 War Studies was founded 60 years ago, around this very subject, I'm sure we'll hear a bit more about that tonight, but around the idea that history tells us something and if we can learn from history and understand what has happened, it will have an impact on warfare in the future and hopefully change and prevent it from happening. And War Studies, since that point when we had one lecturer in military history has grown to a monster-sized department of 100 full-time academics, 1600 students, 14 MA programs, lots of our students and staff and some very type of colleagues are here tonight. So I won't speak for any long, but it just really leaves me with you to thank everyone for coming, those of you here in the room, those of you online. I hope you enjoy this and thank you everyone who's been part of this last 12 months of events, particularly Lizzie Ellen, who's been a really strong person in organizing everything. I shall now pass over to Dr Jonathan Fennell, who is the co-director of the Michael Howard Centre for the Study of War. And it's an exciting evening for the Michael Howard Centre as well. We have probably the biggest cohort of historians of war in Europe and maybe perhaps more widely globally. And to have the speakers we have today is an honour and it's exciting. I've been told I don't need to recount their CVs, but I think it's important to say we have an online from the kind of core constituent compartments that make up the Sir Michael Howard Centre. So we've got Professor Beatrice Huyser representing our War Studies effectively, Dr Hugh Bennett, Ex of Defence Studies, Professor Richard Overy, Ex of History, and of course Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman who we all know. And this is only my second time up in London in about two and a half years, so I can't, the excitement of just being in a room together. And this is why we do this, right? This is why we do scholarly stuff to discuss, to share ideas, to disagree perhaps, to argue. So over to you Sir Lawrence and far away. Thanks very much and welcome to you all and welcome to those online. We haven't forgotten about you. We hope you will be taking your questions. We decided our panel is well known enough and you can find out about them because there's lots to talk about and I'm sure you are looking forward to hearing what they have to say. So the way we're going to do this is that each of the members of the panel are going to talk for seven to ten minutes. I will start granting or something if they start to go seriously over that. Then I will ask possibly a question or two then the audience but we'll be taking questions from those watching online as well because I know there are many of you. So without further ado as they say I'm going to ask you Bennett just to get us started. Thank you very much. I hope you can all hear me if I stretch the microphone over. It's such an honor to be here today and my honor is mixed with horror at the scope and scale of the question that we've been presented with to talk about because the answer, the only answer to this question of course is you better sit down because there's a lot. So I've been selective in what I'm going to talk about. What I'm going to focus on today is the role of domestic politics in warfare and in strategy. That's something that I'm going to argue history can teach us about the future of war. Before getting on to that though I just want to reflect a little bit on some of the problems of connecting the future to the past. Of course EH Carr, the noted historian, reminded us that history is often normally written with ideas of the present in mind. History is not just going back into the past and forgetting all about who we are today. It's about being influenced by today's concerns whether intentional or not and that's particularly difficult for us at the moment. That makes history writing difficult for us at the moment when we're thinking about the present and the future because we're living in a very unsettled present obviously. So there's a great deal of dispute and confusion around what the present today means that makes it harder for us to project on to the future. Traditionally military historians have often been influenced by debates going on within the military profession, within defence communities, within defence ministries. That doesn't of course mean that they've always abided by those agendas relating to those debates doesn't mean conforming with those debates necessarily but it does often imply a question of relevance, a concern for being relevant and that's difficult at the moment if you're like me and you've just come out of working on a big historical project and you're kind of casting around seeing where the defence debate is at the moment and where it's been for the last few years. Much of the defence debates in the UK and many other countries right now is really in a kind of state of the shock of the new. A lot of this is about technology, a lot of it of course is about the changing world order but there are many and repeated claims in the defence community that essentially imply that history can teach us nothing because we're in a new revolutionary age whether that's because of drones or artificial intelligence or big data or something else in many different ways but this is a challenge for historians if everything is so novel and revolutionary. One of the reactions that we can sometimes have to this unsettled present is that we can seek comfort in a settled past and this has made it quite tempting and of course this is not something that all historians fall into but it does mean that there can be a tendency for searching out for morality tales in the history of warfare and in military history instead of looking at troubling episodes. So searching for certainties, searching for reassurances and things that can give us a positive feeling about national identity for example and I hope that Richard might comment on that assertion in relation to the writings on the Second World War for example. Why is there so much writing on the Second World War? Why is there so little in comparative terms on decolonisation in the UK? The Dutch parliament recently funded a major body of study into the Dutch war of decolonisation in Indonesia, a huge team project with multiple different aspects of it and nothing of that on that scale has ever happened in the UK. Military historians in the UK have never engaged in that kind of activity so why is that? Are we only looking for reassuring stories from the past and not for unsettling stories? Okay. Having said all of that I'm going to argue that this troubling history which we also have is a resource to be drawn upon and it can tell us about not only the past of the UK and of many other countries but also about the present and potentially about the future as well while accepting that there is a lot of uncertainty in that regard. So what I want to just briefly focus on before I get way beyond my seven minutes is some continuities in British warfare and British strategy since 1945 and the aspects that I just want to emphasise in particular and of course this is not an exclusive list are cross-party consensus amongst the major political parties, a sense of limited resources being available for defence or a limited liability so the context of the Cold War and then an enduring commitment to limiting the amount of the national resource that will go into defence and connected to that really an extension of that an idea of there being normally higher priorities that warfare and defence are not the only or the ultimate priorities of government. So I'm going to give you an example of this coming into practice in contemporary British history and argue that this can tell us something about the future because these tendencies, these continuities in British warfare and in British strategy I think are still with us today and are likely to remain with us for the foreseeable future. The case study is something I've just written a book on so I'll try not to get into an extended rant about my book but it's also something where because of the recent electoral results the relevance of this case study may become more apparent in future years I hope not I'm talking about Northern Ireland. Now the particular episode I'm going to just briefly explain is the strategy that changed in the British government's approach to the Northern Ireland conflict in late 1971 and early 1972. At the end of 1971 the British government had got itself into a position inadvertently at first and then deliberately of attempting to destroy the Irish republican army as a precursor to having a political negotiation that would end the conflict so in other words they were pursuing a victory first strategy where the constitutional settlement would come after. From March 1972 the British government abandoned this and they went for simultaneous use of military force alongside major political negotiations at the same time so it's a very significant shift in the conduct of strategy in this conflict which had very profound human consequences as well. Now traditionally the explanation for this shift is very simple and it's very appealing emotionally