 I'm just going to allow a few people to come into the room and then I'll start tonight's online lecture. Okay I'm going to begin. Welcome to this online lecture from national strategy to strategy in policy hosted as a joint initiative between the School of Security Studies, Department of War Studies and the Corbett 100 project. The Corbett 100 project marks the centenary of the death of historian, strategist and philosopher of sea power maritime strategy Sir Julian Stafford Corbett. I'm your host Dr James W. Smith, research fellow in the War Studies department at Kings College London and I'm joined by two speakers today. First is Professor Beatrice Hauser, Chair of International Relations at the University of Glasgow and currently seconded to the German Staff College in Hamburg, Germany. Rehearsal houses are trained historian, political scientist and distinguished author of publications on the evolution strategy and strategic thought has been central to many war studies curricular for civilian students and both impactful and influential in the private military education and beyond the United Kingdom. Our publications include the evolution of strategy, thinking war from antiquity to the present in 2010, strategy before clout fits, linking warfare and statecraft 1400 to 1813 2017 and our latest publication released earlier this year in 2022, War for Genealogy of Western Ideas and Practices. Our second speaker is Professor Andrew Lambert, Lawton chef, enabled history and fellow of Kings College London. An active member of teaching a research staff at Kings, Professor Lambert's career has led him to become the eminent naval historian of our times. His work focuses on the naval and strategic history of the British Empire between the Napoleonic Wars through to the First World War and the early development of naval historical writing. His recent publications include the British way of war, Julian Corbett and the battle for a national strategy in 2021 and sea power states which won the 2018 Gilda Lehmann Book Prize in military history. Before handing over to our speakers, I wanted to provide a very brief abstract or context to today's webinar. The serious study of strategy, strategy making and how it can inform policymaking has been no easy task, nor one that lends itself to a hasty process whether it's in the 21st century or the classical period. The study of strategy has taken on many forms and guises over the centuries such as the art of war through to the analysis of national ways of war and the many facets of strategy, national power and influence and so on that I could mention. But in short there's been effort led by historians directed to study and clearly understand the impact role and influence of war within society and between nations or otherwise. Over recent centuries they've been sustained an objective engagement we ever sophisticated in contemporary professional methodologies to achieve insight from studying the past and an effort to provide a basis for current and future strategy. Many serious strategists understood that experience and applied history must guide strategic theory as after all, experience is all we have to work with. Certainly a key threat from Professor Houses and Lambert's scholarship is that war is an art not a science. However, this process is not a quick one. One often at odds with policymaking and defense, foreign affairs or national security in many nations. A process seemingly at odds or in the 21st century in conflict with lawmakers, the drivers of policy and some within militaries. Increasing it is the wishful thinking of the military mind to try and fit the serious study of strategy to fit into neat little doctrinal pamphlets and elsewhere those who may encourage that strategic way of thinking guide decision making runs headlong into the public servant who controls national finances and all of this influenced by the short term cycles of contemporary political systems which can equally change direction as the fashions at the moment or the political in international wins blow. There are few although you're about to hear about some individuals who did achieve to translate strategy and strategically minded national defense planning into something useful and recognizable to policymakers. Although today perhaps more hampered by techno babble military service ideology and technologists. But the evolution of technology on the art of war is hardly something new whether that be the invention of the longbow adjunct or the advancements of naval strike the invention of military aviation nuclear weapons and now a digital electronic information age with unparalleled surveillance and lethality from seabed to space such as being the pace of change we have seen debate over arguably war and maintaining the peace that's banned and perhaps thinking strategically cast aside replaced by reactionary responses and ways of thought yet we find ourselves called back to the basic tenets and importance to think more seriously prolonged and deeply on the basis of experience to develop coherent thought doctoring a strategy at a national operational level. The serious student of military history and war studies understands that the study of strategy is a never ending process of learning and thinking where you can look to the efforts of previous scholars and historians to guide you. The speakers you're here from today and the topics and individuals they would discuss a part of that process have studied and wrote and contributed while also bringing on the next students to advance the work and continue the process of understanding fundamental questions related to strategy alongside past and future choices. On that note I'll hand over to Beatrice. Thank you very much indeed I'm going to start sharing my screen with my presentation there with me one second while that works and I hope that you will be able to see it now okay now the big questions will it move. I have chosen to concentrate on three very important ideas or clusters of ideas if you like that at the same time Corbett took from Klausowitz to some extent and modified himself in one case he clearly departed from Klausowitz and in other cases he modified Klausowitz and brought him up to date to fit to see how both Klausowitz's and Corbett's thinking fit into a greater evolution of strategic thinking and you will see that these ideas go from something very concrete and limited namely the role of battle in the context of strategy to the larger question of whether war can be limited is or it will be absolute at all times or whether there what limitations there are to war and then to the potentially even bigger question of how strategy is made and what the role is there of politics and what the role is there of the military in the making of strategy. So let me begin by the first very simple topic the one about the role of battle now this is where you will see the Corbett parted company with Klausowitz although he very clearly discussed for himself the thoughts of Klausowitz and took issue with them you must see that Corbett's own background is one of having been thinking about the role of naval battle in particular in this very large body of military history that he wrote naval history that he wrote ranging from the late 16th century all the way to his own times looking at the many different ways in which navies were used throughout these centuries with battles actually being just one of several means of waging war at sea. This is a contrast of course to the way in which Klausowitz saw battle and let me just remind you that he wrote that the annihilation of the inimical armed forces is the main principle of war and the main way to reach the aim of the war and this annihilation of the armed forces mainly takes place only in engagements battles only large scale in general engagements lead to great successes successes are the greatest if the engagements come together in one great battle only in the main battle does the military command and chief hold all the strings in his own hands and the main purpose of great battles has to be the annihilation of the inimical armed forces the main battle is the most natural means of achieving a big positive purpose now this approach to battle was something that was extremely congenial to the very military-minded writers and thinkers particularly on the continent but not only on the continent of europe in the later part of the 19th century where you have many many agreeing on the centrality of battle not only because they were inspired by Klausowitz but because they were inspired by the entire culture around them that became increasingly militaristic as the 19th century moved on those included people like Willem from Willersen but also in britain colonel morris then prince crafts of hohenlohe colmer von der Golds in the german-speaking lands gfr henderson again in the uk and we find it even reflected in the united states kingdom's army manual so this centrality of battle was something that was really amazingly universally recognized i've forgotten to cite some french authors here but you could cite french authors as well this was something that was pretty generally held most of continental europe and this is a bit where a great quite admirably um corbert stepped aside from this tradition went against this tradition and wrote that this was a fallacy it was a fallacy to think that war consists entirely of battles between armies or fleets it