant argued that republics would enjoy peace with other republics, and he wrote that in 1795,
when Europe was still exploring the foothills of a series of wars which would last another 20 years,
wars driven by the French Republic, fighting as it claimed for liberty, equality and fraternity against a league of absolute monarchies.
Despite the horrors which the wars of the French Revolution brought to Europe,
most French revolutionaries, at least in 1795, would not have disagreed with Kant.
They, as they saw it, were waging war to bring perpetual peace.
The reason that France found itself at war, they believed, was not the fault of France,
but the fault of autocracies and absolute monarchies that failed to recognise the
need to democratise the failed to recognise the need to give power to the people.
But against this narrative ran a powerful alternative.
The notion that democratisation was a tool for national mobilisation in a time of war.
The French officer, the aristocratic and enlightened Kant to bear, first published his essay General The Tactic anonymously in 1770,
but then under his own name in 1772 and in an English translation in 1781.
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.
Let us suppose in Europe be better, right?
Let's suppose in Europe there was the spring of a vigorous people with genius with power and a happier form of government,
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,
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.
By the calculation of finances, Gilbert then proceeded to argue that for France,
the first step to a successful exterior policy was domestic political reform.
Interior politics, having thus prepared us things.
He went on cable, went on with what facility external politics can resolve upon the system of her own
interests in opposition to her foreign ones by the raising of a respect for military power.
How easy it is, give our right to have armies invincible in a state where subjects are citizens, where they cherish and revere government,
where they are fond of glory, where they are not intimidated at the idea of toiling for the general good.
As an army officer, Gebauer was, of course, a servant of the king.
But he dedicated his book not to Louis, but to my country.
He included the king of France, his father, as he called him within that.
But he also addressed the book to ministers, its administrators, that is,
the administrators of France, to all ranks of the state, its members to the people, its children.
He looked forward to the day when all its members would be united, as he put it, may the ruler and his subjects,
the high and low degrees of the community, feel themselves honoured with the title of citizens.
Quebecers died after a short illness on the 6th of May 1790.
By then, the French Revolution had not reached its apogee in the terror in the terror,
nor had the transformation of the French state yet revolutionised the structure of the French army by 1795.
Those developments, both of them were much more obvious.
Revolutionary France treated those who opposed the logic of its own position.
Its completion of the revolution with universal principles took it to conclude its right,
to conclude that its enemies were politically backward in the day.
Catholic counterrevolutionary peasants were not treated as naive and well-educated,
but as part of a conspiracy against the revolution and its government, they were treated instead, therefore,
as political actors and about quarter of a million men,
women and children for a quarter of the population of the modern day were exterminated by the revolutionary armies in 1793 1794.
Captain Dupuy of the French Revolution armies wrote from the von Date and his sister in January 1794.
Wherever we go, we are bringing fire and death.
A sex. Nothing is being respected. Yesterday, one of our detachments burned a village.
One volunteer killed three women with his own hands.
It is atrocious, but. And this is the crux.
But the safety of the republic demands imperatively part of that urgency related to the
fact that revolutionary France faced an external threat as well as an internal one.
It was simultaneously fighting the war of the first coalition against Britain, Austria and Prussia in 1797, a hanoverian serving in the Prussian army.
The son of an NCO, Gerhart Scharnhorst,
published his general reflections on the armies in the Revolutionary Wars and tried to provide some sort of explanation why
the French Revolutionary Army had so surprised those of the old order and had formed with the fort with so much success.
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,
as a result, by the identification of the soldier with the nation for scharnhorst as rather military reformers in the following decade and more.
Citizenship created soldiers with a stake in the nation who were ready to fight and die because they had rights.
Then with the soldiers, a pre 1789 monarchists in the wars against Napoleon Prussians were forced to sit on their hands
between the end of that war to the first coalition in 1795 and the year in a campaign of 1806,
and again to sit on their hands after the Treaty of Till said to be to 12th in 1808,
beginning of 1808, and the war of so-called National Liberation in 1813.
And the officers who were associated with Scharnhorst, including, of course, no Tanakh and Clausewitz,
look to Spain and Italy for evidence of effective resistance against France.
Resistance waged by guerrillas motivated as they saw it by national sentiment.
Scharnhorst was a father figure to Clausewitz. And Clausewitz shared the frustration of his mentor and of knights.
And together, they plotted a war of national liberation in defiance of the wishes of their own.
King.
