 Welcome, everyone, to what will be one of, I hope, many future conflict records unit events, workshops, conferences, seminars, seminar series. And we've already had quite a program since its foundation. And I'll ask Mike to comment on that in a moment. I'm Professor Joe Mojolov, the Department of War Studies, Professor of International History. And I'm also a co-director of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the History of War, which is where the conflict records unit is housed. And I would just say, of course, that it's extremely appropriate that the conflict records unit sits within the Sir Michael Howard Center. Sir Michael Howard, for those of you who are unaware, was a historian of war who founded the Department of War Studies back in the early 1960s at King's College London. He had been a guards officer in the Second World War and fought up the Italian Peninsula in the Second World War. So it had been both experienced war, written about war, and I think documented war. So an entirely appropriate moment to reflect on what documenting war means at precise this moment, and particularly within the Department of War Studies. First of all, before we kick off with Mike, who'll give a bit of an intellectual framework for the day, what I would wanna do is I wanna thank, Ellie has dropped out, but Ellie Begnell is the person who has been behind all of the fundamental arrangements. She is part of our fantastic team in the Department of War Studies that makes events happen, our events team. And so we have her to thank, I'd like to thank Andrew Smoller, who's I think here, yes, there he is, who I think all the participants will know from the various email shots and keeping things organized. And ultimately, I would like to thank Dr. Mike Innes, who frightened the ideas and initiated both the conflict records unit and this conference. So just a couple of minor housekeeping issues. One, I just wanna let everybody know that we will be recording and I'll keep the recording running the whole time. In breaks, we won't shut down the webinar because first of all, I don't, not sure if I could be able to necessarily initiate it again. So let's not do that. We'll keep the webinar running. I'll just put up the program on the screen that way you'll know that we are just in a break and the panels will resume shortly. For participants on the webinar, unless your panel is running, can you please keep your mics muted and your cameras off so that those sitting in the participants or the audience gallery will know who's panelist and who isn't. For participants, so the people who are participating in the webinar, if you have questions during the Q and A sessions of the panels, please do switch off, switch your mics on and your cameras on and join us that way. It's kind of nice to have a sense of a discussion across panels. Now, for those of you who have joined us in the audience room, the participants room, the Q and A function is working and we will be keeping an eye on that, obviously, particularly during the Q and A sessions. So please, at any time, because it's an open function, just feel free to pop your questions in there. And if you have any messages or things you want to alert us to, please feel free to use the Q and A function for that. And I think that is everything, Mike. So over to you. Yeah, thanks, Joe. I mean, I'm blushing a little bit for that generous introduction. Maybe if we could just add a housekeeping point, the obvious one being about connectivity. I'm dialing in from Baghdad. Others will be dialing in from all sorts of interesting locations. If you get bumped, if your connectivity breaks, especially when you're speaking, if you're speaking, if you're in the middle of your own paper and things break, we'll pause, we'll wait for you. Just try to log back in. We'll wait a few minutes, a respectful amount of time. And if it looks like it's unrecoverable, then we'll try to revisit that afterwards and carry on with the conference. I've already had one connectivity break this morning. Hopefully it should be pretty stable and fingers crossed it's stable over the next hour and a half or hour and a quarter while I'm discussing for the first panel. Right, so I'm Mike Guinness. I'm a visiting senior research fellow in the Department of War Studies wearing my academic hat. In my non-academic professional hat, I am a what's broadly and vaguely framed as a UN official. I work with the UN investigative team for accountability of Daesh in Iraq. It is essentially a fact-finding and investigative mission meant to collect and preserve evidence of Daesh commission of core international crimes by which we mean of course war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and crimes that constitute those larger crimes. I'm speaking on a personal basis, but of course a lot of what I do on the research side, on the academic side is driven by quite a bit of practice experience in the Balkans, Afghanistan and now Iraq and another place as well. I think a lot of that went into setting up the conflict records units. So quite a few of you will already be familiar with the background. The conflict records unit was set up in late 2020 after discussions between myself and Joe and this real interest as historians in how war is documented, how we use primary sources, the methods we use and as kind of maybe a parallel to other high profile focuses on different kinds of public history, I suppose, or applied history where there's a lot of work on bringing in a more historically informed approach to current conflicts and policy making and what have you. And in our view, all of that tended to neglect the practical aspect to this, the methods, these side of things, how we go about collecting evidence and preserving evidence, what evidence even means. It can mean quite a few different things depending on where you're coming from, what discipline you're coming from what domain or what sort of practice you're involved with. So the idea is to set this up in a very multidisciplinary sort of way, but housed within the Sir Michael Howard Center precisely because we're coming at this initially as historians and that's our start point but it's not our end point. Joe mentioned that we've already had quite a, we ran a speaker series over the last year and our approach to this was pretty exploratory. We didn't come at it with a narrowly defined agenda or with any particular sorts of questions. I have a few questions of my own that I tend to bring into these, but otherwise we took a very exploratory sort of approach to this thing that is various to refer to as conflict records or conflict archives or captured enemy documents or indeed the frame of this conference or today's events which is documenting more. And we understand those terms as broadly as you'd like them to be understood just so that we can take an initial broad brush to all of this and then narrow things down as we go along. So very exploratory, very wide coverage, a lot of really interesting topics and speakers including a couple who are here today elaborating on what they've already spoken about and contributing to the larger conversation. So today's event really serves as both kind of a capstone to the last year's events but also as a prod for future research and in the call for papers, we mentioned that we're very interested in putting together an edited collection that would have as its start point some of what gets presented today but building out from there as well. So we're very interested in trying to maybe set the agenda or actually try to define what the agenda is and take it from there. So today, content of this series over 2021, 2022 actually started in May of 2021 and leading up to today, we haven't yet defined what we'll do next year or the year after but there will be more to follow. And hopefully this can bring in a lot of what was covered over the last year, add yet more to it and push things forward. So it's feeling quite ambitious and optimistic about that and really looking forward to it. Today's paper, the panels and the paper topics really reflect, so I can do this, this broad interest, right? This very exploratory approach. So we're covering a lot of different regions. We've allowed for quite a few disciplines and historical periods indeed. While they're driven by some very contemporary issues, anybody looking at any given bit of political violence or conflict now can't help but be struck by how easy it is to record and to document. And indeed formal and organized efforts to document conflicts for all sorts of purposes, whether it's purely and altruistically historical purposes or driven by something more specific like capturing in real time evidence of core international crimes or what have you. It's a very contemporary set of issues but there's some pretty, I think some pretty, what I think of as some fairly fundamental sort of questions that can help shape things. And we've tried to organize the panels today's panels around that. Panel one is really looking at some of the origins of those contemporary practices and indeed what they can tell us about current priorities and more, I suppose, forecasting or prospective kind of practices where documentation comes into play. Panel two looks at, it takes a more explicit look at history and the courts and particularly international law and as this relates to use of different kinds of evidence and use of that evidence in particular kinds of cases. This ties very closely to a question that's been close to my heart for the last couple of years and that is this idea that there's a forensic aesthetic or an investigative aesthetic that's been in play for some time. Anybody who's read Ale Weitzman's work on this understands it or pays attention to things like forensic architecture or indeed the other like entities out there that are doing research. But the forensic standard seems to be kind of a default or a growing, there's a growing sense that a forensic standard should be a default if for anybody doing research in difficult areas because of the potential implications of what is being researched for human rights or crimes or genocide prosecutions. So is that a default that's fair? What are the kind of issues that come up when that becomes a default for people who are otherwise not meant to be or not intend to instigate or research issues as criminal acts per se? And panel three and four look at different cases and tell us about, which can tell us about problems of access and evidence. There are other kinds of fundamental issues that they can tell us about as well, but the way we framed it here in part because of the way you framed your own data for some kinds of research that you're doing as panelists, what can that tell us about problems of access? Which is something that is always a problem for I suppose researchers who may not have privilege to access to more difficult operating environments. Academics in particular have very strict codes of ethics and ethics boards and reviews that they have to pass through to be able to do research and access cannot be treated as a given. Whereas others will by virtue of their remits be quite embedded in those difficult to operate environments. So problems of access are fairly key and types of evidence and how evidence is handled and preserved and stored and used. Those are all things that come up and they come up increasingly and prominently in relation to more contemporary conflicts. But going back to panel one and panel two, there's quite a bit that can be learned for how this has been done in the past. And seeing actually some of the practices are no different but there are differences of technology and access and other issues that do come into play. So seeing how these things play out over the long term is especially appropriate to the conflict records unit and to something that's done within the context of the Sir Michael Howard Center. I think that's all I wanna say in terms of setting the stage