Okay. It's a great pleasure to introduce Commodore retired professor of newly created Steam Journey who was has been a Hudson fellow here at Oxford,
has been associated with the Family Carriage War program as a visiting fellow.
And crucially in that time while he was doing those things,
was working on this strategy for action now available a snippet of 999 and to be read by all of course
is around that that he will be speaking his career in the Royal Navy as well as including a number of,
of course, of what he fought at sea, including responsibilities in the directorate, of course, the planning.
He was principal staff officer, the chief of Defence Staff. He deployed as well as the number of operational deployments before Afghanistan.
He went as the strategy director of the British Embassy in Kabul about which he has spoken.
Most interestingly, I have to say to this group before in terms of of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan,
and he has also been involved in the staff of the royal court.
And the professorship is at the University of Plymouth. Great.
And your title to see the strategy for his strategy of this under the title of him.
Thank you. I'm going to talk about the subjects of strategy today.
But actually, if I'm really talking about some things, not strategy, but strategy making,
and I think it's an important distinction I want to sort of journey and it sort of started with the Falklands War,
I suppose, and being deployed to the Falklands War went through operational roles versus operational deployments.
Then we sort of arrived in about 2005 and I can remember sitting in St Anthony's with you and talking about strategy and what I foresaw.
All I felt was intuitively a lack of a capacity to make strategy properly in this country.
I went on after that job or after those discussions.
We kept talking, but I went on then to ask the chief of staff's principal staff officer deployed to Iraq and to Afghanistan,
but really was right to the sort of central and some of the key decisions.
I don't talk about these today. Afghanistan was fine.
I was the only naval officer, senior Naval Observatory employee to deploy.
And that had its moments. I think Cheryl Cooper is my talk to recently.
He's a charmer.
We didn't agree on everything, but actually because the Afghans got extremely confused by the idea of having a commodore in Afghanistan,
he started calling brigadier general, which was great fun,
though it did come a moment ago when I was in Herat deploying to Iraq to have a look at the overall camp in Herat,
and sat down with the corps commander to seven corps through Afghanistan to a seven core Afghan army.
And what I thought would be what I was a courtesy call immediately became clear to me that it was going to be something else,
because he got his maps out and it was clear that we were going to start to talk about dispositions,
because I'm a naval aviator and I'm conscious of the army officers and probably ex-army officers in the audience.
So I suddenly faced with that decision, should I say something to him and explain that I'm actually a naval aviator?
My job was to fly from carriers and to drive ships, or should I actually just get on with it?
But I thought to myself and I'm looking at Rob, have thought to myself, How hard can this Army staff be?
We sat down with his dispositions and for about half an hour or so reorganised thought things through.
And I'm pleased to say that the Taliban have still not invested.
Alright, and what I want to talk to today is about strategy.
And on a much more serious point,
I came back from Afghanistan angry and I was angry because it was extremely difficult to really get Whitehall to think strategically.
I remember coming into a briefing amongst other places in number ten and not to the Prime Minister,
but to special advisers and actually saying there is no strategy out there.
And this is in late 2000, late 2007, early 2008.
The answer I got was, well, that's the right strategy. This is it.
What they were talking about was a British strategy for Helmand province, which essentially amounts to 1/34 of the country.
And it was very difficult to explain to people that actually Helmand would matter, but not really that much.
And even one wants to use metaphors like it was a bit like thinking about an election.
Robin I've just had this conversation at lunch about like think about an election this country
and working out whether or not success or failure can be judged from what happens in Somerset.
There are much more in places, much more important places in Afghanistan.
But I came out of angry because it was very, very difficult to actually make a change.
So that's what my thing is going to be about today.
I want to start off with the proposition, and the proposition is about thinking about strategic, thinking about our capacity.
You say to do, well, am I going to test it and I'll test it using some simple frameworks that I have in my book.
I'll use those frameworks. Look at those kind of case studies. I'll talk about Iraq and these are decisions which I was pretty much engaged in.
Apart from Libya, talk about Afghanistan campaign level, talk a little bit about Libya.
Then I'll talk to the big grand strategic decisions. And one of the big to me was why did we go from Iraq to Afghanistan when we did in 2005?