ignores the fundamental fact that battles are only the means to an ape of enabling you to do what which that which is really brings a war to an end that is to exert pressure on the citizens and their collective life so very importantly it was corbert who managed to break with this tradition which was all around him and of course that meant that he made himself a lot of enemies and a lot of adversaries corbert wrote elsewhere the current conception of the functions of a fleet is dangerously narrowed and our best minds cramped their strategical views by assuming unconsciously that the sole function of a fleet is to win battles at sea that this is the supreme function of the fleet is certain but on the other hand convenient opportunities of winning a battle do not always occur when they are wanted the first preoccupation of the fleet will almost always be to bring them about by interference with the enemy's military and diplomatic arrangements and it is not accidental that we find this in a book that he wrote about england in the seven years war where he simply took a larger um view of history and looked at past periods and not only at this battle obsessed 19th century from which he had only just emerged in his countrymen so it was it's very important that therefore he assumed and he he postulated from this that naval battle was not always central naval battle seeking out the enemy's fleet is not always helpful he thought either you will find that it's in a place where you cannot destroy it except at a very heavy cost which you then probably should choose not to incur instead he articulated in the green pamphlet and his original version of 1906 that the primary object of the fleet is to secure communications and if the enemy's fleet is in a position to render them unsafe it must be put out of action the enemy's fleet usually is in this position but not always and seeking out the enemy's fleet is only one way of doing this and not always the best perhaps it's even nine times out of ten the best but still he was very concerned that one shouldn't make this a one size fits all rule that applied always here we can see that this big departure that called it um incorporated would be a step towards something which almost a hundred years later or at the end of the 20th century would be articulated in a complete revision of this klaus witzian approach and of the approach that had led to the second world war and the weight which was afford for which i'll just give you one little example to show the development of this in the writings of john warden now an airpower specialist not a naval specialist but nevertheless i thought that this passage was particularly significant and particularly exemplary of the change of thinking particularly after the end of the cold war where john warden as this airpower specialist wrote the purpose of war is not to defeat the enemy's armed forces i mean this is now more extreme still than than corbett a lot more extreme paradoxically it may not even be to win the war itself the only reasonable purpose of war ought to be to win the peace which follows and all planning and operations should be directly connected with the final objective then he added that everybody was paying lip service to this idea but in policy military and academic circles we easily get lost in the klaus witzian world in fact people he thought were still dominated by this klaus witzian idea in which the defeat of the enemy military forces becomes an end in itself rather than merely one of a number of possible means to a higher end let me just explain that by the end of the 20th century we had well and truly returned to a way of thinking that prevailed in europe before klaus witz wrote where it was clear to everybody that the most important thing about war was the peace that follows and that this peace that follows should be just and lasting which is i suppose what john warden talks about when he said to win the peace that follows and that it took a very long time after the writing of klaus witz for people to return to this particular approach when they had for a long time been obsessed with the idea of military victory something that came in with napoleon and with klaus witz and germany writing about the polian because both klaus witz and germany failed to write about really the the subjugation of the the lower importance of military victory compared with the superior aim of getting a lasting peace which everybody before klaus witz had always recognized so in a strange way with this john warden quote you come full circle to a situation a position that people had before klaus witz wrote and corbett's was a very important step in this direction with corbett himself opening himself up to an awful lot of criticism of course precisely for taking this position for taking this step in a way forward and backwards to another way of thinking which put peace a lasting and just peace at the pinnacle of war aims rather than the military victory so that was the first point i wanted to discuss with you briefly um let me go on to the second one which is these distinctions between absolute war limited war and something that inspired corbett which was a very small throwaway phrase of klaus witz as where he said there might sort of be a third sort which was war limited by contingent klaus witz on the whole really just concentrated on these two ideas of absolute war on the one hand war meaning war unlimited by i.e. absolved from any political constraints or friction as well but particularly political constraints which was the case for the napoleonic wars which kept going further and further when napoleon did not try to limit himself and his ambitions the characteristics of these wars would be then to have mass armies involved with the population very largely mobilized as largely as you could do in a pre-industrial age and with the aim of overthrowing other governments a regime changes we would now call it or at least turning them into vassals to france and to turn large parts of europe into a one a party dynastic possession so these were the pretty unlimited aims under napoleon in particular but we would sum them up by mass armies aim of throw overthrowing other governments subjecting very large numbers of other countries to the rule of the one being expansionist power with those unlimited aims and that all that in the context of of course very large battles annihilation battles clauselitz contrasted this with the possibility of limited wars wars that were limited by political constraints where the respect for the adversary or wars between equals that respected each other equally meant that you didn't want to overthrow the other regime that you didn't have this completely unlimited aim but only quarrel really about a province or a limited territory that in some way you wanted to seize or might even just take in order to be able to negotiate at peace conferences and to exchange such conquests for other benefits in peace negotiations if necessary now clauselitz was still assuming that you could make such territorial gains in war and and trade them in peace negotiations there's a passage here that i share with you from clauselitz is on war where he says war was only a stronger form of diplomacy under the ansia regime before Napoleon came a more vigorous way of negotiating which battles and sieges were the main Dimash even the most ambitious only aimed to acquire a limited advantage that they could use in peace negotiations so here this idea that at the time of the ansia regime before the rise of Napoleon and with him the rise of nationalism such limited wars were possible and such limited territorial exchanges such limited territorial conquests and then trading them again was possible but in fact this was quite transformed even in the in clauselitz's lifetime by the arrival of Napoleon because henceforth this revolutionary drive of Napoleon was fused with nationalism meaning that in fact even a conquest of a small piece of territory could put up the backs of a nationalist entity and nationalist people and make them extremely angry and make them quite quite determined that they would go to war over and over again to secure these territories and this in a way came to a pinnacle in the bismarcks wars what in this very blurred photograph which didn't look anywhere near as blurred when i put it on my powerpoint slide i apologize for this shows you the statue of the city of strazburg in paris on the concorde and strazburg was of course in alsace when in the bismarckian wars france was forced in the treaty of frankfurt not only to pay horrendous reparations to the victoria's prussian and then german empire but also forced to cede that small amount of territory that would have been quite exemplary of what clauselitz said this became quite unacceptable for a nation now fully conscious of the sort of nationalist fervor shared throughout europe at that stage and this statue in the middle of paris was veiled was shrouded in black tissue for people to see at all times so that you could always as the saying was always think about it even if you didn't talk about it so the idea that you wanted to reconquer free this territory this small piece of territory that have been seized by the german empire was something that was a driving force an actual diplomatic aim and even became a war aim in the first world war incidentally it is not without interest that you can see something