It gives me great pleasure to the first was on guns and I thought that really if
she saw himself bossy he's going to talk to us about a particular area of concern,
influence of psychological operations in war.
But critical question is going to be probably thinking forward in the next two years as well.
The vitally important component of modern warfare itself neglected at the moment, both of these, at least according to college.
He was placed in the Ministry of Defence, hosted the lecture that because on his title today I think it has a table to show you something.
Thank you very much indeed. Her man is, as Rob said, I'm just going to choose myself.
So you understand sort of where I come from,
which sounds probably hope for to explain my background slightly and why I ended up working for
the entity I was actually my last job was working for MTV of all people about seven years ago,
so launching TV stations around the world. I worked as a spin doctor for a couple of Tory politicians, and then I was college candidate.
I spent full time Harvard and Brown and the ten years as a reporter with the Times and The Washington Post quite a long time ago now,
about five years ago, I got mobilised.
I was reservists, I got mobilised out of the blue, having done a five day course in sort of very basic sort of psychological operations,
which sadly in a lot of conventional military is really quite basic.
And on the back of that, I got mobilised to go to Iraq and I was in Iraq for about eight months.
And then as soon as I came back I got really mobilised, happy to do so.
And I've done I've been out to Afghanistan about four times and I did two months the media up till
then and four months doing influence planning and spent some time in a place called Nada Alley,
which is not very nice area of central Helmand, where it's been fairly active in helping to plan operations there.
And I've done two other short visits. I've worked an exercise and I'm going out with the army on operations and in various other parts of the world,
in the Mediterranean, down in the Falklands. So that's my background.
So it's a sort of mix of sort of civilian media ops and all that sort of good stuff.
And then five years in the military, I am technically a soldier. I don't think anyone who's a proper soldier sees me as they want,
but I do have an army number and I get posted into all operations, all with various regiments and units,
and I hope advise them not just on psyops and influence, but more broadly on on what the nature of insurgency warfare in this age looks like.
And there are a number of points I'm going to try to make. And probably the most important one is that really insurgency.
It is warfare, but it is and it's violent politics.
And one of the huge problems in the last hundred years is that we've sent soldiers to do effectively a political campaign.
Political campaign. We need aeroplanes and bombs and bullets and all that sort of good stuff.
But really, insurgency, conventional warfare is a branch of politics almost more than it is of of of violence and warfare.
It's this presentation slightly unstructured. I slightly call it love, so don't apologise.
And I'm sorry because I want to do a perfect presentation with time because I'm actually students,
so I can cut lots of academic to make it look like I've done the reading and all that.
I was actually quite myself as well, so quite proportion.
But I thought, I've got a bit of a mishmash of what I'm going to do and talk a little bit about myself.
Just tick that box there and then I'm going to say, what is influence?
If anyone is going to go in about 5 minutes, I will answer that in about 2 minutes time.
And then I'm going to do a little bit of background historically about hearts and minds within warfare and roughly where I think it fits in.
And then I'm going to make a bunch of points for about 10 minutes. The most important one is that that insurgency is political warfare.
And then I'm going to come and look slightly at doctrine, and I know it's very boring and I find it boring,
but my supervisor has told me often said, no, you must hear the doctrine that's really important.
So I have Ken is here that I will I'm going to talk a little bit about the doctrine of how influence as an idea has evolved.
And because it's how vague it is and how precise and how useful it is.
And then come on to make some more general points about the nature of warfare and what the use of influence
tells us about how warfare is going to evolve in the 21st Century and and what sort of things we can expect.
And that's specifically looking at ideas like Smart Power, which is are Joseph Nye's ideas, you know,
using the power of soft power and how that combines with hard power and using smart power and all that sort of thing.
So it's going to be slightly unstructured. I've got a bunch of, as you can see, power points.
And there's one specific example of all the campaign we did in Basra.
But if I forget to do it in the formal bit of the talk,
hopefully somebody will prompt me and I'll just run through that in 5 minutes to give you an idea there.