as well and the explanation is that Bloody Sunday happened and that there was a huge amount of public outrage at Bloody Sunday and it provoked the British government to change course. What we can see from the archival record however is that it's more complicated than that and there were many many reasons for the change but the one I want to emphasize is to do with the role of domestic politics in strategy and in conflict because I think these things endure. What was absolutely critical to this change of position was that the labour opposition in the person of Harold Wilson went from supporting war against the IRA a victory first strategy to changing tack and supporting negotiation and it happened because Harold Wilson had secret covert negotiations with the IRA leaderships on behalf of the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath and he conveyed the message back to Edward Heath at a Catholic cathedral and a secret conversation that the official and the provisional IRA were offering negotiation or escalation and part of their escalation implied and meant a bombing campaign in England, in London and other major English cities and this is when the strategy changed because of that shift not only in what the enemy were doing but also because of this crucial party politics shift. The timing of it as well is important it also shows this party political idea and this idea of higher priorities in politics normally trumping defence and normally trumping warfare considerations was that the major change in policy only happened after Parliament had approved Edward Heath's bid to bring Britain into the European community. Once that crucial vote in Parliament had happened on the 17th of February 1972 the Prime Minister was willing to devote political capital to fundamentally changing the game in Northern Ireland he would not do it until that higher priority the ultimate calling of his career as a Europeanist had been satisfied and I think this is a lesson from history that is has repeated itself since and it's likely to be seen in the future in the context of limited wars that party politics and higher national interests will often outweigh what is the most logical and self-interested strategy to pursue in purely military or strategic terms those higher national interests will take precedence. So that's my conclusion if you like firstly that domestic politics is here to stay it's been present for a long time in the UK as a factor in warfare that's likely to endure it into the future as well and that secondly we should turn more to our unsettling uncomfortable difficult past to look for those lessons from history and not only to the past that reassures us and tells us comforting morality tales about who we are. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Beatrice. Very very honored to be here terribly nostalgic about my time here we had a fantastic head of department I'm not doubting that his successes were also wonderful but it was a great time just to commemorate that. I am going to leave aside some of these big questions of whether history does or does not repeat itself whether history is cyclical whether it always happens twice once as a tragedy once as a fast variously attributed to Karl Marx at the Hegel or whether history stutters I'll leave aside those but I will show you some areas where there is continuity there is that there are things that can be reduced from history more in more general terms not a case study that's a fascinating one but I'll try to be slightly more general than that. First of all in history there are no satirist parables you never have exactly the same situation again and yet there can be constants in a single human character so you might find that there are people are very important players who are chronic liars chronic megalomaniacs chronic despots chronic self-promoters chronic cowards and yet you might also find that some important leaders change over time change fundamentally change their approach fundamentally and I'm sure you can all think of examples for both there are themes in national narratives that are of a very long a degree that can be revived periodically for example our nation is destined by fate by god by history for greatness and glory but has been prevented from doing so by wicked powers and yet national narratives can change see Sweden Germany Italy in the last say 250 years. Traditional animosity is handed over from generation to generation we in Glasgow have orange marches even today and even today not to mention Northern Ireland of course where they they actually come from but we even have them in Glasgow and from generation to generation something is handed over there in terms of animosity and something that will continue to condition future war unless these marches end. There are temptations to have an exaggerated view of one's own rights power influence one's exceeding to higher office among clear player key players that are very important in the context of war along the lines of power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely and there is this temptation of the abuse of power and that seems to be a pattern that repeats itself over and over with people who come to very high positions of power. There are hard enduring constants such as geography even that can change though ports can rivers can silt up ports can be suddenly be far away from our city port cities can be far away from the the the actual sea. There are areas with sustained importance because of their natural resources and yet technology may change the importance of these natural resources over time so this again something very important if you look at what areas of Europe wars have been fought over you say the the the coal of the Ruhr or the industrial areas of southern Belgium and all of a sudden coal is out you know so things like that can be on the one hand factors for war and conflict or they can recede for new changes that have come about. You can say I think that similar political organizational economic social configurations that produce similar interredational dynamics exist so for example there are parallels in decision making I'm slightly psyched strained away from war here but still I need to give you this example there are parallels between the way in which the early Roman emperors of the principate had to relate to their senates and the ways in which Tudor and Seward monarchs related to their parliaments so that there are power sharing structures that somehow result in similar conflicts similar tensions over in different periods of time or think of for example the similarities of the effects of the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the subprime financial crisis and how that then played out gradually one faster one buffered by social security as more slowly into the impoverishment of sectors of population that then became drifted into political areas of that were dominated by populists and there are times when you have in now getting more directly to warfare a toolkit of political economic propaganda or military measures or tools of strategy that are applied to conflicts for example I conducted a study together with a lot of colleagues a number of colleagues on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies and what tools they used and interestingly enough we found that in many different countries and many different parts of the world different parts of history the toolkit was similar there are very few tools that were used by only one culture the kneecapping in Ireland was actually one of the few exceptions but other than that tools tended to be the same and even used by both by insurgents and counterinsurgents and so you can have a continuity from this point of view you can see that this has been used in the past and if you have a new conflict like that you might look out for similar things to happen the configuration of some key factors can be very similar in two different situations what other key factors while other key factors will differ the outcome may still be similar albeit not identical examples in intra-state wars insurgents confronting a government in its state apparatus tend to be on the weaker side so there are recurrent patterns here that do not apply every time but can still apply quite a lot of times this is a configuration has been less affected by technological transformation than inter-state wars we have argued then there is a pattern that we found in a number of counterinsurgency operations particularly when there were foreign dimensions namely that the foreign intervening force in the counterinsurgency tried to court some minorities which had structural reasons to be against the government or against insurgents or whatever but then abandoned them when the going got rough and they withdrew so the montagnards in Vietnam the way in which the French are accused of having abandoned a lot of their hard keys the abandonment of Kurds on the Iraqi-Turkish border etc so there is that there are little patterns like that that can repeat themselves in different situations historical situation, historical experience can also have something completely different and that is a they can be