For her. I'm speaking very much as a a sort of practitioner who's dabbled in academia and certainly been involved in the military.
I would call them think tanks, but doctrine and concepts and centres.
So I hope I don't in any way tarnish the reputation of Oxford University over the next 6 minutes or so.
The title Civilisation Security has been very much sort of buzzwords from sort of contemporary operations,
or indeed maybe the way operations have been conducted in the near past as opposed to perhaps how they might be conducted in the future.
What I'm trying to do is trying to develop the link between the way conflict is,
is looked at and managed and what we can draw from maybe non conventional sources.
Certainly the business schools originally drew their inspiration from from the military, but maybe there's a reverse flow that could take place now.
And social science in the broadest sense as as being as kind as becoming folk, certainly military circles in order to again, draw inspiration.
So my underlying theme really is one of all the military innovation where we draw ideas from for framing conflict.
And bear in mind that war now and conflicts are much sort of broader concepts and beyond the military as a result of our experiences.
I always feel that when we enter into a period of uncertainty, as perhaps we are now in terms of how we deal and frame conflict,
my evidence for that is sort of I was a Defence Fellow at King's College London for the last nine months and on some of the big
subjects I listened to some pretty distinguished people coming from entirely different directions on how it should progress.
I think there's a degree of sort of some of the different ways in which we can navigate the complexity of operations.
But I think as we as we enter into the sort of this period,
that there's more there's a greater need to understand or to look at it from a conceptual point of view to do more conceptualisation.
Well, at the moment, certainly in the British army, we focus in the last few years on writing doctrine based on the evidence from operations.
I think perhaps now we need to start thinking conceptually about a number of things,
which I'll touch on is the features of both the way conflict is is going on might say this looking back,
I remember when I was a staff college student 20 odd years ago, and then conceptually there was only one book on the shelves.
And this was a book by Richard Simpkin called Race the Swift.
And I don't recall seeing any other sort of conceptual thinking.
Most of our education was was lessons from history, which I'm sure Hugh Strong would would recommend,
but in historical analysis was not enough, I don't think.
But then again, you could say all our operations were relatively straightforward.
And when you think about what happened on the North German plane, but it is his book.
John Nagl draws attention to the fact that the British Army was going through a period of innovation,
was showing a high degree of imagination and flexibility,
albeit tacitly in Northern Ireland as we fought that ongoing battle, that competition with the with the IRA and as Naval says,
that that was probably in our DNA as a sort of throwback from colonial policing days.
You probably know of you might well know the way that military thinking has sort of progressed.
We have the battle reforms that looked at other ways in which and we're talking about sort of eighties,
nineties now, in which the military viewed the attritional battle, became a model of manoeuvre.
However, when we were first took the division out to Gulf War One in the early nineties,
that division didn't look that much dissimilar from its World War Two predecessor.
And also, I think now of the the sort of renaissance of of information ops and psyops and all things to do with the information environment.
I recall that my site is sort of college where not only did we have I think it was a 45 day period on peacekeeping,
but we had a multilateral from the only psychological operations officer in the Army, one lieutenant colonel on his load.
So that was the that was the sole representation of this of this dedicate of this particular lost art,
although General Smith did resurrect that as a result,
for all the the need for psychological operations, particularly deception, as a result of his experiences in Gulf War One.
One thing happened in the nineties, which was the American Generation Revolution in military affairs, that sort of once again to simplify war.
So if you recall the dominance of technology being able to see and manoeuvre
and strike and that sort of reinforced at the time existing military cultures,
particularly our forces and encouraged the military or reinforced military education that was based on the hard sciences.
We had the Star College before we went to Starfleet. They went to the Royal College of Science.
The winner, Social Sciences, though certainly not my experience.
What changed the game was the obvious. The ball in Sierra Leone, in the Middle East, in recent operations.
I think what I'm saying is we would have adapted our armed forces, our conventional forces and some of our thinking.