And there's a little bit of doctrine as well that I want to show you a little bit about intelligence work and the reason it's something like this.
I can remember all the stuff that I've got there so I can put it up as.
And when. Like what influence? Very good question.
And one of the slight problems that the Army hasn't really got its head around, what influence is?
It has an idea, but it sort of changes every six months. About ten years ago,
the word influence crept into army doctrine as a subset of information ops and information ops as a fairly old chunk of sort of soft effect,
which was very much part of something called J. Three Support.
Now, for those of you with a military background, you'll know that J three is the hard, pointy end of the military.
It's the immediate operations that day, or certainly in the next couple of days for regular soldiers.
J three is operations within the next 48 hours.
J Five is operations within the next week or two in the more rarefied world of our effort.
The date since sort of changed slightly, but basically. J three.
J five. This is the act, you know, these are soldiers going out and doing stuff on the ground.
And Info Ops was very much part of J3 three of support.
So we were supporting doing press releases or information operations on the back of kinetic that is violent physical military operations.
It is then moved to become a much greater thing. About five years later.
It evolved into being the sum of all non-kinetic effect.
If anyone wants to stick up behind hand and say, I don't understand what you're talking about,
please do so as I talk because it's much better than ask for the end.
All non-kinetic effective military activity is divided into two kinetic effect things that go by a non-kinetic effect,
which is things that don't go back.
So inference became the sum of all non-kinetic effects that is in our hearts and minds operations, key leadership engagement,
interaction with villages, interaction with prime ministers, media ops externally to bring in Indigenous information ops to local people.
So that became influence. It's since morphed even further into being the overarching aim in a lot of what the UK does strategically.
So if you look at some of the manuals we produced,
some of the some words like feature character conflict, which goes by the charming aspect of the mascot.
And if you look at all those sorts of things, influence is now the name of the game, how you get people to do what you want, either by posturing,
by taking an aircraft carrier that we may or may not have outside somebody's support, or by economic power or by military power,
or even using different and other organisations when they can be bothered to, to, to do stuff.
So that in the some of it is what influence is. It starts off as a bit of info ops as an element of it.
It morphed into all non-kinetic effect or the supporting effect that the military needs.
And because of the nature of insurgency and counterinsurgency that we've been doing in the past ten years,
it's become almost the greatest sum of everything.
Everything that the military does. And I think there's a decent slide here.
If you look at the US military influence the levers, ignore the writing on the on on display.
This is the military contribution to stabilisation. This is out of a publication GDP.
340 I think it has come out about two or three years ago and you go to all of the activities that we do,
the manoeuvre is, is getting the army to focus on the enemy's weak point to defeat him.
That may be a raid on a compound in a village in northern Afghanistan.
It may be a divisional level operation.
So this is the fighting and these are infrastructure projects of soft effects.
This is fires, physical destruction made of putting your your kinetic operations.
This is the information activities that support it. And everything is to win over your target audience.
Prime Minister, get a village bit a national population and that is now were influences come.
So it started out as an acorn and it's become this oak and it's as many people point out,
a very vague sort of out because people still aren't quite sure what it means.
And in effect, influence in practical terms is a thing that generals waffle about understanding quite what it is.
BE It's a thing that colonels and majors need as part of their support to the kinetic, kinetic operations.
If you're slightly old fashioned, commander,
you will get influenced to support the kinetic operation that you do clearing a compound of clearing village.
If you're a slightly more enlightened commander, I would add you start off as Moshtarak, a very important operation.
I'll discuss a bit later, a couple of years ago in Afghanistan that we'll start off by saying, what is my end result?
My result is no Taliban and infrastructure projects going ahead.
That is my political aim operationally in my patch of Nadi, ideally north or south or Sangin or wherever.
How do I use my kinetic and non-kinetic to combine to make that happen?
That should be the thing you say influences two things at a tactical operational level,
it's support to kinetic or kinetic is support it to achieve your political objectives.
