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It gives me great pleasure to the first was on guns and I thought that really if
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she saw himself bossy he's going to talk to us about a particular area of concern,
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influence of psychological operations in war.
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But critical question is going to be probably thinking forward in the next two years as well.
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The vitally important component of modern warfare itself neglected at the moment, both of these, at least according to college.
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He was placed in the Ministry of Defence, hosted the lecture that because on his title today I think it has a table to show you something.
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Thank you very much indeed. Her man is, as Rob said, I'm just going to choose myself.
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So you understand sort of where I come from,
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which sounds probably hope for to explain my background slightly and why I ended up working for
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the entity I was actually my last job was working for MTV of all people about seven years ago,
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so launching TV stations around the world. I worked as a spin doctor for a couple of Tory politicians, and then I was college candidate.
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I spent full time Harvard and Brown and the ten years as a reporter with the Times and The Washington Post quite a long time ago now,
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about five years ago, I got mobilised.
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I was reservists, I got mobilised out of the blue, having done a five day course in sort of very basic sort of psychological operations,
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which sadly in a lot of conventional military is really quite basic.
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And on the back of that, I got mobilised to go to Iraq and I was in Iraq for about eight months.
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And then as soon as I came back I got really mobilised, happy to do so.
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And I've done I've been out to Afghanistan about four times and I did two months the media up till
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then and four months doing influence planning and spent some time in a place called Nada Alley,
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which is not very nice area of central Helmand, where it's been fairly active in helping to plan operations there.
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And I've done two other short visits. I've worked an exercise and I'm going out with the army on operations and in various other parts of the world,
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in the Mediterranean, down in the Falklands. So that's my background.
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So it's a sort of mix of sort of civilian media ops and all that sort of good stuff.
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And then five years in the military, I am technically a soldier. I don't think anyone who's a proper soldier sees me as they want,
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but I do have an army number and I get posted into all operations, all with various regiments and units,
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and I hope advise them not just on psyops and influence, but more broadly on on what the nature of insurgency warfare in this age looks like.
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And there are a number of points I'm going to try to make. And probably the most important one is that really insurgency.
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It is warfare, but it is and it's violent politics.
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And one of the huge problems in the last hundred years is that we've sent soldiers to do effectively a political campaign.
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Political campaign. We need aeroplanes and bombs and bullets and all that sort of good stuff.
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But really, insurgency, conventional warfare is a branch of politics almost more than it is of of of violence and warfare.
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It's this presentation slightly unstructured. I slightly call it love, so don't apologise.
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And I'm sorry because I want to do a perfect presentation with time because I'm actually students,
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so I can cut lots of academic to make it look like I've done the reading and all that.
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I was actually quite myself as well, so quite proportion.
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But I thought, I've got a bit of a mishmash of what I'm going to do and talk a little bit about myself.
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Just tick that box there and then I'm going to say, what is influence?
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If anyone is going to go in about 5 minutes, I will answer that in about 2 minutes time.
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And then I'm going to do a little bit of background historically about hearts and minds within warfare and roughly where I think it fits in.
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And then I'm going to make a bunch of points for about 10 minutes. The most important one is that that insurgency is political warfare.
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And then I'm going to come and look slightly at doctrine, and I know it's very boring and I find it boring,
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but my supervisor has told me often said, no, you must hear the doctrine that's really important.
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So I have Ken is here that I will I'm going to talk a little bit about the doctrine of how influence as an idea has evolved.
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And because it's how vague it is and how precise and how useful it is.
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And then come on to make some more general points about the nature of warfare and what the use of influence
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Load full transcript
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tells us about how warfare is going to evolve in the 21st Century and and what sort of things we can expect.
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And that's specifically looking at ideas like Smart Power, which is are Joseph Nye's ideas, you know,
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using the power of soft power and how that combines with hard power and using smart power and all that sort of thing.
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So it's going to be slightly unstructured. I've got a bunch of, as you can see, power points.
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And there's one specific example of all the campaign we did in Basra.
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But if I forget to do it in the formal bit of the talk,
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hopefully somebody will prompt me and I'll just run through that in 5 minutes to give you an idea there.
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And there's a little bit of doctrine as well that I want to show you a little bit about intelligence work and the reason it's something like this.
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I can remember all the stuff that I've got there so I can put it up as.
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And when. Like what influence? Very good question.