And was Libya the right thing in 2011 when we were already heavily committed in Afghanistan?
So then I'll finish off some some deductions and about say what?
So what's proposition? That's my proposition that you read it.
I'm not alone in this. There are a bunch of strategy.
Insurgents, I suppose you could call us actually trying to make change in Whitehall.
It's hard work, but we're making progress. Where does it come from?
This is a important and I think it's a fabulous quote from General Andre.
For those who don't know of his work, I thoroughly recommend his An Introduction to Strategy written in 1956.
It's probably still one of the best pieces in terms of strategy making wonder about who's the French general and engaged in a whole load of things.
Interesting.
He is the only Four-Star officer who's written, as far as I can see in the last two years on strategy, which is a rather curious, curious observation.
I think it's more modern. Have a look at that.
Quotes. That is from Bill Jenkins, who Jenkins runs the Public Administration Select Committee.
And again, for those who haven't, I thoroughly reckon this document has Commons Defence Select Committee who does national
strategy because Burton is one of the people who recognise that this is a shortfall.
And I'm glad to say that having been part of this and within the organisation now looking at it as a,
as an author and, and a thinker, I think there's really something in this.
We're starting at last I that the most important thing when I was interviewed by the committee
is that the key thing is we last have the insight that we're not very good at this.
In some areas I'd like to say we had the insight within Westminster, which we don't chart.
We'll get there. So that's my proposition.
I'm to test the proposition. I'm going to use two very simple things that I've used from my book ship What is good strategy look like?
And for those of you who are strategic thinkers, the term good strategy is a poor term strategy.
Generally speaking, it's about a dialectic, it's about a confrontation.
So that's why Superior is the much better term,
because good strategy can only be gauged in terms of a confrontation if it's confrontational or in a circumstance.
I'll also use a term called the strategic estimate.
I'll talk a little bit about this, but for those of you who are of military background, you will recognise the term estimate which is is use.
It's a set of structure questions for the commanders as to where we think through problems.
And it is no more or less than that. And I'll use that just to say how we might frame strategic thinking.
What does superior strategy look like in my book?
And I've sort of come at it both deductively and also from historical historical sense.
Usually Strachan has a big idea in it or a collection of smaller ideas.
Let me give you an example of that. An example is the Second World War.
What is the very first big idea in the Second World War when the Americans enter it?
To me, it's dead simple.
It's Germany first when having made that significant decision next, you then find that most of the strategic judgements from there flow from that.
Usually the strategy is easy to to explain.
There's a sense of initiative, and this comes from General Slim's work. Actually, Slim's work has always was he's always about having the initiative.
It's doable operation, nice operational, terrible term, but it's difficult to find another one.
But there's also flexibility. And the last but most important, I think, is the ability to bind the key players.
And sometimes there are theoretical discussions about actually having suboptimal strategy because actually binds the coalition players much.
If you ask me what, I prefer to have a theoretical strategy that's perfect,
but nobody agrees to, or suboptimal strategy and adequate, and all the coalitions agreed to.
It's the latter every time, because the former actually simply won't work.
So that's really the test. But again, as I've said, the test can only be against situations.
And I have three very simple tests for effective strategy. For successful strategy wasn't effective.
So did it deliver the political objective was inefficient to deliver the political objective
within the resources that we had originally envisage and then durability to the results in India.
And on those tests, I would say that looking back historically, I am conscious that I've got a great thing to tell you.
Professor of War Studies has sat in front of me, so I'm cautious about historical job.
I'm not a historian,
but I would say that Frederick the Great and what a great strategist and I would say Napoleon was a pretty awful one based on those tests.
But now there is more to the substance of what it is that I want to use to test some of my case studies.
The term the military estimates is a term which is really about sets of structured questions in the military.
Those of you with a military background, the audience will recognise it.
We actually called commanders estimates and it's the estimate is about questions are run through those questions.
When I was working for Jokester of the Chief of Defence Staff in 2005 and we were struggling to find out what was going wrong,
I came back to him, he asked me to have a look at this and I came back to him and said two things.