or setting the frame for today. And I think with that, we're right on time actually to go right into the first panel. And so that's what I'll do. I'll just go through introductions first. I'll set a couple of broad frames and then I'll open the space for the three panelists to present their papers and we'll go into Q&A after that. I would just ask you to again, just to remind you for any questions, post your questions into the Q&A function and those will be brought into the discussion. We're probably looking at 15 minutes per paper, more or less. But what we wanna do is over this hour and a quarter is have about 45 minutes for speaking about half an hour for Q&A. We can play with that time a little bit but that's what we're looking at from now until 1045 UK. So with that going straight into the introductions, I've already introduced myself. I have three panelists on this first panel which is on what's been, what I've framed broadly as the Anglo-American experience past, present, and future. Panelists are Jeff Michaels who is a senior fellow in the Institute of International Studies and a fellow, I think Jeff's still a fellow with this department. Timothy Heck, US Marine Corps Reserve. And Matthew Ford who's a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex and also has a long time connection to the worst studies department. I don't know if it's a current one as well as well as many other places including formerly West Point and a few other places. I think, I hope I've captured that accurately. Jeff, Jeff and Matthew, I know you both quite well. So I know I have Timothy. I've presented what I have of your bio. Each of you, if you want to present a little bit more about yourselves when it's time to present your paper, please feel free to do so. In terms of this panel, I just wanna set sort of a broad frame and then a slightly broader frame and then I'll stop talking and just to discuss it, I'm not a presenter. So I guess in terms of what we wanna achieve or things that we wanna look at with this first panel is longer term histories of two things. And this is really my interest in this longer term history and understanding the origins of contemporary practices. Goes to two things, right? One is document exploitation or more recently document and media exploitation, docX and domex respectively as part of a Western sort of intelligence practice. And the other is post-war and post-genocide efforts to document over international crimes. Both of these have long histories. Both of them sort of intersect and have evolved in separate and distinct ways. And so my own interest is in how these have evolved over time and I think it'll be elements of these you'll see in some of the presentations this morning. The broader frame for this, I think is how do organizations learn? How do they produce knowledge? Organizations in particular that are by design meant to be operating in a war context. And I think Timothy's paper will speak to this quite explicitly. So the longer term histories, that's one aspect of this. How do organizations learn and produce knowledge more generally? And another question is what about the tech, right? We can't talk about this sort of issue especially over the last, probably 20, 30 years now without talking about advances in technology and information technology what that means for our ability, our capacity to handle large volumes of data or high volumes of information. And this is something that I always find striking because while this is all real we're all equipped with mobile phones we're all equipped with all sorts of technology we're operating virtually with equipment that allows us to do all this. But there are still counter examples and known work. There's not a lot I can say about it but what I can say is that the premise that information is automatically electronic and AI is the solution that tends to be kind of the one of the headline sort of frames for this sort of thing always runs I guess, false short of reality in the places where I work where the large volumes of information you're dealing with tend to be with analog media in my current workmate a head of unit unit that's responsible for it's referred to colloquially within the mission as the digitization project and it's really about converting millions and millions I mean we've estimated 20 to 25 million pages of paper documents as well as physical artifacts and other kinds of material into digitally usable surrogates, right? And if you don't do that it doesn't matter how much AI you have you can't use it I mean you have to make you have to convert media types that itself is complicated by things like some of the software some of the technologies that do enable this they only really work well in a Western context they don't work well with non-English language media or non-Western language media they really don't work with Arabic in particular in this context and they don't work well with handwritten documents so things like optical character recognition fall short and that's not even AI that's basic sort of stuff so what about the tech? What about the media? What about the kinds of media that the information is stored on or is held in? What are the sort of countervailing tendencies that we see because of this or in sort of the orbit of these kinds of issues? And the last point I'll put out there just to bring Matthew's work more closely into the frame is what does this mean of anything for the future? Collecting evidence and producing knowledge involves looking back at the past it's about helping make decisions about the now and informs how we prepare for the future, right? And so I think there's some interesting constellation of subject matter and implications between Jeff Michaels, Timothy Eck and Matthew Ford this morning as a panel in its own right but as a way of setting up the day as well as we get into other panels later we'll see some of those issues recurring I hope anyways so that's it for me I'll stop now and Q I think we'll go in the order that the, if you don't mind go in the order listed in the agenda and if Jeff if you want to step up the mic is yours and then we'll go to Tim and then to Matthew. And so I'm not sure can you see my screen at the moment? I can, yes. Okay, let me just sit there. Right. The screen's on. Screen's on, excellent. So, well first off, thank you, Mike for the kind invitation to present my research at this conference. My presentation somewhat unusual in the sense that I'm not talking about documenting war per se but much of what I will be discussing I think still relates very closely to wartime acquisition and exploitation of documents indeed the system for procuring publications by U.S. intelligence agencies during the Cold War and specifically Chinese publications was very much an outgrowth of the system devised by the U.S. government during the Second World War. Also, although as I'll briefly mention it goes back much earlier. So what I hope to do with my presentation is address a number of themes that I think overlap with documenting war including government strategies for acquiring documentary sources in the first place. How do you actually get documents? How do you obtain these from a state that doesn't want to give them away where there's no official diplomatic representation where there is no access as Mike just mentioned? I'll address some of the practical problems with translating material. Again, as Michael just mentioned especially when it's received in bulk and then organizing it cataloging it, et cetera which are problems that exist in war or no war. I'll talk about the value of open sources and here I'm specifically referring to newspapers, magazines, journals and books both for intelligence analysis but just as importantly for developing an expert community. When it comes to U.S. analysis of China there was very much an intelligence academic nexus. Notably the systematic study of contemporary China was not a priority for American universities prior to the Cold War and it basically had to be created more or less from scratch. And in the absence of access to contemporary documents coming out of China you simply could not create any meaningful research on this topic and in that sense the U.S. intelligence community plays a vital role in developing the academic field. And sort of more generally I think all too often in academia we're not as reflective as we probably should be about how much our research is dependent on the databases, the archives and the libraries we have access to. In that sense our worldviews what it is we research what we think we know about subject X, Y or Z is fundamentally shaped by our access to sources. It's a reality that I've been painfully reminded of working at a university here in Barcelona where the library's collections on the subjects that I work on are quite limited. We're not from my remote access to the Balian system in Oxford or having access to Amazon. Quite frankly I'd be completely screwed and would have to find myself a new profession. So let me begin by making a couple of background points. The first point is that the acquisition of open sources from an American perspective at least goes right back to the beginning back to the War of Independence. Despite the emphasis within intelligent studies much less the work of more sensationalist authors Hollywood script writers and so forth which tend to focus on spies doing sort of hardcore spying. The fact of the matter is at least for George Washington newspapers were a major source of intelligence but the thing about this which I don't think is properly appreciated and also relates directly to the procurement of Chinese publications is that overt sources should not be equated with overt procurement. In this 1780 engraving by the French artist Jean-Paptiste LePont you see a close-up of Washington and you can see various British proclamations et cetera but how does Washington actually get these to his headquarters out in the field presumably in New Jersey at this time along with newspapers as well as whatever other intelligence he receives. Well I mean it basically it's smuggled across British lines an early example of a clandestine operation to acquire newspapers and other documents. The same thing was done incidentally by both sides during the American Civil War. But prior to World War II there wasn't any large scale U.S. operation at least mounted on a global scale to collect documents about a foreign adversary. And here I'm not merely talking about a dedicated intelligence organization like OSS. What emerges in World War II is an intelligence-led coordinated program across the U.S. government which was designed to collect foreign documents primarily dealing with the access countries especially Germany. But in practice what did this amount to? It amounted to setting up a system in all neutral countries Switzerland, Sweden, Turkey, et cetera to gather as many newspapers, magazines, books and so forth from inside Germany and the occupied countries. And they'd be microfilmed at least mostly microfilmed and sent back to the U.S. where analysts could exploit them for intelligence whether it was political intelligence, military, economic, scientific and so on and also exploited for their propaganda value. This system was coordinated by the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications or IDC which was run by a librarian working for the OSS. And if you wanna learn more about this I can highly recommend this book by Kathy Pice which only came out about a year or so ago. And basically what happens is that this model of collecting open sources is utilized during the Cold War. There's a similar committee to the IDC although it's sort of named different things at different times. And this committee deals with the direction and coordination of the acquisition and exploitation of foreign publications across the U.S. government. There are a number of important actors within the government I'd like to single out. Probably