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And one of the slight problems that the Army hasn't really got its head around, what influence is?
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It has an idea, but it sort of changes every six months. About ten years ago,
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the word influence crept into army doctrine as a subset of information ops and information ops as a fairly old chunk of sort of soft effect,
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which was very much part of something called J. Three Support.
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Now, for those of you with a military background, you'll know that J three is the hard, pointy end of the military.
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It's the immediate operations that day, or certainly in the next couple of days for regular soldiers.
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J three is operations within the next 48 hours.
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J Five is operations within the next week or two in the more rarefied world of our effort.
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The date since sort of changed slightly, but basically. J three.
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J five. This is the act, you know, these are soldiers going out and doing stuff on the ground.
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And Info Ops was very much part of J3 three of support.
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So we were supporting doing press releases or information operations on the back of kinetic that is violent physical military operations.
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It is then moved to become a much greater thing. About five years later.
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It evolved into being the sum of all non-kinetic effect.
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If anyone wants to stick up behind hand and say, I don't understand what you're talking about,
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please do so as I talk because it's much better than ask for the end.
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All non-kinetic effective military activity is divided into two kinetic effect things that go by a non-kinetic effect,
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which is things that don't go back.
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So inference became the sum of all non-kinetic effects that is in our hearts and minds operations, key leadership engagement,
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interaction with villages, interaction with prime ministers, media ops externally to bring in Indigenous information ops to local people.
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So that became influence. It's since morphed even further into being the overarching aim in a lot of what the UK does strategically.
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So if you look at some of the manuals we produced,
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some of the some words like feature character conflict, which goes by the charming aspect of the mascot.
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And if you look at all those sorts of things, influence is now the name of the game, how you get people to do what you want, either by posturing,
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by taking an aircraft carrier that we may or may not have outside somebody's support, or by economic power or by military power,
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or even using different and other organisations when they can be bothered to, to, to do stuff.
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So that in the some of it is what influence is. It starts off as a bit of info ops as an element of it.
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It morphed into all non-kinetic effect or the supporting effect that the military needs.
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And because of the nature of insurgency and counterinsurgency that we've been doing in the past ten years,
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it's become almost the greatest sum of everything.
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Everything that the military does. And I think there's a decent slide here.
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If you look at the US military influence the levers, ignore the writing on the on on display.
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This is the military contribution to stabilisation. This is out of a publication GDP.
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340 I think it has come out about two or three years ago and you go to all of the activities that we do,
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the manoeuvre is, is getting the army to focus on the enemy's weak point to defeat him.
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That may be a raid on a compound in a village in northern Afghanistan.
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It may be a divisional level operation.
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So this is the fighting and these are infrastructure projects of
soft effects.
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This is fires, physical destruction made of putting your your kinetic operations.
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This is the information activities that support it. And everything is to win over your target audience.
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Prime Minister, get a village bit a national population and that is now were influences come.
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So it started out as an acorn and it's become this oak and it's as many people point out,
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a very vague sort of out because people still aren't quite sure what it means.
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And in effect, influence in practical terms is a thing that generals waffle about understanding quite what it is.
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BE It's a thing that colonels and majors need as part of their support to the kinetic, kinetic operations.
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If you're slightly old fashioned, commander,
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you will get influenced to support the kinetic operation that you do clearing a compound of clearing village.
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If you're a slightly more enlightened commander, I would add you start off as Moshtarak, a very important operation.
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I'll discuss a bit later, a couple of years ago in Afghanistan that we'll start off by saying, what is my end result?
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My result is no Taliban and infrastructure projects going ahead.
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That is my political aim operationally in my patch of Nadi, ideally north or south or Sangin or wherever.
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How do I use my kinetic and non-kinetic to combine to make that happen?
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That should be the thing you say influences two things at a tactical operational level,
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it's support to kinetic or kinetic is support it to achieve your political objectives.
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At the local level. It's what some general with a very small hand and a very, very large hand and a very small map will say,
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I won't have influence over here and influence over that. So anyway, for those of you who got to that,
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that is influence and that what I'm going to be talking about for the next 20 minutes or so and I will move
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on because obviously I do want to start waffling a little bit about history of hearts and minds in warfare.
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I think it's very important to know what is influence in the history of warfare.
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It's about human and the political within warfare. It's due its Maccabees.
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It could be the zealots, if you think about it.
