Transcript:

Discussion portion of event

American University’s Center for Security, Innovation, and New Technology and the Hudson Institute co-hosted a dialogues between Distinguished Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin, Hudson Asia-Pacific Security Chair Dr. Patrick M. Cronin and distinguished military historian Professor Sir Hew Strachan on 31 August 2022. Strachan discussed the causes and consequences of war against the backdrop of recent conflicts, the broader sweep of European experience, and the foundations of Western military strategic thinking. The “post-9/11 wars” should prompt Western military thought to reconsider Carl von Clausewitz’s presumption that war is the continuation of policy by other means. Characterized by early operational successes that promised quick victories, interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya gave way to protracted conflict, leading to unsatisfactory outcomes at best and outright defeat at worst. These wars demand a more critical examination of the links between the causes and consequences of war. The interventions should also challenge current strategic thought, which aligns ends, ways, and means in a continuum that rarely applies in practice. War’s place in international relations theory has too often been characterized by unfounded expectations of an ideal rarely achieved in practice than by realism founded on actual experience.

A video of the event is available HERE. 

Disclaimer: Transcript has been edited for clarity.

Patrick Cronin:

Well Hew, thank you so much. The breadth of your remarks, the depth of your scholarship are always edifying and a treat for us. This is a bit of a hybrid conversation. Half lecture and then conversation. Sort of like hybrid war. We’ve sort of sneaked in a lecture here. But we’re richer for it, Hew. I want to turn to Audrey to ask the first question.

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

It’s an honor. Hew, I was thinking when you talked about “wars of unification,” that’s exactly the phrase that Putin uses. So looking at it-

Patrick Cronin:

[interjects] Good point.

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

From the other side-

Sir Hew Strachan:

[interjects] Sure, yep.

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

I’m not endorsing it, but-

Sir Hew Strachan:

[interjects] No, no, no, no.

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

I wanted to ask you something that’s very American and civil-military relations oriented. You know I spent many years teaching at the National War College. I’m going to go into territory that I tread on very tentatively, because it’s yours. I’m sure you’ll find things that are wrong in my interpretation. But as you know, Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is a continuation of…” and the next German word is “politik”. You’re mainly using the word “policy” there, although you do refer to politics elsewhere in your remarks. Whereas I think it’s also fair to say that the phrase translated into English could be, “War is a continuation of politics.”
One of the reasons why Clausewitz is so popular in the United States courses is that Michael Howard and Peter Paret published their English translation of On War with the word “policy” in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The Army, and other services as well, were very disappointed and angry about having lost that war, and they felt the loss of the war was the result of civilian leadership and bad policy. So that translation very well suited them.

I honestly don’t think that the United States would have begun teaching Clausewitz in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, in the way that it does now, had it not been for the arrival of that brilliant translation in 1976, in the midst of all that.

So that is background to what I really wanted to ask you about: In the aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think we’re in a similar period now in the United States. Yet I think using the word “politics” may better suit Clausewitz’s book one, chapter one argument about the important role of the passions of the people. The word policy kind of leaves that out of it, doesn’t it?

So my question is, putting aside the war in Iraq, where I completely agree with you about the lack of a clear policy. With the war in Afghanistan, I’d argue that it was not a war of “policy” at all. It was a war of politics from the beginning, and that war was brutally forced upon the United States. There was no linear development of policy in 2001, nor could there be.

There was a broad renaming of it, as we went forward, as a “Global War on Terror” (against the opposition of people like me, frankly); but the passions of the American people drove the war in Afghanistan. Then politics drove mission creep, which changed the military objective from eliminating al-Qaeda, which is what it should have been, to again regime change and democratization.

So my question is, how does your argument fit particularly the U.S. role in the war in Afghanistan?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Well, I take the point absolutely about the importance of the need to come back to indeed the problems of the Howard and Paret translation. Michael Howard was always an enthusiast in defense of the use of the word policy. I think you probably heard him make this argument at Oxford, as he commonly did and where this precisely arose. I’ve been thinking about it and writing about it again recently, and with Michael’s death, it has become easier to do these things.