But in the past has been one or two developments in conflict in the last few years that that require us to make a more talked
about paradigm change just as a further jump leap into the dark rather than constantly adapting what we've what we've got,
although we are very good. My personal view as an army, we are very good at adapting, adapting things.
And so General General John Kinsley recently wrote about the post-modern warrior and starts looking
at the nature of contemporary operations and how that as he was the head of the Defence Academy,
how that might what would that mean in terms of preparing and training and educating a generation of
officers and the challenges of wicked problems and underlying the sort of complexity that we see,
see today. So there's a quote that sort of set me on this particular journey and it's it starts off and I, I won't read it all that says,
just as law at its borders merges with history, politics, economics, sociology and psychology.
So also does the military skill, because this person goes on, say the facts, like the lawyer and the doctor, he, the military practitioner,
is continuously dealing with human beings, requires him to have a deeper understanding of human attitudes,
motivation, behaviour, which a liberal education stimulates.
Now, that was Samuel Huntington writing 50 years ago, and perhaps I had ahead of his time the in terms of where where is conflict going.
Well and a clause of it says that in every age and this age is has its own features, its own peculiarities and nightmares.
And I'll touch on some of those now, which I suspect you'll be familiar with.
But I think they drive the next the next step is where do we gain our inspiration from?
You know,
which bookshelf do we go to see to pull out the to pull out the books to tell us or guide us how we might we might come out of these operations.
We know that conflict itself is is the nature of the sea is unchanging.
And again, that has an impact on how we act in terms of our ambitions are able to to conduct conduct operations.
And I'll touch on that as well. I'm not suggesting for a moment the military have not thought hard, hard about them.
The the the characteristic of of of contemporary conflicts or indeed future conflicts they have.
The question is to what level of maturity as we reach some of the highlights,
a number of areas that require require so and so in the the the foundation documents that was circulated around the his defence about nine months ago.
There's quite a lot on cyber, the cyber cyberspace cyber, but it doesn't really sort of this is an area of immaturity in terms of conceptual thinking.
Yeah, you know, sort of penetrate. Yeah, perhaps. Maybe it is.
It's too early at all. It's ten years after the atom bombs dropped on Japan.
Before we started to think in terms of nuclear theory, I think everyone talks about the present, the future.
Certainly my my colleagues in King's College London, who would always quote Rupert Smith as perhaps a good spokesman for change.
And if you recall, he said, the war as we know it no longer exists.
It's an inner conflict of confrontation. Well, I would add to competition as well,
because after all operations now we are trying to we're trying to outperform the opposition, not just kill them.
And that's the sort of term that perhaps a businessman might use. And we know it's competitive because war is about relationships of power and ideas.
It's a clash between powers to brands rather than just forces.
And we know that these types of or of conflict irregular in nature.
As T.E. Lawrence said, irregular warfare is far more intellectual and pain and charge, and therefore, we need to penetrate that.
And and look at ways in which we can sort of navigate through it.
Where do we draw inspiration from ideas for? And again, I'll touch on that.
So war is more if it's a battle between two brands and perhaps it's a battle
between narratives played out in the minds of populations connected globally
by new media and inextricably linked to to the fact that this new media is
empowering and mobilising masses cyber mobilisation where perception matters.
So it's not just the and what you achieve, but it's also the way you play the game.
This is nothing new. Robert Gates in 2007 was saying about American operations.
It's about shaping behaviour, not just imposing one's will.
So what I've begun to do is to frame war in perhaps a different language or a softer psychological language less less kinetic,
perhaps less confident and less ambitious.
The So what we're asking really is that our practitioners, the broader perhaps we now have a broader description of of a conflict practitioner.
And certainly we found from a military point of view that those leaders have to
be in every man polymath and drawing from and familiar with the social sciences.
As much as brand building, bandwidth and ballistics drawing parallels between war and business is nothing new.
The Japanese view was that business is essentially war,
and that led to business executives in the States in the nineties embracing Sun Tzu as a as a business guru grants strategic one.
So businesses will always increasingly like business.