At the local level. It's what some general with a very small hand and a very, very large hand and a very small map will say,
I won't have influence over here and influence over that. So anyway, for those of you who got to that,
that is influence and that what I'm going to be talking about for the next 20 minutes or so and I will move
on because obviously I do want to start waffling a little bit about history of hearts and minds in warfare.
I think it's very important to know what is influence in the history of warfare.
It's about human and the political within warfare. It's due its Maccabees.
It could be the zealots, if you think about it.
I was I mean, one of the fascinating ideas I had recently, and I'm sure it's not mine because I've heard it on the radio,
it was an academic was talking about Jesus, his role as a zealot.
And I was thinking actually everything that he did leading up and I'm not questioning I'm not questioning the whys and wherefores of Christianity.
I just think he's a historical figure. He was a zealot.
His activity in Jerusalem leading up to his to his crucifixion, arguably was a form of propaganda of the day.
In its effect. It was no different to what Che Guevara was trying to do or the IRA is trying to do, is a propaganda of the day.
These were hands designed to fulfil a propaganda purpose,
whether it's riding to Jerusalem on a donkey or whether it's blowing up a barracks in Londonderry.
Some people may have an issue with that, but I think it's useful to to see these things,
to see conflict in the broad and political role historically hearts and minds in warfare.
It has encompassed irregular troops in the 18th century, you could argue the people like Rodgers Rangers in Canada, the Brits fighting the French,
in Canada, in North America in the middle of the 18th century was a form of irregular, almost a form ftf type revolt.
And the Rangers now, the U.S. Rangers, they take their name from Rodgers Rangers initially, which is his British force in the mid-18th century.
There's a link to certainly Algeria and the Caucasus,
maybe in the middle of the last century in terms of types of tactics used certainly by the insurgents, people fighting against European domination.
And again, the bulls as well were very interesting at the turn of the 19th and 20th century,
who I think were the first group of people to fight in a way that was inconvenient and very counterproductive for the Western imperial forces.
The Bulls arguably were the first to make a truce,
and I think a big question mark would actually play to the strength and not to their weaknesses since then.
T.E. Lawrence, a genius.
I'm going to quote from a little bit later who I think had a great deal to say about psychological battle spaces in warfare in his book,
and I recommend it to everyone. It's an amazing reading.
You can do it in a couple of hours with the evolution of a revolt, an astonishingly brilliant word which resonates, resonate.
And if you want to understand warfare now, read a few.
Lawrence's The Evolution of a Revolt, because in it he and I'll come to the quotes when I can find them in my work here in.
And he was sort of arguing about the yet to be paid his own minds men for battle and he had to understand
the enemy's mindset and the enemy support his mindset and our supporters mindset in the Middle East,
in Europe and beyond.
So we understood the notion that a battle space is not simply what the military now call the jour operating area, but it can encompass the globe.
And I think that was amazingly creative,
considering that he was fighting and leading his his leader advising the king during a time when the First World War,
when you had commanders whose sole aim, whose sole purpose was to march men to the enemy, to try to kill as many of them as possible.
And Lawrence turned that on its head, and that actually what I'm going to do is not have battle.
I will avoid battle, and I will defeat my enemy by tying them down in Medina and all along the railway from the Dean of Asia minor.
And I will defeat my enemy by avoiding battle.
And he did so. And he tied down from about 300,000 Turkish troops at a fraction of the cost of Olympism.
So I'm very slightly into creative warfare.
One of the points I'm unashamedly trying to do is use influence, that is hearts and minds,
operations and understanding of how to win over populations, how to understand the nature of nonconventional and creative warfare.
So I should have said that since then, since T.E. Lawrence, Essawi and the Brits have done a lot of insurgency as well as counterinsurgency.
So you've had a political warfare executive in the last in the Second World War, you had a special operations executive in the last war as well.
You could argue that the Nazis lost the civilizational battle because they had no hearts and minds strategy in Ukraine.
I mean, it is one of the great what ifs in history.
If they've got if the Nazis if the Germans had got a Ukrainian army, which was well within their grasp, if they wanted to,
of 2 to 3 million men who the Russians ever had stood a chance of getting any of European Russia back, I'd argue almost certainly not.
