 I'd just like to start by saying thanks very much to Dan for the introduction and to SDSC for having just a wonderful honor and a delight to be here on this occasion. So I thank you for including me. With respect to the subject at hand, on the last panel, Elliott Cohen somehow managed to restrain himself from talking about primacy. Luckily, I don't have to do so. So the other presentations on the panel are largely about the discipline of strategic studies in its future. My charge is a little bit different, perhaps to set the stage a bit by talking about the practice of grand strategy in its future and specifically American grand strategy in the post-Cold War era. So how it's evolved over the past 25 years, what its prospects are for the future. And so I'm going to do so by making three overarching points over the next 15 to 20 minutes. First, that the United States has in fact had a fairly coherent and consistent grand strategy since the end of the Cold War. Second, that this grand strategy has actually been more effective than not in shaping the international environment to our liking. But then third, that this grand strategy and the broader international system that it supports are now under greater stress today than at any time in the past 25 years. And so to get right into this, I think the first thing you have to understand about post-Cold War grand strategy is just to get past this myth that the U.S. has not actually had a coherent or consistent grand strategy since containment. And this is a myth that I have admittedly contributed to to some degree in earlier work. And I think it reflects the fact that there have been very real policy differences both across and even within post-Cold War presidential administrations and a range of important issues. But in fact, there's nonetheless been significant consistency across this period in the fundamental objectives of the American strategy, as well as many of the key initiatives that make up that strategy. So let's say parenthetically, I think that this is something that often people who are not from the United States are better placed to appreciate than the Americans are ourselves. And so since the end of the Cold War, there have been three major goals of American strategy by my reckoning. First, to perpetuate American international primacy. Second, to extend and deepen the liberal international order that initially took root in the West, the non-communist world following World War II. And then third, very broadly, to address and meet the emerging or resurgent threats that might mess up that order. Every post-Cold War administration has committed to those goals in one way or another. You can find them in every national or defense strategy document that's been issued since the early 1990s, dating back to the Pentagon's defense planning guidance in 1992 up through the Obama administration's strategy documents today. And I would say that every post-Cold War administration has pursued these goals through fairly similar initiatives as well, maintaining a globe-straddling military posture, preserving and extending America's system of alliances and security commitments, promoting democracy and markets overseas, opposing dangers like nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, seeking to integrate the foremost rising power, China, into the international order while also hedging against the possibility that it might behave aggressively. All of these policies have been core features of U.S. daycraft under every post-Cold War president. And so, yes, individual policies have changed from Clinton to Bush, from Bush to Obama, just as policies changed from Truman to Eisenhower or Eisenhower to Kennedy during the Cold War. But I think there's enough similarity over time to say that we have indeed had a fairly consistent grand strategy since the Cold War. So that's the first point. The second point is that this grand strategy has actually been fairly successful over time. And this is contrary to the critique you will often hear within the American Academy, which is that post-Cold War foreign policy has been sort of a profligate disaster, that the U.S. has essentially squandered its moment of international primacy by tilting a geopolitical windmills. Now, it's certainly true that there have been plenty of errors of omission and commission during the past 25 years. There have been setbacks. There have even been some very counterproductive things that you might quantify. You might characterize as disastrous, pardon me. But I think of it this way. We still generally think that Cold War-era grand strategy was more successful than not, despite Vietnam, despite Lebanon, despite all the other missteps and setbacks and traumas that occurred along the way. And so my contention is that on balance we can say something similar about post-Cold War grand strategy, that for all its flaws and imperfections, it's still been more successful than not over the past 25 years. It's helped make the international system more stable, more economically and politically liberal, more advantageous to the United States and its allies than many experts would have predicted at the beginning of the post-Cold War era. And so to grasp this point, I think it actually helps to go back to the early 1990s. So yes, this was the time of the end of history thesis, but it was also the time of some remarkably pessimistic predictions about the future of international affairs. So if you asked international relations experts like John Mirsheimer, sort of of the realist persuasion, their view was that the end of the Cold War and bipolarity was going to unleash all sorts of nastiness in the international system. Resurgent Japanese and German militarism, vicious security competitions in Europe and East Asia, rampant nuclear proliferation in these and other areas, generally speaking, a reversion to multipolar instability and heightened danger of great power war. There were also fears that the end of the Cold War would set off trade conflicts and return to protectionism within the West, without the cohesion that the Cold War had provided holding the West together. And we forget this now, but if you look back at the archival evidence on this period, it's now becoming available. Many policy makers in the United States and elsewhere had some of these same fears. And what's remarkable about this past 25 years is that for the most part these dogs didn't end up barking. The post-Cold War world hasn't been perfect by any means. There have been conflicts, there have been crises, outrageous instability, you name it. But I would say that by historical standards it's been pretty good. It's been a period of relatively low great power tensions, at least until very recently. It's been a period when great power war has been mercifully absent, a period of relative stability in Europe and East Asia, a period of significant gains for democracy, markets, and global prosperity. So compared to other eras, things haven't been half bad during the post-Cold War period. And one of the reasons that this happened, certainly not the only reason, but one of the important reasons was that the United States, in cooperation with its allies and partners, pursued a grand strategy that was specifically intended to keep these dogs from barking. We maintained our alliances and forward deployments. We maintained our military privacy precisely to prevent a reversion to a more unstable environment. We energetically sought to deal with potential sources of international instability from loose nuclear materials in the former USSR to Saddam Hussein and the Persian Gulf. We helped extinguish conflicts in places like the Balkans that might indeed have destabilized parts of Europe. So in essence, the United States and its friends worked quite hard and quite deliberately to maintain basic international stability and to foster an environment in which these nice liberal trends like democratization and globalization could continue to advance. Now, this doesn't mean the U.S. strategy has been perfect by any means. It's fairly easy to tally up all the costs, the risks, the mistakes that have been part of the bargain. And of course it would be an enormous exaggeration to say that U.S. policy was solely responsible for these developments. But I don't think it's at all implausible to argue that the policies of the world's most powerful country did help shape the international environment in these important ways. So I'd say that on the whole, the balance sheet on post-Cold War strategy has been more favorable than not. So that's the second point. But this brings me to the third point, which is that I think U.S. primacy and U.S. grand strategy are more contested and challenged today than any time in the post-Cold War era. When I say this, I want to be very clear. I'm not endorsing thesis that the world has again become bipolar or even truly multipolar, or the idea that U.S. power has declined so much that we have no choice but to retrench massively as a result. Because I think that at a global level, American primacy is still very much intact, even if it is somewhat diminished from a quarter century ago. By most measures, the United States still has a substantial economic lead over its closest competitor, which is China. And if you go beyond just the annual GDP figures and look at statistics like per capita GDP, which is crucial to how much wealth a government can actually mobilize for geopolitical ends, or if you look at more holistic measures like this concept of inclusive wealth, then the lead is even larger. And then if you add up all the long-term economic and political problems that a country like China faces, I think it makes straight-line projections of Chinese economic ascent and dominance seem pretty problematic. In the military realm, U.S. global primacy is even more pronounced. U.S. defense spending is still about three times as high as China's. And of course the U.S. has global power projection capabilities that won't be matched for decades. As was mentioned yesterday, it also has years of recent experience in complex operations. The U.S. military has extraordinarily high levels of human capital. And not least of all, the United States has dozens of allies that add considerably to the overall power of the western community, as Tom mentioned yesterday, whereas challengers like Russia and China have few of any allies, and those allies are often more liabilities than assets. And so I could go on, but I think for these and other reasons, it's premature to say that the era of U.S. primacy has ended, or that it's going to end anytime soon, and that the country has no choice but to fall back radically from its post-Cold War strategy. What it's not premature to say is that this grand strategy is nonetheless being tested and stressed in ways that are probably greater than any time since the Cold War. And so I will just briefly mention six key challenges that the U.S. confronts. So the first is the return of great power competition. After 9-11, it was fashionable to say that the biggest threats came from small and weak states. I think it's pretty clear now that the biggest long-term threats come from big, powerful states. Great power competition has come back with a