So, hello, everybody here in Berlin at Särchen on the Hölzmarkt, a real and at home or wherever you are watching on AlexTV here in Berlin on the respective websites of our partnering institutions to another edition of Making Sense of the Digital Society, running, having run for so long and I'm really glad so many people actually could make it out to this venue here on site in Berlin, it's such a good site after all those years and we know that some of those events have trouble finding their audience, we apparently do not have that problem really, so that's really quite glad it turned out that way. As you probably know, this is an event that is mounted by two different agencies, it's the Homebold Institute for Internet and Society on one hand and also the Federal Agency for Civic Education that is responsible for this series. I'm going to introduce you a little bit to the subject and of course to our guest speaker tonight, then there's going to be a talk of about 45 minutes. We'll start with a one-to-one conversation here on stage for about 10 or 15 minutes, see how this goes and of course you at home you have the opportunity of asking questions with a participatory tool called Slido and of course here in the Saal on site too, there's a microphone going around if you have questions there, so we're going to open up in due time and listen what you have to say or what you have to ask. This is the third session this year actually, the fourth session just as a small outlook is going to place, the first edition is not going to be taking place in Berlin but in Frankfurt within the frame of a theater festival actually, Politik im Freien Theater on the 6th of October, Stefania Milan is going to be with us and she's going to talk about resistance in the data fight society. But let me tune in into the subject and on a more of a cultural note, not just out of a mere whim because I like those subjects because I think we're going to talk a lot about cultural factors too when we talk about war and warfare. Let me start with a song, I'm not going to sing it don't be afraid, let me start with a song you probably all know, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again. It's a song from the famous soul label from Detroit, Motown in Detroit. The Temptations actually recorded in 1969 but the label was afraid to promote an anti-Vietnam song to the rather conservative fan base of the Temptations and gave it to a less polished artist, Edwin Starr, who took it to number one right away in the US and other countries. Allow me to tune in on a pop cultural note here because you probably know the quote according to famous German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler. Rock music is the misuse of military equipment. He himself actually was quoting a German general of World War I that didn't want to, didn't want his troops to listen to radio broadcasts that were being invented at the time, not until 1920 when Germany actually established a state radio but there were certain technicians on the front lines that did radio broadcasting for both sides for the French and the Germans actually. But back to the song, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, what a line, what an ambivalent line too because most people probably agree that war is not very pleasant but there's a second meaning looming here, absolutely nothing, signifies not only an ethical judgment like war is bad but marks the dark political objective of war that can be nothingness as a metaphor for total destruction, high number of casualties, nothingness as the abyss. I'm quoting this song because I'm not sure it still would work today actually. First of all because pop music lost its social thrust to technology. Who needs slogans in music when social media are very more effective in organizing protest. The second reason why we do not hear a lot of protest music against war probably has to do with the popular conceptions of warfare many of us have today and this is getting closer to what we're going to hear tonight by our guests. The Vietnam War was the first at least in parts televised war that communicated the images of death to any TV set near you. What one in Germany we often call the second Gulf War the first of course having been the Iran-Iraq war or Operation Desert Storm it was just only one part of this war actually somehow initiated a shift of popular imagery radar images from within fighter planes guided missiles with precise engines so we were told a seemingly easy ground invasion of Kuwait after the clean air battle by the coalition led by the United States. There are many computer games that are staged around the second Gulf War actually probably for this very reason that technology changed war completely or so many believed but what kind of war is this now reaching so close to home the closer the conflict or war let's call it war the fuzzier our knowledge about this technology or rather the various technologies involved regular irregular hybrid cyber conventional and so forth tonight's lecture will shed some light right here not only when it comes to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but generally to our shifting notions of warfare what warfare actually is has become was and so forth. So I guess tonight he was a soldier in the Canadian army as he just told me before his lecture he studied then in Glasgow and is now teaching at King's College in London he's coming all the way from London to our series is Professor of War in the Modern World it's called at King's College he's written widely on the effect of information technology and war and warfare in recent times many of these ideas you can find in his 2017 book carnage and connectivity landmarks in the decline of conventional military power his main interest at present is in the astonishing size range and design ingenuity of contemporary fortifications these reflections will be published next year in his upcoming book The Guarded Age in his lecture titled War in the Digital Age he will also give us a deeper glimpse into the theory of his discipline its history before leading us to the present in order to discuss current events of course and I'm quite optimistic that we will see the present war in a different light after his lecture however this is about all the optimism I can muster recording this war right now when we had a video call in preparation for tonight I guess told me to beware of a rather gloomy outlook he was going to present at the end in order to stress the importance of the outcome of the Russo-Ukrainian war if this is a defining moment for our future we better had a good grip on what this war actually materially is and what it is much less or not at all very pleased he's here to talk to and with us please welcome David J. Betz thank you for your introduction was very kind and for the invitation to be here which was very flattering I used to think that war was good for lots of things and I've changed my mind over time as you get older and you study a thing for a long time I'm not so sure it really is good for much at all but it does exist and it remains very interesting or and I think I mean it must obviously be interesting because there are a lot of people in the room and I think it's important for us to figure figure out or to understand as well as we're able for obvious reasons I'm going to talk mostly about I'm mostly going to focus on society and must much more so on society than on the technology of weapons and the like if people want to talk about guns and missiles and weapon systems and the like I'm very happy to indulge in the discussion which which follows so what you'll hear is about about a third is theory of warfare essentially a third is going to be on on history and a third is going to be on the contemporary scene for what it's worth how I see it at the end of the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 Space Odyssey there's a two-minute sequence that is set to the music of Richard Strauss Strauss's also Sprak Zarathustra in which you see two groups of pre-humans in a battle and at the end of it one of our distant hominid ancestors having just smashed in the skull of his enemy with an animal thigh bone triumphantly hurls this newfound weapon up into the air where through the magic of cinema it transforms into an orbiting spaceship many of you will have seen and recognize this scene it's I think that that is a masterpiece of grand historical narrative completely without words I think it says a few things about war and about humans that are quite useful as a starting point for this lecture basically war goes back a long way as long as we can see in history war is there we can presume it's there in prehistory also secondly in its nature war doesn't change very much it was it's still fundamentally about it is still fundamentally instrumental violence it's still essentially about skull breaking thirdly the ways and means of war the way in which is what we mean by the word warfare the conduct of war that of course changes constantly as we go through as we go through history warfare at any given time in history is is shaped by the dominant societal assemblage in all of its intertwined aspects there are cultural political economic and technological drivers for that I put technological at the end because frankly I think that the technological is probably the least the least of it or it's not the most important as it is often assumed to be so in this lecture I want to focus on warfare as the dependent variable and my main premise is that warfare changes constantly like a chameleon because of larger societal changes when it comes down to it humans are simply very imaginative at fighting we're relentless and ingenious at exploiting every possible way of killing our enemies and breaking their things causing pain essentially ten thousand years ago we hurled rocks at each other because that was that because in that was the extent of the combat potential that existed in a neolithic society now we throw rockets at each other because the technological wherewithal of modern society is so much is so much greater now it is widely supposed also that in the last generation or two depending on where you started ours has become a postmodern information society or digital society if you will there were various ways of naming it and if that is the case then what should we should ask are the paradigm paradigmatic weapons and techniques of warfare coming into being now that's what I'm going to try to talk about and I really have three main points I'll give you the bottom line up front the first is that at the level of a whole societal confrontation the character of information age warfare is dominated by the weaponization of ideas something which at which the west is at a surprising disadvantage because of the critical tunneling out of its myth power over the last generation or two the tunneling out of its cultural myths secondly at the level of physical combat there's a surprising shift away from maneuver warfare towards a much more positional form of warfare that I would describe as network-enabled attrition something of which again the west is at a significant disadvantage at this time because of long-standing industrial and defense policy decisions which have resulted in the drastic thinning and lightening of our armed forces thirdly given that the post 1945 liberal international order as it is called is based upon dynamics that reflected the high point of the industrial age a phase from which the west at any rate is supposed to be departing we should anticipate therefore that the alteration of that societal form will also reorder world affairs profoundly the the processes that are contributing to these things are decades old but the recent and ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought them into focus quite sharply before getting into details of however I want to dwell for a few moments on definition firstly war war and warfare war is the organized use of violence by one organized group against another for some political objective it has several natural we might call them attributes that exist attributes that exist no matter what era in history or place in the world that we observe it these are firstly that it involves the causing of pain and destroying destruction of value that is what distinguishes war from normal political commerce secondly war is reciprocal we don't make war on inanimate entities despite the fact you may have heard the phrase war on drugs war on poverty those things are not wars because they are not reciprocal the drugs are not fighting back whereas we when we make when we make war we make war on another living thinking entity which is imaginative and which wants to win as badly as we do thirdly war is chancey it is intrinsically chancey the outcome of any given action in war is never completely predictable this is vital vital to understand and I think an important point particularly with this audience or in this subject area where there are frequent claims that technology is going to eliminate that area area of unpredictability and chance in war that it will lift the fog of war as it is called in my view this will not happen it cannot happen without a change in the nature of warfare that I very much suspect is not going to happen while human beings are while war is a human thing warfare by contrast is the conduct of war which in practice varies enormously new techniques for applying force are constantly invented we create new weapons we also are very are very creative at finding new finding ways of weaponizing things which are not weapons in themselves human inventiveness particularly in non-military fields often has a bigger impact on warfare than the improvement of old weapons or the creation of new weapons for example the railroad railroad revolutionized military logistics the railroad is probably one of the big reasons for the existence of Germany today because the railroad led to the German success in the Franco-Prussian war telecommunications telecoms are the central requirement of mobile combined arms operations there would have been no Blitzkrieg without radios without medicine especially disease control or food preservation technology you couldn't run an army around year-round campaigning it would just be impossible certain areas that you simply couldn't operate in you couldn't put large numbers of people together in without them suffering from disease without modern medicine for that matter even without even without even more abstract technologies like central banking or double account bookkeeping big armies could not be paid so for example an important reason that Britain prevailed over Napoleon in the Napoleonic wars was that Britain was fundamentally very very good at raising money all right to pay for ships to pay for continental allies and so on so we should not be surprised therefore that big claims are made about the impact of digital technology on warfare because the fact that it is a civil technology doesn't isn't very meaningful it doesn't mean that it cannot have a direct and large impact on warfare okay so war is war is more than just spasmodic violence because it has a political object and warfare is more than just a barbrawl because ultimately it can employ the full potentiality of violence that it exists within a given society a good rule of thumb for understanding the way in which societies make war is to say that societies make war in the same way they make wealth right so whatever in in this case the war think of the wars of agrarian societies tend to have distinctively rural qualities to them the campaigns conform with the growing season because you can't take men out of the fields or there's a very great cost to a society of taking men out of the fields during harvest for example weapons tend to resemble agricultural instruments you know is it pointy or sharp things on the end of long polls there's a heavy use of animals same sort of animals you would encounter on a farm the rank structure of agricultural armies tends to reflect the the rank structure of the parent society with peasants as soldiers and nobles as officers likewise the wars of industrial societies reflect the strengths and preoccupations of factory managers and uh state technocrats what are they interested in standardization standardization of things like weapons mechanization mass mobilization and generally speaking the rational application of science to military problems what we might then call the character of warfare is especially notice noticeable at the beginning at the end or and at the end of any given age when societies that are participating in one form of warfare agrarian say come into conflict with societies that are participating in another in those sort of cases you have a kind of laboratory test of that in which you can compare the warfighting effectiveness of the new ways and means as against the old version and generally that's when we know something big has happened in warfare because we get a war where there's a very lopsided outcome for a good mental image of this picture uh i would ask you to consider the 1877 battle of shiro yama in japan if this is completely news to you maybe you're familiar with the tom cruise film uh which portrayed the the battle but it is popularly known as the last band of the samurai in which a small band of superb swordsmen of the old regime a quintessentially agrarian system each resplendent in their uh armor and their individualized military regalia faced off against a superior mass of very blandly uniformed riflemen of the new imperial japanese army short story that the samurai are wiped out all right um the industrial revolution clearly transformed society i don't think this needs much further explication than that and it it similarly transforms warfare uh it's really impossible to to do justice to that transformation in a paragraph or two so what i want to do is just focus on three things that i think are pertinent to understanding where we are now which i i will get to in a bit firstly the first factor i would say is that the patterns of whatever the old paradigm were are not fully erased or replaced by those of the new one instead there seems to emerge a kind of blend of the two in which sometimes the importance of old things reemerges in ways that can be quite shocking this is particularly the case in customs and art we're very familiar with this again for example to stick with japan for a moment contemporary japan is an undeniable undeniably a modern uh a modern high-tech country yet you can find samurais everywhere right go into any in every neighborhood and you'll find a samurai school or a kendo school where they're teaching people in the traditions of japanese swordsmanship go to any country festival in any small town and you'll have you'll see people practicing horse archery or all kinds of archaic uh archaic skills that people have kept it's just in human nature and very admirable in my view that people hold on to things long past the point that they had any superior functionality or possibly any functionality just because they like them um it's also true of physical things to an extent so to illustrate that i would ask you to consider that the industrial model of war which experts tend to call the modern system was invented on the battlefields of the first world war and it's was designed to solve the problem of trench warfare and essentially it refers to the integration of of infantry armor artillery and air power plus supporting arms uh in combined operations in the popular concept in the popular consciousness this is this development in warfare is often revolves around the image of horses and tanks sometimes just horses right you may be familiar with the michael more pergo novel turned into a film uh war horse right so this first world war and horses really is an idea that goes together in people's minds and it's pretty obvious why horses are extremely vulnerable to bullets and shrapnel and horses are also we we like horses i mean a human being who doesn't like a horse is very suspicious figure in my point uh from my point of view tanks basically are immune to bullets and and shrapnel therefore from the perspective of 1918 from the from the perspective of the invention of modern warfare what do we know about the future of war warfare no horses except when you look at the details you realize things like the the british imperial camel core okay not horses but four legged creatures uh that you ride on was very important for the policing of of uh vast tracks of british africa all the way through the interwar period the same uh british imperial camel court played a very useful role in the abyssinian campaign of 1940 41 the german army of the second world war often argued be argued to be the army that first perfected mobile operations its logistics system was based on wagons and horses right through to the end of the war right through to 1945 the soviet army deployed dozens of cavalry divisions throughout the war and laid in it even organized core-sized cavalry formation so big cavalry units bottom line is that horses were very useful on the eastern front for lots of reasons which is why germany recruited uh two cossack two ukrainian cossack divisions uh during uh during the second world war which were used extensively in counter counterpartisan warfare even today the united states marine corps keeps a school running in a in a mountainous part of california where soldiers are trained to pack horses and organize mule trains i could give lots more examples of continuity as opposed to revolution in military affairs but the point is that all things don't do not completely disappear right they tend they may get attenuated they get mutated but but they but these but they they they don't disappear completely again for a mental image of this that is pretty accessible to people who enjoy film or literature picture the air cavalryman or the air cavalry commander in the vietnam war film apocalypse now right he's wearing a cavalryman's hat while he's charging into battle on a helicopter while listening to Wagner's ride of the valkyries fundamentally things are not black and white rather gray they're never completely monocausal or one directional but sometimes they're a bit forwards and a bit backwards all at the same time second main point is that although we have quite a quite few transitions of ages to judge by in this case of just presented agrarian industrial and information as we get further one of the things that we observe pretty obviously is that the pace of change is accelerating the agrarian age lasted a very long time it effectively is lasts from the beginning of civilization just up to a couple of hundred years ago the industrial age by comparison is you know maybe 200 years it's a blip in time moreover the industrial era era moved at a blinding pace which frequently confounded and bewildered those involved in it again part of the to go back to the first world war part of the reason for the particularly horrific waste of lives in the first two years of the first world war was that the Napoleonic mindset of the of the general ship which was only a century old at that point was wholly ill-suited to the new potentialities of warfare a lot of military historians would argue that there was as much military adaptation occurring in two years 1916 through 1918 as there had been as there have been in all the years since the first world war in that short period armed forces learned to coherently integrate accurate long range indirect