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,
mobilising the entire population, ready to use terror and prepare to die rather than to admit defeat.
He specifically quoted an event going back to that first quotation from Baron, the most familiar one, even if, of course, being Clausewitz.
He never acknowledged his sources. He called for a people with genius, with power, and a happy form of government.
This was the clown prince who, when he wrote a book, chapter three of On War,
identified the French Revolution as having put the state's mobilisation for war on a new and unprecedented level.
To quote Michael Howard and Peter Praise translation suddenly war again.
The last time had been Roman Republic.
Suddenly, war again became the business of the people.
The people of 30 millions, all of whom considered themselves to be citizens.
The people became a participant in war instead of governments and armies as heretofore.
The full weight of the nation as heretofore, the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance.
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.
He asked,
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?
Or shall we again see a gradual separation taking place between government and people?
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,
of its politics, its war potential, and its fighting strength.
Robb's already referred to the Clausewitz in Trinity, and this is where the Trinity fits in, in book one of On War.
Clausewitz described war as being made up of three parts passion, the play probability and chance and reason.
He then associated each of those qualities with three particular groups of actors, with the passion, with people,
the player, probability and chance, with the army and its commanders, and reason with the government.
But he also made absolutely clear in a way which for too many modern, which only a way which too many modern readers neglect,
that those relations, the relations between those three component parts over the primary trinity of the secondary trinity were not fixed.
He did not rule out a people that was passionate and rational.
Indeed, much else that he wrote about 19th century warfare was conditioned on the realisation that
European civilisation did not preclude the need to abandon moderation and embrace terror.
Nor is the relationship between war and policy fixed in the Trinity.
It too can fluctuate with the rational elements of policy of most by passion or by the contingencies of the battlefield.
The problem with recent largely, predominantly Anglophone readings of John War is this determination to wrest it
within a view of strategy that sees a linear relationship between policy and war,
and an elite relationship between generals and politicians in the making of strategy and the making of strategy,
which then excludes the people, the roles of the people, and possibly the passion becomes subordinated.
To be fair, after the defeat from Napoleon, Clausewitz could be seen as colluding in this process.
The French Revolution was seen to have wrought war protracted, destructive, and to use a neologism total to Europe.
Preventing revolution could prevent war.
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.
One of them was Friedrich Wilhelm, the third of Prussia, whose authority Clausewitz,
had so directly challenged 1812 by appealing to the German nation rather than to the Prussian king,
and by then resigning from the Prussian army and from the Royal Service.
To serve in the army of Russia. By 1819, Clausewitz knew which side his bread was buttered if he wanted a job.
And he realised that if he required and depended on preferment in post-war Prussia, he better moderate his proposals for military reform,
specifically his proposals for the reform of the land that carried directly political implications.
And said something about some small form of implicit citizenship.
So the idealistic conflation of citizenship and military service of political awareness
and the defence of the nation was moderated after 1815 and not just in Prussia.
Armies became less instruments for national mobilisation and more tools of counterrevolutionary domestic order.
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.
And conscription became less a manifestation of liberation and political awareness.
The full idealist idealised form it had had in the 1790s, and now more a mechanism for social control, broadly speaking.
In 1848, armies remained loyal to their governments.
By 1914, mass armies could be raised without too much attention being paid to the corollary that they
should see themselves as politically aware partners in the making of national strategy.
The debate hadn't gone away. Of course, it remained vibrant in France, not least thanks to John Jeu, as is La Nouvelle,
and with socialists, of course, arguing that citizen soldiers would fight purely defensive wars.
But in 1916, Britain could introduce conscription without simultaneously adopting universal military male suffrage.
In 19 1718, Britain, France and Germany all addressed the issue of political education in their armed forces,
believing it was important to reduce motivated bodies of men.
But in none of them was that programme adequately fulfilled.
Even in revolutionary Russia,
where of course there were advocates for soldiers who should be political or work politically aware, most evidently frenzy.
There were others who said professional qualifications to trump political ones, and for that reason,
Trotsky argued that Tsarist officers should be included within the Revolutionary Army and in Germany at the war's end.
Because Mikhail Geier has written Ludendorff called in October for national mobilisation for a nation in arms,
but it remained an idea in embryo which others turned against and which indeed contributed to the loss of respect,
which ludendorff experienced that in the period leading up to the armistice.
I am not suggesting that the First World War ended the idea of the political but politicised soldier.