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I was I mean, one of the fascinating ideas I had recently, and I'm sure it's not mine because I've heard it on the radio,
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it was an academic was talking about Jesus, his role as a zealot.
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And I was thinking actually everything that he did leading up and I'm not questioning I'm not questioning the whys and wherefores of Christianity.
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I just think he's a historical figure. He was a zealot.
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His activity in Jerusalem leading up to his to his crucifixion, arguably was a form of propaganda of the day.
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In its effect. It was no different to what Che Guevara was trying to do or the IRA is trying to do, is a propaganda of the day.
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These were hands designed to fulfil a propaganda purpose,
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whether it's riding to Jerusalem on a donkey or whether it's blowing up a barracks in Londonderry.
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Some people may have an issue with that, but I think it's useful to to see these things,
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to see conflict in the broad and political role historically hearts and minds in warfare.
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It has encompassed irregular troops in the 18th century, you could argue the people like Rodgers Rangers in Canada, the Brits fighting the French,
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in Canada, in North America in the middle of the 18th century was a form of irregular, almost a form ftf type revolt.
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And the Rangers now, the U.S. Rangers, they take their name from Rodgers Rangers initially, which is his British force in the mid-18th century.
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There's a link to certainly Algeria and the Caucasus,
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maybe in the middle of the last century in terms of types of tactics used certainly by the insurgents, people fighting against European domination.
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And again, the bulls as well were very interesting at the turn of the 19th and 20th century,
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who I think were the first group of people to fight in a way that was inconvenient and very counterproductive for the Western imperial forces.
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The Bulls arguably were the first to make a truce,
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and I think a big question mark would actually play to the strength and not to their weaknesses since then.
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T.E. Lawrence, a genius.
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I'm going to quote from a little bit later who I think had a great deal to say about psychological battle spaces in warfare in his book,
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and I recommend it to everyone. It's an amazing reading.
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You can do it in a couple of hours with the evolution of a
revolt, an astonishingly brilliant word which resonates, resonate.
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And if you want to understand warfare now, read a few.
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Lawrence's The Evolution of a Revolt, because in it he and I'll come to the quotes when I can find them in my work here in.
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And he was sort of arguing about the yet to be paid his own minds men for battle and he had to understand
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the enemy's mindset and the enemy support his mindset and our supporters mindset in the Middle East,
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in Europe and beyond.
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So we understood the notion that a battle space is not simply what the military now call the jour operating area, but it can encompass the globe.
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And I think that was amazingly creative,
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considering that he was fighting and leading his his leader advising the king during a time when the First World War,
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when you had commanders whose sole aim, whose sole purpose was to march men to the enemy, to try to kill as many of them as possible.
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And Lawrence turned that on its head, and that actually what I'm going to do is not have battle.
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I will avoid battle, and I will defeat my enemy by tying them down in Medina and all along the railway from the Dean of Asia minor.
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And I will defeat my enemy by avoiding battle.
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And he did so. And he tied down from about 300,000 Turkish troops at a fraction of the cost of Olympism.
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So I'm very slightly into creative warfare.
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One of the points I'm unashamedly trying to do is use influence, that is hearts and minds,
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operations and understanding of how to win over populations, how to understand the nature of nonconventional and creative warfare.
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So I should have said that since then, since T.E. Lawrence, Essawi and the Brits have done a lot of insurgency as well as counterinsurgency.
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So you've had a political warfare executive in the last in the Second World War, you had a special operations executive in the last war as well.
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You could argue that the Nazis lost the civilizational battle because they had no hearts and minds strategy in Ukraine.
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I mean, it is one of the great what ifs in history.
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If they've got if the Nazis if the Germans had got a Ukrainian army, which was well within their grasp, if they wanted to,
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of 2 to 3 million men who the Russians ever had stood a chance of getting any of European Russia back, I'd argue almost certainly not.
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But the Germans were phenomenally good soldiers. But unlike the Brits, they missed the bigger picture.
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They missed the political objective. I say once again, we lost what Kelly did.
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But, you know, if manpower had been the operative, the issue for the Germans in the last war, then getting a Ukrainian army of 5 million,
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using hearts and minds, appealing to the Ukrainians, giving them a national identity, giving them the the political aims that they stand for.
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I think we probably would have been unstoppable. Very glad that he didn't do that.
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Clearly, post-war counterinsurgency, Gulu kits and Thomson, these people are all worth reading again to those of you who don't know them.
