Talking 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 th...

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 thei...

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 di...

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 indi...

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...

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 wha...

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 1930...

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...

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....

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 ano...

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, a...

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...

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...

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 drawi...

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...

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...

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 a...

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 a...

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, ind...

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...

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...

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 becam...

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 (1743–179...

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 t...

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...