vengeance. Countries like Russia and China never fully accepted the post-Cold War. And so now that they have greater capacity to challenge that order, whether that's the economic capacity, the military capacity, or both, they are rather unsurprisingly doing so. They're seeking to assert primacy within their own regions. They're probing the periphery of the U.S. alliance system. And notwithstanding what I said earlier about the global military balance, they're developing capabilities that are posing a growing threat to the U.S. ability to project power into Eastern Europe or East Asia. And so this problem of protected competition with great power rivals that have their own views of international order, or at the very least of regional order, this is going to be a major challenge ahead. And it's related to a second challenge, which is that regional military balances in particular are shifting in some very uncomfortable ways. In Europe, the combination of NATO expanding to the East and Russia's recent military modernization means that the U.S. and its allies actually have a significant local inferiority in areas along Russian borders, especially in the Baltic and Eastern Europe. In Asia, the Chinese buildup was increasingly testing the superiority the U.S. has historically countered on having in the region, particularly within the first island chain and especially close to the Chinese mainland, so in a Taiwan contingency, for instance. And so in each of these cases, you have a combination of military modernization by great power rivals, adverse geography that significantly attenuates U.S. military strengths, and then an asymmetry of interests as well. These areas simply matter more to our rivals than they do to us. And so when you put these things together, it starts to raise questions about whether the United States can actually uphold its alliance obligations in a crisis and whether it can uphold favorable regional climates in these areas. So that's a second challenge. A third challenge is that the end of history is ended. And by this I mean that the world ideological climate is becoming more contested as well. Authoritarian regimes are becoming more skillful, more subtle in many ways, more tenacious and resisting liberalization. Russia and China are touting the virtues of their own authoritarian models over Western concepts of liberalism and human rights. They're opposing democratic regime changes in their own neighborhoods and in places like Syria as well. There are growing questions about whether democracies can deliver the goods economically and in terms of governance. And so even though democracy remains highly robust and historical standards, the advance of electoral democracy has largely stalled over the past decade and there may even be a modest democratic recession underway. And so the point here is that Americans can no longer simply assume that the world ideological climate is moving inexorably in their direction. A fourth challenge is that handling what we often call rogue actors, so those actors that fall out the basic norms of the international order, this has also become more difficult because I think these actors have become more empowered. North Korea now has a sizable nuclear arsenal and is working towards an ICBM capability. Iran is fanning sectarianism and instability in the Middle East even as it's emerging from international sanctions. ISIL has demonstrated how non-state actors can sow chaos throughout that region while also spreading or simply inspiring terrorism across the globe. And so I would say that on balance, the rogues are probably stronger than any time since 1991 since Saddam Hussein was defeated during the Persian Gulf War. And so that's another challenge. A fifth challenge has less to do with the United States than with its allies. As U.S. adversaries have been getting stronger in relative terms over the past 10, 15 years, particularly U.S. allies have been getting relatively weaker. U.S. grand strategy has always been a coalition strategy. It's rested on our leadership of a group of like-minded and highly caped countries. But with some notable exceptions, and I would largely consider Australia to be one of these, most of our traditional allies have been losing global wealth and power at least in relative terms over the past decade and a half. And in Europe especially, they've just been eviscerating their defense capabilities. So on aggregate, I think our allies are less capable of contributing to the common cause than they were earlier in the post-Cold War era, whether that cause is supporting out of area military interventions or maintaining favorable military balances within Europe or East Asia. So that's a fifth challenge. And then I think the sixth challenge perhaps the most profound arguably comes from within. If you just watch CNN or you read The New York Times, you can see, I think pretty easily, that there are now real questions about whether the United States will be able to take the political steps that are needed to sustain its strategy over time. Think about defense spending. Political polarization and gridlock have really just played havoc with U.S. defense budget over the past five years. They have severely disrupted readiness, and that's a huge force structure all at a time, and U.S. primacy is already becoming more contested. The free trade aspect of American strategy is also under fire politically. Just look at the debate over TPP. And then more broadly, the current election cycle is the first time in about 45 years since 1972 that a major party candidate has fundamentally opposed key aspects of American international engagement, as we've known it since World War II anyways. And so the domestic foundation of American grand strategy has become more uncertain. And so the first and second parts of this talk were sort of meant to give you the reasons to be optimistic about American grand strategy. The third part gives you all the reasons you should be worried. And in fact, I think when you add all these challenges together, U.S. strategy faces a more difficult panorama than at any time since the end of the Cold War. I think the challenges are more severe than they have been in some time, in many ways at least. And they're also more numerous, which has the effect of further stretching of resources that we and our friends have available to deal with those challenges. Now, I haven't given myself much time to discuss what the way ahead is, but I will just close by saying that I think the United States, along with many of its partners, is going to be confronted with sharper grand strategic dilemmas in the coming years. So over the course of the post-Cold War era, we've become somewhat accustomed to being able to pursue such an ambitious, encompassing grand strategy, essentially on the cheap. Because the margin of American and Allied power was so comfortable, and because so many of the trends and the international environment seemed to be going our way. That's no longer the case today. The international environment has become more contested, and I think this general trend is likely to continue over the next 10 to 20 years. And so I think what we're likely to find is that the same level of effort, the same level of investment, is likely to produce diminishing results in a grand strategic sense. And so what this means is that in the coming years and decades, we're going to reach a point where we will have to make a decision. That is whether we and our allies are willing to invest fairly significantly more resources in effort to sustain this grand strategy, along with the post-Cold War order that it's promoted, or alternatively, whether we should start accepting greater trade-offs in terms of the ambition of American strategy, in terms of what we think we can accomplish in the world. Now, my preference would be for the first approach, because I think that American strategy has worked fairly well over the past quarter century, because the U.S. and its allies still command the power of global wealth and power that by most historical standards is quite impressive. Because I think that the level of marginal investment that we're talking about here is significant but not prohibitive, whether you're talking about defense spending or anything else. But I do acknowledge that it's an open question whether our leaders in the United States and perhaps elsewhere can mobilize the domestic support necessary to make those investments. And I think that even people like me who think that America's post-Cold War grand strategy and primacy have generally been a good thing is likely to be some rougher sledding ahead. So with that, I will go ahead and wrap up and I look forward to the discussion. Thank you. I want to show ultimate temerity by challenging the chairman. The chair that Bob O'Neill and I both held in Oxford is, of course, a chair in the history of war, not of war. And it's an important distinction. Well, it did, Bob. That's true. That's true. I won't dispute that. The distinction is important because, at least for me, I'm definitely a historian. The fact that I now hold a chair in international relations shows that even in old age there could be life and that you can con some of the people some of the time. Or at least not you lot, but I'm probably Colin St Andrews. I say that because my job today is to address lessons from the Golden Age. And it's to... I'm being asked to project into the future from the past. Part of my problem is that I'm not terribly sure when the Golden Age was. I looked at those concentric circles over there saw what I presume is Sun Tzu though whether he was a he or they is an open question. And certainly it must be an open question like any portrait of Homer is a true likeness. The other chap you will recognise because it's the only likeness we have of him Carl von Klauswitz. I'm not going to mention Sun Tzu again he hasn't been mentioned so far in the conference Klauswitz has been mentioned so far in the conference and I will mention him again. Is the action the Golden Age we're talking about really, of course, the true Golden Age? 1966 because that was the year of SDSC whose birthday here to celebrate. I assume that is what we're all meant to take for granted. It's unusual because most adults can't remember where they were robust infants on their birth. SDSC clearly can remember when it was a healthy infant what proved to be a healthy infant and I'm going to assume that what I meant to be addressing is the period between 1966 and the publication of New Directions of Strategy in other words what we might call the sort of middle to late co-war era. The second question of definition and Eliot's already raised this is what are strategic studies? And actually the question that Evelyn asked went to the heart of this you know is it a matter of policy direction? Is it a matter of scholarship? Are we engaged in something that is and should be a policy relevant activity and I think you know this question is going to come up again later today a pragmatic business which is located in the present and is orientated towards the future which is to quote something I think Chris Barry said in the previous session about shaping good outcomes or are we addressing strategic