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David Gillooly was a Frenchman, served in Vietnam and then went and lived in the States.
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Sir Frank Kitson Great man. He talked about the continuum between kinetic operations and non-kinetic operations, the unity of effect.
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And that's one of the things that Britain and America and all these conventional armies are struggling with now.
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The idea of unity, of effect, how do you get the Foreign Office defeated, demoted regular soldiery?
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You get combined in an operating area to create the effect.
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You create the influence effect that you finally want. Since then, I'd argue that since the 1970s, I think we've lost our way.
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We've become addicted to high tech war. We follow the Americans.
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Americans are brilliant in many ways, but they've got their flaws. We threw the Americans down this high tech route.
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We abandoned the human understanding of the human.
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And very importantly, for people like Andrew McKinley, who wrote his book, The Insurgent Archipelago,
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he would argue the reason why the Brits did counterinsurgency so well in the post-war period is not because our army was particularly good,
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although I think it was very competent. And the use of the idea of minimum force was something that was essential to the British army operations,
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that you don't kill more people than you have to. You don't create, you don't engage in brutality.
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And a question marks to what extent we believed that and actually practised it, but we certainly argued it, McKinney said.
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Actually, the thing was we had political officers.
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You had some bloke who lived with them for 40 years or 20 years, and he was a political officer and knew his stuff.
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You had somebody in the Afghan hills, you had somebody in the Peshawar Valley who knew the natives,
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who knew that the fundamental problem was the breakdown of politics and not simply are not not simply an outbreak of fighting,
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because fighting in huge societies generally comes when you had a collapse of a political settlement of some kind or would in fact, some crisis.
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And so McKinley argued, the reason we did counterinsurgency so well is because we understood the nuances the people,
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the villagers, the ethnic identity, the cultural nuances and all these good thing.
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And let me show you a quick slide on that here. Now, I found it's a bit as I apologise, it is a little bit messy if I can find it.
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Where is it? There's a great bit of, you know, sort of cultural stuff here.
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This is a just a present, a just a product.
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This is a guy in in Iraq how to do this nowadays, if we actually this is a guy in an Iraqi Shia who's trying to advise the Americans and said no.
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And the Brits as well, he said, can come. You talk about democracy. We've had that with Saddam.
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You know, we don't believe a word of it. Actually, we are a religious nation and our culture is our religion in the same way,
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in a way that it hasn't been in a place like Britain for 100, 150 years.
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And if you want to win over the Shia, this is what you should say, that you're the followers of Jesus and you're the sons of Ibrahim Michael Muslims.
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We've come to the Holy Land because you serve us here and we're going to kill Lucifer.
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Now, if I have said that to my general officer commanding in Iraq, I would have been sent back home,
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probably in a straight jacket and with a very useful diagnosis of being mentally ill.
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Because then wonderful, because you just extend your services until it results.
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So it would be great because the army could have paid me to write my Ph.D. and I would have go now because I'd be mentally ill.
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I'd also be correct because that's what we should have said.
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And now, even now in Afghanistan until about a year ago, we have 17 themes and messages.
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And if I pin down the the brigadier in the task force and said, give me five of them, he'd probably remember one.
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And that's about the Taliban. We know Islam foreigners are you know, we've now got two messages, but it's taken six years.
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And I think one of the lessons that we've learned I apologise. I'm running slightly behind.
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I'm trying to offer. One of the lessons that we've learned is actually is to get your narrative right and you have to learn very quickly.
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And one of the problems that have to be Iraq bureaucratic armed force that we've had, both the US and the Brits and the French and other people,
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is that we've learned our lesson very slowly and it's taken us years to get the doctrine right.
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And the reason you have an insurgency is because of a political breakdown in the first place.
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What we did, unfortunately, in Afghanistan is that we helped to create not more,
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not because we were bad soldiers, but because going into Helmand under strain, we created a hornet's nest.
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When all the hatred and all the divisions could be focussed on a very small number of British troops.
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We don't have to fight like cats and dogs. To stop that posting overrun and slaughtered a lot of Russians up in Kajaki when they
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all skinned all the Brits in Jalalabad when they were pretty much all skinned as well.
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After that, we have to call an air power to survive, which massively infuriated the locals with people who were sitting on the fence.
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So right when you trash my village square, what on earth do you think you're doing?
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You're killing my kids, etc.? There's collateral damage. So yeah.