It is clear that he and Peter Paret wanted “politik” translated as “policy.” That’s very odd, particularly for Peter Paret, because he absolutely understood how important the passion side of war was to Clausewitz. How much Clausewitz hated the French. How this was a war in which people would have to be mobilized, in which there would need to be public participation, and he—not least thanks to the noted recent biography of Marie von Brühl, of Clausewitz’s wife, which brings out just how much she was central to the debates during his life about politics—he was very political. He was bound to be an important character politically.

When you actually swap sides and fight for the other side, as Clausewitz did in 1812 against the Prussians, then you realize just how insubordinate a colonel can behave. Imagine that happening in the U.S. context now!
So how does that work out in relation to governments? Well, I think it’s not just how you portray Afghanistan—sorry, how you portray the American response to Afghanistan. It’s how you portray Afghanistan itself, because the politics within Afghanistan (if you read Carter Malkasian’s book for example) were absolutely rife with tribal loyalties, all the competition within the government. All that Afghan politics is likewise essential to the outcome of the war.

The last time I went to Afghanistan was in 2016. I stayed one week with the British Army, most of the time with the Second Gurkhas. And the second week I stayed with Afghans. One evening, my Afghan host came in and said, “Hew, Hew, there’s been a coup.” I said, “Funny, because I don’t think there’s been a coup.” He said, “No, but it feels like that every day.” What he was talking about was the tension between [Ashraf] Ghani and [Abdullah] Abdullah, which just tore that government apart. And at that stage, I thought we were going to fail in Afghanistan, not because of the Taliban, but because of the ruptures within the Afghan government.

It’s not about corruption and all the charges that were leveled against Ghani. It was simply the division in the government itself; and of course the problem there was that the U.S. had itself acted politically, ultimately politically, in supporting Ghani as its choice for president, over Abdullah, just as it had supported Karzai. So it’s not just the politics of the U.S. that played out there. It’s the politics of Afghanistan and the reciprocal effects of those two things, that were going both ways.

So is the implication of the question, Audrey, that if we had translated, or if Michael Howard and Peter Paret had translated politik as politics more often (they certainly got the context right when Clausewitz might be thinking about politics, which he undoubtedly was from time to time, though when he is thinking very specifically about politics, as he is in some of his histories, then he does use a different word; he talks essentially about politics and the pathway to politics), then if we had been more open about that [i.e., the key role of politics], then the United States’ use of force would have been different?

When we talk about proper reactions to 9/11, absolutely it was imperative to do something. You could not have done nothing about the 9/11 attacks, I entirely accept that. The question is thinking through what you do do in a coherent and logical way and recognizing the consequences. And if you have that groundswell of popular support for military action, which is what we are now confronting certainly in many European states with respect to the war in Ukraine (or has been there in the course of this year), the popular passions are running ahead perhaps of a sense of political reality and reason.

On the other hand, policies have political effects. So, are the people really the holders of policy? Are they in some ways closer to what in the Clausewitzian trinity terms turns into the dominant position? So and how far from the government, except in theory, [can the people] remain distinct from that, when you have a crisis to which a democratic society is going to have to respond? That policy/politics distinction is easier for someone like Clausewitz to retain because he is still thinking of a pre-modern-day strategy. But we have a modern-day strategy. So how do we actually indicate it there?

Patrick Cronin:

It’s a great question, Audrey and there’s a great backstory here with Colonel Colin Powell at the War College and my former boss, my first boss out of Oxford, John Collins. I was reading Clausewitz for him and condensing it and doing everything wrong. Sorry about that, Hew. I have to apologize to you right now.

Sir Hew Strachan:

You were in good company at the time. Everybody was doing it, including me.

Patrick Cronin:

At least I was trying to make sense of it.

