 Today's talk is something that that I'm certainly interested in and I think it's something the British defence Establishment should be interested in as it sort of wrestles and grapples And re grapples with the notion of what military power is How it works how to utilise it how to deploy it? And I think this collection of essays Will be hopefully instrumental in informing the debate. So the way the way we're going to do it today. I think is Greg is going to kick off as the editor to just speak about the rationale behind the book in general and then and then talk about his contribution and then poppy and Then grant will follow on for about ten minutes each of speakers Just talking about their own particular aspects of how they see this this particular subject and its significance And then we will open up after about 40 minutes to Q&A and so those of you watching if you'd like to use a Q&A function At the bottom of your screen to input your questions, and then hopefully I can I can feed them to the presenters Usual rules apply so in the interim if you couldn't mute your Mute your speakers your microphone rather so that we don't get interference And with that said Greg you like to take it away Thanks Chris You robbed me of two years of hard time 2000 was the year that I came to the beloved shores here Thank you everybody for joining us today As Chris indicated I'm going to give a quick overview of the rationale for the book and then talk about my own chapter the book came about In many ways because of what it is that we teach and who our students are here at the Defense Academy and this was particularly the case With my teaching on the higher command and staff course if you look at the table of contents for the book the very last chapter takes us up to basically it takes us up to two years ago and That chapter was written as part of the coursework by two of the students on HCSE Chas Kenneth and Ollie Brown and both our practitioners of that all the out in Kenya with the British Army and Chas involved in typhoon and Saudi Arabian connection there of sales to typhoon to Saudi Arabia So they were well placed to be able to draw Contemporary lessons into what we provided as kind of the historical background The the motivation besides the teaching part was of course the defense engagement doctrine of 2017 Which as part of the curriculum at the Defense Academy in general We all were obliged to kind of take a look at and some of us more than others would have had to teach to it Or around it or with it Excuse me and it struck me that Well, there were a number of very kind of important flaws with this document and certainly with Ollie and Chas my My time spent was there with them was trying to Convince them that actually what that doctrine was talking about in terms of the role of defense engagement and more importantly the Expectations of outcomes was quite off-center to what you could really expect Defense engagement to do and if you thought about defense engagement more as an attribute of soft power It had a great deal of sophistication and a great deal of complexity and the ability to be used widely in different circumstances But to do things like as was claimed prevent war was Problematical to say the least in terms of crafting an application So that was where the catalyst for trying to provide a reader in some ways For those that are interested in defense engagement and it's a topic that it has found Other more contemporary commentators Kev Rowland who Rollins is on a naval captain who's on staff head of ACSC at the moment the staff college his own book on maritime defense engagement defense diplomacy is One of the more recent ones that's come out to also augment this kind of area so as an area of study and one with which Academic tools can be provided. I think it's a rich environment in that way And I think that the book proves itself to be the case because you do have a cross-pollination of history and political science and international relations theory and other types of theory that are invested in the analysis of these kind of things and So I think a multidisciplinary approach to the concept of defense engagement Deeply rooted in historical case studies is a fairly valid way to be able to produce the raw materials that then can be presented to practitioners to Validate or vindicate or to indeed test whether or not the beliefs they have at the time of its effectiveness Are corroborated by historical precedent The technology aspect to talk then briefly about my own contribution is The only contribution in the book to the Navy I put my hand up right now and say that it is missing the air domain as well as the cyber in the space of course and therefore as the only contribution to the the collection that had to do with naval power It interestingly enough is around technology and technology transfer And it's a case study that takes place in the middle of the 1930s and it's particularly apropos I think for today's Condition in the sense that you have great power competition and in this circumstance It's the relationship between Great Britain and Japan With the United States thrown in there for good measure and one of the things that's a problem Much like today when you think about British and American relations with regard to China Is that the United States and Great Britain in the 1930s? Well, at least to the mid 1930s have varying differing different views about how to approach and just exactly how much and what kind of a problem Japan is and on the British side, there is definitely a historical legacy of Cooperation collaboration and even in alignment through the Anglo-Japanese Treaty of 1902 Which is then disbanded or dissolved with the Washington Naval Conference in 1922 So the the relationship building here and the attempt to try and and create better relations in the midst of what has become a more fractured relationship between Great Britain and Japan is Usually viewed as being one of preparation for war by the Royal Navy and not one Overlia of engagement and what you get in 1934 is an opportunity and in many ways defense engagement Successful defense engagement is the ability to recognize and seize the right tools to be able to exploit an opportunity And in 1934, there's a typhoon that destroys a couple of Japanese destroyers And what the the the issue that arises from that is is that then the Japanese imperial Japanese Navy has a crisis of Confidence in its procurement and construction Capabilities because it's quite embarrassing. These are new destroyers that capsize and sink with a high loss of life So in the midst of what has grown out from 1934 with the Amman declaration where Japan is basically declaring a greater Control over China and all things to do with the Asia Pacific Which has created a higher sense of tension this opportunity comes up when the imperial Japanese