 So, hello everybody here in Berlin at Särchen on the Holzmarkt, a real and at home or wherever you are watching on AlexTV here in Berlin on the respective websites of our partnering institutions to another edition of Making Sense of the Digital Society, running, having run for so long and I'm really glad so many people actually could make it out to this venue here on site in Berlin. It's such a good site after all those years and we know that. A good place here in Berlin and I know that it's difficult for some organizations to find a audience. Obviously, we don't have this problem despite the pandemic and we are happy that it has come to this. You know that this is a organization that is led by two organizations, namely by the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and also by the Federal Political Education, which is also responsible for this event series. I will introduce you a little bit in the topic and of course also some information to our speaker. Tonight there is a lecture of about 45 minutes. We will start here with a discussion here afterwards, here on stage after the lecture and after that you also have the opportunity to ask questions with the slide if you want to follow online and also here in the hall, there is a microphone if you have questions . We will then start at the right time and then we will also listen to you on the slide and follow what you want to say. This is the third meeting this year and this is the first and the fourth meeting this year will not take place in Berlin or in Frankfurt, but in the framework of the Berlin Theater Festival, Festival Politik im freien Theater, Stefania Milan will be there and she will talk about Resistance in the Data Files Society, resistance in the ratified society. And I would now like to start culturally, not just because it is out of a dictionary, but because we will talk a lot about cultural factors in this lecture here, when we talk about culture, when we talk about war and war leadership. I would like to start with a song. I could sing it, but I will not do that, don't worry, I'll start with a song that we all know. War is good for absolutely nothing, say it again. This is a song of the famous Motown Music Labels from Detroit. The band Temptations should sing it in 1969, but the music label was afraid of this anti-Vietnam war leader of the group, the Temptations, and because of the rather conservative fan base, this music group and the songs were then read by Edwin Starr and that came to the tip of the chart and the famous German philosopher Friedrich Kittler said pop music is a misuse of a master's device and thus quoted a general from the First World War who did not want his soldiers to hear radio, which pop music was just invented back then. There were certain technicians at the front who made radio and radio broadcasts for the Germans and also for the other parties and who engaged in the war. War for which it is good for nothing is a very ambivalent number, a more specific number. Of course, the word war for nothing is good, but it also has a different meaning. Namely, it is a ethical judgment that war is bad, but it also refers to the goal of the war, namely the great nothing and that is, so to speak, a metaphor for total destruction, for a high number of deaths, for the nothing on the ground. I do not know if this song will still work today, first of all, because the pop music has taken off its social order, the technology. We need sung slogans when these social media are more effective in organizing a protest and there is only a second group and that probably has to do with the usual ideas of war leadership that many of us have and that brings us closer to what we will hear from our guest today. The Vietnam War was the first time, at least partially, in the TV series War, which we often call the Second Gulf War in Germany. The first was the Iran-Iraq War and the Operation Desert is Storm. That was only part of this war and so, so to speak, a change in the pictures. We had radars, images from the planes, a so-called precision-controlled steering armament, a light light on the ground to win a war, a clean air battle and so on. And then there was that and that and that many believed that this war would change very much. But what kind of war do we have now? The closer the conflict is back, the more our knowledge is about technology or about the used technologies, regular, irregular, hybrid numbers, conventional and so on, technology and so on. Today's lecture is supposed to bring a little more light into the dark, not only in relation to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, but also in general in relation to the change of our perception of war, in relation to war. Our speaker was a soldier in the Canadian army and studied in Glasgow. He is now Professor in King's College and came from London to us. He is a professor for war in the modern world. He has written extensively about the effect of information technology on war and war in recent years and many of his thoughts are in his book from 2017. The book is called Carnage in Connectivity, Landmarks in the Klein of Convention on Military Power, which is the main interest of the time. It refers to the size and size of the discovery kingdom, today's fortresses, his new book is called Guarded Age, the Watched Age. And in this lecture we will also get an insight into the theory of his discipline, into the history of discipline and of course we will also discuss today's events. And I am pretty optimistic that we will see the war afterwards in a different light. But I have to say that it is also all about optimism, what I can bring up here. When we had a video interview here, he told me that our guests should be looking at the future, to see what the meaning of the course of the Russian-Ukrainian War is. And the more important thing is to say that this is a way to show the moment for our future and that's why we have to understand better the material and also what else is happening here. And that's why I would like to welcome you here, David J. Betz. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you very much for the introduction and the warm words. And I thank you again for the invitation. I was very happy about it. Well, I once thought that the war is good for many things, but I have changed my opinion. Because the older you get and the longer you study, the less I am sure that the war is really good for someone. But the war continues to exist and that is an interesting fact. And I think it is very important that we understand what the war is all about. From very obvious reasons. I will not talk about the society, or rather I will focus more on the society, not so much on technology. When people talk about bombs and weapons systems here, then of course I like to prepare for the discussion at the end to talk about it. Well, a third of the topic is the theory of war leadership. A third is about history and another third is about the modern war leadership and how I see the war. In the opening scene of the Stanley Kubrick film Odyssey in the World there is a two-minute sequence to the music of Richard Strauss, which means Saratustra, in which you see two groups of pre-human beings in a fight and at the end of this fight there is one of our distant human ancestors who smithers the damage of the enemy with a thigh and throws the newly found weapon into the air where it turns into a spaceship. Many of you will have seen this scene and remember it. Well, I think it is a masterpiece, a powerful historical narrative and without a word. And I think it says a lot about the war and about people who are very useful here as a starting point for my lecture. Because the war has existed for a very, very long time. There was war in the whole story and we also assume that there was already war in the pre-history. And secondly, it is in the nature of the war that the war does not change. It is still fundamentally an instrumentalized form of violence. It is still essential to destroy damage. And thirdly, the form and middle of the war, which we also call war leadership, that naturally changes over the course of history. The war leadership in every place and every time point in history is shaped by the dominating social constellations in all its connected aspects, so cultural, political, economic and technological factors. There are technological factors here. I want to put it back now, because I think the technological factor is probably the most important factor here. And often it is thought that it is one of the most important. Now, in this lecture, I would like to focus on the war leadership as a variable or variable that can be changed. And my premise is that the war leadership constantly changes. We are a chameleon