the most important was the U.S. State Department and its system of publications procurement officers who were stationed around the world and whose job it was to buy documents and have them shipped to the United States. And these were State Department officers rather so although these were State Department officers their purchases were reimbursed by the CIA and they were often being directed by the agency in terms of what sort of books and so forth to look out for and buy. In the Soviet Union, for instance there were usually three publications procurement officers at any one time. Literally went into the bookstores in Moscow, Leningrad and across the country. Went to newspaper and magazine kiosks and bought up everything that was related to topics of interest in the intelligence community. But it wasn't just Soviet material inside the Soviet Union it was also Soviet materials outside the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe or further afield. And I should say it was also Chinese material inside the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Actually one of the key problems the U.S. had with collecting Chinese materials unlike in the Soviet Union was that without an embassy in China it was unable to go around China collecting documents. So it had to find other ways. And this was a key reason why the procurement officer in Hong Kong become such an important figure and to a much lesser extent the procurement officer in Tokyo. Of course there were also in terms of other actors the military attaché system and military intelligence units stations around the world collecting newspapers. For instance, when we think about Soviet military publications, newspapers like Krasnaya Zvezda, Red Star being studied by analysts back in Washington you only get to Washington because some attaché in Moscow goes out to the kiosk every day, buys lots of copies and then they're shipped in the diplomatic pouch along with copies of Izvestia, Pravda and so on for analysis the next day back in Washington. Likewise, for instance, the service libraries the army library for example play important roles. This aspect of intelligence collection and analysis as I mentioned has basically received next to no attention. The only instance in a feature film that I've been able to find where it is referred to was from this 1973 film The Serpent also known as Night Flight from Moscow where they briefly discuss what goes on at CIA headquarters and allocate an amazing 22 seconds the collection and analysis of communist publications. The CIA had its foreign documents division which was responsible for collecting and exploiting documents although I think the more important organization in terms of direction and coordination was actually the CIA library. This is actually the old CIA headquarters here before they moved to Langley as you can see here what they referred to the CIA library's own in-house history. It says that it was in December of 1950 that the CIA library was given responsibility for publications procurement that they would use the commercial book trade US government facilities and covert means in special cases. You'll never see the Library of Congress listed as part of the intelligence community but nevertheless it played a very important intelligence role. I was single at the Air Information Division of the Library of Congress in terms of exploitation of foreign documents as you can see here it says you know basically there are only two large groups in US government engaged in the exploitation of foreign language publications one is the Foreign Documents Division of CIA and the other is the Air Information Division of the Library of Congress. The division was mainly concerned with Soviet and Eastern European documents and didn't do too much with Chinese documents although they did do some as you can see from here from this example a survey of scientific and technical monographs published in China. Two things I think that are interesting about the Library of Congress the first is that prior to the Cold War their interest in Chinese books was mainly centered on ancient texts after 1949 however the emphasis switches to contemporary China and their collections expand considerably and they're given a lot of funding for this actually this picture is a bit deceptive it's not the Library of Congress it's actually the Hoover Institution where they're taking out and cataloging lots of Chinese books that they just received around I think around 1949-1950. The second thing is that the Library of Congress becomes the repository for most of the Chinese materials gathered by other agencies and there are two reasons for this the obvious one is simply a matter of storage the more important one though is that what you see in relation to broader US efforts to understand China is this recognition that what the US lacks is not simply analysts working for the intelligence agencies but they're lacking national expertise on contemporary China more generally and that such expertise cannot be developed without documentary sources especially if you want to build a field of contemporary China studies thus the people needed to study China to analyze it or unable to do so without a steady source of documents to work with. One statistic I found quite interesting was that by 1959 the Chinese collection at the Library of Congress had between about 30 to 35,000 books and pamphlets from communist China but there were so many that nearly half of them were still on catalog there was a two-year backlog although we often focus a lot on analysis the basic problem of transporting cataloging and translating massive amounts of material is very large infrastructure it's something you know all the stuff that goes on in the background is something that I think we still know very little about here for instance you get a sense of the challenge this figure I find quite unbelievable and perhaps it's just an error but one full page of a Chinese newspaper to be fully exploited would require two weeks for one analyst with a problem being that the CIA was receiving 30 Chinese newspapers a day and 50 periodicals per month and just to give you a sense of the size and the scope of the China operation alone and to emphasize this was much smaller than the acquisition of Soviet documents as you can see here in 1959 68 newspaper titles were received as well as 390 journal titles this declines the following year probably due to the publication's export ban during that period that the Chinese government imposed I'd also direct your attention to the final line which is that to receive the journals in Washington there's a time lag of between three to four weeks and three to four months anyway that's the period it takes for these materials to be shipped and exploited back to Washington but before they even reached Washington many of the newspapers which were acquired in Hong Kong or exploited locally in Hong Kong at the Consulate General the Hong Kong effort began in 1950 when they began putting out a publication called which became the standard source of reference for the government and in the academic community as you can see here this last line that I've highlighted in red referring to a number of the publications coming out of Hong Kong where one sort of China Watcher says that these five publications were our Holy Scriptures eagerly perused by China Watchers everywhere in English speaking the world producing this was the responsibility of the Hong Kong Press Monitoring Unit which had about 10 translators and 20 typists and they would churn out about 60 to 70 pages of single spaced sheets of paper every day they also put out a number of other publications dealing with more in-depth research on certain topics as well as a similar survey of Chinese magazines but Hong Kong at this time really is the principal hub for the procurement of Chinese publications and the analysis of the Chinese press and this continues even after the US sets up a liaison office in Beijing in 1973 which is so small initially that it simply doesn't have the people to go out and buy newspapers and ship them back it's only in 1979 when US finally sets up an embassy in Beijing that Hong Kong begins to lose its important role as the Center for China Watching so in my remaining time and I only have a couple minutes left I think I'll just briefly discuss three issues before concluding the first is how did the US officials in Hong Kong get documents out of China basically the short answer is mainly through smuggling officials had connections with all sorts of book dealers and news agents in Hong Kong who had contacts on the mainland that were able to supply them with newspapers books etc for a price to a lesser extent the US tapped into other sources such as in Japan you can see here this is a report from 1951 referencing a bookstore in Tokyo which has very close connections with the communist Chinese incidentally this bookstore which existed in China up until the end of the Second World War they moved back to Tokyo I think it only recently reopened in China itself and in addition to going through various dealers the US also had people to go to locations in Hong Kong that were frequented by refugees and other travelers to the mainland trying to find any documents they were carrying with them perhaps offering to buy them looking for discarded newspapers and so on one US official stated that newspapers especially provincial newspapers would often be wrapped around fish among the most useful newspapers were the People's Daily and the Communist Party Journal Red Flag during the Cultural Revolution it was a great effort placed on Red Guard publications including wall posters as one official put it wall posters and Red Guard newspapers became the most sought after sources of information they were in great demand our embassy friends in Peking obliged ripping them from the walls shards of concrete and all and stuffing them in the diplomatic pouch scholars in the field of contemporary China studies credited this procurement effort as essential to the development of the academic field and in addition to the Hong Kong effort as I said US was collecting documents from elsewhere both in the Communist block and further a field for instance I saw one reference to US officials finding Chinese scientific publications in the National Library of Finland that did maintain some library exchange agreements with other countries so in terms of exploitation there was the intelligence community on the one hand and academia on the other with regards to the latter materials were often made available at least initially to the Library of Congress and then to the Hoover Institution and leading universities with China programs such as Harvard and Columbia for the intelligence community it was mainly a matter of utilizing and adapting the techniques of propaganda analysis they used to study Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as well as criminology basically to gain as much political intelligence as possible from these documents as one official stated what we were doing was pouring over text looking at the language looking at the adjectives the adverbs with the knowledge that what was coming out of the official press was supposed to be guidance for the countries throughout the country you got the big picture most of the time didn't get the details I should also emphasize there was a good deal of economic intelligence biographical intelligence scientific intelligence and so on to be obtained from these documents one amusing anecdote I came across was of a US official who was it who was asked to translate a book on ornithology wasn't this book that you see here in the picture that was the only book that I could actually the only sort of publication that I could find referring to Chinese books this is part of a translation program funded by the CIA and when the official asked why the CIA were interested in the birds of China as you can see here he