 Welcome. The topic for this session is what do lessons from history tell us about the future of war? And to help us explore this topic we have three not polymaths but technically polyhistories. Historians who have thought long and hard about the relationship between war, statecraft and strategy. Dr. Ian Morris of Stanford University is the author most recently of War What Is It Good For? Sir Lawrence Friedman of Kings College London. His most recent book is Strategy of History. And Philip Bobbet of Columbia Law School is the author of The Shield of Achilles and a recent groundbreaking study of Machiavelli, the garments of court in palace. I'm going to start with Dr. Morris. As an archaeologist as well as a historian, you've taken truly the big picture approach from the ice age to the industrial era and come up with some paradoxical thinking about the relationship between war and politics. Could you explain? Yeah, sure. There's this famous saying that Winston Churchill is supposed to have said although no one has ever been able to trace it back to an actual source. He said, the farther you can look back, the farther forward you're able to see. And I've always felt that even if he didn't say it, this is the sort of thing he should have said. I think it's true. I guess it seems to me there's two big ways of trying to learn lessons from history about the future. One is what I think of as the grab bag approach where you've got an idea in your head you kind of already know what you think is going to happen. And then you look for analogies and you look for, say, one or two cases which kind of agree with what you think. And then the other way, which is the way I try to do it, is to say, well, if you take as much history as possible by which, like you say, 15,000 years going back to the end of the ice age across the whole planet, can we see really big trends? Can we see the overall shape of history? And if we can see that, can we figure out what the forces are that have been driving this storyline? And so this is basically what I try to do in my work. And in this book on war, I came to three main conclusions, I think, about the lessons that we might draw from this. And one is a sort of, like I said, a sort of paradoxical conclusion, which is that we're trespassing slightly now into the territory of the next panel where Stephen Ping is going to be talking. I think one of the big trends in world history has been declining rates of violent death, that if we'd lived in the Stone Age, we would be ten times likelier to die violently than we are today, which is a huge transformation. But I think that the great paradox of this story is that the force that's driven this, like Hobbes recognized in the 17th century, has been the rise of states and governments that kind of raise the costs for people of using violence. You ask me a difficult question, we get into an argument, I pull out a knife and cut your throat, I'm going to pay a price for this. And in the world we now live in, there's no way the benefits from murdering you, because you asked a question I couldn't answer, are ever going to be greater than the costs I will pay for doing it. So we are people in the modern world that are complex powerful governments have learned not to use force very much to settle their arguments compared to what went on through most of history. And so I think the big force has been the rise of great powerful states making it more and more difficult for people to use violence to get what they want from the world and people have started to use violence less. But that is a very broad conclusion. I think one potential implication is we maybe can afford to be optimistic and think this trend might continue across the next century. But I think a couple of other general lessons I thought we could draw from this big story. One is about the small wars that we've seen so much of in the last 20, 25 years. And I think this is not a new phenomenon. I think any time you get a great power that really dominates the stage it operates on and raises the costs of using violence for other competitors you tend to see a lot less interstate warfare. This is true say of the Roman Empire. True to some extent to the British world system in the 19th century. The costs of using violence go up. Potential rivals near peers are less inclined to use violence but you still get lots of small actors or asymmetrical actors saying well yeah of course the great power could come and crush us completely but they're not going to. I mean they're not going to nuke us. They're not going to put 100,000 troops on the ground to crush us so we're going to give it a try and see what happens. And I think you see some very similar patterns in the later Roman Empire in the late 19th century with the British as to what we've seen in the last couple of decades. And then the final thing though, the final conclusion I felt I could come to was about great wars and because a lot of people have been saying well we're in an age now where great power war is just off the table. Never going to happen. And I would say that the long-term lessons of history don't point in that direction. One thing again we see over and over again is when you get a truly great power dominating the stage it operates on one of the things you see happening is that it kind of creates its own rivals. It creates this peaceful international scene which allows space for other groups to become powerful and wealthy. Create your own rivals. I think British very much did this with Germany and the US in the late 19th century and I noticed yesterday when people were talking about potential threats facing the US there were names of one or two countries that conspicuously never got mentioned so perhaps this is some rule we're all supposed to abide by. I won't say what the obvious candidates are for the great powers we have helped create. But I think you can perhaps see something rather similar happening again now in the early 21st century. The success of the US in creating this world scale system of free trade has created new rivals to the US. And if the script of history does rerun itself I think one thing we'll see is people increasingly losing confidence in the ability of the Leviathan to continue playing the role of Leviathan. Being more and more tempted like a Germany a hundred years ago more and more tempted to try to solve their problems by violence. And if that is the way things go then I think the trend toward a more peaceful world might not be in fact a permanent one. Well thank you Sir Lawrence in your book Strategy you have an interesting definition of strategy as the art of