similar in moscow in moscow of course like london and paris you have several railway stations all pointing in the directions of the different areas of the old soviet russian empire soviet empire with which these railways then could link up wasco and there if you look at the there is the ukrainian railway station and in a similar way this ukrainian railway station has of course even since the end of the 1990s been there as a constant reminder of the loss of ukraine and i'm sure it's also been one contributing factor to this perception of russians in moscow the muscovites that ukraine really should be part of russia and that it is somehow wrong to have lobbed off this part this essential part of the russian anatomy to describe this new feeling that came in in the 19th century this idea of nationalism just a little excerpt from somebody who still coexisted and lived at the same time as corbert the the prussian author colmar from their golds who wrote the growth of national motives of jealousy and national enmity entails a corresponding display of force where such forces set the great machinery of war into motion wars can only end with the entire annihilation of one party or the complete exhausture of both the growing national sentiment and the political realization of the principles of nationality have increased to a marvellous extent the powers of resistance of states so here just the formulation the explanation of how you could no longer think of it in terms of a limited war for the thinkers of that time and he added the day of the cabinet wars is over the cabinet wars as described by clausowitz the wars in which you could simply seize a small piece of territory and then bargain over it wars have become solely the concern of the nations engaged a clashing of interests leads to war but the passions of the nations decide independently of these up to what point the war shall be carried war now is before aids polity in the attainment of its objects yet if only for the sake of subordinate interests it must aim at the complete subjection of the enemy this necessarily entails this decisive use of all means intellectual material like tending to subdue the foe so he again this idea that a limited war for him and for his contemporaries was no longer possible and indeed colmar von der golds and others in his time decided that they had to part company with clausowitz not like corbett because they didn't like this emphasis on battle but unlike corbett because they felt that clausowitz hadn't gone far enough in saying that only the big battle was possible and no small and limited wars were possible and the beyond and all of war would be the annihilation well indeed the complete subjection of the enemy and the humiliation of the enemy of which he was of course totally right corbett didn't recognize that one had moved away from the possibility of having a limited war in europe so talking about europe he said if then we only regard war between contiguous continental i.e european states in which the object is the conquest of territory and either of their frontiers we get no real generic difference between limited and unlimited war because these walls would escalate the european powers would escalate them they would go further they would no longer be able to see these as limited wars but he thought we if we extend our views to wars between worldwide empires the distinction at once becomes organic possessions which lie overseas or at the extremities of vast areas of imperfectly settled territory are in an entirely different category from those limited objects which clausowitz contemplated history shows that they can never have the political importance of objects which are organically part of the european system and it shows further that they can be isolated by naval actions efficiently to set up the conditions for true limited war so for corbett limited war didn't continue to exist it might not be compatible but with what was going on in europe but he realized that this could happen in far-flung colonial possessions and that's what he concentrated his particular thinking on um so if you the idea of true limited objects therefore we must leave the continental theaters in turn to mixed or maritime wars which was then an area that he explored so very interesting each larger view of the world than you find in the critics of clausowitz like komath on their golds and many others of that period let me turn to my third point um so i'll just do to end there that therefore corbett developed these different discussion of absolute war of limited war and um very importantly this he developed further this idea of war limited by contingent the british way of war which he thought was possible mainly in a naval context only so my third point um which is the big question of what predominates politics the politic or the military or what in for this particular point i need to take you back a long time before clausowitz because i think it is unfair to keep saying that this was a clauswitzian discovery it really went back a hundred years before clausowitz and he cribbed it from other people even though he slightly changed the emphasis in it um basically somebody called gibet he who lived in the mid um 17 18th century uh in a book that he wrote just after the seven years war but that was only published in the mid 18th century had already talked about the fact that there was la politique which consisted of two branches domestic politics and foreign policy and that foreign policy had to control how to dominate the use of the armed forces and also diplomacy and that those two really had to interact and that it was very important that domestic politics and foreign policy should work together very closely that they should mutually strengthen each other then there was somebody who i think was somebody called sam tir but he published anonymously in 1774 a very interesting book again about the conduct of war in which he said decreed that there had to be the cabinet very much in the british sense of cabinet only you have to imagine that it would have been under a king or other monarch who was still actively involved and not just a figurehead so the cabinet would have to decide on an overall war plan that had to be distinguished between a political war plan drawn up jointly by the ministers and generals jointly very important this idea that they should cooperate because the ministers the the the civilian ministers would hardly understand how to use the politically military tool properly and have to do this jointly with the military and then from that the military could derive a campaign plan so here was already another idea that a political larger grand strategy if you like how to dominate and direct a military complaint plan if you like it would be strategy directing operations um immanuel kand had already said that war was the state's application of its power in pursuit of its rights which is another way of saying that war's a continuation is a tool of state policy and um claus witz is contemporary in the same promotion as a young officer Otto August rüle von liegenstein wrote on the relationship between war and the state that the state must dominate the raw violence of war in such a way that war allows itself to become a useful instrument of enlightened straight craft so war as instrument of state craft so clearly both kand and rüle von liegenstein had already said that the state uses war as an instrument rüle took this a little bit further in which he said that it was very important that diplomacy or he said politics as it is also called goes hand in hand with the art of war and this could be done either when you have the prince himself being both the military leader and also the chief diplomat or the chief negotiator or when you have a supreme commander that is left to a military commander or whether where the foreign minister works closely with the military and knows his job well enough and even the military job well enough to be able to coordinate this another contemporary affairs who was the most read most widely read Russian author of his times before coming to a very nasty sticky end at the hands of the Russians a few years later wrote that strategy must be subject to diplomacy the knowledge of the state's interest here again really the idea that strategy has to be below our politic as Iber would have said it for the atrocities of war are never given as the purpose of war as war is not something complete within itself but merely a means for the achievement of the diplomatic aim so here again this idea that diplomacy should prevail over strategy which in turn should dominate tactics as he said another passage you need this as a background to see just to what extent Klausowitz was on the one hand copying all the others when he wrote famously that war is not an independent thing but the continuation of politics with altered means consequently the main outlines of every major strategic plan of primarily political in nature and that he wasn't either very original when he said until now when I sought to divide the military element of a great strategic plan from the political trying to regard the latter something irrelevant well it wasn't even true that people had seen these two things as distinct as I showed you with all those quotations that I just subjected you to and famously of course was nothing but a continuation of policy political endeavor with altered means or the