 Good evening everybody, welcome to this event which is co-hosted by the Department of War Studies Kings College London and Roussy. My name is Michael Goodman, I'm a Professor of Intelligence and International Affairs, Head of the Department of War Studies at Kings. And I'm delighted to be co-hosting this event with Roussy, a long time partner of War Studies and a great collaborator in events. This is part of the War Studies at 60 Anniversary celebrations. War Studies was founded 60 years ago, hence the name in 1961, by Sir Michael Howard. And Michael Howard had this great view himself, a veteran of World War II, that actually if you wanted to study war, it required moving beyond the confines of traditional military history to a consideration of its political, economic and social contexts. And since that point 60 years ago, War Studies has grown enormously. Today we have over 100 full-time members of staff, we have over 270 staff in the Department overall. 1600 students spread across four BA degrees, 14 MA degrees and a PhD program. And we've moved from quite a narrow look at strategy, military history, to everything surrounding the worlds of war, security and conflict, from the origins of wars, the conducts of wars, post-conflict reconstruction, proliferation, cyber, intelligence, you name it, we study it. And the focus of War Studies at 60, of which this event has passed, is looking at the past, present and future of War Studies, looking at where we've come from, where we are now and where we might go into the future. And one area we're really focusing on is War Studies Futures Scholarship Programme, to provide 60 scholarships over the next 10 years to students from low-income, widening participation backgrounds. And I'd just like to finish this very brief introduction with some words which come from our newest War Studies BA video, which were provided by one of our PhD students. And he said, we're not here to teach or learn how to win wars, we're here how to learn about the phenomenon of war in its general sense. And so with that, I shall close my opening remarks and pass across to Deborah Haynes, the security and defence correspondent for Sky News. Thank you. Thank you very much for that introduction. And I'm here with General David Petraeus, who doesn't really need much introduction, I'm sure. People will know him, he's a partner at KKR, the global investment firm, but we'll probably know him better for his 37-year military career, including six consecutive commands, which included the surge in Iraq back in 2007, and also commanding forces in Afghanistan before he then became the director of the CIA, so a man of huge experience on the defence and security front. So thank you ever so much for being in conversation. Now, in terms of what we're going to be doing, it's going to be a sort of 25-minute chat between you and I, which will be on the record, and then we're going to move to questions from the audience. And I think we've got some people here in the room and then also in their homes and offices on Zoom. And I think you've got a question and answer function. And if you wouldn't mind when you ask your questions to identify your name and affiliation, then that would be much appreciated. And those question and answers will be off the record, if that's all right. That's fine. And obviously the theme of the discussion is sort of the future of geopolitics post-pandemic, even though we're still in the pandemic, I guess. So I thought we should just start maybe just with your reflections. People, experts were sort of looking at the pandemic in the early stages and wondering the impact it had on the balance of global power. Talk about how it's accelerating a general shift in trend towards this rise of China authoritarianism, the diminishing of democracies, the fragmentation of the West. What do you think now sort of nearly two years on? Well, first of all, thanks for doing this. Thanks to Kings for which I have enormous respect. I work closely. I knew Sir Michael Howard very, very well, had enormous admiration for him. Of course, he was honored by Russi, as was Sir Lawrence Friedman, with whom I also worked there over the years. But many Americans have actually chosen that path to particularly get a PhD and a number of them in uniform and in security studies. So thanks for the contribution that you have made. And, Ebra, you know, you and I have done this in so many different incarnations over the years of you and I both have had different positions. It's always good to do this. And I always have to ask up front how old is the biscuit boy now, who made an early appearance on one of your shows, asking mommy for a biscuit. Yeah, that is my son, Charlie, who actually General Petraeus first met when he was in my tummy at about five months pregnant. I remember coming over and you kindly didn't interview with me. Yeah, Charlie is now five and still liking his biscuit. I will pass on your best wishes again. Please, please give him one. It said General Petraeus asked it. You give that, you know, you're right that in the very beginning of the pandemic, there were lots of notable folks. And I maybe was at least I was among them, whether notable or not, that said that crises tend to accelerate existing trends. And the trend at the time, of course, was in some respects, it was literally the return of geopolitics. I mean, we had gone, we were very much now into the rise of China and the whole future is Asia kind of scholarship and thinking. But as this has gone on, it's not quite as clear, I don't think that it is all going to play out that way because of issues involving supply chains, because of recognition that perhaps you shouldn't assemble all of your iPhones or manufacturer, all of your whatever in one location in one country, because if it gets hit and it shuts down, then it all stops. So the diversification, there were already labor cost trends in China that were leading to some off-shoring or Southeast Asia or even on-shoring coming home. You have the rise of the robots that is still having ramifications where you don't need labor much at all. And it can just all come home and be done by machines. So you have all of these different factors that are still playing out. And frankly, the US was coming roaring