 So this event really is the sort of kickoff event for the Corbett Center's strategic thinker series. We are hoping that eventually sort of every six months we will have one of these roundtables to discuss a major maritime thinker. So once we move through some of the major maritime thinkers we might start going to more unusual or not so often considered maritime thinkers. And the purpose of this series is really for students who are in PME, for students who are in undergraduate master's PhD, but with an interest in maritime affairs, or for anyone who's really just interested in strategic thinking and how strategic thinking is happening today within the world defense here and now. So for our first series, we are doing Corbett as you all know, and we have with us Professor Andrew Lander, Professor Jake Biedin and Dr. David Morgan Owen and of course myself. And we are just going to have a sort of informal but led discussion about Corbett as a historian, Corbett as a strategic thinker and sort of Corbett just as an Edwardian man running through the world and trying to gift his ideas to further national strategy. So without further ado, I will actually hand over to Dr. David Morgan Owen who is the chair for this session. Thanks Anna, and welcome everyone for the eagle-eyed moments to you who tuned in expecting Greg Kennedy. I am not Greg Kennedy, I apologize for this. If Greg is why you are here, I can't imagine why that would be the case, then I am sorry, but I have set it at last minute to do my best impersonation of Greg in chairing this. I'm very pleased to be here amongst such August company both in the participants and on the panel. So I'm just going to offer a very, very brief introduction before we then kind of move through 45 minutes, as Anna said, of sort of semi-guided but informal discussion amongst the panelists who are going to kind of share some of their expertise and ideas, and then we're going to open it to the floor as much as possible. So if you want to type any questions or comments into the chat, we'll do our best to monitor that as we go through, and then we'll certainly come back and pick up some of those questions at the end. So very briefly then, I think we've got a really great blend in the panel here because we're going to approach Corbett from a series of different traditions that are each going to bring a lot to illuminating a really rich and fascinating subject. So my colleague, Dr. Anna Brinkman-Schwartz, who introduced the session, is a rising star of 17th and 18th century diplomatic, imperial, and maritime history, working particularly on Britain, also in a broader Atlantic and Anglo-Iberian context. So as encountered very much, Corbett the historian, some of those really enduring and influential books on the Seven Years War and afterwards. Next, we have Jake Wyden, who probably must have been about 10 years ago now that Jake's original Corbett book came out, which is now available in paperback as I discovered today for a very reasonable price. So Jake obviously brings, comes to this topic very much from the perspective of military thought and strategic theory. And Corbett's kind of place within the broader canon of thinking about war in the round and how Corbett has kind of influenced how we've conceptualized maritime strategy and war in the maritime domain over the course of the last 100 years. And in this context, obviously, Professor Andrew Lambert needs no introduction. Andrew's biography of Corbett came out this year, his much-anticipated biography, which I whistled through over the last week and thoroughly recommend to all of you. It's a fantastic book in which Andrew has advanced a number of really significant and original arguments about Corbett, the thinker, the historian, and the man, which I'm sure we're gonna get into during the course of some of this discussion. So that's more than enough for me. What I'd like to do to start this off is to maybe ask each of you perhaps to elaborate a little bit on your own kind of perspective and relationship with Corbett and Corbett's work and how you feel that he's kind of particularly relevant or significant to your own research or indeed your teaching if that's something that you'd like to reflect on as well. So perhaps if we'd like to kick off with Anna and then feel free to jump in, in whichever order you like. Great, thanks, Steve. So yeah, so my interactions with Corbett actually began through Andrew as one of his MA students in the history of warfare, MA offered at King's. And my, you know, I sort of, I fell in love with Corbett's writing probably because as any of you who've read Andrew's recent book, we'll know Corbett actually started off in a very literary way and was a novelist as well. And so his writing is incredibly accessible and compelling and as an introduction to sort of maritime strategic thinking and the maritime world, you couldn't really ask for anything better to hook you in and get you really interested in the subject. I then pursued my interest in Corbett because I realized or, you know, Andrew pointed out to me at one point that he in fact had written the Seven Years War book which he is rightly famous for. And this is the book that really launched my interest in the Seven Years War and in the Seven Years War as an example of sort of quintessentially British maritime strategic thinking and in a wider context, sort of quintessential maritime thought in an Atlantic world, in a very 18th or long 18th century context that applies up through the Napoleonic period and too much before. So I very much approach Corbett as a historian and as for myself as a historian of strategic thinking. I find his interactions between being a lawyer, being a historian and being a practitioner and a strategic thinker, a really fruitful avenue for my own thinking. And I think the last thing that I would say on this is that I actually, I find Corbett rather inspirational as someone involved in PME. So the way that Corbett writes is incredibly accessible. And I find that as someone who is also teaching in PME to make my own subjects and any subjects that we cover and teach accessible to the students and to get them interested in it and to get them to have the same sort of passion that I have for the subject is probably one of the best things that I can impart upon them. And whilst I have learned this from various colleagues and various of my own teachers I actually think that it is Corbett who first really drove this point home to me from his own approach to PME. So yeah, that would be me for that first one. All right. Thank you for inviting me to this round table. I first encountered Corbett in 2003. It's a bit of an interesting background. The Swedish armed forces were writing doctrines and they thought of having sort of a textbook on military theory as well. And then some officers started to write that book and they realized pretty soon that it wasn't very good and it was diverging between the different services. And so they brought into young researchers, me and a colleague of mine, Jan Ongström, to write this textbook on military theory, sort of a primer on military theory to go along with all these service doctrines and the operational doctrine. So I got hired for that. And I wrote the naval part of that book with the naval chapter. And that was actually the first time I've seen his name before, but I never read him. And my background is in the history, Cold War history, a bit of a political scientist as well. And we were trying to write this book on military theory and immediately I read through works on naval theory, maritime strategy, and Corbett caught my eye as a very