thought? And for me strategic thought and actually even more for Klaus I hesitate to put myself in the same category but that just shows how conditioned I am by reading his book it is a matter strategic thought above all about a dialogue between the present and the past rather than about the present and the future after all the raw material that Klaus is addressing in on war was the outcome of his experience of war the experiential quality of that and his relationship of that to the immediate past of his father and maybe of his grandfather I mean in other words back to the era of friendship and great the military history of the last 60 or 70 years Klaus was deliberately refused to speculate about the future except on one occasion where in effect he said we can't do it he wrote far more military history in his life than he ever wrote military theory and he assumed that his current experience would only be given theoretical force by comparing it with the past so as to establish what he regarded as generally true as opposed to his things which might simply be unique or peculiar phenomena rather than generally applicable phenomena so what does that approach if you like Klaus's approach tell us about the golden age that we're looking back to the second half of the Cold War I want to make three points in answer to that question two I'll put in relatively simplified and abbreviated fashion and the other the third I want to develop more fully assuming I allow myself time the first point is that Klaus with his understanding of strategic studies had the study of war and war's conduct at its heart the overwhelming focus of strategic studies in the Low Cold War and we've had this reflected in much of the earlier discussion was about war's avoidance now of course that's a gross oversimplification especially given the fact that in the golden age as far as SDSC was concerned Australia went to war in Vietnam with profound national consequences and the need for Bob O'Neill personal consequences but by 1966 Bernard Brodie's Damascene conversion of 7th of August 1945 I'm sure you all know the story that he was driving with his wife on the 7th of August 1945 and he jumped out of the car and he bought a copy of the New York Times and he read of the news of the dropping of the first atomic bomb and he said to her, allegedly everything I have ever written what he'd written was largely on maritime strategy it was obsolete thus far he went on the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars from now on its chief purpose must be to avert them and so deterrence was the dominant theme of 1966 in 2016 if you think about our discussions today deterrence may be a theme but it's become a sub theme much more evident has been our discussion once again of war itself we haven't always called it war we might give it other guises but we are talking about the use of violence in human relationships and we have to be discussing we increasingly do discuss I think what is a war, when is a war when is this a war and not a war is the global war on terror and so on we've actually had to engage once again with what war means the debates of the 1960s were not silent on those questions but they were not centre stage so my first point is this war is back we may give it another title we may call it our conflict we may call it all sorts of other things and that's one of the reasons why strategic studies are back and not security studies if you like to go back to a question that Elliot raised that strategy is centrally concerned with the business of war if we think war is important then we probably need to address strategy second point and this was also adumbrated in the last session history is back now of course history never went too far away in the Cold War but Brodie's principle point in 1945 and the point that he wanted to get over when his book on the absolute weapon was published in 1946 was that his earlier work just to remind you of his phrase other disciplines ousted history from its primacy in the study of strategy I was struck by Peter Ho's use of the phrase the acceleration of history in the last session because what it called to mind was a phrase Laurie Martin Laurie Freedman's predecessor at King's London, Lawrence Martin used in I think 1980 when he talked about the deceleration of history by which he meant of course the sense of permanence which the bipolar system and the adoption of nuclear weapons and through that the embracing of deterrence had given to the appearance of international relations today we would describe strategic studies and it has been described and it's a much better subject for it as multidisciplinary I'm not for a moment saying its position of primacy but what I am concerned to do is to engage with the question of whether history is just about hindsight whether somehow it becomes a form of imprisonment which makes us less able to respond to contingency to change and to the unexpected because that is the usual accusation and we've heard it today that is leveled against it history did not go away but it was abused more than it was used by the strategic studies fraternity and it was used and it's still used in ways that historians fully paid up historians which I would claim to be one would simply not recognize and let me give you three examples of that the first is the trend in departments of politics and political science especially in the United States to reject history to struggle to accept the place of history or to discuss it as anything other than storytelling the best that it can do it seems to be is to provide a basis for a case study and the shaping of that case study is determined not by context by historical context and much more by a set of theoretical assumptions which then rob history of its context and seem to be impervious to contradictory evidence as a first world war historian I say this with considerable passion if you read any IR discussion of the origins of the first world war it is locked in the legacy of the 1960s in its literature and I have to say it's not just that Germany still caused the first world war in a way that Fritz Fischer would have argued it is also that it broke out because of something called the cult of the offensive and I find that offensive because I think it simply fails to understand the debates that are going on in military thought before 1914 I haven't got time to explain that just take it from me I'm right and they're wrong in other words the use of history has got locked in the golden age of the 60s and 70s the second point is that even those departments that are open to history and the use of history treat history as telling you something that is continuous and unchanging quite frankly this is not what historians do I'm fond of quoting I'm going to quote him again the example of Marc Bloch the great French medieval economic historian essentially the father of the Annales school the man who was entirely concerned with the long delay but who reflected on his own experience as a French officer in the first world war as a French officer again in May 1940 and when he was fighting as a French Jew in the resistance movement before his execution by the Gestapo in 1944 he wrote a book called Strange Defeat and the middle of that there is a discussion why the French army had performed so badly in May 1940 having done so well in 1914 and his response to that was the way the École de Guerre treated history it had treated history as a study of continuity it had gone back to Napoleonic precept rather than to study of change history, Bloch asserted absolutely rightly is concerned with understanding change over time why do we become obsessive with the outbreak of the first world war because it was self evidently a turning point just as 1789 was a turning point or 1939 was a turning point or the end of the Cold War was a turning point and the third problem is this that history in the late Cold War found its knees less in strategic thought and more in operational thought and in thinking about so called conventional war when I lectured at Santos in the late 1970s my job was to give the one so called history lecture and that was on the Russo-German front between 1943 and 1945 because that was meant to tell the British Army of the 1980s how it was going to deal with the Soviet attack on the inner German border and of course as the arguments about the operational level of war took hold particularly in the United States then what were they concerned with they were concerned with the main 1940 attack but a concerned Mark Bloch because it was a model of course of how to do the operational level of war and then others of course look back before that to Tukhachevsky deep attack on the Soviet Army what it was in other words was another use of the argument about continuity and as actual war climbed back up the agenda after the end of the Cold War as armies found themselves concerned with how they would operate and Laurie Friedman's reference yesterday to the Iraq war and its importance is central here then of course they went back very often to exactly those sort of arguments and that trend has increased since then not diminished let me just give you two quotations Jim Mattis writing the joint forces quarterly in 2008 when he attacked effects-based operations to quote we must return to time model principles and terminology that our forces have tested in the crucible of battle and that are well grounded in the theory and nature of war it's an argument about continuity and about history General Vansonte Port who ran both the Echo de Guerre and the French Doctrine Centre when the two were co-located in exactly the same year War is war for centuries we have had the feeling that we are fighting new wars unrelated to previous conflicts but with the benefit of hindsight it is surprising to see the stability of the general characteristic of conflicts their unchanging logic and the error that could have been avoided if the trendsetters of the period had simply had longer memories the rediscovery of counterinsurgency in 2006 whereabouts, that is of course the year of the publication of the US Field Mandel 3-24 used history in exactly that way the cherry picking of Algeria, Malaya and so on in ways that suited the themes that the doctrine was developing but bore no relationship to the historical context within which they were set the ultimate absurdity of course was the figure of T.E. Lawrence an insurgent leader who suddenly became an example for seriously thinking thus showing exactly how counterinsurgency thought was being devoid, stripped out of its political context it was in other words not a substitute or it became a substitute for the strategic thought in the years between 2002 and 2014 and we look back in 2016 on a decade and a half by constant reports of operational progress and operational success measured in all sorts of ways but no strategically satisfactory outcome in Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya partly because we haven't been engaging with strategies we have done so the essential point here is not that history has no part to play in strategic studies but we must stop abusing history and how we use it indeed the reemergence of war since 1990 increases the value