 So I'm Peter Bergen and thank you to the brilliant Daniel Rothenberg, Rosa Brooks and Rob Johnson for their discussion of some of the themes that I'm going to discuss with Sir Lawrence Friedman. Sir Lawrence Friedman has been a professor in the war studies department at King's College since 1982. He's really in many ways the dean of the study of war and he has written a number of books including strategy which we're going to discuss now which is by the way is available for sale along with a lot of other books in the sort of book shop we have outside those doors over here. And he is also writing a book which he's completing which is actually called The Future of War so we thought that that would be a useful thing to discuss as well. So you know a basic question is what is strategy and does it change over time? Well so strategy is something that people do and part of the objective of the book was to look at the way that people have conceptualized strategy over time and if you just follow the literature people didn't do strategy before the late 18th century because the word wasn't used they talked about the art of war or something else but clearly they were doing something that we would recognize as strategy and it's essentially how you make your choices about dealing with the problems at hand and trying to create a better situation than you might be expecting just looking at the resources you've got and the resources your opponents have got. So I talk about strategy as the art of creating power which is basically the ability to extract from a situation more than you might reasonably expect but of course it can also be if you get it wrong the art of subtracting power a bad strategy means that you just get into a mess. Well let's consider then what I think was one of the great strategic failures of recent history which was 9-11. I mean Bin Laden had a theory of the case that by attacking us on 9-11 the United States would pull out of the Middle East and all the American backed regimes would then fall. I mean he had a strategy it was just a very bad one he had a tactical success just as Pearl Harbor was for the Japanese but you know it led to their defeat so to what extent I mean people have strategies most of them appear to be pretty bad. Yeah so strategy is very hard and it's often disappointing but you have to do it anyway because you've got to take some decisions and you can't just give up. So what you're trying to do is work out causation you have to have a theory of causation. Bin Laden example you've given Peter and written about so well is a clear one. He thought looking back at Somalia and Beirut if you hit the Americans hard enough they just ran away whereas he didn't quite understand if he hit the Americans bang in the middle of their major cities they may have a slightly different reaction and you thought people might have been able to tell him that so it was a bad strategy but it's strategy isn't a single event it's a process it's a series of adjustments and so on and so he had to work out another strategy after that strategy to that and couldn't find a much better one but others learned from it and developed it so the importance in all of these things is not to think about strategy as a single product but it's a process of constant adaption and evaluation and reconsideration of events because new possibilities open up and even as some others are closed down and I think one of the problems with strategy is you hear so often demands for better strategy we must have great strategy as if there's some sort of magic ingredient that if only you inserted into the body politic wise decisions will be made were only foolish ones made before but it's actually very difficult because there are lots of moving parts lots of different players and if you fix on something say this is our strategy you're going to be disappointed because somebody else A knows that and B has got their own objectives their own interests and they're going to come in and frustrate what you're trying to do so it requires this continual reflection and adaption. You begin your book with a wonderful quote from Mike Tyson who says you know everybody has a plan till they get hit in the mouth. So what did you mean why did you begin the book with that? Well partly because I'm old enough to get away with it. I think I mean I like because it just captured a very base point which is part of what I'm following is that strategy is not a plan involves plans involves planning but it isn't a plan by itself because a plan suggests a sequence of events that is going to reach a defined objective and I want to get people away from that idea and the other obvious quote is the more professional one is Von Malker's no plan survives contact with the enemy it's the same basic point. So first people should accept that whatever they think is going to happen it'll be different and they need to prepare for that. Secondly not to think in terms of a defined end. It's a strategy policy it's a soap opera one thing leads to another you think you've achieved the victory but you've just got to a new stage and then you've got to deal with the new state. So it's really just a reiteration of the point I was making before of the importance of recognizing that once you're engaged in an encounter with other actors you're not in complete control of the situation. One of our fellows at New America Scott Silverstone who's here and teaches at West Point is doing a book about preventative war and sort of the the temptations and obviously in 2003 we had a classic preventative war in Iraq and you've been engaged in the study of that war as an official capacity. So I mean preventative wars do they ever work are they are they are they are they part of a strategic plan that makes sense of a just generally sort of fizzle and fail. Well I mean there's lots of what needs to distinguish between a preemptive war and the preventative war preemptive is