a counter influence they can be a never again type thing that will weigh heavily on a new situation so the never again effect that would ensure a particularly knee jerk reaction in a usage context for example western politicians thought Stalin would proceed in a similar fashion apply salami tactics in the late 1940s to enlarge his sway of power as Hitler done in the 1930s therefore one would need to stop him early a very crucial point a very crucial thought that would repeat itself or that was expressed repeatedly in the early cold war this idea that because we've made a mistake there it has to be applied elsewhere and that's very interesting because it's very simple human psychology also I this one shouldn't say this in black company but I will there is a tendency of humans to take on out on your next lover the damage done to your relationship and by a previous lover so that's quite interesting how you say no but because this person betrayed me I will now be very cautious with your culture this new relationship you know there's similarities there or one of the lines that you heard over and over in a number of different crises which was Britain must not appease dictators then variously applied to completely different situations whether appropriate or not so you can have this this counter example as well of something that would then lead you to apply history in an almost predictable way but in a negative sense I will stop there rather than talking about the Ukraine perhaps we'll do that later thank you very much Richard well thank you very much um well I'm going to talk a bit more generally I think but I'm going to start off with a little anecdote and you will see the purpose of it I think I once attended the conference in Harvard in 1980 it was funded by the CIA that we were not told that it was about intelligence and predicting war we all did our stuff for three days and at the end the director of the CIA came to tell us what he'd learned from our deliberations with all historians and he said well he said I'm very sorry to say he said but I've learned nothing from these three days but at a moment we're working on guerrilla glands and these are going to help us a lot in understanding my human beings wage war there wasn't much you could say to that but it was quite clear that there's a limit to what historians can tell practitioners about the future of war and in fact when I was asked to do this I I was tempted to say really there's nothing much you can say except that we study past wars we can perhaps predict something about what's going to happen in terms of technical development tactical strategic development and so on and so on but at the end of the day history is so unpredictable unpredictable as we know because in February when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began very few historians had really imagined that that was going to be a possibility I think also when we consider the question what can the study of history tell us about future wars is a big temptation that you know to see us as predictors I'm so often asked that I'm sure and we all are I'm so often asked when will world war three break out or will world war three break out more often obviously in the last few weeks and than before but there is no point of asking the story in that because the process is political social technical and so on which will contribute to the wars of the future and there will be wars for future of course one thing historians can say is when you look after over the last 6000 years there's no doubt that we are looking at a bellicose species wars are not going to disappear but what shape they will take where the initiatives will lie where the danger spots well we can you know we can all we can all do that we will double guess that but I think it doesn't get as very far as the war in Ukraine has already made very evident in fact I want to argue really that I think historians are the wrong people to ask at the moment in fact I'm working on a book about called why war which is about the various approaches that different disciplines have had the human sciences have had to this question of the war of war and indeed its future and I'm very struck that there's almost no reference to historians because historians are regarded as people who will say something very particular about one war and know an awful lot about it but it doesn't mean that you will then be able to influence you know the way we think about future war actually that's my career working on a second world war and I do wish that those leaders willing to go to war and of course the last half century might have taken more note of it they don't I mean don't I think because historians are as I suggested in a sense I think the wrong people to ask we know an awful lot about the past we analyze it explore it etc but ask us about the future you know we are not astrologers and you know too many of the presses are talking about a dynamic understood better perhaps by other disciplines than by the discipline of history I want to just start with with one example where there is discussion of what's about the prospect of future war and that's in climatology and in particular of course the current crisis of climate change but linking climate and history together which goes back roughly to the 1970s when some pioneering work was first being done on paleo climatology and so on trying to link that to the long history of human conflict and it's arrived I think at some very interesting conclusions these are these are historians of climate if you like they're not historians in our conventional sense and certainly not military historians but the research has shown over the course of the last 2000 years at least that you can chart quite well a pattern between climate change and increased or decreased conflict it's obviously going to be climate change when there is a sudden and severe change the so-called little ice age in Europe for example studies have shown that little ice age produced a great many more conflicts than the period either before immediately afterwards or the so-called medieval anomaly which produced excessive high temperatures and drought across much of the world between 800 and 11-1200 AD and it's been shown very clearly in the United States that the medieval anomaly produced widespread drought crisis ecological crisis on a large scale and the norms increasing conflict which can be shown by the archaeological evidence clearly shown by the archaeological evidence but where does that leave us today of course because you know since the 1990s climate conflicts have been one of the things that everybody's been talking about every security studies group thinks about what will the future of climatic conflict be and there are plenty of examples that people are able to point to particularly in the Horn of Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Sudan areas where there has been extreme weather variability which is closely correlated with an increase in levels of conflict the same as true of so-called water wars there's a great deal of work done again not by historians on the roughly 350 major river estuaries in the world to show that arguments over water which are going to get worse as climate changes is a potential for conflict perhaps not in the short term but in 10 years time 20 years time there have been some scientific predictions to show very precisely in fact how many conflicts you might expect or what increase in conflict you might get an increase of one degree centigrade in the world's temperature according to one geographer will result in 11 percent more conflicts now these are of course actually not measurable at all but it's interesting that it's not historians but it's academics in other disciplines who are thinking about the 21st century and where we are likely to be finding conflict and conflict driven by climate change which has been evident in many cases of the course of the last 2000 years there's a great deal of work on China in fact in that relation that because the excellent records of 2000 years and there was a strong correlation between periods of extreme weather variability and conflict along with Chinese nomad border in central Asia where does this leave us where does this leave us for the 21st century I mean always everybody who writes about this now assumes that we will have water wars or climate wars of some kind over the course of the 21st century and the reference point is to look back over a very long period of time 2000 years to show that there is a strong correlation between increased conflict and dramatic change in climate but you can see similar work being done by anthropologists or psychologists and so on who again seem much better equipped to look at the way in which human societies have evolved and the extent to which human society which which kinds of human society or under what circumstances will those societies commit themselves to war I think for historians of course there's a much more familiar ground we tend to talk about power we talk about security we talk about resources we talk about belief whether we're talking about the crusades or we're talking about ISIS when we