I want to come back to the causes of war now. Disconnected from Clausewitz, for which you rightly say, it was more about the conduct of war, not the causes of war. Yes, disconnected from even the consequences, in terms of policy.
But let’s think about the thousands of books written about World War I and its origins—of which yours are the best, of course. Yet there’s still no agreement on the causes of World War I and here is something that has been exhaustively examined. I want to make the distinction of course, that Clausewitz does between the unchanging nature of war—and maybe we can’t go beyond Thucydides in terms of fear, honor and interest—and the changing and variable character of individual wars.

But with the causes of World War I, do we start in the 1870s, with the creation of the German state? Or do we start with Sarajevo and the assassinations? The reason I want to ask that question is, in part, to go back to Ukraine. Where does the Ukraine War begin? Did it really just begin on February 24th?

So I wonder if you can comment on the causes of war in terms of your own work and Ukraine.

Sir Hew Strachan:

Yeah. No, just a short question. Where do I start?

A general point first: Where you are now tends to be of course where you are when you read history. So I think there is a way in which we see different things in the past as we read Clausewitz now, than how it was read in the past, because we have different preoccupations. Those are preoccupations which Clausewitz also happens to speak to, which none of us, including Michael Howard and Peter Paret, fully recognized in 1976. But now their preoccupations are outdated because our preoccupations have moved on beyond the Cold War.

But a specific point about the First World War, is that I suspect that in part, of course, you’re absolutely right. It’s about the role of long-term causation, versus short-term contingency and what happens actually in the July Crisis. And this is definitely relevant to the Ukraine question. So when people wanted to prove German war guilt in 1918, they looked at the July Crisis. But when it came to exonerating the Germans, they looked at long-term process of German unification.

Then paradoxically of course, when [German historian Fritz] Fischer wrote, he still used a medium-term distance to make the calls and argue, and he brought the July Crisis and German unification together.

If you read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers and Margaret Macmillan’s book on the causes of war The War That Ended Peace, they say almost nothing about the July Crisis at all. How you can understand the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 without explaining the July Crisis is totally beyond me. I just, I’m sorry. I respect both their works enormously, but it does seem to me that their publishers are breathing down the back of their necks and telling them to get their books in quickly. The July Crisis is important because contingency matters.

Now what I think has happened, in terms of the long-term debate, is that there was a period when Germany was guilty. There was a period when Germany was not guilty. There was a period when Germany was guilty again. Now we’re in one of those stages where Germany is not so guilty, and we’ll be back shortly. It’s a bit like the causes of the French Revolution and no doubt, the causes of American Independence. There’ll be some variations in interpretation. Or the American Civil War—the first American Civil War, just to be sure there is no doubt about what I am referring to.

Let’s look at Ukraine. Well absolutely, war did not begin in February 2022…. But it’s an indication of our own myopia. It began effectively in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, because that period in 2014 was the last point we could have seriously stood up and confronted Russia and supported Ukraine in any sensible terms with a chance of deterrence holding.

I remember very clearly (and I won’t name names), but I was in a meeting just before having a NATO summit, in a British government department, and a senior official was briefing a group of us on a defense review, and the official said, “The one thing we’re not talking about is Ukraine and let’s be absolutely clear.” In other words, it was off the agenda. In a way, we’re thinking, “Why are we here? What have we come about?”

But of course, others would say that it goes back to 2008. Others will say it goes back to 1994. Or back to James Baker and promises made. So there’s a long history. [Cold War Historian] Mary Sarotte will no doubt give us the answer to the question [as to when the Ukraine war began].. But, why does it take so long?

Patrick Cronin:

Audrey, do you have another question?