was told that it was one of the things they were using to monitor Chinese nuclear testing so to conclude in terms of the overall value of this effort to the to the intelligence community at least there's no doubt that the open sources obtained through this procurement system was responsible for the vast majority of intelligence produced on China one senior official referred to the Chinese mainland press as quote our key source another official noted that although clandestine sources and methods existed quote the yield was limited another senior intelligence official said that the CIA had no good sources of information and to the extent that there were differences among the various analysts analytical products of the different US intelligence agencies there were essentially differences over interpretation of the same people's daily editorial and finally sort of one one one one other official said that although the national security agency was monitoring Chinese communications and that this intelligence was quote somewhat helpful that they actually found open sources to be the most valuable source I should also point out that another crucial open source for the Chinese intelligence community I should also point out that another crucial open source for radio broadcasts which were monitored by FIBIS the form broadcast information service but this was a separate operation from the publications procurement where I think all this leads and this is my final point is that we still have a long way to go in terms of appreciating the value of basic sources of information and especially in the field of intelligence studies there is a need to study the infrastructure behind it in that sense if we really want a better appreciation of what constitutes intelligence we need to switch our focus from the sensational to the mundane and I would also like to say that it was precisely the existence of this infrastructure that made US intelligence at least infrastructure on this scale this global network that made US intelligence rather unique and I'll stop there so thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to your questions. Thanks very much Jeff that I am familiar with a lot of what you you just presented but not all of it it was fascinating I'll just reiterate for any participants who joined since we started I see I see a hand raised thanks for any questions we're just going to proceed through the three papers and then open it up to Q&A if you have questions please put them into the Q&A if you are moderated and presented to the presenters for discussion after that we already have one really interesting question I'm sure to have some more so just use that Q&A function for any questions you have for the panelists and those will come up once we're through the three papers Tim you are up Good morning thank you give me a second let me share my screen and goodness not what I wanted to do I've got the zoom window thing down here at the bottom that's presenting me from seeing what I want to see so give me one second there we go alright can you see that yes alright so I'm going to show you that and pull up my paper alright I am so sorry about this it is five o'clock in the morning I'm not fully awake yet so good morning my name is Tim Heck I'm a joint historian with Marine Corps History Division and that is my reserve obligation and my reserve duty so first I want to lead with a disclaimer that says I am presenting absolutely unofficially here the views expressed here do not reflect the official position of the United States Marine Corps Marine Corps History Division of the United States government they're solely those of the author and that is me in July 2019 General David H. Berger released the command on planning guides which outlined an intent to execute significant changes for the US Marine Corps his first priority was a force transformation ultimately codified as force design 2030 the changes he proposed were near seismic in nature explicitly couched in terms of the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s force design 2030 seeks to adapt the force to the counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan tasked with collecting the history of that change Marine Corps History Division is actively collecting primary source material to develop a fuller picture of the changes and efforts underway this paper breaks down the elements of force design 2030 the role and organization of Marine Corps History Division and the impact of the past the past three years have had on the Marine Corps in collecting historical material shortly after starting shortly after the attacks of September 11 2001 the US Marine Corps began a period of non-stop combat operations in Afghanistan Iraq that only ended with the withdrawal from Hamid Karzai International Airport in August of 2021 and indeed there are still Marines in Iraq currently indeed for the last few years of America's involvement in Afghanistan there were troops that were posted there that were born after the events of 9-11 as such at least a generation of Marine Corps leadership knew nothing but consistent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan relatively wide open budgets and counterinsurgency warfare central to the pre 9-11 Marine Corps and still operationally and foundationally relevant today is the Marine Expeditionary Unit the Marine Corps has also referred to as MUSE the Marine Corps has 7 MUSE the 11th 13th 15th 22nd 24th 26th and 31st why we don't know the 1 through 7 I don't know these MUSE exists are in existence and they rotate on Navy ships throughout the world conducting a variety of missions during their 6 months at sea they're part of the Marine Air Ground Task Force their America's projected response force 2 MUSE for example linked up off the coast of Pakistan and started American conventional operations against the Taliban in late 2001 the MUSE however had shifted focus so that by 2006 it was not uncommon for MUSE to never see a ship on their deployment instead had directly to Iraq or Afghanistan to own battle space these dirt MUSE were symptomatic of the Marine Corps at the time the nation needed boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan and turned to its Marine Corps to execute these mission missions the winding down of combat operations in the late 20 teen saw a shift in the role of the Marine Corps it was a period of a variety of visions of what the Marine Corps should was or should be Leo Spader in his fantastic piece Sir Who Am I an open letter to the to the incoming command on the Marine Corps and war on the rocks remarked on the ambiguity present in the Marine Corps planning and directional circles he wrote quote at headquarters Marine Corps I have heard and read a dizzying array of what we are doing pursuing and becoming not much of it is coherent general purpose force expeditionary advanced base operations force based against a specific threat no pacing threat applicable to all combatant commands urban and mega cities jungle sea control forcible entry operations amphibious expeditionary naval crisis responders contact force blunt force surge force heavy light etc I could go on but it's starting to feel absurd unsurprisingly Spader received a variety of feedback on his article in places like war on the rocks the modern war institute the Marine Corps Gazette and others when general Berger became commandant he saw the need for change no longer was the Marine Corps going to be a second land army fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan instead it was going to return to its maritime roots the threat to the United States was no longer predominantly violent extremist organizations or surgeons in the dusty cities of Iraq or mountainous valleys of Afghanistan instead the Marine Corps needed to pivot itself to address great power competition and peer or near peer threats after two decades of total domination of the skies and the electromagnetic spectrum the Marine Corps identified pacing threats in China and Russia with additional threats coming from North Korea and Iran general Berger discussed force design 2030 in a simple document released in March 2020 document that's only 15 pages in length the follow on to his planning guidance issued in 2019 he stated quote such a profound shift in missions from inland to littoral and from non-state actor to peer competitor necessarily require substantial adjustments in how we organize train and equip our core or return to our historic role in the the maritime littoral will also demand greater integration with the Navy and a reaffirmation of that strategic partnership as a consequence we must transform our traditional models for organizing training and equipping the force to meet newly desired to meet new desired ends and do so in full partnership with the Navy the organization of the Marine Corps he stated had basically not changed since the 1950s and it was time to see that fixed general Berger based his analysis and plan in a variety of foundational documents for the national for national security including the 2018 version of the national defense strategy the intellectual heritage Berger remarked in his May 2022 update to force design 2030 goes back further to experiments in the 1990s and concepts for distributed operations and maneuver warfare released in the early 2000s three lines of efforts can be identified as part of force design 2030 the first is conceptual and intellectual these changes represent a change in thought or tenant and how the Marine Corps operates or frames the operating environment the second line of effort is a force structure and organizational change these are the Marines and equipment changes that needed to be implemented as part of the force design 2030 efforts the third is an experimentation analysis shift that provides an iterative model in iterative model for who and what the Marine Corps needs to be for the next fight first looking at the doctrinal products that have come out of force design 2030 it is apparent that a large volume of intellectual capital has been expended to determine where we are going and why general Berger has answered Spader's statement without about ambiguity and multiple personality disorder in the Marine Corps quite clearly the pacing threat is the people's Republic of China the Marine Corps is hard at work addressing that threat and defining intellectual and conceptual ways to do so from May 2021 to May 2022 the Marine Corps released two major publications a concept for stand in forces and a functional concept for maritime reconnaissance and counter reconnaissance forthcoming publications include a functional concept for MAG TAF the Marine Air Ground Task Force air and missile defense Marine Corps doctrinal publication eight information and the forthcoming joint naval concept distributed maritime logistics operations in terms of force structure and equipment the Marine Corps is divested itself of tanks reflag the third Marine Regiment is the third Marine Latoro Regiment and shifted the size of infantry battalions helicopter squadrons and fixed wing aircraft among other changes the human capital has been reinvested in other units in the reserves for example the Marine Innovation Unit has been created MIU seeks to collect widespread talent present in the reserves especially that tied to science and technology cyberspace and robotics these are skills many reserve Marines possess as a result of their civilian employment for self study they do not translate easily into usable skills in an infantry company or truck platoon the unit received almost five times as many applications as there were start as there were spots when it started forming. Third line of effort General Berger as emphasizes the need to experiment and refine the changes made experimentation at home station and in combined and joint exercises of help improve the shifts made. As an example the pre designed for the pre force design 2030 active duty infantry battalion