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