talk about Pa we're talking about Alexander the Great we're talking about Napoleon we're talking about Putin who is the last example of futuristic leadership waging war because he wants to wage war there are purposes behind it but he waging war there are plenty of other things he could have done but waging war is testament I think to his hubris resource wars and the historians are much more comfortable with resource wars because you can see plenty of those certainly in the modern age 19th century many wars are in fact about access to resources I'm always told off for saying that the bore wars about access to golds I won't repeat that one but you know here here is one example through to the wars Italian Japanese and German wars of the 1930s which were all about trying to engross more resources now we haven't had resource wars quite that kind except for conflicts over oil now again with the Ukraine crisis we have the issues of a gas and oil all over again I think historians are happier talking about things that because they are much more familiar I think also if you know we're thinking about climate change and conflicts in the 21st century we also need to talk about resources because climate or not resources are finite in many cases they're running out and it is extremely hard to imagine in a case like that of severe environmental crisis and it's happened of course in the past but for different reasons it's hard to imagine that that is not going to generate confrontational conflict of one kind or another now as I said I think you know saying how war will develop in the future is something I think you know historians are a little bit hostage to fortune on that it also depends critically and I think we've been touched on here on issues of peace of course not you know peace versus war but we are in an age of course where there is a huge amount of institutional commitment to reducing the possibility of conflict now some of the things I've just talked about arguments over river estuaries almost all been settled by international agreement and pressure war perhaps by the United Nations or by others conflict in the whole of Africa too there are examples where local tribes find ways of developing conflict resolution so side by side with thinking now about you know what can history tell us about the future of war I think we need to to grasp the other national and say you know what does history tell us about the prospects of peace are those prospects better now in the 21st century than they were 100 years ago I think they almost certainly are despite Putin I think they almost certainly are so these are two I think in a sense two questions the sides of the same coin that when we're talking about the future of war in the 21st century we've also got to think about the future of peacemaking and what that means and whether peacemaking are a more extensive broader on a more extensive broader social base not just peacemaking between states with peacemaking at home will become more and more characteristic of the century ahead thank you very much thank you very much and thank you to all the panelists for getting us off to such a good start now while you're starting to think of your questions and I hope there'll be plenty I'm going to start off with a question of my own and it's the starting point is well from each of the three presentations Richard ended describing Putin's role and described it as hubristic which is a maybe a generous interpretation that certainly it certainly fits you talked about the need to address troubling issues um particularly mentioned the colonization of both of which Richard has written very extensively in his sort of a new and very influential reinterpretation of the second world war Beatrice talked mentioned narratives national narratives um and I was thinking given this is under the aegis of the Michael Howard Center Michael's inaugural lectures about Oxford on was very skeptical about the lessons of history but one of the things he talked about was the privilege we have in the west as historians of being able to challenge our national myths um and I just want to in a sense consider what what Michael was trying to challenge part of what he's trying to challenge in that lecture which is the role of historical myths in conflict um so one of the explanations for what went wrong with Putin is not only the pandemic which left him far too isolated but also he seemed to have time to go to the library um and you may recall it's in July 2021 and this long it's extraordinary historical essay about the origins of Russia who's um the the relationship between Ukraine and um and Russia with little Russia and great Russia Belarus had a place there too um and if you and maybe it has mentioned this sense of of the role of national myths and by goodness this was a national myth that was being developed so I'll just be interesting so it's not just the question of whether historians can throw light on um on how wars develop but whether historians can be culpable uh in all of this bad bad history in particular I should be interested in bituses is eager to come in on this I mean it just what's striking is it when you're looking at the Russian debates yes I mean look at the way May the 9th the role of May the 9th in this the the whole cult of the great patriotic war um the the insistence on labelling Zelensky as Jewish and the as a Nazi and the complete mess they get into when it's pointed out that he is Jewish and you know even Putin had to to rescue Lavrov from the sort of the Holocaust mythology he was getting into but it's interesting you know in your thoughts on that role of history in conflict Beatrice wants to come in with a colleague at Reading Athena Leusi we conducted a lot of big project on stupid title two volumes pen and sword famous battles and how they change the world or something stupid but what it's actually about is famous battles and their myths how they were used politically in history particularly but not only since the 19th century so since the great age of nationalism in order to drive people to either constantly think about inherited enemies hereditary enemies or somehow revive some animosity or somehow revive some sense of sacrifice collective sacrifice loyalty to the nation this stuff and the other and no sooner had we finished this project that we began to realize that this is actually what is flourishing Russia it's not a historical thing at all I mean our two volume thing is actually all about how countries of the past did this but it's actually alive and kicking very much so and in the the Russian mythology it's extraordinary just how all those big selective narratives of conflicts of the past you know they're being overrun by the Mongols and how the Russians were punished for the fact that they were not under one solitary but rather authoritarian leader that they were that what they needed in order to defend against this external enemy the Mongols and then afterwards the wicked Polish Lithuanian Empire the Teutonic Knights whatever it was they needed this strong leader to see them through just to to bring them all together and that being divided and too democratic if you like and was always a great great problem there or that everybody always had it in for them that they are the country that is the victim country when if you look at the map of Russia today you sort of think it's difficult to imagine that they feel that they're always being conquered by others and yes you can see how that must be the effect on the rebound to having been occupied and conquered or invaded by other countries they wanted to have lots and lots of buffer area having said that they ended up with the largest time zone country in the world so it's quite amazing how this narrative is very much there if you ever get to Moscow my goodness go to the fantastic museum Russia my history the fantastic museum that they've built which is all about the great battles of Russian past pretortrait in in colours which you get from icons it's all sort of gold and black and actually artificial candles in front of them where you see all these heroes of the various Russian battles of how they've suffered and it's a terrible Christian myth because it's all by suffering they have been they've they have a merited salvation in the end you know it's this terribly sort of crusty and whatever myth that is constantly being played upon how immensely alive this is and the 9th of May is all about this instead of doing what we've done which has been mourning for individuals mourning for people that we knew in our families anything like that and commemorating individuals and trying to home in on individual faiths it's this collectivist thing about how collectively and just look at the the war graves they have where you hardly have any names it's always the collectivity who tried to forget the grief in the glorying in that collective sacrifice that merits for you the great place in world history and that is so alive and kicking you see it in the conflict now in every possible way sorry thank you um yeah i'm gonna my my interpretation of the question is is how far we can get away from myths and when do we escape from