Talking Strategy

The Swedish campaigns in Central Europe in the Thirty Years’ War are remembered in folklore for their brutality, for massacres of civilians and ‘scorched earth’ tactics. And yet, as their leader, King Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden (1594 – 1632) is remembered almost as a saint, even in these very same regions.

King Gustavus Adolphus, an experienced military commander who had already fought and won wars against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark, intervened in the Thirty Years’ War like a force of nature – a ‘Lion from Midnight’. He was the champion of the Protestant cause, fighting the Catholic Habsburgs and their followers. In a series of huge moves, his armies swept through the Holy Roman Empire, winning battles at Frankfurt/Oder, Werben, Breitenfeld, Rain on the River Lech, and, finally, Lützen – but this last Swedish victory cost him his life.

Professor Gunnar Åselius explains the paradox: Gustavus Adolphus prided himself on his military reforms and the discipline he kept among his soldiers, but even they would turn to pillage and murder to feed themselves when they were not paid. Holding degrees from the universities of Uppsala and Stockholm, Professor Åselius teaches Military History at the Swedish Defence University.

Julius Caesar is famous for describing hugely complicated strategic problems, then adding his famous Vini, vidi, vici: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. But what did his strategic genius consist of? And how did he justify extending the Roman Empire right across Western Europe?

Did Rome acquire her empire, not quite in a fit of absent-mindedness, but defensively, or was she ruthlessly expansionist? Gaius Iulius Caesar’s account of his Gallic Wars (58-50 BC) explained his military operations as ‘just’ wars: Rome came to the rescue of allies and quelled lawless rebels. Admittedly, Caesar showed outstanding generalship. Forced marches by Roman infantry, operations - even in winter - caught adversaries by surprise. Complementing kinetic tools of siege craft and battle, Caesar’s diplomacy turned Gallic and Germanic tribes and their leaders against each other, forging alliances and isolating adversaries, just as he had done previously in Roman domestic politics.

Dr Louis Rawlings helps us dissect Caesar as a strategist and as a political animal. Rawlings holds his degrees from University College London, having previously taught there and at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. He is now Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at Cardiff University.

While most of the political and military commanders whom we now call ‘great’ were often ruthless or megalomaniacs, Korean Admiral Yi Sun-sin is remembered not only for his military prowess but also for his integrity and humility. He came to his nation’s rescue in extremis when others had failed.

The 15th and 16th century saw unprecedented creativity in naval warfare. The Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese and Koreans each employed their first blue water navies in distinct ways, for distinct strategic purposes, and with distinct technological innovations. In 1592, Admiral Yi Sun-sin answered the call to rescue his country from invasion, despite having been undeservedly court-martialled twice and reduced to the ranks by hostile superiors who were jealous of his abilities. Vastly overmatched, with only a dozen innovative ‘turtle ships’ and some support from Chinese naval forces, he defeated the Japanese fleet, isolating the Hideyoshi army and ending the Imjin War – a triumph that cost him his life.

Lt Cdr Dr Seok Yeong-dal teaches naval history and strategy at the Republic of Korea Naval Academy. His PhD from Yonsei University in Seoul examined the successes and limitations of the Royal Navy's reforms in the 19th century. He has written extensively on Admiral Yi, as well as on the Royal Navy in the 19th century with his recent book, A Failed Reform or The First Steps of Reforms, Achievements and Limitations of the Royal Navy's Reforms in the 19th Century, published in South Korea in 2023.

Frederick II of Prussia, like the Era of the Enlightenment in which he lived, was torn about warfare: was it to be humanised, or was it to be perfected? As king he favoured the latter, earning the respect of contemporaries as the greatest strategist of his age.

Frederick in his youth thought Machiavelli’s instructions for princes morally reprehensible, and as a king surrounded himself with great moral philosophers, including, famously, Voltaire. But Frederick saw it as his duty, as that of any monarch, to increase the territorial possessions of his dynasty, even by war, irrespective of just causes. One of the last monarchs who was his own commander-in-chief on his military campaigns, he was also a crafty political strategist, wresting Silesia away from Empress Maria Theresia yet persuading her to colluding with him (and Catherine II of Russia) in the partition of Poland.

Dr Adam Storring helps us understand this complicated man, who like Xerxes and Alexander III before him, was obsessed with outdoing and outshining his father. A Cambridge man, Dr Storring was awarded the André Corvisier Prize for the worldwide Best Dissertation on Military History in 2019. His publications include works on Frederick the Great, including in the forthcoming Cambridge History of Strategy (2024). He teaches at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

Alexander III of Macedon posed as the ‘Son of Zeus’, but followed the advice of his biological father, King Philip II, to get out of Macedon and “seek a kingdom equal to yourself”. Between 336 and 323 BC, Alexander the Great created the largest empire the Middle East had known.

Macedonian expansionism had begun under Philip II, with his son Alexander II picking up and honing the armed forces created by his father. But where Philip’s strategic aims were to dominate all of Greece and Western Asia Minor, Alexander’s sight was set on bringing the Persian Empire to heel. And as he moved from sieges and massacres to battle after victorious battle, his ambitions grew further – the conquest of Afghanistan and India. How did he keep his Macedonian and Greek companions motivated? Without him to lead, they did not know how to get back?

Dr Andrew Fear, Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Manchester, joins Paul and Beatrice to tell us about the strategies of Alexander. An Oxonian, he has a spate of publications on Alexander and on warfare in Antiquity, with contributions to the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (CUP 2007) and to the forthcoming Cambridge History of Strategy, co-edited by Beatrice, and Isabelle Duyvesteyn. He is co-editor with Dr Jamie Wood of A Companion to Isidore of Seville (Brill, 2015).

Shaka Zulu (c. 1787–1828) was the most powerful king in southern Africa during the pre-colonial period. He forged a polity that would become the largest in the region through the ruthless use of his reorganised and loyal army.

Initially regarded as an upstart, Shaka managed to impose himself as a regional ruler. Invaded by a powerful neighbouring tribe, he organised the collective defence of the Zulus and other tribes, reorganising the militia and drawing on indigenous traditions, without any European influences. He then turned to crushing the surrounding chiefdoms with the utmost brutality, leaving a trail of massacres and destruction in his wake. Operating with only 5,000 to 10,000 warriors at any given time, Shaka – like Napoleon – prevailed not through the introduction of new technologies, but through innovative ways of training and employing his army.