sharp mind. And a very good book, I mean, it's old, but it still was very easy to read, very well put together, very convincing arguments. So after that book was published, eventually it came into an English translation in 2015 as Contemporary Military Theory, published by Rutledge. But after the work was done in let's say 2005, I started to think, okay, what should I write my next book on? And then I was very excited by Corbett and his work. So I decided to write sort of a theoretical, intellectual biography of Corbett. And the only book available at that time was Donald Sherman's biography, that I thought that, you know, I could write a different sort of book than he did. And consider the fact that I'm not much of a naval historian. So I came to Corbett from a military theoretical perspective, having read a lot of Klausowitz, Yomini, Littleheart, Machiavelli and thinkers like that, even modern ones. So I tried to write that kind of book. And I much regret now that I didn't have Andrew's new book at hand for the historical context when I wrote that book. It would have been so helpful for me because I never had the time and I don't think I have the skill to get into British naval history to get the context I needed. So I just approached it as theory and that's what I tried to do in my book and not do a mess of him just because I didn't know the historical context. But hopefully I managed to avoid the worst excesses of treating this as theory and sort of draw it from the historical context. And but I'm very glad that Andrew has written his book now. I learned a lot by reading it about Corbett. So thank you, Andrew, for your book. It was something I started a very long time ago and Jake's book was one of the road, one of the way stations on the road, realizing that other people were actually engaging with Corbett and had different things to say. You know, I very much didn't want to write another version of Jake's book. This was the book that I was always going to write. My relationship with Corbett started when I joined the war studies department in 1978 as an MA student. And I worked with Professor Brian Ranft who had edited and published the first post-war edition of some principles of maritime strategy only four years before that, for the use of the Royal Navy. So I realized from the very start that this was a text which had a very deliberate focus on a PME context. Later in my career, I ended up teaching at the Naval Staff College before it wound up and also at the British Army Academy at Santa. So I had ample experience of PME to see the issues that Corbett was dealing with. Part of the value of his elegant and accessible prose, he is not talking to historians who are working through difficult subjects. He's talking to career professionals whose primary task is not to understand the theory of war. It's actually to be junior and mid-ranking officers and carry out a rather more mundane set of tasks and that this is a shaping education that becomes more significant. So Corbett isn't teaching initial officer training. He's teaching on the Navy's war course. He's teaching commanders, captains and admirals. And that is his audience. So while he writes about history, he is conscious of the uniformed, present-minded nature of that audience. So for him, history isn't the end product. History is the vehicle that leads towards those conclusions which are in some principles. His book on the Seven Years War in many ways is a template of what British strategy looks like in 1907. If you cross out France and write in Germany and cross out Ship of the Line and write Dreadnought, you've pretty much got what the British think war is going to look like in 1907. So it's a period piece. It's a 1907 account of a war fought 200 odd years earlier written for people who are thinking about doing something pretty similar in the future. And Corbett's audience always has that mix, but he made a huge effort, particularly in the last 10, 14 years of his life, to make sure that the history he was delivering and the history of Army's, Navy's and war that he was engaged with was taken seriously by the academic historical community because that was the only way that it would be taken seriously by the military education community. If this is serious or in the Edwardian term scientific, then it's something the military needs and the military will buy science. If you tell them it's impressionistic and somewhat wrapped up in the minutiae of the past and really not going to be very concerned with it. So Corbett is creating a credible history. He's linking it with the leading movements in international as well as British history. In 1913, the world of history comes to London and Corbett delivers his own stand out section to the Congress of Historical Sciences on naval and military history. For the first time, naval and military history gets respectable in 1913 and it's Corbett that makes that happen. He also makes sure that the lectures are chaired by very senior figures from the Royal Navy and the British Army by holding them in the United Services Institute which is literally across the road from the war office and the Admiralty. So we have the first sea lord chairing most of the naval history papers. This is Corbett drawing the Navy in to thinking seriously and using the past as precedent. And throughout my career, I've seen the parallels between those of us who are working in that context and the experience that Corbett had. I have to say in the defense of the rest of us, Corbett doesn't have to do this. He doesn't need the work. He is very well off. He could have stopped working at any stage in his life and it wouldn't have troubled him at all. He does this because he believes that it's important and he believes that it's his duty as an educated member of the upper middle classes to make a contribution. And this is the contribution that he wants to make. So he's driven by a sense of responsibility not by the more mundane financial pressures that affect many people in this line of work. I also, because I work at King's, became increasingly interested in his great friend, Sir John Lawton, the pioneer naval historian who really kicked a lot of this off, who inspired both Corbett and Mohan with his work. So 20 years ago, I published a study of Lawton's career and I very much saw that as the opening shot in a two-part offensive to get this subject of naval history, put on a proper basis and to see where it sits at the intersection of military education, strategic thought and academic history. It's never belonged wholly in any one of those communities. It's always drawn strength from all of them and different practitioners take different cuts of this. So Mohan uses history as a resource which he chops bits out of and assembles them into theory. Lawton insists on doing history and doesn't do much theorizing at all and is somewhat critical of theoretical writing. And Corbett, I think, hits the sweet spot and manages to meld the two together in a way that is most effective, both for the educational purpose and also using strategic theory as an analytical tool in the writing of military naval history. So Corbett, I think, brings these developments to a point where they're stretching across the education of officers and the civilian sector, where they're reaching civilian audiences but also having an impact on the military. And his role in the First World War just emphasizes how important that clarity of thought, that ability to express himself so elegantly and efficiently at a time when words are often spewed out on the paper, Corbett always produces a neat, concise and effective memorandum. So he has