 I'm just waiting for the attendee numbers to go up, and we'll begin in about a minute. Okay, well, good morning, everybody. I'm very pleased to welcome you to the annual School of Security Studies conference. I have a sense of deja vu. It was my role this time last year to welcome you to our first annual conference, which also was forced online. I guess then we did not know anticipate where we would be in a year's time, but last year our theme was global shocks, and a year later we are following on that theme with the theme of navigating global shocks as they are ongoing. I would hesitate to anticipate whether I'll be talking to you in the same vein this time next year, but this panel is the panel sponsored by the military and political history theme in the School of Security Studies. And therefore as historians, I think history does have a use when we have to engage with ongoing events in the present. I'm not one who suggests history teaches us lessons, but it does help us to explain the present and possibly anticipate the future. I do remember that one of the most interesting things I read a year ago was a piece actually written by a historian and doctor on what we know as the 1918 flu pandemic, although that, as explained, was actually the 1916 to 1919 flu pandemic. And one of the lessons I took from reading that piece was that there would be a subsequent waves of the pandemic before it finally settled down. So we might be in the middle of the 2019 to 2022 period of the pandemic as we speak. A couple of practical issues. This webinar is being live streamed on YouTube as well at the moment. Also, we will have panels after the panels, we will have a Q and A session. Please, if you have questions either generally about the content of the panel or addressed to the individual speakers, please put those in the Q and A function on Zoom and we will address those after we've heard from all four of our speakers. Without further ado, I'd like to move on to the business of the morning and introduce our first speaker. This is Kunika Kakuta. I say she's a PhD student in the War Studies Department. She's actually submitted her doctorate and is awaiting examination. So we wish her well in the upcoming examination and she's going to kick us off by addressing issues of ancient crisis looking at the Athenian oligarchic coup of 411 BC. Thank you, Kunika. Thank you, Bill, for your lovely introduction and good morning or afternoon or evening to everyone wherever they are watching this. My stream, let me just quickly share my screen. So, Athen's strategy had been centered around the sea since the Second Persian Invasion, especially after its success at the Battle of Salamis and after they built the long wars that connected their city and appears to harbor, making itself essentially an artificial island on the Attic peninsula. To city these contrast what was known for the polis, a community of citizens agreed on a common goal that was resistant to Persia before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. However, as the war broke out, the norm was challenged along with the foundations of communal or collective thought, which provided the stability and morality to the polis. The conflict was no longer limited to the Greek city-states but now included strife within each community as Athen's weapons democracy. In particular, contrast between the many and the few became clearer and to a certain extent, the perception of sea power identity seems to have changed, especially after the Sicilian expedition of 415 BC and the oligarchy killed 411 BC. Athen's was a marginal great power which needed significant additional resources to support sea power strategy and politics. In books one and two of Thucydides' history, Thucydides demonstrated the essential role of money in creation and expansion of naval power combined with their accused judgment and leadership of Pericles who had warned the Athenians not to engage in land battles. He also highlighted the issue of democracy's capability to run a maritime empire and a fight-enable war. Money was the core of Athenian power, an indicator of its military strength and indispensable factor to maintain the power relationship it created through the exploitation of their subjects except political control. Money was also a means to an end. Athen's has created a power relationship where money became the prerequisites for success. The fragility of sea power model, heavily resource dependent, was highlighted by Athen's desperate attempt to ruin a sea power while its imperial subjects continued to revolt against Athens, emphasizing the second half of Thucydides' history. Athen's launched an expedition to Sicily in 415 BC that ended disastrously. The intended goal of the expedition was money for the present and everlasting pay. It was also the occlaus, the masses, that decision for the Sicilian expedition that believed Arcebides, one of the statesmen and also Stratagos commander was aiming for tyranny but accepted the plan anyway for financial gain. It shows how important money was in the Athenians' collective mentality. The Athenians became so weak that they were willing to submit to the stronger parties even if in the long term, ultimate outcome would be disadvantaged to them for a financial gain. It is not surprising that Athens felt pressure on the financing of the war with the increasing number of allied revolts. The conflicts of interest dominated the political platform during the debate and after the loss of the Sicilian expedition. Thucydides' narrative makes explicitly clear from the beginning of histories the importance of the financing of the war. And it was precisely the reason why the coup began amongst the Athenians at Samos. The coup was not a hidden plot. The subversion of democracy was intended to obtain money from Persia with the help of Satrap's Tisafanis whom Ausibides had defected to after he became persona non grata at Sparta. So the Athens could continue the war. The plan was presented by the Donatoi, the powerful men, to the Oclos, the masses, who at the first was reluctant but nevertheless agreed to it because of the abundance of hope of pay. Thucydides' portrayal of their reaction echoes his account of the Sicilian expedition. There's no explicit mention of oligarchy in the address of the masses suggesting there was an element of this seat in the planning. The narrative is clear that the Donatoi, the powerful men, did not expect any difficulty persuading the masses to accept the proposal. The oligarchic coup and events at Samos are often seen as because of the ideological conflicts between democracy and oligarchy. The sources suggest that naval crew played an active role in resisting oligarchic role in Athens by creating a separate democratic system on Samos to continue the war effort. Thucydides makes it clear that subsequent political change in Athens was the direct consequence of events at Samos, that now the Athenians expected the Persians to be their financiers. The leader of coup, Paisanda, put to the demos, the only means to receive financial aid, which the success of the war entirely dependent on, of which the Athenians had none, would be to change the forms of government so that the Persians would be willing to provide support vis-à-vis the Ausebides. The Athenians were willing to give up inclusive politics, critical to achieving a maritime identity, which ensured the success of the naval empire for financial aid from Persia. The oligarchic movement's objective was to remove political power from the Council of 500 and the Popular Assembly. A changing government would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Yet, the disastrous decidian expedition and an increasing number of revolts by allies placed Athens in a critical position, where unthinkable thoughts were unacceptable in the hope of the salvation of their city. It is clear the oclos, the masses' interest was in money and not in democracy itself, or the political freedom associated with the system. And these masses, who would have been disenfranchised by the oligarchy of the 400, accepted the proposal. What Thucydides' narrative implies is that the masses' interest was in pay for serving in a fleet. The rule had made democratic ideas irrelevant to those who served in the fleet. At the same time, Thucydides' narrative implies that it was difficult for the Athenians to switch from democracy to oligarchy. This was an intermediate regime, which restricted the political rights to the hoplite class. In another words, a modified democracy was implemented, where basic rights were retained by all citizens, but only the 5,000 were able to hold office in order to cut the public spending on official pay by excluding those who could not serve unless they were given salaries. There is an element of terror in Thucydides' narrative. However, terror was not the cause of the oligarchic movement. The anti-democratic groups were already present before Paisanda had left Athens. Nor was his proposal met with opposition when it was fast-propositions. The Athenians were not compelled to vote for the oligarchic movement, but political intimidation was present and the oligarchs did not require a vast amount of terror to disperse democracy. The oligarchs had proposed the abolition of all pay, except military pay, and that participation in governments should be restricted to maximum of 5,000, indicating that Athenians were already moving away from democracy. Thucydides' conveys an impression that they were passive because they were ignorant and cowardly. Their ignorance prevented them from seeking the truth, but they did not have a good politician who was not motivated by personal greed, who had the state's best interests at heart. In another words, it was not the oligarchic coup that terrified the Athenians, but the lack of knowledge. The Athenians were already under political and financial pressure after the Sicilian expedition. The proposal to abolish office pay, followed by political murders carried out by pro-oligarchy members, would likely have increased the fear among them adding to the pressure. A close reading of