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So I'm back to this a more free zone. This is probably what we did in Iraq.
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We were taught one of the rules.
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And I think another another point of learning that I've got is that in religious countries, you have to talk about God.
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And we're not allowed to according to the rules, because God is is a bit touching from the younger man.
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So we left the most important idea to the enemy, to the Jaish al-Mahdi, to the army of the Mahdi,
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which was run by Muqtada al-Sadr or Muqtada al-Sadr was the need to figure out how we got around it slightly,
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because we Allah Akbar in a lot of what we did, and that's the closest we could come to religion by having a nice big Allah
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Akbar all day and to almost never get under
the cover because it was in there.
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It was in the Iraqi police and Iraqi army literature. By getting the Allah Akbar in, we could at least get a reference to religion in there.
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So we didn't have to vacate that absolutely critical cultural space.
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And there it is there. Right. I'm going to come on to a few points I'm going to make.
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I'm going to get through these quickly. I was actually over. Right.
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And think I'm going to run out of time. So I've got enough to say that I always have too much to say from right points I'm trying to make.
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COIN is a violent political campaign. We've done that. Culture is very difficult to understand and getting it right is absolutely critical.
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And we don't have the cultural relationships to know, have societies that we used to have because we don't have the people living in them.
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And when we do like the Foreign Office, they are not the adventurous types anymore.
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And the Foreign Office, unfortunately, is not the Foreign Office that it was in the days of Empire, which is a shame.
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This is a bit of a sort of hegemony in the whole sort of hearts and minds return to the understanding, the human and the political in warfare.
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It's all a little bit of a return or it's a little bit of a reality check on the revolution of military affairs,
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which I know Ulric and others are studying where the IRA was all about technology.
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This is all about human beings. Now, clearly there is a synthesis of the two use of drones, use of technology to listen, to understand.
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So you can act on the human. So you can get the intelligence that allows you to kill individuals or capture
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individuals rather than kill the wrong people and suffer collateral damage.
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So there's a balance between high tech and the human that we haven't had in warfare,
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but the army and the whole sort of we love cruise missiles because we can part one.
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Whatever we want is great in conventional war.
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But the problem is, as von Clausewitz and other people at MIT, that it conflicts with endlessly about conventional war.
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Actually, he talked a lot about partisan warfare when when Napoleon in the French came through Prussia.
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I mean, he was absolutely up for doing an assault, a result special operations, executive insurgency warfare out of Vietnam.
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And all this good stuff, things on war is all about conventional war.
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And I'd argue he actually wrote about I don't think you should have wrote about the Spanish about the Peninsula War, which is still very much with us.
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The idea being a peninsula war was Wellington that took a small, very well trained,
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irregular force and bulked it out with matters of really angry Spaniards who wanted to kill the French.
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And that actually is a model for warfare in our age, for this century, maybe for future centuries.
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But the conventional warfare that Van will cause it actually studied, you know, apart from the fact that it's entirely historic,
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even if you take conventional warfare and say, right, well, let's take that model and bring it forward.
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Now, how often do we fight conventional war? Ten, 15 years.
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Every century. How often do we fight chaos in warfare, political warfare, nonconventional warfare?
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Probably most years of every century. Certainly that's the rule of the last hundred years,
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even with the cataclysmic industrial wars that we've had, and probably which are unlikely to happen again,
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because even if you take the idea of a naval war in in in the Pacific between China and the US,
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which may be the most likely form of significant conventional war, or perhaps between India and Pakistan against them in a civil maps.
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Now, you know, it's difficult to see these conventional wars lasting any length of time,
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but chaos wars, political wars, nonconventional wars, insurgency wars.
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These are going to be with us for years and decades to come. Right.
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Limited warfare is all about sending messages, which is why your narrative is so important in warfare,
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and which is why your information operations are important, are not just as a subset, but as an encompassing.
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And what is our political game in this village, on this road, in this city, in this country, you know, in this region, at whatever level.
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And so it is about sending messages and everything.
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Everything that we do is is a message.
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And we forget that at our peril. And I think we have forgotten that in a lot of the soldiers.
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That we've done in the last ten years. There is a fluidity and insurgency warfare between information and violence because they overlap.
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If you're planning a resistance, we're teaching people to sabotage tanks.