transferable skills as well as his educational role. And of course, his practice as a lawyer means that advocacy, what much of his writing is, his second nature, making an argument, developing an argument, engaging in argument is a key part of Corbett's intellectual rationale. I've actually got a book on the shelf here that he owned and in the margins, I can see him writing part of his book about Trafalgar. He's actually critiquing the essay in this book and he's using that and you can see his Trafalgar book emerging in the margins of this text. So he enjoys the debate, he enjoys the argument, he doesn't see that as a fixed and closed process, it's an open process. And the biggest thing he wanted his students to take away from all of his work, it's not finished, it's not closed, there's a debate, it's ongoing, it's a permanent process. PME is not about teaching people something, it's about teaching them to think and Corbett absolutely nailed that down. His last essay in the Naval Review was a wonderful piece where he argues that naval officers really need to think about how they should think, then they can start thinking about their subject. They need to get the mechanics right before they approach the discipline of being educated naval officers. And he takes them through what the problems of thinking inductively and deductively are and suggesting that they really ought to get that right before they start to address the material they're dealing with. So it's been a very long time and I've enjoyed the journey and I can even read Corbett's handwriting which is not something many people can say. I remember after the first time you were talking to me about the Corbett diary, I obviously hurried over there and had a look at it. I was like, may as well be in a different language. Yeah. But I think that point about how Corbett kind of so intuitively and beguilingly gets how to write in a very accessible thought provoking way for the military audience is something that has endured incredibly well. Like when students engage with even the green pamphlet or sections of some principles, they always come away shocked that they found something that made them really think about something differently. And that's an incredible, I mean, imagine how pleased any of us would be if something that we wrote a hundred years, hence would still be speaking to people in a way that was kind of encouraging them to do that. So we've got, as a question in the chat that I'm going to come back to in a moment that's about kind of more contemporary questions. But before we get to kind of Corbett's more enduring legacy or what he might tell us about kind of today, just maybe want to say, ask you a few of these a little bit about kind of how we might appreciate Corbett or how he might approach Corbett in terms of his kind of, we've spoken about him as an astute historian. He's also someone that speaks very powerfully into strategic studies and also to kind of PME contexts. So maybe I'll poke the question then of how do you think in your research you've encountered different disciplines and traditions of thought treating Corbett and what place does he kind of hold in those sorts of different disciplines in your analysis? I know that you've written directly about kind of Corbett and Marathon Doctor and Jake but kind of how do you analyse kind of how people have engaged with his work, what they've taken away from it, the things that they've maybe questioned or not understood or misrepresented or really seized on? I think they actually, I mean, he's writing is so accessible that it's compared to other theories. I think he's harder to misunderstand while other theorists are pretty easy to get wrong and misinterpret. I mean, I know even today at the senior military programme at the Swedish Defence College, they read Corbett and they read Marathon in original text. And like Andrew said, the first pages there in that famous book by Marathon from 1890, okay, that's fairly accessible but it seems Corbett has such a modern style and it's easy to understand it and he's very clear and he's prose, he's conceptual clarity. It just holds the reader in his hand and just you go through the book and well, I think that's probably part of his attraction that he's so accessible but at the same time, very precise, very condensed and you get a lot of rewards for reading that text could be 50, 100 pages but you get a lot of knowledge by reading just 50, 100 pages in that book. Compared to many other theorists that you need to read and assess for a long time to sort of, okay, what do they mean? What's their approach? So I think that's the important thing or what makes Corbett attractive and it's fairly amazing actually that more than 100 years later is feel so modern and so current and usable for even the contemporary naval officer. I get feedback a lot from my students, senior naval officers and cadets and they are very, you know, Corbett is their favorite. I think it's, so again, coming from a sort of empire history perspective, I find it really interesting that in the past, I'd say 10, 15 years even in the past five years, the history of empire and the history of the Atlantic world and even the conception of the Atlantic world as its own sort of subfield of history has really come a long way and it has really, really developed and as such, I think often treatments like Corbett's sort of get left behind and you will often encounter the very sort of modern historian dismissal of Corbett because, oh, it was written in 1907. So it couldn't possibly still be relevant to histories of empire or histories of the Atlantic world. And I think that that is kind of missing the point and I would suggest that one of the things that Corbett perhaps does the best in his, particularly in his book on the Seven Years War is actually analyze the political situation and analyze the relationship between the politicians, the legal circles and the admirals and the practitioners. And this relationship has never gone away, right? This is a key relationship for any conflict that you are studying or any sort of security situation or empire situation. And Corbett kind of makes that argument probably the most elegantly of any historian I have ever read and he really drives it home that the success of a national strategy or the success of an operation is often down to the relationships of the individual people involved. So whilst you can have a doctrine, whilst you can have a pamphlet that gives you the ideas behind a national strategy, if you don't have the relationships that make that strategy then work or make that thinking then work and actually play out correctly, it won't necessarily come off. And certainly in a PME context being able to sort of convey to students that analyzing these relationships and then analyzing their own relationships when they are in positions of command is really key to seeing a successful strategy or operation play out is perhaps one of his more sort of enduring commentaries. And it is now often missed out in histories of the Seven Years War or histories of empire with notable exceptions, of course. That's a really super important point about the form of it. So there's sort of an intuitive sort of, it seems to make no sense that a hundred plus years ago it was possible to write what you might call strategic history in a thoroughly considered short form accessible way, but in a way that is not really encouraged by the pressures within the discipline of history today. So writing an accessible hundred page distillation of the strategy of war X or just of war X is not something that's commonly done. I mean, like a very