The first, that strategy is being made in the Ministry of Defence by a major and deliberately low level area of the organisation.
And we didn't really take much, much look at it. And the second thing is I said that we have no estimate.
So whereas if you had asked me to take over a if you'd asked me as an operation commander to do something, I'd run through these questions.
If you'd asked me as the training commander, would we do it? We just didn't didn't do those questions.
One of the questions that I've got in the book. Seven What is the political and strategic context?
We so often get this one wrong, and I've got examples of that.
I'll talk about that. So what's odd to me, this is almost like what's the political map within which we're operating?
And I think that actually, as I look back and I include myself, we all made mistakes and I look back,
we simply didn't give enough thinking to this question time and time again, why are we fighting?
What is the political issue contest? And again, this question isn't really, really very well thought through.
What, for example, is the political issue contest in the global war on terrorism?
I think there's a rhetorical question. This one also gets missed.
What's the objective and why? I think it's very interesting. If you look at the Vietnam War.
One of the good studies in the Vietnam War says that 70% of the generals in the Vietnam War didn't know nor did not know what the objective was.
And if you asked me about Afghanistan and Iraq, I think there's still a fair bit of lack of clarity on both of those, particularly Afghanistan.
So those are the things that you need to do. To me, they are the foundations.
Then I start to talk about what resources are available to achieve this objective.
It's very easy to see the resources in terms of two things. We tend to think in terms of blood and treasure.
Those are all tangible resources of people money.
But we often forget there are other resources as well. To me, times are terribly important.
Resource How much time we got? Another terribly important resource is political capital because actually sometimes in
these things you actually you use up a [INAUDIBLE] of a lot of political capital and again,
prestige tends to be another one that's linked in that. And I don't think we give enough thought to that shift.
I mean, if people have thought through what Afghanistan might have been like over a ten year period and we have done things differently,
and I would say that a fair bit of political capital has been used up.
And one Prime Minister, your career has probably been quintessentially damaged for the Iraq campaign.
What course of action could we adopt now getting into strategy. So the course of action to be a stretch.
So how are we going to do this? And this answers the question. My next question is what course of action should we adopt?
And the reason I have those two different questions is that I think it's worth through
thinking three or four different ways to do these things before you actually make a decision.
That's not my idea, is General Slim's idea. Again, to me, of all the books that I've read on strategy,
the one that isn't about strategy but is the most fascinating nevertheless is defeating to victory by probably the best,
in my view, is probably the greatest general segment we will build. Slim and the last thing what should be the spiritual approach?
Strategically difficult question to get your mind around, but it comes from a conversation I had when we were doing policy planning.
We were writing up our thinking at the end of 911, we'd done the thing called the Strategic Defence Review, a new chapter.
I was the deputy director of the organisation. My director was a terrific civil servant and he said, You know, see,
we need to get this policy implemented in a way in the spirit in which we wrote it.
And so it's having that spirit. And I understand the spirit of your approach. Well, I can't justify that one evidentially.
I can do the rest, actually, but I'm terribly sure it's important.
So those are the frameworks and I'm going to use to actually look at our case studies.
And that's if I have one big point, these are the areas that we don't do the thinking properly.
Thinking can make a difference. My brother's a middle Eastern specialist, actually.
He understood extremely well as a result of his study, done two tours in Afghanistan, two in Iraq, and predicted to me almost to the month.
And in terms of how it played out, how the Syrian campaign would play out for the first six months,
not at all in the way that actually people anticipated.
But he understood the tribal dynamics and the power dynamics going on within Syria was those, I think, where we need to really invest our thinking.
Okay, let's come to my first case study, Iraq 2005.
I was in the Chief of Defence Staff's Organisation.
I was his executive assistant, if you like, his principal staff officer.
And my first job in taking over the post was to actually go out with with my walk resembles General Mike Walker and Tony Blair.
And we went out and to Iraq and had a look at the campaign, a war room.
Some of you may come across some Jonathan, not Jonathan, very, you know, wonderful Army officer and it very, very direct man.
I remember him almost literally poking Tony Blair in the in the chest on three or four issues on Afghanistan.
Very interesting to watch that. Mike Walker was completely nervous about this search for the prime minister.
