 Good afternoon, I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IIA webinar and we're delighted to be joined today by Sir Lawrence Friedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies, who's been generous enough to take time out of his schedule to speak to us. Professor Friedman will speak for about 20 minutes or so and then we'll have a Q&A session with our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function that you should see on your Zoom panel in front of you. And please feel free to send in any questions you wish throughout the session as they occur to you and we'll come to them at the end. When Professor Friedman has finished his presentation, I then go to those questions. Just a reminder to today's presentation and the Q&A is both on the record and please feel free to also join in on our Twitter handle at IIA. It's a pleasure of formally introducing Sir Lawrence Friedman and I'll hand over to him just briefly after that. Sir Lawrence Friedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London where he was Professor of War Studies from 1982 to 2014 and was Vice Principal from 2003 to 2013. In his findings he held research appointments at Nuffield College, Oxford, IISS and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and he was appointed official historian of the Falklands campaign in 1997. And in June 2009 he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War. Professor Friedman has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the Cold War, as well as commenting regularly on contemporary security issues. His new book is Command to Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. And I would like to hand over to Professor Friedman, Lawrence. Thank you very much, Mark. It's a great pleasure to be with you, if only virtually. What I would like to do, because I was particularly asked to talk about Ukraine, as if I may just say a little bit about the book and not too much, and then move on to what Ukraine tells us about some of the issues of command. So the point about the book was that I wanted to look quite hard, following on from previous work on strategy, at the point at which strategy turns into action, which is when the orders have to be given, the movements made, and command described that, but I didn't want to do sort of a big old history going right back to ancient times as I've done with strategy. I'm particularly keen to look at post 45 conflicts. And because I don't think these are considered in the same sort of depth as we tend to look at the first and second world wars. I wanted to look at countries, not just the US and UK, which I know best, but many other types of conflict. So, just to give my plug for the book, it covers a wide range of conflicts from colonial conflicts of the French and Indo-China and Algeria, to post-colonial in Congo, to contemporary conflicts. Now Ukraine came in, even before the Russian invasion, I had a chapter on Ukraine, going back to 2014. And it is important to keep in mind that this war didn't start in February 2022. It started in March 2014 when Russia took an annexed Crimea from Ukraine. But as the book was being completed, the invasion did take place. So it fitted in, it seemed to me, quite well with the existing manuscript to add to the chapter on Ukraine material on what had happened since. And it's sort of up to date to the sort of summer of last year. But I don't think the major issues have changed that much in terms of the two areas which I'd like to focus on. The first is the political side of the story. The book in a way is seeking to show that at the highest level of civil military relations when decisions on war are being made and acted upon. That you can't simply say that the politicians decide on the objectives and the military decide on the means. Politicians should at least take military advice on the feasibility of their meeting their objectives by military means and the politicians are certainly going to take an interest in how the military is pursuing the objectives. They're the ones who have to explain the costs of the war in the end to their people. And what's interesting about about the Ukrainian example about essentially the Russian example is it reinforces what turned out to be one of the themes of the which is the problem is vortocratic decision making. It's one of the features of dictatorships, which essentially is what Russia has become, is that they can take bold audacious decisions and catch people by surprise. They can't do that because they're not necessarily very good at taking advice at inviting criticism and caution. And this has turned out to be a very striking example of that. I don't know if you've seen whether or not because of COVID had isolated himself from from many of his officials and conjured up this idea about dealing with the Ukraine problem for Ukraine, the Ukraine problem for Russia, which is a root that is the Russian sphere of influence. It's, you know, there's lots of discussion about NATO enlargement and things like that. The impact of the color revolution and your remain but the basic problem going back to 1991 is the Russian difficulty dealing with the idea of Ukraine as a separate independent and put in touch this idea, this was the time to deal with it doesn't seem to have taken any advice even from Ukrainian experts on what on what might be done, or what the Ukrainians might do in response, the obvious lessons