Professor John Laband is the world-leading expert on Zulu history. A graduate of the University of Natal and Cambridge, he is Professor Emeritus of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. He joins Beatrice and Paul for this episode.

Dr John O. Hyland joins Paul and Beatrice to discuss fifth-century BC Persian ruler Xerxes I, whose royal progress took him to the Western boundaries of his empire.

Xerxes I tried to extend his rule beyond the Aegean, which his father had failed to accomplish. For a land power this was a challenge, despite the formidable army that Xerxes commanded. He used two strategic tools – engineering, to construct a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont, and the hire of a navy, to tackle the Athenian fleet. While the latter did not work so well for him at Salamis, Xerxes’ army returned by land.Safely back beyond the Straits, Xerxes portrayed himself as conqueror and enforcer of order on the Greeks.

Dr John O. Hyland is the perfect specialist to talk to us about Xerxes, and also about the theory of a Greek or ‘Western’ Way of War, identified and scorned by Xerxes’ cousin Mardonius, and contrasted with a supposedly more subtle ‘Eastern’ way of war. Dr Hyland holds a PhD on the Ancient Mediterranean World from the University of Chicago and teaches at Christopher Newport University. His next book will explore Persia’s Greek Campaigns.

The credit for successful military campaigns often goes to the senior commander, when in fact, the brilliance of the operation and the planning happened at much lower levels of the organisation. This is the case with Subotai (1175 – 1248), Genghis Khan’s leading general.

Veteran and military historian Dr Angelo Caravaggio joins Paul and Beatrice to discuss Subotai, the brains behind Genghis Khan’s vision of conquest, and the one who should be in receipt of many of the strategic credits given to Khan. Many of the concepts that we talk about today at military colleges about strategy and tactics – speed, manoeuvre, surprise, the deep battle, the battle of annihilation, even the concept of Mission Command – were all practiced by the Mongols under Subotai. Without Subotai, the Mongols would not have defeated Korea, China, Poland, Persia, Russia or Hungary. This does not, however, make him a hero to worship; he had the majority of the population of Afghanistan killed, the entire population of towns that would not yield were massacred, in one case right down to the cats and dogs.

Dr Angelo developed a keen interest in Subotai and holds his degrees from the Royal Military College of Canada and the Wilfrid Laurier University. He has been teaching at the Canadian Forces College for 13 years, specialising in leadership, defence and security.

To conclude Season Three of Talking Strategy, US Army General (ret.) Dr David Petraeus shares with us his philosophy about making good strategy. A scholarly soldier with a long and varied career, he commanded the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2010–11 and subsequently served as director of the CIA.

General Petraeus’s experience has taught him that the best results can arise from what he describes as his own ‘intellectual construct for strategic leadership’, comprised of four tasks: brainstorming, communication, implementation and assessment. Successful results can be achieved from initially brainstorming with the best and brightest around the commander to find the next ‘big idea’ – thinking through all good proposals, and deciding which is the best. Then, the challenge is to communicate it to the entire defence establishment both at home and abroad, including one’s own forces and allied/coalition forces. Then comes the implementation, requiring energetic leadership. Finally, the results must be assessed – and here the circle closes.

For General Petraeus, making and implementing good strategy is possible when the armed forces are turned into a learning organisation, one that can draw lessons and jettison approaches that have been unhelpful. For communication with multiple audiences during an armed conflict, his motto is: ‘Be first with the truth’.

Raoul Castex (1878–1968) was an active naval officer who theorised widely on strategy. As an advocate of ‘jointness’, he took a comprehensive approach rather than relying on any one service.

A child of the predominant geopolitical fashions of his time, Castex was an advocate of keeping diplomats and ministers out of strategy-making during war, of an offensive strategy on all fronts (despite the experience of the First World War), and of France not concentrating all its efforts on defending itself on the continent but seeing itself as, above all, a colonial empire.

He reached the rank of Vice-Admiral after having headed the French Naval College and the Centre for Advanced Naval Studies. He was an author on strategy more generally, which kept him busy following his retirement from the French Navy in 1939 after he failed to be appointed to the Navy's top position. His most important works were a series of volumes on strategic theory.

Our guest for this episode, Professor Martin Motte, teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and also at the French École de Guerre, the war college for higher officers. He is one of three authors of the manual produced by the École de Guerre for the education of its officers.

Professor Steve Tsang joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss the founding father of the Chinese People’s Republic, Mao Zedong. Mao was both a Leninist strategic theorist and the leader of the Chinese Communists in their fight to overthrow the Chinese nationalists – while not exerting themselves too much in the battle against Japanese occupation.

There is a considerable gulf between Mao’s theoretical writings on strategies for insurgency and civil war, and the practices he followed, Professor Tsang explains. Nevertheless, his three-stage concept for a successful guerrilla movement has inspired other Communist revolutionary movements the world over.

Another disciple of Clausewitz, Mao used the tenet that war is a continuation of politics by other means to argue, famously, that peace is also a time of fighting – even if the tools are not those of war. He made this his main argument for breaking with the Stalinist tradition that sought to rely only on Communist strategic thinkers, and with Soviet tutelage. For Mao, ‘Fighting in times of peace is politics, war is also politics, even if it uses special means’. This doctrine perfectly captured the spirit of the Cold War.

Professor Steve Tsang is the Director of the SOAS China Institute. Previously, he was the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham, and before that a Professorial Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. He is also an Associate Fellow of Chatham House and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College.

With a serious commitment to the ‘Just War’ tradition, Sir Michael Quinlan (1930–2009), chief British nuclear strategist of the late 1970s and 1980s, helped to construct the complex edifice of the British and NATO nuclear deterrence posture.

Sir Michael was both a strategic analyst and, as a key British civil servant, a practitioner in so far as his analysis formed the British nuclear strategy. That he was a Jesuit-educated Catholic and an Oxford-educated Classicist explains much about his approach to nuclear strategy: throughout his adult life, he grappled with the nuclear paradox that peace could be the result of the mutual threat of unbearable nuclear conflagration. He sought serious debate with all and sundry, replacing secrecy with transparency and persuasion where at all possible.