I thought quite likes it.
But actually what he was saying is that we didn't really have a strategy here and he was the only person who actually did it.
But the question for me as the political objective and what was the political objective for the British the British nation in that campaign?
Those are the ones we classically talk about.
If you ask me what I think happens and this is pure speculation, I think what happens is in early April 2002, Tony walks out to the states.
He has a conversation with George. George takes him in, set aside and said, look, we're going to do Iraq.
Are you with us? Tony said, yes. He comes back to this country.
He says, we're against Iraq and the Foreign Office say, my God, Prime Minister, you realise that this is illegal.
He said, We'd better find a rationale in that case, and I think that's what leads us to to weapons of mass destruction.
That's purely speculation. I can't justify it, but I think what it misses and actually the British objective was something different.
I think that's what the British objective was. And I think actually we completely blew it and we blew it because of what happened in Basra.
I think the British objective almost with that decision was really I'm so sorry, you can't read it and let me read it out.
It was of good along to the US. And what would that mean to me?
That means sticking it out in Basra. Basra mature the crown and also to learn from our successes there.
So what do we see happening? I think what we see happening is that we start to see a divergence in British and American strategy since the late 2007.
What do we see?
We see the Americans surging into to mid 2007, surging into Iraq based on a change, a clear change in strategy played out under Petraeus.
And we see the British drawing down why the British are drawing down.
I can't tell you exactly, but I think a lot of it was too stirrup had taken the view.
But then the new Chief of Defence Staff was that the Iranians are going to try and kick us out of Basra.
We were finally retreating content. We simply had to get on and make that so to me that it completely missed the point.
You know, if we were in this to act as good allies to Americans, we not to have thought it through.
And what do we see in early 2008?
We see the Americans starting to have some success.
We also see the charge of the knights and we actually see a change in Basra.
But what happens much more subtly, it's not very well recognised at all. Is that actually a new British general?
One general personal friend of mine, 97, arrives out in Basra and he and Richard Iron, who some of you may also know, Colonel,
in charge of the training for the Americans for the Iraq division out there, actually start to make a change in differences.
And within about nine months, they made such a difference. That's Petraeus is going round.
Odierno has now taken over from Petraeus is going around and saying to the rest of his American divisional commanders,
they want you to be operating like the British are in Basra because it's the model campaign.
So in nine months from having had what was a pretty disastrous period for the British,
we now have turned this campaign and within nine months, actually, it's seen by Odierno, the four star general, as great success.
And what do we do at that moment? We withdraw and we go instead to Afghanistan.
I want to talk about that decision a bit, but let me take you to the next campaign, because it's this is a bigger strategic issue.
Let me take you to the next the next my my case studies.
And this is about political context. I want to understand what the political context is.
Some of you I know, Hugh and I think Rob may have seen these diagrams before.
They're about Afghanistan. They're diagrams which we were looking at.
I remember looking at it specifically in the American headquarters in Mountain Top secret headquarters.
The Brits were the only ones, I think, with access there and with limited access as well.
But we were looking at diagrams which were not unlike this on the right and on the left hand side, there you see this ethnic distribution.
So this is the ethnic description of the Pashtuns.
And what we were looking at was not this, but we looking at a distributed disposition to the security instruments,
the bombs, the IEDs, everything that happened in Afghanistan.
And what was fascinating was they've pretty much actually followed the Afghan ethnic disposition.
So.
Well, that told us it was a it was one of those moments we thought, blimey, you know, this isn't an Afghanistan insurgency, it's a Pashtun insurgency.
And I think it's a terribly important observation. What you're seeing here is another reflection of the same thing.
This is the United Nations maps, and it's sort of telling you where they're happy to operate and whether or not happy to operate.
2006, this is before the Brits go in. You know, they're generally speaking, happy to operate in the north, but not in the south.
And it's all to do with this being a Pashtun insurgency. Why are some two other escorts in the audience?
The way I sometimes describe the Pashtuns as they're a bit like the Scots and the girls are here to the east, or a bit like the Highlanders.
And if they're not fighting each other, they're fighting anybody else.