you think you're about to be attacked and you do something about it and you can say Israel in 67 was preemptive in that way and if it was it was successful or actually Argentina in in 82 believed it was preempting something the British weren't actually going to do but it and it wasn't successful. So that's preemptive preventive is saying well we think there's going to be a shift in the power structure so unless we act quickly then in a few years time 10 years time we're going to be in trouble and you know one example of that I mean one factor is one of the factors in July 14 the Germans the German view that Russia was going to get stronger and if they didn't move quite quickly it wasn't the only factor obviously but it's one of the factors there. So I think statesmen women have views of changing power balances and that will give some urgency to their moves but the trouble with preventive war is you're turning something that's a possibility for the future into a reality now and if you're not absolutely sure that you are the stronger one at that particular moment then you're going to get into trouble anyway I think it's a sort of thinking you can still see that sort of thinking at quite local levels but for great powers I think it's one hell of a couple and you can you know you just look back at these these we see the books now on the rise of China and how you need to deal with that now you know 30 years ago you have similar books on the rise of Japan and how we did have to deal with it now and you know you're grateful that nobody took much notice of it 30 years ago because it's it's this very sort of crude formula way of looking at the shifts in international balances. We've talked today about drones and bioengineering and other sort of exotic you know new forms of warfare do any of those let's assume that they happen and are important going forward do any of those actually change strategy I mean you meant in your book you talk about I mean maps the invention of useful maps obviously had an impact I mean is it what do you see in the future might actually change the way we think strategically well what what's happening is options are being created that weren't there before presidents can do things that they couldn't have done before and they may seem very tempting things to do even useful things to do drones obviously give a president options to deal directly with a source of threat I think there's so technology I mean technology matters it's silly to say that the war whether you talk about its character or not is not being changed by new technologies I think one of the difficulties we have is to assume that the way that we see these technological possibilities is the way that others see them the obvious example from you know the moment in in Vietnam where the first smart weapons were introduced the possibility of more discriminatory attacks became a way by which we think so up to that point certainly going back back through Korea back into the Second World War we had been responsible for indiscriminatory attacks on big centres of population all of a sudden we couldn't have the excuse that we there's no other way of doing it during the Second World War the US Air Force of the Army Air Force the RAF if they experimented to try to be do the tactics with more precision they just suffered heavy losses so I think little heart but if it in inaccuracy of bomb aim led to it in more immorality of war rain you just attacked large population now we don't have to do that and so over time we actually get offended and quite properly so if large numbers of civilians are killed because it almost seems like a callous act but that doesn't mean to say that other people think the same way about about how they might use this technology if you wanted to use the same technology precise technology you can use it to kill a lot of people you can pick your targets to do that as well so we shouldn't assume that new technologies mandate a certain form of warfare they just increase your options to fight in different ways if you still want to kill large numbers of innocents you can kill large numbers of innocents probably more efficiently than before but we have an option not to do that and I think it's the interaction between the technologies and the strategic culture and the overall political context in which you're operating that changes things it's not technology driving it by itself so in 2003 we overthrew Saddam and then we made them later we overthrew Gaddafi and under a different administration yet not seeming to have learned the kind of lessons how common is that because you thought that you know something that was readily recent would inform the decision that took place in 2011 the understanding that vacuums create opportunities for other groups yes he would I think that I mean I think as explained earlier part of the problem with Libya is and I think you can argue with Syria as well is everybody got terribly excited in 2011 Arab Spring popular movements like we got excited about the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia and so on without thinking through necessarily how this would work out and we attached ourselves to very big political objectives on the assumption that the people would achieve this I the overthrow of Gaddafi and then the overthrow of Assad and then in both cases but very starkly in the case of Libya we found ourselves in the position where the good guys who were going to overthrow the bad guy were about to be overwhelmed in Benghazi so there was a panic because the initial defeat of our foreign policy was going to appear with a massacre of people who we'd encouraged to act without very doing very much to help them so that so I think part of the problem with Libya was it was a conflict developing or a role developing not as a deliberate act of foreign policy but it's an act of panic by and large in Europe rather than in the United States and then you suddenly