and exactly how society changes. People are very creative when it comes to fighting. We are unobstructed and refined and look for every opportunity to kill our opponents and destroy their things. So in the end, it is about the pain to cause. Ten thousand years ago, we threw rocks at each other or stones. That was the potential for fighting in a neolithic society. And now we throw or shoot rockets at each other. Because our modern industrialized society has a much larger technological potential. Now, it is often assumed that in the last one or two generations, that our society has become a post-modern information society, such as a digital society, you could also say there are different forms to describe it. And if this is the case, then the question is, the paradigmatic weapons and the war leadership technologies that are now available and will be given. And I will talk about it today. And I have three important points here that I want to make very briefly. First of all, on the level of a very social confrontation, the character of war leadership in the information age has been characterized by the idea of sharpening weapons. So that's something that is surprisingly disadvantageous in the West, because he has not used the power of the myth so well in the past decades. And then, secondly, on the level of the physical war, there is a surprising change or a change in the form of manoeuvres into more static forms of war leadership, which is also called network-advanced smirking. And again, the West is here in a significant disadvantage because of the long return of the industrial and defense policy, which ultimately led to our armies being diluted dramatically. And third, in the face of the liberal international world order, which was created in 1945, at the height of the industrial age. Now that was a phase in which the West slowly turned away from the West. And here we see that the change of the paradigmatic social form is also structuring the world again. The processes that are involved in these things are decades old, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has once again turned to the midpoint. And before I go into further detail, I would like to use a few moments to clarify a few definitions. First of all, war and war leadership. War is the organized use of violence by one organized group against another out of any political motive. There are different natural attributes that exist, no matter in which epoch in history or in which place in the world we are. First, pain should be created and values are destroyed. That distinguishes war from normal political actions. Second, war is reciprocal or opposite. We do not get any helpless things. You have probably already heard about war against drugs, war against work and so on, but that's not war. Because they are not opposite. Because when you have to fight against war, when we lead war, then we get a different living, creative being that wants to win and third, war is risky and that is also the nature of war. The result of every action in a war is never predictable and we have to understand that here. And a very important point here is also in this topic area that we understand it, because we often hear that technology will ultimately eliminate this unpredictability in war. But I think that the next step in the war will be lighted, but I don't think that will happen. That can't happen without a wall in the form of war leadership and I think this wall will not enter as long as war is a human opportunity or war is a human opportunity, but war leadership on the other side against war changes constantly. We create new weapons. We are very creative. We also find new ways to convert things into weapons. They can't imagine weapons. Humans are really kind, especially in non-military areas. And that often has a greater influence on war leadership than the creation of new weapons, for example. Let's take China, for example. China has revolutionized the military logistics. China is probably one of the most important reasons why there is Germany today. Because China has led to the fact that Germany was successful in the French-speaking war. Telecommunication, another point. See, telecommunication is a key requirement for mobile operations with connected weapons systems. There was no flash war or radios, or medicine, very important for the health struggle, or food conservation. Without all that, you couldn't keep a army for the whole year in the war. It would simply not be useful. And you couldn't have a lot of people on one heap without being sick, just as an example. Without abstract technologies like, for example, central banking systems or double book management, large armies couldn't be financed at all. So a important reason, for example, why the Great Britain, Napoleon, won the Napoleonic War, is that the Great Britain was very good at getting money to pay ships, to pay for the continents. So it's no surprise that the consequences of the digital changes on our war are expected. There is a new development in the war leadership. War is more about force, because war is a political goal. And war leadership is more than a strike. Ultimately, the full potential of force can be mobilized within a society, through the war. How do we understand the ways that wars lead to war? Now, societies lead their wars in the same way as they lead their wars. And we think now, for example, of commercial societies and their wars. The wars also have very rural or commercial influences. The war invaders, for example, live in the construction season, because it would have cost a lot of money if the men weren't there at the harvest. And also the weapons, the weapons were used in the war, which is also the weapons. The weapons were used in the war like agricultural equipment, for example, long spears, sinews, animals, the same animals that would be found on a farm. The hierarchy of agricultural armies is similar to those of the back then society, the class structure with agricultural owners A.D. officers and so on, as farmers. And the yellow goes for the industrialized societies, where we see the factory manager, for example, and state technocrats, who want to standardize, want to mechanize, want to mobilize as a goal, and overall require the rational application of knowledge on military problems. What we could now call the character of war leadership is particularly noticeable at the beginning and at the end of every epoch when the war leaders engage with a different society in contact, they come up with a different type of war leadership and in such cases you have a kind of laboratory that you can see or compare which effectiveness the two forms have, so old against new, so to speak. Normally we know at this point that something has changed in the war leadership, in which the profit is clearly and clearly on one side lies. To introduce ourselves, we take the battle of Chiroyama from 1877. If you don't know this war, then think of Tom Cruise and the film Samurai, where this fight is presented. And normally this war is known as the last use of Samurai, where a group of best out of the land-based systems, great in their armor and their individualized insignia, against a super-powerful, very united, uniformed, defensive, of the new imperial Japanese army fighting. And ultimately the Samurai completely extinguished. The industrial revolution changed the society in any way. I probably have to say more about this. At the same time, the war leadership was also changed. We can't just talk about it in one or two sections, because it's a big wall, so I want to mention three things that are important. First, the first factor is that the old paradigms are not completely extinguished or replaced by the new paradigms. Instead, a kind of mix seems to arise between the two. And sometimes the importance of old things is repeated, in a very shocking way. That's mainly the case with commonalities and art. We all know that. Just to mention an example, Japan in today's Japan is a country that is a high-tech nation, but everywhere you see samurais. If you go to a neighborhood, you will see a kendo school where traditional martial arts are taught. Or you go to a small city festival. There you will see people who practice archery or other archaic arts. I think it's just in the human nature that it's wonderful that people hold on to it. Even after a long time, they had an extraordinary or even a function. Because you like these things. The same goes for material things to a certain degree. To underline this, I would like to tell you that the industrial war model, the expert also called the modern system on the battlefields of the first world war. And to solve the problem in principle, the weapons, infantry, armor, artillery, air guns were put