If when I talked about the idea of that, the the military practitioner or the conflict practitioners as a much broader remit
now drawing from a much broader sort of library full of books that will guide,
guide that individual organisations, it does create a bit of what is the dilemma certainly for the military.
Does the military in navigating through this complexity turn around and say, well, you know, we are what we are, we'll stick to our guns?
Or does it? To what extent does it do other people's jobs or to what extent does it need to understand the wider context in which it operates?
But it does have it it has and continues to have an impact on the way the military forces are designed in the future.
And because perhaps there's a degree of uncertainty, there is a degree of uncertainty or confidence about how to adapt military forces.
So therefore, some aspects that are a prominent in operations now are not necessarily as well
developed in the military as there might be information operations being of.
So Rupert Smith war amongst to plead people placing civilians as a target to be warned it's not dissimilar from
any business in marketing its product or service in order to win customers and keep the stakeholders happy.
And of course, outperforming the other brands. He also talks about the utility force in a conventional sense, that encouragement moves,
we think is to to reflect on influencing various stakeholders in the conflict,
using words and deeds where physical force has a role to be applied intelligently,
and that the military commanders and the colleagues, civilian police on an operations can not afford to be one dimensional.
But in terms of the way they are thinking, perhaps, and I've seen it written, is that we still tend to think in a logical, analytical way,
looking at end states and looking at progression to end states and the sort of set piece battle rather than in an elastic, deductive way.
And therefore, military commanders have got to be savvy in the heart of influence and not simply organising violence.
Now at the same time as if we're drawing similarities with business or ideas from business.
We know that business has progressed and has changed with the times we live in, the time of influence and not deference.
Hierarchies have been flattened. Compliance has given way to commitment.
Business understands the power of new media and building networks and creating partnerships.
The structure of boardrooms, too, has changed, where reputation and goodwill are just important as a healthy balance sheet.
And another connection with business is the fact that, as Christopher Coker says in his recent book,
A War in the Age of Risk, is that we are in the age of risk where security and risk are more important than anything else.
And therefore, risk becomes the language not only of conflict, but it is the language of business, politics and public policy.
And the problem with taking a risk approach to conflict is that it does not lead necessarily to clear messaging, but tends to be one of ambiguity.
Before I just jump into words. Social science and business can perhaps add some more inspiration to to thinking about conflict.
I just want to touch on some of the drivers, some of the features of contemporary conflict,
which which begin to affect the way that we think about strategy and the way in which we will organise ourselves.
The first, obviously, is the information environment,
and the fact is that conflict spills over out of areas of operation thanks to the information age and the idea of cyber in the cyber domain,
characterised not only by electronic work networks, but also by communities.
And Manuel Castells, the Spanish sociologist in his book Information Age,
and the second book, Communication Power Coins The Networked Society and the Politics.
Of course, you know, politics is war or war is politics by other means is played out in now in this media space and therefore influenced
by the likes of media corporations and this new information doer the doer who operates in the blogosphere.
This is highlighting this growing individualism and and predominately short termism,
online informality that undermines deference and has implications for authority and also for the elites.
People, whether friends or enemies, are free to connect in the source sociological process.
And this has an impact on on conflict as we know it, this free flow of ideas, ideas and grievances that fuel conflict and indeed encourage revolution.
Nick Gowan is a seasoned media practitioner,
warns governments that the modern communications of modern communications expose surprise and affect their reputations.
He further concludes that contemporary Western liberal democratic society, perhaps led by US media,
is demanding greater transparency that complicates the working of elites and their messaging when managing conflict.
And perhaps we see an element of that now where it is quite difficult to explain a strategic
narrative because it because it may not be necessarily what what the public wants to hear,
if indeed and therefore leads onto, as I'll talk about later,
is in strategic communication makes street unification quite almost impossible and they need to rethink that through.
What So in terms of the information age is that we're into the business now,
targets which are no longer limited to power stations, military bases, but also softer targets.
So target has become a legitimacy, authority and reputation.
I keep returning back to this this business of reputation.