Thucydides' account suggests that Athenians' concern was not the preservation of freedom and ideas related to democracy, but financial greed. Liberty and democracy perceived a synonym in Athens, but Athenians were willing to give up freedom for pay, just as they had taken their allies' liberty, Athenians gave away their own liberty without any second thought. Samo's democracy demonstrated a total division between the fleet and Athens under the 400. The division was between the oligarchy and the democratic fleet, not Athens and the fleet. In essence, Athenians on Samo's created another sea power state, an independent political community, which demonstrated the importance of the combination between inclusive democratic politics and naval power. Their character initially conceived as democratic and the opposition to oligarchy. Its independence was however brief. Samo's fleet demonstrated the importance of strategic power and pay in a sea power state. They claimed that they had superior access to resources and could control the sea. They attempted to force the oligarchs to preserve the law of their fathers to continue with the war efforts. Even Arcebides dismissed the 400 demanding an installation of democratic council and was in favor of any measures of economy, which would result in better pay for the campaigners. The division between Samo's fleet and Athens under the 400 was clear. The division however, was not necessarily about Athens and the fleet. It was between the democratic fleet and the oligarchy. The Athenians rejection of the new democratic political body on Samo's in 411 BC was a rejection of sea power identity. The restored democracy could not recover the clarity and purpose of Athens' strategic and cultural identity and the Pericles in the final years of the Peloponnesian War. Paving the way for personal ambition and political opportunism to dictate the fate of Athens. Athens sea power was successful as long as it could maintain control of the naval empire as the Samo's democracy fleet demonstrated revealing the ultimate weakness of the oligarchic Athens. Athens needed the navy to survive without it, the city did not have any power. The oligarchy in Athens was a short... The oligarchy in Athens was a short lived. The 400 was replaced with a wider oligarchy of 5,000. The Samo's fleet continued to be perceived as independent of the city and continue to operate under separate financial systems. The importance of the events here is not of the durability but of their nature. The democratic fleet elected Alcibides as the leading powerful statement from a number of small number of elected generals who seemed to have increasingly made major decisions a more characteristic of an oligarchy than a democracy. There was some cooperation and coordination and fruits of victories being shared between the city and Samo's fleet between 49 BC to 47 BC. By two criteria of money and leadership which the city is considered essential to be a successful sea power, the fleet predominately remained independent of city's control. Commanders such as Alcibides failed to recognize this and they also failed to use ample resources they had motivated by greed and profit pursued over ambitious expansion such as the Sicilian expedition where personal gain of popularity outweighed the financial gain for the state. The political tension that had maintained Athenian powers already broken doomed to fail if the fleet and the city continued to operate under two different systems. The Athenian democracy was the result of the cultural hegemony of the Demos that informed democratic ideology through democratic institutions that offered a platform for members of the elites that achieved political ascendancy. Any individuals who addressed the Demos in the assembly needed to pledge the allegiance to democracy and institution that celebrated the uniqueness and superiority of the Athenian democratic politics. The citizens to write to rule and to be ruled through the magistrates and offices responded to the popular assembly. Sovereignty and the ideological dominance were achieved through popular rule, liberty and equality in the popular assembly. The Demos exercised for hegemony over the commanders or any other public officials under the scrutiny of those voters for the fear of political or judicial retaliation could influence their actions. The impacts of coup in Athens and the insurging that Samos is reflecting the election of four or seven slash six BC collegiate of stratagoi, the commanders. Xenophon, who picks up so Cydides narrative emphasizes this, the distance between the generals at home and elsewhere, implying political separation between the two functional allegiances. The Athenians elected also by using exile, Therosivolus, absent and conon from those at home. The separation was not simply about oligarchy and democracy but the election highlighted the Athenian democracy no longer functioning the same way after the oligarchy coup. The new collegiate of stratagoi in four seven slash BC reflected not only the disparity of the political diversity but the physical distance between the generals chosen reflected the lack of clarity and the purpose of the restored democracy. Voting these men onto the board acknowledged their successful campaigning in the Hellespont yet Athens defeat at Notium in four six BC revived the voters dislike of Alcivides prompting an election of the board of the generals. These parochial and violent decisions made by the assembly to dismiss Alcivides and his associates from the collegiate of the stratagoi ultimately brought destruction to Athens at the Battle of Arginosa and Iobgospotomy leading Athens to its ultimate defeat. Thank you, Conica. I will move promptly on to our second speaker who is Professor Andrew Lambert who is Professor of Naval History in the War Studies Department. Published extensively, I haven't got time to talk about his rich research background but I know he's currently completing a biography of Julian Corbett and he's going to talk to us this morning about the Corbett and the Battle of Jutland. Thank you. Good morning, everyone and welcome to this session. What I want to look at today is Julian Corbett, the concept of decisive battle and the extent to which the Battle of Jutland is a decisive battle or indeed is not. So this opens up, I think, a very important discussion right at the heart of the development of modern naval strategic theory which begins in the late 19th century with the American Naval Officer Captain Alfred Thea Mahan and Corbett very much overlaps with Mahan. Mahan publishes in 1890. Corbett is publishing his critical work in the first decade of the 20th century and it's a division about the importance of battle in the overall development of CPOW strategy. Mahan as a naval officer and a student of Yomini, the man who had capitalized on the intellectual legacy of the Napoleonic Wars and had used the so-called decisive battles of Napoleon to argue that that was how wars were won and Corbett takes a different view. Mahan is operating in an American Navy which has only just recovered its modern professional ethos after long decades of being ignored essentially by the American government and was very much a challenger naval power. Whereas Corbett is writing in Britain, he's writing not just in Britain, but for the Royal Navy. His job when he goes to work is teaching senior officers of the Royal Navy about strategy and CPOW going forward. So there's a core argument here. Mahan believes that CPOW is secured by great battle fleets meeting in combat and the winner of battle requires a decisive control over the sea that is the CPOW he talks about which it can then use to conduct other kinds of operation the projection of military power, the imposition of economic blockade, the capture of overseas territories. Corbett believes that these things are all possible but that from a British perspective, it is not necessary to seek out the enemy's fleet and defeat it because in 1900 and indeed in 1914, Britain is dominant at sea. It has the largest Navy. It doesn't need to challenge anybody to secure control of the sea. It has that control and therefore, rather than rushing around in a somewhat chaotic fashion looking for a battle, it should simply get on with applying CPOW to the strategic conduct of the war. And he used his historical studies which date back to the late 1890s through to the First World War to demonstrate how Britain had fought a series of long involved wars with relatively limited commitment of military power but a very extensive commitment to naval power. And the main strategy of those wars was not finding the enemy fleet and defeating it but defeating the enemy and waiting for the enemy to challenge British sea control. So in his great history of the Seven Years War which was published in 1907, Corbett argued that the decisive battle of the war, the Battle of Puy-Bur-Hombay was actually the French response to Britain capturing France's entire overseas empire, culminating in the capture of Quebec in the same year that the French had been left with no means of winning the war other than attempting to invade Britain and land an army on the British coast and that when they sent their fleet out to attempt this operation, it put itself in a position where the main British fleet could engage and destroy it. In the wars of the French Revolution and Empire, Corbett says exactly the same thing happens. Britain has command of the sea. It's for the French to challenge that command. And the only significant challenges that French make are the invasion of Egypt where their entire fleet was wiped out. And in 1805, the events leading to the Battle of Trafalgar in which again, the main French fleet was destroyed. And the genius of Nelson in those two battles is not winning the battle. It's understanding that this was a fleeting opportunity to reduce the enemy's fleet to complete uselessness by destroying a large portion of it and achieving both a material and a moral ascendancy that would shape the rest of the war. It was not necessary to defeat those fleets because the British already had command of