that you might have learned from both the Russian and the NATO experience in Afghanistan about the difficulty of subjugating countries where you're not welcome. All of these things seem to have been dismissed on the basis of confidence about Russian military strength and dismissal of Ukrainian capacity to resist and their capabilities. So the, the war was undertaken with very little notice so not only did was the rest of the world surprise the Ukraine surprise but Russia was surprised to its own commanders were not properly prepared for what they were undertaking the troops weren't properly prepared. And it was a bold plan that they had, but not really one that they could execute, nor did they have an easy plan B for when the first one failed they attacked on far too many axes. And they, and once they got back bogged down their logistics became vulnerable and very problematic I'll come back to that in a second. The starting point is the problem of an autocracy waging war, and I think what we're now seeing is the problem of an autocracy ending. In a democratic society, if you put the country through what Putin has put Russia with tens of thousands killed. The more wounded, the economy, which survived reasonably well last year now in increasing difficulty isolation, and no gains no serious gains and then that they at the peak of the operation just after the original invasion they had about 27% of the Ukrainian territory some of which have been taken in 2014. Now they're down to 18% we'll see how much they've got after becoming Ukrainian offensive but the point is, it's not coherent, the objectives, which Putin has set, taking over the Donbass and then taking all of the next provinces in addition to Crimea which was announced last September, none of these have been achieved well in a democratic society. You would struggle with this, but the assumption is that in an autocratic society. If one by dissent is crushed, you're able to carry on and carry on I suspect because Putin fears the reckoning, fears the assessment of the losses incurred for such limited, limited gains, possibly no gains at all at the end. It's an interesting feature of this situation that it was easy, easier than normal to start this war, but also harder than normal to end it it's difficult for Russia just to cut its losses and withdraw though this would have been the sensible thing to do. On the other hand with Ukraine, you see quite a different situation the country is probably more united than it's ever been in its existence it's mobilized for conflict it's taken grievous losses, both in the battlefield and in the battering of its cities, but it's shown in its existence and it's still in there. A militia here which has come from Zelensky is in remarkable contrast with Putin, whereas Putin is fold out of touch, very wary about popular contact, repeats the same lines over and over again whether they bear any relationship to reality. Zelensky is a modern young media savvy performer. I mean people think of him as a comedian but he's actually also was quite a successful businessman has a law degree. He's very articulate. He pitches his messages very carefully, and it's not just that he's provided a unifying leadership for Ukraine. He's been a very effective in pursuing a war policy, not in terms of telling the generals how to fight. But in keeping up pressure constantly on his Western supporters to provide him with weapons to provide ammunition, never suggesting that he's got enough, and always reminding people that this isn't a war just being fought for Ukraine that if Ukraine fails in this if it fails, then the consequences for Western Europe would be dire, and long term costs, even greater. So you have remarkable contrast in leadership here, which, again, we will see how this works out over the final stages of the war. But for now it demonstrates the leaders able to connect with the people able to take criticism and address it are going to be in the longer run in a stronger position than autocrats who can suppress all dissent. The other aspect of the story that's interesting, looking at the military side is a contrast in styles. This was very sharp initially, whereby on the Russian side you had a very hierarchical command structure with orders handed down, and very little attitude apparently given to junior officers to shift to adapt them to the conditions in which they found themselves and troops more or less told to do what was expected of them without much chance to query their orders. Even though it kept on getting them into trouble, and we saw in the initial days of the war, Russian generals ending up putting themselves in danger because as their communication systems broke down or were penetrated by Ukraine, they found it difficult to have the conversations that would have allowed them to give better orders or to shift. So you have the problems again of a very hierarchical system, whereas the Ukrainian side I think as much out of necessity as preparation had to rely on small units dispersed doing what they knew they had to do, but not necessarily fully coordinated by the centre. Over time I think more centralised command systems have emerged in Ukraine, and I think that's unavoidable because you're going to have to use scarce resources, air power, ammunition, and as everybody can't call them in at the same time, somebody's got to decide how they're done. And I think you've seen with the Battle