fire artillery tanks and other mechanized vehicles battlefield electronic communications fighter and bomber airplanes so on and so forth all while fighting in what then was the largest war in human history the importance of this point in my view is that if you accept the concept of transition from one age to another age from one paradigm to another paradigm and you accept the idea that change is accelerating then the logical conclusion is that we now are awaiting a moment of realization that everything we have been doing is now wrong and we must do something completely different more or less immediately thirdly change from one age to another seems to coincide with changes in the international order that are large and jarring that's pretty obvious less obvious is that it's not always the earliest beneficiaries of the change which profit from it in the long run for example the industrial revolution powered the rise of the west more specifically the european powers in part because they were able to exercise military power in ways that the rest of the world simply could not match but at the same time it also led to the world wars that drastically weakened the european global powers and created two extra european superpowers in the form of the usa and the USSR so we're coming close now to the present and if i've dwelled a bit long on the past here it's just that i think that's the best way i think to get towards some understanding of today's apparent paradoxes if we may call them that with respect to the last point i raised i believe the important thing to understand is that even great powers get blown away by the tides of history it happened to the european empires it happened to the ussr not so long ago and i think it is happening to the america to the american hegemony which we call the liberal international order right now it's a matter of debate when you when you start the information age i think with this audience and in the interest of moving along in time i won't dwell very long on on this point most of you will be familiar with a lot of the literature to which i i might refer suffice to say that from my point of view the information age didn't begin yesterday it doesn't begin with the invention of the microchip it doesn't invent it doesn't begin with the incorporation of google or uh or amazon or or what have what have you it's somewhere further back in history i am 53 years old and i would consider personally that i've never lived in a non networked uh in a non network uh networked society in a non uh networked age and people have been you know scholars much smaller much smarter than i am have been writing about the dawning of the information age for at least a half century in short the information age has been around for a while and so i think we can safely draw a few conclusions about it sticking to the subject of warfare we can clearly observe that equipped with modern military force the european powers the 19th century quickly conquered up and gobbled or quickly conquered and gobbled up the territories of the extra european wars governing other peoples so it was argued for their own good uh for about a hundred years there was a comfortable alignment of two basic ideas one a belief that progress was served by european ideas governing everything basically and the military muscle to make that happen then the same powers turned on each other mobilizing the whole industrial might of western civilization in two great wars that ended up with most of this continent raised and a good number of the old empires wiped out my point here is simply that coming first to a change in the potentiality of warfare is not necessarily an indicator of success in the long term more narrowly framing the discussion to recent technologies we may ask more specifically what happens to warfare when digital computing and high speed uh high density communications and microelectronics are applied to it i think a starting point for that to an answer to that question would be an understanding of the general context to that end it is said that the qualities of the information age are said to be something like the following that it has a character that these characteristics a high degree of intangibility of value in the larger economy now to say if you've got knowledge industries right what are they doing they are creating wealth not by making things per se but by creating ideas which may lead to products the physical products often made elsewhere or they may simply remain as ideas they don't turn into physical products because they're perfectly saleable as ideas financial services entertainment so on secondly there is a massive increase in the portability of information which practically everyone can now share in volumes and at speed and with a reach that would have astonished the most powerful governments just a generation ago and a fact which is the main reason why it is now so difficult to keep secrets governments really struggle with keeping secrets as does everybody frankly because people are just so enthusiastic about sharing their their stuff thirdly there's a dramatic leap in the scalability of certain types of inventions particularly ideas the ideas noted above which can go from fringe to mainstream very very quickly right we're all familiar with the concept of virality that's essentially what i'm talking about changes in the military sphere have followed similar patterns and drawn on the same sorts of of language you may have heard this old syllogism that knowledge is power that's a phrase credited originally to Francis Bacon but undoubtedly a truism that human beings have always recognized it seemed to be massively affirmed by digital technologies like advanced communications satellite communication particularly GPS navigation very powerful sensors and certain types of precision attack weapons it's easy to see that for a general to be able to see his enemies forces before they could see his to know in real time the whereabouts of everything that was meaningful on the battlefield and to be able to strike accurately would be a gigantic advantage right that would be like being Zeus on Mount Olympus you were practically guaranteed to win win that sort of conflict ironically the first military theorists to see this development coming were in the soviet general staff not in the west and it occurred to the to the soviets because they were so acutely aware of the way in which the soviet civilian economy was lagging behind the west in microelectronics and computing so they were looking at their own weaknesses and projecting out the meaning of that in terms of their enemy right war is reciprocal that that is why they looked at it in that way and they when they looked at it that way they feared that this was a development that it would allow the west to fight a new sort of warfare in which armies could be much smaller but have less mass in military parlance while generating as much or more actual combat power and their fear was that this would counterbalance the material preponderance of heavy soviet military forces in ways that they couldn't match the 1990-1991 Gulf War in which an american led coalition decisively defeated the iraqi forces occupying Kuwait and violently expelled them at the cost of a very few coalition casualties appeared to prove this concept in some ways that war became a bit of a watershed something a bit like the first world war in fact not in scale but in terms of the way that it was thought to signal the shape of future warfare although the west arrived at it belatedly it soon adopted this idea that what had occurred was a did a new digital revolution in military affairs and the gist of that idea was that high technology was going to enable relatively small and light western armies to fight wars against powers that were not participating in the revolution in the new age of warfare cheaply decisively and quickly in general terms these beliefs accord were reflected in accord we're in accordance with larger ideas that were moving around in society at that time which you may recall was resonantly described as a new world order a new world order which was distinctively unipolar with the united states unambiguously at its head and indeed but was announced by the american political historian francis fukuyama to be the end of history the idea being that no matter what else we would fight wars over after that it wouldn't be constitutional order or or economic models because liberal democratic capitalism had triumphed and that was the end of the story of course that wasn't the end of the story as we can all see in in today's headlines and have seen over the last 20 20 years which is a about a solid refutation of the end of history thesis as as as possible as with the transition from one age to another in previous times though what appears to be the direction of benefit initially has the potential to whip around drastically in an opposite direction as other powers adjust to whatever is the new normal likewise the acceleration of the pace of change which was such a strong aspect of the shift to industrial modernity seems to have accelerated again in our times by an order by an order of magnitude to my mind the best example of this is the fact that is the effective deindustrialization of the west which is a process that is essentially occurred in little more than one generation so very very quickly okay so for the remainder of the lecture i'm just going to focus on three interconnected aspects of the still unfold unfolding story of the military and strategic impact of the information age the ongoing war between russia and ukraine which began in the spring of 22 has put into sharp focus some matters which previously were present but were more dimly perceived than they are now from the perspective of a western man speaking to a western audience the picture is extremely alarming the antecedents of the conflict date back to the invasion of Crimea in 2014 or even earlier depending on where you wish to pick up the story of the confrontation between the two countries in which the west is thoroughly imbricated from the beginning but traces back to the dissolution of the USSR 30 years ago it has evolved rapidly however into a proxy war between NATO and Russia a fact which is utterly apparent if you happen to it just go well if you could go to the NATO NATO headquarters in Brussels and look at the walls you would see this is completely obvious because it's covered in in propaganda posters on it what is worrying from my perspective is a there is no chance for western victory let alone victory for Ukraine which has already lost no matter what else happens well for as long as the war continues there's a worsening probability of escalation the emerging Eurasian compact between China and Russia which the west has motivated is undoubtedly the most globally strategically consequential thing to have happened since the end of the Cold War and possibly more than the end of the Cold War anyway it is a very big deal the rise of China which has historically been weaker than it ought to be for well over a century is I think a reasonably historically natural process the alignment of Russia with China is was in no way inevitable but that is the current likelihood and that is such a massive on-goal as the British would say from a western perspective then there is the self-injury done to what remains of western industries and consumers by sanctions that have already exposed that have exposed already inflationary economies to a ballistic rise in energy costs that will last for as long as it takes to bring into operation alternative energies which will probably have to be something that at least half of the population is opposed to in at this time at the same time sticking to more military