The men who would fight because they were committed to a set of over arching values were still there.
In the Second World War.
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.
And as in the First World War, the armies of Western democracies again established programs of political education.
But something much more profound began to happen, at least in the ideas of these Western democracies.
Those who were motivated for political reasons to fight were more often seen to be insurgents, radicals and revolutionaries.
The First World War changed the relationship of established democratic paths to revolution and its place within war.
Popular mobilisation and political awareness, universal suffrage and a mass popular press made the people full participants in the war.
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.
Revolution had led to war in the First World War.
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.
Bettmann holding in Germany and Tsar Nicholas in Russia.
Once the war broke out, Germany aimed to export revolution to the empires of its enemies to Britain, France and Russia.
But it did so not just in a colonial context, but also in Dublin and ultimately in Petrograd.
Britain did the same exporting revolution to the Ottoman Empire,
and in 19 1718 the Allies were ready to promote revolution also within Germany and Austria-Hungary.
Democracy has become a source of vulnerability as well as a strength.
It was no longer just about its capacity for mass mobilisation, but also potentially a source of introspection and domestic concern.
After Britain's after 1918, Britain's blockade of Germany became rationalised as the instrument that had persuaded the German
people to turn against their Kaiser and to overthrow that government in the final stages of the war.
In 1930 940. Britain planned to repeat the act to use economic warfare once more.
But with the overrunning of most of Europe, that was no longer a possibility.
Instead, by the winter of 1940 142, the strategic bombing offensive had been fashioned into an instrument designed to target German civilian morale.
As Thomas Hitler shown in his study of doing the ideas of strategic bombing into his hands through their
origins precisely from to raise awareness of the relationship between citizenship and modern war,
and his readiness to argue that citizens were actually responsible political actors who were therefore regarded as potential targets.
In 1944, after D-Day, Allied Intelligence was searching for the signs of another German stab in the back of another coup against Hitler.
And on the basis of that, we're expecting the war to end by the by December 1944.
Of course, in the Western narrative, their own populations were robust and loyal.
It was the populations of authoritarian regimes which were vulnerable and fickle.
The presumption here was that the offer of democratisation would call for people to
turn against their own autocratic leaders and embrace support for their invaders.
A presumption put to the test.
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.
Between 1945 and the end of the Cold War,
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.
Their armed forces were actively engaged in the wars, fought as part of the withdrawal from Empire.
The promoters of democracy were colonial resistance movements, not the powers of Europe or the United States.
Students of my generation,
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.
I went up in October 68. Students of my generation all read Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.
No, not all of them. Some less, and put posters of Che Guevara on their walls.
These were the icons of the enemy, not of the constituent elements of the Trinity in the making of national strategy and at home.
Nuclear weapons made the people potential targets of attack as they have been in the Second World War.
But they were now perpetually bombed as hostages to deterrence.
They became passive pawns more than potentially active participants whose loyalties
might be affected when they protested against their role in the nexus of deterrence,
as they did in some cases through the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or through opposition to cruise missiles.
They were identified with subversive influences, with the influences of the putative enemy seen as weakening the state.
Not strengthening nuclear weapons had the effect of demobilising the democratic strength of Western governments.
And they did so in two more direct ways.
The first way in which they did so was that nuclear weapons acted as one element in the swing away from the mass army,
a process directly linked here in Britain because the Sands White Paper of 1957 simultaneously embraced nuclear deterrence and rejected conscription.
Other states did not do it quite so explicitly and did it much more slowly.
But think where France the. Home of the nation at arms.
The sponsor, if you like, above all of the citizen soldier, think where France is today.
Nearly two decades on, from its own decision to abandon conscription and to embrace the idea of the professional army.
Democracies no longer presume that going to war will require the active participation of their citizens as a body.
And the second way in which nuclear weapons were attractive or had an effect in terms that they were attractive for this reason,
but they also had an effect in demobilising democracy was that nuclear weapons were cheap option.
This is all comparative.
Of course, they were a way of maintaining a major military option after containable cost while not engaging in active hostilities.
And the challenge of the Cold War was how to maintain a large military establishment
while not actually fighting a major war to justify that large military establishment.
Nuclear the beauty of nuclear weapons was that you were able to square that particular circle.
But the corollary of that was that you maintained a large military establishment and comparatively low cost, relatively in the 19th century.