had almost 900 Marines on its table of organization. Initial plans cut that number to 735. Two years of experience and experimentation has demonstrated the number should be somewhere between 800 and 835 a change that's being made. Similarly the cannon artillery but it batteries initially were reduced down to five but have now been increased to seven from the original 14 in 2022 seven major exercises have been designated as experimentation exercises to help prove or disprove the concepts and refine them thereafter of force design 2030. Like many corporate restructurings or institutional pivots force design 2030 is not been without critics the objections and those that do so however fall outside the scope of this paper. Regardless if viewed as regardless of viewed as positive or negative there is little denying the general burger is fundamentally reorganizing the Marine Corps. The 2020s are described by general burger quoting from the 2022 national defense strategy as a decisive decade. This is language echoed in other official US government statements and documents including those involving climate change interaction with China and the global fragility. Global fragility act. Collecting history amidst this change is quite a tall order the Marine Corps history division is a mixed civilian and international organization that serves as the memory and repository of the Marine Corps. Its website remarks history division's primary task has been to preserve and promulgate the official record of the Marine Corps in peace time in war. In doing so its archivists collect and maintain research materials official documents special collections maps oral histories photos and film and video. So that its historians might research and write official accounts on operational institutional and doctrinal topics and events. So this is the history division of the Marine Corps history division. This is the history division in the establishment and life cycle of Marine Corps bases and stations. Excuse me. History division indeed the entirety of collecting Marine Corps history which is governed by Marine Corps order 5750.1 H. Which fixes responsibilities and establishes policies for recording preserving and disseminating the cumulative operational institutional experience of the Marine Corps which is the connection between history and current operations. Quote if the harsher lessons of history are not to be painfully revisited the past must be extensively evaluated. To conduct such an extensive evaluation a systematic means of preserving historical records is needed. Toward that end the Marine Corps has dedicated resources to amass, preserve and use records and collections of historical value. This is not to be history in a vacuum but a history that informs and guides current and future operations of the eight objectives assigned to Marine Corps history division in the order half are directly tied to modern and future war fighting. Like any good military briefing this one wouldn't be complete without a good box and wire diagram showing the table of organization and force structure of history division which is divided into three branches. First is history's branch which writes the history of the Marine Corps for the second is archives branch which manages flat records such as papers and digital documentation. Three dimensional objects including uniforms weapons and flags including the two famously raised over Iwo Jima are managed by the National Museum of the Marine Corps. The third branch is field history branch which comprises of 17 reservists in an individual mobilization augmentee unit and you see here on the slide you know the breakdown between archives histories and field branch field history which is commanded by a full 06 Colonel which has three teams and one joint team which is what I'm part of down there in purple at the bottom who works both for history division and for the joint history and research office out of the Pentagon in support of the joint staff. This paper focuses on the role of the field history branch in the work of its reservists the work produced by them since force design 2030 was initiated in 2019 and the changes we face in obstacles we've surmounted a few years ago. Let me note about the Marines that make up field history branch there's a photo of us last year there are only 17 of us most of us are field grade officers or senior staff and CO's so folks with 10 plus years of experience in the Marine Corps and operational forces as one could be expected the Marine Corps being an organization predominantly focused on combat operations and ground combat operations in our in our backgrounds. That photo shows 13 but 17. That's all that we're talking about and we're going to talk about that in a little bit more detail. I'm an artillery officer by background most of our commanders and infantry officer a fair amount of the other historians or infantry officers. We have logisticians military police intelligence officers and aviators as well so we cover the whole breadth and scope of it. That's all there are in terms of tasks and organized historians in the Marine Corps 17 reservists trying to capture worldwide operational history of a force of almost 180,000 active duty and 38,000 plus reserve Marines it's a tall order but one largely that we've tried to succeed at and I think as evidence will show we have since 9 11 approximately 10,750 oral history interviews have been conducted by members that averages to approximately 1.4 interviews every day in the last 20 plus years. Given that a reservist only has 48 four hour drill periods a year plus 12 day annual cycle plus a 12 day annual training cycle this is an impressive number. The interviews themselves are mostly conducted at an unclassified level though some by their very nature are classified the intent is to conduct as many unclassified as interviews as possible so that they can be used to publish that history can be shared as widely as possible with as many as possible The majority of the field historians in the detachment are not historians by academic training there are some who are academically trained historians but this is most often is not a result of this is most often not as a result of the Marine Corps investing in advanced schooling but rather something undertaken by the Marine at her or his own direction and expense instead most of us attend the US Army's week long military history detachment course conducted by the Center for Military History the US Army has been tasked by the Department of Defense with being the lead proponent for military history training across the uniform services the focus of the Marine history detachment course is collecting oral history artifacts photographs of current operations and the field historians of the Marine Corps are largely focused on collecting oral histories of current operations the slide you're seeing here is one of our summary sheets one that I did in relationship to the evacuation of Hamid Karzai International Airport and the US Embassy in Kabul oral history interviews are conducted by Marine Corps history division field historians are submitted to archive branch along with a summary sheet and supplementary materials from the interview those usually include a biography and photo of the interviewee additionally they also include scan documents like cruise books photographs letters emails briefing slides operations meetings orders etc basically whatever we can get our hands on these supplemental materials help flush out the delays help flush out the delays related in the interviews and the decisions related in the interviews or humanize the Marine narrative or they humanize the Marine narrative and the Marine interview additionally we conduct interviews with former Marines and those affiliated with the Marine Corps including family members, joints and combined service personnel assigned to Marine units with them including interpreters and foreign nationals and others that can help tell the story of the Marine Corps we also collect and preserve artifacts and documents for the archives and museum enterprise as an example of the recent work on what I call deep history we've conducted in the past six months we've interviewed three World War two women Marines two of whom are over 100 years old and you'll see the photos of Elsie Fidge there in the upper left hand corner and Peg Biddle in the bottom center of other World War two Marines and a good number from Korea, Vietnam and the Cold War our leads come in from a variety of sources to include children of these Marines as was the case with the Marine in the middle newspaper articles and word of mouth as an example I recently interviewed a Marine medically retired in 1966 after taking machine gun round through his head in Vietnam all because his son met a recruiter at a Starbucks a few days after I had spoken with the recruiter I didn't even know I was in the area and in a feel good story I was able to have that Marine awarded a medal he had earned in 1966 but never received examples of documents collected and preserved include the wartime photo albums and letters of some of those World War two Marines the letters of a wife of a Marine officer posted to China in 1919 to 1921 and documents related to the atomic test conducted in the Nevada desert of the 1950s with Marine serving as a maneuver force under the detonations the legacy and heritage of the Marine Corps is important and is important and certainly enjoyable but as the Marine Corps order states we are tasked with capturing current and operational history force design 2030 as the closest thing we've seen to a paradigm shift since the fall of 2001 is indeed that current history but reality sets in force design however is hardly not the only thing occurring in the Marine Corps nor has it been the only collection or effort or priority since General Berger became commandant reality strikes in the limited number of historians just 17 of us are cat trying to capture everything we can since General Berger assumed commonance several significant events have also occurred requiring our attention and focus I'm going to break down these efforts and demonstrate the role Marine Corps field historians have played in capturing those stories and documenting war as it happens in real time first COVID-19 it would be hard to explain the impact of COVID-19 and collecting oral history interviews other than saying that if you can't travel or visit to your subjects it can be hard to convince them to talk to you well commercial applications like Zencaster or recording off of your phone do allow us to conduct virtual interviews a variety of security measures make it difficult for reservists to access government computer networks or programs like Microsoft team to conduct interviews using approved programs the impact of COVID-19 on travel significantly reduced our efficiency and when we looked at our records when I was coming up with this you can see almost a six to eight month gap in interviews conducted because we were all trying to figure out COVID and how to approach historical collections in and serving at that time of note however is that a statistical analysis project was conducted and written by several field historians about COVID's impact and the efforts of Marine Corps recruiting command the authors of that survey had previously served in recruiting command and were able to leverage that knowledge to produce something of immediate relevance and importance to the supporting establishment this goes back to our background of having ten plus years in the Marine Corps across the board to understand and have access to folks and have experienced in those in those roles and recognizing what should be collected and what needs to be collected make sure I'm not running close to two to three minutes left got it thanks Mike there was a coup in Burma will quickly roll through that and the evacuation of Hamid Karzai International Airport in August 2021 the United States