Navy approaches the Royal Navy and basically asks How do you do quality assurance for your naval construction programs and in particular this type of vessel? So into the diplomatic Process goes this request and and this is now a combination of the Royal Navy as a major part of government something that probably is is A bit different to the relationship of the the the MOD to government today And of course the primacy of diplomacy being able to use and utilize this opportunity To be able to create goodwill long story short is through a number of of methods of engagement Both the Foreign Office and the Royal Navy decide that it is good to share this technical Expertise and knowledge with the Imperial Japanese Navy in order to create closer links and to create obviously a sense of of A closer relationship built on on this one episode and a return to what had previously been close relations between the Navy's because these had had drifted apart over the years So indeed the Royal Navy does give these detailed Processes and information about how to do quality assurance and quality management of construction and procurement for its shipbuilding Which the Japanese gratefully receive now? I mentioned the Americans in here because this is one of the issues in terms of at the time The United States not being favorable to such kinds of Relationship building processes between Great Britain and Japan because of the fear that Japan are a great Britain is appeasing or indeed trying to be closer to Japan than the United States would like and therefore May not be aligned as closely with American ideas about how to contain deter course Japan on a range of issues. So there's a balancing here between a close ally the United States and the need for a a Individual national security objective and that's the an interesting part of the story but the resulting outcome is the lesson really of The utility of defense engagement and actual activities within the military domain only is it of course by 1936 when this material had been handed over and visits had been made and the Japanese have now Consumed this technical advice and bettered their own systems. Well, it didn't matter At the end of the day the ideas and the concepts around how this would create closer Individual links it would create organizational links It would be a beacon around which perhaps even higher greater strategic sorts of collaboration or at least shows of goodwill Could create a different strategic environment They fell to not Because the political environment at that time particularly within the Japanese ruling elite didn't care that this Technological kind of transfer had taken place. They would use it Accept it, but it didn't change the price of fish whatsoever about their national security objectives Which was of course to grow Japanese influence and power in the region So really my chapter is a tale of the limits of such activities and indeed Like many arms sales or arms transfer technology transfers You never know what might happen to the technology you share with others in a time in a space where the belief is that you will end up being Able to reap positive rewards, but actually over time and not very much time over the you know Of course of just a couple years all of a sudden you find that actually the intelligent the technology and the Capabilities that you've shared are now actually staring at you Across the table in a not friendly fashion whatsoever and you can see where Japanese Construction methods do improve after this time But of course those ships will be better ships that will find their way into the order of battle against both the Royal Navy and the United States Navy in the not too distant future so limitations of expectations and limitations of engagement as to what it is you think you're going to be offering and Just exactly where the final outcome would lie in terms of the investment you make is What my chapter illustrates in terms of the utility of defense engagement in that condition. Thank you very much brilliant Thanks for that Greg. I Think Poppy You up next Yeah Great so my chapter then in the book focuses on Kenya in the the decades after its independence in 1963 the 1960s up to the early 1980 And particularly the role of the British defense advisors in this relationship with Kenya And that the sort of departure point for for me and thinking about this was Greg Sent round where when we think about this this the document. He's already mentioned the international defense engagement strategy from 2017 and what really struck me in reading this is that a lot of it's presented as being very new This is a new strategy, but it actually seemed incredibly familiar to me in terms of a lot of the things that they were talking about so Promoting prosperity capacity building Developing understanding and access and influence. These were all things that I really recognized from My working in Kenya at this time And so that's that sort of Part of my chapter is really pulling out actually how these things have worked in a in a historical context so the the chapter really sort of starts with independence in Kenya in 1963 and at that time Kenya has a British Sorry, it has a colonial military an army and It has British leaders of the military So there's a British commander of the army until 1966 the Navy until 1972 and the Air Force until 1973 And this is really unusual that these continue for such a long time and Kenya is also important in the 1960s for Britain Strategically as part of the East of Suez role. It's Western aligned in the Cold War And there's also an interest in protecting the white European population in Kenya I'm including with kind of military secret plans to protect them if need be And so that the result of this is a memorandum of intentional understanding in 1964 which really sets up these key benefits I'm The British get things like overflying and air staging rights and the right to train in Kenya While the Kenyans get considerable finance and equipment Including a lot of fixed assets that the British had built up over their colonial history And also the British offer a training team in Kenya and places on courses in Britain And there's a real exchange of benefits here And the British military get quite a lot from this certainly in comparison to most of their colonies in Africa But they have to also give quite a lot in order to get that So in terms of some of these these exchange of benefits Training was a really crucial way that the British tried to gain influence in the Kenyan military The Soviet Union was also making some offers and did do some training for Kenya But very quickly Britain was the main training partner Establishing a training team that was permanently stationed in Kenya until the 1970s And this Made the training in in Kenya very much British led throughout the first decade and therefore sort