The. And therefore in the battlespace.
Now, the information element may well be the decisive, decisive part.
It may well be that this begins to question the way we approach strategy,
the way we approach communicating in in conflict, and particularly if the centre of gravity is not perceptual.
So Information Age is the first one. The next one is culture.
And this is sort of resurrection of culture within within conflict as a way of trying to explain what is going on or to give for further,
I'll talk about later. Contextual Intelligence.
Lawrence Friedman states that operations undertaken in politically complex settings can be full of surprises
that often results from a failure to understand strategic cultures and agendas of both friends and enemies,
and a mixture and the mixture of motives and attitudes that influence their actions.
And he goes on to stress that coping with these new conditions presents substantial challenges to strategists.
As as we have known. And that sort of leads on to the way in which understanding culture or the resurrection of both anthropologists, you might say,
in conflict, has informed the way in which we do security, stabilisation and political resolution, which are in the title of the lecture.
And the greatest manifestation of this has really been that the whole idea of nation
building and whether or not we whether or not we have that particular solution,
that template is the way in which we can we that we can apply now given the certain change, particularly in the information age.
And that's what I again, I'll touch on again, Peter. So.
In terms of nation building or stable stabilisation,
a number of things themes have come out that begin to suggest that we need to draw from other sources of inspiration.
So for example, the role of civil society was previously only sort of secondary.
Important in conventional conflict is now of major significance in building stability because of governance, reconciliation, integration.
Other areas are the fact that there are a lot of stakeholders involved in nation building and again,
handling those and skills like negotiation are essentially non-military.
In his book The Sword, Swords and Ploughshares,
Paddy Ashdown suggests that we could get better at or more professional in terms of rebuilding states and suggests that that it's
about the quality of people and the to the sort of people who have been heavily involved in this have been humanitarian workers,
NGOs and foreign service personnel, not necessarily businessmen.
And it's and it is quite possible that if these these missions were looked at more like a program and adopting a
businessman's approach to programs that might provide a better structure in which a process in which they can be conducted,
but also in the way that the West is approached, is nation building.
In a particular way. We have a template,
but that tends to build institutions at the top first when often certainly in Afghanistan and not suggesting that we template this well,
perhaps the requirement was to build local institutions and it was only really
through Petraeus who came in with adopted this whole low level idea of clear,
hold and build where you can actually build, build, build,
build up a society from from the bottom right rather than from the top and and
from whether or not the the whole idea of spending years trying to put in top
level institutions and legal reforms that are somewhat alien to that particular
country was the best way to just sense that there is one for is one template.
Why is there one template? I think it is because the it is very, very difficult internationally with donors,
everything else to to offer them other than what is is the the standard way in which development takes place in in countries.
So how might social science help inform from the cultural theme we've seen how
anthropology has been drawn upon to to provide this sort of contextual intelligence.
And bearing in mind that understanding the context is, well,
what's the conflict practitioner or the military leader needs to do now is rather this much broader concept, the role than just intelligence.
I think looking beyond the enemy that that has tested certainly military
structures in order to to build this continue with this wider idea of context.
Now, it's certainly been successful at a micro-level in things like the Helmand taskforce,
where Britain has been able to bring it at a tactical level,
a number of states or anthropologists or some social sciences who are on the government's payroll.
And you'll know that the Human Terrain teams and the work of Montgomery McFate,
the anthropologist with in the U.S., has has led to a number of a number of successes.
But also they paid the price, I think, to two anthropologists were killed on operations.
At the macro level, I don't see any evidence of that taking place, this idea of building a much larger view of what is going on.
And that may be simply because I haven't got access to the information.
So what so embedded experts, usually anthropologists have been able to explain, explain the local culture and how important things like leadership,
authority in power are managed, but more importantly,
how local culture works in terms of motivation and how they view and understand and frame any external intervention force.
So the way we position ourselves, you know,
whether we go into these large bases and whether the fact is that what is the consequence of that is we send a message that we don't trust you,
but we're here to protect you. Are we sending a message of occupation and repression?