matters there is the problem that western arsenals are being drained at an astonishing rate which western industries are unable to replenish at a strategically meaningful pace on the other hand at its current rate of expenditure of heavy artillery shells peak which is peaking at about 50 000 per day it's estimated that Russia can keep on fighting as it is for another five and a half years more over that's only taking into account existing stockpiles not new production which is also surging so the picture is and the picture is similar with other weapons tanks and armored vehicles there are tens of thousands in storage ballistic rockets and cruise missiles thousands again the fact is that here we are 50 years or so into the information age and we are looking at what seems to be an industrial war conducted along a front of more than 1500 miles crisscrossed by trenches and fortifications out of the first world war which would have been perfectly recognizable to these fellows in which Russia is winning inexorably on account primarily of its superiority in a sort of military muscle that was supposed to be obsolescent by now moreover the things that you might have expected like cyber attack in the conflict or even disinformation of campaigns a supposed long-standing Russian preoccupation have been minor and ineffective which is why Ukraine is so widely considered to be agreed to be winning the information war while losing the actual war if that's not paradoxical then it's certainly contrary to expectations why is that why has it happened my guess is I will my guess is three fold for a start the main thing is that warfare is intrinsically self-balancing the whole story i've told you already about change in warfare is is yes of course it changes but it it tends to balance out it tends towards an equilibrium on the battlefield where certain durable factors become decisive those durable factors are in my view the ability to generate and sustain the application of physical force i.e logistics do you have weapons do you have supplies or not the courage secondly the courage and endurance to sustain fighting in the best in the in the face of the best efforts of your enemy to obliterate you i.e what Napoleon famously called moral forces and thirdly the support of one's own population what klaus witz called passion these things were true in agrarian warfare they were true in industrial warfare and i think they're true of information age warfare it follows even in the information age physical stuff matters and even in previous ages intangible things also mattered of course it's not all simple and to get deeper i'll just try to draw you for you a mental picture the scene is late april 2022 did a location about a half mile behind the front line somewhere in the donbas region where the commander of a donetsk militia battalion is being interviewed at his headquarters at his mobile headquarters by a russian military reporter this battalion has been in hard fighting against ukrainian forces for weeks generally very successfully generally very successfully the commander who is a formal former local bureaucrat working in local government has been at war since 2014 yet ultimately he's also an amateur because he has almost no formal professional military training relative to his rank and i refer to an actual interview which was carried on the telegram channel of the russian ministry of defense which i urge people to to follow it's very interesting i draw your attention firstly to the headquarters i mentioned because at first glance if you're looking at this scene you would probably not recognize it as such because it's nothing more than a commercial panel van that has been painted green and has a zed a big white zed splash on the side on the inside of the vehicle there are two large screen tvs mounted on on on the walls connected to a jury rigged communication system at the heart of which there are a couple of laptop computers there's an army corporal sitting on a plastic lawn chair in the back of this vehicle tapping on the computers he seems to be running the whole thing there are a bunch of mobile phones around on the television screens there is showing live stream imagery from 12 different commercial drones at least three for each of the companies under this battalion battalion's command it is certainly not a pretty setup the total cost i would estimate including the van and the drones might be 50 000 euros possibly 25 000 euros if you get the Costco or whatever okay depending how much you spent on the van it is however undeniably effective equally that commander is undeniably participating in information age warfare uh to my mind and to my mind in a war-winning way that i would describe as networked network-enabled attrition it's a relentless and progressive wearing down of your enemy by fire that is aided by digital systems that are obtained cheaply so that the effort is sustainable and operated effectively enough to be superior to the to the operations of one's one's enemy Moore's law i'm sure everybody here is probably familiar with Moore's law basically the idea is that the cost of the the the cost of a given amount of computing declines drastically because the number of transistors on an integrated circuit the doubles so rapidly in case in this case every every two years i think he says so this is why you'll probably have heard the the the quip that there's more computing power in your apple watch than there was in uh the computers that landed people on the moon a half century ago of course that goes for military equipment too in the west however the way military procurement works is over much longer time scales more more like 20 than two years and virtually never with off-the-shelf components as a result the cost of a done don yet style headquarters for the german army or for the british army uh would probably be in the millions not 50 000 euros but five million ten million euros it would take five years to plan it would take 10 years to implement and so it would be based on 15 year old technology in other words it would probably be prettier but it's not as good and vastly more expensive the example i've given is recent and small but it's not at all unique it's a pattern that exists broadly across essentially all military equipment including things usually considered to be top of the line think for the example of the computing power of the new american f-35 fighter fighter aircraft it's a vital quality it's the software of the plane that not particularly it's avionics that is supposed to make it exceptional that's what you were paying it i don't think germany's bought one yet but anyway if you had bought f-35 what you're mainly buying is a software package with the name airplane attached okay the newest tesla electric motor car motor car possesses a hundred times more processing capability than the f-35 fraction of the cost the fact is that military technology has not been leading civilian technology in this sphere at any rate for decades now but our defense procurement patterns still suggest that they do simply put it's not in military applications where the rapid growth and information technological capability is being applied not in the west at any rate it is elsewhere however most obviously in russia now even if it's in a jury rigged fashion which is enabling them to catch up very rapidly in capability out of and at a fraction of the cost it reminds me finally of the soldiers and officers of the first world war who contrived the modern system of warfare out of a cobbled together assemblage of random parts agricultural machinery that they bolted iron plates to which is effectively what a tank was at the time balsa wood and canvas airplanes that they figured out how to bolt machine guns to right okay the result then was not also not pretty but it did work and it defined warfare for the for the century to come necessity is the mother of invention so they say my concern is that the west has played at war for too long and too long been insulated from necessity to be inventive now when it really counts that is not a safe position for us to be in i'd be remiss not to consider in this lecture also the role of the broader information environment in contemporary conflict if i were to ignore it it might be to suggest that my earlier decoration that physical stuff still matters means that in intangible things do not matter i do not believe that is the case both are important the physical and the intangible are matter and have always mattered the way that it plays out in a hyper connected world like ours which moreover being highly materialistic another main attribute of modernism is quite out of practice with moral argument is all extremely perplexing but is it truly more difficult today than it was in the past contempt if you ask contemporary strategist the answer is yes and that is because people have a tendency to bemoan the special complexity of the time that they are in it's a natural human problem we think we've got it hard and our forebears had it easier or times were simpler to put it more more precisely honestly though i'm not sure that a field commander during the kathar wars of the 13th century or the 30 years war might not have envied the relative political simplicity of conflicts now the moral dimension of war has always been a massive challenge in the early 2000s the american political scientist joseph nye coined the term soft power to describe a form of power that is based upon the relative attractiveness attractiveness of a country's image and culture as opposed to its hard power which is a measure of its military potential with strong links to industrial power access to strategic resources and so on it is in a sense a very information age concept rather it's kind of like a corporate brand but national right apple coca-cola nike Volkswagen it's very clear that there's value in it but it's intangible making it its measurement highly subjective long before nike came along however the armed forces of the major nations took seriously the idea of that information warfare according to a broad interpretation of the term was about the management of the perception of conflict of a given conflict if winning war in short is about exhausting one's opponents will to continue fighting then it follows that targeting the mood beliefs ideals and so on of an enemy population is a key element of war strategy this idea is as old as war itself it was the basic strategy behind the defeat of the soviet union in the cold war also a contemporary twist in it stems from the fact stems from that we tend now not to go to war per se with other nations but rather we get into conflict with illegitimate regimes illegitimate regimes obviously it complicates messaging greatly when you are bombing an ostensibly not an enemy population for their own good you can be a very good marketer a superbly skilled marketer and find that a difficult proposition to sell a further twist is that the logical endpoint of any argument that says war is a contest of wills between populations is that you must also attend to the management of the mood of your own people the obvious problem here is that operations to affect the mood of the domestic population propaganda in other words is something which most democracies are leery of doing openly the fact is that for a hundred years no good propagandist would allow themselves to be called a propagandist that's the rule number one of propaganda studies don't allow you don't don't mention propaganda don't mention fight club don't mention propaganda club in fact in the united states up until the 2012 passing of the smith month modernization act the government was legally forbidden to propagandize domestically it is now permitted to do so and does so very industriously