and our allies was drew from Afghanistan after the Afghan government gave ground and eventually collapsed under Taliban pressure as American forces were drawing down in Afghanistan several Marine Corps units were placed on the ground to facilitate that drawdown and evacuation since the departure in Hamid Karzai of Hamid Karzai International Airport field historian branch has conducted approximately 200 interviews to include every Marine security guard at the U.S. Embassy that was interviewed within days of arrival in the United States after the evacuation the uniforms and equipment of the Marines standing guard on post one at the closing when the Embassy closing announcement was made was collected and donated to the museum because field history branch was there we conducted approximately 20 interviews in that process we've conducted interviews with members of the special purpose MAGTAF Task Force 515 and the 24th MEW who are on ground in Kabul to include those who were at the bombing blast at Abigate these range from a general officer present down these range from a general officer down to the junior enlisted Marines who were present in Afghanistan months after completing boot camp some of whom were born after 9-11 more interviews more interviewees have been identified and the process is ongoing having done a number of these interviews they are particularly I'm going to say heavy they're particularly particularly impactful I spent 6 months in Afghanistan in 2009 advising the Afghan Security Forces and to hear how it all went out has been a very interesting thing once the evacuation was over we started receiving evacuees and Marine Corps Base Quantico logistics and engineer units from Camp Lejeune form Task Force Quantico to receive these refugees and within 10 days of standing up that task force we had a field historian on site conducting interviews with both the Marines and Sailors of the Task Force but also the evacuated Afghans so conducting immediate analysis and immediate collection in terms of force design we've collected several major efforts including looking at the Marine rotational force in Darwin Australia exercise cold response in 2022 well in northern Norway where two historians attended the exercise and documented the variety of experimentation efforts thinking back to General Berger's focus additionally in one weekend of drilling we conducted 18 interviews over an hour long each with leader planners for force design 2030 and those impacted by it ultimately the Marine Corps ultimately the Marine Corps won't know if we are successful at the transition General Berger has implemented until the dust settles after the next war in the aftermath of that conflict the interviews and archival material collected by Marine Corps history divisions individual mobilization augmented attachment will help historians piece together what worked and hopefully the fewer concepts that didn't thank you I am so sorry I think this is part of conferences is the stories we can tell about whether or not we state a time it's all fine this was really fascinating I'm going to say that about every paper that gets presented today because they all are this is quite interesting in terms of I think with a lot of people with anybody who has read anything about how the Marine Corps learns is how it looks inwards and is able to not out of ignorance of everything that's going on out there but because it wants to understand how it works and how it works so this is really interesting an interesting example of that I'm just going to shift right away Matthew and then we'll do the Q&A afterwards Matthew you're up Thanks Mike I'll try and get you back on track that means that means I'll add lib and look at my watch and actually keep the timer on which I've got going now thanks both to Jeff and Tim you've kind of set me up very nicely I think because your descriptions of the hierarchical and bureaucratic structures necessary for collecting material so that the past might be recorded or the present might be understood is really fascinating really fascinating because what I want to do here is discuss or talk about things like accidental archives and in particular what I mean by that is the sort of material that comes out of war that isn't official that gets stuck in people's lofts and emerges later on as parents and grandparents start reminiscing or talking about the war and then framing that into a way we might think about future war and I know that sounds like it might be a bit of a difficult leap but principally I'm interested in how things like smartphones are shaping our capacity to create accidental archives to create representations of war that are now in my opinion going to dominate how we think about future war how future war is represented and will make the process of writing future history really really complicated and I think that's why the conflict the conflict records unit is really important it's clearly something that's very very important now in the context of the war in Ukraine and it's something that my Andrew Hoskins and I have been thinking about for the last couple of years which has led to producing this book called Radical War yes that is a gratuitous attempt on my part to flog copy at your and it's only 20 quid but it's also me trying making sure that I acknowledge Andrew as my co-author and who has been very important in framing some of the thoughts that I put to you this morning so what I really want to do is contrast what might be described as an establishment history with how we might reflect on contemporary or present collections of materials that in the past would have been described as accidental archives they wouldn't have been very accessible but of course now they are very very very very very present they're right in your palm of your hand the smartphone allows us to see the war and see wars in all sorts of ways that previously weren't able to do and it's that I suppose that's the point of contrast I guess between an analog history of war and might nicely set up how your work in Iraq involves digitising a lot of material I think what I want to sort of start off by sort of getting you to think about is that if the past was framed by paper magnetic tape recordings of things microfetion all of that now of course things are being recorded all the time it's just an exponential growth in data to the point of just a little fact that I want you to keep in mind and the reason I'm only referencing the war in Ukraine here principally because Andrew and I wrote this book Radical War Before the War in Ukraine and the last three or four months we've been stressing about how wrong Radical War is and actually surprisingly there's a load of things that have been happening that make us think we weren't so far off the money in terms of the challenges of trying to understand how connectivity and digitisation are going to and are reshaping how we come to think about, represent and understand and make sense of war in the 21st century the first stat I want you to think about is in Ukraine 85% of the population have access to mobile broadband connectivity so that's the first thing I want you to think about the second is that the Ukrainian NGO and Andrew was good enough to have spoken to mnemonics because he's got lots of connections with friends and colleagues in Ukraine established that the civil war in Syria produced something like 40 years worth of footage over a 10-year civil war the astonishing truth of 80 days of war in Ukraine right now is that it has produced 20 years of footage 20 years of footage I mean that is enormous when Andrew wrote his PhD way back in the 1990s he was talking about how the amount of footage that came out of the Gulf War was in the realms of 200 hours of VHS that really makes it very that really contrasts how an analogue period of creating news, information, archives things that would shape people's understanding of war compares with the 21st century the process of where smartphone technology and connectivity is just mundane so I think that point here is really important because I've talked about mainstream media here on the left and user created media on the right through connectivity and smartphone technology but if you think about it mainstream media and what both Tim and Jeff were describing in an analogue age we're talking about a very, very hierarchical structure lots of bureaucracy, lots of different layers, lots of people making choices that conform with some sort of editorial process or policy or a set of ambitions that shape and frame what ends up in the archive whereas user created media is being produced, published and consumed every single second and moment of the day and of course it's being uploaded to social media and we think we might be seeing the war wars in Ukraine and elsewhere in Syria whatever in an unmediated way we're just seeing it being presented to us but I think we need to reflect on the fact that that's not quite the case I spoke to some people in the open source intelligence community and it was clear that stuff that was coming up and getting published online was maybe 20 sometimes 24 to 48 hours behind actual events so you know whilst we might think it is the war is being represented online the wars are being represented online in immediacy day that's not necessarily the case now that the implication of all this is that we have and the connectivity is that even if material doesn't get published online there's a lot of material on people's phones recorded and kept in the background and that stuff is going to creep out and it's shaping how we might think about war crimes tribunals it's also shaping how we come to remember and it will shape how we come to remember and make sense of war and what it does is it produces a constant churn of material that sort of upends and destabilizes and creates a dialectic if you like with establishment or received views those sorts of mainstream media or the views that might come out of governmental organizations which can be very quickly contrasted with what's going on as it's being represented online and that creates a sense of uncertainty or disorder it creates distorting prisons and social media of course is a great place for those sorts of distorting prisons and this sets the context if you like for what we might describe as the new media ecology which forms and is framing how the new war ecology works it's that combination of government structures, establishment views mainstream media and social media and a reflection that the sort of sedimented understanding of the past as it might be framed by the kinds of analog efforts that were being put in place by as Jeff articulated very nicely and of course Tim is trying to bridge between the analog and the digital it sort of this sets the context in which everyone is participating in this war and you can see it the pictures down the bottom we've got GoPro cameras in Syria all the way to even in Northern Ireland people are recording things on their smartphones or looking at prisons of war in the recent Armenian Azerbaijan war it creates war in that sense is always on as we've seen Russian armed forces have struggled to shut down internet connectivity in Ukraine and that results in this sort of collapse of different ways of framing or thinking about how we might make sense of war between what we know in terms of our general understanding about how war works with what we're seeing and what we're seeing is I think Jay Winter would describe what we're seeing is is that the the studio that received establishment view is in direct dialectic with the puncture with the stuff that's coming up from the battlefield and it's very unique and unpleasant and doesn't conform with an establishment view so you get this very interesting contrast of war as it's represented in mainstream media which is sanitized and doesn't show us in all its gruesome details all of the unpleasantries of war but also focuses on specific areas and