for Bakhmut, which has been the longest and bloodiest of this war, it was back to last summer, still not over. Probably been the occasion where there'd been the biggest debates within Ukraine about whether or not this holding Bakhmut was the wise thing to do, whether it's been better to shift back to an easier defensive position or to deny the Russians everything that they wanted. But I think what you're now seeing is some vindication of the decision to hold on. And Bakhmut also illustrates something that has happened to the Russian command since the start of the war. And what that is, is the increasing role of private military companies. Wagner Group is the most prominent of these, these led by Evgeny Prigozin, but by no means the only one, there's quite a lot of these private armies knocking around, loosely brought together. So you have a system which really want unity of command, orders from the center, rigorously obeyed. You have this constant negotiation going on with these various warlords, Gadirov, the Chechen leader is another one about who's going to play what role and what they're willing to do. And of course with Bakhmut, we've recently had the spectacle of Prigozin complaining bitterly that Defense Minister Shoigu and Commander-in-Chief, Gerasimov have failed to provide him with the ammunition that he needed to finish off the job. And yesterday, after the rather lackluster victory parade in Moscow, just after it had finished, Prigozin released yet another video in which he said the promised ammunition had yet to arrive and complain this time about Russian regular forces fleeing in the face of a Ukrainian counterattack, a counterattack that the Ukrainians have since confirmed. So again, it's a very different sort of system, a way of running a war in Russia to the Ukrainian way you've had continuity in command. And the same command, some of the intermediate commanders have been demoted or promoted, but there hasn't been any change at the top, whereas Russia keeps on going through different commanders in chief, reflecting I think the frustration with Putin on Putin's side that he hasn't got what he expected and wanted out of this war. And just finally to wrap it up, just looking forward a bit and just assessing where we are at the moment. And the key feature of the current situation is Russian failure. Russia knew that the Ukrainians were going to be getting more weaponry in from the west. But see that this would enable a new Ukrainian offensive taking place about now, and decided it needs to get its own winter offensive in, despite the problems of terrain that is created by boggy ground, decided to get its own offensive in before the Ukrainians got started. And what this led to was a push on a remarkably narrow front really, which has ended up with them taking a few settlements actually in April going backwards rather than forwards with Bakhmut, the key place but other places, having their battles to and really nothing to show if some gains were made in the last days of this offensive, compared with what was needed to meet Putin's objective, it's fallen far short, and has left Russia really having to pivot to much more defensive positions and operations. And without its own offensive having, having gained much territory, and having lost, according to the Pentagon figures, 100,000 casualties of which about 20,000 may have been killed. There's very round numbers and how accurate they are. I don't know but they give you an idea of the scale of what's been going on certainly, again, noting another unusual feature of this war which you can watch on a pretty careful basis on social media. There's more than enough grim evidence of Russian losses. So having held it, Bakhmut, more or less, even if I have to evacuate that quite soon, the Ukrainians are now thinking very hard on how to mount their own offensive and that's really what everybody is now waiting for. I think the Ukrainians have been engaging some quite complex, expectation management over the last week or so, not so that people don't get ahead of themselves, assume amazing breakthroughs and successes, when it's going to be very difficult for them. One thing we've seen from this war is that the defences normally are stronger than the offenses, and you need enormous effort to overcome them. So I guess as we'll see more attacks behind the front lines trying to weaken the Russian ability to adapt and respond, probings to see where there might be weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the Russian position before we get to really big breakthroughs. And on this much depends, much depends on how the war, the next stage of the war, the CIA observed last week that the Russians probably can't mount another offensive this year. And Ukraine is the initiative at the moment, but there is also a strong view that if the Ukrainians can't make this work, then the pressure to some sort of ceasefire will grow, although it's actually quite difficult to see the terms on which that might be agreed. So we've reached the stage in this war of waiting and watching to see to see what happens next. But I think the only thing that we can be pretty sure is that, compared with what he wanted to achieve. This war has been a serious failure for Putin, and has probably thrown back. Military position decays because of the time it will take to recover and reconstitute from this really disastrous campaign. Thank you very much.