Both Sir Robert Peel as a as a peacetime prime minister and his and even if another party, William Ewart Gladstone,
had argued that income tax introduced of course originally in Britain as a war tax during the Napoleonic wars,
would inhibit Britain's appetite for war. They argue that if Britain went to war,
the rate of income tax would have to go up and that would actually give Parliament
pause and might actually need it to reflect on the wisdom of doing this.
The corollary of that was that taxation was a form of wider participation in the decision making process,
which we all will require if going to war forced up the rate of income tax.
Then there had to be a parliamentary debate about income tax as well as about going to war.
And indeed,
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.
That relationship between the cost of war and the decision to embrace it was weakened during the Cold
War by that reliance on nuclear weapons and seems to me to be have been almost completely broken.
After 2003, one of the most remarkable aspects of the wars waged by Western democracies
since 911 is that they are effectively presented to their publics as cost free.
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes made this point in relation to the United States in their book, The $3 Trillion War.
3 trillion was then their estimate of the eventual overall costs, including indirect costs, including medical costs,
including opportunity costs, including interest payments for the United States of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The point they were making could apply equally well in the United Kingdom.
We don't actually know what the cost of our participation in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
will turn out to be because we're still living with those costs and we're still absorbing them.
Many of them incurred indirectly. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown mobilised the people of Britain for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and a particularly did not mobilise them for the war in Iraq in 2003 by asking them to fund
Britain's military effort through increased taxation all through that incredibly fashionable word,
austerity. Instead, the democracies hid the costs of war and struggled to answer direct questions designed to elicit them.
When the economic crash came in 2008 nine.
Nobody suggested that the waging the protracted war had any role in creating national deficits or in causing the crash.
I'm not suggesting they did, but it still seems to me remarkable that nobody made the links,
both directly and indirectly, that for the place of democracy in the making of strategy,
through the active participation of the citizen soldier all through the enduring contribution of the enfranchised taxpayer has become marginalised.
The effect is that the making of strategy today is no longer Trinitarian.
We're not over. Working that world.
And we have adopted a model of civil military relations designed to reflect that, designed effectively to exclude the people.
In 1957, Sam Huntington wrote The Soldier and the State.
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.
In comparison with its earlier experiences, a major war, the US after 1945 did not simply demobilise and go back home.
Instead, it maintained large armed forces in peacetime and that the Huntington introduced into the making a policy a significant
new active one which might require an over mighty and preponderant influence in the United States of the Revolution.
Of the War of Independence, like the France of 1789, had embraced what Huntington called subjective military control.
The idea that the citizen soldier would, by virtue of his combination of civic rights and military obligations,
become the symbol of a national will, and that politicised intent and military capability could be fused in one.
The malicious central position in 18th century American political thought is,
of course, the justification for the constitutional right to bear arms today.
Instead, Huntington stressed what he called objective military control.
The idea that armed forces are controlled by their governments.
The focus here is not on the people, but on the relationship between elites, between the government and their chiefs of staff.
This is the model of civil military relations,
which required President Obama to sack General Stanley McChrystal in 2009 because he criticised the president's strategy in Afghanistan.
And this in the United Kingdom is the model of civil military relations,
which produced in 2010 a National Security Council, but a National Security Council,
which is actually reluctant to engage in external consultation on national strategy and
is reluctant to have a national debate about such issues as Trident and nuclear weapons,
neither of which is currently intended to be included within the 2015 National Security Strategy.
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.
A small majority? I think I'm right in saying that of course these fluctuate.
Even in Scotland. Although Nicola Sturgeon doesn't believe that's true.
This has not stopped Alex Salmond arguing in a speech given on the 11th of September,
just the other day that the unilateral UK government decision to renew Trident could be one of four conditions
which would justify the Scottish Government in calling for a second referendum on Scottish independence.
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,
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.
But it's causing debate by virtue of Jeremy Corbyn's election as its party leader.
If both the second and third ranking parties in the country are concerned about the future of nuclear weapons,
it seems to me very odd that we do not have a national debate about them.
The public debate about deterrence in Britain today is frankly infantile, and it treats its publics as infants.
Those in favour assert we do not know what threats may emerge in 50 years time.
True, but a pretty hopeless argument if you're trying to explain the relevance of deterrence today.
Those against nuclear weapons assert that nuclear weapons will not deter suicide bombers.
That is also true, but is a pretty hopeless argument with regard to every other sort of threat.
If the electorate of a democratic state is not implicated in the making of national strategy,
it cannot be expected to identify with the objectives of that strategy.