And really well, the tyranny here to the south and west are a bit like the lowlands.
They're not always fighting. They're pretty good. They're not always fighting, actually, because they've got the enemy on the southern border.
But actually they're quite good about making deals. And generally speaking,
the girls going to these when the wars and the terrain into the south actually win the peace is what's causing it because there is a Geronimo Pashtun.
But again, what do we do to this? It's a red thing here. So the great thing says we inserted 16 years ago.
So the the the British equivalent if you like to 82nd Airborne but essentially
a a body of shock troops designed and fantastic people if you're fighting a
Falklands war and they were great to have an officer in the Falklands but are they
necessarily the right place people to put into a delicate counterinsurgency?
The thing that we did, we did do some reconnaissance in Helmand beforehand, and that reconnaissance told us there were probably about 400 Taliban.
We the received wisdom is that that intelligence is wrong for the regime.
We discovered that there are many more Taliban in Helmand than we thought because actually there's a lot of fighting as a result of us going in.
I think that actually there probably were only 400 Taliban and that we very probably created the additional ones through the way in which we acted.
I don't blame this. The the air assault brigade. I don't blame the parents.
I think we ought to have seen it, but we didn't know it was simply a lack of understanding of the campaign context.
Let me just quote to you. Is this a global problem?
This is about the Russian engagement. When you hear I'm going to talk a little bit about when you hear this, I think instead of Russian,
this is actually the Russian general staff talking about themselves going into Afghanistan.
Imagine putting ourselves and seeing if we could use the same words. Russia analysis of Afghanistan is another example.
And here's a quote from the journalist. Unlike the communist guerrilla movements in China and Vietnam,
the Mujahideen guerrillas were not trying to force a new ideology in government on their land.
Rather, they were fighting to defend their families, their corm and their religion against a hostile,
atheistic ideology, an alien balance system and oppressive central government and foreign invader.
Individual groups unconnected to the national and international political organisations
spontaneously defended their community values and their traditional way of life.
Doesn't that sound familiar? Well, perhaps that's the subject of questions, but I think he's got it.
I think it's a more modern one. It's one that I'm not as a think with.
But do we really understand the political context of the Libyan bombing campaign? I think we've tended to think a lot about that.
And of course, I never saw certainly one in the audience. But I think a lot of enthusiasts would have expected this to be over quickly.
A lot of other enthusiasts didn't because I'd talk to them about addiction.
But I think one of the mistakes we may have made was to assume that these two campaigns
were similar from that point of view was around that they were quite different.
What did we have in Afghanistan at the time of 2003 when we when the air campaign supported by Special Forces, is happening on the ground?
What we have is a simmering civil war between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban and by no means a complete civil war.
So essentially, we've got to ruthlessly, evenly matched opponents.
One dormant but ready and the other in the South not ready to take it to to talk to the west.
And so, of course, when air power comes in there and when it has properly supports, as it was then with special forces, it makes a huge difference.
And quickly. I think actually one of the great mistakes we made in Iraq was to assume it would be like Afghanistan in this respect tension.
Should we assume that actually the idea of special forces on horses supported by overwhelming air power was the answer.
And of course, we said, no, that wasn't the case. So I don't think we should have been surprised.
And yet we were given the extended duration of this campaign.
I think we were surprised.
I think one of the most interesting things, actually, is to watch the British and the French get suddenly nervous when the Americans say,
look, they'll do what they say they'll do, which is not to engage.
And as we're getting a little bit worried about whether we're going to be successful or not, the Americans are going to leave us to it.
And there were moments when we wondered whether this campaign were perhaps as we wished it should.
How does it how will this campaign play out? I'm not sure, actually.
I think I think we might be lucky, but I don't think there's been much Strachan is and I speak from extremely again.
I'm not serving now,
but I have talked to friends actually in nature and will look for and it's a two star general operating in the central they've said.
I said, what's the strategy like Xe? He said, Well, we don't seem to have much of a clue, frankly.
So I think actually it'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
I think the most interesting thing about how this plays out compared to Afghanistan is that we are now in a moment in the West actually,
where we have very little control whatsoever of the campaign.