But the Germans were phenomenally good soldiers. But unlike the Brits, they missed the bigger picture.
They missed the political objective. I say once again, we lost what Kelly did.
But, you know, if manpower had been the operative, the issue for the Germans in the last war, then getting a Ukrainian army of 5 million,
using hearts and minds, appealing to the Ukrainians, giving them a national identity, giving them the the political aims that they stand for.
I think we probably would have been unstoppable. Very glad that he didn't do that.
Clearly, post-war counterinsurgency, Gulu kits and Thomson, these people are all worth reading again to those of you who don't know them.
David Gillooly was a Frenchman, served in Vietnam and then went and lived in the States.
Sir Frank Kitson Great man. He talked about the continuum between kinetic operations and non-kinetic operations, the unity of effect.
And that's one of the things that Britain and America and all these conventional armies are struggling with now.
The idea of unity, of effect, how do you get the Foreign Office defeated, demoted regular soldiery?
You get combined in an operating area to create the effect.
You create the influence effect that you finally want. Since then, I'd argue that since the 1970s, I think we've lost our way.
We've become addicted to high tech war. We follow the Americans.
Americans are brilliant in many ways, but they've got their flaws. We threw the Americans down this high tech route.
We abandoned the human understanding of the human.
And very importantly, for people like Andrew McKinley, who wrote his book, The Insurgent Archipelago,
he would argue the reason why the Brits did counterinsurgency so well in the post-war period is not because our army was particularly good,
although I think it was very competent. And the use of the idea of minimum force was something that was essential to the British army operations,
that you don't kill more people than you have to. You don't create, you don't engage in brutality.
And a question marks to what extent we believed that and actually practised it, but we certainly argued it, McKinney said.
Actually, the thing was we had political officers.
You had some bloke who lived with them for 40 years or 20 years, and he was a political officer and knew his stuff.
You had somebody in the Afghan hills, you had somebody in the Peshawar Valley who knew the natives,
who knew that the fundamental problem was the breakdown of politics and not simply are not not simply an outbreak of fighting,
because fighting in huge societies generally comes when you had a collapse of a political settlement of some kind or would in fact, some crisis.
And so McKinley argued, the reason we did counterinsurgency so well is because we understood the nuances the people,
the villagers, the ethnic identity, the cultural nuances and all these good thing.
And let me show you a quick slide on that here. Now, I found it's a bit as I apologise, it is a little bit messy if I can find it.
Where is it? There's a great bit of, you know, sort of cultural stuff here.
This is a just a present, a just a product.
This is a guy in in Iraq how to do this nowadays, if we actually this is a guy in an Iraqi Shia who's trying to advise the Americans and said no.
And the Brits as well, he said, can come. You talk about democracy. We've had that with Saddam.
You know, we don't believe a word of it. Actually, we are a religious nation and our culture is our religion in the same way,
in a way that it hasn't been in a place like Britain for 100, 150 years.
And if you want to win over the Shia, this is what you should say, that you're the followers of Jesus and you're the sons of Ibrahim Michael Muslims.
We've come to the Holy Land because you serve us here and we're going to kill Lucifer.
Now, if I have said that to my general officer commanding in Iraq, I would have been sent back home,
probably in a straight jacket and with a very useful diagnosis of being mentally ill.
Because then wonderful, because you just extend your services until it results.
So it would be great because the army could have paid me to write my Ph.D. and I would have go now because I'd be mentally ill.
I'd also be correct because that's what we should have said.
And now, even now in Afghanistan until about a year ago, we have 17 themes and messages.
And if I pin down the the brigadier in the task force and said, give me five of them, he'd probably remember one.
And that's about the Taliban. We know Islam foreigners are you know, we've now got two messages, but it's taken six years.
And I think one of the lessons that we've learned I apologise. I'm running slightly behind.
I'm trying to offer. One of the lessons that we've learned is actually is to get your narrative right and you have to learn very quickly.