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

A quick one. Americans use technology to try to reduce casualties, and that’s one way of managing politics. So technology has been very important in Ukraine, and I’m not even talking about technology on the battlefield. I would talk more about Starlink and the ability to maintain the Ukrainian people’s connection to the internet, that’s given [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy the ability to mobilize people around the world to follow him and his own domestic mobilization. Too. So given the arguments that you’ve made about the causes and consequences and the unfolding of war, are any comments that you’d like to make about the role of technology now and into the future? Any changes you’d like to discuss or with respect to Clausewitz?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Well, I mean the beauty to me of Clausewitz is he’s effectively in a technology-free space!

Audrey Kurth Cronin:

I know.

Sir Hew Strachan:

For somebody who did one year of science in school, this is a great relief. You will say it’s a great disappointment, I understand that. But…I would argue one reason that Clausewitz has continued purchase, is precisely because he’s not technology-specific. Because in his era, the weaponry for war changed very little. One hundred years before, basically he would recognize the battlefield, and it’s not going to change dramatically until [the late nineteenth century]. Technology does change the battlefield then. But that means, because he’s not essentially binding himself to any particular period, he is binding himself very much to the legacy of the French Revolution.

But in many ways, of course, we still live with the impacts of the French Revolution, so that doesn’t distance himself from us as much as it might otherwise have done. What does this mean though in terms of technology and how you read the Ukrainian War of course is itself interesting, because in many respects, a lot of that war was horribly familiar. I mean other than fighting tank warfare, counter attacks from small groups. I mean there was not here much that was technologically enabled. What I find most striking about the technology change, is back in exactly to your point, it goes exactly back to your point about Afghanistan, is that what technology is doing for us, is mobilizing international support, and it’s mobilizing popular support, not just in terms of popular interest.

But what’s really interesting, in British universities and from contacts I’m having to American universities too, is the academic population is more involved because so much intelligence is open source, is much better informed, much more easily mobilized and is much better at being able to give central input and broadly speaking, certainly in the UK, the government has responded.

Patrick Cronin:

I’m tempted to come in here and talk about your discussion about fighting limited wars, with unlimited ends, but not unlimited means. Because, and you even suggested, I think, in your remarks here today, Hew, that if we’re going to defend Zelenskyy in Ukraine, with his existential war, then we ought to have no limits on means. But clearly, that’s not possible, is it, in the nuclear era?

Sir Hew Strachan:

No and I think part of the problem here, is that Putin has actually, in a way, won a war he actually shouldn’t have won. Let me explain what I mean. Very early on, he invoked the possibility of the use of nuclear weapons – without actually it seemed intending to do anything at all. Likely rhetorical as far as we know. That is to say, sure, absolutely all this with fingers crossed and this is part of the problem and that he didn’t, there was no upgrading of levels, there was no movement of missiles.

But of course, that created panic. It was front-line news and for those in government in western countries concerned about the possibility of escalation of the war itself. If you look at what’s happened since then, the west has escalated its response. Not overtly. Not by blowing its trumpet saying we’re escalating. But actually just doing things. As it has done those things, there’s been no response. The West implicitly has established escalation dominance.

But we’re not talking about nuclear weapons. We’re not talking about chemical weapons. I think part of Putin’s victory is to get us worried about nuclear weapons when we don’t need to be. Again, fingers crossed. Because actually, first, if Putin’s going to escalate things, he would logically escalate his own military force in very different directions. It would escalate it geographically, be more in the Black Sea, for example. He could conceivably escalate it, because of [NATO’s] Article V, by thinking how best to target the last communication bringing in munitions to the Ukrainians.

Or he could simply escalate it in Ukraine, by using longer-range missiles. He’s not doing any of that at the moment, and I absolutely get it, you know, war’s full of uncertainties. There’s also the realm of risk. If you take too much fear out of this, then presumably we’re not going to do what is necessary to stop him. So where does that leave us, in terms of limited means? Of course, we can’t move all the way up, but do we have any idea of where we are going? At the moment, we’re doing enough to keep Ukraine in the fight. Without support from the United States, especially in trained units… [inaudible].