together. In general, awareness is this development in the war is often connected with a picture of horses and tanks. Maybe you know a well-known novel called War Horse. This idea of horses and tanks goes together here. Well, horses are very sensitive and dangerous because of bullets and combat. But tanks are actually well protected from bullets and that's why if you think about the background of the war, what the future of war would mean now the conclusion would be that there should be no horses. But if you look at the details for example the British Imperial Camel Corps, now camels in this case on which you can ride, now this was a very important control medium in large parts of the British Africa in the time between the war in the Abyssinian war from 1940 to 1941 the German army of the Second World War which is often seen as the first perfected mobile use army now the system here on horses and until 1945 the Soviet army had dozens of cavalry units while the war is and even later even large formations in the size of all corps and also horses were used in the Eastern Front and that's why Germany had among other things two Ukrainian Cossacks cavalry units recruited during the Second World War which were used against attacks and operations and also today there is the United States Marine Corps the Marine of the USA to ride, to pack, etc I could give more examples for continuity against a revolution but actually the old things are not completely disappeared they might be changed a little bit but they disappear not completely and again to show us exactly that you can clearly imagine if you like books then imagine a commander of the air cavalry in Vietnam war film Apocalypse Now this commander wears a rider's hat and flies in the battle with a helicopter and hears the music of Wagner's Valkyrie and things are not black or white, there are gray zones and not monocausal or unidirectional but sometimes it goes back and forth, etc, and second even if we had a few epochal times I just talked about bourgeois and industrial societies and also about the information age now one factor we often see is that the tempo of the war does not accelerate the bourgeois age takes a long time and from the beginning of civilization up to a few hundred years so to speak the time age of the industry however in comparison is just 200 years old a blink of an eye in the time history the industrial time age is yet a very fast-paced term and therefore when people who watch it often in the Second World War there was especially an incredible loss to people's lives, especially in the first two years because the Napoleon order with general ranks for example does not fit the new possibilities of the war many military historians back then would say that it was in 1916-1918 more military care than in the whole years and in this short time armed forces have learned to use long lines tanks, other mechanical horses battlefield electronic communication and all of that they have learned during the fight in one of the greatest wars of humanity and the most important point I think that if you realize that this is a transition from one epoch to another from one paradigm to another paradigm then it would be the logical conclusion here that we are now in a moment when we have to understand that everything we have done was wrong and that we now have to do something completely different Third, the wall of one time to another seems to go into the international order and these changes are often big and drastic, that is less obviously is here that it is often not the first profiteers of this change are also long-term profiteers we take as an example the industrial revolution which has the rise of the west, especially the European powers, which also military forces could practice in a way in which the rest of the world did not come at the same time, it also led to the world and has the European world powers weakened and has two outside European superpowers created, namely the USA and the USSR let's take a look at who I have talked a lot about the past because I think that this is one of the best opportunities to understand our today paradox in relation to the last point that I mentioned and I think the most important thing to understand is that even if big world powers from the times of the history can be swamped by it and that happens to the Europeans that happens to the European powers that happens to the USSR and that is what what could happen today in the international order today, so I think at least now when you look at the information at all times, I think that the whole audience wants that we also get ahead that's why I don't want to go too much into this topic because you all probably know the literature for the information age on which I will take reference I think that the information age did not start yesterday not with the invention of the microchips not with google amazon or whatever the beginning is still in the history back. I am 53 years old and I would say that I have never lived in a not connected digital or connected society and learned that are much smarter than I have or at the beginning of the information age since about 50 years so the information age already exists for a while and I think we can also pull a few conclusions when we talk about war then we can observe that with modern military forces led to that the areas of other nations outside of the west were accepted their own advantages that was the narrative it was about the progress could only be achieved and here you also needed the military muscle to really spread these ideas and then you saw that we had major wars that led to that a large part of this continent was extinguished where the potential of the war and the change here is no direction whether this change is really successful let's look at new technologies then we ask ourselves the question what happens to the war when computer, microelectronics are used here we have to start with the question about the general context and here is the quality of the information and the properties the following characteristics I take a high degree of immateriality of values in the general economy so if you have a science industry what do these science industries do they create values not by producing things that may lead to physical products that are often produced differently or they just remain ideas and they don't become a product because they are already marketable and predictable for example financial services maintenance etc. there is a big increase in the mobility of information that means you can divide a lot of data which would have been amazing a few hundred years ago and this is also a reason why it is so difficult nowadays to keep secrets for governments this is a problem but also for all of us because we are all so enthusiastic to share our things that it will be really difficult and thirdly there is a dramatic progress in the field of information of discoveries that are very very fast from random phenomena to a mainstream phenomenon in some days or hours that means when something goes viral so to speak the changes in the military follow similar patterns and use the same kind of language you have probably heard knowledge is power this is a sentence that was created by Francis Bacon but this sentence was still today and this statement will be reinforced by digital technology communication, GPS navigation powerful sensors and precision attack weapons so that a general can see the strenght of his opponent before they can see him or his strenght to identify everything what is on the battlefield and lead accurate attacks or precision attacks that would be an incredible advantage that would allow him to win this kind of conflict ironically the first military theorists who saw this development were the Soviet Union General Staff not in the USA the Soviet Union understood very well how much they stuck in micro-electronics and informatics that means they looked at these weaknesses and understood that wars are opposite that they had seen this development in the end they thought that the West would be able to create more control where the strenght would have to be smaller and still would have more power so to speak that means they have decided that they would have to find a counterweight against this overweight and in the Gulf War 1991 where the Iraqi strenghters from from the American international coalition were taken out and that was a real turning point almost like the first world war and you thought that it might be a fanatic for the future of the war situation and the West was now aware that there was a new digital revolution in the Middle East and the theory behind it was that the new technology would be able to make the West smaller easier in a new kind of war that would