 I'd like to welcome you all, people in the room and people online, to the first event in our New Voices in Global Security Events series. This is organised by the School of Security Studies EDI Committee. We're coming to you today from the Joint Services Command and Staff College in the Defence Academy in the UK. The goal of this series is to promote new research and scholarship in security studies to highlight new and innovative approaches. No pressure there, James and Rodrigo. And to generate opportunities for collaboration and networking across the school. Most importantly, the key part of this is that we are here to showcase the work of PhD students and early career academics. I think so that mid-career academics and late-career academics like myself can see what's coming through the line and why we should probably just get out of the way and let that happen. But we also do want to use this forum to gain an insight into the new kind of logical, ontological, epistemological priorities that are being brought to the field by what is an increasingly diverse set of scholars not simply in terms of disciplines but also in terms of demographics. And the presentations from this series are going to be recorded, uploaded to the school's New Voices channel and disseminated more widely. Now we're going to start this series with a subject that is always relevant but one could argue is sort of increasingly relevant in the global quagmire in which we find ourselves. The role of information operations and joint commands in military campaigns. And I'm thrilled to have joining us two speakers who have CVs that are frankly upsettingly well, upsettingly sort of well experienced. Starting off we've got Lieutenant Colonel James Chandler. He's a serving British Army officer with operational experience in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. This group included a role as head of the research unit with 77 Brigade and his Chief of Strategic Communications to the Combined Joint Task Force, Operation Inherent Resolve, in fact that. James is also a graduate of the UK's Advanced Commander in Staff College, Cambridge University and King's as well. We won't hold that last one against him and his research explores the planning and execution of British Information Operations during Operation TELIC, brings together interviews with retired and serving military personnel and announced sort of over 6,000 pages of official documents from the Iraq war. So I'll start off James over to you. Thank you very much. It's a really kind introduction. Good afternoon everybody. Thanks so much for coming along. It's really good to see you all. As Joe said I'm James Chandler and during 2018 to 2022 it's really lucky to be seconded from the British Army to be a full-time academic fellow at the Defence Studies Department, King's College London. And the focus of my PhD research was on information operations, most importantly how these information operations were used during the British campaign in Baghdad between 2003 and 2009. Next slide please. Here we go. So I thought I'd just start with the question why study information operations? Well some thoughts on that are on this slide in front of you now. We live in an era that some have called the information age rightly or wrongly. And some of the issues expressed on this slide represent the heightened interest that we saw in information operations just in the last decade alone. This heightened interest really stemmed from the activities in 2014 where we saw Russia's bloodless annexation of the Crimea and then that dramatic rise of ISIS and their jihadi sweep through Iraq and northeast Syria. Both organisations using information operations in an innovative way to achieve their quite dramatic geopolitical objectives. And they set all sorts of hairs running both from a organisational perspective and conceptual and those hairs running in the western militaries and within their governments. From an organisational perspective it led in my own British military organisation to new institutions like the rebranding of 30 Kimano to be the new information exploitation unit. The rise of 77th Brigade there you can see in 2015 and then called the sixth division that came on stream in 2019. Underpinning all of that were these new concepts that western militaries were trying to bring into their approach to military campaigning. These included at top left strategic communications, how that might work but also behavioural conflict there and influence operations and also the joint action model that you can see alongside. So just in the last 10 years alone there's just been this dizzyingly high interest in how military information operations can support campaigns which are ultimately there designed to achieve political objectives. So I when I embarked upon my research wanted just to find out were there any insights from the British military campaign in Iraq that could help answer some of these questions that we were asking ourselves in the back end of the last decade. How can we better use information operations to help us achieve military objectives in the way that we had seen potentially being used by Russia and ISIS. They seem to have got it just right. What could we do to improve our information operations like they have done to our next slide please. So I thought let's just start with some of the research fundamentals i.e my aim, my scope, my focus. So the aim of the research was to do an analysis of British military information operations during the British campaign in Iraq between 2003 and 2009 in order to make an assessment as to how information operations could be used as an effective element of future military campaigns. The research scope was really important. I ensured or I wanted to make sure that my study was always focused at the battlefield level. So the scope was ruthlessly focused in on how militaries conduct campaigns. I did not allow myself to be drawn up to that higher level discussion about the use of information as a lever of national power. There's a lot going on up there and there's a lot of literature that's already been written on that but a little less on the practical application of information operations on the battlefield and that is where I wanted to keep a focus of my study. Particular attention was paid to the