Dr Tanya Ogilvie-White and Dr Kristan Stoddart join Beatrice and Paul for this week’s episode. Both Tanya and Kristan knew Sir Michael and his writings at first hand: Tanya posthumously published his correspondence under the title On Nuclear Deterrence. She is Senior Research Adviser at the Asia-Pacific Leadership Network and a member of the International Group of Eminent Persons – an initiative working to achieve a world without nuclear weapons. Previously, she was research director of the Centre for Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament at the Crawford School of Public Policy (Australian National University) and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and she has held positions at several think tanks.

Dr Kristan Stoddart is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Swansea University. He was previously a Reader in the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth, and he is the author of Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964-70 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow (1757–1807) was called ‘everything from a conceited crank to the founder of modern military science’ (R R Palmer). Probably the last Prussian strategist to sympathise with the French Revolution, he had a keen interest in the relationship between political aims and war as their instrument, and in geopolitics: he correctly prophesied that the 19th century would produce in Europe the smallest number of states since states came into being, after the territorial expansion of the strong by conquering or annexing smaller powers.

Von Bülow’s Spirit of the Modern System of War combined geopolitics with geographic considerations, ideas about the balance of power in Europe and geometric treatises on how to calculate and establish the best chances of success in battle by focusing on magazines and lines of supply and movement. He was unfairly ridiculed for his geometric approach by Clausewitz, who, at the same time, borrowed Bülow’s main tenet: ‘If something can be effected by force and cannot be achieved by negotiations, diplomacy turns into war, or conflict with reasons becomes conflict with physical forces’. And he concluded: ‘war is a means for the achievement of diplomatic aims’. Sound familiar?

This week’s guest on Talking Strategy, Dr Arthur Kuhle, studied History and Arts History at the Universities of Berlin and Belfast from 2006 to 2012. He completed his PhD at the Humboldt University Berlin on the intellectual predecessors of Carl von Clausewitz, a work subsequently published in German. After working at the University of Göttingen for some time, he is now engaged in research on the history of the climate of the Himalayas and its relevance for the emergence of early civilisations there.

Lawrence of Arabia is legendary status, Britain’s most romantic strategic theorist-cum-practitioner; as ‘al-Lorans’, he won the hearts of many Arabs in their fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Dr Rob Johnson, the author of T.E. Lawrence’s most recent biography, joins Beatrice and Paul for this week’s episode.

T.E. Lawrence’s great classic article on ‘guerrilla warfare’ published after the First World War is that of a practitioner who could, from his own experience, note that much about this form of war is counter-intuitive. It is better that guerilla fighters own their flawed strategy and application, rather than execute ‘perfect’ strategy seen as a foreign achievement. This crucial tenet developed by Lawrence still holds true and must be kept in mind, whichever side one is on.

He ‘went native’ – and wrote about insurgency strategy from the point of view of the insurgent, not, as Major-General Sir Charles Edward Callwell did, from the point of view of the counter-insurgent.

Dr Rob Johnson has written T.E. Lawrence’s most recent biography: Lawrence of Arabia on War: The Campaign in the Desert 1916–18 (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020). A scholar at the University of Oxford, Dr Johnson has for many years now run the prestigious “Changing Character of War” programme originally created by Professor Sir Hew Strachan. But he is now applying his great energy to directing the British Ministry of Defence’s office of Net Assessment. The opinions expressed here are entirely his own as an Oxford scholar, and must not be seen to represent the British defence establishment.

Foreign policy strategist Andrew Marshall had a career that spanned seven decades from the late 1940s. He was hailed by a former KGB officer as ‘the grey cardinal, the éminence grise’ of the US revolution of military affairs, and as ‘the great hero’ of Chinese officers tracking developments in US military technology, claiming they had translated every word he wrote. Dr Thomas G Mahnken joins Talking Strategy to discuss his work and life.

Andrew Marshall spent 25 years at the RAND Corporation, which developed methods of analysing the nature of the long-term competition between the US and the Soviet Union. He was recruited by Henry Kissinger to apply these approaches in the National Security Council, and later became the first Director of Net Assessment, a post he held for the next 43 years. His special approach to strategic thinking was interdisciplinary, questioning everything – including past successes – and encouraging out-of-the box thinking.

This week’s guest, Dr Thomas G Mahnken, is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. He is a Senior Research Professor at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and currently serves as a member of the congressionally mandated 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission and as a member of the Army Science Board.

Kautilya lived in India from 375 to 283 BC. He ranks alongside Sun Tzu as one of the great early sages who wrote about the relations between polities, and thus also about wars between them. Kaushik Roy, Guru Nanak Chair Professor at Jadavpur University, India, joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss his work.

Kautilya’s approach to strategy included an understanding of inter-polity relations that assumed that one’s ‘enemy’s rear-enemy’ would be a good ally against the shared enemy: in other words, ‘make friends with your enemy’s enemy’. Meanwhile, insurgents would get support from other polities, and aggressors could be just, or just greedy. He thus paired ‘realist’ views with moral elements.

Also referred to as Chanakya or Vishnugupta, Kautilya was adviser to two successive emperors of the Mauryan Empire in India. He was thus not only a theoretician but also had considerable political influence. His main body of work is the Arthashastra, an ancient Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. While one is hard-pushed to argue that he had a lasting influence on the following millennia of political or strategic thinking in India, his views are worth pondering, as they cast fresh light on strategy and on relations between states.

Kaushik Roy is Guru Nanak Chair Professor in the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), Norway. He obtained his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Admiral Arne Røksund joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss a set of French strategists collectively referred to as the Jeune Ecole, ‘the young school’.

The Jeune Ecole is considered the counterpoint to many battle-obsessed land strategists and followers of 19th century US naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan. Leading among the strategists of the Jeune Ecole were Admiral Théophile Aube (1826–1890), who held the posts of governor of Martinique and navy minister, and Gabriel Charmes, an influential journalist whom he had met in the French colonies. For them, as for many other strategists of the decades before and after the First World War, treaties were scraps of paper to be torn up upon the outbreak of war; all was fair, they argued, for a weaker power in defence of its interests.