be faster and decided at the end generally speaking from these considerations also shared by others and were in agreement with other big ideas of the society of the time they remember maybe also here a new world order a new world order that is universal with the United States at the tip and of course something from the historical Francis Fukuyama when the end of the story was mentioned which war would lead again and again would it not go to the constitution or the economic models because in the end the liberal democratic capitalism won of course it wasn't the end of the story as we read it today in the last 20 years it wasn't the case that this thesis was reached and was strongly reflected when changing from one time to another in the past it was the positive direction that could suddenly change dramatically and develop in the opposite direction also the speed of the change that a strong aspect of the change to industrial modernity is not accelerated and dramatic I think the best example is the effective deindustrialization of the West that is a process that is the clear example that actually happens more or less than a generation during the end of the story I will focus on three related aspects with the development of the history of the military and strategic impact of the information age this war between Russia and Ukraine since spring 2022 has clearly shown things that were already aware but which we have only perceived as weak from the point of view of a western person that speaks to a western audience that is very alarming that it went back to the invasion of the Kremlin in 2014 or even before that there was a confrontation between the two countries and the West has always been more and more developed and that goes back to the resolution of the USSR 30 years ago that has developed into a war between NATO and Russia that clearly shows if you would look at the main quarter and look at the walls and then you will see that clearly because there are all the walls with propaganda posters what I will get from my point of view is that there is no chance for a victory of the West and also no chance for a victory of the Ukraine and as long as this war continues there is the probability that the whole thing escalates between Russia and China what the West has predicted is without question the most global strategic success since the end of the Cold War the rise of China the historical the historical weaker was than it wanted and it was a century away this rise is a pretty natural process the connection between Russia and China was actually not inevitable but it is now very likely and then there are the self-shadowing that we ourselves have provided the western finance and also the western national economy and the western consumers through the measures of the global finance I think at least half of our population is affected by the negative effects of these financial measures and there is also the problem that the western arsenals bloom very quickly and that the western industries cannot fill up this storage and the costs for heavy goods are drastically reduced and we assume that Russia can continue for another five and a half years with the existing existing and the remaining production there are tens of thousands of vehicles thousands of ballistic missiles and missiles we are now here in the information age and we are looking at what looks like an industrial war which is led to a distance of 1,500 miles which is full of protection crabs and fortresses that remind us of the First World War and that would remind people of their war and it seems that Russia is invincible because of its military muscles which we assume that it would be used now and things that we would have expected such as cyber attacks in this conflict or disinformation campaigns it has been a long occupation of Russia all this was more or less ineffective and that's why we have the impression that the war is winning but at the same time losing the real conflict so it is very paradoxical the situation is a bit different than we expected why is it so? I would say for two reasons the most important is that the war leadership is inherent self-explanatory changes in the war leadership is more or less self-explanatory there is always a balance on the battlefield where certain permanent factors are decided these permanent factors are in my opinion the ability to create physical violence and to keep up logistic questions can you prepare these weapons and so on? the courage and the endurance to keep up these combat actions in the face of the greatest stress and to destroy your own enemy that means that is the moral power and as a third factor the support of your own people what I would call passion and that applies for agrarian war leadership also for war leadership in the age of industry and it also applies for war leadership in the age of information and that shows that even in an age of information physical things are really important and also in earlier times material things were important and I would like to build a picture here the scene is the end of April 2020 the place is about half a mile behind the frontline the Donbass region where the command battalions in Donetsk are being interviewed by a Russian military reporter the battalion was developed in fierce battles and was very successful the command was a former commander-in-chief very experienced and since 2014 in the war at the same time he is also an amateur he does not have a military training that would correspond to his rank and here I refer to a real interview that appeared on the telegram channel of the Russian Defense Ministry that means everyone could follow I would like to draw your attention first to the main quarter on the point of view because if you look at it very carefully you would not see it as a military main quarter because it is actually just a normal transporter with a big white Z on the side in this vehicle there are two big television screens that are attached to the wall and are connected with a protective communication system and there is a series of laptops there is one main man who sits on a plastic lying chair and in the computer it appears to lead this operation he has a lot of mobile phones on the television screen you can see the live images of twelve commercial drones three of them are for every hundredth of this this battalion the whole thing does not look pretty the costs for the vehicle and the drones are maybe 50.000 euros so maybe a little less depending on whether you get a discount but it is still very effective and this command is involved in the war in the information age and in my opinion after a war they are there to win, that is for me the network of possible delay or use that means it is about using the enemy by normal firepower supported by digital systems that are cheap and effective so that this use can be won at the end Moors law I think everyone knows the law of Moor basically it just says that the costs for a computer power takes off and drastically because the number of transistors in a circuit doubles it doubles very quickly every two years it doubles the transistors on a circuit and you have heard that today you know the law that there are more computer power in your apple watch than in the computer that people brought to the moon 50 years ago and this applies to military equipment in the west military equipment takes a lot longer 20 years or 2 years for the equipment and actually with non-traditional equipment that means the costs of what we have seen in Donetsk if the Germans would buy the British army it would probably cost millions 5 to 10 millions it takes 5 years to plan to build it and then it would have technology that would be 15 years old it would probably look nicer but it would not be so good and expensive the example that I mentioned it is a small example but it is not unique it really is something for all military equipment also for top equipment for example the computer power of the new American F-35 it is a really the important quality of this aircraft is the software that should make this aircraft extraordinary not the flight technology so if you buy a F-35 fighter aircraft it is a software package with a kind of aircraft the youngest Tesla car has 100 times more processor power than a F-35 in terms of cost that means the military technology was not the driving force behind the development of technology but it was behind the civilian technology and it is the fast growth in the information time and in the power of the information time it does not come from the military use but from other areas so even in Russia even where it is done and they are in the position with these instruments their abilities to increase the cost drastically and that reminds me of what the