But how long for? At what scale? What is the cost to U.S. capability? What does it mean if you’re putting so much into the defense for Ukraine in budgetary terms, for defense budgets domestically in the countries that are supporting Ukraine? We’re not having any of these discussions that I can see. And we’re certainly not having them in the United Kingdom…. We’re still talking about a carrier strike group with global reach. When we actually have two carriers, but we don’t have two carrier escorts. Where exactly is this going?

Patrick Cronin:

I wonder if we can switch to the consequences of war, and I want to especially press you, Hew, on what you think about the consequences of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, a year after that withdrawal, to the extent you can try to see any long shadow that comes out of that? That’s difficult at this point, perhaps. But I am struck by your analysis on the fall of empires out of World War I, the onset of the Cold War out of World War II, and the revolutions in Russia and China. Now, maybe in hindsight, we can see all of those things. We couldn’t see them necessarily in 1919, or 1946 exactly. But what do you think about the post-9/11 wars in general, Iraq and Afghanistan, but especially Afghanistan, given the fact that the withdrawal was met with such controversy and near-term tragedy?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Sure, sure. Well, it’s very hard to distance I think for anybody who knows Afghanistan reasonably well, to distance themself from the tragedy.

I mean we have been let down, very badly let down. The speed with which we have moved on, distresses me. Distresses many other people, because and I think what we’re tending to do in policy, for me is sort of devote our attention to the wrong issues. We are concerned understandably about the rights of education; but we always knew that was going to be a problem if the Taliban were back in power. I remember going to meetings and being told by women’s groups even then saying, “You’ve given us so much. There is so much opportunity that’s opened up to us. But what will happen? How is this going to be guaranteed?” We had no answers then and we haven’t got any answers now.

But the humanitarian crisis is far more pressing. Dare I say it? This is not minimizing the importance of education or human rights or the women’s movement. People are dying of starvation and are dying because there’s no cash in the economy. … These are much more fundamental things. At that level, we don’t seem to be able to move on. We don’t seem to be able to say, because of reluctance to recognize that Afghanistan is a state, because it is acting as a haven for terrorism. But actually, there are also the needs of the people, back to politics from policy, in terms of what’s going on.

So that’s one dimension. What are the regional implications that it will obviously tell us about how that plays out? Pakistan, I suppose, is the key here, in terms of how the current state of Pakistan, the formulation of policy, and apart from that, the disposition of Imran Kahn…. The fact that Pakistan does seem to have moved a bit away from the Taliban in the last few weeks. But it’s done that before. Where will that lead? Pakistan seems to be our principal entry into Afghanistan; yet what are the implications of course for the other nations, implications for Iran, the implications for Tajikistan. And the real question is first, and we don’t know this, but if there were to be a reoccurrence of insurgency, and there are reports of some fighters in the Panjshir Valley…what would we do? How would we respond to that? We don’t know. Once again, we’re not having that discussion. I think we did entirely the right thing: we, the west, Europe, above all the United States, in saying we’re going… But should we go into the north and support the opposition of the Taliban….

…This obviously was U.S. policy to be here in the first place. It’s the U.S. decision entirely to come out and a lot of other countries are committing themselves in the wake of this. Not as directly as the U.S., obviously. But I think the sense of being let down in the United Kingdom, and there was quite a push in the United Kingdom, I think in a way of trying to scrabble together a coalition far too late to do something, but actually being incapable of achieving it. That in itself, the United States should be worried, that…if the moment should have come with Ukraine for Europe to step up and do more for its own defense, arguably it should do so. If they really felt they had an obligation, a humanitarian obligation…. There’s not even a discussion about that. NATO failed more catastrophically….