the currently used term of art for propaganda is strategic communication and it is a burgeoning industry some of you may work in that field is uh i don't know quite likely currently it is the most popular masters program in the department of war studies at king's college london where i teach which is a clear indication of the perception of need for the subject consider propaganda whatever we call it is and always has been a primary aspect of warfare because people need to be motivated quite passionately by war otherwise why would they sacrifice warfare in the information age moreover is occurring in a context where the density of communication channels the potential visibility of small and distant events the range of potential audiences for any given story is much greater than in the past in other words it's quite difficult the the context i would suggest that context is uh challenging in that way but more fundamentally it's challenging in that there is a great need for myth for or meta narrative if you are at war and you are engaging with a population's passion which is an emotion after all uh you need to use uh you need to have access to myth um if we equate the information age and postmodernism as seems reasonable considering we tend to equate industry the industrial age and modernism it is a problem that postmodernists define hostility postmodernist define postmodernism as uh one that is as intrinsically hostile to meta narrative or myth the the internet moreover has a tendency to fragment audiences rather than unify them it may sound strange to say this but i mean this very deliberately the lack of myth power the ability to call on a population to sacrifice is the most strategic the most strategically debilitating thing in the west today followed closely by the collapse in levels of trust in society both problems empirically observed by social scientists war is fundamentally a collective societal effort and a society which is unable to sacralize politically instrumental violence which is war cannot fight well a society which is unable to define itself collectively in a way that is meaningful to its supposed members will self-evidently be unable to generate coherent collective effort on the contrary it will be brittle and the fractured mass that is very vulnerable to external probes that are meant to split it and to shatter it i went today to the german historical museum where there's a terrific exhibit on identity and passports which i encourage you uh to uh to go to if you haven't done so because it is a superb illustration of the points which i just made it if in a slightly different way with a rather less alarming conclusion why am i alarmed well i'm alarmed because as europe moves into a cold winter with insufficient gas sputtering industries and already inflationary economies we now see leaders attempting to psychologically prepare populations for pain in the last two weeks both macron in france and boris johnson in the uk have made speeches to this effect i'm extremely dubious of the likelihood of success of these pleas uh and consider it rather more likely that the people of those countries will react to the realization of chronic malgovernance of their nations rather like the people of srilanka have done in their country in recent months the irony is that after september 11th 2001 one of the most popular ways for governments to describe the war on terror was as a war of ideas which is to say it would be a global war for the hearts and minds of people that would be fought primarily through persuasion and by uh by a demonstrable example of a better way of life undoubtedly this contradiction the contradiction between what is said and what is done i physical military intervention in countries uh was not completely thought through at the time nor has it been uh since furthermore though what happens when the putatively better way turns out not to be better at all the answer i fear is a precipitate precipitate collapse in credibility whatever the difficulty of measuring soft power scientifically there are several plausible methods for making relative rankings and rough estimations what these show over the last 20 years is that the soft power of the united states to take an obvious example is somewhat diminished within the west a 2018 poll found that 49 percent of french people and uh germans agreed with the statement us power and influence is a major threat to our country however uh by and large it seems to be the case that while western countries like and trust each other less than they did 20 years ago they still dislike and mistrust other countries outside of their club more outside the west the picture is quite different in the same 2018 poll only 43 percent of russians shared the same apprehension about america as france and germany did that number i would guess is probably now doubled if we take surveys about putans domestic satisfaction ratings credibly currently over 80 percent as a reasonable proxy attitudes in china are hardly less disagreeable from a western perspective something which we can glean from the increasingly belligerent tone of chinese foreign ministry statements in in recent months both russia and china moreover are working hard and with a good deal of success to win over the rest of the world to their point of view in the case of the middle east notably syria but also astonishingly saudi arabia as well as africa the degree of receptiveness to russian and chinese perspective is quite surprising the bottom line is that the west in my view is that the western proposition to the world is badly discredited not by its ideals per se people like freedom nobody does not like freedom and prosperity but by the perception that the west now deeply embroiled in its own internal culture war no longer obviously epitomizes those things that is a collapse in credibility that's what i mean by a credibility collapse the manner of the american withdrawal from afghanistan in the summer of 2021 appeared to confirm the worst about western credibility and also to further poison relationships within the west it was not just the chaotic nature of the scenes at the Kabul airport which could easily have turned into a repeat of the french disaster at yen bianfu in 1954 it is likely the only reason that was avoided was a massive payoff to the Taliban which ultimately was almost as eager as the white house to get american troops out an even more wounding problem was that after 20 years in afghanistan alongside the united states britain for example was not even informed that it was that the withdrawal was about to occur in the uk at the time uh there was a minor political scandal after the withdrawal on account of the fact that the foreign minister as well as his deputy and a bunch of other uh senior government officials were all out of the country on holiday uh and the reason for that was simply that none of them had any idea that the biden administration had decided to pull out had decided to pull the plug that they were leaving immediately uh because they didn't tell them uh they learned the event of the event more or less like you did by seeing it uh on the news furthermore coming to the end now since the end of the cold war all western wars have been sub-strategic in nature by by sub-strategic i mean they occurred not because survival was at stake was at stake nor even always that there was any vital national interest in in play but out of a perception on the part of politicians that they had to respond to a public urge that something must be done about something awful happening in the world and people's of course because we are so connected people are connected in a way that they see these distant events and feel strongly about them so politicians are responding to an urge that something must be done in other words many wars have been fought in the last generation as essentially as set pieces in domestic political theater not as aspects of overarching international strategy something must be done is the call it doesn't need to be particularly effective and probably will not be but a gesture is required and it has and therefore in the nature it is in the nature of gestures to be kept cheap the politics of this are completely logical and i think completely defensible defensible from a political point of view the problem is that they're low also low and dishonest and over time the repeated pattern of them further erodes credibility trust and ultimately the perception of elite competence the situation where we've now arrived in my observation has some of the elements of dramatic tragedy out of a combination of desire to do the right thing at any rate to be seen to be doing the right thing and to lash out after suffering a very surprising attack on September 11th the west has drained out its own capital of credibility and trust the two qualities unfortunately which are the most vital in a war of ideas once again it is a very unsafe situation finally in in conclusion sometime ago i mentioned the thousands of years long agrarian era of human civilization as compared to the couple of centuries long industrial era era which has been followed by an information era that perhaps we might say is a half century long now i noted also the distinctions between these eras are is quite fuzzy things that were important in previous ages often continue to be important in the following ones or they seemingly shift out of interest for a while only to come back at a later point producing what my colleague David edgerton has called a shock of the old russia i have argued is right now winning an information war because it still has so much old-school industrial muscle military specifically military industrial muscle are we still in the in industrial age then for that matter one of the biggest concerns of governments outside of the west about the coming winter is not energy but food supply collectively ukraine and russia grow most of the grain that feeds north africa and the middle east particularly egypt if that supply is imperiled then what we've been calling the migrant crisis up until now will look like nothing in comparison so are we even out of the agricultural era then indulge me for a moment in an anecdote recently i picked up my teenage daughter from her work in the local library where she'd just done her first full eight hour shift she's 17 she was hungry and exhausted her immediate needs therefore were to get home have something to eat and go to bed take me home so i can eat and sleep so far so much in accordance with maslow's famous hierarchy of needs which has physiological needs right at the base as we drove off in the car however her first need was to connect her mobile phone to the bluetooth system so that she can continue the podcast or whatever it is she'd been left listening to before she went to work so for the first two minutes of our drive home we argued because i needed her to put her seatbelt on which is a security need right which she insisted she could not do before satisfying her psychological need to be connected i think this illustrates something useful maybe about the general topic that we've been discussing the ways in which we seek to satisfy basic physiological needs is different from age to age we are after all not pre-humans on the african savannah bashing each other's heads in with animal thigh bones anymore we do it differently but the needs themselves do not go away perhaps the order of priority that we give to some secondary psychological and self-fulfillment needs there uh is different from one era to another in some cases we might even put certain sorts of self-fulfillment goals ahead of security ones to a degree for certain there's a palpable need in people to be constantly connected to information which is obvious why you