back once we got vaccination going and everything else. And then we got hit with the Delta variant and it clearly slowed down that particular recovery. And there's still a lot of dynamics in the biggest economy of the world involving labor force participation and a handful of other issues that have to be worked through. And of course, we're in the throes right now in Washington today of the president having delayed his trip to the G20 so that he could put together a package that will inject another probably it's multiple trillions of dollars, the one that's 1.75 that's been announced the outline. But there was another one that is also in the infrastructure spending in that is very, very considerable and over time will increase productivity in the US and so on. So again, I think now it's too soon and the old economics professor in me would say it depends and you would have to look at a variety of make a variety of different assumptions about what will play out. Certainly very much involving the US, involving the EU and the UK and involving Asia principally among that obviously being the extraordinary rise of China that has done something in 42 years since Deng Xiaoping welcomed the world of China that no other country in history has ever achieved. And there is even a systemic component in this because there is the dynamic of a Western democratically elected governments with generally free market economics in a sense competing with a Chinese system of a Chinese Communist Party government that has demonstrated considerable competence has some very different features, particularly when it comes to certain freedoms and then a hyper competitive state capitalism or what have you but which has stayed on enterprises in it as well. So and of course this which defeated, if you will, the system of the Soviet Communist Party in a command economy and the end of history was proclaimed and so forth. Will history is back with a vengeance and even Francis Fukuyama has written roughly that having written the original end of history essay. And and again, how that plays out actually has some very significant elements to what happens as a result, not just of the pandemic, but because of the pandemic and a variety of other features that were already starting to influence geopolitics at large. And I guess one of them has got to be climate change and we are very much so. Yeah, with this cop 26 and of course, another reason present by delayed is because there are major elements of climate in that particular package that he is trying to finalize with Congress and so that he can go to Glasgow and actually have something tangible without which, obviously it's pretty hard to lead and there is a commitment, I think of this president, a sense that the US does need to lead certain activities around the world. And if you're going to get something done in some of these, you actually have to again have set an example in certain regards and so forth. And so again, the same with the G20 to which he's headed either now or soon will be. And just on the climate security front, like just how, you know, how important is it that leaders do actually come up with some kind of tangible plan to tackle climate security? I mean, what if they don't do that, what are we facing? Well, we're all already seen, you know, just where we are right now. The intensity of storms is just vastly greater. The fires in Australia, the fires in the West Coast, through the United States, are just incomparably and they have just gone like this in recent years. You see greater desertification and that therefore the migration of entire populations as a result of the refugee crises that Europe experienced wasn't just the Syrian Civil War. It was also populations in Africa that were trying to make their way across the Mediterranean into a better life as well. You will have water wars. You already have issues where, you know, the land of the two rivers where we spent so much time over the past 20 years or so, the Marsh Arabs are no longer able really to survive down in the southern marshes and mason and muster of the way that they used to because of climate change. The water isn't a substantial coming down the Tigris and the salination of the salt water is creeping ever further up as a result of that. So these are very, very serious issues and you see the kind of potential conflict over something like the Renaissance dam that Ethiopia has built and they're trying to fill it. But of course that has implications for the flow of the Nile. The Nile is what gives Egypt its fertile crescent. So you have all of these issues and they are very, very, very serious and of course trying to mitigate the further changes that will be brought about by continued global warming and the changes that that usher is in. This is very serious stuff. So, you know, it's not just because you have a democratic administration in the United States, the Department of Defense and the intelligence community say this is a very serious problem and something has to be done about it to at the very least mitigate the further changes that will result from all of this. How likely is it that there could, that there will one day be a war over water? I think it's entirely likely. Again, if you look at how, for example, Iran has just completely mismanaged border war sources, there's going to become, there will come points at which whoever is upstream is not sending as much as before. Again, we actually do see it in the Tigris and Euphrates. Literally we have seen it just in, you know, say the nearly 20 years since I was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, we did the fight to Baghdad and then went up to Mosul where we had the Tigris went right through our capital city. So I think those are very real prospects and certainly you do see it again in places in Africa where they're fighting over grazing land or you have, again, this does produce conflict and I think you will see more of that as the intensity of the change continues. And do you think that it could Glasgow, could the leaders in Glasgow do something that could stop a war over water? Or do you think it's too late? I don't know that, I mean, I tend to think that these are more tactical issues that are a result from factors that will emanate from