find well you you know we're just doing that as a humanitarian thing to protect a massacre but you know the war's going on so you know gradually with the help of a UN resolution that the Russians hadn't stopped when they might have done you're able to do more but we were always sort of behind the pace we weren't controlling it and I don't think people had thought through if you're having a big militia-based war we know from the past that these things blur into criminality they blur into warlordism and it's very hard to control but if we were going to do something we would have needed I think to put people on the ground much more you know the sort of tied debate about boots on the ground and so on is right in a very basic sense if if your war is about political control it's in the end about control of territory and if you're not controlling the territory there's a limit to what you can do and you just have to accept that that's a limit to what you can do or you have to put in the far greater effort than at the moment people were and certainly in 2011 people were prepared to do why is there so much so much optimism about war as an instrument of policy when there's so much evidence that it usually doesn't achieve its aims it's a good question I mean war disappoints it's you look back at history and you know it's not the case that war never achieves anything war achieves things by and large defensively that is you know if we look back at the second world war which most people think of as a good war it just was a good war it was because we were we were responding to somebody who believed war could re-change the map and re-change the the whole character social character of Europe and the rest of the world so we fought back and that was a good war to achieve that but in the end and then the end it created other possibilities for a different sort of international order so states exist now because of war that wouldn't otherwise have existed but the fact of war and this goes back to the previous discussion is most of them don't end you know if you look back at the history since 1945 you know take two acts of partition in 1947 in Palestine and in the British Raj my country being responsible they produced a series of wars which are not quite over because they left sufficient contested territory and uncertainty that you could never solve it so people believe and you hear this often enough that enemies can be eliminated and removed but they keep on coming back because you can't remove your enemies and the old days in which sovereigns would go to war because of a particular dispute and have an understanding about how sovereigns dealt with these matters once it was over their past once you had popular wars it was very difficult to bring them to a satisfactory close so the French Revolution changed everything the French Revolution well the French Revolution first encouraged the idea of mass armies led to the mass armies and the Napoleonic Wars I there's a French Revolution that changed a lot arguably it was the one in 1871 because it was then that you have the important moment when having been beaten by the Germans the French don't give up so you've had your battles I'd sit down so but the French don't give up and you have this debate between Von Mulcher and Bismarck about what to do about Paris and Von Mulcher Bismarck's worry is that if he doesn't get this over quickly then the French will bring in allies and it'll start to change and Von Mulcher doesn't think this is how it doesn't want to be given orders by Bismarck apart from anything else this is the moment when the operational art comes in and the idea of this operational level of war at which politicians should stay completely clear of it's the military responsibility anyway Bismarck didn't believe that and he got his way but I think that was the moment when Von Mulcher at least realized the importance of popular will as a real problem for a professional military army and you know one response that which you can see in the in the German General Staff's initial response to colonial wars and then even following through it into the First World War is that civilian populations do are a target or a legitimate target so I think I think that was the those you know just step back a second if you're going to use war as a political instrument you've got to feel that you can use your armed forces decisively and you can contain it socially and both of those conditions which are interdependent have become increasingly qualified over over time. Is there a sort of specifically Western and in fact specifically American form of strategy? Well American strategy was always you know there's these two great figures from the interpreters of Napoleon Klausowitz and Jomini and American strategy was always much more influenced by Jomini than by Klausowitz and Jomini was a great believer in the decisive battle and you know you can trace the influence of Jomini through the elder man and the younger man and you know the idea the idea that you can have a clash of arms which settles the political matter. And this was taught at West Point? It was taught at West Point and I think it's still a very strong influence on American thinking. Is it right? No in context. For all the reasons I'm saying it's very hard these days to have decisive war and I think it's the problem of the idea of the operational level of strategy from which politicians are excluded which goes back to Vietnam and grumbles about micromanagement and so on leads to a belief that there are things that the military do which are quite separate from the things that the politicians do and it means that neither side is pretty well informed enough about what the others are up to and I think that was some of the early discussions this morning. So I mean it's not wholly wrong because if you're a country as powerful as the United States then there are things that you can do that others just can't