And one of the problems that have to be Iraq bureaucratic armed force that we've had, both the US and the Brits and the French and other people,
is that we've learned our lesson very slowly and it's taken us years to get the doctrine right.
And the reason you have an insurgency is because of a political breakdown in the first place.
What we did, unfortunately, in Afghanistan is that we helped to create not more,
not because we were bad soldiers, but because going into Helmand under strain, we created a hornet's nest.
When all the hatred and all the divisions could be focussed on a very small number of British troops.
We don't have to fight like cats and dogs. To stop that posting overrun and slaughtered a lot of Russians up in Kajaki when they
all skinned all the Brits in Jalalabad when they were pretty much all skinned as well.
After that, we have to call an air power to survive, which massively infuriated the locals with people who were sitting on the fence.
So right when you trash my village square, what on earth do you think you're doing?
You're killing my kids, etc.? There's collateral damage. So yeah.
So I'm back to this a more free zone. This is probably what we did in Iraq.
We were taught one of the rules.
And I think another another point of learning that I've got is that in religious countries, you have to talk about God.
And we're not allowed to according to the rules, because God is is a bit touching from the younger man.
So we left the most important idea to the enemy, to the Jaish al-Mahdi, to the army of the Mahdi,
which was run by Muqtada al-Sadr or Muqtada al-Sadr was the need to figure out how we got around it slightly,
because we Allah Akbar in a lot of what we did, and that's the closest we could come to religion by having a nice big Allah
Akbar all day and to almost never get under the cover because it was in there.
It was in the Iraqi police and Iraqi army literature. By getting the Allah Akbar in, we could at least get a reference to religion in there.
So we didn't have to vacate that absolutely critical cultural space.
And there it is there. Right. I'm going to come on to a few points I'm going to make.
I'm going to get through these quickly. I was actually over. Right.
And think I'm going to run out of time. So I've got enough to say that I always have too much to say from right points I'm trying to make.
COIN is a violent political campaign. We've done that. Culture is very difficult to understand and getting it right is absolutely critical.
And we don't have the cultural relationships to know, have societies that we used to have because we don't have the people living in them.
And when we do like the Foreign Office, they are not the adventurous types anymore.
And the Foreign Office, unfortunately, is not the Foreign Office that it was in the days of Empire, which is a shame.
This is a bit of a sort of hegemony in the whole sort of hearts and minds return to the understanding, the human and the political in warfare.
It's all a little bit of a return or it's a little bit of a reality check on the revolution of military affairs,
which I know Ulric and others are studying where the IRA was all about technology.
This is all about human beings. Now, clearly there is a synthesis of the two use of drones, use of technology to listen, to understand.
So you can act on the human. So you can get the intelligence that allows you to kill individuals or capture
individuals rather than kill the wrong people and suffer collateral damage.
So there's a balance between high tech and the human that we haven't had in warfare,
but the army and the whole sort of we love cruise missiles because we can part one.
Whatever we want is great in conventional war.
But the problem is, as von Clausewitz and other people at MIT, that it conflicts with endlessly about conventional war.
Actually, he talked a lot about partisan warfare when when Napoleon in the French came through Prussia.
I mean, he was absolutely up for doing an assault, a result special operations, executive insurgency warfare out of Vietnam.
And all this good stuff, things on war is all about conventional war.
And I'd argue he actually wrote about I don't think you should have wrote about the Spanish about the Peninsula War, which is still very much with us.
The idea being a peninsula war was Wellington that took a small, very well trained,
irregular force and bulked it out with matters of really angry Spaniards who wanted to kill the French.
And that actually is a model for warfare in our age, for this century, maybe for future centuries.
But the conventional warfare that Van will cause it actually studied, you know, apart from the fact that it's entirely historic,
even if you take conventional warfare and say, right, well, let's take that model and bring it forward.
Now, how often do we fight conventional war? Ten, 15 years.
Every century. How often do we fight chaos in warfare, political warfare, nonconventional warfare?