But have we thought through these things? And in fact, no, we do it for another reason.
Is that you that is that it suggests that at this stage we are not you know, we are not part of a long term solution.
But perhaps the indigenous forces and government is or is it do we do it by design or we just do it by default?
Certainly developing the cultural adviser role, we've moved towards this idea of prison cells.
But where where commanders can look at the problem through the through the eyes of local people, of local people.
And that certainly has been effective at the tactical operational level.
They and of course, drawing in terms of measuring effect and operations,
a lot of the techniques that are used in marketing this sort of almost like the mystery shopper technique,
are used to find the sort of to get the vibes from the ground, to get the atmospherics in a way that perhaps has not been done before,
but is very familiar with those who have been operating in a marketing and advertising.
What about sociology and social psychology?
Well, social psychology has always, always had a connection with the military through psychological operations,
more so in the states than than in the UK,
although that does begin begin to bring a rather narrow view of of understanding the dynamics of of of an effective population,
because social groups do influence individuals thinking.
But there's always been a problem with sociology and social scientists in terms of of getting involved with the military,
particularly because of their implicit liberalism.
And it is quite difficult to identify, well, in sociology, the military or in fact, conflict is looked at.
If you look at some of the work to to do with gender rather than assist or the ways in which they could perhaps explain why,
why, why groups that hold the nexus between social groups and conflict.
One other problem really for the practitioner is that some of the theories,
psychological theories is far too abstract to be of immediate operational value.
And it's this whole idea of trying to take academic work and sort of translate it to the practitioner who provides that bridge.
How do we do it? And I see in military circles how what they've done is they've gone to some to an everyman psychology like Robert Cialdini is.
Yes.
50 seekers from science persuasion, which sort of gives some sort of easy to understand ways in which you can manipulate a situation to influence.
But once again, is that as entered into the realm, realms of information operations?
But but I can't see it sort of being brought into the understanding of how to do why wider operation while they're just information operations.
So so war snow what does all this mean from a social science point of view?
Is that for the moment? My experience is that, first of all, it's quite difficult to to draw from social science,
to draw from academia in order to use all that thinking, to synthesise all that thinking and bring it bring it into the management of conflict.
Often even within organisations, academic organisations need people to do the same thing, to even talk to each other.
And some of that has to do with contracts. Certainly that is the case and I suspect is the case in the Defence Academy.
If what we probably need is, is to draw this into certainly within the military but also into a wider conflict,
practitioner's education and preparation.
So how do we do that will certainly as part of this as it is falling into the realm of information operations
or the sort of this idea of military influence is that we need to have I think we're going to take it forward.
Then you need to have a champion, certainly within within military circles to lead for it.
And this doesn't exist at the moment. There wasn't organisation to do this defence,
but that dealt with cyber as well and quite naturally got moved into the more technical aspects of cyber defence.
So it needs professionalised and institutionalised and perhaps we need a centre of excellence but not limited to the military.
And there's quite problems in terms of labelling this or branding it a do we call it military sociology?
Is this what it is or is it, as Darren Lawrence at Cranfield talked about, personal logic.
Do we need a centre for military science that which might be less controversial than perhaps the Behaviour Warfare Centre?
Okay, so that's a few ideas from social science.
What about business theory? Well, business strategy has drawn quite something from from from the military over the years,
but most about business strategy tends to be a one year plan and looking out three years and some businesses tend to not have a hard and fast plan.
But like the Foreign Office,
whether or not they don't have a full plan with an end to that with an end state win some means that way of doing strategy.
What they essentially do is they look at the market, the fall in the market, and they're flexible.
You might argue that the Foreign Office, hitherto criticised for being a bit like that,
are not as well organised as the military in terms of stabilisation.
Working back from an end state is that they're far,
far more flexible and perhaps now with the onset of the way that the environment is being influenced by,
by the information age, perhaps of the fall of this model of being a little bit more flexible and not necessarily having a clearly defined end state,
but just moving towards as long as Friedman said recently, has rolled out a strategic narrative just to have a script,
which I think is what William Hague has at the moment, works within some broad parameters of what is right and wrong.