information activities that we know as psychological operations and media operations as well as the integrating function of info ops and it was those three elements that I collectively referred to as information operations and those are the focus of the study. In line with that as well the researchers focus on the three research questions that you can see there. The research questions really honed in on how the British military approached as an organization the business of planning information operations and then what were the issues that affected their execution and therefore answering those what does that tell us about how we potentially use information operations in future campaigns. Importantly this was not an analysis of the effectiveness of information operations. It wasn't an analysis of whether organizationally the British military were correctly set to plan and execute information activities from the get-go. Next slide please. So methodology came in three phases background research data collection and then data analysis and exploitation. So the background research comprised of two main elements the first which was deciding on a research philosophy and a related methodological approach. The next bit was more to do with literature reviews and campaign analysis. The first element of which deciding on that research philosophy and the associated methodology that was very difficult and I can draw out a bit more of why that was difficult in questions. Importantly with the background research was the literature reviews not because of what they were but how I used them. I approached those literature reviews in order to generate key themes which I then use as an analytical framework for the data that I collected during my research and I found that to be really really useful and helpful. The first part of the data collection there was all mostly about documentary analysis as I've already alluded to. My research the first part was focused on all the official papers that the British military produced during their time during the campaign in Iraq that's mostly as the uniformed audience will be fully with post-operational tour reports but also post-operational interviews but also official letters between Basra and London but also the internal memos and email traffic between all the different military organizations in Basra and and around southern Iraq for that entire 60 a campaign in total as Joe's already alluded to that came to over 6,000 pages of official British military documents all of which are classified and are not currently in the public domain and that was really really fascinating going through those. The next phase of data collection involved interviews that was with three groups of people. Group one were the commanders and senior staff officers who'd been responsible for executing the British campaign. Secondly were those individual officers who held appointments in information operations like SOTI Siles or so three info ops and then the third group were any other people, civil servants, senior officials that were directly involved in the military campaign. Overall at the end of the interview process I've managed to interview over 63 individuals each represented across section during Britain's campaign during their time in Iraq. The final phase of the method there and really comprised concerns data analysis and I did that principally through coding to start with the coding was done with those key themes that are identified during that literature review. Those themes that stood up there they were the codes that I then applied against the research findings and that enabled me then to do a coherent write up. Exploitation that's finally element of that was I was keen that all the people I interviewed were intimately involved in my research so I socialized all in my draft research chapters with those interview participants and I found that really really useful to make sure that I captured the sentiment of their of their input correctly. So that's how I've moved through the methodology. The challenges that I experienced during my approach to during my time of research pretty obviously first of all the coronavirus pandemic that was a major impact literally the day I finished my upgrade exam was the date of the beginning of the first coronavirus national lockdown. How that impacted me was that it locked all of the national archives and prevented access into all of those primary documents that I needed to get so even the military archives at Warminster in Northwood they were they were closed to me and indeed they didn't open up until early into 2021 which meant I had a just sort of a two-year fieldwork and a write-up phase which had to be compressed into under 12 months which gave me a bit of a sweat on my brow at the time and so coronavirus was the real problem. The other thing that it affected was participant participant identification. I needed those documents to tell me who was in theatre at what time so I could then go and find them and interview them because I couldn't get hold of those documents I didn't know who those English words were quite late in the day. The other problem was it was really easy to find all those senior commanders will know who they are and get them to be interviewed but it was very very difficult trying to find all those individual junior staff officers that held appointments in information operations during Britain's six-year campaign in Iraq and remember that six-year campaign turned over every six months so every six months you got up to about 20 different people involved in information operations finding all those people that was a challenge and then finally MOD approval. No one really knew how we could go about doing this. I had privileged access to classified material which I wanted to release unclassified and getting the MOD to approve that should prove to be quite challenging. Fortunately we found some workarounds there and that's indeed what we achieved but I can explore how we did that a little bit in questions but that was a motor headache that I never really knew how we were going to do it up until the very last moment. Next slide please. So to finish off really some of the findings from my research so I argued in my thesis that Britain's information operations were always victim to shifting sands what