Probably most years of every century. Certainly that's the rule of the last hundred years,
even with the cataclysmic industrial wars that we've had, and probably which are unlikely to happen again,
because even if you take the idea of a naval war in in in the Pacific between China and the US,
which may be the most likely form of significant conventional war, or perhaps between India and Pakistan against them in a civil maps.
Now, you know, it's difficult to see these conventional wars lasting any length of time,
but chaos wars, political wars, nonconventional wars, insurgency wars.
These are going to be with us for years and decades to come. Right.
Limited warfare is all about sending messages, which is why your narrative is so important in warfare,
and which is why your information operations are important, are not just as a subset, but as an encompassing.
And what is our political game in this village, on this road, in this city, in this country, you know, in this region, at whatever level.
And so it is about sending messages and everything.
Everything that we do is is a message.
And we forget that at our peril. And I think we have forgotten that in a lot of the soldiers.
That we've done in the last ten years. There is a fluidity and insurgency warfare between information and violence because they overlap.
If you're planning a resistance, we're teaching people to sabotage tanks.
You're teaching people to sabotage broadcast systems,
which nowadays has a violent effect because it helps to overthrow the regime in the same way that you're doing violent action,
in the same way that you're doing information activities that lead to violent action by gearing people up to fight, by advising them how to fight,
like the Palestinians did in the first intifada, the first intifada, if you remember, with kids, spontaneous uprising, slingshots.
Very often the way it occurs or sort of, you know, hooded thugs and all that sort of stuff.
So keeping the intifada going, the information campaign was about ginning up the soldiers,
was about charging up the young Palestinians, but also advising them on how to fight, advising them on tactics against the Israelis.
So in the same way that that information campaign hasn't fallen foul of that.
So by having the propaganda the dean bit and explosion better suicide bomber bit of violent action to use that violent action as a statement as well.
So there's an overlap between information warfare and violent warfare.
They feed off each other and they have to be seen of things that are fundamentally intertwined.
And I think, again, we are learning that hearts and minds in practical terms is much more complex nowadays.
Undoubtedly true. I mean, so not have a bomb with a bunch of ammonium nitrate fertiliser,
a computer or a mobile phone, you can pretty much set yourself up as a global terrorist group.
You may not have much success, but it is possible. And arguably that is what elements of Al Qaeda have done.
And al Qaeda is absolutely focussed, as we know. They see themselves that our battle is 90% in the media and it's 10% in their acts of violence.
For conventional war, conventional forces like our own tend to do the opposite, which isn't great.
However, despite the fact that hearts and minds are much more complex nowadays,
we have succeeded less than we should have or failed more than we should have.
Depending on what your slant is, in part because we have forgotten most of the lessons that we originally lacked.
And that for me has been the really painful thing about watching our own armed forces.
And when I've been serving with them, my job is to thank them, allow them to have a little bit of not oversight,
but to nose around the elements of of Division one headquarters or to get out in the crowd with troops from a company level down.
I think the Brits are probably the Americans are going to do fantastically good job because they have to interact with locals.
They are forced to take hearts and minds seriously. They are forced to engage.
They're forced to pick up intelligence and information and life.
But above that level, there has been a corporate and institution and institutional forgetting of of what we have been about.
But I'm going to stop there because I'm just going to go through. If anyone is interested in this,
just the having a quick look at doctrine for those of you who are interested and I know
I'm sort of I know this is a bit of the sort of nuts and bolts bread and butter piece,
but I hope it's going to be quite useful. And then I'll go and some general points provided I can find the bit of paper
that has it looking at some of the research that may be of interest to you,
but also then looking a little bit just as the future and what the future may hold in terms of warfare.
And that'll be about another ten, 10 minutes or so. And then maybe questions I think will be talking a bit too much about doctrine.
22 First influence terminology of influence in in Gwp three eight Information Officers 2002 Then there's a
lot of other references to influence and influence operations within military affects approach to warfare.
So JD, JD and one of five. JD And four or five looked at the comprehensive approach and I'm just going to
throw up a couple of slides on that now to give you some idea of the confusion.
