Talking Strategy

NATO’s first Secretary General, Hastings Ismay, profoundly shaped today’s Alliance. Join us to discuss his legacy with his latest biographer, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely.

Hastings (Pug) Ismay was a general who never commanded beyond lieutenant colonel, rising through the ranks as a staff officer. This brought him into contact with politicians, like Churchill, and senior military commanders such as General Eisenhower, with whom he formed an enduring friendship. After retirement from the Army, Ismay briefly became a minister before serving as NATO Secretary General, 1952-1957.

His time in office saw many challenges - the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Suez, the Cyprus Crisis of 1963-64 and the death of Stalin. Steering NATO through these crises required judgement, patience and humility. His legacy is that of NATO with a strong central headquarters connecting its political and military dimensions, and organisation with a global security perspective and a Secretary General who remains the servant of the Alliance.

Our guest this episode, Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely , served in the British Army for 40 years, including in the 1982 Falklands War for which he was awarded the Military Cross, in Bosnia and Iraq. His book ‘Anatomy of a Campaign: The British Fiasco in Norway 1940’ won RUSI’s inaugural Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History. His latest book, ‘General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay: Soldier, Statesman, Diplomat’ was published in 2024.

To conclude Season Four of Talking Strategy, we talk to long-serving diplomat, policy adviser and politician The Rt Hon Baroness Neville-Jones.

With intimate experience of the functioning of governments and the EU, Lady Neville-Jones compares the respective organisational cultures and human side of strategy, drawing on lessons from her career.

Pauline Neville-Jones joined the British diplomatic service in 1963. She was posted in places as varied as Rhodesia, Singapore, Bonn, Washington and the European Commission. From the 1990s onwards her postings were specifically concerned with defence matters. She was head of the Defence and Overseas Secretariat of the Cabinet Office from 1991 to 1994, and during that time she also chaired the Joint Intelligence Committee. Subsequently, she was Political Director of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office until 1996, and in that capacity negotiated the 1995 Dayton Agreement on Bosnia on behalf of the UK.

In the final episode of this season, Lady Neville-Jones reflects on the success of the Dayton Agreement: was it ‘good enough’? Was anything better in the offing? And on relations with Russia: did the West ‘lose’ Moscow in the 1990s? Tune in to hear her advice to practitioners.

Moshe Dayan (1915-1981) is a controversial figure in Israeli politics. Revered by some as a master strategist, he is criticised by others for his failure to foresee Egypt’s attack in 1973, and then for ‘giving up’ the Sinai in return for a peace treaty.

Strategy-making can take two approaches. The first, ‘Deliberate Strategy’, is formulated and implemented hierarchically and centrally; decisions are taken by the head of the organisation, and detailed plans and instructions are issued to those responsible for implementation. The alternative model, ‘Emergent Strategy’, is characterised by its flexibility on ends as well as ways and means.

This week’s guest, Professor Eitan Shamir, is the Director of the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies of Bar Ilan University, argues that Moshe Dayan was a strategist who took the second approach. Professor Shamir is the author of a new biography entitled “Moshe Dayan: The Making of a Strategist” (2023, in Hebrew, and due to be published in English in 2024 by Cambridge University Press) and, with Beatrice, edited Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies: National Styles and Strategic Cultures (CUP, 2017).

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur Tedder was General Eisenhower’s Deputy as Supreme Commander for Operation Overlord during the Second World War. A quiet and thoughtful leader, Tedder understood the difference between war and warfare and carefully orchestrated his campaigns – including the transportation plan concerning D-Day – in an alliance context to great effect.

Tedder’s strategic leadership can be characterised as understated and thoughtful, underpinned by his ability to manage relationships with allies and experts to get the most from each. He also understood the importance of waging war economically in a way that exploited logistics capacity as a critical enabler for his own forces and as a means of weakening his enemies. Despite the Allied victory, after the Second World War he recognised the weaknesses that loomed.

This week’s guest, Air Marshal Edward Stringer, was the air component commander for NATO's operation in Libya in 2011, the Director of Operations in the UK Ministry of Defence and the UK liaison officer to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. In his last role, he was Director General Joint Force Development. Since retirement, he has become an expert commentator and writer on defence, defence strategy and air power.

Qasim Soleimani was arguably Iran’s most important military leader in modern history. He moved Iran’s overall strategy from a direct approach to an indirect one of proxy warfare using non-state actors.

Born in 1957, General Soleimani rose from a humble background to become a key commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His experience of the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–88 gave him a desire to avoid another high-casualty conflict. Instead, he developed a proxy war approach that was much less costly to Iran, using Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and later Hamas to put pressure on Israel and the US. Soleimani was killed in a targeted strike by US forces in January 2020, which made him a martyr in Iran.