do I mean by that. While the planning was never on a firm foundation it was always unstable and the execution was similarly unstructured so that when it was exposed to the dynamic ever-changing environment that was post-conflict at Iraq it simply didn't have enough structure to survive in that maelstrom. Most importantly your average British military information operations officer serving in Basra was undermined or adversely affected by these six issues. Primarily they were not suitably qualified and experienced personnel they did not have appropriate training for what we were asking them to do. They were working in headquarters who had never been trained in how to use information operations as part of a military campaign and had very little military doctrine to help guide them. Next those information operations officers were not what we called in the military top third quality. They were often junior officers who had lacked operational experience and they struggled to establish themselves in the heady environment of a military headquarters on a pressure of a military operation. Importantly those information operations also lacked the meaningful resources to communicate with the local people in Basra down mediums that mattered to those local people. And finally they are sorry at the next point they worked in an organization which saw information operations as a secondary activity at best but normally just an afterthought that returned their attention to if we had time after we'd done that really important strike operation in downtown Basra. And finally they lacked to see at the top table they were never an integral element of the British military's approach to campaign execution. Despite that rather downcast down the overview of our approach to information operations at the time actually when you look at it from the other side of the prism these are the key areas that if the military was engaged with in an effective way would provide the bedrock from which we could potentially have in the British military a more successful approach to planning and executing information operations and that is indeed the key conclusion that I reached at the end. So ladies and gentlemen that's a very very brief run through through my PhD research and I'll just stop there and over to Chris for any comments that he wants to Thank you we're already getting some questions online for those of you who are online in the room we're going to do some questions after we've had both presentations and the discussions have asked you know we've had a bit of kind of feedback. So I'm going to hand over to Dr Chris Tripodi who is a reader in a regular warfare here at the Penn Studies Department. Very much Spurs first James it supports me to say well done on the PhD and not only because it's the achievement in itself trying to be in contact with all blown active services that were in the final year of your PhD instead of getting ready to go out and do all the frictions that occurred there in this pretty remarkable achievement. I think also congratulations on the book bill that is that is emerging. So yeah really with that in that respect so but back to the back to the issue of how in terms of information operations and you know we understand now in particular how they've been seen at war in Ukraine in particular sort of play out in front of the last couple of years extent to which information breach is now part of the language and not order. Well I want to take you back sort of about 15 60 years and I want you to just sort of give you give your thoughts on this. This is a passage from a book called The Centurions which is about the French fighting the colonial war in Algeria and there's a fictional conversation between a French military officer and a rebel and a rebel says to him there's only one word for me which is independence. So deep, fine sounding word that's been in recent years in the Algeria is more about even poverty, social security and three medical systems. Speak to the ground Islam, we're in great need of dreams of dignity and tactical care. What about you? What word have you got to offer? It's better than mine than you get one. So in a sense of the word and narrative the big idea that the French could offer the average Algerian competition with the insurgents did with respect to British information operations in Iraq was there a consciousness of those engaged in information which they were part of a big idea and they understand what the idea was what they had to offer and the extent to which it was. Do you want me to address that now or later? I mean it's up to you. I think it's a really really great custom and I think that's at the heart of the story of the campaign in Basra in the sense that what was being offered not just by information operations but by activities on the ground just simply didn't resonate with the local community and if you don't have that sense and support of the local community in a counter-services campaign or a stabilisation operation of this nature then you're on a very difficult look at from the get go. So thank you Chris. So I mean you brought lots of interesting some really interesting some of the issues you describe without why information operations don't work in Basra is our structural nature you know the way the types of people are engaged structures within which they're engaged seniority who is involved in the extent to which they are part of policy of the higher up. Is there a case to say that if and I know that your thesis doesn't deal with with measurements of effect it's a matter of fact the organisation the way it does these things. But the extent to which if the information operations aren't being deployed in a reactive and complex environment that there must just need to understand are those environment social environments particularly social and physical environments automatically understandable or are there some things that are just beyond understanding the extent to which we think we can know these things and know them well even as outsiders we bring that knowledge into contact with it we say we recognize that but we still think we can understand this thing but in reality it's not understandable and I say that simply because I having read Glen around Muller's article on Basra after the fall I've read it 10 times and I