of further on as well and And there was also a lot of Kenyans who went to training courses in Britain and Until about 1980. This was the main place Kenya looked for training and this also Fed into the fact that Britain remained Kenya's major arms supplier after independence providing a lot of equipment as well as a lot of military aid and These two things are really interconnected as part of this longer term relationship arms would require training and Training would also encourage buying British arms. So they're very interconnected at this point. I Mean this really encouraged this kind of extended relationship and Britain provided a lot of both for Kenya and What they're what they're getting from this the reason why Kenya becomes so important Is that British troops are allowed to train there? And this was really rare among their former African colonies unlike say France, which had a lot of agreements for this The British did not have have many and Kenya was it offered various climactic conditions that were useful and Particularly after leaving east of the east of Suez roll. It was one of few Comparable facilities and Just as one example in thinking about their training for 1979 to 80 There were 10 exercises planned overseas and six of them are in Kenya So it's really the centerpiece at this point of overseas training And it's also Valuable because of the British Army training liaison staff that set up in 1971 and this is small staff that remains stationed in Kenya alongside equipment and vehicles So training becomes much Much less expensive. There's less less transportation costs and things much easier and more permanent And there was the potential for criticism with this training criticism of why a British troops training in Kenya Neocolonialism and so on. So there were attempts to mitigate this using joint training quite a lot and Exercises by the Royal Engineers building bridges medical support and so on that helped kind of Make the training seem more palatable to the Kenyan public But the Kenyan government notably remained very happy to continue hosting such training And they really raised no objections to training even when this was a lot more than the two yearly exercises that were initially set up and then the other area that that I really focus on in the book is this about advice and influence Before independence, of course, there were no need for for these kind of roles and when The Kenya Kenya was initially independent. There were so many military officers military commanders That they really had a lot of access and influence. They were they were leading the military and This really gave the British Defence Advisors who are stationed there a lot of access to Understanding the leading figures in Kenya's military the understanding its training its processes And its equipment its abilities and so on So their their reports at this time are incredibly detailed About the military readiness and training of Kenya's armed forces, and they they know this very well and This really remains until the late 1970s I mean just to give one example of you know, even 15 years after independence how how strong this relationship was In 1978 the Kenya had Ordered a lot of new equipment and really struggled with actually absorbing all of this They sort of ordered more than they have the capacity to absorb and The British Defence Advisor set up a military assistance program to help Kenya advise it and he Informally was asked by what he called a charming brigadier Who's been appointed? chief of logistics and asking The Defence Advisor could brief him on what his duties would be in this So looking to the British Defence Advisor rather than his own military for an understanding of this new role and This Defence Advisor was also invited to draft the Charters for the Chief of General Staff and the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Defence So again, he's very much being asked to shape these military roles And partly this is because of the the slow Africanization process before independence So that there hadn't been a lot of time to build up huge expertise And but it also really speaks to the level of trust that the Kenyan military placed in the British Defence Advisor This level of influence Didn't really last through the 1980s and it quite quickly started to decline As one that the new Defence Advisor said, you know, we now have to make appointments With the Department of Defence and we never used to So there is a shift and the informal Nature of this relationship does begin to decline in the early 1980s Partly this is because America becomes much more significant as a partner for Kenya And there's also a growth in the number of Defence Advisors in Kenya Which means they get treated much more formally as a group and this informality Which had characterized the earlier relations Sort of declines quite a lot Yeah, so the kind of low point of that is 1983 when the Defence Advisor cannot comment on the effectiveness of the army because he hadn't been Allowed to see any any training hadn't been into the camps So it's a hugely different position To when Britain was the British were largely doing the training and the Defence Advisor could could have pretty Wide access Nonetheless At the same time as commenting this this Defence Advisor pointed out that Britain was still really getting a lot from Kenya There were staging facilities for the RAF Moreing facilities for the Royal Navy and training for the army So even though they weren't as close it was still really worth in his idea in his view investing in the relationship And obviously this has continued to be to be true in many ways that the British army continues to train in Kenya and so the Um, as I've sort of suggested then the priorities of defence engagement from 2017 actually have a much longer history Things like capacity building with training relationships with defence sales friendly personal relations and advice and influence All come out really strongly in this this period of post-colonial Kenyan-British military relations Thank you Thank you very much Poppy And and so to the last of our contributors Uh, Geraint who I think is going to talk to us about Anglo-Egyptian relations being mediated through defence engagement Thank you Chris, and um, thank you Greg and uh, thank you Poppy. Um, what I was looking at really focuses on the area from 1967 to 1973 Involving the relationship that the defence attache and his team in the British embassy in Cairo Established with the Egyptian armed forces. This was an opportunity to hold a piece I did a few years back Quite long to well back I think on the Yonkipur war and its impact on Anglo-American relations where I'd come across The Cairo industry's reports and not just from the ambassador, but also from the the military attache there Now this is a quite an interesting period for me