know when people do this do i have my keys my phone and my wallet and if you don't as i put my phone somewhere you're pang of nervousness and realizing that you don't have your phone on you and short last paragraph on a macro scale reality is also a sort of palimpsest in which ages are not replaced but rather another layer is added over top of the pre-existing one in the case of warfare this is undoubtedly the case the most powerful digital system is of little use of some commandos has just stabbed its operator through the eyeball with a pointed stick for that matter if you want to shut down the critical infrastructure of an enemy at whom with whom you are at at war openly at war there are easier and more effective ways of doing it than with cyber attack the big lesson in the long view in my opinion is against complacency great powers rise and fall within any given era for all kinds of for all kinds of reasons not requiring any sort of change from one age to another but paradigmatic social changes like we are observing now seem to sweep away the status quo anti with shocking speed and ease that's it thank you very much so thanks uh hello am i on i can't hear myself am i me a little bit there we are thank you so much david for this very rich very outspoken in some cases very controversial talk i'm looking forward to our conversation the two of us now for a little bit and then of course you hear the audience and all the people watching on your devices at home i'd like to start a more general note before we of course will be zooming in and to the current war you've talked about extensively also now we here in germany we definitely know about you know old technology not so proceeding a new technology when we think of all the fax machines that had a big comeback here in this country that were collecting the covet cases and centralizing them in a database actually that was one thing where we got very near to this observation of yours you talked about this continuity instead of revolution with many examples one example i found particularly interesting where we can uh go back to this historical perspective to begin now and you talked about the napoleonic mindset uh of the generality right in the first world war that actually led to the great carnage of the especially the first two years of world war one can you dive a little deeper into what actually that mindset was about and how it was able to do that much damage it was not just technology but also mindset you were talking about right okay oh yeah that's on so napoleonic mindset it was not too i don't mean it's not very complicated what i what i mean most of the most of the first world war generals european or the european generals during the first world war their their mental image of what warfare was going to be like was primarily formed by the napoleonic experience which was the last big example of uh intra european war on a large scale of course between the napoleonic war and the first world war a lot happened in terms of well technology uh uh obviously and there were signs through the 19th century that things were changing if you looked at the american civil war which had a distinctively industrial flavor right one of the reasons one of the main reasons that the north prevails was because of its industrial muscle i mentioned the franco-prussian war of 1871 okay and you one could look at that and say well things are happening with respect to um the technology of transportation which is which are having a big material effect on on the battlefield uh the boar war um there were signs there both of the increasing lethality of of uh of uh rifled weapons and and so on as well as signs coming out of the bull the boar war particularly in terms of the connectedness of global society right so one of the reasons that the boar war is so traumatic for the british is that um because there's already an international media at at that point in which the british empire is portrayed particularly in continental europeans french media especially as a as a as a big bully essentially um so there were signs of that things were changing but they you know they weren't picked up on as they might have as they might have been that in itself is is a lesson of not ignoring the signals that are coming that are contrary to um the existing perception of of the prevailing the security of the prevailing paradigm but fundamentally yes so the the senior generals were informed by a particular image of of warfare uh which didn't sit which didn't work in an environment where there had been such leaps in the lethality of weapons there'd been such leaps in terms of the uh the visibility of military operations from above right so there've been balloons before but the so these sorts of things occurred and all of that happened very very rapidly in the in the in the context of uh major modern states essentially exercising the full societal muscle so putting essentially every able-bodied or able-bodied person that they could get on on on the front lines which all added up to a tremendous amount of of bloodshed much of it much of it uh much of it wasted until they figured out how to fight under modern uh conditions which which they did ultimately now obviously i'm not a military historian but i would think that um some of the you know premises of how an army was organized a hundred years ago and today are very different all the generals and officers were most of them were aristocrats at the time that's not really the case anymore there's a totally different kind of upward mobility possible in many armies i would think i hope this is safe to say like this but yet you are describing something that reminds me of this napoleonic example when you talked about the don bass example right about the network-enabled detrition relentless and progressive wearing down of once eminy by fire aided cheap digital systems when you were mentioning the van and concluding there by saying military tech in the west at least is not leading but lagging with the f-35 you mentioned and you would say that this whole rig that they had there behind the front line would cost 50 000 euros it would cost about five million if it were the british army right now why is that is that this is a similar clash of mindsets happening right in this situation or why would it not be possible for ukraine for a british army for nato in the end we don't know that to do the same thing for the same amount of money i i i give two two answers which are two aspects of the same answer the first is that the west has not fought a proper war in well over a generation we fought wars of wars of choice right fought the wars in which we had a huge material preponderance except perhaps for the kosovo war where the serbs did have the serbs did have a relatively capable air defense system all of our wars have been fought in in a context in which we had unchallenged air power complete impunity in in in the sky uh so i i give that just as an example of many ways in which the wars that we have been fighting uh have not been terribly have not been challenging in the way in which uh interstate conventional war wars um can be and this and indeed this one is the second point i would uh raise it just occurred to me now while you were asking this question i was thinking about class structure and and the like i think it's true we we don't have the same so we don't have the same you know our parent societies don't have the same underlying class structure class distinctions as existed at that time and uh recruitment is is is different so indeed that pattern is i would suggest is not really this or i wouldn't wish to say that that is the same because i i don't think it is but i do think that if you look at you know senior generals or your office senior generals are drawn from the same managerial class they are drawn from the same bureaucratic class as the rest of the civilian elite is and that is why i would i would suggest that you see this natural progression from senior military leadership to corporate board to executive director you know not not not not not a non-executive director uh roles in defense industry and so on why is it because those are the same people they're in the same that's the that's the you know that's the officer stratum uh today and i in that way i do think that you know possibly not possibly i think our society is also stratified stratified uh today not quite in the same ways in which it it it does but it does have that character to it and for sure our our our senior officers are drawn from that that managerial class which is you know in some sense is fine why else would you you tend to draw your managerial class from your educational elite uh so that makes sense but on the downside that coming all from the same class they tend to have all the same ideas all the same backgrounds tend to lead of all you know the same ways of looking at things uh and you know progressive uh same same same tends to lead to non-creative non-creative uh solutions and established patterns anyway that not to mention the fact that i just spoke about the transition of senior leadership into in military into senior leadership in industry is undoubtedly and no small part an explanation of the reason for the gigantic costs of of military equipment we have to open up soon due to the progressing time and i would have lots of questions about the technology actually but i think one very strong point we have to refer to now this conversation you made is about the power of myth making and the lack thereof in the west you pointed out um and you argued that the internet has this fracturing tendency to sort of de-unify society now i am not so sure about this because there's also very unifying tendencies in a lot of it can mobilize a lot of people it can put a lot of people into power of you know emancipation movements we've had in the last you know 15 years i would say this is a stronghold of western democracy and many people in the east will probably say the same at least many Ukrainians would say that this kind of liberty would be one of the strongholds that actually in favor of western democracy now you're saying no it's actually quite a threat to what we need in order to go to war or am i quoting you or is this incorrect no i don't think we have to end our friendship over this this because it's not a gigantic disagreement i i believe you know as i said a lot of the i mean i mean all of this is very complicated and there are elements of backwards and backwards and and and forward and forwards and contrary indicators across a lot of things uh and i think the the the invention of new media types the impact of that on on society is is interesting uh and it tends so and part of the reason i i said what i said about the internet is uh from looking at the invention of uh a print so print when you look at the invention of print what happens is on the one hand you do get a certain unifying effect you get a strong unifying effect within sciences for example because now once you start writing things down and or sorry not once you once you start printing things so that becomes the authoritative version of something that can then be shared around all sort of science you're not working off you know fragmentary bits so there's a unifying effect going on within science and philosophy and all kinds of uh all kinds of uh thinking at that level at the same time there's an enormously fragmenting effect at all other levels in society what else occurs around that that's when you get into the the basically the wars of the wars of the the wars of the reformation you get the pamphlet wars the pamphlet wars the key is in the title what is it you know right you're having pamphlet wars because now people are able to produce pamphlet so there's there is there