still don't understand Basra politics any better it is so difficult it's so confusing so multi-faceted so is there something to say that even if you reform the structures the structuring aspect that you're going to still be sort of stewing in your in your own inability to make your message count because you simply can't understand what it is you need to explain who to explain it to. Yeah I think there's a really really good point in that for a second I think you're your own book on that. It's a really good place to start. What really struck me from the interviews that I conducted with those that served in Basra was their absolute belief that they simply didn't have big enough grasp of what's going on in Basra and whether that's something that is achievable on a campaign of that nature is moot and I think it's really difficult to answer but what is absolutely writ large in the British Energy Experience in Basra is that we simply fell short of that by a crushing margin we never went anywhere near it and there are structures and procedures that should be put in place in order to make good on that in future campaigns. Cool so reflecting on some of the points you made in the presentation so you you I think we can use the term justly had a unique privilege as well as in the sense of getting access to people some of me simply will never get access to. I spent months and months trying to get a secret post-operational tour out of the British Army and in fact eventually was told I was allowed to see it whereas you gained access to important people in the book documents that are not in the public record. So what is the what is the benefit to scholarship and to our wider understanding of this what do we know what will we know now as a consequence of your scholarship we didn't know before. It's a really good question and difficult one to answer I think based on the way you led into that question that's seen writ large the views opinions of some very senior people on the ground and how they assess the situation to be all of the answers if you like are in there and and seeing them being brought to the fore through the words that they themselves wrote at the time and that for me is the most significant element of my research which I hope people can can can take forward from this day forward. Did you find them? I'm going to cut you off for I guess so I think that's a really good to provide some really good insights we can sort of build on that in the Q&A. I'm going to hand over now yeah that's all right and we'll get a kind of second presentation second discussion and then we can feed these into Q&A after that. Thank you very much James. Thank you. So it's my pleasure to introduce our second speaker Rodrigo Pereira who is also disproportionately qualified should say you're a good company James. Rodrigo is a visiting research student at the Defence Studies Department PhD candidate at the Brazilian Air Force's Air Force University's Aerospace Sciences post-graduation program with the research program for the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development. He also somehow manages to find time to serve in the Brazilian Air Force and is currently the Air Force Parliamentary Advisor at Brazilian Congress. So he's going to be giving us an insights into his research on the role of permanent operational level joint commands in Brazil, the UK, US and Canada and how this might be influenced by issues of threat perceptions, the involvement of civilian political elites and the nature of I suppose joint culture and joint destiny on forces but I shall load up the presentation. Rodrigo if you'd like to come and join us and I'm ready here to sort of change your slides for you. Thank you guys very much for having me. Thanks for the kind of introduction I don't know if I can serve it but yes I am Rodrigo from the Brazilian Air Force University and I'm a visiting research student here at King's. This provides for Dr. Dave Jordan and in Brazil by Drs. Jasper and Cochart. If you could next slide please whenever you're ready. Okay so in my research I'm looking to show the cause of factors that lead to the installment of operational level joint commands on a permanent basis instead of the ad hoc model that we have now in Brazil which we will see in a second and based on the literature on military innovation I established as a hypothesis that three factors should be present for this for the creation of these permanent structures. The first one of those is a threat perception because there should be no incentives to meddle in such military matters if there are no credible threats on the horizon. The second one is the participation of civilian political elites because left to themselves I wouldn't expect this one service to yield command prerogatives to the other right serves the shouldn't side of their autonomy their independence. And the third factor is a joint culture because if there is a strong rivalry between the services I would expect them to activate fight against this new arrangement or to make some cosmetic changes just to appease the civilian leadership without actually changing anything. Okay so how did I go into investigating this next week? I did a small end comparison between Brazil, US, UK and Canada and these three countries were chosen because they are influential cases on the study of jointness. They will see that more on that in a minute. And for each case I looked into the process the alleged installment of these permanent structures looking for clues that would tell me if each one of those variables was present or absent. Okay so what am I going to do now? I'm going to present a bit about Brazil which is the case I'm most comfortable talking about and which I think is going to be the most interesting for you. Then I'm going to talk a bit further about the UK which is the one I'm least comfortable talking about because I'm here and which I have the most chances of embarrassing myself but I do hope that you will point out any mistakes I make that will really help you. Okay and then I'll present a table just to summary the whole thing and so briefly about US and Canada because I have only 15 minutes and then we'll see where that leads as in Brazil. So next one please. Okay so in Brazil whenever there's a crisis the president has to sign his directive