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.