creating power and in connection with that what do you think are lessons if any of history for strategy? Okay well first on the lessons of history I don't think history isn't a syllabus. People don't do things for didactic purposes. They do things because they have choices and they make decisions and things turn out in particular ways. So my approach is that you can learn from history but don't claim that history has lessons that are universal that can guide every action. Second point just relating to the topic of what does it teach us about the future of war. The problem of any attempt to determine the future of war and there's been some spectacular failures in the past when people have attempted to discern the future of war and that's one thing a historian can tell you is that people keep on getting it very wrong is because it depends on choices that are being made or have not yet been made. We're not destined to a particular future. There are forces at work, there are structures, there are demographic trends there are material limitations but we have choices and we have decisions and that's what strategy comes in. So my approach to strategy and again this comes from having written a very large history of it is that one of the things you look at is sometimes strategies are successful sometimes they're not but the unintended consequences are often as important as the intended consequences that if people said, you know, when you're told any of you are being told we must have a strategy the first thing you're probably said is describe what you're trying to achieve and then work out how to achieve it but actually very rarely do you achieve what you set out to achieve because things happen people you're dealing with have their own strategies it becomes a model and you suddenly see an opportunity that you didn't realise was there before so you often do something else and so actually strategy is a process of adoption a good strategy seems to be about adoption and flexibility and being aware that the things that you weren't expecting are going to be as important as the things that you were expecting so that leads into the idea well, first we want ideas of the book which is that don't think of strategy as a plan because the idea of a plan is a series of sort of sequential steps that takes you to where you want to be but doesn't actually allow for people who are actively trying to disrupt your plan and have got their own plans and the famous Von Malker quote of no plan survives contact with the enemy or my favourite, the Mike Tyson quote everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the throat so instead of thinking about plans you've got to think about it as something much more active and engaged with others so the definition of the art of creating power comes out of, I think, attention in the use of the word power so when we talk about somebody's being powerful we normally talk about that in terms of assets we've got great military strength, great economic strength soft power everybody thinks you're terribly interesting and wishes to emulate you or whatever soft power is and then there's a specific application so what I'm interested in with strategy is the specific applications where your general power may turn out to be absolutely useless to the circumstances in which you find yourself despite the fact that you've called yourself powerful so the strategy is the difference looking at an encounter between what you might expect just looking at the relative balance of the general power and actually what transpires strategy is the value added if you like what makes the difference and I found this is a reasonably serviceable definition but you have to have a particular view of power to make it work so that's why you need to read the book just another point that comes from that what makes for good strategy again historically I would argue there's a great tendency amongst people interested in strategy to want to be clever and cunning this is why Sun Tzu is so popular because he's basically saying you can outsmart your enemy even if he's bigger than you which is fine unless your opponent has also read Sun Tzu and then you never engage at all because you're doing indirect approaches and you go off in opposite directions so my view is if you just look back is what makes the difference is coalitions, alliances if you're not as strong as somebody else find somebody to work with you who can build you up and I think in this country it's important to stress this because actually what makes the United States the great power it is is its network of alliances take that away and why would the United States be bothering with a lot of the things it's doing and the reason that the United States is a more important power in China is China doesn't have a network of alliances nor is it likely to develop one so you need to look at coalition and alliances to understand the potential of strategy so just a sort of final observation seeing Ian started with Churchill I'll end on Churchill we always have to quote Churchill at least once if you want to be positive you quote Churchill if you want to be negative you quote Hitler we just can't escape from the Second World War but Churchill when he came to power in terrible circumstances in May 1940 and looked at the predicament that Britain was in he didn't have an end point at the time but basically the issue of survival and endurance and we've got to remember that a lot of strategy is nothing about setting out yourself great initiatives that you're going to achieve it's just hanging in there and that was what strategy was about but in the long term the first thing he did was to make contact with President Roosevelt which his predecessor had notably failed to do and when Pearl Harbor happened he said so we have won you hadn't won there was time to go but now a coalition had been formed that was not going to be beaten and when Hitler I mean strategy 101 don't invade Russia when Hitler did it and this great anti-Bolshevik found himself so ribbed in the House of Commons he said if Hitler had invaded Hades I'd have a good word to say to Satan in the House of Commons he understood the importance of coalition and I think if there's one point that the book tries to bring out is sometimes you can outsmart your opponent sometimes being cleverer works but actually by and large getting more strength than they have is a pretty good recipe and the best way to do that if you start off is to find a friend well you make that point in your book where you quote the Bible saying the race goeth not to the swift nor the battle to the strong and then you