Do we people from the stabilisation use and they're finding on the ground they'll make not just a difference, I can assure you.
The only thing that will make a difference on the ground is having ground troops on the ground.
I don't think we're right to say to do.
But actually what you do have to recognise is that if you do this with air power, then the end of the bombing campaign,
at the end of the campaign actually, then actually you lose whatever power you think you might have over the campaign.
I happen to think that's a really good thing in the long term,
but it'll be terribly interesting to see bits and pieces of it go wrong in the short term.
Could you imagine, for example, those who were of the Gaddafi ilk and what that regime looks like is an open question.
But could you imagine them suddenly in situations where actually the rebels are actually starting to do things which we don't much like,
the look of reprisals and that sort of thing?
What will we do in the circumstances where actually the ex Gadhafi's asked us for their support,
to protect them and to protect the slaughter of their innocents on the ground?
I think that puts us in a very, very interesting question. Right.
I want to go to drones strategic,
because I think actually much of what's going wrong is actually not because we are thinking right at the ground strategic level.
My first case study is this one fact. I'm going to put another red arrow to one of what can you see that really?
You can see that. That's a good point.
Why was it that we shifted our main effort and so remain efforts a term for that military guys in the audience will recognise
which is shifting the main priority 1 to 1 position forces shift their main effort from Iraq to Afghanistan in 2005 2006.
Like, I can't give you all the answers, but I can give you quite a lot of it because I was I was central to a paper which went to the Cabinet Office,
which was taken at Cabinet to actually do this. And what I can tell you about that paper was that the logics within it were all on the bet
made all on the basis of military thinking and with no support in foreign policy analysis.
How do I know that?
I know it because when I the paper was given to me and there are only three people engaged in this paper, there was no underlying logic for the shift.
Well, I thought we have got to have a logic if it was going to get sense.
It seemed to me that the best logic from a military point of view was about about the fact
that we would get more leverage from military investment in Afghanistan opposed to Iraq,
because we seem to have lost a lot of consents in Iraq, where there was still a lot in.
Emma Stone But what we did do and what I did do was put in a sentence which said,
in the absence of any overriding foreign policy analysis, the military arguments, blah, blah, blah.
Now, that was actually a code to the Foreign Office to say, look,
you guys might want to have a think about whether it's a good idea moving from a state which is critical to the Americans,
which is right in the north of the Gulf,
which is one of our key strategic areas, and where we still may want to retain interest into one which seems less important or
certainly seem less important to me and is not fundamental to Britain's security.
And I still don't think what we're doing in Afghanistan is fundamental to our security.
So that foreign policy analysis was never done. And that just seems strange to me.
I think it's strange in part because I don't think actually we are really very good at thinking at the ground strategic level.
And again, for those of you who really do recommend this,
I also recommend listening in to the next of these because they're doing this again in the autumn.
So I think December will see another public administration select committee thinking about strategic thinking about whether we're very good at this.
You know, it's a red in here. So to get all that red says, it didn't make sense to make this decision without any supporting foreign policy analysis.
And I think actually even the word supporting foreign policy analysis is wrong.
I mean,
surely we should have made a decision like that on the basis of foreign policy analysis and it should have been driven by the foreign policy analysis.
I want us to the lecture when as the record expands, there is no talk about strategy making the end of it.
A British diplomat came up to me and noted British diplomat and said, You know, I'm awfully sorry.
He said, I never realised you guys in the military how important foreign policy was that made me think.
And there was then another British diplomat, again another diplomat. And I said to Richard, how do we make foreign policy?
And he looked at me rather quaintly. He said, he said, British foreign policy is not me,
but rather the amalgamation and the coagulation of all the different decisions made by individual diplomats and people out in the our embassies.
And I thought how interesting. And when you start to look in I've written about strategy making.
I'm one of the only people to have done it. If you look at if you look for books on diplomacy and foreign policy making,
I can find hardly anything does even less is about strategy making how much training the diplomats get in foreign policy and strategy.
I can't detect any in the British model. And again, I think that's terribly interesting.
So we've got untrained people making up stuff as they go along, muddling through.
Here's my second case study Libya and the Arab Spring.