soldiers and officers had in the First World War where they created a modern system of war from each other connected collections with welded protective plates with wood and canvas aircraft the result was not pretty but it worked and that was decisive for the war in the next decades I am worried that the West played a long war and shamed itself for too long and therefore enough is now where it would count where it would count and that felt us in a not sure position I would make a mistake if I would not take the wider area of information into this conflict I said before that physical material is important but that does not mean that immaterial is not important I think both are important physical material they are important and how it affects in a hyper-connected world like in our world is not materialistic and everything is confusing and today it is really more difficult than in the past I would not say because people notice that it is more complex and difficult I think that is a normal mental problem we always say that our ancestors were so much easier the past was so much more beautiful so much easier I am not sure if a commander in the Thirty Years War really had so much easier the moral dimension of the war was always a great challenge at the beginning of the year of the second millennium the American political scientist Joseph Nain called the term soft power and it has to do with the attractiveness of a country and its culture in contrast to hard power the military potential of a country in connection with the industrial power this soft power is a concept of information more like a product called apple coca cola volkswagen and so on so there is value but the immaterial is also important but very subjective and information warfare war leadership is about managing the perception of a conflict that means you have to deal with the mood with the ideals with the beliefs of the people and it was an important concept and an important strategy behind the victory of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War and I think that nowadays in a time when we are not talking about that we are leading war against other countries but that we are leading war against illegitimate regimes and the whole thing makes the transmission of the message much more difficult if you are a people who are good for their well-being then it is difficult to convey this message so that is a very difficult sales argument and another turning point is that the war is the competition between the will of the people that means that you have to take care of the mood of your own people that is what most democracies do not like to do so so in the last hundred years all good propagandists have called themselves non-propagandists that is the first rule not to call propaganda not to say that you make propaganda and so on until until the constitution was not used in the Great Britain it will be done but strategic communication is called and that is a flower of the economy some of you may work in that area probably today is the most popular master program in the Institute for War Studies where I teach and propaganda as we want to call it has always been an important aspect of the war because people have to be motivated and both passionate for the war otherwise they should sacrifice war leadership in the age of information is war leadership in a context where the communication channels become more and more smaller and distant events and that means it is quite difficult I would say this context is a challenge and that is a challenge because it is really necessary to develop a myth if you are involved in a war if you want the people to be passionate then you need access to a myth and if we if we postmodernity if we do the same I think it makes sense to do that modernism and industrialization we can do the same postmodernism and there is postmodernism something intrinsically hostile to such myths and we experience rather that the audience is fragmented and not unified and this lack of myth power that means the possibility to turn the people and to call for sacrifice there is no such thing and that simply weakens and that and that is followed by often a broken-up trust in society and war is a collective society and a society that is not able to sacrifice will lose and a society that cannot fully define for such a citizen will not create collective effort and the whole will be fragmented and I was in the German Historical Museum and there is a wonderful exhibition about identity and I would like to ask you to go there to see this exhibition it is a wonderful exhibition of the points I just mentioned it is a bit different it is a bit less alarming the conclusion of this exhibition why am I so alarmed I am alarmed we are standing in front of a cold winter not enough gas and now we see that our political leadership and psychologically prepare that we will be in need Macron and we have talked in this direction I am not so happy I would like that the people of this country would react to the chronic bad government leadership in their countries like the people of Sri Lanka the irony after September 11 was that the government at that time fought against terrorism and called it ideas it was a world war for the hearts and the brain of the people and it was convincing that a better life was led and shown and that was not completely thought through and since then it has not been thought through that if this better way of life is not actually really better the answer would be I would be afraid would be a real collapse of credibility and this in the last 20 years has shown that the soft power of the United States has taken this example within the West a survey from 2018 showed that 49% of the French and Germans agree that the US is a great threat to our country but it seems that although Western countries trust each other less than they did 20 years ago they and like other countries outside of the West outside of the West it looks different from the same survey from 2018 that only 43% of the Russians had similar threats against America as the French and the Germans this number would probably have doubled if we were to judge the voting values for Putin's policy the attitude in China is much less negative Russia and China work hard on it and also pretty successful to take the rest of the world in the Middle East, Syria and surprisingly in Saudi Arabia and other countries there is a great willingness to close the Russian and Chinese perspectives that shows that the West has discredited itself not the ideal nobody likes peace and prosperity but that shows that the West doesn't represent it doesn't represent it and that leads to this loss of credibility that the U.S. returned from Afghanistan in summer 2021 I confirm the worst this loss of credibility it's not just this chaotic way what happened what the pictures we saw from the airport in Kabul it's repeated so to speak the whole thing was a reward of the Taliban and after 20 years in Afghanistan together with the United States although Great Britain fought with the United States in Afghanistan Great Britain was not informed about the withdrawal and it shows that a reason for that was that the U.S. and the government didn't say that they would withdraw and the politicians in Great Britain experienced this event like they did with the pictures on the TV all Western wars were sub-strategic that I would like to say it's not about living it wasn't even a big national interest it was this war from the point of view of the politicians that the public had to do something because something terrible happened because we were connected people reacted to what they saw in the distance and they reacted intensively politicians felt that they were forced to do something and many wars in the last generation were led as things in the inland not something there were no wars an international strategy but more from inside political motives they felt they had the feeling that it was a gesture and I think it's typical for a gesture that it has to be cheap the politics behind it is logical and actually political you can understand that but the problem is that it's really unfair and long-term eroded the credibility and trust the view or perception that the elite is competent the situation is dramatic and tragic from the combination that you wish to do the right thing the West has his own capital of credibility and trust and these are the two qualities that are particularly important in this war of ideas so this is a very uncertain situation that we are in and in the end I want to say the following a few years ago a thousand years long-term agrarian time of human civilization is mentioned compared to the really short time of the industrial age and I have also seen said that the