of history precisely because it should enhance our understanding of war at the operational, sorry at the experiential level my own writing is usual the function of history for strategic studies is to encourage understanding not to stress continuity to realise what is changing our understanding of change so let me come to my third point which is essentially one to illustrate that argument the place of democracy in strategy Elliot Cohen just now gave us a wonderful broad understanding of who our audience might be if we study strategy and it was a pretty eclectic and wide ranging bunch but what concerns me here is it's still a pretty much defined as an elite activity it is a job for those of us in this room members of our forces statesmen, academics it is for us to debate strategic studies in universities and think tanks in order for generals to use as a basis for discussion with politicians and for statesmen then to reach decisions the fact that we exclude the wider electorate despite the fact that we are democracies is I would argue a product in part of the golden age but it is now a legacy which leaves us confused and vulnerable and I said I had mentioned Klaus Witz and I'm going to do it again so look at him again just doff your cap for a moment when Klaus Witz addressed strategy in the so called trinity vexed passage at the end of book one chapter one of course he defined the trinity in terms of reason, the player probability and chance and passion I don't need to tell you lot all this and then he went on to relate those to what his strategic studies people and I call the secondary trinity which were the government, the armed forces and the people in the era the Klaus Witz saw the beginning of the era of war after the French Revolution and up until 1945 the growing dominance of the mass army made popular participation in war self evident and indeed it was Klaus Witz's departure point it's worth remembering that he described absolute war not just as theory but in book eight he said we would believe it was theory had we not seen it in our own times had we not seen the effect of the revolution immobilising people for war in making the wider nation part of the war effort and that trend was reflected and reinforced by the processes of industrialisation which made the civilian factory employee I knew I'd run out of time made the civilian employee a fundamental part in the waging of war and a strategy in both the world wars in those world wars the civilian became a target but also a participant the purpose of blockade in the first world war was to facilitate the revolution of the German people against the German government and indeed revolution was used in a wider sense across the Ottoman Empire by the British and across the Russian Empire by the Germans when of course they smuggled Lenin I could elaborate on the examples in the past the hope had been to curb revolution and to prevent revolution leading to war now that relationship was inverted during the Cold War the role of the people in making strategy became passive they were the hostages of nuclear deterrence the lives of the price to be paid if there was a devastating counter city strike democracy for revolutionary France had been a means of mobilisation for war nuclear weapons demobilised the democracies and demobilised the democratic strength of western governments in three ways first of all because they permitted I've got to shut up permitted three points permitted the end of the mass army secondly because they were presented as a cheap option so the taxation rather than being a war tax which had a bottom being in the 19th century taxation essentially became focused on health, social services and so on and indeed the argument in 2003 was effectively war could be waged without the major democracies confronting the costs of doing so increased taxation and thirdly nuclear weapons promised short sudden war with no need to mobilise the nation by essential point which I haven't got time to develop and I'm happy to develop and you want to come back to me is the challenge we confront today is the challenge of engaging our wider societies and the nation as a whole in terms of what we understand strategy because at the moment a disconnect between the sort of discussions we are having and wider public participation a disconnect exacerbated by the tendencies of our leaders to use the vocabulary of the Second World War to hype the threat to oversell what they tend to do and then under deliver a response which tends to produce cynicism rather than the reverse the way through this thicket of late has been of course drone special forces and so on as an operational solution to that problem but one which itself does not address the need for democratic engagement within our own people and that seems to me exactly the lesson that we need to draw that we need to embrace strategies which allow the participation of the people in what we are trying to do because without that there will remain a demographic deficit in the structure Well it's a tough challenge to go after Houston and before Bob O'Neill so it is pretty intimidating I haven't asked to talk on the topic an Asian school of strategic studies with a question mark and my first reaction when I saw this topic an email from Brendan was that here we go again ANU is setting up another school ah don't welcome ANU will know what I'm talking about but then it dawned on me that actually I've been asked to talk about a distinctive Asian approach to issues of strategy and security and that's what I'm going to talk about I'm not going to give any advice ANU will set up another school or restructure the existing schools alright I'm glad that there is a question mark after this topic because I have serious doubts about whether an Asian school is possible or even desirable but I think it's a very useful question I'm glad that Brendan posted that way because it allows us to reflect on what are the challenges and what are the possibilities of creating not even creating what are the challenges and possibilities of strategic studies in Asia Asia Pacific or Indo-Pacific or maybe the train today and ah I want to raise five points the first three of them are not insurmountable they're also well known but the last two are really critical but let me mention the first three points because they are important as well but the answer to the first three depends on the answer to the last two first which region where and what is Asia we all know Asia is not a fixed notion it's a region of immense diversity regional naming keeps changing like a fastened statement in the first three decades we have seen the rise and fall of Asia Pacific or East Asia and now the trend of the day what is trending today is the Indo-Pacific at least in Australia so regional naming is a very political affair but it also has academic connotations what an Asian school should or should not study who should belong and it's very interesting that Sira Jamohan was one of our first speakers today when I came to SDSC in 1983 my first visit I can imagine strategic studies conference being opened in India India was not seen as part of Asia Pacific in those states so I think this is important to keep in mind which region are we covering if we are going to think of a school of strategic studies second and this is mentioned by Elliot strategic studies or security studies I thought this debate had been settled but I hadn't counted on Elliot Cohen being here and reviving we had so much debate on this in the 1990s and we know strategic studies traditionally understood is the threat of use of military force security is more broader it includes non-partisanal security or human security and strategic studies is often criticized for being too narrow and security studies is often seen as being too broad but the problem is when you think of a strategic studies school in Asia it's pretty hard not to take the broader view of security because security in this region is always understood as comprehensive security it's a long tradition of thinking of security in fact there are very few places in Asia where you can really do strategic studies in the classic sense of the term so in this case I'm actually with Peter Ho against Elliot Cohen I think you need to have security in the broad sense this is the region this is the tradition this is the cognitive prior of this region and this is what we try to do in the Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies named as defense and strategic studies but to heart of it was security the leading programs there I was the head of research for the first seven years was regionalism, multi-largoism, security architecture non-partisanal security research studies of warranties and Peter Ho funded all of that third who is to lead or anchor an Asian school well STSE it is without question and I'm not saying that because I'm here at the 50th anniversary of STSE but without question this is the place that has been the leader, intellectual leader of strategic studies in Asia many of us have passed through STSE at different points whether full time or part time as full our visitors but can we think of STSE providing that leadership today in the 21st century in the rise of Asia it will be politically problematic it will also be seen fairly unfairly as a threat to localization and indigenization scholarship or the need for more local Asian voices and scholarship but then are there really institutions in Asia that are up to this task I'm not so sure I have lived and worked in Asia and the West approximately half of in each of the two I have been the founding president of the Asian political international studies association the founded secretary general of Asian consortium and the president of the global international studies association I don't think there is an STSE anywhere in Asia sorry to say this that is not to say that there are strategic thinkers or traditions in Asia which are absolutely brilliant but the combination of intellectual depth policy relevance and academic independence that combination is not there in any institution in Asia India comes closer but lack of resources is a huge problem there and there is also different types of politics so it is actually revealing some of the best strategic scholars from Asia are not working in Asia they are working in United States and Australia and this is not because simply lack of resources it's also because of lack of permissive conditions academic freedom so these three questions are important but they are not as important or answers to them depends on the last two questions I'm going to raise which I think are absolutely crucial so this leads me to the fourth point what a school needs a core thematic focus a set of generalizable concepts and methods so we have two examples one is an example in international relations broadly which seems strategic studies that's the English school of international relations the other one is the Copenhagen school the English school developed the idea of society of states and a whole range of concepts such as solidarity and pluralism and order versus justice people here who have been trained in English school the Copenhagen school developed this idea of securitization and desecuritization