What's the British national interest in Libya? An intervention.
And what are the grand strategic benefits and costs? I think that's a very, very good question.
Not just because I wrote it myself, because I think it's the one that we should be thinking about.
The national interest.
I think what really matters, if you understand the national interest and you understand what objective it is you're trying to pursue,
it gives you a much better understanding of how much price you're prepared to pay.
And I don't think we do enough of this.
Let me read to you from General, from going to Britain, if those of you who is one of the most fantastic stretch of distinction, American professor.
This is about the American engagement in Vietnam. He says the US engagement in Vietnam should have been guided by a conception that ought to
be utterly commonplace in strategic discourse and in related national policy decisions,
but seems on the contrary, to be often neglected or limited.
It is the conception of reasonable price being applied to strategy and national policy.
The idea that some ends or objectives are worth paying a good deal for and others are not.
The latter include ends that are no doubt desirable, but which are worth attempting only if the price can, with confidence, be kept relatively low.
I would have said that that was the test which ought to govern the way what we did in Libya.
I think there's a much more interesting issue about Libya as there is, is and I'm sure I'm going to put my read.
You probably can't see it, but I'll talk about it. Where does Libya stand in terms of two other critical areas?
What have we got at the moment?
We've got the Arab Spring and whether it's been playing out, it's playing out critically in Middle East and north in Africa,
but critically in Suez and Egypt, but also potentially in the Gulf.
Now, what I can tell you is that with the intervention in Libya, one thing we probably did, because we were really heavily committed in Afghanistan,
is that we used up our remaining British military contingency to do anything else in the world.
Does that make. Does that make sense? Does that make sense?
At a time where I think events are playing out in Egypt, which we don't really understand, and there are issues in the Gulf as well.
What would be the financial implications of things going wrong in Libya?
To the world system. I'm not sure they'd be that great. What would be the financial implications of this significant conflict in the Gulf?
I actually thought they'd be pretty catastrophic at the moment.
But I can tell you that at the moment we've got very, very little capacity if we wanted to do anything about it.
Fortunately, the Americans have. Should they want to?
Because actually they made the decision about and I'm sure the decision about getting
engaged or not in Libya was made on the basis of price and whether it was worth it.
So I think that's a really interesting question. So let me just come to conclude unconscious.
I got about 5 minutes of promise myself about sort of 35 or 40 minutes.
I'm going to come to to the say what in this I happen to believe in this.
I don't think it's the only thing about what goes wrong, but I think it should.
And so I think getting the strategic thinking right is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition for success.
But equally, if you get it wrong, then actually it seems to me that you're going to be lucky if you actually are successful.
Let's look at that. Another great book on strategy was written by an American admiral.
John Whiting writes in 1966 is a great book.
There's not really well well read enough, actually. But actually he talks about about this.
And it's the phrase that I particularly like is those last two sentences.
What I did across that strategy and I would turn it into strategy meeting because there's an important distinction there,
which is so clearly affects the course of societies, such a disorganised, undisciplined, intellectual activity.
And I can guarantee you from my personal experience that that has not changed since 1966, and it still is.
And I believe this state of affairs might be improved. And I think he's right.
Where would I go? On to my book. I'm shamelessly and put my book cover up.
But actually, I suppose there's some honesty in this as well, because you know what? I do think this is important.
I really do. The fact that we can't make strategy properly, what do I talk about?
I talk about in the final chapter of my book, I talk about the lack of focus and knowledge on strategy making.
I would say light-heartedly to my military friends. I said This is the best book written on strategy by serving bishops for the 70 years.
And it is because it's the only one that says something.
It says something that we're actually not even really thinking about.
This now can go to one or two standard text, brilliant text, actually, about strategy and you have to work through them.
The one text I can think of, it's foolish. I don't think you're one of the authors, but certainly one of the great street thinkers.
It's got not one page in it on strategy making and administration, not one page standard text.
We don't even, I think, have an insight that this really matters.
It was very interesting at the House of Commons, the Public Administration Select Committee, that I was privileged to be to be the witness to,
as indeed was Hugh, that one of the the deputy of the National Security Council of this country was asked about what training it had strategy.