differences between these two are very swampy it shows that it is my colleague has the shock of the old it seems to be Russia seems to be winning a war in a war in this information age because they still have military muscle military power old school military power and we are still in an industrial time age and the biggest concern the biggest concern of the region in the West is at the moment if we have enough food for the winter Ukraine and Russia build the industry for North Africa and especially for the Middle East and what what the result could be is a migration crisis that is unparalleled and I would like to briefly mention an anecdote recently I got my teenager daughter from the library there she worked for 8 hours she was very hungry and tired she really wanted to go home eat something and then directly to bed I would like to go home eat and sleep in relation to the needs someone has physical needs in the car however was the first need to connect her mobile to the Bluetooth network so that she could hear a broadcast that she had already heard before her work in the library and I was mocking her because she should connect her security goods first needs which was important to me and she said she could not do it before she did not have her psychological needs connected with the Bluetooth I think that really shows that our needs are different from time to time we are no more prehistoric people on the African savannah where we beat each other we are different but our basic needs remain and maybe we have to change our priorities and maybe we change our priorities that some psychological needs change a little and maybe that's why our security needs are not that important anymore we see the need of people to connect them and we also see that people are very nervous when they do not have their phones with them on an overgoated level we see that the age of time is not replaced but that one layer is added to the other and during the war the digital system does not use when the operator is just knocked out or there is the simpler and more effective way to fight than with a cyber attack and what we really have to learn is the problem of self-satisfaction is great power and go under not go under on different causes from one side to the other but the is the microphone on wonderful can you hear me ok wonderful thank you David for this very open often controlled version of the lecture now we have time to talk and then you can also hear the questions from the audience a few general questions we look at the current war here in Germany we know of course the old technologies the new technologies are not replaced because we have here seen that the fax machines were really used during the corona pandemic here we had a similar observation they talked about continuity they talked about revolution they made a few examples and back to the historical perspective they talked about the Napoleonic mindset in the first world war which led to a big mess especially in the first two years of the first world war could you explain what this mindset was about and how much damage it was that was not just about technology but also about attitude so the Napoleonic mindset or the attitude now it's not that complicated I explain the most general in the first world war the european general during the first world war now their idea of how the war led was inspired by the experience with Napoleon the last example of an inter-European war because between the Napoleonic war and the first world war a lot happened in the area of the development of technology and there were signs in the course of the 19th century that there was a change you look at the American civil war which was one of the reasons why the Nord had won his industrial power I mentioned the french-prussian wars and here you could say that things developed because of the transport technology that was developed which had a great impact on the course of the war then when you look at the wars of wars there were signs that were used for the war where new technologies came into play and also in the wars the connection of the global society was strong back then there was an international medium the British empire and especially fighting with the french media only as an example there were signs for a change and that alone is already a lesson that you should not ignore the signs that maybe our existing of the situation of the counter-war or of the counter-war paradigm should be replaced so there was this picture of the war and it did not work in one environment which already had such a big change in the killing of weapons in the visibility of the operation of the air with the help of balance all these things developed very quickly in a context in which already modern big states already had the entire social muscle used that means they took every person who could bring them to the frontline and in the end led to a huge mess many lost people until they found out how to lead under modern conditions now I am not a military historian but I think that some of the premises like an army organized 200 years ago and today very different while the general officers they were all aristocrats that is of course not the case today we now have a completely different mobility within the rank order but they describe something that reminds me of the Napoleonic example they spoke about the Donbas about the possible destruction through cheap digital systems only as an example and they concluded that the military tactic is behind and not for them they called it the F35 and the all the considerations that they mentioned that the German and French millions were given while the Russians only 50,000 we see a similar combination of different mindset settings and will be the same for the same amount of money to create now two answers in this place or two aspects better one and the same answer first the West has not really fought war for more than a generation we have which we have consciously decided we often had a large material over power maybe the Kosovo war where the Serbs actually had a very good air defense now other wars that were carried out by the West were carried out in a context where we had the most powerful air weapons and were able to act in the sky through just an example for how the wars that we carried out were not necessarily challenged like for example other wars were in the past or how other wars can be in the future or even the current war in Ukraine is the second point and it just occurred to me when you asked the question I just remembered the subject of class structure hierarchy yes, we have in our today's society not the same class structure or hierarchy like in the past and the recruitment runs today completely different now I would say it is not completely the same but I think when you look at the highest military generals they all come from the same class with the same bureaucratic background like the rest of the civilian elite that's why I would say that you this natural progress of senior officers to managers to other leading positions in the industry and economy these are the same people that is often what happens here with the officers I think that's why our society basically in class structure hierarchy does not have in the past but definitely our highest generals come from a manager class and yes from me then here you have this educational background that makes sense if they all have the same background then they all have the same ideas and ideas and perspectives that means you always have the same and that leads to that you do not find any creative solutions and always only follows the same patterns I already talked about that there is also this transition leading position in the military leading position in the economy and that may be a reason why military education is so expensive now we will soon ask the audience I would also like to ask further questions about technology but another point that I would like to address is the power of the myth and that we no longer use this power of the myth and they have said that the internet leads to our societies to be saved and I am not so sure because the internet can also bring together and can mobilize people for example or bring people into a power position we have always seen in the last 15 years the internet is the center of western democracy and many in the east especially in Ukraine and that is actually the strength of western democracy and now they say no it is a threat for what we need to move into the war I really understood I don't think we have to end our friendship because we agree I would say that was really very complicated and there is a big and contrary to the indicators I think that the invention of new media and the consequences of the society is really interesting and