them and when don't we and i think to go back to what i was saying earlier in my view it's it's when we're in a crisis in the present and it's when the myths no longer work you know the myths are supposed to do something they're supposed to explain the world and big events that are taking place and sometimes they just don't make sense anymore and you know to react to something that that was being said at the beginning about about kings when i started my career as an academic i worked in the defense studies department and this was when things were going wrong in iraq and the mythology that had existed for a few decades about the british army and counter insurgency was that the british army had kind of solved the essential conundrum of how you tackle insurgencies that the british were very humane and used minimum force and they were uniquely good at dealing with this type of conflict and then iraq came along and it just didn't make any sense anymore so there was a lot of myth busting at that time um and i think a great kind of phrase for this is something i came across looking at um debates in the ministry of defense on official history in the 1970s when they were thinking should we have an official history of northern island or not and the answer was not with capital letters um the phrase came up with this beautiful piece of sort of civil service writing the idea of the dirty laundry and that people in defense and people in the military you know are concerned about exposing their dirty laundry and about being open to criticism because careers were at risk this is a very difficult thing to people for people to do to reflect on on the recent past now of course what sir lorence freedman did was participate and play a leading role in the iraq inquiry which was the major example of dirty laundry in uk and defense history in the last 20 or 30 years right but what's so interesting about that i think is that the iraq inquiry can perhaps stand out as unique this is not the it did not become the new normal of how defense and the military and war is scrutinized and discussed in the united kingdom it's been left and in the last couple of years there's been a lot of concern about criticism within defense and between uh the military and civilians actually being on the decline and about taboos re-emerging so we may be back into the the myth territory and away from the myth-breaking era interesting richard well i just had a little bit um i mean i think that that obviously you know all countries develop their national narratives and they don't you know myth myths or not they don't necessarily lead to conflicts so they're not quite the same thing i think in the russian case uh i mean it is important for putin but there are other sources of resentment too i mean i i think that in the case of if ukraine iridentism is a very important issue as it was for uh on numerous occasions in the tinci century too um myths can then be mobilized and they are mobilized of course when it's necessary to mobilize them i think it's a fact to uh lead to conflict i think more dangerous thing is to is to recognize when a leader of a major power um in other words a power capable of destabilizing the system as russia is doing uh harbors resentments um which are backed by an increasingly irrational rhetoric uh and now we all can see that with putin from 2014 and more perhaps should have been done um either you know either to appease placate or oppose um but it does seem to be that it's the national narrative is then mobilized you know deliberately in this case to justify what it is it is doing but national narratives don't necessarily do that um there are plenty of national narratives but there are also plenty of places where conflict takes place in the world where you know there's not a particularly secure in the national narrative but there certainly are conflicts in the world which are fueled by you know resentment iridentism ethocentrism and so on um and you know this you know if suppose if historians can focus on anything these are the sorts of things they can focus on because there is a long history up and down the century um but you know whether we can assume that these are the drivers of future conflicts i think it's uh it's a much more problematic issue now two people have already caught my eye are there any other questions at the back there so john gearson there's a microphone we have roving microphones thanks um i was just well i've really careful because he and i are working on a very similar subject area and so we can just have a seminar together um i was going to say you know narratives changing it's only taken 75 years for people to celebrate germany increasing defense spending uh rather than not and you know we've had this sort of uh this this this you know this nervous breakdown about this over 30 years but but now it's been celebrated let's remember the german narrative is not a west german narrative it's an east and west german narrative that's led to where they are today so i think um i think history does tell us something about narratives but i was going to say and again Hugh stole my thunder but i was going to say you know michael howard's initiation has led to war studies from which came defense studies which is within our school now um where there are lots of military historians and there's lots of history being done and when i spent some time uh teach teaching there um as as Hugh did and others um a lot of today's military going through our staff colleges are studying history very carefully and they are and they're not just sucking up narratives they're analyzing the decision making and and how and how their predecessors did things they do think about the future um and i suppose what troubles me 35 years into into doing this is um why hasn't that worked and it seems to me first of all people take the lessons they want to when they are faced with the next challenge as it as it comes but there must be something else about how how are phrasing back to uh domestic politics or even clouds of its we revert to politics ultimately there is something wrong between the professional military class their understanding of the past and decision making when politicians say they want to use a military instrument at which point it seems that there are people who are then willing to usually under pressure offer quick solutions and then repeat i'm going to say it now repeat the mistakes of the past and Hugh and Beatrice both talked about counterinsurgency quite a lot and it's a dismal tale of the same failed techniques being used sometimes by militaries but also crucially almost always the failure of strategy to guide what is done on on the on these long and divisive uh campaigns so i do think that says something about the future of warfare for us in looking at it which is that they're probably going to be very much the same because the people who don't look at the future of warfare other than i would say two to three hundred years ago is our political class they tend not to want to look at that difficult maybe that difficult post-colonial period or even some of those lessons and in the pursuit of of objectives which are usually domestically driven i'd agree with you on that they want solutions and if somebody offers them solutions they often seem to take them thanks i take that as an observation rather than a question i wish to park it there and take mike goodman next and then the question at the back of a men will ask the panel to comment mike and then thanks very much it's a sort of question on the question you know what what does history teach us in a week where we've had the rough results and history and politics here has done well and impact has done well you know we are i think academics in war studies that don't preach from the ivory tower we like to mix with practitioners but of course the problem is you can come up with the best forms of history and you can come up with the best lessons does anyone ever listen so it's a question i think for lots of you know for all of you even for lorry you know we have had an official history program in this country for a very long time which was closed down lots of the government departments have lost their historians the foreign office still have them and still do that very well but they're the exception rather than the norm so actually is this really a question not about historians writing and learning from history but trying to persuade those who actually should be doing something about it to learn from history and at the back there when i've got a couple of questions at the back perhaps i'd say who you are as well if you don't mind hi yeah my name is sam i work in financial services thank you very much for giving up your time to come and speak to us today i have two questions first was on the initial remark about the study of war the purpose of it is to prevent war do you think that also the study of war is to do better next time and secondly one of the themes that you've discussed is myth and domestic politics is being really crucial do you think that in a situation where a nation state doesn't potentially have a myth that it's that it loses that sort of cordus