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You're teaching people to sabotage broadcast systems,
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which nowadays has a violent effect because it helps to overthrow the regime in the same way that you're doing violent action,
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in the same way that you're doing information activities that lead to violent action by gearing people up to fight, by advising them how to fight,
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like the Palestinians did in the first intifada, the first intifada, if you remember, with kids, spontaneous uprising, slingshots.
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Very often the way it occurs or sort of, you know, hooded thugs and all that sort of stuff.
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So keeping the intifada going, the information campaign was about ginning up the soldiers,
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was about charging up the young Palestinians, but also advising them on how to fight, advising them on tactics against the Israelis.
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So in the same way that that information campaign hasn't fallen foul of that.
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So by having the propaganda the dean bit and explosion better suicide bomber bit of violent action to use that violent action as a statement as well.
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So there's an overlap between information warfare and violent warfare.
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They feed off each other and they have to be seen of things that are fundamentally intertwined.
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And I think, again, we are learning that hearts and minds in practical terms is much more complex nowadays.
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Undoubtedly true. I mean, so not have a bomb with a bunch of ammonium nitrate fertiliser,
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a computer or a mobile phone, you can pretty much set yourself up as a global terrorist group.
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You may not have much success, but it is possible. And arguably that is what elements of Al Qaeda have done.
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And al Qaeda is absolutely focussed, as we know. They see themselves that our battle is 90% in the media and it's 10% in their acts of violence.
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For conventional war, conventional forces like our own tend to do the opposite, which isn't great.
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However, despite the fact that hearts and minds are much more complex nowadays,
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we have succeeded less than we should have or failed more than we should have.
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Depending on what your slant is, in part because we have forgotten most of the lessons that we originally lacked.
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And that for me has been the really painful thing
about watching our own armed forces.
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And when I've been serving with them, my job is to thank them, allow them to have a little bit of not oversight,
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but to nose around the elements of of Division one headquarters or to get out in the crowd with troops from a company level down.
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I think the Brits are probably the Americans are going to do fantastically good job because they have to interact with locals.
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They are forced to take hearts and minds seriously. They are forced to engage.
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They're forced to pick up intelligence and information and life.
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But above that level, there has been a corporate and institution and institutional forgetting of of what we have been about.
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But I'm going to stop there because I'm just going to go through. If anyone is interested in this,
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just the having a quick look at doctrine for those of you who are interested and I know
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I'm sort of I know this is a bit of the sort of nuts and bolts bread and butter piece,
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but I hope it's going to be quite useful. And then I'll go and some general points provided I can find the bit of paper
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that has it looking at some of the research that may be of interest to you,
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but also then looking a little bit just as the future and what the future may hold in terms of warfare.
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And that'll be about another ten, 10 minutes or so. And then maybe questions I think will be talking a bit too much about doctrine.
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22 First influence terminology of influence in in Gwp three eight Information Officers 2002 Then there's a
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lot of other references to influence and influence operations within military affects approach to warfare.
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So JD, JD and one of five. JD And four or five looked at the comprehensive approach and I'm just going to
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throw up a couple of slides on that now to give you some idea of the confusion.
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When we think about the military, we always think the military are very swept up in what they're doing.
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And if the military say something very smart or if the military say something, there's only a very good reason because they're very smart people.
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I was talking to Professor Strewn about this, and actually one of the things he said was that really wasn't the case.
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So if you look at the comprehensive approach here, we see what a sort of intellectual method is.
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--> 00:29:24,990
And I'm sorry to be negative. I know there's strong points about it. I'm not disagreeing with everything.
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The comprehensive approach is being a defence aptitude. So you've got the second problem.
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You've got the UK approach to campaign, you've got capability,
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which is to get the people you've got understanding and you've got well now clearly you need desire to do something that's absolutely true,
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but understanding in terms of G-2 and capability are pretty much the same thing, I'd argue.
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So why is intelligence gathering different from capability?
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It's absolutely not. So I think that is a fundamental flaw that if you take out that you end up with capability.
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Well, then if you look at joint action fires blowing things up, it's called the propaganda of the.
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Now, that is part of inference. That's part of the psychological approach.
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That's part of the psychological understanding.
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You know, manoeuvre is allegedly not part of includes any influences fits into manoeuvre anyway according to according to doctrine writing.
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But I don't understand the difference between father and influence, because influence surely is an outcome of manoeuvre.
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Getting your man in the right place at the right time to kill the enemy or capture the enemy.