the sea before the battle, during the battle, and after the battle. The opportunity that Nelson grasps so brilliantly is to grind up the enemy's resources and stop them mounting any kind of challenge going forward. This allows the British to disperse their fleets around the world and to be much more proactive in prosecuting the war. Corbett explained all of this, I think, very neatly in a wonderful quotation from his books on principles of maritime strategy where he argued that since men live upon the land, that's where sea power has to be measured. Fighting at sea is merely an auxiliary to the ultimate decision on land. And sea power's greatest contribution to victory in long continental wars is economic, the destruction of the enemy's economy, the resources of war. And this can be complimented by amphibious operations, but in the case of Britain, which has a small army, these will tend to be directed only against naval and maritime targets. They will not be conducted as primarily continental military operations. And if you look at the Napoleonic Wars, that's certainly the case. Corbett developed from the arguments of Britain's leading military strategist of the late 19th century, Colonel GF R. Henderson, who observed that the core task of any British army was to ensure the maintenance of British sea power. And you can see that in operations in the Napoleonic Wars and indeed in the Crimean War, where the enemy's fleet is the core target, not the enemy's army. That was the orthodoxy in Britain going into the 20th century. But in 1904, we begin a process where the army begins to challenge that orthodoxy and argue that what Britain needs is an army to engage in Europe, because the war in Europe will be over quickly. The relative balance of power between France and Germany means there's a possibility France might be overthrown in a single campaign as it had been in 1870. And just as the government creates a committee of imperial defence to coordinate and systematise British strategic thinking, the army decides that it doesn't want to do what it's always done, which is to be the amphibious strike force of the navy. So we end up with a navy that needs to think about fighting an enemy navy, but not with an army alongside it. And this leads into, I think, the great conundrum about the Battle of Jutland. When Corbett enters the First World War, August 1914, he is quite literally just finishing a great strategic analysis of the Russo-Japanese War in which he demonstrates compellingly that the Japanese navy at no stage in this war sought a decisive battle with the Russians. The Japanese navy was used to move the Japanese army from Japanese islands to Korea and Manchuria. It then maintained those supply lines against any attempt of the Russians to attack them. It did not seek out the enemy fleet for battle. The Russian First Pacific Squadron was destroyed by the Japanese army, which surrounded its base at Port Arthur and bombarded it from the land. And when the Second Pacific Squadron arrived all the way from the Baltic, the Japanese navy waited in a strong defensive position in the Straits of Tsushima between Japan and Korea and literally forced the Russians to attack them. The Russian attack failed and most of the fleet was destroyed. These battles were decisive, but they were not battles that were sought. And Corbett stresses the point, it's not the business of the dominant fleet to seek out the enemy's fleet. The enemy ultimately will have to come to you and it is much better to let them do so. Sadly, this analysis wasn't widely promulgated before the First World War because it was literally in the press when the war broke out. What Corbett was arguing, and here he's worked with Admiral Sir John Fisher, who was First Sea Lord before the First World War and in 1914-15, is that in order to bring the German fleet to battle and to reinforce Britain's command of the sea, it would be necessary to put pressure on Germany in a place where it would be compelled to use its fleet. And that was not by attacking Germany's colonies in the Pacific or indeed by steaming around in the North Sea looking for a battle. That was not going to happen. Corbett stresses in August 1914, the only thing the Germans would use their main fleet for is the defense of the Baltic coast to prevent the Royal Navy entering and commanding the Baltic and breaking the German economy by cutting it off from its neutral suppliers, particularly Sweden and operating there in concert with its Russian allies to break the German economy by cutting its access to iron, copper, and other vital strategic war materials. So while many thought that it was possible to seek out the enemy and defeat them, Corbett stressed that this was not possible. So in concert with Fisher, he develops a strategy to send a fleet towards the Baltic narrows into the Danish channels and to draw the German fleet out into battle. This would take a little time to mobilize the problem here is that the soldiers had convinced the politicians that the war would be over by Christmas and it was necessary that Britain made a serious military effort on the continent in the interval. This meant that the strike force that was necessary to operate in the Baltic was committed to fighting in France and Belgium and was simply drawn into a continental war leaving the Navy without the necessary divisions to secure territory ashore in the Baltic region. The problem becomes significantly worse as the country mobilizes more and more military power and ends up fighting two completely separate wars. This means the offensive element of naval power projection is gravely weakened and public pressure, the denusion that the war would be over by Christmas either 1914, 1915 or perhaps 1916. And here we think about the point of the bill raised at the beginning. How long is the pandemic going to last? Well, past president suggests about three years and British wars tended to last many years and that I think is a key problem. The politicians did not expect the war to last that long. They thought it would all be over and that they had to rush. That was not actually the case. So Corbett is putting forward a strategy that looks at winning the war through economic pressure and through the threat to Germany's vital interests. Not a kinetic threat, not a direct threat. And so when we get to the Battle of Jutland, the great controversial centerpiece of the naval history of the First World War, we're looking at something which is not by any stretch of the imagination intended to be a decisive battle. The German high seas fleet has just set off from Willemshaven into the North Sea to conduct a raid against British shipping on the Norway to Great Britain route. It hopes that this will draw out part of the British fleet and that some kind of action will take place in which small parts of the British fleet can be destroyed, that the balance at sea can be upset. When intelligence of this sortie comes through, the British commander-in-chief, Admiral Sir John Jelico, is about to launch his most ambitious strategic move of the war. He is going to send elements of the Grand Fleet around the Jutland Peninsula into the catagate and heading down towards the approaches to Copenhagen. He is going to be knocking on the front door of the Baltic. This is precisely what Admiral Fisher, Julian Corbett, had been arguing that it was only by threatening to enter the Baltic that the British could get a battle with the Germans in which the Germans would not do what they did at Jutland. The two fleets meet in late afternoon on the 31st of May off the coast of Jutland. The Germans have no reason to stand and fight against a larger and more powerful fleet. Once they realize the situation they're in, they retreat. And when they get back into a bad situation, they retreat again because they're not going to use their fleet to fight a battle with no strategic value in the middle of the North Sea. Had that battle been fought in the approaches to Copenhagen, it is unlikely the Germans would have retreated and much more likely that the battle would have had some significant effect. So what we need to look at with Jutland is, this is not going to be a decisive battle. From the beginning, it is not in a place that is strategically critical to Germany. Once the Germans realize that they're fighting not part of the Grand Fleet, but all of it and that they're outnumbered, they retreat. This is perfectly logical. And Corbett's task in the last years of his life was to explain all of this to a country that thought the Battle of Jutland should have been the Battle of Trafalgar, rather missing the point that the enemy at Trafalgar were brave, but not very capable. Whereas the enemy at Jutland were brave and highly professional, and the British could take no liberties with the high seas fleet. It was a very efficient fighting organization. So the irony of Jutland ultimately is that if the Germans hadn't sailed on the 31st of May, the British might well on the 1st of June have sailed on a sortie into the Categette towards Copenhagen. And this might indeed have brought on a properly decisive battle. So what is a decisive battle at sea? Well, it's one that finishes off a campaign, not one that starts it. So the odd decisive battle at sea is one when the enemy takes the ultimate risk with their fleet in a disadvantageous situation and is put in a position where they are able to be destroyed. The ultimate examples of this would be the Nile and Kiberong where the French overextended the use of sea power and were ultimately defeated. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Andrew. I'll move straight on to our third speaker, who is Dr. Graham Huse. He's reader in diplomatic and military history in the Defense Studies Department. He worked particularly on British strategy, military policy after 1945 in the Cold War era. And he's going to talk to us today about the response of Margaret Thatcher's government to the surprise, I guess, invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union. Thank you. Go right. Thank you very much, Bill. Just a moment while I just try and hopefully get my screen up. So far, so good. Right, brilliant. Okay, good morning, everyone. Thanks again to Bill for that very nice introduction. Thank you all for inviting me to present at this year's conference. For this panel, I decided to focus on the UK's response to the USSR intervention in Afghanistan from the 25th of December, 1979, which is a subject of an article which I hope will be approved for publication in the journal Cold War Studies. I suppose this is very much a case of watch this space. Now, I thought that this was worth talking about because the following the annexation of Crimea by Russia in February, March, 2014, we live in an environment where we are, we're seeing the salience of great power competition. European security has acquired a more military dimension than it had previously, certainly since the end of the Cold War. And we're having to ask the very same questions that Cold War era strategist has to ask about the validity of Article 5, whether it had deterrent effects about how also how you helped vulnerable NATO allies protect themselves from the threat of Russian aggression. Now, I agree fully with Bill's point at the beginning of this panel where he says that academic stories are always wary of analogies and the idea that somehow there are lessons to be learned from the study of the past. But I think that a close study of policy making in historical crises can help us think about the dilemmas and the challenges we face now, hence this paper. So, as this cartoon from by Giles in the evening standard shows, now, even at the time, the decision by Britain and indeed by other countries to aid and arm the Akan which are deemed resistance groups against the Soviets and against the communist regime, Kabul was seen even at time as a somewhat ironic one. And looking now, our popular perceptions of the 1980s and also the war in Afghanistan are inevitably influenced by 9-11 and also by the long war that the USA and NATO has waged against the Taliban. And it may very well be that some of you listening to this paper actually have some direct experience of servicing that war. And in fact, it's worth noting here that war studies has its own link with this rather this tragic conflict because out of the 456 British servicemen and women killed in it, one of them was a former war study students, Jack Sadler who has a memorial plaque to him in the war studies department. So it's a reminder here that history is not just something abstract, there is something very real behind this as well. Now, I hate to add that Ossie Weston, including British policy towards Afghanistan over the past 40 years can and indeed should be criticized. But I personally think that the we created the Taliban or the we created al-Qaeda narrative is a very reductionist one. And I think it's also in certain respects and insulting ones to Afghans themselves to conflate them all together. A good number of the Mujahideen of the 1980s ended up fighting both against Mullah Omar's movement and also Osama bin Laden's network. And it's also a reminder again of the importance of coincide. We know how things turned out whereas policy makers in the United Kingdom and indeed other countries in around 1979, 1980 did not have that luxury. Now, Afghanistan also resonates with a British audience because of its own, because of Britain's own imperial history and also the three wars fought, the three Afghan conflicts between 1839 to 1919. So they have an impact on popular sections and culture as per Rudyard Kipling's poem. So even before the actual intervention in April, 1979, the Daily Telegraph cartoonist Nicholas Garland uses one of them as an analogy for that year's general election, perhaps with questionable tastes. The idea that essentially being that Jim Callaghan, the outgoing Labour Prime Minister, is in a situation very much analogous to the young British soldier in Kipling's famous poem and the general election is basically his way of ending it. And this of course is the election that ends his, well, effectively ends his political career and puts Margaret Thatcher in number 10, Downing Street. So what this means is that when the intervention actually happens, some British officials conclude that once the Soviets have sent combat troops to save their client regime in Kabul, this is not going to end the same way as, for example, the suppression of the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia 11 years earlier. This is going to get a lot messier. There's Michael Alexander, the Prime Minister's foreign and Commonwealth Office, FCO, private secretary, they put it, if the Russians were paired to believe themselves white in Afghanistan, then good luck to them. So what are my core conclusions when it comes to this specific piece? Well, firstly, prior to the actual intervention on Christmas Day, 1979, both GCHQ and its American counterparts, National Security Agency, they were monitoring troop movements in Soviet Central Asia and are also monitoring the buildup of personnel in Afghanistan itself. Notably advisors sent to the Kabul regime's armed forces and security forces, special forces personnel to try to translate that term roughly and also a contingent of paratroopers said to guard background airfield. The problem with this sort of slow motion intervention is one that's obviously intelligence professionals and intelligence scholars would refer as distinction signals from noise, not least because Huffizala Armin, the Afghan president at the time, was actually requesting Soviet aid against the Mojidean insurgents as well. And the decision actually to intervene was only made by Leonid Brezhnev and by the Soviet Politburo on the 12th of December, 1979. And prior to this, FCO officials in particular are considering the possibility of intervention but wondering what to do about it. There's one warning here about the idea of a Knotulite warning to the Moscow by Britain and all by our other Western powers, which is simply disregarded, which again would have a rather catastrophic effect on Western credibility. The second point here is although Thatcher spoke in an alarmist tones about the intervention in a speech at the House of Commons on the 28th of January, 1980, the FCO and the joint intelligence committee were they collectively saw the intervention as a last resort by the USSR to save the Afghan communist regime from being overthrown. It was not seen as being some part of some grand scheme for expansion to the Persian Gulf. Now, for what we know about Soviet policy from post 1991 archival disclosures, this interpretation was actually the correct one. The third point here is that when it came to any potential future moves after Afghanistan, the key threat in the British perspective was not an actual invasion of either Pakistan or Iran. It was the use of subversion to destabilize these already rather fragile states to the USSR South. Bear in mind that at this point, of course, Iran is going through the Islamic revolution that just overthrown its charm. Fourthly, the Afghan intervention is seen in completely different terms than the crushing of Hungarian revolution in 1956 or the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. As one document from the FCO's planning staff put it, overturned the understanding that prevailed since 1945 that Soviet forces do not fight outside the territory of the Soviet Union and our allies. Of course, that the interpretation that understanding is something that we can discuss, but this was very much the Western perception. Fifthly, the United Kingdom did not have the means to enact its own version of the Carter doctrine. Jimmy Carter's own announcement about preparations made to defend the Persian Gulf gulf against any Soviet attack. And this point was emphasized by the cuts in the armed forces that followed the 1981 defense review. So it was only a matter of days after the invasion that thatcher, the foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, the cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, decided that the Britain had to offer covert assistance to the major dean. Core factors behind this were punitive. The intentions were to delay the Soviet takeover of Afghanistan and also to ensure that the Soviets paid such a heavy price that it would be a deterrent to further intervention. The problem here, however, was one of implementation because there was a time lag between that decision and the FCO and the secret intelligence service actually identifying which Afghan rebel factions were actually fighting Soviet and government troops and which ones were therefore worth supporting. Now this decision needs really to be seen as a reflection of contemporary Cold War tensions. In Europe, Poland as part of the Warsaw Pact was in a state of high tension because of the standoff between an unpopular communist regime and the trade union movement, solidarity or solid downloss to use the Polish term. This presented the possibility as shown by this cartoon of another and potentially far more de-stabilizing Soviet military intervention, at least up until the Polish regime itself declared martial law in December 1981. This was also the era of the Europe missile crisis. European NATO members requested a U.S. counter to the deployment of the Soviet SS-20 missile system of the Pigeonair behind the Iron Curtain and got the cruising of the Pershing missiles as a counter. And this actually galvanized the anti-nuclear protest movement in Europe, particularly in Britain with the agreement common protests. And the run up to Afghanistan is also increasing Soviet activity beyond the U.S. S.R. traditional sphere of influence in support of the Cuban military intervention in Angola in the Civil War in November 1975 and also over to assistance given to Ethiopia in its war against Somalia in 1977-1978. Now, from Moscow and Havana's perspective, these interventions are perfectly legitimate. They were not expansionist, but this is not how the facture herself saw them as shown by her first major foreign policy speech after her election as leader of the opposition at Kensington Town Hall on the 19th of January 1976, the