quote the American writer Damon Runyon who said but that's where the smart money is that's the way to bet Professor Bob it what do you think the main feature of the future of war will be it will be surprising and I say that not because the future is unpredictable which it is or uncertain which it is in fact I say that because that is what is predictable and certain the future of warfare will be surprising for two reasons one a general reason that's always true and then one specific to this generation the general reason is that because we cannot even a country as wealthy as ours defend against every vulnerability we try and defend those vulnerabilities that are likely to be attacked or perhaps those whose loss would be most significant for us by doing that we push our adversaries into unexpected areas they attack us in those arenas where we least expect it because we have defended those areas where we most expect to attack so the future of war will be surprising in January 2001 the Hart Rudman commission gave its final report it's hard to imagine a more distinguished group of people a very sophisticated group with quite a wide array of advisors the report missed global networked terror completely the report missed hybrid warfare the mix of insurgency terrorism cyber war and conventional war that tends to sort of paralyze alliance structures which Professor Friedman was very right to stress the report missed the fragility of our financial institutions and the fact that our increasing wealth is tied to our increasing vulnerability why? because in each of those areas America's strengths had pushed our adversaries into unexpected areas into novel alliances of their own novel arrangements, novel points of attack so the eternal reason is war will be surprising because we make it surprising and that should be no surprise the specific reason for the generation of young people I see in the room here is that we do live as you so often hear at a pivotal moment but what you rarely hear is why it is pivotal for the last hundred and fifty years or so we have lived in the constitutional order of industrial nation states this is an order conceived and innovated by Lincoln in this country by Bismarck in Germany a constitutional order that challenged the imperial states of the 19th century and it also dominated for a more than a century if you think that you live in nation states that are Westphalian states that were basically founded in 1648 then I think you are living in a delusion that will blind you to what is really novel what is really pivotal about this time we do not live in kingly states the constitutional order that originated at Westphalia that was ratified by those two treaties we do not live in princely states the first modern states that preceded kingly states we do not live in imperial states or territorial states we live in industrial nation states and their pedigree is not as ancient or as distinguished as we pretend once you freed your mind from the idea that the constitutional order is eternal in the modern era you will be more sensitive to see what changes are underway now that are bringing about a change in that order and what the new order will look like you will see a state that is more devolved or decentralized more favorable to nationalism outsources and privatizes its activities that is global and that is networked this is partly a consequence of changes in warfare but it will also drive changes in warfare and warfare from the 21st century will be more devolved decentralized more networked more informational more outsourcing more privatized and more global it will also be more nationalistic and more ethnic those shouldn't be surprising to us except that we we don't expect it none of the really important books on the future of the 21st century that were written into the 20th century even discuss the state the state is held constant and just the furniture of economics and representation is moved around most of the time that's a wise assumption but it won't be true now things will be changing in a way that is both surprising and momentous well thank you I think what is interesting from all of these comments is the omission of what are usually thought of as lessons of history for foreign policy of the kind that are frequently invoked here in Washington DC where we have what I think of as the Potomac School of History with four lessons there's the lesson of Sarajevo which is that world wars can start completely by accident there's the lesson of Munich which is you can never negotiate there's the lesson of Vietnam which is escalation will lead to a quagmire and then the fourth lesson is that all adversaries are just like Hitler that's the instrumental promiscuous way to use or rather abuse history in policy debates you know if you're addressing policy makers and we'll go in reverse order because it's not that you're going to leave history out of debate it's already in there the conception of where we are is there a way that policy makers who are not academics can think in a clear way other than simply reaching for this metaphor or that metaphor you know ransacking the past to start in reverse order with Professor Bobbitt well I think there is of course but your approach to this I think is wiser than am I telling you how to do it how not to do it seems to me to be the better part of wisdom here we reach for analogies and metaphors to shore up the ideas that we already have and that's fine that's a natural form of language but then we can reach into the same toolbox and extract lessons for the future is an idle pursuit any time you hear someone say history teaches us that you should look at your watch think about your wife and your husband I wonder what your children are up to but you need pay any further attention Professor Friedman Professor Friedman you're exactly right that when people talking about the lessons of history they mean Munich and what actually they're doing is saying I really don't think we should be talking to the Iranians gosh this reminds me of Munich and then it's as useful as the Chamberlain in terms of time saying this reminds me of how the Union dealt with secession because that's the distance between the two as if there's no other interesting diplomatic history between 1938 and now that we could look to to understand how you might deal with it but that's not what they're trying to do it's basically a shorthand for making a point it's not actually using history situations draw comparisons if you do that it can be quite interesting there's a book that just come out of Harvard because a year ago people were saying this is 1914 what's