do and you do have enormous capability. I think one of the things you know it leads to is actually I'm not sure the Americans sorry this sounds terribly patronizing to an American audience. I don't think Americans always appreciate that it's your raw power that makes the difference. You know all this stuff about the Revolution and military affairs and all this clever cunning ways that you're going to use new technology. You know the basic thing the US has got is more firepower than anybody else and that's why you keep on winning is because you know the enemies can't really cope if they want to stand up as a regular force against the United States they can't cope so that's why they go to guerrilla warfare and militias in the end. But this Germany's sort of decisive you can see that in the debate between which Kennedy won at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Curtis LeMay was looking for a sort of first strike against the Soviets right. Well to the influence at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis was still career and the belief and the military irritation at the idea of limited war. So the conclusion that the political military establishment had reached as a result of career was that you had to accept there are certain things you may have to fight but you couldn't go the whole way because it was just too dangerous in the nuclear age which is not an unreasonable conclusion to reach. But the military didn't like it because again limited war went against the ethos. So you remember Kennedy had received during the Laos he was called it Laos because he didn't think the Americans could go to war for a country called Laos. During that crisis he kept on getting proposals that involved a tactical nuclear weapon. So he'd lost confidence and also because of the bad pigs he'd lost confidence in military advice. Actually if you look at what the argument between I mean that they barely met during the Missile Crisis and they had more meeting but if you look at the argument between what Curtis LeMay was proposing and what Kennedy was proposing LeMay wanted preventive war. I mean he just thought this was the opportunity they've laid themselves open let's get them now take your chance deal with the issue whereas Kennedy was much more conscious of the risks of escalation and you know fearful that the wrong moves would lead to some sort of nuclear catastrophe. So it was about it wasn't just a question of the different views of risk it was also a question of political objectives. And there's a final point of course that one of the reasons that LeMay was irritating many people on the hawkish side of the debate then is because what the Air Force was proposing for an airstrike on Cuba was a massive attack lots of sorties and the Dean Atchison's who were prepared to have a go you know we're looking for the quotes and quote surgical strikes so there's also you come back to the ethos of massive force leaving nothing to doubt as being the right way to go about fighting a war as against those who are trying to think about more politically sensitive ways of using your force and achieve your objectives without creating worse problems. So your writing a book on the future of war how do you go about it. What I don't try to do is predict the future of war so it's about the history it's about the way people have thought about the future of war so it starts which I'm sure Rob may know about this but most of you want the famous book called the Battle of Dawking which came out in 1871 so related to these events that I was describing before which in which describe the genre of books on the future of war which is essentially to make a polemical point that if we don't prepare ourselves properly before we know where we are the Germans will be in Dawking and we'll be having where is Dawking near Guilford. You know where Guilford is, it's the last place you'd expect to fight a war. It's not what they do there and so that opened up a genre of literature on the future of war that is essentially designed to act as a warning not as a prediction but act as a warning so that if you don't follow the advice of my book then you're going to get into trouble so and you know more recent things well I mean Pete Singer knows all about this but there's more recent example other example would be General Hackett's book on the Third World War which you know if we if only we increase our defense expenditure to 3% of the NATO norm then this war that's going to come in 1985 will win but if we don't then we'll lose it it's that that finer balance so that a lot of the writing on the future of war is that one of the things that interests me is the interaction between the this sort of literature and reality and one of you know the most famous example is H. G. Wells's book the world set free in which he introduces the idea of atomic bombs you know atomic bombs are called atomic bombs because of that book because Leo Tzilard the scientist in 1933 had that book in mind when he was reading about the scientist Rutherford's dismissal of the idea that there could be a chain reaction that would lead to so much energy release and you know the links between Wells and the scientists and Szilard and so on are quite close so that's the start but just to sort of where it goes on to I guess it's also a challenge I mean you had Stephen Pinkie here last year it's a challenge to Pinkie's view as well I I don't believe there's a science at work here I think that the is a challenge to the view that if you look at the numbers carefully enough and you're really good at statistics you can work all this out because you can't what you need to do is to understand war as part of a historical stream put it to keep it in context and the fact that you've now got statistical techniques that allow you to compare very different episodes in military conflict between separated in time and space it doesn't really help you very much you