Our guest, Admiral Arne Røksund, has had a distinguished career, holding posts including the Commandant and Commander in charge of all Norwegian military education, and Secretary General of the Norwegian Ministry of Defence. Currently the Secretary General of the Surveillance Authority of the European Free Trade Area, he holds a PhD in History from the University of Oslo.

John Warden III was an exceptionally influential air power strategist whose name is inextricably connected with Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 coalition campaign to free Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. We discuss his influence with Colonel Dr John Andreas Olsen of the Royal Norwegian Air Force.

Warden was a pupil of theorist Carl von Clausewitz, taking from him his concept of the ‘centre of gravity’, which Warden multiplied concentrically to identify five targets for air bombardment that would bring an enemy power to its knees – his ‘five rings’. But he also rejected Clausewitz’s emphasis on a decisive battle between land forces to achieve the same outcome.

In an almost ‘Douhetian’ fashion, Warden made the case that air power on its own could bring about a decision in war – but very much unlike the Italian general, Warden wanted to spare the enemy civilian population, targeting above all the enemy’s centre of power.

Our guest, Col Dr John Andreas Olsen, is currently assigned to NATO Headquarters in Brussels. He is a professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, and a fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences. He completed a doctorate in history and international relations at De Montfort University, and he holds further degrees from the Universities of Warwick and Trondheim.

Historian Dr Daniel Whittingham joins Beatrice and Paul for a conversation about Major-General Sir Charles Edward Callwell (1859–1928). An unabashed British imperialist, Callwell’s views are strongly reflected in his writings on Small Wars, by which he meant counterinsurgency operations.

Callwell started his career as an artillery officer, and then went on to serve as a staff officer and commander during the Boer War. He also served in one of the Anglo-Afghan Wars, and later, in the First World War. But it was RUSI that launched him on his literary career: he won the Trench Gascoigne Prize Essay Competition in 1886 for his essay ‘Lessons to be learned from the campaigns in which British Forces have been employed since the year 1865’, published in the RUSI Journal Vol. 139. This success gave him the confidence that he could write and be read, and he later expanded his prize-winning essay into the famous book Small Wars: Their Principles and Practices, published in 1896. The work went through several re-editions and was adopted by the British Army as a textbook on how to conduct counterinsurgency operations.

While his prescriptions in this domain were brutal, his equally important writings on naval strategy are sensible and restrained, foreshadowing Sir Julian Corbett’s views on the need for jointness and the pointlessness of naval operations that did not have the land dimension as their focus.

Dr Daniel Whittingham is an Oxford-trained historian by background, who completed his PhD at King’s College London before joining the University of Birmingham in September 2013.

Antoine-Henri Jomini was the strategist who anticipated Napoleon’s movements – and the general who betrayed the emperor by defecting to the Russians for a better position. He was among the most widely read strategists of land warfare in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To kick off Season 3 of Talking Strategy, Beatrice Heuser and Paul O’Neill are joined by Professor Antulio Echevarria to reflect on his work.

Jomini’s analysis of Napoleon’s way of war – his strategies, his ‘système de guerre’ – is outstanding, and the true reason for the great popularity of his work. Napoleon’s concentration on the centre of gravity, seeking the decisive battle, and bringing his forces together on one point – these were all key features of Jomini’s analysis. It was perfect for those not looking for philosophies, but for something allowing them to penetrate through the complexities of warfare in a revolutionary age.

Jomini’s works on strategy were being read in military academies from the US to Russia at the turn of the 20th century. Then came a period when he was eclipsed by other authors and unjustly neglected. What remained greatly inspirational for militaries on all sides, however, was his list of principles of war, and his focused and insightful analysis of Napoleonic warfare. Our guest in this episode is Professor Antulio Echevarria, who, after serving in the US Army, turned to academia. He teaches at the US Army War College and has published widely on strategy.

Recently retired Major General Mick Ryan sits down with Beatrice and Paul for the Series 2 finale of Talking Strategy.

Mick is an experienced strategist, having worked at high levels in this capacity in the Australian and US militaries. During his career, he commanded at platoon, squadron, regiment, task force and brigade levels in the Australian Army. His last position was that of Commander of the Australian Defence College in Canberra.

A graduate of the Australian Defence Force School of Languages (language speciality: Bahasa Indonesia), Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, the USMC Command and Staff College and School of Advanced Warfighting, he is also a passionate advocate of professional education and lifelong learning.

Brigadier General Dr Hervé Pierre joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss the 20th century French strategist General André Beaufre, who defined strategy as ‘the art of applying force so that it makes the most effective contribution towards achieving the ends set by political policy’.

General Beaufre (1902–1975) said strategy is the ‘art of the dialectic of two opposing wills using force to resolve their dispute’. But for him, battle was not the only possible means of achieving one’s objective; ‘other methods may be more effective’.

He underscored changing the enemy’s mind as a key aim of strategy, and pointed to the indirect approach taken by insurgents the world over in their pursuit of this aim.

Beaufre’s originality lay in his fusion of selected insights of several other strategists, ranging from Clausewitz and Foch to Basil Liddell Hart, his friend and mentor.

Our guest, Brigadier General Dr Hervé Pierre, completed his doctorate on André Beaufre at the Sorbonne, with parts of it undertaken while he was deployment in Niger and Mali under Operation Barkhane.

Basil Liddell Hart (1895-1970) was described by President John F. Kennedy as the “captain who taught generals”. Dr Bradley Potter joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss Liddell Hart, captain of the First World War who took to writing about war with the aim of preventing a repetition of its great slaughter.

The tools of strategy explored by Liddell Hart ranged from city bombing, manoeuvre warfare to diplomatic means to deflect war or a transition to lasting peace. The 'lasting peace’ concept cost him dearly in terms of reputation as he was an appeaser of Hitler in the 1930s, but after the Second World War his reputation recovered. Liddell Hart was the father and grandfather of a particular family of strategic analysts, steeped in the study of history rather than ahistorical theories. His pupils include Brian Bond, Sir Michael Howard, the Australian Robert O’Neill and, arguably, General André Beaufre in France, who each in turn had their disciples to the legacy of the Liddell Hartian approach to strategic studies was passed. Second generation heirs included strategic analysts such as Sir Lawrence Freedman and Azar Gat.

This podcast introduces Dr Bradley Potter, Adjunct Lecturer at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.