sounds like a mouthful but there's a long tradition of now there is a huge literature on the Copenhagen school so what will be the comparable focus for a nation school would it be strategic culture well I'm reminded of a very important article by Des Baal in 1993 in security studies which many of you might have read it's called strategic culture in the Asia-Pacific region and in that article Des identified distinctive aspects of strategic culture in Asia or Asia-Pacific and some of them are an Asian way of war which has less emphasis on holding territory than exercising all the forms of indirect forms of military, economic and cultural influence or even hegemony informality of policymaking structures and processes consensus over majority rule pragmatism over idealism and a comprehensive approach to security here many other categories but these are the important ones but putting culture at the heart of strategic studies brings back bad memories like Asian values Asian concept of human rights these were criticized not only as a justification for authoritarianism but also for going too far in cultural particularism and exceptionalism and that's not a good basis for developing a strategic study school to be sure each country and each region is distinctive all theories and schools of IR whether in international relations of strategic studies reflect a certain national or regional context it's true of America, Europe everywhere but they must do more than just that reflect a certain national or regional context so I have a simple test for any regional or national school to be effective or to be credible that school must explain not just what happens in that country or the region it must also generate ideas that can travel beyond that country and the region and have some universal applicability look at the English school some of us are little skeptical the English school are cynical I'd say it's probably a way of nostalgia about Britain's lost empire and it's allegedly a beneficial contribution to creating an international society all but based on European rules the Copenhagen school we can think of secretaries in theory as reflecting continental Europe intellectual traditions whether it's post structuralism or discourse analysis that English school can be useful applied to Asia or everywhere else in the world it has concepts and theories that can travel so Copenhagen school in fact when we build a non-traditional security program in Singapore we use Copenhagen school as the starting point so what theories from Asia can travel like that the closest attempt to create an Asia school is not a regional school but maybe a sub-regional or national school of IR many of you know about this the Chinese are most advanced in creating their own school of IR and it's very interesting but does it pass my test the Chinese school of IR is mostly drawing from Chinese world view and practice or the past, present or future and a good deal of it not if not all seems like a legitimization of Chinese official foreign policy ideology whether it's the TNCA or London Heaven or the Peaceful Rise of China it is yet to offer a set of concepts and approaches that can travel beyond China or East Asia which can be used to study international relations or strategy in other regions or at the global level and my last challenge to an Asian school of strategic studies is the most important one and I call it the Hadley Bull Test why? I'm maintaining an essay that Hadley Bull wrote in Australian Outlook now called Australian Journal of International Affairs in 1972 and Nick Bisley the editor is here is now freely available until the end of this year you should read it it's titled International Relations as an Academic Pursuit and Bull and I am using that included strategic studies as a self-filled of international relations some of you may disagree with that because he talks about international relations applies to study of strategic and defence and he actually mentions that so let me quote one passage from Bull I quote the academic international relations specialist should not be a servant or agent of his government there is a need on both sides for exchange of ideas and mutual criticism between academics and officials and defence but inquiry into international relations is a different activity from running the foreign policy of a country and necessarily classes with it unquote this may be going a little too far I'm more sympathetic to you know the cross-fertilization between academia and policy but Bull is not opposed to it either so let me read another little paragraph from that article international relations specialists in universities and in governments should talk to each other but should remain themselves let me emphasize should remain themselves it is only if they remain themselves that academic students of international relations are likely to have anything distinctive to contribute to the discussion of foreign policy problems unquote now strategic studies everywhere is policy driven and enjoys close proximity with the government in the west or in asia everywhere and nothing new but in the west governments change so if you are in the government today you will be a critic tomorrow in asia governments don't change very much so you remain basically reinforcing the same set of ideas and or if you train to be a critic you lose your access to the government resources of the government so I have added a corollary to the head legal test an article in the international studies review in 2011 entitled engagement or entrapment scholarship in policy making in asian regionalism I developed this idea of entrapment what is entrapment? it happens when academic specialists of international relations or strategic studies after making contribution to policy and enjoying after securing proximity to the policy makers and earning their trust become trapped beholded to the official line and find it very difficult to get out of that to independently criticize the government position or take an independent policy and it happens a lot in asia why it happens? because the primary stakeholders and consumers of strategic studies knowledge in asia are governments and not the academic community or the civil society in fact strategic studies in asia is dominated not by universities but by think tanks including some think tanks placed in universities that are closely tied to governments many strategic studies think tanks are extensions of defense and foreign ministries directly funded or run by government officials university based or genuinely independent research centers and strategic studies in asia are rather few and far between one consequence of this is that there is a discouragement of high quality theoretical or conceptual work theoretical or conceptual work is not valued that incentive structure is not there but without some conceptual theoretical work you can't have a school of strategic studies you can still be very useful because strategic studies need some concepts and their ideas also a key function of strategic studies think tanks in asia is the so called track 2 as professor steward harris from a new once wrote in an article in pacific review in 1994 track 2 dialogues in asia are dependent and I quote upon the consent endorsement and commitment often including financial commitment of governments now as a consequence non-conforming social governments or independent academics are often astuted from those dialogues another problem is the generalist rule rather than specialists so even on I've been to meetings and maritime security where the expertise is not run by or the meetings are not run by maritime experts but general higher scholars are specialists in international relations more generally and there is generational gatekeeping very failure to bring in the world on a continuous basis so as a result track 2 dialogues in asia are unable to write above national interest or present alternative understanding the strategy of foreign policy they remain beholden to the trap of nationalism state sovereignty and non-intervention so what is to be done if anything I think instead of an asian school I would call for more networking especially among universities in think tanks in asia or asia pacific or inter pacific with the view to exchange ideas information and solution to common problems this can be done at multiple levels track 2 is useful I'm there small and I participated jointly in many fracture activities we even developed the idea of preventive diplomacy getting the book together and that become the standard text for preventive diplomacy for asian regional forum I do not disparage that work but that's not enough you can't build an asian school of strategic studies on track 2 you also need at the level of graduate students even though here is developing a graduate students network in asia pacific security that's very important to catch them early and I'm happy to be part of it a really good model is in canada we should have something called cancaps when I was a professor in canada Canadian consortium for asia pacific security this is now defund because of the harper government may be revived now but the idea was that you will have a discussion annual meeting and it moves from university to university the president is elected every year anybody can come in as long as you register but government officials participate with enthusiasm in drugs and you got really fruitful interaction between government officials and academics but it's laid by academics so it is also important to develop some core themes and I think that for asia the two areas that are very important one is non-traditional security it kind of bridges the divide between the traditional strategic studies and the more expansive notion of security studies and another area very seriously lacking in asia is conflict resolution of negotiations which is a tradition in northern Europe and other parts of the world but in asia I can't think of really a situation that really seriously trains people in conflict resolution and negotiations it's also important to have historical and theoretical research to quote Hedley bull again the test for an academic contribution to international relations that it should have either historical or theoretical depth academic work which consists simply of the retelling of information about international affairs so polemic does not need that test and quote finally strategic studies institutions and scholars should engage in genuine policy debates and explore alternative ways of promoting security one of the problems which think tanks strategic studies think tanks in asia is that their main role is providing background information not doing policy debates the way we do that in washington dc that's probably too much of washington dc and too little of it in asia so you can get a lot of policy papers but they only tell you this is the background to a conflict this is what different people say but saying that this is policy a and this is policy b and we shouldn't do a but we should do b or c very rarely happens it happens in some countries but vast majority of asian countries this sort of policy debate and alternative framing of policy doesn't happen and that really needs to happen