famous passage that I won't read to you because you know it the political act was a mere continuation of deep politic with other means etc etc it's a political instrument so those famous passages from Klausowitz are really based on what a lot of people had been saying around that time as well the what is perhaps interesting there is that each one of them had a slightly different emphasis on diplomacy or politics or something like that where sometimes you see the political decision-making as an equal of the military and in most cases people saw it as the military as clearly subordinated to some political decision-making let's jump forwards to Corbett who of course took this idea from Klausowitz slightly rephrased it warm as a form of political intercourse of continuation of foreign politics which begins when force is introduced to attain its our ends where for Corbett there's clearly most emphasis on this idea of a transition of foreign policy turning into warfare at that particular time that war begins let's turn to how he used Klausowitz's definition of strategy strategy is the use of engagements for the object and purpose of war so again the object and purpose of war is the superior notion and strategy is the thing that is subordinate to it from which Corbett took the idea that there was something what she called a major strategy as we'll see in a second he occasionally also called this ground strategy in which you were dealing with ulterior objects and that is reflected in the plan of the war and then you had minor strategy the word operational art had not been invented so he already made this distinction between the two seeing the need of an extra word an additional word and here is an actual piece of text with which he defines all this major strategy in this broader sense has also to deal with the whole resources of the nation for war it is a branch of statesmanship army and navy are instruments of war that for major strategy but major strategy also has to keep in view constantly the political diplomatic position of the country on which depends the effective action of the instrument and its commercial and financial position by which the energy for working the instrument is maintained and finally the friction between these two considerations is inherent in war and we call it the deflection of strategy by politics it is usually regarded as a disease that's very much the case for a lot of the prussian thinkers in his time but also the french thinkers who wanted to have as unfettered a way of war as they could possibly have unfettered by politics that is but corbett recognized that it is really a vital factor in every statistical problem no question of ground strategy this is where user's ground strategy is synonymous with major strategy can be decided apart from diplomacy so clearly he links the two very strongly but i would put it to you that he was not quite quite sure how to define this hierarchy the text is sort of slightly ambiguous so you could say that it's either major strategy that is at the top with a political diplomatic position and commercial financial position etc of the country is subjected to it or else it's not quite clear whether he sees major strategy as something that is on par with the political diplomatic position and influenced on par by commercial and financial positions of the country so that's still this slightly ambiguous text in the context of course of several decades of strife particularly in prussia but also elsewhere between the military and the political leadership under various mormacks and emperors and presidents where the question was always that once war begins whether diplomats and political leaders should take second place and wait for the war to be ended by the generals a big debate that was reflected in the contest between Bismarck and Moltke but also in other countries or whether in fact the political leadership should play a role also in the conduct of war itself as you can imagine it's quite easy to see who would have been on the side of saying well the military should take over completely and who should have been on the side of saying no no no politics must always guide the way of war just to put it into context I think this evolution was complete really with little heart who as far as I can tell was not really influenced by corbett but simply took these ideas one step further when he said well strategy is the art of distributing applying military means to fulfill the end of policy and strategy grand strategy is what coordinates all the resources of elation not just the military but all the other resources towards detainment of the political object of the war the goals defined by fundamental policy so now it's really with a little heart it's really clear how the overall hierarchy is which is simply that fundamental policy has to be at the top dictating grand strategy which in turn dictates how armed forces diplomacy economy and society is used just to contextualize this whole development there so after corbett there this consensus came into being that really there should be this primacy of the political lead but the challenge of course of bringing the knowledge and the language gap between political leaderships and the military continues and it is now that which is the main field of debate in the question of how politics and the conduct of war should be framed how that should be processed and how that process should be carried out thank you very much for your attention I will stop sharing at this point and hand over to Andrew excellent thank you very much that was a masterly demonstration of why we need to read our strategic thinkers in context and not to pick them out and hold them up alone as individual voices this is an endless process and what we've been given access to is a way of thinking about how strategists are impacted by their context what they bring to the process making strategy and how this is a cumulative exercise rather than as some would like to have it a matter of inspired and new work where I want to start I think is with corbett's work and this question about how these ideas get into the political structure and the adversarial nature of the the civil military debate in which soldiers like calma von der golfs are talking about a war which essentially has nothing to do with civilians and corbett is talking about a war which is absolutely under the control of civilians and of course corbett unlike all of the other strategists that Beatrice mentioned is a civilian he has not served in the army the navy but he has served in other branches of activity which shape his thinking and also enhance his ability to join this debate so he's one of the first cambridge university students to take a law degree rather than taking a classics degree and then transitioning so he has a first class law degree from trinity cambridge he then qualifies as a barrister and he practices as a barrister so he's a courtroom advocate in in american parlance and his job is to put together arguments on behalf of his clients he is not talking about right or wrong he's talking about the quality of the argument and the job of a barrister is to represent their client the best of their abilities and what he's representing is the role of the civilian political leadership because alongside his career in the law he is also a fully paid up member of the liberal party which in those days was a governing party of enormous influence in british life he serves in local government and on at least two occasions possibly three he has offered a fairly safe liberal seat in the huts of commons where he would have joined his elder brother who is already serving as an mp so he's right at the heart of the political elite not at the heart of the naval or military elite his audience primarily i think is the people who are going to make those decisions those political level decisions it's not accidental that that great book england in the seven years war of 1907 which pitch is highlighted in the talk one of the first people he sent a copy to was the secretary of state for war richard bird and hall dane a fellow lawyer who would end up as lord chancellor and the book is used to put an argument about the nature of british strategy in as a maritime expeditionary amphibious strategy and the purpose of sending it to hall dane is to make sure that hall dane as the responsible minister shapes the army to serve that end rather than following the wishes of many of his uniformed advisors which would have been towards a more normative continental approach to the army and hall dane's response which is very quick is that he's read the book and he has his staff working on it to develop what will become the british expeditionary force that's where corbert is absolutely critical his day job as far as he has to work he's unbelievably rich so he doesn't have to do any work at all but he does is teaching mid and senior level naval officers how to interact with civilian politicians how to think about war in a coherent way but his other job is to operate at that higher level to get into the decision making of the british state he's also a member of the great think tank of the edwardian era the coefficients where he's talking to hall dane Earl gray the foreign secretary and others so he's mixing in the very place where those decisions will be made in a country where the civilians will always have the final say and the problem he identifies