rare recent example would be Michael Howard's very short introduction to the First World War because that's a 40,000 word book on the First World War. Now, when you compare that to the hundreds of thousands of books, not allowing hundreds of thousands of words that are written on that war. And if you want to write about it, you have to cross so many i's, dot so many t's, there were so many issues that it's actually almost impossible to write this sort of a book or it's very difficult to write this sort of a book. I think as well. So one, sorry, it's just what you said reminded me of this. And I think this is an important point to make here. What Corbett is doing, if you're not paying attention can really start seeming like you are arguing for great man theory or great man history. And it's important to make the distinction that that is absolutely not what's going on because it doesn't matter particularly who is in the position of prime minister or who is in the position of First Lord of the Admiralty. What matters is their relationship. So it's not that he's arguing that, Pitt was the, if it wasn't William Pitt, it couldn't have been anyone else. Although there may be some merit to that because William Pitt is an exceptional man. But what matters here is his relationship to Lord Anson and his relationship to Lord Hardwick who is the chancellor and his relationship to Newcastle. So it's the relationship between the people in power not an inherent importance of those people by themselves. And I think that distinction is really important in order to continue to give Corbett his due and to use him in a historical discipline where the great man theory for very good reasons is Passe. Yeah, I think there's a couple of very good points developing on those arguments. Corbett got his knighthood for writing a cabinet memorandum on the conduct of cabinet government in wartime. It was written for Asquith. It was later used by Lloyd George. That's what he got his knighthood for not for a lifetime of service or his dedication to PME, the writing of history, any of those things. It was a gear of jail card for a government in trouble. His understanding of politics is at a very high level. His brother is a member of parliament. He is a lifelong, indeed a dynastic liberal on the progressive side of the liberal party. On at least three occasions, he was invited to stand for parliament. Two of those were safe seats. His views of empire going back to the point Anna was raising, he's not a died in the world defend the empire. He believes in the future being a Commonwealth, a Commonwealth linked by mutual dependence on the sea, a Commonwealth of freestanding nations with shared culture and shared interests. He is not like his contemporary Churchill, for example, thinking about saving everything. He's looking for a developing progressive future. So his strategy is not about defending what we have, it's about overseeing the evolution of this important organization into something which is different. And I think that marks him out from so many strategic thinkers who tend to be both uniformed and socially conservative. Mahan certainly fits that model. Klauswitz by contrast, of course for a Prussian army officer is a liberal and that may be part of the synergy. Michael Howard obviously springs to mind. The reason I looked at the British way of war in this book as well as at Corbett's work, not just because Corbett actually coined the phrase in 1917, but also because of the way that in Michael Howard's great book on the continental commitment, he doesn't engage with Corbett at all. So Michael didn't use Corbett, he didn't consult Corbett, he used a straw man to make his alternative to the continental commitment, which was the journalistic output of Basil Littleheart, who was spoon fed a kind of bowdrized version of Corbett by Herbert Richmond in the 1930s, which is the basis of his writing on a British way of war. It's one of the problems with Michael Howard's book that he is very much writing about the continental commitment of the early 1970s, but he's going back in history to stitch together a narrative that sustains this as an obvious and logical thing to do, when in all honesty, it has to be seen as entirely asymmetric to Britain's interests and unprecedented in terms of a standing commitment. So the accessibility of Corbett doesn't ensure that everybody reads him, those who don't want to read him don't read him. The last book on the British way of war, my good friend David Francis' book manages to mention him, I think twice, and on neither occasion is he in any way seriously engaged with what Corbett is talking about, which is national strategy. Corbett's maritime strategy is not what navies do, it is what the nation does in a country like Britain, which is a sea power and sees the world in global and maritime terms. That's why it doesn't translate into most continental languages because it's not relevant to most continental powers who have a navy for a more limited range of tasks and find Mahan's arguments more effective because Mahan is also talking to a continental military power. So he would translate well into many languages but he has not been translated because his message is not one that works across all of those divisions. For me, his greatest intellectual contribution is to make people reading in English understand that Klausowitz is not a monolith but a piece of work that has to be developed both in time and in context. You know, reading Klausowitz is very good. Reading Klausowitz as Corbett does in the 1900s in England at a time when England, Britain is a great power but a maritime power. You come up with some principles. It's that meeting of the historical record, the analytical tools. And he is the greatest Klausowitz in, I think of the 20th century because he doesn't take Klausowitz as gospel. He takes him as the basis for fresh and original thinking to reflect the particular circumstances in which he and his audience happen to find themselves. He gets the key from another German author, Rudolf von Kammerer, German general who wrote about Klausowitz and said the great thing about Klausowitz unlike Yomini and all the other strategic systems is this is capable of being developed. Kammerer developed it for Germany. Corbett developed it and it's a much bigger leap for imperial maritime Britain. And that I think is a hugely impressive piece of work which I think puts him at the very top end of the Klauswitzians of the 20th century. That's a really interesting point, Andrew. And I think quite a neat way of maybe segwaying the discussion a bit more towards kind of the legacy and contemporary relevance of some of this. So perhaps there's a sort of first step in that direction. I might pose a question about kind of how we collectively, we and broadly academics and practitioners should or can approach Corbett as a text. But I think the analogy with Klauswitz is a good one here, right? So whenever a serious debate about Klauswitz bruised up your questions are asked about which translation you are reading about whether you're reading it in the original German about whether a particular section of the book was finished or was subsequently changed or would it have been developed? I think it fair to say that no equivalent debate exists for Corbett or certainly nowhere near on a similar sort of scale. Yeah, I'm trying to start one. Yeah, maybe we'll, you know, progress it here. So perhaps the first question then is about kind of maybe about treatment and about how we can continue to develop some of Corbett's ideas, how maybe that process might enable us to move past some of the kind of