why did I say that if you look at the inventions of the media or the printing process first you have a united effect for example within the sciences if you print something then it becomes the version of authority and then divided so here you have something that brings together in the sciences for example and also in many other areas at the same time you also see that that leads to a split in the society and then we have the pamphlet pamphlet is here in the title what does pamphlet mean now the people have been able to produce pamphlets so on the one hand we have something that brings together people and on the other hand we have the split and I think that is also what we see in our society today because now I think it is too controversial to say that identity politics has become very mainstream or dominant in most western societies because here it is not about that people find a group with which they identify and how can they do that now because of the greater fanatism etc. and on the other hand we also see a reduction of other affinities that are also important at least in the context of war especially when the national identity for example can be reported you can no longer see the image of the nation because then you don't know where you actually speak so I think these two things are happening at the same time as I said the war is a collective and it exists between states for example there are of course no state actors I can't talk about that now and if it doesn't work the national identity then that is really a problem for the power and if you take a look at why on the one hand there are more exceptions than on the other and I think that is an important factor here now I think Germany is not very sensitive to this national myth after the Second World War and one of my favorite quotes from the American historian is that the U.S. is also very fragmented in 1976 I think that's how you can describe democracy that there are opinions differences that leads to conflicts of course we can also ask the audience and dive deeper in many aspects of this wonderful lecture that we just heard maybe we start with the audience there is also the microphone can you wait for it because it will be broadcast here thank you David for this insight you really drew a dark image the West lost this war the West lost this information war and this paradigm and the material side could the West lost the material war and also lost the social war because we could not create this unity in many ways as a European ideal could unite us to a kind of national state what would be your advice for politicians what would be your advice to politicians so that this war wins I laugh here Tobi already started to say that I would be controversial I do not think that I am controversial I do not win I would say to politicians that they should give up the idea that they have to win this war I read today that the electricity costs in Germany increased by 720% 720% I think that is why? that is a political decision that is self-sufficient for the biggest industrial power in Europe and I could say another example Great Britain decided to take the gas price at 80% and that the majority of the British families until midwinter in a state that the fuel would live in poverty that is not sustainable that is my view that it will not last and I think that that this war has to end we all know the result of this war we know it since the first day that there will be a kind of political division and that can not be kept together as a country, the Ukraine can not be kept together and we have to end this war now and so that this happens we have to speak directly with the Russians and they ask what they want and we have to ask them what it is that would comfort you that for the West would not be so humiliating that we could not sell our population so that is a really difficult discussion and I would also stress that a topic should be this discussion that the Russians have to be asked what they really how they really long-term see their connection to China this erasic pact between Russia and China that is really what geostrategies have warned us since ages since the geostrategies that is very dangerous and we really need discussions between adults with Russia and that would be my advice thank you very much there is one more question from the audience before the show good evening for the lecture you are now here in Berlin the capital of Prussia and you spoke of the Napoleonic wars I think there are two layers that Prussia had pulled from the Napoleonic wars the first is that you have to connect friendship with Russia only in an alliance with Russia can the German state somehow survive in this overall play of the European nations that after the British blockade of the continental barrier this war industrialisation and the innovation has practically been extended if we would now live in other times would you not think that the west that is now under this blockade of Russia in relation to the fossil energy lives that it is not in principle just a good thing that the development alternative energy would support but what should Europe do we are neighbors from Russia at the same time connected by the USA and they thought that the USA is a power that is described in the process I think that is very interesting what you said your remarks to Russia and I understand this point of view but at the moment at the moment whether we can see the advantages of this blockade whether it is actually a demand for innovation in alternative energies for example I think that could be the case I hope that at least I am in general for innovation and also for the one who has such developments but I think in principle it is not a good way to call innovation so war often leads to innovation drives developments forward but the costs of a war are so high a friend of mine had had a very strong overweight and then this friend had cancer and he had months of chemotherapy and in the end he was no longer overweight cancer is now a good kind of a diet I would not really recommend it and I would not recommend that one has a war with Russia here in addition to a blockade blockade for gas, oil, fertilizers a whole series of strategic minerals and so on I would not say that it is a good way to drive forward innovation in other areas it likes to long-term short-term pessimistic but long-term I am optimistic things will somehow work but then we are all dead and I do not think it is a good way to drive forward innovation that first of all so much suffering and it is not worth it I was a Soviet military analyst at the beginning of my career in the 1990s I spent a lot of time in Russia and also in Eastern Europe and as a society you do not want to make a return of the Boto-Interns-Punuz products in two-dimensional frames that leads to need in many generations and I think that is what we are going into so is war for something good is war economically good or for something else good I think people in Detroit when this song came out probably thought that war could be good for them because it has driven the automobile industry we have more questions on Slido maybe we can hear what is written on Slido that the participants of the house can use so we said that is this a relation to artificial intelligence yes that is a relation to artificial intelligence yes I did not talk about artificial intelligence I I could also say that I would not talk so much about technology but that this question is really very appropriate very attentive I said that there are a whole series of things or aspects in war that coincidence reciprocity and so on these are typical aspects of war and the fact that war brings violence with it and I think as long as people do not say that if there is AI then it is probably possible that it changes and AI is not necessarily thinking like humans it would probably be interesting to see for example that if you had a general a general AI that could have feelings and really have emotions and not just an algorithm even if it would be a very sophisticated algorithm then I think it would be interesting to ask if we had such an AI then it would be interesting to ask such an AI to see what the meaning of a war could be this AI maybe at the end maybe war is good for nothing and that's why you can't lead a war and maybe the AI can also come to the end that war is wonderful and so on this this attachment to such destructive things that you don't want to have on this idea could the AI be cost-effective? Is there a second question on the slide? Or was that it? Yes Yes, thank you very much I wanted to ask about the fact that the war is reciprocal you spoke about your students about your institute where it is about strategic communication that many students want to