When we think about the military, we always think the military are very swept up in what they're doing.
And if the military say something very smart or if the military say something, there's only a very good reason because they're very smart people.
I was talking to Professor Strewn about this, and actually one of the things he said was that really wasn't the case.
So if you look at the comprehensive approach here, we see what a sort of intellectual method is.
And I'm sorry to be negative. I know there's strong points about it. I'm not disagreeing with everything.
The comprehensive approach is being a defence aptitude. So you've got the second problem.
You've got the UK approach to campaign, you've got capability,
which is to get the people you've got understanding and you've got well now clearly you need desire to do something that's absolutely true,
but understanding in terms of G-2 and capability are pretty much the same thing, I'd argue.
So why is intelligence gathering different from capability?
It's absolutely not. So I think that is a fundamental flaw that if you take out that you end up with capability.
Well, then if you look at joint action fires blowing things up, it's called the propaganda of the.
Now, that is part of inference. That's part of the psychological approach.
That's part of the psychological understanding.
You know, manoeuvre is allegedly not part of includes any influences fits into manoeuvre anyway according to according to doctrine writing.
But I don't understand the difference between father and influence, because influence surely is an outcome of manoeuvre.
Getting your man in the right place at the right time to kill the enemy or capture the enemy.
And it's also an outcome of fires, putting bombs down or dropping leaflets on a specific area.
So, again, there is a lack of sort of intellectual rigour and intellectual credibility there.
And again I don't we need Connecticut non-kinetic. Then moving further down opsec coordinating ops.
Well, sac has got nothing to do with influence and media ops tend to be terrible gossips anyway.
So that's a bit of a coordinating oxygen media.
No, coordinating there is influence because influence is coordinating off for all non-kinetic effect.
So why is media, though, and media as a subset of something that should be higher up the chain?
Likewise, information ops and civics stabilisation is one of the great themes which should be much higher.
So again, there's a lack of credibility, that sort of a lack of intellectual rigour and all those sort of areas.
And then moving down to the tools and techniques. Well, physical destruction, I'm not sure it's a tool and technique.
And again, I think that is the wrong place. Special capability.
Electronic warfare has got nothing to do with key leadership engagement, which is related to it.
PSYOPS actually infuses everything that we're talking about.
All the different bubbles completely. What was that come to?
Come on again. Wrong place. It's not a tactical. It's much more of an operational issue.
So if you're going to look at information operations,
probably what you want to do is divide up information into various different elements and aspects that you can understand better.
So you have direct information, which is information operations of stuff like control, stuff that I can when you have a directly,
it's a meeting with you with dropping a leaflet on your house or sending you a diet message on radio.
I control it so I know what I'm going to say to you.
I may get the message wrong if I don't do my cultural appreciation correctly, but at least I have a good idea in the information is through the media.
And again, it's one of our big failings in Afghanistan that a lot of the people who've worked in indigenous
media have certainly been a pretty poor quality and it's a bit of a tough job to do.
And in fact, the quality of work has been extremely poor. So, you know, community.
So we've got direct information, indirect information, which is via the media.
So you're a journalist, I'm trying to influence you. So get interview to hit that person.
That is direct and indirect information, not cyber information, including very special capabilities of the army.
You've been cited about electronic warfare, all that good stuff. And then we have presents, information, what I look like on the ground.
And amazingly, actually, you disappointed me that even in the dying days in 2012 and 13, how it was operational and given to Afghanistan, to Iraq,
we went out with hard hats on, very much tooled up for violence when the war, the insurgency had actually finished about six months earlier.
And when I was doing the training for take 13, everyone came through a U.S. based down in Kuwait.
We had that for a couple of weeks and I was doing the PSYOPS bet and I was just talking to people and none of them,
the British soldier was coming through and they had not had any training in their population engagement.
Their training was still in hard kinetic warfare,
and that was at the end of the day and the last year of the campaign were really we had
moved on and I was against private much disappointed that we got that so badly wrong.