But he can't tell you where he's going in the interview.
What he can tell you is what the next step is in the script.
So the way business had actually taken some zu, for example, who, who said, you know, the broad in the broadest sense,
you've got to understand politically, socially, physically to lead for success, you've got to be to avoid introspection.
You've got to look from the other point of, you know, it's knowing yourself and knowing the opposition as well.
Well, this is all true. And business, you know, embraced this through SWOT analysis and so on and so forth.
And interesting SWOT analysis has been recently brought into military doctrine for the first time in a joint in publication and campaigning.
So I think that's all all fine. And I think that that the the broadening the way in which we understand conflict,
drawing from business methods, also helps us to view ourselves, which we we tend not to do.
There's very little at the moment within doctrine about sitting back and just looking at one's self and looking at one's own weaknesses,
one's own perspective, in order to shape how you're going to deal with a problem,
mostly marketing or marketing business academics increasingly view the role of the
corporate communications director who deals with marketing as well as being centre stage.
They've been brought into the boardroom. This is because of the importance of perception, reputation.
And I don't need to to highlight that because, you know, we didn't do what had to be paid to anyone.
There's been really done on military marketing. Some work done a few years ago by the RAND Corporation called and listed Madison Avenue.
But that starts to look at the ways in which marketing and advertising, branding and so on can be brought into the way we do operations now.
Branding, for example,
and is the art of conditioning an audience to an ad to associate with a given product to the personal or an idea with a desired emotional response.
And there's a very good book by a guy called Walter Cole Fighting a war of ideas like the real war,
in which he talks at length about about branding and the idea of commercial marketing.
But the problem with trying to translate it is to to to the conflict sphere is that commercial marketing really is about a standard product,
which you all know and you're marketing it. Political marketing is about a promise that at the time of the marketing you don't need to deliver on.
But crisis marketing is quite is quite difficult because the situation is all fluid.
People are making mistakes. You don't always know the you know exactly what you're trying to sell.
And you've got some very distinct audiences.
For example, while in the handling of the of the assassination or the killing of of bin Laden, it was quite interesting.
And I was part of the debate about that. Why did President Obama tell the domestic audience first?
Well, because there was the repercussions in the style it was given in, you know, why was that?
Well, it may well be because the obviously democratic population is, well, the centre of gravity in any irregular conflict.
So I think that something that there's there's material within branding that is is quite useful in terms of the way
the military and the civilian intervention force talk about managing perceptions and this idea of campaign authority,
which I can talk about later. This is how the force presents itself and behaves to enable its strategy, often called presence, profile and posture.
So for example, the Take the musical a few years ago was was branded as a as an Afghan operation.
The Afghan symbols, the Afghan flag goes up as an icon at the time.
What about the narrative I've touched on?
The narrative narrative is simply, as Lawrence Freeman said, it's it's it's just a story, a compelling story.
And and initially in his work in an Adelphi paper in 2006, he said, you know, how important within strategic affairs was?
This was the whole business of getting this narrative right, the story of why are you doing it?
And one of the problems has been is that whilst the Americans might be able to,
with their level of confidence and the fact being a global superpower can have a strategic narrative,
I think in the UK we find it very difficult to craft a strategic narrative narrative that's come that's compelling because the idea is,
is to leave no, no grey areas.
It's supposed to be an alternative vision to to the opposition and perhaps that's something that could come out in discussions later.
Reputation management is very much at the core of this, and that sort of links in ideas of image and branding as well.
And it is core business for for any training,
for any commercial concern and is pretty much part of the success and failure of all of that particular business.
We know the reputations can take years to build and could be destroyed in weeks.
Abu Ghraib, you know,
the problem is a sort of ideas or events that would challenge the reputation of what's been done by Gary Davis at Manchester Business School,
which stresses the need to to match external cuts to the perception of an organisation,
the internal customer facing employee perception of the business and and of organisational values and the idea that these two should be harmonised.