Patrick Cronin:

I don’t want to be facile about history and current issues, but it’s obvious that China, in a major power war, in the concern of a clash over Taiwan, has gripped national attention, in terms of the focus of both policy and discussion, including with our allies and partners. In terms of thinking about that confrontation, obviously the mainland has defined Taiwan unification as an existential issue. Now that’s a subjective definition by Xi Jinping, because it’s not objectively true that China will fall, if Taiwan’s not part of it, because Taiwan has never been part of the PRC. Nonetheless, maybe that doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, the United States is looking at this narrow window—in this decade, not long in the future, but in this decade—at the possibility of a military clash over Taiwan. Now whether that could be a prolonged war, or a short war, whether it will happen, or just continue to be protracted political struggle, those are big questions that I don’t expect you to answer, Hew. But how would you help us think about the possibility of great power conflict in the 2020s?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Well, I suppose the easy way out of that question is you know far more about this than I do, Patrick. I would easily pose those questions to you.

But what is striking to me on the historical argument, is the capacity of small powers to trigger the actions of big powers. That for me, is the story here. Taiwan can get the U.S. into a war which it doesn’t want. I’m not accusing Taiwan of being manipulative or duplicitous in this. But if I do my analogy stuff—and this disregards all the earlier stuff I’ve been saying about the origins of the First World War—this war begins at a clash in 1914 between Austria and Serbia…. It’s Serbia who effectively, in its very well justified response to Austria-Hungary, makes sure that Russia, then France, and then Britain get in. Sir Edward Gray, the British foreign secretary at the time, said I do wish we could just take Serbia out of the middle of the sea and sink it. It’s such a nuisance. He really didn’t care about Serbia any more than most Brits did. Then in 1939, a small power on the other side of Europe triggers a second global war.

Taiwan sits for me, exactly in that framework. Of course, going back to 1918…we recognized the autonomy of states and their rights to determine their own futures. We see it as an important democratic principle. We recognized that in the UN Charter. We recognized it through the massive explosion in the number of states in the UN since 1945, more than tripling of members of states. Not all those states are able to defend themselves and in fact the vast majority are unable to do so. So where does that leave us? That has to leave us either and this comes back to realism and liberalism, essentially.

If you’re a realist you say, “There are so many potential wars out there, you should generally put your hard hat on and go down to the shelter. Stay out of it.” The liberals would say, “How can we let this happen? We have to be everywhere.” So actually in that situation, the liberals would probably lead us into more wars than we want. But there are, so I think, I mean that’s the concern. Great powers continue to feud over how do you define your responsibilities?

…The First World War was caused by the actions of other states. And that did lead to that confrontation…. But that doesn’t mean it has to happen. One of the reasons it need not happen, is actually ironically, if the United States focuses on its relationship to China, rather than its relationship with Taiwan and equally if China focuses on its relationship with the United States. But if both sides let Taiwan become the center of attention, then they’re in danger of finding themselves in a situation that leads to confrontation.

Patrick Cronin:

Well to segue way from that very important topic, back to history. But let’s shift to something that’s squarely in your wheelhouse, the British way of war. There is this fabulous new book, as you know, The British Way of War, by Andrew Lambert is it?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Yep.

Patrick Cronin:

You’re quoted in it, in fact, favorably, early on. But there seems to b5-

Sir Hew Strachan:

[interjects] He hasn’t read my review.

Patrick Cronin:

Well, I wondered about that, because there is a distinction between your description of the continental commitment of Michael Howard’s view, versus his view, that there is this British way of war that’s separate from having a large continental army. I wondered if you could just take us very briefly through this argument about the British Way of War, and why it matters?

Sir Hew Strachan:

Well, why I think it matters now and why Corbett—this book by Andrew Lambert, for those of you who haven’t read it, is essentially about Julian Corbett.—it’s a biography that comes in two halves. The first half is a discussion of Julian Corbett, especially his ideas, although to my mind there’s a lack of recognition of the strategic context in the build-up to the First World War. But then the second half is an argument that there was a totally different way of combatting this war, which was in line with what Corbett had been thinking, which reflected of course a genuine debate between governments at the time in 1914 about whether Britain should ever have put an army, or for that matter British soldiers, in Europe. Would they be enough?