so if strategic studies in asia is to have some credibility even as a policy oriented enterprise it's to really have providing platform for alternatives and debates so those are my five points I'll be happy to take your questions and my time is up thank you ladies and gentlemen may I thank brendan for the opportunity of speaking to you this morning brendan this has been a great conference and I've felt for you during the last couple of days having run a few conferences myself in the past it's a little bit like setting out to build sydney harbour bridge you've got a whole lot of big heavy things that you have to lock into place and you have to design the thing carefully so that the final structure is worth much more than the sum of its individual parts and brendan I think you've achieved that with this program this team of speakers and the way the discussion has gone it's going to make a very good book and I look forward to reading it next year or whenever it comes out now I've been given the task of addressing the next golden age in strategic studies and that means I'd better find one as I look out there I'm very caught by Peter Ho's metaphor of the black elephants am I seeing a herd of black elephants out there I think I can part some of them and there are some little golden specks of light there what am I looking for what is a golden age it's one which results in the production of fruitful wisdom I'd place emphasis on that word fruitful there is an awful lot of wisdom thought up by analysts and think tankers and government staffers and army staff colleges and so on but whether it results in something that you can actually use successfully is I think the big determining factor and if you ask me to give you an example of a golden age in strategic studies I would say the 1980s because this was the time when the salt one and salt two had settled into place and were seen to be working and we were then able to move on to the development they took a huge amount of tension and uncertainty out of the air and I think have helped us get through the past 30 years without any use of nuclear weapons let's hope that the coming decade is another golden age because there are some very tough challenges coming up a few of them I have to say sorry to Frank Fukuyama because this is certainly not the end of history. History is changing as we go through it we are very unlikely to see a world war one scenario again where everything is tightly controlled by national governments almost dictatorial regimes hundreds of thousands of young men dash out of their homes with their packs on the back and their rifle and border train to go 300 or 400 miles and then fight a series of ghastly battles which results in their deaths we are not going to repeat that kind of situation again even the second world war type of mobilization and control I think is going to be very unlikely we are moving into an era where power is being distributed in different ways in our national societies and in our global society Hugh you mentioned the importance of looking at democracy in the process of generating strategic policy and I think that is a very important new factor our societies are changing and of course as they change technology changes and with everything being much more societally driven at lower levels we have this hideous little instrument that anyone can run around with and organize their own miniature civil war out of and they have been doing it in recent weeks let me just list some of the major challenges that I think we will have to address the first is that of the jihadis I use jihadi deliberately rather than terrorists because jihadis are much more serious people they are out to kill they like killing they think we should be dead and they don't mind if they die in the process it's all part of the exhilaration of life and now that this spark has been released into the international haystack we are going to have to take it very seriously indeed and upgrade our methods for dealing with it including drawing in allies from the islamic community who have as much to fear from these jihadis as we do if not more but it's a tough issue the second is the uncontrolled flow of refugees if you have been looking at the Mediterranean over the past five years it has just been tragic to see the number of people starving badly governed going north out of Africa looking desperately for somewhere safe to be and they see Europe there will be other refugee flows in other parts of the world but that one is I think going to remain very important and tough to deal with it's not just a matter of stop the votes you have to do something about stopping people at the source you have to give them better government they have to develop this themselves there are plenty of knowledgeable willing people to do it but they need resources and they need encouragement and that's going to be another big role for us in the future we have talked about China in the past day and a half and so we should have it's a wholly new factor on the scene we need to cast our minds back about 500 years before we come across a China that's like the China of the 21st century China in the Middle Ages was the great power it was not terribly aggressive because it had so much within its own borders but it demanded respect and it did poke its nose into other parts of the world its naval expeditions are famous China today is going to be curious about how far the limits of its sovereignty go and this is all being tested in the western Pacific as I speak it's going to be a very tough problem I don't think it's insolvable my experience of dealing with Chinese very reasonable people there as well as some potential fanatics and let's not forget we kicked China around very badly in the 19th century just think back to the opium wars where Great Britain comes along and says you won't take my opium well hell I'm going to send the Royal Navy and blast you to bits so that you have no structure of authority to prevent us sending you our opium and look how China just disintegrated through the 19th century it's taken China a long time to get back on its feet but they haven't forgotten any of that they're going to be very proud nationally they're going to be difficult to deal with we're going to have to show a lot of understanding and discretion to be able to get through the next generation without some conflict with China so we're going to be dealing with an uncomfortable Russia Paul Depp has pointed out its continuing military strength and the proclivities of its leadership one of the great joys of retirement is that you get to read all kinds of things that you wish you had known about when you were teaching subjects I've been reading a lot about Central Asia over the past couple of years and every couple of hundred years some terrible bunch of people have come out of the east and they've gone right through this area when you look at the structure of Siberia geographically Paul covered with beautiful grass that horses can be fed off enough people riding enough horses discover that a saddle is a useful thing to have on a horse you can go much longer distances you can go much faster and by chance once you're on this saddle stirrups are a great idea you can control the horse and once you get the horse with bridal saddle and stirrups you look around and think hell this strong animal could pull something and then you get to the chariot and by the time you get to the chariot you're up to the Pechenegs and the Majas and the Mongols just think of Russians sitting in this invasion corridor for a couple of thousand years when these conquerors come through they're not bringing human rights and strengthening local means of improving the life of people they are enslaving the women and children they're killing the men they're burning the towns and houses and so on Russians have grown up in that climate of fear for a couple of thousand years if not more it's no wonder they are paranoid about their security and that's going to continue to make them difficult to live with managing Russia climate change continuing there are climate change deniers around I have a lot of funny crossing swords with them sometimes because I'm very powerfully influenced by the arguments that climate control, climate changes is going on and we're going to see massive floods in places like Bangladesh that again will generate hundreds of thousands if not millions of refugees which will spill over into other countries population growth is going on all the time and this is putting pressure on food and resources and we shouldn't think we're immune from this problem either just look a little bit north across the turret straight and we have Papua New Guinea first got to know Papua New Guinea in the early 1970s it had four million people now it has nine million people and it gets a whole lot less rain than it did in the 1970s people are getting very hungry they're mainly subsistence farmers Papua New Guinea is verging towards ungovernability we should prepare ourselves for there to be an uncontrolled outflow of people from our nearest neighbour to the north and where are they going to come well it's only a few miles across the turret straight that's just one local example nuclear proliferation now okay I accept that it's occurred much more slowly than people thought it might have in the 60s and 70s but it is still going on we have not found a way to row the boat back and the more countries have nuclear weapons the more incentive there is for other countries slowly to acquire them what I worry about most particularly coming from nuclear proliferation is the connection with jihadis it only needs someone to slip a particular type of nuclear device it doesn't have to be a big super bomb just a dirty weapon and give it to half a dozen people who take it across the Atlantic land on the gas bay peninsula on the southern side of the Lawrence River there aren't many customs guards along there have someone waiting with an SUV you drive down across the United States border through forests and I know from what I've heard from United States border control officials they can't guarantee that that border is uncrossable and it ends up in the southern part of Manhattan and what have you got we need to take nuclear proliferation also very seriously we have talked a little bit about alliances and they're becoming dysfunctional I think if we're sensible we can keep our alliance structures together in a fruitful stable way but it will take a lot of hard work and study we've also talked a bit about cyber crime, cyber warfare information warfare etc there are the challenges we could get a great golden age out of all those challenges if we can meet a few of them who are the people who are going to be involved there are five groups independent institutions that is think tanks like the strategic and defence studies centre government experts in defence departments foreign affairs departments prime ministers departments etc intelligence organisations there are plenty of them military specialists who have tended to be a bit sotto voce in the international strategic policy debate over the years they've stuck very much to their operational last and that has resulted in some severe misunderstandings