on how to deal with this and then the minister of defense can sign his directive on how to deal with this and then our equivalent of the chief of defense staff which we call chief of armed forces joint staff can sign his directive on how to deal with this and only then can his staff create or update any strategic planning and all of this happens and we don't know if we have a joint command or not because for us to have a joint command next please the president has to sign this command into existence okay and once the command exists then the defense minister can appoint a joint commander and once this joint commander has the strategic plan he can then start his own operational planning so as you can see the whole process is heavily bureaucratic to say the least and full of uncertainties that may come from the political level and that may hinder the ability of the joint commander to act in a timely manner so the whole process is kind of cumbersome and not actually joint that's why I think we should study it so for Brazil study the three variables we see that there are no immediate threats to president's security president is by president is by far the largest country in South America and organized crime and the interrupted state security matters are more relevant to the security agenda than any sort of interstate aggression okay uh as for political elites they have distanced themselves from national security matters especially after the military regime which ended in 1985 it has become unpopular to talk about national security and apart from that there are just no votes in defense okay and for a joint culture I it's hard to measure culture right so I looked into the existence and the extent of a joint professional militarization and I used that as a way to measure culture so in Brazil we do have some joint PME but it's very limited and when it happens happens very late in the career so I said Brazil has no joint culture so all those three variables are absent for Brazil okay so for the UK UK you have the permanent joint headquarters which is the national personal development base led by the chief of joint operations and this EGHQ was the result came to be as a result of the 1994 defense cost study defense review which was the second one after the end of the Cold War and both the options for change in 1991 and the defense cost study they brought this wish to read the peace in this and so joint solutions were pointed as a way to both reduce the cost of defense and to improve the efficiency of the armed forces so that's pretty much the background on it so for the UK threat perception is absent on the contrary it seems that the end of the Cold War and the end of a obvious threat scenario was sort of a catalyzer for in the search for joint solutions that would lead to a reduced defense budget and also with the efficiency of the armed forces the joint culture I also deemed it to be absent because there was joint PME-4 in three English if I'm not mistaken for a long time actually but not to this extent that there is now with the joint services coming inside college which also was created as a result of 1994 defense cost study in 1997 in Brocknell and then in 2000 yes but political involvement was present because the whole process of defense reviews is political nature so yes there is involvement of the political elites in defense so this table summarizes all the findings all the data that I collected so we talked about Brazil and the UK the US they do have the combatant commands that were created as a result of the unified comments plan after the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War so threat perception is absent is present sorry as is the political involvement but a joint culture was not there until the Cold War and it was act in 1986 and for Canada pretty much like the UK the threat perception was absent but political involvement was present in a more indirect way it was more a way of appointing key figures for key positions in the armed forces and providing a high level political guidance for the whole process than actually creating the documents itself themselves and a joint culture I deemed it to be present because since the sixties after the unification process they have a joint BME as a rule for everyone okay so that's pretty much summarized summarized all the data and so contrary to what I was expecting actually threat perception was not a factor in fact it seems that especially the UK it was the opposite it seems that a lack of a clear threat on the horizon was a scandalizer in the search for joint solutions political involvement was crucial for all three cases studied as you see before the whole process is political in nature a week in Canada it was done in a more indirect way and a joint culture was also not a cause of factor but it's interesting because in the US the joint culture was necessary for the commented comments to be more affected okay so what do I intend to do with this once I get back home results I'm proposing a few policy changes first to improve the minister's structure which is the whole point of the research also to promote jointness to try to enhance the effectiveness of joint comments if they are created in a permanent basis or even if they are continue to be created in an ad hoc basis as they are now and to increase the participation the best matters otherwise it's never going to change so just to give you an example an idea of what I'm proposing in Brazil the chief of defense staff or equivalent is has no he has no seniority over the service chiefs over the comment of manner of each service in fact inside the structure of the ministry of defense he is below the three service chiefs so I am proposing legislation to actually change that and put the cds above the individual service commanders so this should help promote jointness should help promote at least a wider debate inside the ministry of defense and it also may make me lose my job let's not just say that I am correct and everything was so strong this is obviously going to go up chain of command and it's not up to me to decide but this is just the result of my research okay so that's pretty much it thank you very much thank you so we're going to have a quick discussion and leaving that is doctor Augusto Tixero who is a visiting senior research