going to produce a great war in 2014 why? it could be the United States and China and Prime Minister Abbey was foolish enough to make the comparison so Harvard's produced a book with lots of distinguished people on the first war writing very interesting stuff about the first world war about which there is no consensus about how it started and why well it's actually quite different so it's perfectly sensible conclusion but it's not very exciting but it does illuminate the differences what you want policymakers to do with history is read it find out about the places they're about to invade people have been there before and had trouble that's what history is good for context background you don't have to say what the British experienced in the early 20s is how the last century is how the Americans are going to experience Iraq now but at least know that these things happened and it's part of the memory of those countries and the culture of those countries so rather than you know ram sack history to find examples as Philip suggested that support whatever position you'd come to beforehand anyway taking events out of context learn do your learning from history by reading it and actually investing the time to understand the particularities of situations and the choices that people made can I come back to my starting point that just going back to 1914 big review of all the different books on 1914 what you come down to is absolutely terrible decision making people had choices and they made the wrong ones you couldn't predict that if they'd be faced with a similar set of choices but a year later that it probably turned out different but that's how it happened at the time that sort of thing that you can do from just learning your history Professor Morris, should there be a historical Hippocratic oath do you know harms by misusing history all the historians would have been fired by now if we had that I think my learned colleagues have already the smart points about this so I can be pretty brief logicians will often say there's two kinds of analogies you can make when you're comparing things one is the formal analogy which I think is the sort of thing you are both casting aspersions on where you say oh god it's always 1938 we are always across the table from Adolf Hitler therefore we must do X whatever my chosen pet rock happens to be we must do that but not always a very good way to proceed then the second way they'll say is what they'll call a relational analogy where instead of saying you go to the past to plunder it for the example that supports my case you'll say you go to the past to try to see how things fit together, what the relations were and you'll be as interested in the differences as in the similarities and so maybe you will want to talk about 1938 but you say well how is our situation here different from what Chamberlain and Hitler were confronting are there things we could do which Chamberlain didn't do which will lead to a better outcome that's the way I think we should be thinking about history but again it does sort of come back to the point that Lawrence was making that you need to know some history to do this you can't just go with the four points in Potomac School of History we've got time for some questions any questions from the audience yes way in the back if we could get a microphone there Mohamed Binou with Humanize Global this question might be a follow-up on what Mr. Bobbitt said but I'd like to direct it to all the panelists and today's international system and international law we're trying to box sovereignty within territorial boundaries but we see actors like ISIS trying to erase territorial boundaries Russia by its actions is ignoring its boundaries its territory the territorial system as being a lasting trend in history or is it fading away Professor Bobbitt would you like to start let's say a bit of both the the real leap occurs from a feudal world to the first modern states and so our terms of international law force states, personality identity, integrity sovereignty, continuity or all terms that were applied to the person of a prince and are then transformed into the structure of an immortal state territoriality is part of that but just as your question implies we can already see markets in territoriality and sovereignty the European Union being a great example Turkey was applying with more hope than perhaps it has now to become a member the European Union said as a sovereign state you are entitled to have capital punishment and we're not trying to interfere with that but if you want to join this union you'll have to renounce that that's a market in sovereignty and one can easily imagine states that have legal structures that are extra territorial and or like the sovereign status the semi sovereign status of Indian tribes that are non-territorial Sir Lawrence there's an enormous variety of state formations now the European state system is very different it seems to me in all sorts of ways from the Asian one different again from the Middle Eastern one and so on but it's worth starting at one point is most territory is now spoken for and it's pretty clear who does own it where the boundaries are set and what you have are a series of challenges ISIL describes itself as a state I mean it's not suggesting it's something how it imagines this state will actually develop and function who knows while being aggressive is still working within the terminology and the pretence that actually it's following international law that these are autonomous movements desperate for a degree of self-determination and maybe it's making it up as it goes along but it hasn't broken away from the ways of thinking of the traditional international system in terms of how it presents so what we're seeing is a series of different types of challenges and different types of probes which will leave the system every month, every year looking a little different I think the ISIL challenge is essentially not so much their concept of a new state system but the breakdown of one that existed actually it almost had the characteristics of the one that Philip was describing from olden times of a strong man dominated particular states and all those strong men have gone and now some strong men are trying to all men are trying to recreate it in Egypt and so on but that seems to be it's the collapse of an old Middle East that's created what's going on rather than the creation necessarily the new one Do you want to comment? Yeah, I think territorial states have not always been with us they're about 5,000 years old and there's no reason to think they're going to go on forever I think