so-called Britain-awake speech. And above all, at this time, you also have this perennial British obsession with spying with moles and with subversion. And actually a month before the intervention, that should publicly outsourced the blunts as one of the Cambridge spies. At the same time, coincidentally, the BBC broadcast its adaptation of the John McCarrie, nodding to Taylor, soldier spy. Now, I think another point here is it's also worth emphasizing that there's a humanitarian dimension to this reaction. It's the Soviet intervention involves a very savage counter-insurgency campaign to crush resistance. And this, one of the consequences of this is an exodus of refugees into Pakistan and Iran. And it's public pronouncements, the conservative government amplifies this point with its references to the invasion of Afghanistan and also the resistance. The latter is intended to have deliberate connotations of World War II and resistance to the Nazis. But this is not just about government spin. You see here a cartoon from the Daily Mirror printed in January, 1981, after a labor MP, Bond Brown, paid a visit to Kabul and basically extolled the virtues of the regime. And this shows that disgust at Moscow's actions and contempt for the minority that sought to excuse them was not exclusive to that to governments. The Mirror was and is a pro-labor newspaper and was certainly no friend to Margaret Thatcher and the governments. Another example of this was a comment made by the deputy head of the FCO's planning staff who noted in a memo in November, 1980, that people of my acquaintance who have been studiously liberal for years, guarding Nesk to the point of being tiresome, noticed here again the reference to a left-leaning newspaper and its readership, they say they don't have hope that we, namely Her Majesty's government, are aiding the resistance and it would be shameful if we were not. So in conclusion, like Ukraine in 2014, Afghanistan presented the British government and other governments with what could be called the where next problem. Now, whilst Moscow was not necessarily motivated by some grandmaster plan for expansion, the question here was, would opportunism or perceptions of Western weakness lead them towards further acts of adventurism against the USSR's neighbors? Now, we now know with Afghanistan that had the opposite effect, in particular, it made Brezhnev and his Politburo more cautious about how to have all the Polish crisis. But again, this is something we only know now. Secondly, then as now, Britain was dealing with a gap between its global aspirations and its limited economic and military means. Not just because of with the focus of NATO, the Nazi community could only make a token military contribution beyond Europe. And in this respect, as Rory Cormac has observed in his book, Disrupted Night, as Britain's hard power has decreased, covert action of all kinds from influence operations and propaganda to paramilitary activity, are likely to come with default solution in scenarios where overt military intervention is too risky, but the UK has a vested interest in achieving a specific political outcome by backing local actors in the conflict against their adversaries. And as a final point here, this raises again the risks of proxy warfare, the fact that if you subcontract warfighting to a third party factor, then your strategic challenges are compounded by the fact that you don't control the outcome. The Afghan war was one in which a coalition of both state actors including the United States, France, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and others and private actors, fundraisers or volunteers were all involved. So in conflicts such as these where there are a variety of non-state external actors involved, we don't just have to worry about the consequences of our adverse actions, but also those of those who are on our side. Thank you very much indeed, your time. That concludes my presentation. And I'll hand back to Bill. Thank you very much, Geraint. We have our fourth speaker, who's Ignacio Morales-Barcam. He's a PhD student in the Defense Studies Department. His PhD is actually on the radicalization of British soldiers and violence in the Burma campaign in the Second World War. But in another life, he also lectures in international relations and history in Chile. And he has an interest in radicalization, which I understand is probably the root of the paper that he's going to talk about today, which is a reaction to his Bola's international bombing activities. Thank you, Ignacio. Thank you, Professor Philpott. I'm going to show my screen now. Here we go. So thank you very much. Welcome, everyone, to this session. The topic of my talk today is the highly contested Hezbollah's participation in the army of bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994, the allegedly intervention of Iran in the case of Hezbollah's internationalism in this very complex situation. Basically, we have two different arguments to make here. We can go either with Hezbollah's external operations and the aims they were looking for, especially during the 90s, or Hezbollah as the strongest Iranian proxy, not only in the Middle East, but also in the rest of the world, in this case, in Latin America during the 90s. In regards to the first point, the question is, was this a unique type of global jihadism? Can we establish comparisons between the idea of globalization of radical extremist Islamism from the perspective of the radical Sunni Islamism and with the sheer perspective of the same phenomenon? Can we speak about the uredentist jihadism as Fawaz has put it in his book, The Far Enemy Why Jihad Went Global? Does his strategy have geopolitical limitations or did this strategy have geopolitical limitations, especially during the 1990s? And this is a line of inquiry. And the second one, which is the one I'm going to choose for today's talk is Hezbollah's as the strongest Iranian proxy, especially after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. They started with the revolution in 79, the war between Iran and Iraq starting in 1980 and how Hezbollah during the 80s grew as an armed arm of the Iranian regime, especially in Lebanon. So my position in regards with this is that first this is a very highly contested issue. It's not totally resolved, not even in Argentina nowadays. The bombing of the Amia building doesn't have proper results yet. It has been more than 30 years since the bombing of that building in Buenos Aires. And we still don't know. One of the strongest theories is that Hezbollah in coordination with Iran committed this terrorist act in Buenos Aires. But again, this is highly contested. And for the sake of the argument, I'm going to go with that perspective because we have different interpretations on that. We have the so-called Syrian led. We have some investigations trying to make the Argentinian intelligence services responsible for this. But the strongest theory is as follows, Hezbollah working in coordination with Iran trying to affect the Jewish community in Buenos Aires, a very important Jewish community in Latin America by bombing the building of the Amia. That goes for the Association Mutual Israel in Argentina. So my position in this is that Hezbollah being the strongest Iranian proxy speaks of a strategic reassessment both for Iran and Hezbollah during the 90s vis-à-vis the state of Israel. Matthew Levitt in one of the most interesting books about this explained this as a global narrative that ended for the case of Hezbollah and Iran in the growth of global tourism and illicit activities in Europe, Africa, North America and South America. And this is the case of the bombing of the Amia building. So these are the facts. Julie, July 18th, 1994, a big explosion affected a six or seven floor building in downtown Buenos Aires. 95 people were killed, more than 150 wounded. And it was until the day the biggest terrorist attack in the history of Argentina and Latin America. I'm not considering for that the terrorist attacks committed by Paolo Escobar in Colombia if we are going to make the case for the narco-terrorism in this perspective. In terms of terrorist attacks, this has been by far the biggest attack in Latin American soil. After 27 years, there are still no convictions. We have a very extensive investigation made by Alberto Nisman, the special attorney general appointed by President Kirchner during 2015 to investigate this. And this is a timeline to try to explain the causes that eventually ended in this explosion. As Alberto Nisman explained in his report, this is the indication of the events that happened in the 90s in Buenos Aires. This started with the Argentinos agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran to provide help to the regime converting a nuclear reactor and to supply them with low-enrich uranium. That was one year before Carlos Saúl Menem assumed the presidency in Argentina. 