Dr Afshon Ostovar, Associate Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval Postgraduate School, joins Beatrice and Paul for this episode.

A graduate of the Universities of Arizona and Michigan, he was a Fellow at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, worked for the US Department of Defense, and taught at Johns Hopkins University. His book on the Revolutionary Guards examines the rise of Iran’s most powerful armed force and its role in regional conflicts and political violence.

José de San Martín gained his military experience serving Spain and fighting the French, sometimes with the British,meeting Wellington, Beresford, and Napoleon. Having served for 22 years in the Spanish Army, Jose de San Martin brilliantly led the armies that overthrew the Spanish to liberate the southern countries of South America.

With naval experience, in coordination with former British naval officer Thomas, Lord Cochrane, he worked out how maritime and land forces could support each other, catching the Spanish colonial forces between simulated naval attacks on the one hand and land attacks on the other, forcing them to divide their forces. With technology no different from that available to Hannibal, San Martín crossed the Andes, a mountain range far higher than the Alps (admittedly with horses and mules, not elephants!).

Joining us to talk about this national hero of Argentina, Chile and Peru is Lt Gen Diego Luis Suñer, Chief of the Argentine Army from 2016-2018.

General Suñer joined the Army in 1979 and retired after 40 years' service in which he commanded multinational troops in Ecuador and Peru, attended the United States Army Command and Staff Course and was a professor at the Argentine Army’s Higher School of War.

The relationship between Winston Churchill and his leading military advisor, the abrasive General ‘Shrapnel’ Alan Brooke (1883–1963), was one of the most productive yet tensest in the history of civil-military relations. This episode delves into some of their strategic debates.

Viscount Alanbrooke’s relationship with Churchill was famously rocky, yet the two leaders trusted one another. It was due to Brooke’s influence that the Americans were persuaded to drop their plan to liberate Italy by starting off with a campaign to take Sardinia and to go for Sicily instead, and he also talked Churchill into dropping plans for an operation in Indonesia.

The guest for this episode is Dr Andrew Sangster, an historian and Anglican priest and the author of 17 books, including an acclaimed biography of Alanbrooke. His next book, From Plato to Putin, discusses the causes and ethical dilemmas of war.

Generals Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee commanded the opposing armies in the American Civil War, each the greatest military leader of their own side. Products of the Academy at West Point, they were both expert tacticians and, most importantly, understood their sides’ strategic goals, limitations and opportunities, and led them accordingly. But Grant only really took charge in 1863, two years into the war. Had one of his predecessors still been in command, might the South have won? Join us to find out whether it might have, and why it did not.

Joining Beatrice and Paul for this episode is Dr Christian Keller, Professor of History and Director of the Military History Programme of the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College. Dr Keller is the award-winning author of The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy, and is also the host of The Civil War Strategy Podcast. In 2017 he was named the General Dwight D Eisenhower Chair of National Security.

Air Chief Marshal Lord Peach, the former Chair of NATO’s Military Committee and architect of NATO’s first new military strategy in 50 years, joins us to discuss the process of strategy-making in an Alliance context.

Lord Peach is the UK’s most experienced officer, having served in key 4-star appointments, including as the UK’s Chief of the Defence Staff (2016–18) and as the 32nd Chair of the NATO Military Committee (2018–21). He led the NATO military staffs through the creation of NATO’s new Military Strategy and the family of plans that sit beneath it. He is now the UK’s Special Envoy to the Balkans.

In conversation, he offers insights into the challenges and strengths of Alliance strategy-making in NATO. In his view, while NATO requires unanimity for the adoption of any new decision, this is not only possible, but vital. It is a strength rather than the weakness some, less familiar with the organisation, perceive it to be. However, once unanimously adopted, a strategy must cope with ambiguity and evolve before it is adapted to ever-changing, and inevitably ambiguous, circumstances.

Admiral Sergey Georgyevich Gorshkov (1910–1988) was a celebrated hero of the so-called Great Fatherland War (1941–1945). He was Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy from 1956 until 1985, which he built up to be a navy fit for a superpower with global ambitions. He also furnished the navy’s theoretical strategic underpinnings through a series of publications which were studied closely by friends and foes alike.

The navy that Gorshkov inherited was significantly smaller than that of the USSR’s main competitor, the US. Gorshkov turned this navy into a strong defensive force that could keep US nuclear submarines at bay. But he also wanted his navy to project Soviet power globally.

In this episode, Beatrice and Paul and joined by Captain (ret.) Dr Kevin Rowlands, Head of the Royal Navy’s Strategic Studies Centre. Captain Rowlands spent 30 years in the Royal Navy, both at sea and in positions such as Secretary to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and was the Course Director for the UK’s Advanced Command and Staff Course.