because this is a period of rapprochement between Egypt and Britain this would be the relationship Certainly after well the relationship has always been strained as a result of the Um, some laughably ill-named temporary occupation of Egypt and the cloud zone from 1882 to 1954 But obviously with mass and with a serious crisis and with the rivalry between Egypt and Britain over their respective spheres of influence in the Arab world This meant that you saw a fundamental transition from that state of hostility to one where There is a restoration of analytical relations in the beginning of the established the reestablishments of defence ties That have been lost when Nassir And his counterparts have seized power in the 19 of 1952 So what I have to caveat here I should add most of what practically all of what I'm doing looks at this from the British side There is an Egyptian side of this story, which I have not covered and actually also there is another Aspect here in terms of the whilst you see the establishments of this defense relationship between Egypt and Britain You see the collapse of the one that Egypt had when it's former superpower patron was so that you so in the sense this Burgling success in defense diplomacy is accompanied by a colossal failure on the part of a rival Now it matters to me because I have a bit of interest in how The United Kingdom pursued its interests in the Arab world And actually in the video in North Africa the Middle East more generally After these to suit withdrawals from 1968 to 1971 So we still have the same interests But we do not have the same leverage and the same tools of power that were came from having a formal military presence, particularly in the Persian Gulf and also a senior foreign foreign commonwealth office official there to essentially oversee Regional interests and our ties with our former protectorates with our frame United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman So if you are if you don't actually have the formal tools of military power How do you make the best of what you've got and defense diplomacy and arms transfers and military to military time become The way of trying to keep this relationship going I think it's also interesting because the fact that this is this is a case of re-establishing a relationship with a former enemy of using defense diplomacy to try and overcome You know decades of hostility and mutual suspicion And we have plenty of examples of how Britain's relations with states have collapsed over the course of collapse at its influence But this is an example where there's actually a recovery in terms of its influence With a with a quite a significant military and political power in the Arab world The starting point There is the resumption of diplomatic relations in November 1967 offer a two-year hiatus and very you know the Embassy does get an attache team headed by British Army Colonel Initially it consists just of a Royal Navy attache A commander from the from the navy and then a wing commander from the Royal Air Force joins the air attache Things start to change after September October 1970 When mass advise and the vice presidents and well, so that's becomes president But the assumption is that he is very much a sort of a transitory They go into the Smith's sort of a stopgap measure But he has his own agenda in his own views and one of them is to break ties with the Soviet Union Which he now sees as unsatisfactory and to establish A relationship with the United States because his argument is that the russians could give the arms But only the United States can give me what I really want Which is a peace deal with israel which reverses the outcome of the six-day war Reopens a serious canal and returns a Sinai to me. So in a sense actually You know the previous that's they the Egyptians don't have diplomatic relations with the americans If you don't have a relationship with the americans, you go to the next best option, which in this case is in british So one of the turning points here is in july 1971 when the naval attache commander john marriott Receives an invitation from the egyptian chief of the armed forces major general sarf Our chasley Now given the fact that up until that point Attaches have been more or less confined to Cairo and alexandria and have been constantly being shadowed by the egyptian muck over at the internal security police. This is quite a Interesting change and marriott was very well received by chasley who told him that he wanted to see the Restrictions imposed on that attache's removed And he also wanted to see egypt by british kit not being reliant on sobit and sobit block hitters. They've been up until that point So you see the starting point here, which is where actually they're the There's the beginning of an egyptian british military relationship The head of the the chief of naval operations major Sorry, admiral ashram mohammed Is invited to the royal navy exhibition at greninj, and is also invited to the royal naval college except it is the first big egyptian military mission visited in britain since 1956 A year after or about about a year after the chasley meets marriots So that announces the expulsion of the soviet military presence. So all the advisors The autonomous military units that have been sent there in the aftermath of the six-day war to bolster the egyptian defense So that sends them all packing And this is you know gets into the air gets the attention of The british government particularly of the prime minister edward heath and the foreign secretary. So i had to do this human And their argument is If the russians are going we now have a golden opportunity to reinforce this growing relationship We have with the egyptians given their influence in the arab world given their position of leadership This is yeah, this is a great opportunity to capitalize on And this is an attitude that the chief that the attaches themselves have they have the free attaches at this time colonel toni lewis John merit. We command the date of barnacote to the rf officer. They are at the forefront of pushing for Reestablishments of the defense ties defense sales sending egyptians onto the uk military courses. They're pushing this and they are very very keen to see it developed There are however some problems the chiefs of staff asking back in london is that The problem we get these there's nearly there's an intelligence side here Even if the russians are going the chances are that over the course of time their intelligence services the kgb And the gru military intelligence They must have recruited some agents on the ground to report them. They must have recruited and spawn Egyptians so if we sell them advanced weaponry Then that's a security risk And a further problem here involves the arabis rady aspects The british do not want to do anything that can broke the resumption of