It's belief that soldiers are victims, not victims.
The perception that it is as a society, casualty averse itself will themselves weaken deterrence.
It inhibits national leaders from action.
And if our opponents believe that there is no national appetite to use force, then our deterrence posture is itself built on sand.
That, I would argue, is at least one conclusion President Putin drew after the Syria debate in August 2013,
drawing a red line and then deciding that the red line had disappeared, created a permissive environment within which he could act.
Since 2009 and the election of President Obama,
we have seen the adoption of more limited means for waging what is still presented as a long war and even
some respect in some respects still presented as a global war on terror instead of boots on the ground.
Western democracies prefer a mix of air attacks and weaponized drones, supplemented by special forces and by training teams.
The purpose of those training teams, of course, is to impart the necessary military skills to local proxies.
This is a set of solutions which elevates means to end,
which makes viable tactical options special forces, drones and so on into a strategy in its own right.
One most visible today in northern Iraq and in Syria, but developed regionally in the context, of course, is Pakistan and of Yemen.
The trouble is, it doesn't really seem to be working, of course.
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.
And now those people, as we all know, are leaving the theatre of war to come here to Europe and specifically,
of course, some of them to the United Kingdom. But as importantly, it also does not work for the people at home,
the people here in the United Kingdom, for our own population and for our electorates.
And that is so, it seems to me, for four reasons.
The first reason is this the articulation of the idea of limited war, because that,
after all, is what we tend to be engaged in at the moment is totally inadequate.
Western governments approved the means of limited war, but our national leaders do not embrace, at least overtly, a strategy of limited war.
And so means and ends stand in direct contradiction to each other.
Instead, they use the vocabulary of major war,
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.
Limited wars tend to end rather less satisfactorily and with rather less clear outcomes, even if they are waged successfully.
The second reason is this In the Cold War, governments could engage in limited wars, often indeed using proxies or special forces,
but could do so under the radar without the full consciousness of the public on his behalf.
They were engaging those operations today.
The change in digital communications or the development of digital communications,
the mobilisation of mass media and so on, make this effectively impossible.
The result is a paradox democratic governments,
confronted with one of the most powerful agents for mass mobilisation and indeed precisely for democratisation,
seemed to stand transfixed in the headlines. Headlines under the headlines probably too unable to embrace what is now called the strategic narrative,
a narrative which extraordinarily is much more clearly articulated by the opponents of Western democracy, whether those opponents are Russia or ISIS.
Thirdly, our model of civil military relations is broken.
Subjective military control has to sit alongside objects of military control, not be relegated to the margins.
Heads of state cannot have one conversation with their electorates saying the
boys are coming home and a totally different one with their military advisers.
The military, despite being professional forces, find themselves very often against their own wishes, much more in the public spotlight.
And of course, here in this country, movements like Help for Heroes and so on have contributed to that.
The result is they need to have their own conversation with the public so that the latter can
understand better the challenges that face the armed forces and the considerations that drive strategy.
A Trinitarian relationship assumes not only that all three components are participants in national strategy,
but that all those three components can talk to each other in a three way relationship.
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.
The fourth reason is this We have become bogged down partly through a proactive use of force in Kosovo in 1999,
in Libya in 2011, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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.
The debate is all about why do we go to war in the first place?
And of course, that is a crucially important discussion to have.
In the United States. The president is locked in an arm wrestle with Congress on exactly these issues.
And the Constitution, of course, is designed to create that that wrestling match in the United Kingdom.
We have no such constitutional constraints, but we have now come to believe that we cannot go to war without parliamentary approval.
The Prime Minister, naturally enough, perhaps responding to the shadow of Iraq, acts as though if Parliament says no, he cannot act.
The effect is further to weaken the deterrent capacity of democratic states,
both because it makes it hard for the head of state to act and act with speed, which he may often have to do.
And also because of course, it creates another element in the state which is uncertain and which putative opponents recognise.
Now those four reasons are of course challenges to the strategy democracy nexus,
but they also carry their own implicit solutions a coherence approach to limited war, a more effective management of media and communications,
a more sophisticated system of civil military relations,
and a readiness to accept the Congress and Parliament are acting as strategic inquisitors, which very often they are.
All those might produce fresh approaches, but to open the door to better making,
to the better making of strategy, and to the better making of strategy in democratic states in the 21st century.
Thank you very much.