very specific cultural context in which Corbett was writing or indeed what the limitations of that kind of approach might be. So does anyone want to kick us off on treatments of Corbett? I'll jump in just because actually this is something I've been thinking about. And actually, fun enough, I've been thinking about this since I read Hugh Straughn's biography of On War and thinking about how biographies of particular books are actually useful, particularly for, you know, as you say, students who are involved in PME or current practitioners who just wish to have a sort of deeper understanding of these theories. And I think, you know, and Andrew's book is a perfect example of this as well, but contextualizing the theorists that we ask students to engage with is really important. And I think we often don't do it in a PME context in part because we either think, well, they don't have time because they've got so much else on to do or we think, well, we can't do that because, you know, they're not academics, they're not historians, they're not interested in these background contexts. And I genuinely think that we're actually doing them a disservice in this case because it wouldn't take that much more time or that much more effort to involve our students in this contextualization. And I think it would deeply enrich their interactions with the theorists and deepen their understanding as well. So I think that that is partly on us to push this movement that I think both Andrew and Hugh Straughn already recognize and to actually have more faith in our students and in their intellectual curiosity. And I think that that would really bear fruit if we take PME in that direction moving forward. But maybe that's just a pipe dream. I'm not sure what Jake and Andrew would think about that. Happy to take that on. I agree entirely with that. I did write a publication history of some of Corbett's books as a way of working out. You know, you have to know with some principles that Corbett drafted it at the behest of Jackie Fisher, who sent him an elegant notebook to write it in, which Corbett didn't use, it's still in his archive. He then made sure that the first sea lord of the day read and approved it before he took it to his publisher to be published. So if the first sea lord has read and signed off on it, that sort of looks to me like Edwardian doctrine, which is pretty much what I would argue it is. And then in the PME context, if you can get your students engaged, it is going to be by helping them to understand just how human those writers are. So being tasked with the unlovely job of teaching Closwitz to army captains who are anxious to pass their promotion exams, I quickly realized the key was to make them understand that he was one of them and to take them through his military experience and to stress that he's not writing a book of theory, he's digesting his own hard one experience. You know, you can't take Napoleon out of on war. You can't take the Russian campaign out of on war. You certainly can't take the battles of Janer and Arstadt out of on war. That's what's driving that book. It's bitter personal experience. It's trying to reconcile the mythology of the Prussian army with the catastrophe that befell it in 1806. After that, they were much better engaged with Closwitz. They understood who he was and they realized that they too had to think about their profession and that part of that thinking would be driven by their own experiences. And the last, it's a long time ago now, it's 30 years ago but the last group of captains I taught in that way had just come back from the First Gulf War and they brought a lot of experience with them and they were digesting that experience as we were talking about these issues. So I think that's a very important point. We have, strategic theory doesn't emerge written on tablets of stone by a deity. It's written by human beings and the better we know them, the better we understand them and the better we understand the context in which they're writing, the more useful their ideas are. These are not unique, godlike figures. They are human, all too human and knowing them makes their work much more interesting. You need to know that Alfred Thea Mahan called his dog Yomini and that tells you a great deal about his strategic thinking. You also need to know that his father was Yomini's high priest in North America and tragically he had a mental aberration and committed suicide. And this is why Mahan never mentions his father in all of his writings. His father published extensively but Mahan never mentions that. The influence is there but he's not prepared to talk about the unpleasant nature of the end of his father's life. And very few people have picked up on that. And it's the same with Corbett. You need to know that he's been around the world that his close personal friends include half the liberal cabinet going into the First World War. He works with artists. He works with musicians. He's part of the London cultural scene. He isn't working in an ivory tower or in some out of the way place. He's at the heart of living, breathing London. He works in the Committee of Imperial Defense which is a ramshackle old building underneath what is now the south end of M.O.D. Main Building. He lives in Knightsbridge and he walks to work through Green Park and he often meets movers and shakers on his journeys to and from work. This is a man at the very center of power and to see him as anything other than right engaged, not just in wartime but also in peacetime at the very heart of the political system. His brother is an MP. He's one of the coefficients. He's right at the heart of this thing and that absolutely shapes what he's thinking. It also shapes what he's thinking about because those conversations are raising the questions that he's then going on to answer. So he knows what the official world is thinking about and he's managing to bring that into his thinking. So he's very much of a time and the fact that he's remained relatively timeless is a great credit to him and the quality of his work. I think as well, there's a lot. Sorry, Jacob, I'll let you talk in a second. It just occurred to me that there is a lot public that's published out there and admittedly it is usually from a historical perspective but when we think about the sort of people that we tend to study in PME or who perhaps we don't study and maybe we should, books written about Lincoln and his relationship with his cabinet in the past couple of years have been extraordinarily good. The biography of Marie von Klauschwitz that came out a couple of years ago again really sheds light on the relationships that shaped Klauschwitz thinking. And as you say, the men and women that we're teaching in PME right now, a lot of them have just come back and as you say are digesting their own experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. And they are undergoing similar intellectual transformations as Klauschwitz and we as civilian sort of educators are undergoing similar digestions as Corbett and his relationships. So I think to be able to study those relationships and convey that they are important in a strategic context and in a PME context is really important going forward because a lot of the research is out there, a lot of the material is out there. We just have to make it important in these courses that we develop. Sorry, Jake, please go on. You're muted, Jake. All right, speaking by Corbett in a PME context, I'm involved a lot in officer education and there's so many things for them to do and to read. And you basically, it's very rare that you get the time to really throw Corbett