hostilities because like you can see An array of nasty things happening ranging from an oil embargo And an order to a superpower Standoff as the united states and the soviet union back their respective partners So the other point here of course is that if the british seem to sell weaponry that boldens the egyptians to resume hostilities That's going to have implications for the anglo-american special relationship as well so Part the problem here is there that although the attache's are Advocates for arms sales The problem is that the egyptians want stuff That the british are not prepared to sell in particular the jaguar ground attack aircraft which has ranged to strike targets in israel So whilst there is you know the beginning of the process in practice there are a lot of constraints on the extent to which the british can provide Equipment to the egyptians there are two deals that are in place for the rapier short range surface-to-air missile system And also the sea king anti-submarine warfare helicopter But these then get cancelled after the outbreak of the yon kippur war when the heave government announces a complete arms embargo in the sales It's all in big deliverance So there's no real conclusion here. I think it's an excellent point with you to say that you know that they are virtually There appears to have been genuinely in a good will on part of the egyptians and a genuine willingness to forgive and forget And to establish close ties with british and to put all the baggage of the past behind them And there were opportunities in this respect to try and rebuild that relationship But there were a lot of practical constraints and the anglo-american aspect in this regard was quite substantial But the irony is that once the main constraints to british arms sales is removed when egypt signs a peace deal with israel It then means that the americans then become the main arms suppliers to egyptian army because They obviously know that that kit will not be used against israel. So they then become the main suppliers of weaponry to the egyptian armed forces So that window of opportunity was very very narrow indeed It didn't really and by the time The opportunity was there to exploit it uncle sam effectively steps in So that in short is what i've hoped i contributed to this volume because i think it'd be interesting to look at an example of the constraints of using defense diplomacy as a way of Affecting essentially a reconciliation with a form of foe. Thank you very much indeed Oh brilliant, uh, thank you very much to the uh the three contributors i think From my perspective a pretty sort of balanced Offering in that sense. I think greg and his description of the the anglo-japanese naval relationship and local initiatives by the royal navy To cooperate with its, uh, its japanese brethren in that respect Undermined by broader sort of broader strategic climate and broader strategic failings and then conversely i think poppy showing how you know the avenues of defense engagement really cementing the relationship between britain and newly and increasingly independent kenya although slightly time sensitive i think as it goes on And then and then garaint are sort of a half and half really um the way in which the the british Defense engagement initiatives provide a key avenue of approach to egypt at this very difficult time but The way in which is sort of the macro strategic climate prevents that relationship from flowering necessarily as both sides would want One side in terms of arms supplies And the other side obviously is The recipient of those that being one of the one of the key tensions in britain having to be very mindful of its alliances uh in the region in the form of israel um So from that point of view to you know to my mind genuinely and i think potentially then if that's representative of the Of the sort of range of offerings in the book as a whole you know across all of the contributions I think You know that's a hugely nuanced Sort of a set of examples as to how this functions in the in the real world And how governments benefit or indeed fail to benefit from the use of When we say military power in a in a sort of an indirect and rather oblique form in furthering national national interest um, so I mean it falls to me in the absence of any Questions as far as I can tell having having been asked I suppose I have a few For the panel and and and feel free to answer in any in edu or do you like and cards on the table I wrote a sort of uh, and I say as an article is more of a blog piece a couple of months ago in the in the wavel room, which I think garage already aware of which was fairly skeptical of this this notion of of soft power as As an easily wieldable method of national influence in the sense that for example I noted in uh earlier this year penny mordant a former defense secretary and former former minister minister in in charge of diff it gave a speech That chatham house on britain's soft power Potential going forwards and and not at one point in the hour long speech Did she mention britain's military? russi in june Talking about britain's soft power future at no point in that report. Did it mention The military one one area why I did see the military mentioned was in a parliamentary report on uh persuasion and power in the in the modern world Which took the british defense engagement in me and mar in 2014 As uh as an example of how well this sort of thing can work in practice in allowing a A a regime military to transition to being good actors As it were and of course what we see afterwards Is an attempted genocide of the rohingya of the hands of the very same military that the british sought to To train and so my question to i'm supposed to greg then as the editor i mean you you spoke i think you speak in the book of understanding power in the round In a sense and defense engagement being part of this as as part of the articulation of of national national power And I suppose my question is i know the military british military establishment is very keen to talk about power in the sense of narratives and audiences and influence and information and a delicate adjustment of Sort of political realities and sentiments and everyone's talking about language and you can see where Things like defense engagement and soft power Fit into that in a theoretical sense, but do you get the sense that the government understands what soft power is, what it means, and more importantly where the military or militaries fit into this. On the first part, I think the standard assessment here of soft power has got to do with things like Oxford and Cambridge road scholarships, exporting of values and ethics, the BBC, all that kind of the traditional tools of the trade. In terms of the understanding of the military and that the military could be anything other than hard power, absolutely not, I mean