So for example, operating in conflict zone where a brand, an image is important, if you are to be a force for good,
then this requires target audience to understand that and for the players, our soldiers and civilians to match that in the way they behave.
It may well be that they are not in that precise moment to be a force well, a force for good.
But it may be that the posture has got to be one of a credible fighting military force.
Again, that needs to be and for what they do, needs to reflect that there needs to be a lot of alignment,
perhaps taking more risks as a result of a stakeholder management.
We all we are doing that. Certainly my military education was in the 1970s.
So I would ask the question, you know, where do I dig in? In the 1990s, I would ask the question, where is the enemy?
And I suppose in the 2000 now is I in a conflict time?
I would say, where are the stakeholders? Who are they? Who do I need to influence?
I'm following Rupert Smith's advice. Who do I need to speak to first and who shouldn't I speak to?
And that's for military operations and security stabilisation require commanders to identify stakeholders rather than the enemy.
And that requires a degree of control over the contextual intelligence.
And also it needs to be planned in terms of how to approach them, how to how to influence them.
And therefore, it needs a high degree of target audience and target audience analysis.
Now, in a company in a commercial company, a lot of money is spent.
Thousands of people are employed in marketing in order that that engagement can be correct with the customer or the stakeholders.
And I think, therefore, that's why in the military or in managing conflict,
we've seen this expansion in the intelligence function in order that world expansion just in size but also in its nature,
this contextual intelligence, in order that stakeholder management can be affected better and this is all about an engagement policy,
certainly is in strategic community, in core communications. The idea is that it's not simply this is a building, a dialogue.
Building partnerships is not just pushing and pumping out messages and therefore so it is on patrol.
I'm talking about the lowest level now proactively engaged day to day with local people serving counter insurgency or in security operation.
In a similar way in business, the emphasis is on the sort of customer salesmen salesperson relationship.
Not all people will be naturally good at engagement and like business in the retail sector.
So isn't commanders need to be schooled in how to do this. Some will be better than others.
And I think this has been known. But it's it's a question of how it's brought brought in in the education and training and the salesperson needs,
because the essence of the brand and the reputation and the narrative through each engagement to try and reinforce the message and build trust.
And it's all about trust, any inconsistency between between the activity of a soldier or a commander.
And and the what is essentially the brand?
The brand and the narrative is, is going to create problems.
And that intensity could be as a result of changing personalities over time.
There's always limitations in the commercial approach. I touched on it earlier.
This war and conflict is emotionally charged and there's a need to learn, need to be understood in those terms.
But still, at the same time,
I think there is a certain amount that can be drawn from social science and also from the from selectively from business management,
particularly corporate communication, which includes marketing that can be brought into the way in which we conduct or we handle conflict.
And some of the problems that they have in terms of getting over their narrative strategic narratives to some degree can be
experienced for those of us who are conducting stabilisation operations and some of the things now getting into the DNA.
Well, the first thing is your concept.
You've got to go examine this, examine this, because you might have to say, yeah, some of this we're doing some of it.
Actually, I just don't see any value in it. And it's an interesting idea.
But, you know, we don't I don't think we will embrace this or it's something we need to discuss, keep alive, be thoughtful about.
But we're not. We do. I can't see it being because of any practical use.
You might just embrace it all. But I'm not for those who are not from a military background.
I mean General David Richards when he was commander of the arc that's the formation of went up ISAF in Afghanistan.
But he said the operation was essentially an information operation and he placed the idea of what could have been military marketing,
the very centre of his thinking and his headquarters processes and business.
And and this was all about this deeper understanding of target audiences,
how they might be influenced and nudged to nudged forward towards preferred outcome with this sort of mixture of kinetic and non-kinetic,
hard and soft approach of levers or effects, and using this sort of combination of words and deeds,
you know, how what is said, how we say it, how are we going about saying it, who says it and how?
