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).