the modern nation states version of the territorial state was a very good solution to a lot of the problems governments in Europe were facing in the 19th century but now we're facing different problems and so new forms of organization are becoming increasingly popular they're nibbling away I think of the territorial state both from super-state organizations like the UN and the European Union and from below by NGOs and characters like the Islamic State in the Middle East I think with the Islamic State they do call themselves Islamic State but they also like to say they're a new caliphate and a caliphate is not a state in the sense in which we think of it and I think often people will see these claims they're making to be a caliphate which is as much a religious organization as a state but I think we should actually take them more seriously I think a lot of the things Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi takes his name from Abu Bakr the first caliph and a lot of the things they're trying to do really are strikingly reminiscent of what the original caliphs did and it's a different kind of organization and so yeah I think the question was absolutely right I think we are seeing the transformation of the current system of territorial states One word I would like to see banished is non-state actor I think this confuses more than it clarifies because it confuses radically different groups some which are like international drug traffickers or perhaps some militant movements like anarchists that have no political ambitions and it conflates these with revolutionary movements which are non-state actors until they can seize power in a state and it's just like terrorism at that point they can seize being terrorists because they have an army and a navy and police and border security so the German National Socialist Workers Party was a non-state actor until 1933 it then became a state Lenin's communists were non-state actors until the October Revolution in 1917 and particularly if you look at these groups which I think are best described as Salafist jihadists you know these are revolutionaries we've sort of dropped the word revolution but these are revolutionary political ideologies that seek state power if they can get it we have one more question right up your front row the microphone is coming I'm Harlan Oman I really want to provoke the panel you talk about uncertainty obviously an unpredictability and you can argue that economists have predicted 5,000 of the last two recessions but some people have been fairly predictive about future war 1929 the navy war games Rear Admiral Ernie King made the attack that was replicated by the Japanese in World War II the navy was very good in thinking about World War II the army war college was very good thinking about the same thing you read Guderian you read De Gaulle and so forth we had a movie if you can bring it to a question I'm going to bring it to a question in a second we had a movie that predicted the events of September 11 and even the Rudman heart panel predicted a terrorist attack on the United States they were wrong by 19 years and 6 months so you have predictability here how do you examine that what appears to be good predictions about the future can indeed be launched into a policy arena or is that just too difficult anyone want to take this? I think thinking about the future is immensely valuable I worked for a while with the shell global scenarios who have a marvelous team every few years puts together these scenarios for the future but thinking about the future is going to be our two very different activities thinking about the future is like a safe cracker filing down his fingertips it just makes you more sensitive to things that are happening on the horizon and prevent you from assimilating them in kind of a complacent way to what's going on now but predicting the future is I think a real snare when Lori was talking about the flexible nature of successful strategies I was thinking about a parallel in chess most chess players have a favorite opening that they master and they study responses to the opening but some chess players simply open up the center try and control it, protect the king and see what happens are there responses? yeah difficulty I mean you can always find examples of people who were apparently very prescient but you also have to look at all the other things they were saying at the time as well so just take two great examples H.G. Wells who people would argue is sort of the founder of modern futurology who talked about the atom bomb but he also described the first world war as the war to end all wars and some of the things he said just seemed amazing and spot on when you read his books now something just seemed absolutely ludicrous Herman Kahn who was another one who used to produce these sort of lists of futures and he had the exact date right in 1960 or maybe 62 of when the US would put a man on the moon but the other prediction was just completely balmy so looking back you can say if only we paid attention to that but you then have to ignore all the other stuff and know that that was the prediction that was likely to come right so it's a difficult game I agree with Phil that basically you need to think and of course a responsible government needs to prepare recognize there are contingencies and some of these are pretty obvious some of you have a great British civil servant Michael Quinlan who was eventually leading our ministry of defence who observed that the real problem with defence planning is things that you prepared for didn't happen precisely because you prepared for them and the things that you hadn't prepared for they were the things that you hadn't prepared for well those sound like genuine lessons of history that's a lesson of history for you Doctor Morse, last word very quickly I think the most valuable thing about making the predictions is the way it forces you to think about the assumptions you're making and this is something I learned actually from talking to financial planners that there's any number of possible predictions you can make about how the markets are likely to behave in the future on the basis of how they've behaved in the past with sometimes very small shifts in the assumptions like the old saying about planning is all important it's the process of thinking about what assumptions am I making I think that's where drawing lessons from the past and projecting them forward that's where I think it comes in most useful Our distinguished historians agree with Yogi Berra that prediction is hard especially about the future please join me in thanking them