for those of you who haven't read it I commend HR McMaster's book dereliction of duty which really says that the senior United States military were derelict in that they did not convince the Johnson administration that what they were trying to do in Vietnam was just unrealistic and I suspect there has been a certain amount that problem behind American difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan we've got to make military people more confident, more articulate, better informed and at the same time get them used to the cut and thrush to debate with people who are not wearing the form the fourth group are the people who are responsible for managing it all namely the politicians there is a huge problem in this area because as the second world war gets further and further away in the Vietnam war there are almost no members of parliament with military service so they don't feel confident in relating to the military they don't know how to question to us they come along and field exercises and poke around and ask stupid questions and make your name remarks because they don't know any better my experience of dealing with politicians is that if you offer them a chance to get educated in this field a lot of them will take it and I think this is going to be another important challenge that has been studied center in years to come the fifth group are the independent writers and journalists and I don't need to say anything more about how important they are in connecting us with the democratic base that our societies run we need to have better functioning institutions for shaping the people to deal with the challenges that I talked about think tanks groups that co-operate not only within national boundaries but cross-fertilize internationally they need people coming in from appropriate education bases Elliot was talking about this earlier this morning there are a huge number of people out there who could make useful contributions to our field but they just don't know how to get into it because it is highly specialized and a bit complex we have to think about sharing perspectives within alliances it's not been done in the past but as the Cold War gets further and further away the purposes of alliances become harder to define and the sixth institution that we need to improve is the United Nations and make sure that there are more people with a solid training in strategic policy making within their ranks and fewer people who just know about little bits of Africa and Asia and Latin America and so on well what do we need to do we need to educate from secondary level upwards in a more thoughtful way we need to impart experience within these five groups of people at first and second hand we need to establish credibility for each group and they have to pass the test of what their peers think of them in argument we have to hold open debates that are consistent with security there are some things you can't talk about publicly but there is an awful lot you can have a knowledgeable electorate out there then they are going to be much more interested we need to establish dialogue between the professional communities be they government armed forces think tanks journalists and our political leaders that's going to be a very big task and then finally we need to engage with the governments because they will have the final choice let me stop with that we're going to take three questions first Elliot Hall other questions and Peter Edwards the mics thank you the question is it's actually a comment and a question largely to Q but I think reactions very much take your point we need to address public and certainly there's a need for intellectuals to be out there in the public square talking about these things it does rest primarily on politicians to make the case for doing the things that we may think are desirable or kind of pain where it's a lot better the second is I'd like to draw you out a little bit more about the relationship between the uniform milk because it does seem to me there's a big difference between suits and dresses talking to suits and dresses as opposed to suits and dresses talking to uniforms and you painted a pretty dark picture of serious military professionals and there are other names of people we both admire a lot kind of take the Jim Mattis or the French generals point of view and again I'm inclined to be pessimistic because I think those folks haven't been so busy over the last decade and a half they're actually not going to be inclined to step back and ask the first order strategic kinds of questions so if you have thoughts again just sort of elaborate a bit and if you see as it weighs ahead I'd really be curious to hear them then Paul and then Peter and Beck thank you I thought that was a brilliant group and if I might say so the conference as a whole has been remarkably eclectic I don't know how to say this a bit bluntly I've stopped going to double I double S annual conferences it's too exclusive and it's too big I've spent about equal amounts of time in my career as a policy and then intelligence practitioner and then as an academic and just to pick up a couple of points and questions you heard me say yesterday I think that in my view most countries including Australia and in a different way Russia prisoners of their geography their history and their culture and that's an appeal for us to work more with area specialists we've got some in SDSC Bob you were quite right to raise Papua New Guinea I think by 2030 its population will be close to 20 million and we'll be about 28 and we will always have responsibility for that if something goes wrong and the place collapses and let's remember it has a common border with a place called Indonesia which brings me to an associated point of view in the last few years when we mentioned Indonesia it is critical to Australia's national security we benefit when it is democratising I don't say democratic and stable prudent defence planners in this country will always plan against Indonesia going badly wrong and we must always have the military capability to handle them in the CA gap there's a percentage chance of the Indonesian democratic experiment failing and us having an extreme Islamic military government now the answer often from ONA is 10% I'll tell you what as a defence planner that's good enough for me it's not to see Indonesia as the enemy we should be cooperating as much as possible I'm talking about prudent defence planning so I think we need to do more within our research school and our experts secondly you heard Brendan's sergeant last night in a tremendously sensitive and insightful speech which he'd written himself talk about and I think Brendan's you disagree with the other Brendan I agree with the other Brendan when I was deputy secretary of defence and I'm sure it applied with Hugh White I could count on the fingers of one hand out of a staff of 2000 who might just make top strategic policy makers which brings me to my final point Bob and I know many of my colleagues will disagree with what I said yesterday we're quite a fast growing eclectic organisation there is a danger we're becoming a cross between an IR department and a military history department that is not to say we don't need both those things but I think I heard you say and Hugh certainly said it what do we do to return to our traditional core capability or is that no longer relevant remembering that Tom Miller Hugh and Des founded our skill in defence policy and led the battle we've got increasing competition from ASPE what do we do about that very quickly finally Amitav there is a brilliant exposition on the issue of conflict resolution and the ASEAN regional forum the ASEAN regional forum is now in its 22nd year it has three priorities in order confidence building confidence building preventive diplomacy which I'm currently involved with them in and conflict resolution we can't even get to first base after 22 years on preventive diplomacy because the Chinese at every remove say preventive diplomacy is interference in internal affairs glad to comment thanks very much to the organisers and I congratulate everybody I was cheering to the echo two people who I've admired for a long time Hugh straw and admired from afar and Bob O'Neill fortunately from closer quarters in many years as a historian of war a historian of foreign policy in this country could I point to another problem which is a sort of obverse of the one that Hugh straw raised about the use of history it's not only often the sort of history that we've been talking about here and that we're interested in is only conducted in political science or international relations strategic studies centres or departments I can illustrate this by pointing out that sometime in the later middle ages I was a young research fellow in this university just down the road here and at 11 o'clock every Thursday morning I had a dilemma because the weekly seminar from the history department was which I was expected to attend as a member I was writing a book on the early history of war policy and policymaking but should I go to the weekly seminar which was usually eminent historians but working on race, gender or class or should I go at that precisely same time to the Department of International Relations which had people like Robert O'Neill and Hedley Ball and JDB Miller and others and people that they had brought in from overseas to talk about to talk as historians about international relations in peace or war or birth there's a gulf between history as it's understood and military or international or strategic or diplomatic history in its institutional frameworks I don't know how we counter that but I just wish somebody would set up a Department of the History of War somewhere in this country Let's make one quick comment about Paul Dibs remark about the need for closer ties to area experts in the United States at least the loss or perhaps the absence of closer ties between strategic studies or security studies and then area studies is one of the great losses and tragedies of modern academia because certainly in the United States area studies was created precisely for national security purposes it was a Cold War era invention and it still receives tons and tons of government funding and at the undergraduate and perhaps at the master's level there are still quite a number of area studies majors who go to work for the intelligence community or things like that because they possess language skills and knowledge that it's hard to find but sort of at the PhD level and at the faculty level that discipline if you want to call it a discipline it reflects broader trends in academia and that it's been essentially captured by faculty or essentially hostile to the mission or hostile to the relationship between academia and government academia and national security and so the relationship there is just not as strong as it could be and should be and there are various initiatives going on in the United States a couple of which I'm a part of now that are trying to sort of break down that wall and to root it that it's simply hard to do Let me follow on on exactly that point and to begin with before I go to Elliot's series of questions I mean the UK problem is that each of