bery and in a domestic sense that it would perform worse or or is susceptible to conflict thanks thank you very much for the question too including the question of does anybody take any notice when they do their history um richard why don't you start this time yeah i mean i i would certainly not made any case to say that the militia don't study history they do study it a lot and i'd been as we all have done too many militia colleges here and in the united states where you know they're fascinated and informed about history but i still think that's you know it's limited what that will actually tell them about the kind of war that they're going to be fighting um and you know we could have gone and lectured a lot in the 1980s about the history of warfare in european in the um in the 20th century but you know they were faced with the iran war and a very different set of circumstances i think the problem of the military is that you can't predict the circumstances and coming back to what you're saying about the politicians of course um you know we're not talking about the history lessons of the military we're talking about the history lessons of everybody and politicians are very bad at taking history lessons or or or they want to take the lessons that they want to take um but since 1945 um you know ukraine apart i mean there have been very few uh serious interstate conflicts and and you know politicians might huff and puff and want to do something the military might be straining a militia and so on but in fact the wars that they actually fight are relatively simple wars um and uh you know the two gulf wars um uh well i can say the vietnam war is not so impact a simple war at all um but they're but they're you know not wars that you know do the same thing as the first and second world war um and um you know politicians and soldiers like obviously you know committed to avoiding that problem and you know the issue for butin is is different you know he did need in the story and sitting with him and he did need to talk to people to take some advice about you know what's the best way to pursue a set of strategic goals that i've got um you know tell me how to do it and nobody did so in the end he says you know that anyone's going to do it just to is to go to war and this is a political decision yeah not a military decision thanks um yeah it's just in response to john's question i mean i think one of the greatest kind of intellectual problems for um the military and for civilian leaders strategically of course is knowing what is relevant what is the relevant history and when should it be kind of engaged and acted upon and when is the environment completely novel to go to to Beatrice's point as well of course about repetition and cycles in history so from the northern island case yet very clear that one of the most disastrous policy decisions to introduce intern without trial the military advice was almost the anonymous that it should not be done because there was clear historical understanding of what was likely to happen as a result which did happen the politicians were warned they were told about the history but they were thinking in political terms there were no better options that they could find and they were impatient for results to get the problem dealt with as soon as possible and to move on to the next things so i think that there is certainly a limit to how much historical understanding and awareness by the military profession can actually have any effect at a strategic level having said that i do think there are areas of military practice that are politically difficult especially for example into service rivalry this question of why does somebody always offer a solution why as the iraq iraq inquiry unveiled why did the ministry of defense and senior leaders in the ministry of defense advised that defense planning assumptions be breached and the afghanistan the deployment into helman go ahead against all the planning assumptions it's because perhaps of rivalry and ambition and the politics of the services so i think it's very largely to do with this civilian leadership ignorance and operating to political timetables but there's also the politics within the military that does come into play too and thankfully you've said about the military and strategy making what i was going to say that so i don't need to repeat it just to summarize it to say military don't make political strategy it's the politicians who make it and the military who plays with it and then adapt it to their own careers and ambitions and all the rest of it and their own genders etc yeah um a country without identity narrative can that do well well um it's absolutely fascinating to see a very recent countries and how they struggle with this and very often of course do disintegrate into civil war and things like that because there are conflicting narratives um so i've learned a tiny bit about Liberia in the recent past which is a fascinating a case study that i will bowl with it but it's just about a country that is finding it very difficult to have a national narrative in which it's civil wars are suppressed and in which there's some sort of tradition of liberty and and alliance with the united states which becomes part of the nationalism it's it's very and it's very fragile so i do think that there you have a point there that it might be very difficult um do uh is war studies about trying to prevent war or to do better next time i think both um but not uh the preventing war at absolutely every cost i mean this is the lesson from 1939 1938 39 uh and the other one do better define better and what is very interesting there is that you know among the multiplicity of definitions um one very interesting one is actually one that comes goes back to a russian strategist i've learned more about the due to a phd student of mine um which is to say to try to achieve what's political goals with as key losses as possible uh and i think that's a sort of fairly um consensus building idea you know the idea that you're trying to do this with not too much bloodshed and if you are going to go to war and you think that the cause is just trying to do it without having too many horrible victims sorry losses and victims etc um so that would be my attempt to say that i've got lots of questions around now um but i've also got some from our online audience uh and uh i'm going to quickly mention those because they have a right to be heard um so three quick ones um that they've got names attached to them so i'll um i'll put them in but i think all of you may want to answer first for Hugh uh why does the study of military history become so emotional and if our understanding of warfare is so emotionally charged can we really learn from it for Beatrice and i know what's going to happen with this question if history is useful due to the fact that we can identify patterns are we better using the more quantitative approaches of the social and political scientists when trying to understand the role of history and understanding the future and then for Richard um many historians argue that there are no patterns but that is a lesson in itself practitioners therefore can one can argue cannot learn set approaches to the problem of war there must be imaginative and analytical evaluative reflective practitioners so to develop those skills is it advisable necessary to study history so one question each okay thank you um i don't think the study of war does have to be emotional there's a long tradition of the study of war not being emotional um to a certain extent it's a it's a matter of personality and and style uh i'm a Welshman i'm quite emotional and that's who i am so it comes out in my speech and in my writing and you know you can you can take it or leave it and some people find it very objectionable objectionable on the other hand war is about suffering and war is about loss and destruction so to me personally it seems odd to pretend that it doesn't involve emotion the historical discipline in the last few decades of course has become quite adept at the study of emotions emotions in politics emotions in political cultures in in all sorts of different contexts there's an increasing study of the emotions of soldiers and of the military profession so i think there's um there's a lot to be gained from uh bringing emotion into the study of war i'm not quite sure i heard the question properly it's basically if you need all these evaluative skills uh what um do you need history the study does the history of study of history help you develop the skills necessary to be a good policymaker i think that's roughly what it comes down to well we would like to think so we'd like to think we'd like to think we've trained many policymakers of the course for lots of decades and gone away and made better policy i think it's actually very difficult to uh to answer that question um i mean clearly we think that the things we do as western historians in terms of evaluating evidence uh disposing of myths um revising what seemed to be comfortable truths and so on is what we do as historians i think many people go out into the wider world after hearing us do that at university