fellow at King's College London as well as an associate professor at the federal university in Paraguay in Brazil thank you very much if you'd like to in front of me I want to be asked a few questions thank you thanks a lot for the invitation it's a pleasure to be in this course and such important paper in tesis integrate our genes in order to foster this debate first of all I'd like to congratulate you for your courage as you said you can put yourself in arm by presenting this test especially with our colleagues from the army and the navy but the idea honestly for me is that coming from military and active duty ideas such as those very important in terms not only for putting the debate publicly to the Brazilian audience also but trying to understand how international experiences can teach us on how can we provide an initiation on our forced structures and the connection between political, strategic and operational levels the issue is how to do it especially in terms of academic work as it is so some of my comments will be like the relation between the technology and how to apply it in the proper research of your world well one of the first issues that I really liked on your idea is that you begin with a puzzle especially trying to shed light on how the literature does not like old when you see the cases that you analyze especially when you really expect that normally threats leads to change especially in terms of senior institutions which is the point that you say well not really in the case that you try to display but there's an issue when you put it on that because the question that you start when you do your thesis asks about casual factors it's like it's more of a deductive question not an intuitive question but the issue is that you are more worried and concerned about the Brazilian case that you're likely to achieve for making that question so if Brazil is the case of the major concern of your book and you were doing a comparative study how do you bounce the value of the other case that you use in comparison with the Brazilian case so in that sense for example the Brazilian case should be the last one that you present in terms of trying to understand how Brazil differs is similar to the ones that you already analyzed especially because the Brazilian case maybe is a negative case about the phenomenon that you're trying to explain why that because if you think of the three variables that you try to pull off for example threat perception political involvement and the third one which is a joint culture well maybe the three of them are completely absent in the Brazilian case so how would you expect having a joint operation comment if you don't have any of the three variables in the Brazilian case so is Brazil a case in its study I think that's an important claim for you to do in terms of trying to understand well why don't we have a joint operation comment why does the three variables are absent in Brazilian case in that sense so this is a strong not only academic claim in terms of the theory within the Brazilian case but also important political claim in terms of defense as a public policy other issue that I think is very interesting for you to think about is the case selection which is one of the main aspects in terms of logical awareness that you need to be careful why then because you can be like confronted with the idea that the cases that you select already proves of your hypothesis and you have like other problems related to that for example how the U.S. case helps you to test your hypothesis well the U.S. not really comparable with affinals so why do not compare with countries like Australia that has no like clear threat throughout its history or India which is not aligned with any country so are the cases that you select important for you to really put in your hypothesis open stress that's an issue that I feel that you need to better prove your audience that the cases that you're trying to use are important for you try to hold your claim other issue related to that my opinion is in terms of how you structure your research design combining both process tracing and small in comparative analysis well I think that if you try to do so you'll have like two teasers because for having a state process tracing study normally doesn't fit a comparative model especially because a strong issue that this approach helps you to have is a deep and historical bounded explanation that leads you to build a historical narrative which needs depth and normally for that you need to have not cases so are you use a small in comparative model or a process tracing which I think the the later expects for the performance expects for you in terms of trying to understand in there you have one of the issues that I think is your major obstacle is between correlation and causation why that your question asks about causality what leads to the creation of joint operation commands but the way that you treat your variables in data is like a correlation and that's really clear when you give the answers about the present or nor present of these variables in the cases that you analyze for example although you have huge interservice rivalry in the U.S. I think that wouldn't be good sense to say that they don't have a joint culture that because we have like informal institutions that can create a kind of culture that's a part of professional military education how will you deal with that in terms of confirmation of the presence of a variable in its effect in the political and military phenomena that you analyze or for example to say that you don't have a threat perception that's complicated to say where you have countries that are part of an alliance and an alliance normally gives guidelines about what is the strategic environment that they will plan forward so the conflict spoke aspects of each country that you analyze U.S. UK and Canada is important for you to better value the weight of the variable not what we think about them in terms of present or not presence for you to hold your claim about causality in that being said I think that one of the greatest contributions that you can do in your thesis is trying to add a casual history in each case trying to understand how those variables not only present or absent but how do they combine how do they interact in which level