1987, 1988, the president was Raúl Alfonsin in Argentina. One year later, Carlos Saúl Menem was pressured by Washington to stop this agreement with the Iranians so the Argentinians stop. So they actually notified the Iranians that they were not going to go further with this aspiration of the Iranian regime to try to convert a nuclear reactor for our momentous aims. So Argentina actually changed his mind in terms of alignments and went with the US in this international position. At the same time, in 1992, in February the 16th, in a military operation in Lebanon, the IDF killed Abbas al-Musawi, as well as Secretary General. So the same year, just one month later, the Islamic Jihad organization, one of Hezbollah's arms, claimed responsibility for the first bombing of a target in Argentina. That was the outside of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. That was the first terrorist attempt, which killed around 45 people and led more than 50 wounded. Two years later, July the 18th, the bomb exploded in the Amir building, killing more than 95 people in that terrorist attempt that I am trying to explain here. So you can see here in this slide, this is Alberto Nisman. He was the Attorney General trying to resolve this. And he had one position in regards to this. His biggest conclusion was that the attack was carried out in Argentina. I went to the Argentine government's unilateral decision to terminate the nuclear materials and technology supply agreements that had been concluded some years previously between Argentina and Iran. This was the determining factor that prompted the decision to carry out the Amir attack at the decision that was made by the Committee for Special Apparitions. Without the time decision was made, was composed by the spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, President Ali Akbar Rafsani, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and Intelligence Minister. The decision in words of Alberto Nisman was made at the meeting held on August the 14th, 1993 in the Iran city of Mashhad. Now, what is the important thing here is that Alberto Nisman died on January the 18th, 2015. Allegedly, he committed suicide, but the main theory is that he was killed. We don't know yet who killed him. He was blaming not only the Iranians and Hezbollah for the bombing of the Amir building in 1994. He was also pointing to the responsibility of Cristina Fernandes, the President of Argentina at that time for trying to erase the clues, trying to point to Iran and Hezbollah as responsible for this attack. So he was trying to uncover a very complex operation. And I'm not saying with this that Cristina Fernandes was responsible for this. I'm just saying that Alberto Nisman tried to argue that the Argentinian government, the presidency of Argentina during 2014, well, starting in 2013, ending in 2015, tried to cover the Iranian participation because they wanted to have commercial relations with Iran. They were trying to buy oil at the same time, trying to and buy and sell corn from Argentina. So this is a very, again, very contested issue in Argentina nowadays. It has to do with different problems that encounter in the same narrative. First, you have the idea of Hezbollah's internationalism, the ties between Hezbollah and Iran, trying to open the scope of the attacks against the state of Israel, not only in the Middle East, but also in Europe and Africa and in South America. And then you have the internal issues related to the problem of how the Argentinian government, the intelligence services, the special attorneys, the general attorneys before Nisman tried to cover this without giving any clue about who were the responsible for this. The strongest line of inquiry point to Iran and Hezbollah. That's not the only theory, but it's the theory that makes sense in terms of how Hezbollah worked as an arm of the Iranian foreign policy in terms of trying to attack the state of Israel, not in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world. So this is the case of the Amir building. The idea, the general inquire of Alberto Nisman pointed that Iran or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps worked in coordination with Hezbollah and they started a very strong and illicit organization in a very particular location in La Marica, which is called the Triple Frontier, La Trible Frontera. And that's the frontier between Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina, especially in the city of Ciudad El Este. The idea of Nisman is that Hezbollah was making this global network of finance, trying to laundering money and selling drugs and weapons from La Marica to the Middle East and trying to enrich themselves with illicit activities in the Triple Frontier. And that gave space to the finance of the bombing in 1994. So basically Nisman's conclusion is that the Iranians were trying to get revenge for the Argentinians, for not following the agreement of the final years of the 80s, where they were willing to provide nuclear support and the sale of uranium. And at the same time, after the killing of Hezbollah's secretary general, Hezbollah had at that time an intention to retaliate against the state of Israel. Now, in terms of the asymmetry of the conflict, it doesn't make sense, it didn't make sense if we follow this lead for Hezbollah to attack Israel in Israel or for Iran to open a conflict, a war against Israel in the Middle East. It doesn't make sense. So the idea here is that Iran decided in coordination with Hezbollah to attack the state of Israel, not in Israel. And for that, they attacked the Amir building in 1994. There are many different interpretations for this. Again, not even the Argentinians have a clue about this, especially after the death of Albert Donizman in 2015. He was pointing Iran, he was pointing Hezbollah and he was pointing the responsibility of the Argentinian government at the same time. So if we follow this lead, the basic conclusion is that Iran and Hezbollah committed themselves to reassess their power and they tried to make a strategic construction in this asymmetrical context and they decided to bomb the Israeli community in Buenos Aires two times. First in 1992, when they attempted against the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and two years later with the bombing of the Amir building. This has been very contested in other perspective as well. If we follow Nisman investigation, we will realize that his investigation relies a lot on investigations provided by the FBI, by the ATF and by the US Treasury Department. They were trying to link Hezbollah and Iran in Latin America as part of a network of financing terror around the world. They were not trying in this position to impose this global jihadist position of fighting the war against the infidels all around the world. That's the other perspective of the radical extremist Sunni Islamism. They were trying to follow another path and this is the one providing help, financial support by following illicit activities to Hezbollah and Iran in this struggle and this permanent struggle for them against the state of Israel. And for that, the triple frontier in Latin America was essential. So basically the idea of Nisman was to prove, he was trying to prove that Hezbollah in coordination with Iran, Hezbollah being a proxy had this net of relationships, economic relationships established between the Middle East, Latin America, the US, Europe, Africa and China to reach money and to provide the struggle against the, in their words, the occupation of the state of Israel with fresh money, especially by selling drugs and arms from Latin America to the rest of the world and then providing money, fresh money to Hezbollah and Iran in the Middle East. So again, the most important lead here is that Alberto Nisman before he died, he proved or at least he tried to prove that Hezbollah was working as a proxy for the Iranians in Latin America. So they committed this terrorist attempt. We don't have information about this fresh information. The Amir report actually is very vague in terms of the quality of the witnesses, the investigation about the proofs Nisman provided to prosecute Iranians and Lebanese members of Hezbollah in this very complex situation. So if you follow that lead, you will reach the conclusion that effectively Hezbollah was responsible for the bombing of the Amir building in Latin America. And this is very important to conclude. This doesn't mean that Hezbollah was trying to impose a global jihadism threat, quote unquote against the infidels. They were trying to make this net of illicit trade get bigger and bigger, not only in Latin America, but also in Africa, Europe, the US, and China and all around the world. These are two very different positions in regards to how to approach the issue of global jihadism. We have the line of inquiry proposed by Fawaz Herkiz in regards to the Sunni extremist Islamism agenda. And we have the Shia perspective on the expansion of this extremism idea of global jihadism, especially after 9-11. So we actually can make an argument here and say that the Shia extremist perspective is very different to the Sunni. And this is one good example of that, if, and that's a very big if, if we follow the lead of Alberto Nisman, which was tragically ended in 2015 when he committed allegedly suicide or he was killed. We don't know that yet, it's under investigation. And the victims just don't have answers after the 1994 attack, the State of Israel worked in this investigation, the US worked in this investigation, the United Nations worked in this investigation and the Argentinean so as well. And we don't have answers for that. Try to imagine that the president of Argentina during those times, Cristina Fernandes, is nowadays vice president of Argentina. So this is a very contested issue. It's a very problematic issue and the victims of the AMIA are not having responses to that. It's a tragic situation. And again, it's the biggest terrorist attack committed in Latin America in the history of this idea of modern terrorism. So with that, I'll go back to Professor Philpot and that ends my presentation for today. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Ignacia and thank you also to our other speakers. We've had four contrasting papers that have ranged across time and across place and have introduced to us the different types of crises that are faced either internal as in the case of Athens or international as in the case of the invasion of Argentina or a more contemporary example of a non-state actor provoking international crisis in the case of the bombing in Buenos Aires. And I guess Andrew Lavitt also talked about what you might identify as an intellectual crisis, a crisis in strategic thinking brought about by a particular war situation that tests thought and theory that exists prior to that conflict. I see we have a number of questions in the Q&A function, but I'd ask anyone else with a question to add that to the list. I won't have a question myself at this point but I might intervene if we have the chance later. We have about 15 to 20 minutes left. So I will begin. I hope our speakers can also see the questions. The first question is from Ewan Grant which is also perhaps an observation. Ewan is a former law enforcement and intelligence analyst for HN Custom and Excise. And he says that it is not the unfinished business referred to regarding the Buenos Aires bombing and the criminality in the tri-border area, an indictment of Western failure to properly interdict state policy directed to criminality and this requires a coordinated approach which has implications for IRGC activity today. It's an observation perhaps but perhaps the Asia would like to respond to that. Cool. Well, I think that the basic principle here is not only the failure to investigate properly but we need to get into the Latin American dimension especially in the Argentinian dimension. The investigation was very, very difficult especially for a veteranism because of the corruption inside the regime, inside the political spectrum of the Argentinian government. So it's not only a problem of international investigations vis-à-vis the case of the eventual participation of Iran or Hezbollah. It has to do as well with the lack of access to proper information inside the Argentinian intelligence services and inside the government. Alberto Nisman had a very big enemy in that government especially with Cristina Fernandez. And this is very ironic. The president who proposed Nisman to be the leader of this investigation was Kirchner, the husband of the future president of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez. When he decided to move from power and Cristina Fernandez assumed the presidency that policy changed and she was one of the biggest enemies of Nisman because allegedly she was trying to reach an agreement with Iran in terms of economic ties. So it's not only a case of failure of the Western world in terms of prosecuting the truth or maybe following the clues to clarify this. It's a problem of the Latin Americans for as well. That would be my answer. Thank you. You would follow it up with a question. Are you planning a book based on your research and presentation? I think he's keen to read if you are. Actually, I'm not. I tried to investigate this a few years ago and the problem is that we don't have access to sources. Not even the attorney general had access to proper sources. And when he found information, he allegedly committed suicide. So I'm not sure if I want to get into that position. So it's very complicated in terms of either you go with the official narrative, quote unquote, which is the American narrative proposed by the FBI trying to blame Iran and Hezbollah or you go with other theories like the Syrian lead or maybe the participation of the Argentinean intelligence services in this bombing. So I'd love to get into this more deeply, but it's very difficult in terms of the access to sources. Thank you. We did have a number of questions to rest to our speakers, but rather than answering them live, they have answered them by text, but possibly we could explore those questions. Andri, could you like to comment on the questions that you have received? Yes, with pleasure. Where are we? Let's get the... So I've answered a couple of questions. The first was from James Smith asking about the role of First-Eld Battenberg in the August mini-cabinet meeting that decided to commit the British Expeditionary Force to France. The problem that Battenberg as a First-Sea Lord faces in that meeting is that his political master, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, is present and of all the ministers, Churchill is the one who's advocating the continental deployment of the army and he's backed in the room by nine generals. So we have nine generals, one admiral, four politicians and one of the politicians is a continentalist, two of the others are not really prepared to engage with the alternatives and tend to think that whatever the professionals say is correct. As Fisher discovered in April, 1915, the only way to stop Churchill's continental-minded approach to British strategy was to resign and to get rid of him, which is what Fisher ultimately does. Battenberg isn't going to do that. He's not politically dynamic and at that stage of the war, there is no real basis for him to do so. It would have been unconstitutional for the First-Sea Lord to oppose his minister in a meeting of that gravity. The other one is from Michael Keegan and he's asked about the controversy concerning Corbett's account of the Battle of Jutland and the impact that's had on our understanding of it as a battle. And of course, Corbett publishes an account of the battle, but he doesn't publish an analysis of the strategic consequences because he literally dropped dead having finished the tactical phase of the battle. So we're left with the major strategic analyst of the war not telling us what he thinks the battle actually achieves. And as a result, the battle has endlessly been picked over by people interested in love-scale personalities, particularly that of David Beatty, in technological issues, particularly the explosion of large warships and tactical failure, very few people have commented or indeed thought about what the location of the battle means and why the Germans were so keen not to get engaged in this battle having sent their entire fleet out and have missed the point that the battle is simply an encounter between two forces who are not expecting to meet each other and that one of those is very keen to leave the battlefield as soon as they realize that they're outnumbered and outgunned. So it's not a decisive battle because it's not a battle where both sides are committed to fighting it to a finish. One side has no interest in fighting to the finish and leaves and the others are not committed to winning the battle because they don't want to risk their command of the sea. So it's not a battle that's going to produce a decision and thinking of it as a failed version of Trafalgar misses the point. There isn't a battle of Trafalgar to be fought here. Nobody is going to fight this battle to a conclusion in the way that Nelson does at Trafalgar or at the Nile. So it's a different kind of battle. It's a tactical encounter with limited strategic consequence. The consequences of Jutland are essentially nothing. It's essentially a tactical draw and nothing changes after the battle. Apart from the Germans realizing they can't win such a battle at sea and resorting to unrestricted U-boat warfare. So we needed Corbett to finish his analysis of the wider implications of this battle and to put them back into the big picture of the war. And as a result, the analysis of the battle has dropped down to a low level. A great deal of work has been done on what are not particularly very important issues. So I'll leave it there. Immuted Bill. Could I follow that up? You've studied Corbett more than anybody else. Are you able to fill in that missing analysis? Can you speak more thoughtlessly? Yes, Corbett's analysis of the war, there's ample evidence in the archives to show that he's building an analysis of the war to explain why it lasted so long. And the central plank of that is that failure to even attempt to gain control of the Baltic, which was both his and Fisher's key strategy, allowed Germany to keep open its neutral supply line through Holland, Denmark, and particularly Sweden, which enabled it to prolong the war when taking maritime economic control of the Baltic would have cut off critical supplies of iron, finished steel, goods, copper, food, and even horses. By 1918, the German army's primary supply of horses is coming out of Sweden, certainly not coming out of Germany. So Germany's war effort is being sustained by the fact that the blockade, which is working relatively effectively by 1916, does not include the Baltic. Corbett and Fisher had identified this before the First World War, and that is the central point that he's making. At the outset of volume two of his strategic analysis, he says we've cleared up the world phase of the war, the war from the spring of 1915 is a very large European conflict in which global resources are being deployed on European battlefields. It's not a world war anymore, the world phase is over, and the North Sea must be dominated, and ultimately it will be necessary to go into the Baltic. It's worth noting that this option was kept live by the British government right through to 1917 and was considered, on several occasions, not least the October Revolution, whether that Russia could be kept in the war by sending a fleet into the Baltic. So this option doesn't die with Fisher's resignation, and indeed Fisher is brought back to the war cabinet to discuss it in 1917, and we have the plans and the documents from that. So it was always an option that it never happened, explains some of the way the war unfolds, but that is going to be Corbett's great lesson. We need to think more clearly about how to use our strategic power to achieve greater effect at lower cost going forward. Thank you, I'm aware there's a couple of other questions that have been answered in the answer box. Richard Moore asked Geraint, raised your points about spying moles resistance and COVID action were really interesting. Do you think grey area hybrid warfare is a kind of British invention unless and the Russians are now learning or is that putting it too far? I think that's a big question, but perhaps Geraint would like to comment. That's a really good question, and it's a historically and also currently relevant one as well. And hopefully the link that I put in answer that question to a recent paper in the US Naval War College review gives you a lot more substance to the actual debate. Now, I suppose the short version, just to augment my answer, which hopefully all of you have been able to read, part of the point of course that you hear is perception in the same way that Wild Bill Hickok only ever shot in self-defense. When you resort to these measures, it's always a response to what an adversary is doing. It's never something that you initiate, but of course that's not necessarily how it's seen on the other side. So the point is that it certainly with reference to Afghanistan, the Soviet angle was there is nothing wrong with what we're doing. We're assisting a fraternal ally against