the level of sophistication of the understanding of the application of military power here by governments, this one previous, is not complex nor is it overly well thought out. So I think that within perhaps the, and this is why you see many of the initiatives that are light defense engagement are derived and driven by the actual practitioners, the MOD themselves, trying to educate up. Part of it also is a make a job for yourself, I mean, I don't think it'll come as any surprise that under the pressure of the budgets and the cuts and all the rest of it, the army is trying desperately to make sure it has a role and a job, and if one of those things going back to what Poppy, in particular, was talking about in terms of it, you look now about the talk of moving the tank training and all the stuff out of Canada now back again into Kenya or other parts of Africa, yeah, I mean, that is a traditional way to do things. So, you know, the whole kind of question about their ability to conceptualize, no, because they don't understand what military power is in all of its facets and all of the fashions that it can be actually applied. I'm sorry to say that I don't see the government and the civil service having the same level of sophistication as actually the military does in terms of understanding itself. And therefore, if the military is the one that has to put forward these things, well, then people in the Treasury or the foreign officer, FCOD or whatever it is now, you know, all of these places will see it as nothing more than kind of self and grandizement and job creation on the rest, even though, you know, it is legitimately explaining the utility of military power to them. So, it's a real vicious circle I see right now in terms of being able to get the most out of what it is that you could practically expect, Chris. Thanks. Yeah, Gaurang? I think what strikes me about looking at my own case study was how much consciousness there was from, you know, from the Cairo Embassy right up to Whitehall about how military power could be used in that role. So, the attachés noted, for example, that Egyptian officers who were senior enough to have actually had experience being trained by the British before 1955 actually had some very good, professed to have very fond memories of working with their British counterparts, or certainly they said they preferred them to the Russians. And so, there was a sense that we could actually use these, you know, that we could use training in particular and exchanges between a senior military officer and the meetings to actually facilitate this. Looking at it from the cabinet level, one of the things about the response of Heath and Douglas Hume take is that whilst they're obviously there are other complaints coming from the Chiefs of Staff about the potential security implications of selling kits that might be compromised, their attitude is that the bigger picture, the bigger strategic picture of undermining Soviet influence and helping to build up Western influence in a crucial country in the Arab world trumps those concerns. That, yes, okay, it may be that there may be webwaves of mitigating the security risk, but their argument is do not be so fixed on sort of the traditional concerns here because we could potentially get a bigger payoff. So, there is a strategic rationale for what they're doing. And it's also using arms transfers for political effects, rather than just thinking, oh, will it be nice to sell some kits and actually get some help boost our exports, although those concerns are still there. So, that I think is quite interesting that there is that sort of the sense that, you know, what are we trying to achieve here and how can we use this leverage to best effect. So, in that sense, I think that this thinking certainly does exist at the time, whether it's a difference between generations or what have you, who knows. Perhaps another interesting thing for me in particular which I think is worth noting is the position of the foreign secretary. Now, Bubbles Hume had been one of the hawks during the Suez crisis. As Prime Minister during his brief premiership from 63 to 64, he had overseen COVID action in North Yemen directed against the Egyptian occupation force. So, even though he had had a reputation as an anti-NASA hawk, he adjusted very, very quickly to the idea of rapprochement. So much so that he had quite a striking grasp of his own statecraft in that regard, that whilst he was probably not one of our best prime ministers, although I certainly wouldn't say he's our worst Etonian prime minister, but he does have a considerable amount of knowledge of statecraft, which I think stands in the good stead in this regard. That's me out. I don't know, Poppy, if you have any opinions on any of that? Sorry, go on. I think I'd agree with a lot of what Grant was saying there, that in the Kenyan case, there's always a part of a bigger relationship, and it always fits in with other objectives. You can see sometimes this very explicitly, so the case that comes to mind is in 1973, when the British government as a whole is really worried that Kenya is about to expel the Asian population in the way that Idi Amin had just done in Uganda. And the Kenyans are also at the same time approaching the British in terms of buying arms from them. And these connections are explicitly raised by the Kenyans and the British in these arms negotiations, that the attitude towards arms will affect the attitude, the Kenyan attitude towards their Asian population. And so this, the military, the defence engagement side, is always, you know, sort of tilting other aims at the same time. It is being thought about in this much wider political context, I think, in the Kenyan case. We have, I don't know if the panel can see the question that has been asked. So in terms of research and defence engagement, is it possible to identify measurable variables can you suggest some? Do we mean variables or metrics? I'm not quite sure on that. But if any of you would like to have a stab at answering that, that would be greatly appreciated. Yeah, that's a good goal. So I can't see that one actually. Chris, can you read it again? I'm seeing the other one. So the question is, in terms of researching defence engagement, is it possible to identify measurable variables? Can you suggest some? Yeah, so one of the measurable variables, I suppose, the very simple one, is whether or not the action has an influence that is measurable through economics. So does it change budget? Does it change the allocation of staff? Does it change the way in which things are organised? So in that, there are a number of things you can start to do. And this gets, I mean, one of the things that Grant and Poppy are talking about, and actually most of the chapters in this book do talk about, is that this is a perception and it is an