study strategic communication I wonder why students want to study strategic communication in the West, in the Great Britain maybe it's not a waste of time because if the whole is reciprocal and they speak of this erasic alliance pact and if the internet is closed then it can't be reciprocal how far do you think that it could be reciprocal how yes I don't want to disturb my colleagues I think that the open information that our strategic communication programs are very attractive for you Chinese that our institute for war studies has is very international we have a lot of students from all over the world that's not a secret and at any given time we I can't name any numbers but I don't know the numbers but even if I knew the numbers I wouldn't say them in public in a microphone but there are many Chinese students with us who are interested in strategic communication in the institute for war studies and probably because they have the impression I think some of them are financed by the Chinese government and there is the assumption that that maybe knowledge or the students themselves have the feeling that they could point this knowledge in China and when I was still a student I studied Russian and I studied command economy I studied planning the reason was that we thought it would be useful to learn what our enemies know and know and I think so much that happens anyway I don't know if this is an answer to your question but I think this is a field a study field that is considered as a solid part of our contemporary conflict not only in the West but also in the larger frame of other countries also the feeling that this is something with which they should I think their own national centers for this topic thank you very much for this insight we could have a question from Slido before we come to the conclusion at the beginning they already said that there is a reason for a war that has changed this view could you explain if your personal view has changed whether there is a good reason for a war that has changed personally I was always fascinated by war and I am still and I started well I studied and thought in a certain direction and I spent 35 years with the topic that there are many many wars that have not been useful that I can say in my many years of studies and we have an academic kind with the study of war and most of the time I realized when the war after the Cold War and during this time there really was a rise of a kind of war that is decisive that is cheap that can be easily led and something that has never really happened and what we had so far instead we really had endless wars long, exhausting wars that were unsuccessful and so on so my personal conclusion is that war is not really for anything good we really tried to determine whether war in some way can be useful and the reasons for that are really complicated a lot with our society to do maybe you can express that if you have a relationship that does not believe in the usefulness of war and if you fight a war that believes that war is useful then you are in a difficult situation then you are restricted in your ability to lead this war and this belief in the usefulness of war to lead to a material imbalance most of the crises were not so successful most of them were a disaster very expensive literally thousands of lives lost tens of thousands of people had life-changing injuries I do not know how much I know the death toll or the death toll in Germany in Afghanistan we have tens of thousands of people who have less life-changing injuries than they should have because of the decisions that were made by others hundreds of billions of funds the situation in Afghanistan is not better the international security environment is not improved this war against terror actually led to more terror and more terror I this is my experience that war is not useful although I still find war very interesting 35 years academic experience with experience with war it still leads to the 1967 war where the war was served two questions I think there are two things that I do not understand in this war two things that really astonish me in this phase they started talking about it when we had our video and it shows that we actually expected stronger cyber attacks from Russia and the other point we got so little information we have all these smartphones cell phones mobile network and the pictures the report of the front is very poor compared to other conflicts that means no big cyber attack by Russia some people reported it but no big accident and very little report of the front lines war leadership we did not expect but we did not see what is your explanation the first question that you asked there are two sides as I already said to meet the Ukraine the Ukrainian energy system the traffic system Russia has more material to reach them they are more effective price values and I think that is part of the answer the second part is I suspect that Russia already has significant abilities in the cyber space that would surprise me when a country with experience like Russia has preparation etc not like other countries Great Britain, USA etc in attack with the right of cyber space I think Russia has abilities and Russia did not because Russia tries to save resources there is the possibility that this war will be a direct war and then at this time you want to use what would be a powerful means and then you want to attack and I think that is the best explanation I have here why we do not see cyberattacks for information for the war I think the best what you can do to to sharpen your understanding for this war and other wars is to turn off the media I am sorry that I have to tell the journalists but they do not consume the media there are other channels which channels you probably know why I have this guy or maybe you think that is a good idea but I personally did not hear the media report from the beginning attention of course I live in the environment where there is this media but I do not inform myself about the events or the BBC when the war begins what have I done I am telegram and I have 4 groups the Ukrainian and the Russian participation ministry the pro-Ukrainian power and then the pro-Russian channel I follow in the course of the war there are a lot of videos and pictures of it I have spent many hours to watch videos that show the war from above for example but it is all a form of propaganda so you have to try to collect very different sources from conflicting sources and these channels are there for me I think here I have a big selection of different sources and you have to follow this over a longer time and then use your critical thinking you have one that says one and the other that says the other you have manipulated pictures or pictures that only show a certain perspective but I am really convinced that you should get away from the media report why? now my reason is that the media that offers the least usable information the information is processed and it is not clear and obvious how this information is processed if I want to eat a cake I want to know how this cake is baked and telegram is not processed or the information is not processed by the Russian Defense Ministry of course these are all perspectives of course these are international channels of course you have two conflicting official conflicts and all of them have a perspective and you have to what would be stupid to make a picture on the basis of the information of the Russian Defense Ministry alone for example you have to take different sources it would be problematic to make a picture without the information that the Russian Defense Ministry is a game and you don't need the media and you need maybe I'll leave it there are these international channels are they English or only available in Russian and Ukrainian so I follow both in the English version so you can follow the Russian channel the Russian Defense Ministry and there is also an English-speaking telegram channel the Ukrainian Defense Ministry also has an English-speaking channel for obvious reasons because that is the language of the international audience that they want to address what I haven't done yet is to join the Russian Defense Ministry simply because my Russian is no longer so fit for this amount of information to be processed in Russian but these are English-speaking channels yes well, I have to spread my family chat telegram channels on my cell phone first of all, thank you very much David Betz we'll see you again if you want, this series will continue until October 6 Stefania Milan has another lecture we have already talked about the topic here we will introduce a new perspective in October, thank you very much that you are here from London David Betz, thank you very much that you were here