what leaders do decide to do. But I mean, the fact is that what they're talking about is mitigating the further rise, not stopping it, not reversing it much less. There is a further rise projected and the question is how much hotter is it going to be and how much more of the ice will melt and how much more will the sea levels rise? There are places in Miami, Florida that are flooded now many weeks of the year. So again, you just see this really all throughout the world and you see changes that are very, very substantial. I mean, I'm a big cyclist out in the mountain west during the summers. You've never, ever had smoke in the air in the past. Now almost every year or so, there is smoke, Paul, coming over from the fires that just cannot be contained. And it's a new feature of the landscape and not a very attractive or welcome one. As we're sort of looking at big geopolitical trends, it would be remiss not to look at Afghanistan and first of all, to ask, given your experience during the vast majority of that conflict at West Bandai for 20 years, but a big chunk of that was during your time in service. What are your thoughts as to how it's ended, first of all? Well, I don't think that the result can be described as anything other than heartbreaking, tragic, and frankly disastrous. However imperfect the Afghan government was and there were many imperfections and flaws and maddening issues and corruption. And all these others, surely the lot in life of 50% of the population at the very least was better in those days with some rural areas exception certainly. But beyond that, just to see a regime come in that is essentially taking the country back to a seventh century interpretation of very conservative strict Islam similar to what they imposed on the country from 95 to 2001 or so. I mean, the fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of Afghans have voted with their feet to get out of the country and there are 10 hundreds of thousands that are trying to and I get contacted by many of them through a variety of different means to try to get assistance doing that. And there are 10s of thousands left behind to whom we have a moral obligation, a special immigrant visa, applicants who served two years on the ground as battlefield interpreters with our forces in combat, including one who was with our son when he was a platoon leader in Afghanistan where I was the commander in fact. So again, I think it really is a heartbreaking development beyond that without relitigating the past and suggesting that perhaps there was another way which I did do publicly at the time and I did actually also warn that I feared a psychological collapse of the Afghan forces when we pulled not just our air power and those that brought air power to bear and our advisors and so forth but when we pulled the 18,000 contractors who maintained the Afghan Air Force which is the key to the whole defensive concept for Afghanistan in a country like that with very limited infrastructure and lots of population centers and infrastructure you have to protect. There's no alternative but to have essentially basic soldiers that protect all that stuff and then when they're hit by the Taliban or insurgents or extremists then you respond with a force that's really quite capable it was the commandos roughly 30,000 with very sophisticated US helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, close air support and so forth and that provided the reinforcements, the emergency resupply, the air medevac and also again close air support. When that gradually became less operational and it did and it got shot up and it couldn't be maintained because the contractors had left and they didn't have the capability to do that it was just inevitable that Afghan forces were going to realize at some point nobody's coming to the rescue and so especially with local political figures who were already texting with the Taliban they're going to cut a deal which is what people do in a country like that. They at some point have to be professional chameleons to survive. So it was almost inevitable in a lot of ways certainly collapsed faster than most people seem to have otherwise we wouldn't have pulled our soldiers out before we pulled out our diplomat and development workers spies and again the special immigrant visa applicants and not to mention US citizens and green card holders which is where we were and when we had to go back in and do this on the one hand what was a miraculous logistics feat taking 123,000 people out not all on our planes but the bulk but also a chaotic situation in which we didn't necessarily get all the ones and necessarily we wanted to get in some sequence or order. So but the real issue is that this is the looming humanitarian catastrophe of the world this is going to be worse than anything anyone can imagine. Afghanistan was already one of the three poorest countries in the world they had the worst harvest in 35 years so even their own sort of agricultural production is way way down and then you have the entire economy collapse you have people that had money and visas leave long ago you have the US which used to pay 75% of the budget so together with Japan, UK and a handful of others but you know we paid for all 300,000 of the Afghan security forces I mean Taliban is not going to be able to pay them or nor pay their own soldiers even no matter how many little taxes and maybe illegal narcotics exports that they do beyond that of course they don't have access to their foreign reserves and their access to IMF special drawing rights and World Bank loans are on hold so this country is in a desperate situation and of course you don't even have the technocrats if you will to who even know how to run a lot of what is going on I think that the currency is even printed it's outside the country and I forget if it's here or where but so even that is not so you have enormous challenges and it's literally going to seize up the electricity for Afghanistan largely comes from the Central Asian states by power lines or is produced by refined fuel products that come from Iran are they going to continue to provide that if they're not being paid over time I don't know and then you have a huge effect on Pakistan which Islamabad ironically was sort of cheering