individual, it is a person-to-person thing. It's about individual relationships. It's about perceptions of outcomes or perceptions and beliefs of aims, objectives, and also trying, you know, the measurable in terms of the actual effect. So if you go to your effects-based doctrine, obviously one of the, you know, one of the problems about effects-based is exactly that. And that's why it fell out of fashion is the whole thing about being able to measure the effect. But I would say that, yes, you can. And I mean, you can measure it in fiscal sense. Do you see budgets or do you say funding diverted from other things to what it is that you are fixing on? So is it training? Is it staff college spots so that you're getting a higher number of those interactions? Is it, you know, the easy one is, of course, basic straight-up procurement. Did I buy? Did I spend billions of pounds? In many of those cases, it's not the military capability. It's the associated political connectivity. And this is one of the reasons why I would argue that there's a league table for, of course, technology. If you buy American kit, not only do you get best technology, you get American influence or you get American umbrella. If it was from the British while you're below, if it's the Germans, you're getting good kit, but you don't come with much political clout. The Russians, the Chinese, you're going to get a lot of kit. And it might be good, it might need not, but you're not sure just exactly what the political kind of influence is that you're going to get in the aftermath of that. So the variables you can measure, but what those variables mean is not as clear. And that is where you really have to start digging into the kinds of things about who's making decisions based on what kind of outcomes, what effects are they trying to do. So it's, it is not that easy for in terms of, you know, the quantum. Yeah. I mean, there's the reminder of a classic quote someone came up with in Vietnam, you know, when you can't measure what's important, you tell you what you can measure and make that important. Can I let you answer the next question then, if that's right? Can I come in quickly with something that talks about this issue of how are you measuring effects? From my side with this subject, one of the things was it was very difficult for the attachés in particular to get somebody to hold on exactly what they were achieving. The only things that one thing that was measurable was how their role was changing. So at the start of the period, I was discussing their main role, their intelligence gatherers, and in particular, they're two questions they need to answer. One, are the Egyptians likely to go to war with Israel again? And two, can they get eyes on Soviet kit and can they get photographs and can they get other forms of technical information from them? By the end of this period, they're saying in their reports that the intelligence angle has vanished, particularly because the Soviets have vanished. But now what's more important is defence engagement, that it's arranging for Egyptian officers to go on British courses, arranging for demonstration teams from British industries to come to test it, to show off their kits to Egyptians to see if they're interested in it. So their role, the fact their role fundamentally changes, although it doesn't provide a qualitative measurements, it is quite important in that regard. But they do miss things. One point is that the war minister, General Ahmed Sadik, keeps emphasising the fact that there is a pro-Soviet clique, still within the Egyptian hierarchy, which is agitating to essentially get back into the lives of the Soviets. On the 24th of October, 1972, Sadat fires him. The British have a bit of a panic about this, particularly the attaché team and the defence sales team back in the MOD. And they think, have we missed our opportunity here? Because, Sadek's firing, is this a sign that actually the Egyptians are now going to move back into the Soviet orbit? Is it a missed opportunity for us to develop our ties? And the answer to that question is actually, when he comes down to it, no. Sadek got fired because he told Sadat that the Egyptian armed forces were not ready to go to war with Israel. And Sadat basically said, well, if you're going to give me that answer, I'm going to point somebody who can give me, say yes, because obviously this was part of his strategy leading up to the outbreak of the Yom Lippor War. So it's interesting in that regard is that a certain degree of ethnocentrism corrects him here. British said, they must be all about us. If Sadek's gone, it's us. No, it's not. It's about Israel and it's about the preparations for war. No, that's fine. I mean, the following two questions in a sense, I think, are related. So the first of these is a good point, well made. We're discussing the 30s, the 60s, the 70s, when Britain's armed forces were significantly sized. And so we have a defence engagement that can be conducted as a secondary activity whilst the bulk of your military is directed at facing off the Soviets. So whereas nowadays, the argument could be that is the defence engagement valuable enough to become a principle justification for our military or even for the roles of some particular units. But then that feeds into the third question here, Ashley, one of our own, which is that the military labour under the delusion that defence engagement is directly instrumental in nature, or that it should be, that it's about things like upstream capacity building. And in reality, all it's about is really keeping doors open. What you actually do when you get through the door is immaterial. The fact that the door is open is the most important thing, and that allows other forms of influence to be pushed through and to work at different levels. So I wondered if you had any of you sort of a response to either of those questions? Yeah. I mean, the point, I think these are all very important points. I mean, one's about the idea of, you know, what do you get out of these defence engagements? I mean, Poppy's point about Nanyuki in Kenya, I think it's quite important, because this is one of the only places you can train in hot Savannah terrain, if you're British, to be able to do that is useful. To be able to go to Oman to do exercise, save Saria is useful, because it gives you the opportunity to train in a desert environment and find out things about whether your kit has particular problems functioning in that environment where it's been designed for more temperate European climates. Another point that comes out of Operation Orbital in Ukraine is that what I understand is that there's a certain, sorry, this is with reference to the British Army training team out there, is that this is an opportunity for a two-way process of an exchange of information, because the Ukrainians are fighting the