at them in the original text. I mean, it's usually broader approaches to maritime strategy that you have time with. We do a lot of naval tactics, naval operations. But I have noticed that he is still very popular among the students and when you have the time to insert some of his texts or books about him, it's worth their time and they appreciate it a lot. Speaking about Corbett and to my mind, he's the greatest maritime thinker. But in my book, I wrote a few things. I think it was 10 things that I thought that you could improve upon if you would write a similar book today. And it's one obvious one. It's very, from a very British perspective and a great power perspective. And I think Andrew shows that excellently in his book. And you might consider how relevant is he for other countries. I think there's a lot of relevance, it's a very British perspective when you read his books and principles. Also the great power perspective, most powers are not great powers, they're small, medium powers and they're not Iceland countries or nations like Britain. And that also affects the way you would write, I think a book on maritime strategy coming from other countries and from other settings. And of course, I think also Andrew mentioned that he thinks Corbett is a great interpreter of Klausowitz and I agree, but it's also fairly unique and special interpretation of Klausowitz. It's very like rationalistic, very instrumental. It's a pretty neat and tidy pictures about how war is constructed and then how war works. And we all know it's a pretty brutish and chaotic affair. And that strikes me sometimes when I read Corbett that he paint this picture of a pretty neat and tidy thing. And I think if you would write and try to improve on his work, I think you can go in the direction of Klausowitz a little bit more and try to avoid that neatness and that instrumentality that he's using because war is a bit more complex sometimes and all the moral elements and everything like that. And you don't see much of that in Corbett. It makes him easier to read I think and interpret, but it also sometimes lacks a little bit of how our real wars are. Thank you. I can see Andrew frantically on meeting. Did you want to pop in on that, Andrew? I'm happy, carry on. I think it's really interesting actually, Jake, on that point to see how Corbett tries to make that fit in the three volumes that you write of the official history, which is sort of tantalizingly obviously the last volume which may have answered some of these questions to a degree there, but I suppose my reading of those and I'll admit I haven't read the three volumes in the last couple of years. The last time I read them I think I was probably doing my PhD, but it does feel like there's almost a little bit of attention between trying to reconcile what has happened with some of the more elegant footwork in the theory that's done in some principles because it's almost like accounting for the disappointment of people not having lived up to some of the expectation that it's kind of theoretically possible to justify. I wonder if a close reading of those books may have some kind of help in that regard, but pushing us towards this more sort of contemporary angle then, we had a question come in in the chat which is about kind of Corbett in a contemporary context, so engaging with using Corbett today and the question sort of mentioned in South China Sea and China. Now we've sort of talked about how Corbett provides you with ways to interrogate problems rather than answers to them, but I sort of invite any of you to remark on kind of what your thoughts are on the contemporary salience of Corbett and I suppose how you view Corbett to be relevant, so I think we talk quite interestingly about how Corbett has probably got an awful lot to offer in terms of developing one's own thinking by engaging with the times that he lived in, some of the really elegant and incisive prose that he came out with and some of the ideas that he put across, but when we think about Corbett's relevance, can we go beyond that and are there aspects, frames of it that can potentially be considered in a more applied context by any of you that are kind of obviously in the box on that? Yeah, happy to have to look at that. It's critical to remember Corbett's extensive writing on international law, not just his pre-war writing on belligerent rights, but also his very effective work as a propagandist during the war in defending the British model of economic warfare against attacks first by the Germans and then increasingly by Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party government in Washington. It's no accident that Corbett's last two propaganda essays were printed in New York rather than in London. They were entirely aimed at American audiences and interestingly when Woodrow Wilson gave up point two of his 14 points, Absolute Freedom of the Seas in War Time, he quoted Corbett. I think he did it unwittingly. I can't imagine he would have done it deliberately, but he uses Corbett's phrase to explain what he's done. So maintaining an international legal regime, which is amenable to the use of maritime power and gives it leverage against a very large continental power, is what Corbett is all about. The British need to defend the right to conduct economic warfare. That explains the peace processes in 1814-15, a peace with America and the peace with the rest of Europe. They're driven by Britain's need to preserve the primary weapon system, which is economic warfare. And that's why they sacrifice many of their colonial conquests and go for a piece of essential states called anti with the United States. As far as they're concerned, preserving those rights is more important than territory. They're quite happy to give the Americans back half of Maine and to give the Dutch back the whole of what is now Indonesia because the prize is maintaining the right to conduct proper maritime strategy. That's the critical thing. So that's what Corbett is developing. And when he's talking about the Seven Years War, and Anna knows this better than anyone, the individual who really matters in all of this world is getting the legal precedent settled. And it's the legal development of those arguments that Corbett is tying into, the strategic development. So strategy and law have to come in hand in hand. If you're developing a strategy that relies on international legal precedent, you have to make sure you've got all of your ducks lined up and that the legal argument is not going to let down your political argument. In the First World War, the British exploit just their own legal position, but in the case of the blockade, they also use French economic warfare law because that's different and actually can be, in some cases, more applicable to blockade operations. So the 10th Courageous Squadron always includes a French warship. It's actually a British warship with a few Frenchmen on it given a French name, but this ship can arrest blockade breakers which British ships cannot arrest because of the legal situation. So Corbett sees all of that. And the great problem with naval operations, I thought Dave raised a very good point there, and that's the open reading argument that I want to raise. What is Corbett going to say at the end of naval operations? How is he going to round this up? What is the end of Corbett's version? It's no good reading what Henry Newbold writes because he didn't actually write that. It was written by Corbett's staff. Corbett is imposing order and coherence and strategic logic on operational narratives. Henry Newbold just publishes what he's given. So the last two volumes