and it came out i thought very very well in the lecture is that the civilians don't have either the skill set or the linguistic ability to have that debate with the military what's happened since plowswitz's day since the polian's day is that military professionalism has created its own rhetoric and that's not a rhetoric that liberal civilians in england are engaging with they may be in other countries but when we get to the outbreak of the first world war the liberal cabinet literally has no idea how soldiers think and they have no real idea what strategies should be they have abdicated that responsibility through a very long period of peace and corbett's attempt to make sure they have the language and the intellectual equipment to have that debate ultimately fails the decision making at the very beginning of the first world war reveals that the liberal cabinet may have read corbett's book but they certainly haven't either understood it or internalized it and they allow control of policy to drift away mulcher won the argument in 1914 against the bismarcks because the bismarcks of britain in 1914 had no understanding of the business of war bismarck certainly did understand war and he understood why it needed to be controlled 1914 british liberal cabinet doesn't do that i was very struck reading corbett's diary that he doesn't make much of this failure of decision making but he's going to spend the rest of his life trying to explain what went wrong how british strategy was misdirected in the first world war and how it should have been conducted because his job from 1914 until 1922 and he died is to write the official history of british grand strategy how did the british actually make war what could they have done if they'd actually thought about this and adopted something which is he he coins the phrase a british way of war a british way of making war various different ways of doing that it's a maritime strategy it's not a naval strategy and that's his point of departure from his near contemporary alfred fea mahan mahan is selling naval power to a continental americans and the same message works with continental germans and other continental powers but corbett and other british contemporaries say look this isn't what we do we actually have a maritime strategy it's navy led it's global and it's maritime and so corbett's key texts some principles of maritime strategy appears in the same year as mahan's naval strategy they're talking about different things because mahan is doing one job and corbett is explaining to the british how they've always done business mahan is explaining to the americans how they might want to do business going forward and big driver for corbett going back to those followers of corbett of clausworth who then took the message further understanding what von der gaulz is saying is very important for corbett because gaulz's work is appearing in english in in london being translated and published by the same publishers who're producing the textbooks that are used at the army staff college and on the naval war course so this literature which is very much geared towards a particular audience in imperial germany is becoming normative in british intellectual circles because it's it's been translated it's no longer a german text it's an english text and the english are reading it without that filter of understanding where it's coming from i think a lot of the mistakes that the army makes in their pre first world war period are about thinking that there is a standardized approach to strategy and that von der gaulz is the guardian of that it's very interesting that when corbett reached clausworth's he ends up talking about him with captain later admiral sredman slade who is a germanist and a serious student of clausworth's and the two men end up reading rudolf on camera's version of clausworth's which is much more amenable to the point that camera makes which claus which corbett picks up on clausworth's is all about development this is a text from which you can develop ideas it's not a closed cycle von der gaulz says it's like this and that's it clausworth says it's like this but and we can go forward so it's a it's a philosophy of war not a theory of strategy and this is what corbett is is essaying i think some principles is as close to a a philosophy of maritime strategy as we're going to get it's capable of development this critical point about thinking down from the ultimate objective is something that corbett sees in nelson we're familiar with nelson winning great tactical battles but ultimately nelson is thinking strategically he's thinking grand strategically because his objective is to bring the war to a conclusion as quickly as possible and his tactics are invariably adjusted to suit the strategic objective he fights each battle according to the strategic and political logic of the circumstance so his tactics are in many ways nearly a vehicle to the strategic end when he attacks the danes at copenhagen he uses mission control tactics to make sure that the battle can be stopped as quickly as possible as soon as he thinks that he can call the battle off he wants to defeat the danes without doing any great damage at trufalga he adjusts his tactics to a completely crazy bow-on approach because he has no time there's a storm coming he has to win this battle quickly all the war will go on much longer so that ability is the province i think of some of the higher intellects that have been applied to strategy and it's rare to think about nelson as a strategist most people think of him as a tactician but i see that his tactics are very much driven from the top downwards ultimately this is about creating something that works in a in each context and so strategy is constantly evolving as nations evolve as their objectives evolve and the legacy that plazos and corbett leave us i think is a is this philosophical approach that we have to think our way through this from the top all the way down to the bottom and we should always be aware that we're not going to fight the wars that they were thinking about you can't take the battle of janer out of plazos's writing and there are things in corbett's life that you can't take out of his writing he's a liberal imperialist he believes in the empire evolving into something else he sees a commonwealth he calls it a c commonwealth as a future he sees maritime power as the protecting agency that will enable britain's formal empire becomes something different something that is moving into the 20th century because not only is he a civilian but he is a progressive liberal civilian rather than a social conservative wearing a uniform and that shapes the way he thinks strategically shapes the way that he argues his legal training gives him equipment and the other thing that we haven't mentioned of course before he wrote about history or strategy he wrote some quite interesting victorian novels so his ability to express himself to capture and play with ideas these are novels of ideas they're about really interesting facets in history the first one of them is about the conversion of the scandinavians to christianity in the viking era something which clearly fascinated him and as he traveled extensively in norway so corbett's imagination is important and i think that's the quality the clause that shares with him the ability to think through these things beyond the original and the legacy they leave us is texts that that constantly give us the opportunity to think again they're not closed cycles and if we use them properly they will give us a lot of the equipment we need to think going forward i think they retain relevance because they're not trying to tell us what to do they're trying to help us think better the future and that's a civilian and a military conversation and i think with both of them that civilian audience is the thing that tends to get forgotten but it's absolutely critical these men are writing about strategy the civilian decision makers thank you very much can i very briefly come back on particularly the last point that you made because i find that very very important um it's the way in which we should all see both clausowitz and colbert and in fact any other um author on strategy these are not people who produce eternal truths these are people whom we have to study we have to ask first of all did what they wrote make sense in their own times was it a good and accurate and helpful interpretation of what was going on in their own times was it potentially of more timeless quality which part of it was potentially of that quality and it is for us to make that judgment which is why i always go slightly green in the face when people use their texts particularly clausowitz as though this was the the you know the gospel this was something that had set down eternal rules which you can now apply to african politics or or cyberspace or whatever it is um the question is always to say does it make sense does it help us understand is it a way of ushering us into a new subject area does it help us unravel that does it help us come to grips with it if not let it fall immediately drop it um if it is helpful pursue it but don't see it as something that is a straight jacket from which you can't move left or right and that you can't get out of think of it as a helpful tool rather than something that will be gospel and that will set the bounds of what you can think or interpret and and if i can