In this festive special, Beatrice and Paul reflect on the lessons from their meanderings across the strategic landscape over the past 20 episodes of Talking Strategy.

What is very clear is that, ultimately, commanders must still be able to make sense of the complex environment they are facing – and not just a military one.

Military command remains a complex task, with huge responsibilities on individuals whose decisions are, quite literally, matters of life and death. Hence, it is important to consider what the theory means for practitioners (the stratège). In this episode, we consider how commanders are being taught to meet their responsibilities. Joining the conversation is Emilie Cleret, Director of the English Studies Department at École de Guerre, part of the École Militaire, where the French armed forces train future commanders. We learn about the transformative approach to officer education she has adopted, based on the theories of Jack Mezirow and his ideas of challenging meaning structures and creating disorienting dilemmas. It’s an approach which resonates with the complex demands that war places on those it engages.

Professor Matthew Strickland joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss Gerald of Wales, royal clerk and chaplain to King Henry II of England in 1184. In a time when the Norman rulers of the British Isles relied on clerics as civil servants, Gerald (c. 1146–1223), of mixed Welsh-Norman descent, furnished exceptional analytical surveys of Wales and Ireland.

From Gerald’s surveys, we get invaluable insights into how war was fought in these remote parts of Europe – ‘irregular’ compared with what was happening on the continent, making best use of terrain and of regular armies’ logistic problems.

Gerald of Wales, or Geraldus Cambrensis (Latin), had studied in Paris and travelled widely in Western Europe, which enabled him to observe and articulate what was particular about Wales and Ireland, including in warfare. His writings on the topography and peculiarities of both countries were presented to the Angevin kings. Professor Matthew Strickland runs the prestigious War Studies programme at the University of Glasgow. He specialises in European medieval warfare in the Age of Chivalry, and his publications include the seminal War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Dr Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss prominent futurist and founder of the Hudson Institute Herman Kahn.

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) came across to some as a ‘roly poly, second-strike Father Christmas’, but to most of his contemporaries in the US, his style and way of talking about nuclear strategy seemed deeply immoral.

Arguably, however, his intention was to think through what nuclear war would look like and to plan for the days and months after a strategic nuclear bombing. It was by thinking through these scenarios, he reasoned, that there may be the potential to save tens of millions of lives, even if tens of millions would die. By developing such resilience, therefore, Kahn's intention was to make deterrence more credible.

Shocking journalists and the public with his loose language, Kahn was a product of the RAND Corporation’s emphasis on number-crunching to envisage different scenarios for future wars. Kahn famously developed scenarios involving an escalation ladder for nuclear war on which the nuclear powers might move up or down, potentially but not necessarily to a final nuclear ‘wargasm’ – an example of language that alienated the larger public. Yet he took a great interest in converting existing facilities – mines in particular – into bunkers to protect as many members of that public as possible.

Dr Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her biography The Worlds of Herman Kahn was published by Harvard University Press in 2005.

Dr Élie Tenenbaum joins Beatrice and Paul to discuss two French strategists who focused strongly on the political and psychological warfare element of both insurgencies and counterinsurgency operations (COIN).

Roger Trinquier (1908–1986) and David Galula (1919–1967) had ample personal experience of insurgencies and COIN operations: both had served in French missions in China (Trinquier in the 1930s and Galula during the last phase of the Chinese Civil War).

They emphasised a comprehensive approach that would bring all tools to bear – ’an interlocking system of actions’ (Trinquier) from kinetic to propaganda, coupled with economic and social incentives targeted at the population. This ‘total’ and largely population-centric approach reflected the strong reverberations of the Algerian War in France, fought close to home with French conscripts over the future of the French settlers.

But as French attempts to reassert their colonial rule in Indochina and to keep Algeria were defeated bloodily and humiliatingly, COIN became a non-topic in France; Trinquier and Galula were all but forgotten in their country. Trinquier, in particular, became associated with the practice of ticking-bomb torture during the Algerian War, contrary to the laws of war. By contrast, the Pentagon took a great interest in their ideas as US involvement in the conflicts of Southeast Asia gathered speed. Today, their writing is thus linked with the Vietnam War, where in particular some of their psychological warfare prescriptions were applied.

Dr Élie Tenenbaum is the Director of the French Institute for International Relations’ (IFRI) Security Studies Centre. He is a graduate of Sciences Po and was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University. His latest book, co-authored with Marc Hecker, is on jihadism and counterterrorism in the 21st century.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) had a rocky career, with great ups when he had influential administrative positions in his city and great downs when he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. He published his Art of War to great acclaim, yet he had to publish his The Prince under a pseudonym. In this episode, we concentrate on his Art of War and on the republican values which this work elaborates, with its emphasis on citizens’ responsibility for their republic’s defence.

Known as ‘Old Nick’, Machiavelli has long been seen as a thoroughly amoral if not immoral political writer for whom any ruse or action was acceptable in the quest for power and for its maintenance. Our guest Professor Maurizio Viroli takes a different line altogether: he stresses the moral virtue and the goodness of Machiavelli’s approach which, in the context of war, underscores the need to fight in the interest of the polity, the republic and the political community. Machiavelli used arguments of utility to make moral actions more palatable. But, Viroli argues, Machiavelli’s strategic advice followed the tenet that if you love peace, you must know how to wage war.

Maurizio Viroli is Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University, Professor of Government at the University of Texas (Austin) and Professor of Political Communication at the University of Italian Switzerland (Lugano). He has been a political advisor to successive Italian governments and has published leading books on Jean Jacques Rousseau and, of course, Machiavelli.

Aleksandr Andreevich Svechin was an ethnic Russian born in Odessa in 1878. He became an officer of the imperial Russian army and then of the Red Army, where he rose to the rank of general and wrote a definitive manual on strategy.

A ‘Clausewitzian’ in approach, stressing the uniqueness of each war and rejecting one-size-fits-all principles, Svechin advocated the defence in depth of the young USSR. This idea was abhorrent to Stalin who, in the 1930s, dismantled the homeland defence structures in favour of an offensive posture for the Red Army, which in turn directly contributed to the catastrophic effects of the German surprise attack of 1941. But by then Svechin was long dead, executed on Stalin’s personal orders in 1938 during the Great Purge.