this because they sort of they have now historic depth or what have you relative to India which is something again I'm not sure I understand knowing India not wanting to have another inch of Pakistani soil frankly but they are going to have this backflow of refugees and you have extremists that are cheering what took place the Tariqi Taliban Pakistani is back together for the first time that's the Pakistani Taliban not to be confused with the Afghan Taliban or the Haqqani network or Haqqani Taliban or the IMU or Al Qaeda and you see the Islamic state carrying out very horrific tax much more than the weekly basis that they make it into the news there's a tax going on and you even see a resistance movement so they thought they took care of the Pancir valley well not so fast I mean they're coming back in Masood's forces and then there's a force in Mizari-Sharif in the north so all of these different ethnic and sectarian and then of course they've been putting down the Hazara so they're going to have to respond this is going to be an extraordinary mess for the world and we are not going to take this out of our rear view mirror anytime soon and we are going to have to figure out how to take care of fellow human beings while also not trying necessarily to strengthen the Taliban which is going to be also very very difficult to do That just sounds an impossible problem Do you envisage the US, the UK, other allies having to go back in again? I have actually suggested that we ought to be back in the embassy I mean why wouldn't you be back in the embassy? There is security you can put security forces in there if you need I mean the fear was I think that we felt it and I don't know they will come over and take the embassy and do something like happen to our embassy in Tehran many years ago and I don't think that's a realistic fear it's a spectacular facility I mean it's $500 million worth of embassy and we should be back in there and you're going to have to deal with the Taliban anyway we are dealing with them to get our remaining American citizens there's still a couple hundred of those and there's probably some green card holders and there are tens of thousands again of special immigrant visa applicants and some approved plus multiple family members each and I'm part of a group called No One Left Behind which tries to help with those efforts and then there is another one to help the students from the American University of Afghanistan which my wife and I have supported over the years as well Given that you were such an architect of the strategy that was used in Afghanistan that failed, let's face it to create a military and defence forces that could withstand once the American support withdrew doesn't it mean that the entire counterinsurgency doctrine that the US, the UK and others have followed over the last 20 years is completely wrong, failed, faulty? No, not at all actually and let me explain why I mean first number one, Afghanistan is a unique contextual situation and very very different from Iraq for example in fact one of the times I did two, three and four start tours commands in Iraq as you will recall including the surge after the third start, three start tour Secretary Hemsall asked me to come home through Afghanistan and do an assessment, the first slide in that briefing was titled Afghanistan does not equal Iraq and it laid out all the differences and those differences I recalled for Congress some years later when I was sent to Afghanistan to be the commander and I said we will not be able to achieve in Afghanistan we will be able to achieve in Iraq the enemy is beyond our grasp they are in Baluchistan and north of Aziristan Pakistan won't eliminate them from their soil we are not authorized to go after them so you are always going to be you are never going to be able to put the pressure on the enemy that we did in Iraq beyond that they have no money Iraq had $100 billion when the price of oil was over $105 a barrel for Brent Crude Iraq had infrastructure it actually had central government it had much more educated popular, there are vast differences there is a better insurgency field manual if you will that we develop when I was a three star in the United States between the three and four star tours in Iraq I would contend provided a very good intellectual foundation for Iraq and the surge in Iraq even its fiercest critics had to acknowledge that it succeeded in driving violence down by 85% and keeping it down don't forget that when we gradually withdrew our forces it was down for the subsequent three and a half years and what undid the results of the surge in Iraq which brought the fabric of society back together between Sunni Shia when it was on the verge as you would call well given your old profession in that time the verge of a civil war and we drew them back from that got again stitches back into the fabric of society what tore it apart was Prime Minister Maliki's highly sectarian action so it's very, you can trace exactly what happened and again I think it was a successful application of the counterinsurgency doctrine that we all put together Afghanistan again I said that we would not be able to achieve what we did I would have contended I did contend that what we had at the end with 3,500 troops was something that was unsatisfactory but manageable so again you have to acknowledge you're not going to win you cannot win if the enemy is beyond your grasp the country on whose soil they are located won't take care of it but you can have a situation that is again manageable that keeps our most important objective of course was that Islamist extremists not be able to re-establish a sanctuary that they enjoyed under Taliban rule when the 911 attacks were planned there and of course that's what we went there to do keep in mind that Afghanistan didn't just provide the platform for operations in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda now also the Islamic State Horuson group this is also the platform for the so-called regional campaign not all of which was always visible nor reported because some of it was conducted reportedly under other authorities by other than Defense Department personnel but the one that was reported of course was the raid that got Osama bin Laden which was in