would you know i think perhaps it's a good idea to apply these lessons to the way in which they make policies but whether they are able to do so of course there is another matter altogether um i mean we do like to think that that's what teaching history does and we don't want to be dissolutioned by it but i think it has its limitations my question was qual or quant is better to go about it qualitatively or quantitatively quantitative studies tend to focus on one dimension one aspect and as claus with himself said there is a number of variables in warfare is so large that they could baffle even a newton a newton was a great ideal um may i just read out to you a very short definition uh or a point by genric on tonnoy to layer uh 1829 to 1904 a russian um imperialist imperial um strategist who said very claus witzens um there are no laws or rules that suit every possible occasion because the number of possible incations is infinite therefore each law should be seen as a formula in which situation time and occasion is a variable that should be inserted to get a specific solution to every known occasion so that means that basically you can't simply calculate on in one dimension what's going to happen in one particular uh case and therefore i think you get an element of um a qualitative analysis that has to bring together in a judgmental way lots of different variables which you can't quantify entirely where you have to make a considered judgment or saying this weighs very heavily that's it weighs very heavily without and i totally agree with uh Richard over in this one being able utterly to predict what's going to happen but to point out possible developments given the um interplay of these different variables and to point out what could then what different things could happen in the future uh in the judgment what has to be qualitative in the knowledge of all these different dimensions thank you now i'm i'm aware of questions there there and there and i know there were others so i'm there too let me take those three first and then and then i'll i'll take some more so very patient you've been um my question is more specifically about um dr ovary's point about um like the importance of um politics in regards to decision-making when it comes to warfare and i was just wondering about do you think that the um the fallout from the iraq war and the afghanistan wars will have an long lasting impacts if it has an impact at all upon decision-making in the future of british um like invasions and acts of war i used to be a soldier and also a member of parliament and i can tell you that what you are doing is hugely important and by you i mean people who have the time to think deeply about history and particularly about military history because when a politician needs to make a decision there's one thing he does not have and that is time he needs to be able to turn to a body of academics and also well educated soldiers sailors and airmen as margaret that you had to do of course at the beginning of the falcons war and those people need to be able to give the political decision maker a series of well thought out options within which he or she can choose alice hastings west summer master's student here at kings so we're obviously in a time of great technological change with cyber warfare i arguably making warfare more distant less human how can history help us when all the tools are so new okay so three rather brief questions but very pointed so yeah um when we did our very big study on counterinsurgency in the third century we found the technology had less of an impact there than the interstate war uh very simply because very often not always but very often you find that the insurgents um are on the very weak side of a spectrum of what arms they they have and what means they have which means they have to resort to ruses and to all sorts of things that are fairly old fashioned i have been there for a very long time so there are pockets at least where you can see the things happen over a very long time and because uh where there's a continuity and another thing where there's a continuity is with despite everything else is human nature so there are all sorts of human proclivities but also human inability to decide faster than a certain at a certain speed uh you can augment that with artificial intelligence but the human still has to somehow have that time to reflect something and take decisions so there are some elements where you do actually have continuity despite the new technology i think um thank you i'll just um answer the question about iraq and afghanistan because that's the one where i have the strongest opinions um i'm very i'm a very impatient person myself i'd like to know the answers now really i'd like to know a lot more about what happened in iraq and afghanistan and most of the evidence is not available to the public what we do have is what the iraq inquiry produced which is incredibly valuable but in terms of the actual operational kind of conduct of those wars the most people can't find out what was going on but there's a counter argument to that which might be stronger which is to say that some historical some some distance some time might help us because if you look at the debate on iraq and afghanistan it kind of goes in two directions either people want to forget all about it and move on to what's happening now with russia and china and that's the the dominant tendency i think in in defense and in the military all people are very um engaged in very rancorous acrimonious debate about whose fault it was and why did president biden decide on the withdrawal and and so on and it becomes very bitter and there's not much to be learned from that so i think in that in in that particular case we might need and benefit from from more distance and from it becoming more historical well just be i mean a quick comment um i wonder about having to make decisions quickly of course yes i mean it depends sometimes of course war is contemplated for quite some time before it's decided on the salinas invasion of Ethiopia two years of worrying thinking arguing discussing before it was actually launched on other occasions of course you have to launch a war very quickly and you have you know to decide whether to do it or not in fact and whether it's a possibility whether it's not in the four terms obviously it's a good example of that i mean you know all the circumstances of each of these crises is very a great deal which is what makes it difficult coming up to the beginning which makes it difficult for historians to be able to provide analysis which uh makes sufficient sense because we're talking about such a wide variety of different kinds of war but talking about such a wide variety of regions areas and conflicts but talking about such a wide variety of motives so that you know double guessing what kind of wars will become characteristic for the 21st century i think is much more difficult we talked about cultural insurgency and cultural insurgency is clearly um something which is not going to to go away um we thought interstate war had gone away all that discussion in the 1990s about is war obsolete and people patting themselves on the back and saying it probably is of course it's not obsolete um but you know what direction is going to take in the course of the next 30 40 or 50 years um it is something you can uh i mean you know the one certainty that we have is that war has a future but precisely what that future is i think is difficult for us to detect so i'm watching the time we've got a couple of questions here um one there let let oh to work let's sit down and then behind and then right to the right to the back and that's of the all of time sorry you first okay then um it's part of the challenge of history that you're looking for cause and effect to get lessons but paul alexander by the way um challenge of history to get cause and effect to get lessons which you then use to apply and predict and in the example that hu gave um you then have the challenge of EU membership and explaining the relationship between that and a change for island from victory to negotiate and how do you find a way to be able to learn anything from that and it's part of the challenge that you don't have rational interests but they're rational to them in that moment but it doesn't provide you with enough to create cause and effect that you can then apply elsewhere and is that really then a historical challenge how do you then be able to get into the world of those decision making sufficiently to be able to um extrapolate lessons that can then be used in a richer and better way going forward um thanks very much and uh a comment and a question a comment in response to richards uh statement that um history is not very much very useful for the future of warfare and you know we use these structured analytical techniques and scenario mapping to try and look into the future but actually at the end of the day history is the only data source we have to construct those future scenarios and so it is it remains incredibly useful i'm going to ask a really boring question which i hope you would have answered already but how do you