issues that are of direct interest to their audiences contrasted with what's coming up on channels like telegram which is just some of it is really horrific and of course that's being done in a context where establishment approaches to recording archives is being challenged by digital media itself so we are seeing a lot of data loss in organizations and some of that's perfectly normal as Tim very nicely put there are 17 historians in the US Marine Corps it's impossible to capture everything and some of that is as it has always been but it's also the case that the media itself lend itself to creating memory holes where data gets lost and people don't know where material is and you don't have to I've had many times I've lost music through digital rights management changes through my iCloud account so that kind of data gets lost all the time and on top of that in military organizations there is sometimes a real challenge in terms of putting in place the bureaucratic structures in order to sustain the gathering of material and in the UK for example a lot of effort has been put into trying to manage how the Ministry of Defence spends itself against war crimes tribunals war crimes accusations against British Army British military personnel themselves so I'm thinking Baha Musa or I'm thinking about the Auschwede case both of those are really instructive because they tell us something about how evidence is being pulled through and collected and then made available for government later on to defend itself and what you see is there's a whole series of databases and hard drives being deleted and that's partly just a function of how hard drives are being repurposed as much as it is the infrastructure challenge of actually collecting that material and recording and storing it somewhere indexing it making it available and I think that's something that Tim can clearly talk about in great detail so we have this we have this curious yes and we have this curious cascading if you like of the the analogue as we established as scholars we might be familiar with as historians we might be familiar with with our contemporary experience which is around how we know actually people are engaging with the world through their smartphones in terms of consuming, producing, publishing material all on one device which people can clearly do right at the front lines and they can amplify when they're back in their back at home on the train, on the tube, whatever and that creates this swirling churning effect that is very very distorting and very very difficult to understand and make sense of and it creates this curious situation where we have traditional archives that take all this effort to try and sustain and make and build and curate combined with combined with bureaucratic structures that are themselves struggling to deal with processes of digitisation where the process of digitisation are indeed disintermediating traditional approaches to collecting archive material making sense of it and they're doing that in the context of an exponential growth in digital media that is really really challenging to try and make sense of and of course that's all being produced not by in official contexts but out in the real world amongst people who are just recording on a mundane level everyday life and so you create this situation at John Spencer who people in the States will maybe be a bit more familiar with than in the UK I don't know where you've got this it's very easy to get a sense of what's going on in the past and you see it all the time online where archives are being uploaded or maps are being put online where you can trace out wars previous but when it comes to actually making sense of stuff that's right now and immediately that becomes very very challenging and just let me turn my alarm off and I finish, how about that and my alarm were synchronized perfectly thanks very much that was a really good wrap up in a sense we're tying together threads I'll keep my own observations for later if I could ask the panelists all of you to you've already done it enable your video we've got two questions and we've only really got two time for two questions and we need to keep answers fairly brief so that we can have that short pause in the next panel in 20 minutes or so one question is from an audience member and one is from one of the other panelists Victoria I'll start with the audience thank you apologies if I've mispronounced your name the question is many thanks for the interesting and informative talks there was close intelligence collaboration between K during the 20s and 30s covering other parts of the world so Middle East and China specifically mentioned here could you comment on this relationship and guidance on finding books and sources of information on this topic so keeping it within the I mean that's a big question and the reading lists are quite long I would I know and I would imagine the examples that come to mind are Jeff you mentioned the radio broadcasting that was a fantastic and longstanding collaboration between us and UK on collecting information specifically radio broadcasts and other kinds of broadcasts and where there was an agreement, a sharing agreement basically a division of labor between the foreign broadcast information service in the US and BBC monitoring and they basically divided up the world and then shared sort of the results I suppose the question is really for you guys if you wanted to comment on that the way to expand that a little bit is this first panel is really the title sort of says it all and it's not meant to skew the entire day but it is looking at some of the origins or some of the early practices that we see much more broadly used outside of a US-UK slash Anglo kind of American transatlantic context and so it is a heavy US focus initially but the question is what are some of the non-US corollaries? I think not to get too far away from our audience members question but looking at how that collaboration worked in other parts of the world and how other parts of the world have done this I suppose those would be the two parts of the question if you guys want to comment on that and then I'll let's say 30 to 45 seconds each and then I'll come back to Victoria's question I'll go first go ahead Jeff, Tim, Matthew yeah so I mean in answer to the question to be honest I'm not that familiar with the 20s and 30s if I had to give a very short one word answer I would say short answer not much if any and that's principally because at that time the people who would actually be acquiring that sort of information from a US perspective would have been the military attachés and there weren't very many of them you know maybe 30 or so around the world and most of those were based in Europe you know some of Latin America a few elsewhere but it wasn't the sort of information that they were were really collecting except perhaps to some extent newspapers locally and then sort of just tossing them into the garbage can probably afterwards after they've written their reports of anything interesting that's been going on but in terms of actual collaboration with the US UK collaboration on that topic during that period I would have to say probably none I'm sort of afraid of saying none because maybe there's a small bit somewhere but I suspect it was it was it was very very limited indeed but very very quickly afterwards so you're talking about Fibis for example I didn't really see very much in terms of collecting of documents of newspapers and that sort of thing I think there was probably a little bit of collaboration here and there more likely not centrally directed per se but more out in the field I read one memoir of a British diplomat who was based in Moscow who said that one of his part-time jobs in Moscow was collecting this sort of material for the British government going to bookstores and so forth but he was sort of rather envious that the Americans had three people and he was only doing it part-time but how much they actually collaborated in that sense I think again it was sort of fairly minimal some people out in the field who who did this rather than something that was centrally directed but one last point on this which I'll make in relation to China when I was doing my research on this one of the key gaps that I came across was that the US was doing a lot of this on its own I couldn't really see very much information or even hints that other embassies in Beijing that existed at the time whether it was the British or the French or whoever were actually going around collecting this information for the Americans and then giving it to them again maybe there was some of that going on but it didn't make it into the reporting at least not that I saw it back the emphasis was always on what the US was collecting through its smuggling operations not the liaison operations liaison arrangements I'll stop there Thanks Jeff I'm not much to say in collaboration though it was quite exciting to see the modern war institute so thank you Dr. Ford that's my day job so thank you for that Alright thanks Jim Matthew I'm happy to always give plugs to worthy places and institutions what I'd say is I can't speak to the question from the 20s and 30s but your broader point about collaboration I've been talking to a lot of different companies recently and it seems to me that there's a sort of public-private shift in terms of how data is being accessed and made available and then used to frame intelligence activities and that seems to me to be cutting across that seems to me I mean I'm not ruling out that of course there are all the establishment approaches between different agencies or the rest of it but it's surprising how much we gleaned just from publicly available material and I'm thinking of a company called Anomaly 6 which can basically track your mobile phone all of your social media feeds and locate you, geolocate you in time and reveal your identity all from open source material and effectively allow them to track you know Russian and Chinese and it's that level of public data and the processing power that's needed to do all of that strikes me as being really a shift in that public-private relationships that is not between states but does reflect a changing pattern of power I think in the global system Okay, thanks Matthew I want to shift quickly to the questions from your fellow panelists. Joe I see your hand up Do you want to jump in? Not to jump in or to cut Victoria's question off just to get into Q behind her. Okay, alright so the question from Victoria is basically how do you if I remember let me just go straight to it so I don't misremember is generally about conflict sensitivity how do you deal with conflict sense I think it was a question directed at Tim initially what sort of conflict sensitivity training are your historians given prior to doing their work or as part of their work I think probably it's worth spreading that question out a little bit and directing it to everybody conflict sensitivity is a big part of research as it's done within the development sector it's a big part of what how the UN any sort of human rights sensitive enterprise will see to intervene whether it's to collect information or to deploy resources or whatever and the idea is to minimize harm is to not make things worse is to not put people in a position that they will incur harm by virtue of having responded to an oral history survey or taken a donation of material resources or what have you so I guess Tim not to put you in an awkward position because you're the focus of your paper was quite specific on an internal looking or an inward looking collection enterprise where this may not be appropriate but I think it probably still comes into play if you think about the question in broader terms how do historians go about doing their work without getting in the way of what's the normal day-to-day activities I guess in the context of the Marine Corps but also Jeff and Matthew how do you know