just follow that one up one of the great things that both of them do is give you a window into the the intellectual world of the periods in which they're operating they're both giving you access to things that lesser writers can't give you that they're talking through the debates of the age asus is talking about the options that prussia has going forward post napoleon corbett is talking about edwardian england in the period of tremendous transition there are lots of things happening he's he's writing during the second anglobal war he's heavily involved in the question of home rule in ireland the evolution of empire so he's these men are operating in a very dynamic political people both of them and that gives their work i think of a quality because they're well aware that the world that they're writing in today is not going to last very long it's a moving target so this is a snapshot if corbett had written some principles in 1909 or 1914 in a different book he would have emphasized different aspects of what it was and it's highly likely that we would think differently about his work had he done so but that's the book that he wrote and he wrote it as a doctrine primer for the navy primarily to use at the strategic level in debates about national policy it's its ability to be used in the south colleges is almost inevitable given that's where he's teaching but that primary audience is not uniform the primary audience is meant to be civilian and that's the audience he would want to have captured it may explain why very few copies were sold before the first world war thank you Beatrice and Andrew we've got a little time remaining so if i can ask the audience to put any questions in the q&a function which should be at the bottom of their screen and while they're doing that i'm going to abuse that my position is host a little bit and ask a question to allow you time to do that i was thinking beyond our theoretical and historical discussion today and we're looking out into the world of the 21st century some would say an exceptionally complex divided competitive world environment with interweaved issues energy security finance health logistics tension within and outside nations what would be your your key takeaways on thoughts for those who are perhaps trying to advise on a more intellectual basis or a strategy to policy makers and decision makers what trends signs importance from corbitt's and clausia's experience can they can they harness to address these challenges shall i start and point you towards that wonderful passage that i met to you from corbitt where he talked about this interrelationship of some sorts whether it was in a hierarchical way or whether it was on an equal basis between anything to do with the use of the military but also the political diplomatic position as he called it and commercial and financial positions of the country i think in the cold war for reasons which retrospectively i'm finding difficult to understand we were excessively focused in a lot of our studies on the military instrument of strategy what we're currently seeing in particular and what we have been seeing for the last few years is just how very important those other big tools of strategy are the economic tool of strategy and the you know the domination of things like that's something that you couldn't have had in the cold war the cyber spear or the the propaganda war you didn't have propaganda wars going on and contests going on but the way in which information is now becoming a tool of strategy just shows us how very and finance how very important finances and debts and the way in which you're trying to freeze somebody's assets and on the in user in order to move them to certain things and this is something which clearly corbitt already knew which clearly corbitt already distinguished i mean clausia says not a word about this but for corbitt this was really clear how very important these other tools of grand strategy or major strategy or whatever you call it are and we see these wielded so very forcefully by china in particular of course in the furtherance of what is so far still a benign overall strategy i.e. a non-kinetic one one that is not aiming to kill people but and they then not at all benign strategy of russia where the grain exports from russia but also from the ukraine are an actual really important tool of russian strategy the gas and oil and oil exports of course are the one that you always think of as this huge big tool of strategy how these other instruments also weigh in and side by side with the military and how we can't any longer think of strategy in the way in which you know i'm definitely guilty and we thought for most of the cold war we were concentrated excessively on how the contest was being might be fought out in military sense how the terrors work militarily etc i think that's absolutely right and corbitt's great advantage is that he quite literally lives on the proceeds of international high finance in the back of his diaries a dividend slips from a range of international companies that's where his money is invested his brother is a city financier he's also a member of parliament so he's engaged with this on a day to day basis this is the real world that he lives in this is where his his livelihood comes from it's the money that enables him to do this job which wouldn't have been able to do under other circumstances he's acutely aware of the way the world works because he's traveled around quite a lot of it he's been around north america he's been all the way through to india and around india he's seen the french empire and algeria he spent a lot of time in europe so he's well traveled he has a very clear sense of of a wider global world and a key part of his writing in 1907 he publishes england in the seven years war a key argument in that is how the british develop and refine their economic war strategy during that war using the law courts he then publishes his fabulous essay the capture of private property in war to diffuse attempts to for freedom of the seas at the second aid conference an essay so powerful that mohan insisted on republishing it and jackie fisher made sure that happened and it's corbett who is shaping the way the british see the end game of the first world war when they make sure that the americans are not able to insist on absolute freedom of the seas in wartime that's corbett's work is preserving the primary weapon of the british state which is not a navy it's the ability the navy gives you to strike down the enemy's economic livelihood and all the states that britain has had tension and conflict with in the last 300 years have had economic vulnerabilities they've often been different russia is as vulnerable economically as it was in the days of peter the great if you stop buying everything the russians export their economy will choke fortunately for the west butin is actually doing that for us by blowing up his own pipelines and cutting off his nose despite his face as it were so identifying that as a primary strategic weapon gives the logic to why you don't need to fight for command of the sea the british should be in a position to assume it as soon as the war breaks out as they do in 1914 and exploited what do they do on the first day of the war they cut germanese international cable telegraph links to the rest of the world and they start knocking down its long range wireless relays in the cameroon and in the south pacific so they cut off communications they cut off commerce and once the war gets going they use open courts to stop people breaking the blockade of germany so again they're using the law they're using open source intelligence which includes source intelligence because that is the critical war effort that they plan for it's not going to win the war but it's going to make it a lot more difficult for the central powers to win and corwood is not looking for a knockout he's looking for a limited war brought to a negotiated settlement so that weapon is very strong in the limited context it's less strong in the total context but britain is not a total war state it's ended up waging up but corwood is saying if there is a british war of war it's limited it's maritime it's economic and that really brings all of the things that he knows together and it links him up closely with the man who who shaped a lot of his thinking jackie fischer and both of them absolutely hated the idea of war so they see strategy as a way of securing objectives without war and fischer is a master of deterrence by display that's fischer's approach to what he doesn't want to fight anybody he wants to deter them and make them give him anyway so if you can win wars without fighting that's even more clever than winning them with fighting okay we've got some questions here so i'm going to read the first one given the reservations you both express about adherence to classical strategist as a mantra claus witzmer oft quoted than read to what extent does the study of classical strategists inhibit rather than assist in framing modern strategy read a question by somebody who's the namesake of the great hero of tonight um andy corbett i see i think it's very simple that if you apply a particular method to looking at these texts they can be not inhibitions but they can be stimulants for more thought and i think it's this idea of looking at them first of all to say do they still make sense did they make sense at the