In fact, expectations are managed, which all really is, comes from corporate communication thinking.
So I'll leave you with a few, few thoughts.
This body of knowledge, to what extent does this need to be taken from or almost sort of from normalcy?
And now, as a week of the advanced course is a year long as one week that deals specifically with this this the subject I've been talking about,
but particularly sort of how to influence populations using a lot of commercial ideas.
The question is whether or not how do we bring this into to what extent do we bring the psychological aspect of conflict into a military education?
And indeed, where do we teach? And is it just enough to have it within a military education?
There was in a recent government commissioned report from the Defence,
a defence committee that said and acknowledged the need to establish relationships and
cultural understanding through common training exercises and analysis and planning.
That was a report that was 29 and ten, so not too long ago.
The question is whether or not we want to try and bring this all together with a with an idea of a Whitehall academy
in a sort of French model in which we can begin to view conflict and these other and drawing from other areas,
but rather than simply having it in units in there in specific schools.
So where does this all leave us? What is the military commander like in the future?
Well, perhaps the military commander could be this sort of spending more time in the operations, maybe working for a PR agency at some point.
We'll go into some Russell Group University and then maintaining his links within the alumni, virtually through Facebook or at least iPhone.
This free flow of information drawing inspiration from business, academia, from military, from history, so on and so forth.
This guy is a woman, is multi-skilled, multilingual, multidimensional,
and would be as he's running a camp in Afghanistan, as would be securing the World Cup for Britain.
Televisual. Charismatic. Authentic. Natural speaker linking the word and deed and pass.
Been on the front page of Time magazine or or indeed having a profile in in the Sunday Times.
So whether or not this is this is what we want.
But there is there is a problem, because, of course, the whole idea is that this is supposed to be beyond the military.
The war is too important to leave it to the to the general. Somebody once said calling is just acute politics.
So I think there's this we've got to pass question whether or not the Petraeus factor is a good one, you know,
because it's militarising what is hitherto not necessarily a military problem or are we quite
content with that is that's just the way it is and it's not an awful lot we can do about it.
Well, maybe they're more photogenic than others, so therefore I'll end with war is obviously still politics.
COIN is acute. Politics is played out by human beings.
It can be seen through the lens of social science with a sprinkling of ideas from business
management where we're looking at changing behaviours or certainly maybe attitudes,
using a better idea whether whether that's force money with words or deeds.
And I think also is perhaps this less ambitious language of conflict and strategy.
This limits, you know, this idea that we knew we thought we could nation build.
But perhaps the more than this is too ambitious,
perhaps we thought we could have a strategic narrative but split into maybe the Americans, Canada, the Brits.
You know, we all find it difficult. So is is that we the language of of of of conflict becomes more limiting,
less ambitious in this age of of of risk this age of risk and security, as far as poker said.
And therefore, you know, we're trying like that, like the philosophy and we're trying to leave the stage with dignity, damage limitation.
Our reputation is intact. And perhaps that's that's a better description rather than some hard end state
that we find quite difficult to to reach and also difficult to communicate.
And part of that, as I've tried to argue, is because I think from the information environment,
the way is developing now, it could be an increasingly a game changer.
And that's where we need to start looking conceptually about how it affects
conflict rather than perhaps trying to refine the whole idea of nation building,
which to some degree has been discredited. I've got no idea how much awful.
I thought far too quickly. My script was screwed up.
As I said by the beginning. Yes, I do. I do. I'm not I'm not I'm not a general.
I am more of a nosy fellow like anybody else.
You know, I've developed a view and one of the trends that one sees is that certainly within the military is that the younger officer now,
perhaps because he can or she can, is wants to be able to tell them, give their experience,
give their views, rather that view being been come down for on one time.
So that that's my take on.
The way I think conflict is and some of the problems that we've got of the practice is incredibly complex.
As I said right at the beginning, I've listened to some people as well on several me and they have all argued against each other.
There is no consensus and therefore I think there's a role for concepts rather than sort of applying, rigidity, applying.