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And it's also an outcome of fires, putting bombs down or dropping leaflets on a specific area.
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So, again, there is a lack of sort of intellectual rigour and intellectual credibility there.
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And again I don't we need Connecticut non-kinetic. Then moving further down opsec coordinating ops.
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Well, sac has got nothing to do with influence and media ops tend to be terrible gossips anyway.
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So that's a bit of a coordinating oxygen media.
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No, coordinating there is influence because influence is coordinating off for all non-kinetic effect.
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So why is media, though, and media as a subset of something that should be higher up the chain?
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Likewise, information ops and civics stabilisation is one of the great themes which should be much higher.
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So again, there's a lack of credibility, that sort of a lack of intellectual rigour and all those sort of areas.
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And then moving down to the tools and techniques. Well, physical destruction, I'm not sure it's a tool and technique.
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And again, I think that is the wrong place. Special capability.
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Electronic warfare has got nothing to do with key leadership engagement, which is related to it.
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PSYOPS actually infuses everything that we're talking about.
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All the different bubbles completely. What was that come to?
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Come on again. Wrong place. It's not a tactical. It's much more of an operational issue.
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So if you're going to look at information operations,
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probably what you want to do is divide up information into various different elements and aspects that you can understand better.
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So you have direct information, which is information operations of stuff like control, stuff that I can when you have a directly,
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it's a meeting with you with dropping a leaflet on your house or sending you a diet message on radio.
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I control it so I know what I'm going to say to you.
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I may get the message wrong if I don't do my cultural appreciation correctly, but at least I have a good idea in the information is through the media.
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And again, it's one of our big failings in Afghanistan that a lot of the people who've worked in indigenous
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media have certainly been a pretty poor quality and it's a bit of a tough job to do.
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And in fact, the quality of work has been extremely poor. So, you know, community.
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So we've got direct information, indirect information, which is via the media.
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So you're a journalist, I'm trying to influence you. So get interview to hit that person.
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That is direct and indirect information, not cyber information, including very special capabilities of the army.
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You've been cited about electronic warfare, all that good stuff. And then we have presents, information, what I look like on the ground.
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And amazingly, actually, you disappointed me that even in the dying days in 2012 and 13, how it was operational and given to Afghanistan, to Iraq,
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we went out with hard hats on, very much tooled up for violence when the war, the insurgency had actually finished about six months earlier.
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And when I was doing the training for take 13, everyone came through a U.S. based down in Kuwait.
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We had that for a couple of weeks and I was doing the PSYOPS bet and I was just talking to people and none of them,
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the
British soldier was coming through and they had not had any training in their population engagement.
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Their training was still in hard kinetic warfare,
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and that was at the end of the day and the last year of the campaign were really we had
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moved on and I was against private much disappointed that we got that so badly wrong.
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So your presence, whether you're in berets or helmets, whether you're prodding somebody with a weapon,
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not that I would advise that that was legal to do anyway. All that sort of good stuff says a lot about you and your posture.
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So it's like in Afghanistan, in Helmand back in 2006, we rely on the Air Force because we're about to be overrun.
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That sends messages to locals, Hey, we're on demand.
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We have got the force ratios and we're blowing up everything in sight because we haven't come here with the correct preparation.
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No good disinformation, deception, great stuff, very important strategic level, FCO targeting and information operations,
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a slightly dysfunctional organisation with the MOD and you've got stuff like Number ten, Downing Street, etc., which controls the shrinking level.
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And above that you have the carrot and stick of physical destruction, blowing things up and civic stabilisation,
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winning people over and navigating through the combines undue influence.
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So that just gives you a little bit of an idea about, I think, a sort of certain intellectual dysfunctionality that we've had in the MMT.
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I mean, while the defence was and I think Americans have slightly the same problem as well for that.
374
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But what else, just about doctrine. What else.
375
00:34:39,590 --> 00:34:49,840
GDP 300 company. Very important. I think that shows the quote in the document from 2010 from Major-General Ben.
376
00:34:50,120 --> 00:34:54,710
We conduct all operations in order to influence people and events to bring about change,
377
00:34:54,950 --> 00:34:59,390
whether by 155 millimetre artillery shell or by hosting visits.
378
00:34:59,960 --> 00:35:04,390
And I think. By the time that you had GDP 300, which came in the last couple of years of 2009,
379
00:35:05,290 --> 00:35:12,520
you had that break and that you had the idea that influence was everything and that influence was critical.