Like Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, Svechin was sceptical about theories and very much agreed with Clausewitz that what strategic studies can do is reflexive: ‘Theory is capable of benefitting only those who have raised themselves above the fray and have become completely dispassionate... A narrow doctrine would probably confuse us more than guide us.’ His reading of ‘bourgeois’ authors was held against him as the USSR entered into a phase of great intolerance under Stalin, culminating in the Great Purge. Svechin’s good name was restored under Gorbachev, and he was even praised in 2013 by Russian General Staff Chief Army General Valery Gerasimov.

Professor Gudrun Persson joins Paul and Beatrice for this week’s episode. She is deputy research director at the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and associate professor at the Department of Slavic Studies, Stockholm University. She holds a PhD from LSE and has published widely on Russian affairs, including Learning from Foreign Wars: Russian Military Thinking 1859–73 (Helion, 2013), and is working on a further book on Russian strategic thought.

Professor Malik Mufti, a specialist on the politics and international relations of the Middle East, discusses two medieval Muslim works of exemplary scholarship and erudition.

Like many other Muslim works of the Middle Ages, the two works were greatly influenced by Greek and Roman literature that had become available in translation or, to very educated scholars, in the original texts.

Both the anonymous mid-9th century manual on war and the works of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) show an aversion to simplistic principles devised for the conduct of war and emphasise the need to tailor responses to each conflict with its own configuration. Ibn Khaldun especially emphasises the need to factor in contingency and unpredictable events, and that, by using their own discernment and reason, the commander must seek to make the best of each situation.

Thus, it is not surprising that both authors have no time for any notion of fate or kismet, but focus instead on the commander’s skills and talents, and on the ability of humans to influence events in the interest of protecting and extending a virtuous Islamic Empire – a tolerant republic modelled on ancient Persia in which multiple civilisations could thrive.

Professor Malik Mufti completed a PhD at Harvard and teaches at Tufts University in the US. He is the author of Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and Political Order in Syria and Iraq (1996), Daring and Caution in Turkish Strategic Culture (2009), and The Art of Jihad: Realism in Islamic Political Thought (2019).

Following World War I, air power promised a revolutionary transformation of war, and Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930) was its first prophet.

After the carnage of the First World War, strategists throughout Europe sought to devise new strategies and technologies that would prevent a repetition of the drawn-out trench warfare on the Western Front. Air power would be harnessed to this aim, and Douhet opined that “the purpose of an Independent air force is to inflict upon the enemy the greatest possible damage in the shortest possible time.” Only that this time the victims of such air attacks would be mainly civilians, but Douhet – and for that matter, JFC Fuller, Liddell Hart and others – expected such a war to be much shorter. They would be horribly mistaken, as the subsequent world war proved.

Colonel Dr Stephen Renner, who holds the Chair of the Strategy Department of the US Air War College in Maxwell, Alabama joins Beatrice and Paul for this episode. He . A student of Sir Hew Strachan’s, he holds his DPhil from the University of Oxford. His career has encompassed being a pilot in the US Air Force and commanding a fighter wing.

Writing when the USA was becoming a great power, strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) drew on historical precedent in his talks and books to prepare America to pick up the baton from the United Kingdom.

Unashamedly imperialist, Mahan wrote in his The Impact of Sea Power on History, ‘Naval strategy has for its end to found, support, and increase, as well in peace and in war, the sea power of a country.’ Yet as he pondered the instruments and their ways of application, blending geopolitical, economic and cultural considerations in his analysis, Mahan’s thinking was much more nuanced than many of his fans realised. Although naval battle was prominent, it was not the only tool of strategy in Mahan’s toolbox.

Col. Dr Benjamin Armstrong, Permanent Military Professor at the United States Naval Academy, joins Paul and Beatrice to discuss Mahan and how naval leaders and educators the world over – including RUSI which awarded him its highest prize, the Chesney Gold Medal - fell under his spell, albeit in a caricatured rendering dictating the pre-eminence of the navy over the army, and with an undue fixation on naval battle.

Col. Dr Armstrong’s publications include Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), and has edited a work on Innovation, Education, and Leadership for the Modern Era (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2015). He has received several awards for his publications.

In the first instalment of the new season of Talking Strategy, Paul and Beatrice are joined by Dr Peter Lorge, Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University.

The enigmatic Chinese text that took its definitive form in the third century BC was not discovered in Europe until shortly before the French Revolution and, significantly, by a French missionary. The document’s thoughts on strategy – such as the ideal of winning without giving battle – diverged strongly from those of the battle-obsessed West. Barely remembered for centuries, Sun Tzu’s ideas went through a staggering renaissance in the 20th century, inspiring Mao Zedong and strongly impacting Western thinkers who were struggling to come to terms with the Chinese Communist insurgency’s triumph in China and the US defeat in Vietnam.

Sun Tzu’s approach is that of a rationalisation and planning of warfare. His text advocates evaluating a conflict ahead of time, supposing that one can know its dimensions with reasonable accuracy, and largely excluding contingency. Famously, it says that one should know oneself and one’s enemy, by implication also foreseeing the outcome of all military exchanges. The text thus falls into the category of those, like Christine de Pizan’s and Machiavelli’s works, that argue in favour of prudent planning in the belief that this can minimise risk and uncertainty.

Dr Peter Lorge is an Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The Beginner’s Guide to Imperial China (2021), and perhaps most famously The Asian Military Revolution: from Gunpowder to the Bomb (CUP 2008). Dr Lorge has two forthcoming books: Documents From Early Chinese History, a sourcebook for premodern Chinese history written with Scott Pearce, and Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War, which explores both the writings of Sun Tzu and the impact they have had on Western thinking, especially in the last half-century.

Strategy is an intensely practical consideration, and in this episode, we examine strategy from the perspective of a practitioner. Lord Peter Ricketts was the UK’s first National Security Adviser and joins us to share his experience of strategy-making at the highest levels of government.

Lord Ricketts reflects on the difference between crafting a strategic concept for a state or alliance and drawing up a strategy for a conflict or for the management of a major crisis, such as the coronavirus pandemic. His experience in government includes chairing the Joint Intelligence Committee, directing the formulation of the 2010 UK National Security Strategy, as well as holding top diplomatic posts including that of Permanent UK Representative to NATO and the EU, and Ambassador in Paris.