It would have been difficult to have had any because he was from the Treasury. And the answer was he'd had none at all.
That's how I interpreted interpreters waffling on. So but it hadn't.
And if you looked around the National Security Council of this country, I think you'd probably find that the only person who's had any training
whatsoever in is in the subject to which they're which we've given these powers.
Is the single military man on his foreign policy.
Again, I think I've talked about this, the need for broader foreign policy, which you can actually set your your strategic decisions.
And I think this is a real shortfall. I think it's a problem in process.
We don't have the right processes in this country, and we tend to assume that we can do it all in London.
If you ask me what the simple answer to actually making interventions abroad is,
and I'm not in favour of it generally, but if you want to make them successful,
the simple answer to me is you get your best people and really make sure the best people send them out the listen
what they think is best to do and then give them the resources they need and then let them get on with it.
That's broadly speaking, how the British one in Malaya was actually letting them get on with this and stopping the press
and has commons and other people trying to interfere with what they were doing from 6000 miles.
But ultimately, I think it's ultimately all about people. Without the right people, we won't be able to do this.
And I'm not sure that we're terribly good at selecting the right people.
Let me give you two examples and examine who's the major general royal major general in charge in Basra, an inspirational leader.
And I don't say that he's a personal friend, but he is an inspirational leader, is still not to some level operating base.
And that doesn't make sense to me as somebody who really was successful on the ground.
Another Major-General Andrew Mackay, who was the one general who's really successful British general in Afghanistan,
again, was promoted to star level, pushed to the side and left the left, the service people.
He was successful at strategic level again because they can think properly at the strategic level, have not found a place here of ones that matter.
This is why it matters. On the left hand side, those I command the fleet are on with.
All these guys are killed. They were killed in March 2003.
We've done all the preparations to get them ready for operations.
It had been a long, complex preparation, but we basically aimed off and said, look, we think you're going to be going onto operations in March 2005.
And so we started the preparations in September 2000.
It's from March 2003 starts in September 2002.
They had a collision between two aircraft. And so we we then lost seven guys that I went to six funerals in 11 days.
I can tell you that's not much fun than it was. I didn't go to support John Adams, who's the American on the right hand side.
This was out in California in those days before I started this journey.
I think I would have been able to look at the parents of those young men in the face and say, Yeah, we're doing the right thing.
I'd find it much more difficult and much more difficult. They don't think we're doing the strategic plan properly, those kids.
They are all orphans in Afghanistan, not orphans as a result of wars, but orphans nevertheless.
And I do wonder sometimes about the way that we muck around in people's countries.
Let me sort of finish with a quote. I'm going to quote myself this time and you can find it.
Yeah. So I'm not saying that stretches the answer. Stretching is necessarily right.
But let me just see if I can pull you up with this last quote.
We talk about another strategy making coalitions.
I'm in the complexity of the coalition situation, superior strategy becomes even more important as a guide for the strategic action.
Some may conclude that because of the complexity and the coalition pressures, it is just too difficult.
And instead that muddling through is the answer.
Perhaps, but without without a shared strategy, muddling through will be multiplied across the different nations than multiply it again across them.
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Development Departments.
Without an agreed strategy, national contingents will inevitably, unnecessarily refer back to the national capitals for direction that, when given,
will be based on distance and incomplete precession to the position on the
ground and will often be shaped by other factors based on domestic politics.
This will be muddling through to the Power ten and we will have to pin our chances on the hope that the hurt of internal and internal,
internal and international coalition actors heads blindly but broadly in the right strategic direction.
Effective strategy making seems the better way, and even if it is mind numbingly difficult, then we do not always get it right.
Surely we should try it. Surely we too are agents of strategy, military and civil, who safely risk their lives on the call of duty.
Surely we owe it to the host population, to the territories where our coalitions act,
and whose destinies are so often caught up in the success or otherwise of our actions.
Surely these actions are better guided by the rational strategy rather than the bland, random premise of the herd.
This is not to suggest that we will always be successful in coalition strategy making, but even if our attempts at strategy making,
coalition do not in practice improve our prospects of success, it would be beyond conscience.
Surely not to try.