the final months of my time as the commander conducted by our special mission unit force well-known CLT in 6 the president announced it that was launched from Afghanistan soil went into Pakistan and of course came back so we've lost that now as well but again I just would have contended that you know this is it's very very far from perfect in fact it's maddeningly you know in some cases corrupt or what have you but is that not just much much better and isn't it worth 25 or 3500 US troops if your coalition partners at 8500 which most of them are willing to and it allows you to have 18000 contractors that are the again the the essential element for this force you know there have been some people who puzzlingly have said well gosh you know we never should have should have made it more like the insurgents and I have reminded these individuals you know they were not insurgents they are counter insurgents and by the way the Taliban are finding out it is much harder to be a counter insurgent to be responsible for securing everything everywhere that matters then it is just to be the guys that hang out in the hills and come out attack of a soft spot when you find it and then go back into the hills and they're also of course finding out it's much harder to govern than it is to be on the back benches if you will or at least in the valleys casting aspersions on the Afghan government because they're going to have a very very challenging time I'm going to ask one last question we're going to go to the Q&A because they're going to have a tough time general milley has talked about this concerning this development of this Chinese nuclear capable hypersonic weapon system that's being fired how much of a moment is that how significant interesting I know general mark milley very very well we served in combat together many times with friends and you have to be very careful to read exactly what he said which is sort of almost a sputnik moment something like that the sputnik moment was a big deal I mean that's when we learned that Russia could or the Soviet Union could do something that we could not at that time do and of course they beat us you know in the early days of the space race which was you know very very concerning and then we launched our big effort and eventually caught up and surpassed them and then of course work together and so this is a big deal because hypersonic weapons are something that can obviously travel vastly faster than do other systems although not faster by the way by something that's actually out in intercontinental ballistic missile necessarily but they can invalidate any kinds of ballistic missile defense that one could conceive of so not that we really had a ballistic missile defense that could do more than perhaps do something against North Korea or perhaps you know if some other country ever got a nuclear weapon that might actually use it but had very limited numbers very limited capabilities trajectories, no multiple re-entry vehicles and so forth but it is and it's just another sign really because China's advances are very very impressive in all the different fields they have identified the technologies of the future and they are investing very heavily in them which is one of the reasons of course why the US and many other countries are investing in infrastructure in ways that we have that have just not been there's no precedent for in the United States and again if this multiple trillions of dollars of spending and it includes a lot of these different areas that is going to be an enormous boost to the economy yes the debt to GDP ratio is going to go up and if we're not modern monetary theorists we might be concerned about that but the impact of that for the years that lie ahead is going to be really very substantial but that does mean there is a competition and of course you'll have seen that very recently there's a lot of debate is this a cold war, a new cold war whatever and I think most folks tend to think that that analogy is not all that helpful because the circumstances of the cold war were so very very different there was no economic interdependence I mean China is depending on which category you have either number one two or three trading partner for the US and with Canada and Mexico which are of course our North American neighbors and it's the top trading partner for another 80 or 90 countries around the world it's not like the Soviet Union which occasionally bought some excess wheat from western farmers that we were trying to get off their hands this is a very very different dynamic but there clearly are areas of competition and we have to be very very clear and careful to avoid miscalculation, misperception and mistakes the now former first ever software chief at the Pentagon resigned in protest he said at the slow pace of technological transformation in the US military saying that China was set to be dominant in AI cyber machine learning do you agree not necessarily, I mean first of all I didn't know him I never talked to him it's an interesting one the difference of course is that so much of our advances are going on by private companies and of course you know I'm in the investment world so we own 110 companies around the world we own a lot of high tech firms and of course your deep mind I don't think was a government sponsored although I could be wrong it might have been tied to it because many of these are tied to a university in some way I think Google eventually bought deep mind although the individuals are still here I believe but again it shows you the impact of the private sector in the US not that there is not a vibrant private sector in China but an awful lot of that is also again government funded government overseen and of course the government is getting into some of these a bit more but again we do have to do better and there have been a variety of initiatives in the defense department and elsewhere and you have to do it across the board and it's not just military applications it's AI writ large, it's machine learning it's biotech, it's all of these different areas if we're to remain competitive in the world and we will be and we're pretty determined to be thank you very much so now this is I'm going to take some questions so this is off the record so you can be