of analysis provide provoking the outcome which is the creation of joint military, joint operation comments so that's the challenge the casual history behind each case in which you can say well that's what happened in each case that's what are the differences and similarities and how Brazil holds to those cases in terms of a comparable case or a negative case that being said I think that your work is very important as well very well grounded in the literature and has a huge opportunity to shed light on this necessary debate in Brazil and also in the military innovation and literature abroad so congratulations on your courage and sorry for speaking too much thank you Augusto so I mean I think some really interesting thoughts and findings from both and certainly one kind of common theme there is how much the data that we have access to or the case studies that we can choose can so define an entire research projects and the findings from having difficulty actually being able to get access to the data through to the challenge of deciding which case studies we might choose and how they might filter into the conclusions we have I want to make sure that we have at least 15 or more minutes for sandwiches and chatting and so forth but I would like to open the floor open open the floor to questions and answers I will ask one that's been asked online could our speakers recommend three fundamental books for those interested in the subject that you've presented so something that maybe I would say particularly influenced your thinking in the area I'll throw over to Jake yes so I won't give a particular book you're not allowed to mention I'll talk about a specific paper that was written in 2006 after the Fallujah campaign in Iraq and I think they were really really really important it was authored by a group of US military authors but led by Lieutenant General Thomas Metz and he was able to put the importance of using information operations as a integrated approach to modern military campaigning and by explaining how the failure of the first Fallujah campaign was an information failure and how the second Fallujah campaign had information operations as a more integrated element and therefore was able to perhaps communicate more effectively the aims behind the campaign and what they were trying to achieve so that is a paper that I would refer people to more than any other book thank you very much Puerto Rico yeah there is an author an Australian called Aaron Jackson he's written a paper for Australian joint paper series I guess that's the name of the series it's called Four Aspects of Joint in which he defies the study of jointness into operational aspect organizational aspect educational and doctrine so it's really interesting because it gives you a way to analyze jointness and to define the subject in a way that's easier to study what I did here is I just focused on the doctrine aspect and as for a book I'm going to classic Essence of Decision because the establishment of different models of analyzing government decision is really interesting to give you different perspectives not just the rational actor model but also political and organizations as well thank you very much so there's more questions online but I want to make sure that we've got opportunity for people in the room to ask questions if they have any or could do a second to uh I've got one from Rodrigo if I can I'm allowed the Brazilian military are they expecting the thesis are they going to are they looking forward to you coming home and delivering your findings that this is part of a structured approach is that to look at that right yeah the Air Force University is located inside the Brazilian Air Force so all of this proposals that I'm making they're going to the commander of the Air Force University who's going to lead it out to the chain of command and well each one of those suggestions that it makes the cuts it's going to reach the Air Force Commander and then he can decide what he does yeah but mostly I think I'm hoping that few people will read it yeah yeah brilliant we need some information operations in advance and to make the ground work so you're part indeed I'll throw that me oh sorry I think you raised your hand yeah yeah yes okay we'll see um yeah thank you so much thank you both thank you James thank you Rodrigo and I really enjoyed the presentations I'm sorry I know the lecture and defense studies with King's College London and I want to build something on what Chris said a couple of points um building on the privilege access that you had um and the expertise that you have and I was wondering whether you could say a little bit more about what does your thesis tell us something that we didn't know about information operations so in terms of like what is the wider applicability of your research and why there's significance of your scholarship because I think I think because you said you mentioned you built on the literature to develop to analyze and find me but I think you did a lot more and I'm just curious to find out a bit more and I'm not an expert on information yeah sure yeah so I think we go back to that original slide of where the beginning where how you had this increased interest in information operations following the rise of ISIS and the and the Russia's bloodsand acquisition of Crimea and how that led to this lorry of activity in western militaries and their governments about how can we use information operations in an ethically effective manner as we've seen elsewhere in the world and they came a lot of people came up with these concepts and new organization structural change classic and what I I would argue is the strength of my work is that you don't necessarily need those structural changes or those new concepts if you look at the way that your your organization is culturally um aligned towards the use of information operations um and is your organization the ability to include it in the same way that you would include other either levers of power or for a military perspective capabilities if it's an equal player then it's got the chance of being a more uh effective element of a military campaign uh than he doesn't understand that you've been the case and for me that is really where the where the however I would argue would be the the essence of what's bringing