Building on his book Hard Choices: What Britain Does Next (Atlantic Books: May 2022), Lord Ricketts explains the strategy-making process, both in the context of particular conflicts – he was involved in government decisions to intervene in Kosovo, Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, and mainly not to intervene in Syria – and in drawing up a wide-ranging National Security Strategy requiring an inter-ministerial approach. This inside perspective and explanation of processes and obstacles is an invaluable guide for practitioners and students of public policy alike.

Thomas Schelling brought a cross-disciplinary approach to nuclear strategy and the understanding of conflict. Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, joins us to discuss Schelling’s pioneering work and reluctance to be seen as a game theorist.

Thomas Schelling (1921–2016), was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for ‘having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis’. Despite a reluctance to be seen as a game theorist and a distrust of pure mathematical modelling, he brought to the analysis of strategy concepts borrowed from economics, a discipline that had not previously played a role in military strategy-making.

In the 1950s and 1960s, a revolution took place in the US strategic community: in the wake of the Second World War, systems analysis and operational research on the strategic bombing effort, civilians gained influence on defence policymaking. This was particularly true for nuclear strategy and international crisis management, on which Schelling focused his attention in the 1960s. Earlier, he had worked on the US Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe, while later he would take a great interest in arms control.

An advisor to successive UK governments, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman was only in his early 30s when he published his Evolution of Strategy in 1981, and he was subsequently appointed Head of the then small Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Under Sir Lawrence’s leadership, the Department of War Studies grew to become a centre of excellence of worldwide renown that would educate future military leaders, civil servants, journalists and interested generalists from all parts of the globe.

We’re joined by Emeritus Professor Françoise Le Saux to discuss the unique work of Christine de Pizan. An Italian by origin, de Pizan was charged with writing manuals on good governance and the conduct of war for the medieval French crown prince who became Charles VI. Her main concern in a time of civil and foreign wars was to reduce civilian suffering, and to make the decision to go to war truly a last resort.

Exceedingly well-read, building on the writings of Aristotle, Vegetius and the French cleric Honoré Bovet, de Pizan created benchmarks for good governance in peace and conflict. Unusually for her time, she saw insurgencies as functions of poor governance and provided advice on how to govern wisely and justly. She promoted conflict mediation by bringing together princes and experts to listen to disputing parties and identify possible resolutions short of war. If war was nevertheless required, she reiterated rules to prevent the conflict from degenerating into unnecessary destruction.

The only known female strategic theorist from the time, and highly regarded by the Dukes of Burgundy Philip the Bold and John the Fearless, she was something like the French Courts, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, and the Institute for Public Policy Research all rolled into one.

Professor Françoise Le Saux, our expert consultant on de Pizan, was formerly Professor of French at the University of Reading. She has worked extensively on issues of translation and cultural adaptation in the Middle Ages.

Dr Jeannie Johnson, Director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University, joins us to discuss the legacy of Colin S Gray. Most notable for originating Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’ through his tetrarchy of enquiry, Gray’s thinking on strategic culture remains influential today.

With a career and influence straddling the Atlantic, and as an adviser to successive US administrations, Colin S Gray was a favourite in military academies. His approach went beyond theory and into practice, enabling him to challenge much of the abstract International Relations (IR) theory and to ground thinking and strategy in hard reality. One of Gray’s key contributions to strategic thought was his enquiry into strategic culture. He cautioned against the assumptions underlying game theory and many other IR theories that claim that the enemy necessarily thinks like us. Instead, he would ask, ‘what is the organisational culture engendering, what are the habits and patterns of thinking that we need to factor in when forecasting the enemy’s moves, and how will the enemy react to our moves in a crisis?’ In most contexts of crisis intervention, our resources are limited, so this response, he emphasised, could not be perfect. What, then, would be ‘good enough’?

That having a particular strategic culture is not an attribute only of the adversary has been demonstrated by Gray’s disciple Dr Jeannie Johnson, who will discuss his legacy with us. Herself a specialist on the US Marine Corps’ (and wider US) strategic culture, she is the founding Director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University, and conducts research on cultural terrain mapping for the public sector.

Where do Russian military strategists seek their inspiration now that the Soviet authorities are no longer in fashion? In this episode, we will discuss Genrikh Leer and Evgeny Messner, key authors who have now been rediscovered by Russian military strategists.

Most of the Russian strategists of the 19th and 20th centuries fell into the ‘Realist’ school of thinking about the world: they saw it as an anarchic system, in which might is right, and where the cost of defeat is devastation. The imperial Russian General of the Infantry Genrikh Antonovich Leer and the Colonel of the Imperial Army and later émigré Evgeny Eduardovich Messner are good examples of the holistic view that to some extent distinguished – and still distinguishes – Russian thinking from the more compartmentalising approach in the West.

Dr Ofer Fridman, now a lecturer at King’s College London, came to academia after an active career in the army . His book on what the Russians mean by hybrid war is today the authoritative work on the subject. Of most interest for us today are the excerpts from the works of key Russian imperial and émigré strategists that he has edited in English, called Strategiya.

There is more to military strategist John Boyd than the OODA Loop! This analytical tool of identifying a decision-making cycle – starting with observation, moving on to orientation, then to decision, then to action, to return to observation of what has been achieved by action and what now has to be done – has been exported to many realms of social activity, from the military to grand strategy, industry and economic competition.

We are joined by Professor Frans Osinga, originally a fighter pilot, who is an Air Commodore in the Royal Netherlands Air Force and Professor of Military Operational Sciences at the Netherlands Defence Academy, as well as Professor of War Studies at Leiden University. Osinga has written the authoritative biography of John Boyd, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, which has sold 15,000 copies since its publication in 2007.

Professor Osinga explains how Boyd took a view of war as a battle between two complex systems in which one side seeks to isolate the other and deny their ability to react. At a tactical level, this gives rise to the OODA loop – for which Boyd is most known – that allowed pilots to think about how to get into the decision-making loop of a hostile pilot with whom one was engaged in a dogfight.

But it also translates into an approach in many other domains on how to outsmart an adversary, by manipulating the opponent’s organisational cohesion, the state, the trust between the state and its population, and the cohesion between units prior to actually starting the kinetic parts of war.

Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz created a new way of thinking about war in the West: a study of the phenomenon and its complex social nature, where previous authors had produced prescriptive manuals or homed in on ethics or the laws of war. Thus, Clausewitz is challenging to engage with and richer and rewarding in the insights he provides.

Clausewitz can be considered the father of Strategic Studies as a discipline. Occasionally, somebody comes along and pronounces Clausewitz obsolete – to the tremendous relief of students who think that obviates reading the big fat book he left us - On War. But those who have done so have read him narrowly or to have been proved wrong by subsequent evolutions of warfare. The good news for students is that, ironically, On War is easier to read in the modern English translation than in its original obsolescent German, although scholars will argue endlessly over nuance of meaning.

Clausewitz’s approach has brought him loyal and prominent followers such as Bernard Brodie and Colin S. Gray in the US, Corbett and Sir Michael Howard in the UK, Svechin in Russia, and Mao in China. In this episode, Beatrice Heuser discusses Clausewitz and his intellectual legacy with Paul O’Neill, Director, Military Sciences, RUSI, homing in on the long-term legacy of this most famous of the “dead Prussians”.

For 3000 years, China’s overall strategy was to defend against invaders from the West and the North, but to turn its back on the Pacific. In the early 1990s, Admiral Liu Huaqing changed this almost overnight. In this episode of Talking Strategy, Professor Christopher Yung will tell us how this has revolutionized China’s grand strategy, and what this new naval orientation means for the rest of the world.

America’s performance in the Iraq War of 1991, unchecked by the imploding Soviet Union, led to a profound reassessment in Beijing of China’s strategic interests and position in the world. The Chief of China’s Naval Staff, Admiral Liu Huaqing, advocated a complete turnaround in China’s military posture to take on the world’s only superpower, with a long-term naval armament programme. The progressive realization of a new grand strategy is planned in three steps, involving the assertion of China’s predominance over the three island chains in the Pacific, progressively rolling back the position the US has established here since the mid-19th century.

Paul O’Neill and Beatrice Heuser are joined in this episode of Talking Strategy by Christopher Yung who holds the Donald Bren Chair of Non-Western Strategic Thought and is the Director of East Asian Studies at Marine Corps University and author of several books and articles on the expansion of China’s navy and its expansionist naval strategy.

In this episode, we discuss the reign of Leo VI (the Wise), Byzantine emperor and strategist (r. 866–912), with Dr Georgios Chatzelis from the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (CAS).Leo VI predates the 18th century flourishing of Western thinking about strategy by almost 900 years – although it is the translation of the Greek word strategía in his treatise (confusingly called The Tactic) that became the word ‘strategy’ in modern Western languages. Occupying a unique position between East and West, Leo VI’s empire was shaped by its Roman heritage and the Arab threats it faced. Leo differentiated between tactics, which were about conduct on the battlefield, and strategy, which was about how other skills required of a commander could be combined for defence.

Emperor Leo’s book was regarded by Byzantine generals as a sort of law of war. It places war within a political context, describes how wars should be fought – including matters of ethics – and comments on the way the Byzantine Empire’s enemies fought, seeking to ensure that his commanders kept the moral high ground. Therefore, and despite the passing of more than a millennium, Leo’s contribution and understanding of strategy remain recognisable to a modern audience.

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars profoundly affected all of Europe and became watersheds in the history of strategy. Until then, French thinking on war had dominated European discourse for a good two centuries, even though the word ‘strategy’ had not yet been imported into European languages from the Greek. Crucial among the French thinkers of this period was Comte de Guibert (1743–1790), who has been called the prophet of the wars of the French Revolution, foreseeing the transformation of war into the people’s cause, rather than merely that of their monarchs.

In a republican spirit, Guibert dedicated his first work, the General Essay on Tactics, ‘to my fatherland’ – reason enough to publish it anonymously, even though he noted that the king was part of his fatherland! Guibert – like Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz – changed some of his fundamental views during his lifetime. In his youth, Guibert wrote what would become a bestseller throughout the Western world, in which he made the case for an army of citizen-soldiers who would be unbeatable. However, after fighting in the French conquest of Corsica and then serving in the French War Ministry, he decided that overseas campaigns required a professional army. The arguments he put forward still stand up to scrutiny today.

To discuss Guibert and his works, we are joined by Dr Jonathan Abel, Assistant Professor of Military History, US Army Command and General Staff College, the author of Guibert: Father of Napoleon’s Grande Armée (2016) and translator of Guibert’s General Essay on Tactics (2021).

At the turn of the 20th century, Imperial Germany was a dominant force in thinking about military strategy with a focus on land warfare commensurate with its geography. Prussian strategists agreed with most of their French colleagues that war would involve mass armies, and that their strategy had to be offensive.

Three Prussian strategists of land warfare were particularly influential in shaping the thinking that guided the Imperial German Army’s conduct in the First World War: Colmar von der Goltz, Alfred von Schlieffen and Friedrich von Bernhardi. Controversial in different ways and rivals with one another, they nevertheless exerted a strong influence on the conduct of land warfare, and on thinking about harnessing society in total war in which anything was permitted (the primordial violence and hatred in Clausewitz’s terms).

In this episode of Talking Strategy, Professor Stig Förster from the University of Bern joins hosts Professor Beatrice Heuser and Paul O'Neill. Professor Förster discusses the controversies surrounding the German strategists, the horrors spawned by the ideas of von der Goltz and Bernhardi, and how war does not work to the timetable envisaged by von Schlieffen in his ‘Schlieffen Plan’, which set out how Imperial Germany would fight in the First World War.

Sir Julian Corbett was at the heart of strategy debates before, during and immediately after the First World War. Educator of the British Royal Navy, he was strongly influenced by Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz, but adapted Clausewitz’s theories to include the naval dimension that was missing in most Prussian writings. In his theories of 'maritime strategy', which were inherently ‘joint’, he combined the traditional Prussian emphasis on land warfare with his own naval concepts and thinking about economic warfare.

In the first episode of this new series of podcasts, Professor Andrew Lambert joins hosts Professor Beatrice Heuser and Paul O'Neill. Andrew sees in Corbett the defender of a distinct British role in the world, advocating a 'British Way of War' detached from the European continent, privileging war at sea over war on land. Can this be reconciled with Corbett's famous dictum that ‘since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided – except in the rarest cases – either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do’?