is simultaneously some in some ways a unification and in in other ways fracturing and i think that's probably the case in our society in our society today what is happening in our society i don't think it's too controversial to to say that identity politics has become very mainstream if not completely dominant in most in most western societies that is in one sense that is groups of people finding affinity with each other with a with over a particular whatever the issue might be and they can do so because of the death of distance or the greater connectivity or what what have you on the other hand there's a there's a uh an actually colossal diminishment in other uh in in other affinities which i would argue matter or certainly they matter in the context of warfare particularly in in in a if if you have a collapse in national affinity or a national identity it's very hard to draw on the nation what are you because what are you talking about right um another yeah so i think that there there are the the two things uh are are uh are occurring and in so far as i as i said that war is a collective effort that is uh that is primarily uh that involves uh states i mean i'm not trying to argue there are different sorts of non-state warfare realistic state on state for the moment not being able to call on uh on a national identity seriously compromises your national power and if you're looking for reasons you know why there is more endurance on one side than another than i think that's a good one that's the primary one for me well in germany we're kind of sensitive to the mere idea of a national myth of course uh since after world war two that's maybe one thing and another one is one of my favorite quotes of the you probably know her the american historian jill lapour was always saying the us of a fractured since 1776 that this is actually something that is driving democracy a dissent and the possible to stage that dissent and to stage it publicly and very fiercely if you have to let the public actually not decide but uh delve deeper now and ask questions to uh this aspect many other aspects this wonderful lecture has covered by david we'll start by the audience you probably have to wait for the microphone where is the microphone that's coming right to you please wait for it because we're broadcasting here please thank you thank you david for your insights um you really covered a very gloomy picture right we the west is losing the material war the west is losing the war of ideas so it loses the social material paradigm war uh and so as a scholar of innovation entrepreneurship i wondered whether it is partially uh the material side could be partially because the west is doing an injustice way of sourcing instead of an entrepreneurial way of sourcing right and it loses the social paradigmatic war because it's not creating unified unity in diversity with regards to norms values and so on but the european ideal could be a unifying norm above maybe the nation state so my question to you is what do you advise then politicians do you actually advise them do they listen to you but what do you advise them to do then to actually kind of shift that and win this paradigmatic war against russia i'm i'm i'm smiling because toby started to say that i was controversial but i don't think i'd been controversial so what i'm about to say will be controversial you're not going to win there is i would advise them to drop the idea of winning this war you have to end it now uh like i noticed i i read today that that's what i meant by controversy cost in germany have increased by 720 percent in the last six seven hundred and twenty percent in six months uh that's that's a that's a you know why because of policy decisions that's a suicide note for the industry the the biggest industrial economy uh in in europe um i could i i could go on britain uh it was announced today that uh gas prices had increased by 80 percent uh that the majority of british homes by mid by midwinter will be in a state of what's called fuel fuel poverty um this is not sustainable it's not it it my opinion is that that is that that is not sustainable uh and i also think so it's so i think the war needs to be ended uh and we and also i think that everybody knows what the outcome of the war is going to be we've known since you've known since day one that there is some some sort of political uh that there is some sort of partition of ukraine uh because it's not it's it can't hold itself together as the country um which it was um that's just the facts of it so you need to end the war now and for that to occur you need to start you need to talk to the russians directly what do you want uh right what is it that what is it that will satisfy you that is not so humiliating to the west that we can't you know sell it to people and climb out of the um the well of bad decisions uh made so a real heart to heart discussion and i would urge moreover there has to be a that an object of that discussion too has to be to gauge the russians on what what really is it that they see in terms of the their alignment with china in the long term because this eurasian compact of of russia and china uh is the thing which which geostrategists have been warning against from the very day the geostrategy was was invented um it's it's very very dangerous so we need to swallow our pride in the war have have grown up discussions with russia and and do it now that was that's what i would advise thank you do we have another question from the floor there's one right at the bar to the left hand side from the stage yes good evening and thank you for the lecture you are in berlin the the former capital of prussia and you've been talking about the napoleonic wars i think there were two lessons for prussia from the napoleonic wars the first one was you have to be friends with russia only with an alliance with russia you the the german state can kind of survive with in the in the in the concept of european nations but the second one was um after the blockade the the the british blockade of the continental blockade that the war had kind of boosted innovation industrialization now if we are at a different times now um don't you think that the west being under blockade from russia for fossil energies this could be a good thing because it promotes and boosts innovation here towards different energies but then of course the question is the germany in the 20th century then allied with the u.s. what does a country or the should europe do uh being neighbor of russia being aligned to the u.s. which you think is you know kind of the declining power um okay uh well that's very interesting from the point yes uh from your remarks about uh russia i'm i'm i'm interested to understand that point of view and so thank you for mentioning it uh for with respect to can can we look at the the the benefits of of blockade of saying that this is you know i suppose it's a spur to innovation in uh alternatives and uh yes that that may be i guess that might be the case i you know i said i i hope so uh i mean generally in favor of of innovation uh and of spurring things along but uh you know i think it's a it's not a really a good way to spur uh innovation yes war is to your question about what is war good for war war does tend to spur innovation that's that's or to some extent yeah it does it does drive things have a tendency to drive things but but its costs are so dramatic um a friend of mine uh was quite overweight uh and then he got cancer and had uh months of chemotherapy and then at the end of which he was not overweight at all uh is chemotherapy a good way is cancer a good way to lose weight apparently but i wouldn't suggest it and i wouldn't suggest that that um that running running going having a proxy war with russia uh that involves a a blockade of uh fertilizers gas oil number of strategic very strategic minerals and and and the like is is is a good way to spur innovation in in other things it may turn out in in the end for the good i suppose in the long you know in the long run in the short run i'm pessimistic in the long run i'm optimistic i don't know why that's the reverse of it uh you know things will work out because we'll all be dead i guess um but anyway no i don't think it's a good uh good way forward maybe it maybe it'll have that but you'll go through such enormous amounts of pain uh that it won't be worth it you know i started off my career really focusing on eastern europe i was a soviet military analyst to start with and uh during the 1990s i spent a lot of time in russia and uh and in the east eastern europe generally and you really don't want as a society to experience double digit gdp decline it it will it will uh derange your society for many generations um and that's that's what's at what's at risk i think it's probably uh again an ambivalence in the word good what is it good for economically speaking or ethically speaking in this in this sense right that's quite a bit different uh thing especially people probably knew in detroit that war was good for innovation because it spurred automotive innovation too um after world war one and and then again do we have a question from the digital sphere from slido so uh please sarah let us know what's going on on slido and the participatory tool that people watching it at home could choose um you have said during your presentation was a weight of humans for now is that a reference to artificial intelligence uh yes yes it was uh so um i i i no i i didn't talk about artificial intelligence i may well have i said i was not going to talk too much about uh technology but that was exactly what i was getting at in your so the questioner is very uh perceptive at this and the the thing was i was saying that there are certain uh certain things about uh aspects of war which are in its nature its chances and chanciness its reciprocality uh and uh the fact that it's uh involves violence and i think that those so long as it is human human beings doing doing war that is going to be the case if it when it is ai and when you throw ai into the mix i think that it is possible uh to that all that would that that would change i mean insofar as ai is not a human doesn't doesn't won't necessarily think as humans do it is i i think it would be interesting for example if you had a general ai that is to say an ai which actually had feelings and ideas and its own internal monologue and its own sense of we don't have that right and wasn't simply a an algorithm a very sophisticated algorithm it would be interesting to ask uh um such an entity what it thought war was good for um because it might come up with i don't know what that what the answer would be but that might be a very consequential answer it might decide that war is not good for anything and you guys aren't permitted to do it anymore um on the other hand it might decide that war is terrifically good and there you get all kinds of other scenarios which might include your guys propensity for this destructive thing is is not something i want to have around so but anyway yes that your questioner was correct that's what i was going to take another question from from slider maybe or was that it for the moment and you're pressing on the microphone yes sorry um thank you i wanted to ask you about you said war is reciprocal and you talked about your students in your department study studying strategic communications and i was wondering maybe the students studying strategic communications in the uk in the west isn't that wasted time in a way when you think about how is idea war going to be reciprocal if this eurasian alliance that you're describing is going to shut off its internet and its social media for the chinese firewall which for now in russia isn't as effective but sooner or later