380
00:35:14,770 --> 00:35:18,790
Since then, future coverage of war very influenced orientated.
381
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:25,420
The Land Influence Handbook and the Insurgent Tactics Handbook, again, recent publications that have come out
in the last two years,
382
00:35:25,810 --> 00:35:33,250
all of which talk about the totality of what you're trying to do and seeing it in terms of kinetic and non-kinetic events.
383
00:35:34,630 --> 00:35:42,150
Now, Rob, I'm not going to talk about 35 minutes, so I stop there and then we can have questions because that goes for you.
384
00:35:42,580 --> 00:35:47,080
You have one point of it. I was just talking about future of where we're seeing the future of warfare.
385
00:35:47,860 --> 00:35:53,410
And I'd argue that, I mean, social media is got a huge impact. We don't even know the impact yet, and we're still looking at that.
386
00:35:53,860 --> 00:35:57,280
I think there's a lot of very good thinking, a lot of it being done by the U.S. Marine Corps.
387
00:35:57,760 --> 00:36:06,040
And I'm engaged with somebody over there working on this, and they're looking at freedom and the concept of freedom of manoeuvre across the digital.
388
00:36:06,280 --> 00:36:10,630
Of course, the real and unreal space and real meaning of digital, cyberspace, etc.
389
00:36:11,200 --> 00:36:20,230
A U.S. Marine Corps organisation about has as it has, is used to the idea of having freedom of manoeuvre on land, on, sea, on and all these places.
390
00:36:20,500 --> 00:36:26,020
So the concept of freedom of manoeuvre in the digital space and cyberspace, I think is a very important progression.
391
00:36:26,170 --> 00:36:32,140
And I think it shows the roots of revolutionary thinking that wherever they go, whether it's in a virtual world or the non virtual world,
392
00:36:32,320 --> 00:36:36,490
they have to control and they have to understand and be able to control that space.
393
00:36:36,700 --> 00:36:38,440
So that gives you an idea of some thinking.
394
00:36:38,770 --> 00:36:47,290
I think when it comes to the ideas around smart power, we're combining soft power, power of TV with hard power, the power of, you know, USS Nimitz.
395
00:36:47,530 --> 00:36:50,770
And it's about how to combine the two. And we're not very good at doing so.
396
00:36:50,980 --> 00:36:53,590
And I think Joseph Nye is a very interesting ideas to say about that,
397
00:36:53,710 --> 00:36:57,310
although I don't think you could understand the role of soft power in the military.
398
00:36:58,600 --> 00:37:01,120
I think joint effect is something that we're still very much working on.
399
00:37:01,300 --> 00:37:05,330
Joint Effect is the idea of combining government departments to work together.
400
00:37:05,410 --> 00:37:08,650
Many of you will think, Well, that is not what we pay our taxes for. You'll be right.
401
00:37:08,920 --> 00:37:13,360
I don't think it happens. And I think there's a lot of work that's going to be done in that in the next ten years.
402
00:37:13,870 --> 00:37:18,909
And I think finally, I think there are huge, significant legal implications about modern warfare as well,
403
00:37:18,910 --> 00:37:26,110
that we haven't got our heads around because it is currently very much easier to kill somebody than to persuade them or dissuade Somali pirates.
404
00:37:26,410 --> 00:37:30,810
You can this way. But if you come to near them and you capture them, they can ask for asylum.
405
00:37:31,010 --> 00:37:36,490
We can't drop them off anywhere. We can't put them in Somalia because there is no legal system and they will have a field day in that court.
406
00:37:36,640 --> 00:37:40,740
So actually, it's easier to kill somebody and argue because that moral so legalistic,
407
00:37:40,750 --> 00:37:47,680
we're coming to the point now where legal war is actually becoming legalistic war, which is arguably not moral or ethical.
408
00:37:47,950 --> 00:37:52,270
And I think there's that division, interestingly, between what is legal and what is ethical.
409
00:37:52,390 --> 00:38:00,020
And I think that is a great question. And I probably would flee the far right and you can go to the resource.
410
00:38:00,190 --> 00:38:06,819
So it kind of is very, very unstructured. My apologies. I should just because Bob, I mean, you I found it to be provocative.
411
00:38:06,820 --> 00:38:08,310
You know, just let me just remind.