collection efforts or efforts to preserve preserve information acquire information how's that done in a way is it done in a way to minimize disruption or to sort of I think it's probably a tricky kind of question depending if you're talking about something that's part of the intelligence function where some of that will be framed very differently versus you know the sort of outsourced social media approach to very specifically organized archival efforts for example where do no harm actually applies in a different way and it's about preserving the integrity of a collection as it exists as a collection so it can be sort of it's a kind of question that can be understood a bunch of different ways and I suppose after spreading that out a little bit I'm just wondering if you guys want to like to comment on that there's another question from Victoria about verification authentication which I think sort of comes into that sure go ahead I'll take the lead on that one of the things that I didn't cover and my thing was as the events in Afghanistan were unfolding last summer we made a concerted effort to try to get a historian into Afghanistan to document in real time what was happening at Hkaya at Bagram or even just get them into Bahrain and ultimately that wound up failing for a variety of reasons one of the things we consistently run into is we are asking permission to come and observe and collect and at what point are we a value add in the immediacy you know if I'm a commander and I have the choice between bringing some historian and his or her cameras and audio recording equipment and stuff or another staff officer or planner or whatever I'm going to probably err on the side of the staff officer and so we have an obligation and a duty to sell ourselves it's exciting to hear you know our civilian oral historian was at modern day Marine Expo and ran into the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps right so he's the commandant senior enlisted advisor and he knew that she existed which is huge to have that level of almost access but convincing the operational units hey you actually do want to take me because I bring something to you and so when we go to do our pitch to talk to units about joining them for an exercise or you know even getting to try to be seen as nothing other than another dang mouth to feed we talk about preserving both the legacy and heritage of what they're doing but also protecting those Marines in the future so I mentioned earlier the atomic tests if there was a historian there we now have copies of the rosters and copies of this and that and the other thing and when you go to do your claim because you have some rare cancer that all of your buddies also have we have the evidence and it's interesting how that phrase of I'm protecting your Marines in the future turns commanders heads the other thing very quickly aside while our interviews are conducted at the unclassified level and we look to do to get them published and to have them incorporated into written product produced history to Dr. Ford's kind of cycle models access to those are restricted so when we interviewed the Afghans right when you saw the summary sheet I blanked out the name of the interviewee that I did the Afghans we interviewed those are you have to request them from history divisions archives there's a process there's a vetting to make sure that your means are legitimate you know nobody can you just can't walk off the street and ask for them so that's some of how we do it Thanks Tim quick responses from Jeff and Matthew and then Joe's question and then we need to break for that was perfect and then and then we need to make space for the next the next panel Jeff Matthew actually I'm going to pass on this one if you don't mind but quick quite well on Jeff quick one from me then clearly sensitivity issues are not being in a 21st century context sensitive issues are not being framed by whether partly being framed by our choices in terms of what we allow to allow ourselves to see online but they're also crucially defined in by the platform platform level so Twitter there's a reason why Twitter and Facebook and the rest of it are mainstream social media and they don't you don't see the war very much that's because they're in a constant fight to keep that stuff off the platforms the flip side is this telegram doesn't have such a tight policies on what is put online and the war is seen in all its glory there so wars are seen in so different platforms different I mean and that's the other thing about the how do you make sense of a context in which you've got 20 or so different social media platforms all framing producing content uploaded content that just really does challenge all things around sensitivity because if you really want to go hunt for stuff you can definitely find it yeah that's all I'll say because I can see we're running out of time thanks Matthew Joe go ahead you're muted Joe first first first mention of somebody being muted I think that means we all drink at this point a quick comment for Jeff so the Jeffrey heard Margaret Thatcher's foreign secretary participated in a witness seminar that I was at and I think is recorded where he describes the re-establishment of the UK Embassy to the PRC and talks about how he spent most of his time looking through guidebooks so he could put in requests to go visit shrines or historical sites so they could collect scraps of newspapers on trains so there was definitely some kind of official or unofficial UK collection of precisely the sort of and this would be just after Korean War so mid to late fifties where they were doing that I'd be really interested just to open up a conversation unfortunately time is pressing but with Matthew's paper and I just ask you a straightforward question how do you handle all that material on the phones of Marines and obviously there are questions about the ethics, the legality and obviously there are operational orders governing whether they're bringing them and that sort of thing but just a question about do you actually collect it is it there and when it by default arrives or is available do you collect it and then Matt you intriguingly brought up this question the issue of there's a time lag between when it seems like material is being recorded in the current conflict in Ukraine Russia between Ukraine and Russia and that there's a time lag and perhaps you just elaborate is that a general in other words is that being governed by the service providers and it's quite deliberate yeah okay you're nodding so anyway so I'll leave it at that great questions by the way can I just quick response to and then to the first question and then Matthew Jeff after that 30 to 45 seconds please sorry about that Jeff phones what is on the phones very very difficult to sort out I view my job is I'm trawling I'm just throwing my net out and whatever comes in I collect and I will let the professional civilian historians sort out what to do with it but I collected there was guidance coming out of HKIA and the evacuation there hey you don't have these things don't share them da da da da da ran into some issues there because we knew stuff was on phones and some Marines would share but it's very individual but I view my job is just to I'm just sucking everything up I'm the NSA I guess Tim if I could just throw in just a quick 15 second comment what I thought was striking about the paper was on the one hand thinking of Matthew's work and the volume implied or not implied but mentioned in Jeff's work is that the focus the narrow focus on this particular tool oral histories right has everybody thinking yeah but what about everything else except the volume the number of interviews that has been you know collected over 20 years is remarkable and so there's you know you need to sort of take one in context of the other and sort of maybe not complain so much that we can't have everything but we've got a lot of one thing Matthew and Jeff if you had something to add I'm not sure if you did Matthew go ahead and then we're going to break and provide space for the panel so I love the Marine Corps phone question because that's exactly what I'm interested in and where the policies are on all of that and where it all ends up and whether it just gets left on people's hard drives or whatever in the cloud or whatever the sensitivity issue the 24 at the how long it takes materials to come up yes some of I mean clearly some of that is algorithmically driven but also it fits it is also algorithmically driven in a way that gives time for the information operations that are coming out of places like Ukraine right so 24 hour gap allows narratives to be I mean I think it's a flaw in hope in some ways it's like pushing water uphill but you're trying to get if you've got the IT Army Ukraine working then you can potentially flood social media with a particular set of perspectives one of those was initially the war in Finland the Finnish Soviet war everyone was talking about that you know as far as as a framing for how the war how war in Ukraine was working it struck me as being utter nonsense but you know everyone bought into it and you know next thing you know is is everyone was talking about that you know that is where that 24 hour gap and you can see and of course different social media platforms you have to pay attention to the provenance of some of this material where it starts how it moves through different platforms and how it ends up in mainstream social media because that's also part of the delay but it's also part of the way of being in a position where you can deny things or you can reframe narratives and I just quickly there's a good example there was a I got sent by an anonymous account a on Twitter an image of a Ukrainian talking to a Russian mother about their their son that died in the war and I was like this is really horrific stuff I got a friend of mine who speaks Russian to translate and I was like okay they are really it is really horrific but then I got another friend of mine who works on tracing this stuff and what they found was the video itself came from Russia first then went to China then went through India and then got uploaded to social media via India and you see just when you know how many people on a immediate 24-7 basis go to the level of effort that I did to try and understand the provenance of that image because I just thought this is such horrific stuff we need to understand where it's coming from and I was really surprised as to how it ended up on my timeline and then it made me think well why am I being targeted what is it that they think I am going to do in terms of amplifying this particular message or story right thanks thanks Matthew Jeff did you want to add something or yeah just three very quick things first I cannot recommend State Department or all diplomatic histories enough they're absolutely superb when it comes to the interwar period I apologize Joe I should have just sort of said you know you're the world expert on that subject so you can talk about it more than I can but just one point that Joe raised which I'll just quickly touch upon in terms of sort of allied diplomats working in various countries the US doesn't have access to I remember coming across a very interesting discussion of a Canadian diplomat talking about he was based in Havana talking about his experience of basically picking up Cuban publications wherever he could find them and sending them back and that was supposedly at the behest of Canadian US intelligence cooperation but at the same time I remember going through the records of the British consulate in Hanoi or legation in Hanoi I can remember what the official version of it was but basically I think there was some concern that if they were collecting this information and passing on to the Americans it would somehow get back to them so that there was actual reluctance in some cases to actually collect this sort of information but I'll stop there