Russians, and they are learning things about how the Russians fight. And that, of course, is something that is of interest, certainly from that, you know, flash from all three services, but from an army perspective in particular. The point is about keeping open doors. I think it's very, it is a very interesting, relevant one that's actually trying to keep the relationship going. But I think that part of the problem there is that there is the question of the survivability of that relationship in Malta. I've reminded very much of what happened with the Americans training Iraqi military personnel, particularly training officers, during the occupation of Iraq in the northeast, and certainly when they were, you know, they were Iraqi officers who were skilled and showing real promise as, you know, competence at their job, having non-sectarian attitudes being focused on the other, you know, had a sense of national patriotism about them, and they were good at what they did. And the Americans wrote up their reports, they were training them, or if they were mentoring them, and then Maliki probably sacked them and replaced them with stumblebums who were just basically, you know, by and large, with people who were appointed because of their political loyalty to him, rather than their actual competence. So you can, this is all right because the Americans thought, in many respects, they were doing these guys a favor by emphasizing qualities which to them matter, which is, can they actually do their job? Whereas Maliki's consideration was, these people loyal to me. So you can find that the process that you will go into a relationship with your own mindsets, thinking this is what we need to do to establish it and to strengthen it, and then that all gets torn apart because of the host nation governments and its own attitudes. Poppy or Greg, did you have anything to say? Yeah, I mean, I'd really agree with Ashley's point in the questions that it's a lot of the time in Kenya, it's about keeping wider doors open, keeping more general influence. And it's often, you know, it is aimed at certain needs. So the Kenyans need to kind of Africanize their military, they need to train up. But it's not always very easy to see what the impact of any of that is going back to this point about what you can measure. One of the interesting suggestions that's made about the fact that so many Kenyans are trained in Britain is that this is part of a reason why Kenya doesn't have any successful coups. And yet at the same time, there are plenty of British trained officers who lead coups, Idi Amin, for example. So it's very difficult to measure what the actual impact of this training is. And a lot of the time I think it is very much just about the wider benefits of the relationship and how it fits into that. Greg, did you want to have a go at the final question? I'll do that. But I just wanted to come back to Ashley's and the one above that, the comment that this is when militaries are much far larger, the interwar British army is not a much far larger thing. So, and even in the Cold War, the whole kind of idea about size and scale, this is particularly if you look pre-1941, any of the activities of the British army in this regard are really worthwhile case studies to be looked at. The question about, you know, Ashley's thing about the open door, this is, and then the bottom question about should you have dedicated units, the dedicated unit is called the foreign office. It used to understand military power. It used to add people that could have intellectual, theoretical, and actually practical conversations. And indeed, these were the people that were part of, you know, massive amounts of disarmament conferences that are on the go or peace conferences, all kinds of these things. And they actually understood the military domain. So I would argue that, you know, the disconnect is, I would argue, in this British system today is the fact that the foreign commonwealth development office is all about trade and commerce and trying to do what you used to do with the board of trade. And it's lost its connectivity to being understanding and cognizant of the fact that diplomacy and statecraft is intimately linked to all types of power and military power is one of those. So I would say that under its present condition, no, the British MOD should not be having dedicated specialist units that do defense engagement. Actually what it should be doing is lobbying for the foreign office to actually do its job. The last point would be on then Israel and defense engagement of Israel. The masters of defense engagement, one could argue, given the fact that they don't really export and they don't really go places. This is a very interesting kind of way of thinking about this defense engagement issue in terms of Israel, which is about demonstration, about perception management. Certainly it's all about the information operation element of defense engagement from mythologies of weapons systems, you know, the iron dome and the murk of a tank to, you know, the mystique of Mossad. It's because the whole idea about military power is integral to the state. And the state understands its relationship very, very clearly in terms of the utility of military power. So I would argue that actually what you're seeing from the Israeli condition is not defense engagement. It's the utilization of defense across the spectrum, which other countries we would like to emulate. But of course we can't because we're not Israeli. We don't have Israeli governments. We don't have Israeli national security condition. So the Israeli case, I would argue, you know, has a certain uniqueness that doesn't lend itself or make it an easy comparator to what it is that the Western states of the UK or France, Germany, America, Canada style would do. And that has got to do with the nature of the state and its relationship to military power. I think we come to the end. A nice bit of validation at the end there from Piotra who'd like a copy of the work to be sent. I'm sure we can arrange that. So it just remains for me to say thank you to the participants for their time and effort. And thank you for those of you as well who've tuned in. Hopefully you found it as interesting as I did. So yeah, and hopefully some little flower in terms of total sales and fame and fortune awaits all of you, hopefully. So well done. Thank you. And yeah, I hope everyone enjoyed it. Cheers. Thanks very much to Danny for all the help and pop your name. Thank you both for the chapter's end for coming on board with the project and Chris. And thank you all of the audience for taking the time to be with us here today. And hopefully we'll do some more of these from DSD in the future now that we're all living remote. Thank you. Thank you very much, everyone. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Cheers.