time do they still make sense today rather than saying we have to see the world through that particular lens looking at them critically from the outside questioning whether they make sense now and if they do if they strike a chord with you and you think that this actually is a key to understanding your present situation run with it if they don't make sense dismiss them and say they're obviously not appropriate at least for this particular context that i'm thinking of and then they can be a stimulants for further thought rather than a straight jacket that stops you from seeing a situation in another way that would be my answer yeah and i would echo that and say understand them in their own time these are men of particular periods in time of particular places and they would not have written the book that they produced but for circumstances experience different experience but if you take the men out of the book the books aren't going to be very good at all these are men explaining things which are complex and difficult to deal with but they are real world events so this is real strategic thinking but it's real strategic thinking in the 1820s or the 1900s and accept that it will be limited somebody once said to me um oh corbett's terrible he doesn't say much about submarine warfare well before 1914 nobody had done submarine warfare so there was nothing to talk about you can't blame him for not writing the book that you wish he'd written because he has been dead since 1922 and a hundred years have seen a bit of change and the same with closets you know these are texts of the time we don't read Shakespeare for wisdom about the 21st century we read it for wisdom about human nature which is universal and we should do the same with them we should think about what they can do for us make sure we don't ask them to do things that they're not capable of producing they don't have access to the things that we are now dealing with that's our job we have to grow up and so we these are great contributors to the debate but it's our job to interpret them in in the 21st century and that would be exactly what they would expect of us thank you um next question um Julia asks strategy has been successfully applied to the corporate and business sector which only agrees with Dr. House's points that I fully agree with as well do you think that the use of strategy in the civil world has undermined in any means strategy yeah uh I'd like to take a slightly different take on this particular question because on the one hand it is perfectly clear that as everything is now strategy as many of my colleagues have already commented it seems to be a very hollow uh uh term and it is used absolutely for absolutely everything and therefore doesn't make much sense any longer unless you define that this is about the policies of a strait the overall policies of a state in a particular conflictual situation and the application of its any tools in a particular uh conflictual approach um but there's one thing that I do find that uh military strategy or the use of all these different the coordination of all these different means of a state in a conflictual situation of which military force is a very very important one if not the most important one and business strategy have something in common uh and I'll just uh abuse of your question to make this particular point and that is that both need to coordinate very many conflicting considerations and bring together and coordinate the interests that many different groups have in the particular decision making that you're involved in so particularly if you're in a democracy rather than in autocracy uh then the decision making involved in whether you're going to lock down your country for covid or whether you're going to which tools you're going to apply in order to try to contain uh russian imperial neo imperialist expansionism uh is going to be quite similar in some ways there's it's going to be all about trying to persuade a lot of people to come on board taking into account their diverging interests in the matter trying to massage those trying to find compromises trying to bring everything together and I think this process is quite similar whether you're being you you're the the prime minister leading a cabinet in a conflict situation in the war or whether you're trying to manage a national health system in the covid crisis or something like that so there are similarities there and I think that also probably applies to business when you have lots of different when you're doing it at a level where you have lots of conflicting interests and lots of parties with different and divergent interests that you somehow have to bring together in a leadership role. Andrew do you want to add anything to that? No I'm content with that. The next question I think this can it's for Andrew but I think Beatrice could probably weigh in this as well could you expand on the process through which covid elaborates his concept of grand or major strategy do you happen to remember when he what year he coined this term um another network of naval scholars writing about this beforehand and similar concepts before the publication of some principles as often the case strategic thought is not original it's not the original as pointed out Professor Houser. I'm I'm happy to let you go first. No okay what covid is doing and I think this is critical when we look at the evolution of his thinking he's not rushing into the strategic level he's not rushing into writing some principles some principles is is a slightly early but well merited summation what covid understands and closes as well the key to comprehension is a detailed analysis of real events and that means going back into history to a point where we can analyze things in enough detail with enough access to real evidence to come up with meaningful analysis covid starts that in the Tudor period in the late 1890s and he works fairly swiftly through so he's he's certainly using that term by 1911 it's probable I think that he's using it a little before that so what covid is doing is working from the Tudor period through to the 20th century writing a series of strategic analysis of major conflicts and in his England in the Mediterranean book of a period in which the England goes from being a minor player on the margins of Europe to becoming a great power by dominating the Mediterranean as a sea area and that's a massive strategic transformation European powers have always previously been continental and military even when the English thought about about power in Europe they thought about the military in 1700 onwards the English are able to dominate the Mediterranean and that makes them a great power without an army and that's the basis of maritime thinking so covid is I think quite distinctive from the other writers on naval maritime strategy of this period because they tend to be writing synthetic treatments in which the past is merely an excuse to hang some ideas together mohan as we know came up with his arguments and then wrote some history to justify them and most of his contemporaries like Philip Coulomb and others are doing a pretty similar thing they know the argument they want to make and they're going to make it by selecting the examples that support their case covid doesn't do this he writes through the big issues and he ends up before the first world war writing about the russo-javanese war which is a the most recent major maritime conflict and the key thing in that is he doesn't do the easy thing it would be very easy to say the russo-javanese war is a perfect example to use when you're talking about how Britain is going to operate in the future but on page one he says actually that isn't correct because japan isn't like britain japan is able to operate on the asian mainland because it can operate in the korean peninsula which is the nearest part of the mainland to japan the nearest part of the mainland to european mainland to britain is northern trance and flounders and if the english put an army into there they're going to find themselves in serious trouble but the japanese can operate through korea because it's a peninsula which can be cut off very largely by sea and japan's interests are continental and military rather maritime so he's very clear about what he's talking about it's very clear but what he's not talking about and he's not trying to create a theory which is a one-size-fits-all universal possession he's read plowswitz he's read the plowswitz commentary particularly one camera he's discussed this with his students and he's come to a position where it's how do we use these great ideas going forward and how do i put them down in a format which will allow my students my officers and the people i want to influence statesmen to get this so they can have that conversation without the terminological problems of only one side of the conversation knowing what strategy is and knowing what a decisive battle is so he's he's trying to educate the two sides of the british decision-making process into having a common set of ideas a common language and a common framework in which to discuss them and to a point that sort of works in the first world war but nowhere near as well as it might have done so grand strategy is for civilians and the military he doesn't want the military dictating he doesn't want the civilians simply deciding without consulting the military he wants that conversation and some