need to look at the history so it all goes back to honor interest and fear facilities on what the city is a good a guy to this is as many others and we have time for some questions but not that much time so keep it brief we'll start with Harlan Ullman very good to see you and listen to your elegant appraisal of history I'd like you to comment about transformation of strategy in this sense I've argued for a long time during the 20th century we were spoiled with kind of a binary system of strategy World War One Central Powers versus the Allies World War Two Cold War and now we're in a much more complex environment take for example Syria you've got God knows how many participants all with virginly a divergent interest in views so how do you use strategy and apply it in a sensible way to a situation such as Syria or is this just a sound bite that is not going to lead to any kind of a satisfactory solution I don't think there's a there's certainly no satisfactory solution to a problem like Syria if something's got to that state you know the idea that you can suddenly rewind and go back to 2011 when there's so much so many weapons around so many factions created so much bitterness so much brutality I mean that's that country is now scarred so if you're trying to which is no reason to say that we don't try to do what you can be the first step is to be realistic about what's happened to Syria the second step is this basic problem in a conflict like Syria that once you've decided on your enemy which we have by by and large then you've got to realize that other foreign policy objectives may go by the wayside in trying to deal with that you can't achieve all of your foreign policy objectives at once in the Middle East everything you go in one direction makes it harder in another direction so you know and if you try to balance it all then you may achieve nothing so it you know these are real quantities and the why in the end strategy is an executive function somebody's just got to make a decision and say this is what we do but you've got to recognize there's going to be the result is not going to be very good I mean in situations where my enemies enemies also my enemy you know you can't you can't work your way through everything you know look at the relationship now between the Turks and the Kurds and ISIS and so on and Russia how where do we stand on all of that what's our view I mean the end Turks of Turkey's our ally but it's not a simple situation in which there's an obvious thing to do and it's what you know unless you have got a grip on these conflicts at a very early stage which is a difficult and bold thing to have done but unless you do that then you've got to accept you're moving around in a very fluid and difficult situation channel then here you Richard Ponzi with the Stimson Center Professor Friedman you brought up the end of World War 2 the emergence of a new international order appreciate your thoughts on the emergence of the future of war the topic of today's discussion as it relates to the future of the global collective security system set up in 1945 in particular by our two countries in the Atlantic Charter does it need to be radically overhauled given the types of conflicts today in particular the changing nature as it relates to the shift from interstate to civil war well I'm the Atlantic Alliance NATO is one of the great achievements of the post-war statesmen they were all men and it's played a vital role NATO is essential the American Alliance system is the most important thing the United States does and it's one reason why we don't talk so much about interstate war because it resolves a lot of the basic issues of conflict what what are the situations in which you see war become more likely it's often when alliance relationships are in flux when alliances have been formed and reformed and so on that's what was happening before the first world war so the great thing about NATO particularly as it exists and it takes certain things out of the equation the reason why we're not into Cold War 2 is because all the allies that Russia had when it was the Soviet Union and our members of NATO you know they haven't got any allies China hasn't got any allies not to speak of so and the United States does but maintaining that alliance network is one of the reasons for international stability so if you're worrying about the future of war and you're worrying about nuclear proliferation and other things actually what you're doing a lot of the time is worrying about the ability and the readiness of the United States to sustain its international networks now this isn't particularly a system that's necessarily going to be great at dealing with civil wars and the other sorts of conflict I think you need different sorts of international collective security arrangements to do that and I think one of the one of the problems we've got at the moment as partly as a result of what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan is that sort of appetite that appeared to be developing in the first decade of this century to engage humanitarian interventions right to protect I mean that has been knocked out of us because it just seemed to lead to grief no thanks but actually some of it was quite successful and I think part of the challenge I think for the coming decade is whether we can work out how we engage in a number of not all but a number of these sort of interstate conflict you come back to the point that the basic you know the best guide to future war is past war and the best way to get out of the cycle conflict trap people have called the past war is to is an external intervention so I think that's that's a challenge and you know the feeling that we just didn't do it very well and we didn't do it very well in the last decade means it's a greater challenge than it seemed it would be well thanks a lot of freedom for a really brilliant presentation discussion thank you sir