counter-revolutionaries, and their argument was that these counter-revolutionaries were in turn backed by hostile foreign powers such as the United States and Pakistan. And in fact, in the run-up to the intervention from the declassified Politburo archives, the Soviets are transfixed by this phantom of American intervention prior to December 1979. And the idea that just because Hafez al-Armin, the Afghan president that they subsequently have killed was educated in the United States, he must be an American agent. And this was something very much the KGB was pushing. So I think that it's a reflection of past practice and it does reflect numerous examples in history. Kanika could probably talk about the fact that the Peloponnesian War starts with a proxy conflict on the island of Kokirah, sorry, in the city state of Kokirah and what's now Kuala Lumpur. So the idea, I think that it's something that, it's not necessarily an invention, something that's always been done. And it's been done in those circumstances, not just often in cases of over-conflicts, but in that hinterland between normal peacetime relations, as we call it, and actual warfare. And in certain cases, as with espionage, this is normal peacetime activity. It's a really good question. And I hope the answers gave you, I'll answer that question, and also the useful use to all of you. That's me now, thank you. Thank you, Gerrit. There's been a couple of questions directed. Kanika, she's busily typing away, and I'm aware we're just about towards the end of our time. So Kanika, if you could answer those questions for us. One, Fati Dogen has asked if we would have Twitter names for the speakers, please. In fact, Fati, if you look on the panel biographies, click on the links to the individual panel members. If they have a Twitter handle, you will find that in their biographies. So those are available if you are interested in following our speakers on Twitter. One other follow-up from this panel and the conference as a whole is that we will have associated blog posts from speakers and other members of the military and political history research theme that will be accessible again through the School of Securities Conference webpages. If you want to follow up some of the issues that have happened, that we have covered in this session, I'm gonna just abuse our timeline for a couple of minutes because our general theme of the conference is order and disorder. Can I just ask our speakers to comment for a minute or so on whether what they have presented suggests that you can restore order after a global crisis, or are you just moving from one state of disorder to another as events unfold? Thank you. I'll start, if you like. The period I'm looking at is one where we have a very long period of absence of what we would now call total war. So from the end of the Napoleonic Conflict in 1914, we have regional conflicts, we have imperial conflicts, but the only total war of the 19th century is the American Civil War, which is somewhat self-contained. After 1914, things don't go back to normal, things are changed fundamentally. And one of the lessons of the First World War has to be that whatever the rights and wrongs of the conflict, whoever started it and whoever finished it, the system that had functioned before is fundamentally broken and it does not return to any kind of balance thereafter. At the end of the First World War, there are disappointed defeated powers, there are disappointed victorious powers like Italy, for example, that becomes quite aggressive. And the ongoing problem of dealing with the communist revolution in Russia means that restoring things to balance is difficult. The Congress of Vienna is a masterpiece in trying to put back together again, Humpty Dumpty who's fallen off the wall. It's not possible, but they do a pretty good job and for the next 40 odd years, the system sort of functions without major great power conflict. So the peacemakers of Versailles don't do anywhere near as good a job as the peacemakers of Vienna. And I think the lesson about the issue of decisive battle is very much focused on the South China Sea. If China and Russia, China and the United States go to war, what kind of naval battles will they fight? And the answer is not very many because neither of them is fundamentally interested in the ocean. The Anglo-German conflict is a continental versus a maritime power. As in Cunic's paper, we're looking at continental versus maritime strategies. The synergy between the two powers facing off in the Pacific is different. And they may or may not operate their navies in aggressive ways, but I think they're much less likely to seek or join decisive battle. Thank you. Thank you, Geraint. Yeah, I mean, in response to that question, I'm trying to keep it brief. I'm quite struck by reading the integrated review and the defence response to it. The integrated review talks about global Britain in a competitive age and defence in a competitive age. And when I looked at the title as I thought, looking at it over certainly over the past century, when have we not been in a competitive age? Yeah, when have we actually been in a period of complete, in terms of where there has not been some form of rivalry strategic competition of some form? And I suppose we've perhaps been sort of transfixed by the image of Union clarity since 1991 with US global dominance. And yes, it has been challenged more recently. You see it by the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians certainly in the Persian Gulf region. But this idea that somehow this is new just seems to me to be completely bizarre. The technological environment has changed. The, we are seeing advances in both military and non-military spheres, but it's an idea that somehow this is unprecedented. It just seems to me to be completely wrong. I mean, we can go back to around about 21 years ago with the Kosovo conflict and the fact that it almost ended while there was a standoff between Russian and NATO forces of Pristina airfield, obviously resolved by James Blunt's guitar playing, but according to some certain versions of events. But the fact of the matter was that that conflict and that intervention ended up as a great power standoff. So I think that there is a temptation to be look at here and now and think that our problems are unique, that they are challenging, that they are uniquely threatening and that we are in trouble. And well, that's always been the case. That in the sense that the conditions of competition between democracies and authoritarian or totalitarian regime, there are repeated echoes of this in the past. I don't, you know, certain aspects of characteristics may have changed, but the nature I do not think has changed at all. That's me, thank you. Thank you. Ignatio and finally Konika, thank you. I'll go first. I think I'm a massive ancient history nerd and my focus is significantly on classical Athens, but what Athens essentially does is they go into democracy and then democracy gets overthrown at the end of Peloponnesian War. And then essentially within about 10, 15 years, they pick it up again and try to just sort of sack a naval empire. So in a way, they haven't really learnt any lessons at all. And at the end, when the democracy really falls, when Macedonians and Alexander the Great comes and destroy the city. And so, you know, I think what you can see is within a hundred years, they've really learnt lesson. And what you can see is perhaps as Great and both Andrew said, it just sort of repeats and you can sort of take these synergies out of certain historical period and apply it to today. And certainly there is an element of these challenges up to democracy and perhaps that's what sort of the patterns that we are seeing. But at the same time, again, I don't think we are ever in order. I think it's the correct political tension maintained between whatever powers and when the balance is collapsed, that's when things go wrong. And I think that's perhaps where we are currently at, but it will pick up again because there'll be the right sort of equilibrium that it would meet. And when it gets a little bit disrupted, it gets disrupted, but we figure out how to get back to normal again. I think that's what the lessons I would pick from the ancient world. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, following Dr. Hughes and Konika argument my position is that the key here is how to manage disorder. We know that we are living in the midst of crisis everywhere. So if we approach this problem from the perspective of, okay, we are trying to navigate in this very tumultuous waters and we have to manage disorder and mitigate crisis, that would be essential. COVID is a very good example for that. Are we really going to keep talking about vaccine nationalism or are we going to try to fix this problem once and for all? And for that, we need to have a very pragmatic and realistic approach in terms of what are we aiming for? Are we trying to mitigate this? Are we willing to assume that we are facing disorder everywhere and we need to manage this? If we have that approach, I think that would be very useful in terms of how to deal with different fronts of battle in terms of the different interests put in this equation. Thank you very much. I think that's a very good point on which to conclude this session, how to manage disorder. I think that's what we should be thinking about. History gives us numerous examples. Strikes me as we think about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Everyone who invades Afghanistan seems to come off worse but they still keep doing it. Perhaps that's one lesson that history might teach us but I expect we might see it yet again. Can I end by thanking all our speakers for getting us off to an excellent start of the conference? The conference carries on over the next three days. There's another session this afternoon and there are various workshops and blogs associated with the conference. I hope you will enjoy your engagement with the other material that we're going to bring you in the school conference this year. Can we finish by thanking our speakers?