it's going to be so how our idea war is going to be reciprocal in this way and why do we have to practice attack if we don't really know whether we are going to be able to practice it okay uh well if i i may i i don't i don't want to you know distress my colleagues or but it's it's an open information that that our strategic communications program is very popular with the chinese right the war studies department as you know the whole college but the war studies department has a primarily international student body um so you know at at any given time you know you get we we will have oh i can't give you numbers at on the top of my head uh nor even if i knew them should i probably say them on a microphone but it you know there are a lot of chinese students who are interested in pursuing the study of strategic communications at king's college london department of war studies and uh presumably that is because they apprehend i mean the no doubt some of them are funded by the chinese government or perceive that those are skills which will which would be uh very marketable in in china and just like you know when i was uh an undergraduate and i was studying uh russian russian language and command economics uh that was because uh we had the idea that you you should try to think like your enemy things to learn how your enemy things and i think there is some of that some of that uh going on or a lot of that uh going on um i'm not sure that's an an answer to the question but it is it tip you know a further explanation of i think that the the the fact that this is this is an area of study that is regarded as integral to uh contemporary conflict not just in the west but uh but but broadly you know other countries also see that this is something that they need to that they need to um be involved in and no doubt to have their own national centers uh working on this sort of thing thank you for this insight here david once again now can we take one more question from slido maybe before slowly wrapping this up yes of course um in the very beginning you mentioned that your view of whether good reason for waging war exist has changed over the years could you elaborate shortly that my personal view has changed over time um yeah whether good reasons for waging war exist has have changed uh okay well uh uh well from a personal point of view i you know and i i've always been fascinated by war and and and still am fascinated uh by it uh and i uh started off you know but i've been uh studying it thinking about it in one way or another for 35 years and um that that's a lot of wars that uh were have proved not to be useful you know fundamentally we we started the whole time that i have been in involved in the academic study of of war in the formal academic study of war i'm not sitting in my my room reading uh you know war books uh as an individual uh has been post cold war and during that period there has been a relentless search for a sort of war that is decisive and cheap and easy and of course it's never materialized what has what has what have we had instead it is wars that are protracted that are thankless that are invertebrate and uh so it's just been my personal experience that you know wars hasn't been or anyway it it hasn't been good for very much we've really struggled uh we have really struggled to make war uh useful and the reasons for that are are are complicated uh it may relate to you know i think a lot of it relates to our our society the way we regard war it's not useful for put it this way if you if you're you have a society that does not believe in the utility of war and you are fighting an an enemy that does believe in the utility of it then you're rather compromised in in your in your ability to prosecute that war that belief in the utility of war can make up for a big material imbalance anyway to make a long story short i've been studying war for a long time with none of them have been um very successful most of them have been disastrous uh very expensive in literally uh you know in terms of money many thousands of lives lost uh many tens and tens of thousands with life-changing injuries you know how many people in Germany i don't know german casualty figures in Afghanistan but you know i know in in britain there are 10 000 people going around with fewer limbs than they ought to have because of decisions made uh right and hundreds of billions of pounds spent that have not made the situation in afghanistan better and have not made the international security the environment better you know fighting the war on terror like most seems to have promoted terror um so anyway short answer is experience that's made me feel that it's you know less less useful although i still obviously find it very very interesting so 35 years of academic experience and studies sort of do come together with a pop song out of detroit uh in 1969 by the temptations and edwin star just to end this and take it back actually through the notion of digital warfare i'm trying to put two questions in one you should never do that but i'm trying it right now there's two things for many things that do not understand about this war but there's two things that really amaze me at this stage we've talked about this a little bit when we when we uh video assumed in preparation for this evening one is that we haven't seen broader heavier cyber attacks on the west from the russian side the other is that info is so low on this war i mean there's all those mobile devices there's all this connectivity to starlink satellites going over the ukraine and the real images the moving images the overall reporting from the front lines is very bad compared or very low so to speak compared to other conflicts so no major cyber attacks uh from russia i mean there have been some people have been reporting on it but nothing major right and very low reporting from the front lines two things with digital warfare actually would come into play that haven't come into play yet what's your explanation uh okay so firstly why no uh why no cyber uh two sides to that the first is as i said in the lecture uh russia for purposes of affecting ukraine the ukrainian energy system or a transportation system or what have you russia has much more direct physical means available to it to accomplish those things that are more straightforward more effective cheaper and so on so that i think is one part of the answer the second is i presume that russia does have certain significant cyber capabilities it has the it it i would be surprised if a country with russia's uh russia's experience and its uh attitude towards preparation hadn't invested like other countries britain united states plenty of others invested in offensive cyber capability i'd be so i would i think that russia does have certain cyber capabilities and it has not deployed them yet because um it doesn't because it doesn't it wants to keep its powder dry there is at the moment there is a distinctive there is a distinctive possibility of escalation from a proxy war with nato which is what russia is in now to a direct war that is when you would want if you had something if you had something really powerful in in those terms that's when you would want to uh deploy it it's in the you know so that i think is my best explanation save it for explanation basically my less less cyber than than other the other was about the information coming out of the coming out of the war i think that the best thing that people can do to improve their understanding of this war and other wars is turn off the media i'm sorry to journalists or media people in the room but it's just turn it off there are other channels available to you and uh and um what channels i will mention specifically okay i have not and you'll either leave this room thinking my god why did i listen to that guy or uh think that this is a terrific idea but i have not followed the media account of of this war from the beginning of course like i live in the same media environment as everyone else and i can't help of uh you know read the odd thing but i'm not learning about what's happening out of out of the media certainly not off of the bbc or the or the like when the war began i uh joined telegram and i subscribed to four accounts the ukrainian ministry of defense and the russian ministry of defense and a pro ukrainian um quasi independent account and a pro russian quasi independent uh account and i've simply watched those four accounts uh obsessively throughout the war uh there's no lack of imagery and video coming out you can see tons of it i at this point i ridiculously large number of hours looking at top down uh you know video of of this but it's all it's all a perspective right it's all from propaganda and you have to and so you know to the to the best of your ability you have to take information from a range of sources a binary conflict looking at those at those channels seem to me uh a reasonable choice of range of of of sources and follow them consistently and use your critical faculties you know you've you've got one saying one thing you've got another saying something else you've got partial imagery that's that's the best you can do but unfortunately i would not i i say this uh with with uh conviction that you need to disconnect from the media why uh because it's uh it's the least valuable form of information it's coming to you it's coming to you uh processed in a way that is that is not evident how it has been processed if i'm going to eat a cake i want to know how it's been baked okay uh telegram is not processed by the foreign ministry of the i'm sure you yeah of course yeah of of course all all those are perspectives right those international accounts those are four different perspectives two competing official perspectives and two competing partisan perspectives just accept that that that each of that all of those have that all of those have a perspective it would be ridiculous to form your views of the war on the basis of what the russian ministry of defense said alone i think it's equally uh but i think it's also problematic to form an image of of the war that does not incorporate what is coming out of the russian ministry of defense alongside other alongside other things and you don't need you don't need uh the the media to do that you definitely don't need yeah i wouldn't go further are those international accounts just to i mean are they english-speaking some of them or are they all russian or and ukraine so there are there are uh so those are i am following them both in their english versions but they they both so you you can follow the russian accounts and uh so the russian ministry of defense has it has an english-language telegram channel ukrainian ministry of defense has an english-language telegram channel for obvious reasons because that's the that's the language of the major international audience which they're trying to uh trying to speak to there are uh what i haven't done is subscribe to the russian language ministry of defense channel and that's frankly because my russian is too rusty uh to cope with the volume of of russian reading that that requires but so all of those are are english available in english also okay yeah i have to expand my family chat and incorporate other telegram channels apparently in uh to my mobile phone i'm looking forward to this thank you so much for this lecture once again uh david betz um we're going to see each other again for those of you who want to we're going to continue this series on the 6th of october in frankfurt with um staphoni amilan on the datified society uh subject we've been covered before but from a different perspective now in october thank you very much for coming to us from all the way from london david betz ladies and gentlemen thank you for being with us