principles is a facilitating device if everybody's read the book their conversation will be quicker and more effective thank you interest do you want to add anything i think the next question very much lead into how continents versus islands view strategy and the sea and uh who is a sea power and who is not and the question is um corbett looked at strategy for a maritime lens clouted through that of a continental power mahan possibly for a fledgling nation's lens can we learn anything from china and their approach to the use of strategy does it differ here by contrast i am willing to weigh in but i'm not china expert so i will point you to a rival series of podcasts which i have been working on with my colleague paul anneal at the royal united services institution which you can find under rusi talking strategy where we have three episodes on three different shots of chinese development three very different strategies and despite the fact that the last of these has taken off and so the two of them have taken up a lot of the ideas of the first um and those are of course uh the siltsu and mao himself and then liu huaqing and i can point to two of them already online uh liu han huaqing this episode five of our first series of talking strategies this is the amazing chinese admiral who turned around chinese strategy after three thousand years of concentrating on china's land borders in the west and suddenly turning to the navy side and turning to the sea in the 1990s a strategy we're still living with today and mao who took up a lot of siltsu ideas whose ideas however were also strongly influenced by european thinking not these clouds of it but of course marxist linonism and siltsu himself did a first episode of series two which has just gone online last week so i point you to the real experts whom we interview in talking strategy look it up on the rusi and you'll have two episodes they're already online a third coming the thing that strikes me about the current fixation with china is that predictably enough the united states navy is very keen that the chinese people's liberation army navy should be a peer competitor and should be seen as a justification for sustained or even expanded naval capability the PLAN is is not a peer competitive for the united states navy that that is not what it's doing and if you look at its its order of battle it quite clearly isn't attempting to do that what the chinese are doing is acquiring the trappings of super power which include having aircraft carriers and ballistic missile submarines that they haven't put a great deal of effort into building particularly good ones these are very useful symbols of status and power but their military capabilities are significantly lower than one would expect of an economy of that size and when the chinese use force at sea to secure their objectives it's striking how low down the the violent spectrum they operate fishing fleets and local maritime militias are the primary instruments of chinese expansion at sea because they're very difficult to counter with high-end naval force so the chinese are very carefully using a form of pressure at sea which is the least likely to generate the high-end technologically advanced response that the united states navy might anticipate using so i think we have to we have to watch how china develops but we have to make sure that we don't allow the americans to tell us what the chinese are about because i don't i don't think from their public announcements they're as clear on this as they need to be china is is a very large powerful state and it has very clear agendas about its near abroad but as i said to somebody the other day the chinese are not planning to refight the battle of midway they're not planning to surge into the central pacific and challenge american domination of the region there they want to be protected in their regional area and they see the sea as a vector for threats and they want to be able to close that down that's classic continental power approach to maritime threat if you want to know how the russians think about maritime strategy you have to go to cromstadt they built the world's biggest naval fortress to texton petersburg but that's how states like russia and china see the sea the sea it's a threat it's a vector for risk and blocking it off and closing it down is very attractive but acquiring it using it's not necessary their their power will come in other areas so this is something they need to cover up it's not something they need to dominate and so if if you're making those decisions as a strategist in Moscow or beijing that is not your priority the priorities can be in other places so you have to be careful not to allow the rhetoric of chinese expansion to perhaps exaggerate the reality reality is is not quite what the the list makes it sound as it's these are status symbols and the navy is a status symbol it's it may become more effective over time but the chances of it being used as an open sea threat to the united states navy to generally the pacific is very small i think that's the the last question from the audience so i will i will abuse my position one final time and ask a question um focusing more on on policy making um so julian corbett demonstrated the symbiosis of relationship between the military and the civilian mind to work together to translate complex ideas into something policymakers and politicians can understand irrelevant of if they they then followed that what can we take from corbett or indeed cloud ships and their their experience of that which might be useful to those today and tomorrow who are trying to to inform policy making and convince this a sort of better approach using applied history to to policy making what can we take from this their experience so i one very quick thing and i'll leave you the last word to you very soon um the best advice we can give anybody in that position and there will be people in that position going forward you don't expect too much don't expect to be taken too seriously because other thing will always get in the way and the very best of plans are invariably defeated by other issues so do do your best um make sure that the arguments are clear make sure that the people involved have heard them um but don't expect that you are going to win that argument because there is always another hundred important things to factor in which are outside the strategic domain and putting the economics and the finances in that this is what we're looking at in 2022 there's the economic financial and social problems caused by spike in global gas prices impact your strategic decision making about the ukraine crisis that's not a strategic decision ultimately that's a political call in a western liberal democracy might not be in russia but it certainly is here so that's where the politicians have to come in if they take strategic advice on their options as well that's good but ultimately it's a political decision a point for me is like a different cut because i think what i can say is complimenting what um andrew lander just said rather than replacing it or in any way um it's the to find the common language and clearly the very clear writing of corbett was extremely helpful to people in his own time had they only read it read the green pamphlet read his his other work um but today i think one of the greatest problems is the two different languages that are spoken that of the politicians that of the military they are completely different languages a lot of the time particularly with all the acronyms particularly with all the uh expressions you know the many many many words that are used for small war which go from low intensity conflict to operations other than war etc etc you know there's many many terms that are constantly being reinvented it's constantly labeling similar things with different labels because you've found something new and there's this hell of the acronyms that you have to wade your way through when you're working in any military context rather than having a clear language and it is this is actually very why it is very important to have academics who convite very clearly who have one foot in each of those camps and who can articulate in a way that allows politicians and the general public to understand what the issues are but can also be understood by the military so from that point of view let me just quote my late colleague Colleen Gray who talked about strategy being the bridge between the two and there has to be that writing that brings the two together that makes it possible for both sides to communicate with each other and just having the same vocabulary that Corbett as we just learned earlier furnished is so crucially important thank you and I think that's a very good point to end on right clearly and coherently and if there's any King students attending that's a that's a good final message to send to them but I'm very grateful to our speakers today two exceptional lecturers and lecturers I'm particularly grateful to Beatrice for accepting the invite from us at Kings to present and I can of course advise our audience to explore wishes and Andrews work further in their latest publications so thank you for attending and the school of security studies aims to have this on our YouTube channel in the future thank you thank you for having us thank you pleasure great thank you very much Andy that I thought that went really really well thank you for