So your presence, whether you're in berets or helmets, whether you're prodding somebody with a weapon,
not that I would advise that that was legal to do anyway. All that sort of good stuff says a lot about you and your posture.
So it's like in Afghanistan, in Helmand back in 2006, we rely on the Air Force because we're about to be overrun.
That sends messages to locals, Hey, we're on demand.
We have got the force ratios and we're blowing up everything in sight because we haven't come here with the correct preparation.
No good disinformation, deception, great stuff, very important strategic level, FCO targeting and information operations,
a slightly dysfunctional organisation with the MOD and you've got stuff like Number ten, Downing Street, etc., which controls the shrinking level.
And above that you have the carrot and stick of physical destruction, blowing things up and civic stabilisation,
winning people over and navigating through the combines undue influence.
So that just gives you a little bit of an idea about, I think, a sort of certain intellectual dysfunctionality that we've had in the MMT.
I mean, while the defence was and I think Americans have slightly the same problem as well for that.
But what else, just about doctrine. What else.
GDP 300 company. Very important. I think that shows the quote in the document from 2010 from Major-General Ben.
We conduct all operations in order to influence people and events to bring about change,
whether by 155 millimetre artillery shell or by hosting visits.
And I think. By the time that you had GDP 300, which came in the last couple of years of 2009,
you had that break and that you had the idea that influence was everything and that influence was critical.
Since then, future coverage of war very influenced orientated.
The Land Influence Handbook and the Insurgent Tactics Handbook, again, recent publications that have come out in the last two years,
all of which talk about the totality of what you're trying to do and seeing it in terms of kinetic and non-kinetic events.
Now, Rob, I'm not going to talk about 35 minutes, so I stop there and then we can have questions because that goes for you.
You have one point of it. I was just talking about future of where we're seeing the future of warfare.
And I'd argue that, I mean, social media is got a huge impact. We don't even know the impact yet, and we're still looking at that.
I think there's a lot of very good thinking, a lot of it being done by the U.S. Marine Corps.
And I'm engaged with somebody over there working on this, and they're looking at freedom and the concept of freedom of manoeuvre across the digital.
Of course, the real and unreal space and real meaning of digital, cyberspace, etc.
A U.S. Marine Corps organisation about has as it has, is used to the idea of having freedom of manoeuvre on land, on, sea, on and all these places.
So the concept of freedom of manoeuvre in the digital space and cyberspace, I think is a very important progression.
And I think it shows the roots of revolutionary thinking that wherever they go, whether it's in a virtual world or the non virtual world,
they have to control and they have to understand and be able to control that space.
So that gives you an idea of some thinking.
I think when it comes to the ideas around smart power, we're combining soft power, power of TV with hard power, the power of, you know, USS Nimitz.
And it's about how to combine the two. And we're not very good at doing so.
And I think Joseph Nye is a very interesting ideas to say about that,
although I don't think you could understand the role of soft power in the military.
I think joint effect is something that we're still very much working on.
Joint Effect is the idea of combining government departments to work together.
Many of you will think, Well, that is not what we pay our taxes for. You'll be right.
I don't think it happens. And I think there's a lot of work that's going to be done in that in the next ten years.
And I think finally, I think there are huge, significant legal implications about modern warfare as well,
that we haven't got our heads around because it is currently very much easier to kill somebody than to persuade them or dissuade Somali pirates.
You can this way. But if you come to near them and you capture them, they can ask for asylum.
We can't drop them off anywhere. We can't put them in Somalia because there is no legal system and they will have a field day in that court.
So actually, it's easier to kill somebody and argue because that moral so legalistic,
we're coming to the point now where legal war is actually becoming legalistic war, which is arguably not moral or ethical.
And I think there's that division, interestingly, between what is legal and what is ethical.
And I think that is a great question. And I probably would flee the far right and you can go to the resource.
So it kind of is very, very unstructured. My apologies. I should just because Bob, I mean, you I found it to be provocative.
You know, just let me just remind.