see the future of this war the one that we what does history tell us about how this war proceeds and ends and what we in hng should be doing about it i may do that one and um hi my name is jude and um the lady over there sort of beat me to the punch so i'll try to restructure this question um as sort of warfare becomes more digitalized you know in the 21st century do you think there will be some sort of correlation between that and like sort of how it progresses um so like as we see you know right now like as we speak um the ukrainian conflict you see all this misinformation and fake news spreading on the internet and even just before with the Taliban occupation of afghanistan you really see how it feels more like politics and the internet has become sort of homogeneous and um how it's really become a game of pointing fingers at each other between political groups online so um so basically what i'm saying what i'm asking is uh with your knowledge do you think that would sort of as time progresses you know in the years to come that sort of escalate that have a big say in proxy wars and like thanks very much we are under very great time practice so people just have to excuse me uh maybe you can grab the speakers quickly afterwards and we'll ask them very quickly one minute answers each. Richard or Hugh you start. Yeah thank you um in terms of rational decision making Paul absolutely i mean if we want to understand what was in Edward Heath's head you know there is a question about how valuable that is for for anyone looking to the present or the future um i think you know some of those particular circumstances will not repeat themselves going into the to the EEC and so on but the the broader institutional points about domestic politics and its interrelation with strategy i think that that generalizable point can be taken out it really goes to the difference between me and Richard apart from his immense intellectual stature and my sort of diminutive one which is he's more the purest historian and i think purest historians would argue that they're very great limits to any lessons that can be drawn out but a lot of people who study war are more at the intersection between strategic studies and history and are not quite certain which camp they sit in and would argue that the lessons that can come out on the internet and the digital age and misinformation it's it's the debate now about what changes people's opinions and will it actually ever force them to change their behavior in a conflict is so resonant of the debate in the 1950s about communist propaganda the early cold war misinformation nasa's propaganda campaign against the british in the middle east and so on it's it's all been talked about before in slightly the different terms so there are elements of repetition here as as pittress was discussing Richard uh we're just a couple of things to add um i mean we're talking about history and of course many of the people who do talk about the future of war are in strategic studies or international relations or indeed as i was talking in my remarks you know they're doing climatological history and doing it very well there are sociologists and political scientists who are capable of using a quantitative assessment of past conflicts 20 years 30 years 40 years and able to to make predictions that look much more robust i'm afraid than predictions that might be made by historians but i think one of the problems about history of course is that we are historians you know we historians here is we're a very rational bunch and you know what we try and impose on our history is a kind of rationality and yet the people that we're dealing with you know put in or whatever or indeed the the conflict leaders for the next 30 years you know the chances are that they're gonna have a very different kind of rationality from ours they're going to have a very different set of justifications they're going to have norms and values and um attitudes which we as rational western historians will find difficult to engage with you know i mean we don't understand or we don't empathize particularly with with the way in which the Taliban thinks about the world but the Taliban is our triumph in afghanistan um i mean not only do i think there are limits to what historians can do but i think there are limits to the way we can understand conflict not just in europe or conflict generated by the united states for example but conflicts on all those other parts of the world where conflict actually does take place in the middle east in africa uh in you know southeast asia on the indian frontier and so on there are plenty of areas of conflict which we hardly embrace i think as historians no way in which we think about the future of all but in fact this is where this is where we're going to find warfare in the next 20 or 30 years whether it's motivated by you know rational drives resentments you know frontier arguments or indeed uh you know failing climate um i i think that that we need perhaps as historians we need to have actually a greater measure of humility when we approach this question very briefly we've all dodged the the question about how the ukraine wars could develop uh i shall dodges as well but um there are other sorts of predictions we can make one can say that this is clearly a national identity crystallizing war for ukraine so you can see that um it has crystallized in an extremely fast time uh loyalty to a particular political identity which before that might have been more contested um you can you can do things like that you can see you can see that there are more such outcomes or you know that um i'm still a bit skeptical about the the watershed in in german thinking there i just i can't resist temptation to share with you my favorite tweet on the subject which is just for the record you want us to rearm march across poland defend polish possibly even invade russian territory or in defense of ukraine you know just for the record um the uh but uh i'm a bit skeptical that that's going to be a very big thing but at some stage there is going to be some crystallization there as well of something else um you know where people will finally realize that it is not true that we have all lived in peace since 1945 but that there have been wars in the world you know this is the peculiar central european view that i've encountered many times over the years including by historians of the military history search institute of the boulders there who told me you know we have lived in peace the world has been in peace since 1945 okay um but um quite just just very nice point on the the um your skepticism about all the humidity of historians um one of the things that history does teach us is that people see the world very differently from us because we're confronted with this all the time and i have enormous difficulties understanding how thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousand peoples could become monks and nuns in the middle ages yeah and this is our own civilization from which we descended and yet for them this was a very reasonable thing to do um or something that in some way was inspired and right um just to understand that people think very differently is easier for an ethologist and a historian i think than for a political scientist a little thank you um i'm going to make two observations on the Ukraine thing first the importance of historical method um we deal with evidence and it goes to the fake news information question um you can apply rules of evidence and corroboration um you can be skeptical claims all around and i think that's helpful secondly it's really been interesting that if you look at the debates going on about the course of the um of the Ukraine war that historians have been very active in this debate i'm much more pessimistic on the Russian behalf than others the analysts look at the numbers and so on the historians look what happens to military organizations with poor morale whose logistics are suffering and so on so people like Elliot Cohen and Philip So Bryan uh have been very active in this debate and very um uh and won't make for good reading in in Moscow whereas the more uh political science or analytical side uh is much more cautious about how things will develop and just a final point given that the iraq inquiry was mentioned it was also about accountability and historians do have have a sort of role in that and i think uh i mean just going to the point about uh dirty laundry i was very struck in the middle of the inquiry going to shrivel them and talking to people to two officers there how anxious they were that the dirty laundry came out because they felt quite annoyed about the experience they'd had because of poor decisions so um whether it has any lasting benefit is a different question but if you've been through something like that i mean i hate the word closure but but there's there's some sense that the people have noticed what happened um and held others to account with that i want to thank enormously our panel and also our audience and including our online audience for what has been a really rich interesting and varied discussion so join me in thanking the panel