history and international relations now essentially have different criteria for understanding and developing the discipline and I took aim if you like it what international relations and politics might be doing I could equally well take aim at history which has become much less engaged with public engagement and much more inward looking than was the case two or three decades ago precisely because of research expectation requirements and so the notion that and it goes back in part to what Elliot was saying when he was quoting Cardinal Newman but the notion that somehow you should be trying to look outwards rather than inwards to your discipline is not something that is necessarily rewarded I mean the big exception in that is actually the last research framework included the expectation that public engagement and impact as it was called would be rewarded which I think produces a slight glimmer I mean there is a real challenge here and when I went to Oxford and succeeded Bob one of my concerns was that actually to do both military history and strategic studies or clash in timetables was to do more than one person could possibly bear I mean that actually not only does each of these disciplines now have different sets of expectations but then actually the notion you can embrace the entirety of all this individually is just nonsense it's not sustainable this is why we produce multidisciplinary solutions to the problem but we do need to find ways of having a more sensible dialogue than we've put at the moment and we do need to recognize that actually the difference is the essence of where the creativity can lie rather than trying to squeeze these disciplines into similar outputs because actually that's exactly where you lose the grit that provides the basis for the creativity if I can mix my methods too much to Elliot's question let me begin with what I knew would be if you like the core flag you know who are the generals we most like to consult with well Jim Mattis will be there among the people we put on the right side of the equation and Vincent de Porte is another highly intelligent officer now retired working and making his money in the defense business in France but these are people with whom we would find empathetic so in taking aim at them I don't mean actually to criticize what they're doing because what they were focusing on and what they said was absolutely their last you know it's their job it was the issue of the operational level of war that's what they were focusing on the question is where does that lock in to exactly your point about the relationship with the politicians and how do they perform and you know to take because I truncated the whole discussion of what I was going to say about democratization to take you know two examples our late prime minister in the United Kingdom David Cameron in my memory three times said Britain faced the next essential war as a prime minister after the attack in Algeria after the attack in Tunisia at Seuss and at one point during the Libyan crisis did he have any intention having used that turn of rhetoric to reflect the fact that we were engaged in the next essential war absolutely not and so you have you know politicians and generals if you like occupying parallel universes that never seem to come together national security councils of course which are proliferated including of course we have one in the United Kingdom and in part to address that issue but still don't seem to me to have done so and the reason they're in parallel universes is that to all intents and purposes what we've been doing is engaging in inverted commas or what in cold war terms in what in golden age terms would be called limited wars but we have used in order to engage the public because the public is reacting against these limited wars we've used the vocabulary of existential conflict and we have failed to provide a coherent way of describing them we've recognized the problem because we produce things called strategic narratives I would argue hybrid warfare is part of the recognition of the problem and I've said elsewhere in the last few days it's a sort of mirror imaging we're concerned about our own domestic resilience so we've not seen little green men as the threat but what we're not actually engaging with is what is the policy outcome here and how do we adapt the military means or recognize the relationship between the military means and the policy outcome because our politicians are essentially engaging in a public debate because they recognize the role of democratization they recognize the effect of the new media they recognize the need somehow to reflect that back to their own public but what they're not doing is leading their own publics in recognition of what our force can and cannot do what its limitations are in terms of what it can deliver and actually I believe if I'm going to be positive for a moment this actually reflects a piece that David Carl and I noticed in the Australian response to the NISA tax is actually what domestic terrorism requires us to do is not so much to look out with I mean that is a busted flush really in terms of engaging the public Gordon Bryan tried to do it in Britain or London immediately in relation to the initial attacks what it is to recognize the role of democratic engagement in addressing domestic sources of domestic terrorism that is one way into this argument domestic resilience is one of the ways into this argument of re-engaging and it seemed to me there that is a positive outcome one just a couple of I'm speaking sorry I'm going on too long but one couple of other quick thoughts on the role of the professional military in this number one I mean apart from the need it seems to me to speak truth to power and to say what military force can and can't do there is it seems to me absolutely a necessity for the military to engage in lesson learning in a more proactive way and to make that part of the public engagement of public debate it's not just a military exercise of course increasingly it's across government exercise but you and I were talking about this today but I mean the reluctance to engage with the consequences of Afghanistan and how you understand that across the board seems to me extraordinary as an illustration of that and the other is and this is has been referred to is the need I think Bob mentioned it absolutely Bob did mention is the need to recognize that actually those who were uniform given the fact that very often they're the ones who are most actively having to engage in what you understand war to be have a crucially important part to make in the strategic debate not in just the operational level of war debate and we may not need I'm not arguing that we need large numbers of people go back to the quantitative argument there actually a few can go a very long way yes Paul Dave I should say that I recognize everybody's recognized the ASEAN regional forum was set up in 1994 next that year Paul wrote a concert paper ASEAN regional forum a concert paper which was adopted in the Brunei meeting of ARF which outlined three stages conference building, preventive diplomacy and conflict resolution which the Chinese changed to elaboration of approaches to conflicts but he gets all credit what Des and I did was basically to elaborate on the next stage it's a camera paper so how do you move from conference building to preventive diplomacy and we did a lot of work I thought that was a key step I didn't think ARF would ever do conflict resolution of the type that we see arbitration and all that but we thought preventive diplomacy was possible we spent a lot of time publishing a book in 1999 and unfortunately we haven't moved from it yet but that's another story but full credit to you Paul I just want to make a quick point about area studies and discipline international relations and strategic studies this is a false debate this is a very American debate such debates don't exist in Asia or Europe a lot of scholars in Britain for example who do international relations do area studies and vice versa and in Asia international relations writes in the back of area studies so there is this disparaging of area studies especially IR scholars and theorists think area studies there are people who like cameras and take photographs and not do serious theory but luckily we have a trend now where it is being effectively bridged on the ground whether the funding for area studies is declining or not but it has been bridged and the people who are bridging that is like Tom Preston and Ian Johnson who are IR theorists of the highest caliber but also area specialists who study countries like China or other countries we have here people like Evelyn who does IR theory and Southeast Asia I myself do Southeast Asia and IR theory so it's being effectively bridged but not because of any like conscious movement and we need more of that scholarship especially in universities that's pure area studies just that because you don't have a dialogue unless it is comparative area studies which is a different field so I think let's hope that more and more scholars as they get trained will have one foot on the discipline and one foot on the area studies and that will be the way to go we are close to the end Dan thank you I'll be brief in response to Elliot's point I agree very strongly that politicians have to be on the front line in terms of informing the people what government policy is and then defending it but it's no good having politicians who simply stumble over a script that somebody has put in front of them more politicians have to realize that to give effective leadership they have got to know what national and international security is all about and be able to outline an intelligent position and defend it and I think that is a major responsibility for us in the think tank community Paul on your point regarding Indonesia it would be a catastrophe for us if democracy were to to fail there and it's something we have to watch very closely and your point on the role of the SD SC I agree very much that it has to be focused on national policy and needs in a way to act as a kind of public monitor where that can be done in a secure manner a public monitor of the effectiveness of our defence policy and security policies and of course one way to do this is by more of these sorts of gatherings or even smaller groups more directly related to the policy policies within government Peter Edwards puts his finger on a very tough problem because if you're interested in the history of warfare or a country's foreign policy and involvement in conflicts you do have to remember that you're part of a professional historians community and you do need to have standing in that community there is a long standing prejudice in that community that was fed particularly during the Vietnam War it's eased a bit since then but prejudice against people who do the sorts of things that you do and you doesn't and I do and the only way to cope with that is just to spend more of one's precious time showing that you're not a beast with cloven hooks a tail and horns and they will usually respond fairly well to a little bit of effort but it is frustrating that's just one of the realities of life we have to accept