to the discussion about the use of information gear at a national level or on the battlefield okay thank you so we've got a question for James online and then i'm going to use my privileged position to to ask a final question to Rodrigo um James can you discuss the integration of electromagnetic spectrum operations in British military information operations both currently and in the Basra campaign so obviously I'll I'll say feel free to kind of decide how to answer that question um as as you wish yeah it's not my area of expertise as I said on the scope um particularly attention in my uh researchers um upon psychological operations, media operations and integration function of interval warps so I don't have a lot of expertise in electromagnetic magnetic spectrum so I'm not sure if I could address that um effectively but what I would say is in all of these uh when we're discussing the use of informational operations as I alluded to um I would encourage military colleges to approach that capability in the same way that they approach capabilities that they're very comfortable with uh like the use of armor for aviation or artillery uh or air um they're very comfortable bringing that to the planning table and working out how we can coordinate and and synchronize that those types of activity informational operations which would include potentially if you to scope as wide enough electromagnetic activities should be included in that discussion. Thank you so I'm gonna I'm gonna ask the final question I apologize for pulling right um I'm really interested by I think there was probably a sort of a quiet gasp in the room that the idea that the chief of defence star uh is is sort of unable to force the chiefs uh to engage in jointness or they don't have that capacity um I think there is a consistent um I'm not gonna say endless because that sounds pejorative but there is always an ongoing conversation in discussions in the defence academy and the military majority about how much jointness is the right amount of jointness um you know as what type of jointness do you need at different levels you know cultural jointness um in service doctrinal jointness and so forth I'd be really interested to know obviously you're gonna present this uh present your findings to the military hierarchy but I'd be interested to know how common are those discussions within the um Brazilian armed forces and is there a is there a broad sentiment that actually it's really facing a great deal of risk if it doesn't quite quickly and if I answer that join the select question um just to briefly comment on the position of the chief of defence staff a law that's established in this position says that the chief of defence staff has the same city already as the service chiefs so that's what's written in law uh but you know we minister guys we need to put one thing in front of the other so we need to organize stuff so inside the ministry of defence there's an interim legislation that establishes that the hierarchy inside the ministry of defence is the ministry then comes the chief of the navy uh army, air force and then the chief of defence staff so that's the status on it uh as for the promotion of jointness uh mostly it's done on an ethnic basis so we cooperate when we have to otherwise each services does it something so to give you an example that's really close to my reality right now working in parliament every service has their own parliamentary advisory board so whenever there's a common theme we sit together we talk about it and we act but it's if it's not a common theme I don't know what they're doing they don't know what I'm doing and that's really my tip and is there a is there a sentiment amongst officers such as yourself a broader sentiment that you feel that people people want that system to change or is there a sense of we believe this is this system is working and it provides us those specializations that we need to retain there is this sentiment once we get to know the topic once you get to know to study a little bit more about defence in general people start to realize that if we cooperate things are kind of easier but uh about to the point that someone actually has the chance to sit down think about it read a little read something we're all just in worlds in our everyday activities so it's hard to you know lift our heads up and look at the horizon and see what's on there so I don't know if that's an answer to your question but if you very much yet the tyranny of the urgency I think yeah cool and it does affect so many things okay let's see what he said uh there's a severe perspective about the subject the thing kind of got a little bit worse in like three four years from now because added to the issue that the chief of staff has no seniority without the forces they've created a government council inside the email team so some decisions are not necessary for the minister to take but to having accord with the chief of the single forces and the chief staff so we have a more diluted hour within the ministry that harms jointry inside the mld so that displays kind of a huge trouble in terms of complete lack of involvement of civilian oversight over the military and on the other side and still ongoing process of structuring of a ministry of defense that can provide an institutional architecture that can provide a little bit of jointness to the services so uh as to what Rodrigo's saying you have a huge puzzle in terms of what to do with this and the issue is that it's not a political sensitive topic so there's no debate about and you're about to spearhead the spearhead that exactly I just sent like myself but in a moment that's it so so um thank you so much I'm going to close this out before before I do I'll just say the next session of this series is taking place on Wednesday, December the 13th in the Department of War Studies and it's going to be led by Vicky Hudson and Matti Sparrow and they're going to be looking at Russian information influence and Russia's decolonial critique of international order but for now I'd really love to thank James and Rodrigo for giving us this insights into your research and some of the fascinating takeaways and Augusta and Chris for helping kind of reframe and understand some of the questions that might be asked of those so thank you very much