are effectively useless because Corbett is writing a textbook for post-war PME. Naval operations is going to be the central plank of post-war naval education. It will replace the Seven Years War campaign of Trafalgar and the Russo-Japanese War because this is the new experience. This is the latest material. And we're going to have Britain's best maritime strategist explaining and developing these arguments for that audience of post-1990 naval officers going back into the staff college and developing thinking for the future. He gets to do this once. And it's the opening chapters of volume one that he's lecturing because that's already available. So I think that's critically important. And I think understanding that volume one of naval operations is the basis of Lord Jellico's post-war empire mission. Jellico and Corbett are very close. Jellico refuses to set off on his global tour to understand the strategic needs of the British empire without naval operations volume one, which he gets to advance copies for himself and his chief of staff. Jellico's report reads like Corbett wrote it. There's a very clear synergy there. They'd known each other for a long time and worked together on a number of issues. So he's shaping the way people are thinking strategically right up to the top. And even in his very last months when he's trying to finish volume three of naval operations, he's also writing a position paper for Herbert Richmond at the Admiralty on the strategic utility of the Panama Canal in the event of an Anglo-American war. So he's right up to date. He's always thinking about the here and now and the past always subordinated to the present. So he is a historian for the present. His audience is looking ahead. And I think if we're looking at the current context, we're looking at relations between a maritime coalition and a Chinese continental power, which is anxious to exert greater control over the maritime domain. Corbett would be stressing the legal basis of the maritime case. And he would be emphasizing the need to reinforce that and to make sure that you're creating a legal environment in which the strategic advantages of maritime power can be exploited rather than allowing a power like China to shape the legal regime in ways that are not helpful and are in fact advantageous to continental powers. Not letting a continental power like China essentially extend its land boundaries out into deep blue sea and call it liquid territory is a critical part. And that's what you need to do in terms of shaping the strategic context. You need to win those legal arguments as well as thinking about the technology, the communications and all the other aspects. The legal arguments are critical. And that's one of the things where Corbett is right at the top of the strategic analysts of the past and is a great model for the future because he sees that front and center right the way through. He's acutely aware of the legal issues. Even when he's writing about Francis Drake, he's very keen to emphasize the legal basis on which it was possible for Tudor privateers to operate in the Caribbean as opposed to the Mediterranean. So he's doing that over and over again. And if you study war without studying the law, you're going to come unstuck. And in the 21st century, you'll probably end up in a court and be a reign for breaking the rules rather than for more conventional failings from the past. So being legally astute critical. And I think Corbett gives us a window into that. And he emphasizes just how important the law was in the evolution of British strategy. And that's somewhere, something where Anna's work has been really important. No, I think Andrew, that you're entirely correct about this. And I would just add as well that along with the emphasis on the legal side, you know, part of the reason that Corbett understands and does emphasize the legal aspect of strategic thinking is tied to questions of legitimacy. And this becomes very clear when you are looking at what is happening with China and the attempt to take over this idea of liquid territory and to push the boundaries of accepted legal maritime norms. You know, China is trying to push an attempt to sort of redefine what these norms are in China's own interest. And this makes perfect sense. Of course China would do this. Why wouldn't China do this? This is what the United States has done. This is what Britain has done. This is part of using the law and the maritime sphere as a national strategy. I think it would also be perhaps remiss of us almost to not mention the Corbettian phrase, control of communications. I mean, if you want an enduring Corbettian almost maxim, although he hated maxims, so perhaps I shouldn't say that. And this idea of control of communications is key. You know, if you want to continue to have access to trade, if you want to continue to have a liberal world order with sort of capitalism and free trade at its heart, then you have to have control of communications. And if you lose that, or if you seed that to another power or another group of powers, then you are going to start to lose the edge that that gives you. So I would say that the control of communications along with the legal side absolutely remains one of Corbett's most enduring contributions to how we conceive of maritime strategy and national strategic thinking. You want to jump in on this, Jack? I think Corbett's strategy, maritime strategy will be increasingly relevant, especially for countries, liberal democracies, depending on trade and, for example, United States or some big countries that I've read doctrines and they usually tend to sort of be attracted to Mohammed and his ideas. And I think if you are a liberal democracy, a status quo power that you don't, you don't want to get into wars and you're faced with countries that want to sort of expand and change the world order, I think Corbett's maritime strategy will be very important for the United States today, for example, Japan, the EU. And having read, we do that in the Swedish Defence University and with the military officers, we read a lot of doctrines from other countries and I'm struck by how some, especially great powers, that wants to sort of expand and become more prominent, like Russia, China, India, that they are much focused on Mahan's thinking and very influenced by them. And a way to counter that is probably to view it or approach it the way Corbett approached things during his time when his country were facing France with tensions with France and then the German Empire that was trying to expand. So I see some parallels there and connected to China, for example, for the United States to keep that balance with all their allies and to keep the communications at sea open. And yes. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. Of course, when Mahan is writing, the United States is not really a great power. It doesn't have a Navy. It's only just beginning to launch out of the continental phase into the global phase. And so Mahan reads very well if you're planning to go from being a continental power to being a great power and to reach out to the sea, which is why he translates superbly into German in the 1890s. He says he sees this immediately. And so does Terpets. So they're talking about different things. What we're looking at today is there's a Western liberal economic consortium that effectively has a Corbettian strategy collectively. We see the orcas deal with the British Australians and Americans linking up more closely. We saw the carrier strike group from Britain's side into the South China Sea. We saw a legal demonstration as steaming past non islands, which the Chinese think of as territory and of course, transiting the Taiwan Straits, which the Chinese claim as territorial waters. So that's all part of that process, challenging illegal activity, challenging attempts to limit the use of maritime power and to continentalize the strategic environment to an even greater extent than has been the case up to now. So instead of thinking about weaponizing the sea, we need to think about making sure we can still use it and emphasize the communications. That's what sea power is. It's control of communications. It's the ability to use the sea and to deny it to the other side. That's not a symmetrical contest. This isn't two European great powers fighting a battle somewhere on either side of the Rhine. This isn't France and Germany squaring up in a land battle. These are powers which are asymmetric and therefore, from the sea, you have to think about maximizing that advantage because it's highly likely that in other areas you may not have that advantage. Britain's strategic experience is important because it never had a big army until late in the First World War and it invariably came up against powers with much bigger armies and it had to think of ways of waging war effectively against hegemonic continental states which had different political, economic, and military systems. And so where Klausowitz is talking about like states fighting in a conventional way, Corbett is talking about unlike states and constantly one of the themes of his work is here is Britain which is not doing what everybody else is doing because it's not like everybody else. It's offshore, it's insular, it's maritime and increasingly global. And so he's writing a strategic doctrine which fits closer to the western liberal consortium of the 21st century than that of pretty much all the other strategic writers. His politics line up, I think his ideas line up and if we need a doctrinal starting point for discussions of how we need to think about the 21st century as a British liberal western position that is the best place to start. It's not the end of the debate but it's certainly a very good place to start and to understand that the threats he's facing going into 1914 are of a hegemonic European power which will close down economic access. What is controlling the sea about? It's about denying access. What is China's agenda in the South China Sea to stop people coming in there to make sure that they can't have their resources cut off and to be able to deny market access to hostile powers? So continental imperial powers build hegemonic empires and close down economic activity. They are a threat to the economic livelihood of liberal progressive states and that's the fracture line. The 19th century, every single country that Britain ends up fighting has a very restrictive economic approaches to the development of its internal economy and the powers that Britain ends up allying with are the ones that don't do that. There's a link between trade and strategy and war and it is that open trade makes countries more engaged and if you close trade down, you disengage. The Anglo-Russian standoffs in the 19th century are all about trade. The British didn't want the Russians to take over the Ottoman Empire because they would have shut the marketplace and run it for themselves. They would have closed down that very big marketplace that the British were then operating in. The Crimean War is about money, it's not about the Crimea. I think those points about communications and about access also sort of highlight some of the ways that if you think about Corbett a bit more flexibly the endeavour that he was engaged in is relevant even if some of the things that he wrote about might have changed or the things that he didn't write about. If you think about it in terms of Corbett's writing a book about maritime strategy because all international intercourse that is not over a land border or via railway happens in the maritime domain at the point at which he's writing. Obviously a vastly significant amount of it still does but there are lots of other considerable forms of global flows in exchange and if there was a if we would reanimate Corbett and Corbett was alive and updating some principles of maritime strategy today it might end up being called some principles of something else strategy as it were because there would be considerations of finance, national infrastructure, investment, cyber security all of those sorts of other areas because that's the way that the world works and political economy is an absolutely foundational kind of part of all of this. I think that it's important to remember that Corbett's wealth came from international investments in the back of his diaries there are the dividend certificates of some of the companies in which he was invested a lot of them in North America, in Europe his brother who was also an MP is running a major city finance house so somebody has once claimed that Corbett didn't understand global finance he lived on it and his brother was one of the country's leading experts so I think that's a non-secretary so Corbett does understand this I think he probably under-represents it in his writing I think, you know, having looked at where the money's coming from that's subsidizing what he's doing it becomes very clear that he does understand how the world works financially and that he is very aware of that I think more so than uniformed writers on strategy who tend to assume that these things are a given I think Corbett understands they're most certainly not a given he also understands that governments are reluctant to spend money on defence because he's a liberal and the liberals have a long history of not spending on defence Okay, fantastic so I'm conscious that we've trespassed slightly past the hour and that given it is a Friday evening we've been very lucky to have all of our panellists for as long as we have already have them so I'm sure that you'll all join me in giving a virtual thanks round of applause, crappy emoji if you would like to add one to Anna to Jake and to Andrew and to say thank you very much indeed for some really interesting reflections this session's been recorded so it will be available afterwards if any colleagues or students wanted to access it that weren't able to dial in today I don't know if you want to say anything else about kind of the future of the series Anna but I believe this is going to be a sort of ongoing endeavour did you have a sense when there might be a follow-up that people could tune into? Yeah, so we're looking to run it sort of every six months and I believe the next one will actually be on Sir Herbert Richmond and in fact Dave I believe you are on that panel so you will see Dave again when we tune in for that one and we will put this up on the Corbett Centre YouTube channel and if you do follow us on Twitter you'll see an announcement there of when it's up and running and we hope to see all of you guys again thank you so much for coming it's really lovely to talk about this stuff and to know that there are other people interested in these topics and who enjoy waxing lyrical about ideas presented by men such as Corbett so thank you all so much and hopefully we will see you again soon and thank you again to Dave for chairing this so wonderfully and to Andrew and to Jake for agreeing to talk it was really lovely to chat with you guys about Corbett so thank you. That's been tremendous, thank you Anna, thank you Dave it's great to see you again Jake and have a good weekend everyone thanks very much YouTube, thanks for inviting me and have a great weekend Yep, thanks Jake Talk to you all soon