And you could have fought it, as Corbett argued in 1911, using sea power and having the privilege with Ireland—as the United States has maritime separation from other countries (not from the north and south, but in terms of its immediate competitors). And therefore, you take as much or as little of the land war as you want to, because it’s a maritime conflict, and that Britain could have sustained that strategy.

I just think the argument itself is unsustainable. War was of a scale that actually Britain did have to put in its own ground forces and fight a land war, while [Prime Minister David] Lloyd George, who was well-versed in maritime strategy, never embraced it. I mean he did embrace it, but he embraced the need for continental commitment as well….

Corbett became the official naval historian of the First World War and wrote the first three volumes of the official history…which were not completed. He died. Andrew Lambert retitles them [inaudible 00:37:53], paraphrase, [inaudible 00:37:55] this is what it is. It isn’t. I mean it simply isn’t that. Nor is Corbett thinking in those terms, or if he is thinking in those terms, I can’t see the evidence. He doesn’t, I mean it would be good. There is a sense that comes out of that, which is what [B. H..] Liddell Hart picks up (Liddell Hart was a plagiarist of Julian Corbett’s arguments). But there is an argument that that is the sort of war you should have fought, and it’s certainly the argument that many people thought we should have fought in the 1920s and ’30s, that Liddell Hart then carries through to the Second World War.

But again, it’s actions and circumstances. This is the problem with the United States, is that circumstances of being a great power very often leaves you with very little choice about armed conflict. And as the Duke of Wellington famously said in 1838, and I am tempted to say the same thing about Afghanistan…, there is no such thing as a little war for a great nation. … So I’m delighted Andrew’s written it. I’ve learned a great deal from it. But I do get very confused by it….

Patrick Cronin:

Now Hew, you famously set up the Changing Character of War Program, a truly interdisciplinary program at Oxford University.

Sir Hew Strachan:

Well, thanks a lot.

Patrick Cronin:

You are a dedicated historian, so I’m wondering: What have you learned from the other disciplines beyond history and what can history really bring to the world today? You’ve brought so much with your work; but how would you answer this question about history in a couple of minutes?

Sir Hew Strachan:

I learned an enormous amount and initially, somewhat against my expectation and will, about this interdisciplinary approach to war. This has absolutely changed my thinking, because I learned from philosophers, from political scientists, from lawyers on international law. How do we define war? Well interdisciplinarity is an essential tool…. Thanks to the growth of international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict, the definition of war is essential, too. So absolutely, war leads into interdisciplinary study.

What does history specifically have to contribute? I think there are probably three things. One is (and this is not an original idea) that as one of the core disciplines, military history when it comes to study of war, is the only one that looks exclusively at war. International law looks at other things. Philosophy is certainly concerned with many other things. There were moments in some of those debates that Audrey and I sat in, when you slightly wondered whether the speculation if a bear walks over a cliff and there’s a human being underneath that is hurt how responsible is the bear—when you wondered how exactly that related to war.

I have to say very quickly to my philosophy friends, most of them are not like that, but there were one or two times when you sort of wondered. But military history is concerned with war, in one form or another, at its heart. No other discipline, because I actually think strategic studies in itself is an amalgam and especially influenced by Michael Howard’s legacy, if you think he disputed the value of undergraduate war studies precisely because it was a practical discipline. It is sufficient to say that his way of thinking was that military history is absolutely essential, and I think we’ve lost sight of that history, to our cost.

Because what military history does is, the second point: it gives context and perspective beyond the immediate. It gives a sense of what really is pressing now that is different. If I can put this in very personal terms, when the invasion began on the 24th of February, and someone asked me to make a comment and I said, “Well I’m not a, I don’t know Russia. I am certainly not a Ukrainian specialist.” And the kickback was, yes, but we all do think about war and of course, I did find I had reactions…. But then the next question was, “Were you surprised?” The answer is, “Was I surprised? Yes, I was, but I wasn’t shocked.” Because in the end…and just because of how the experience of wars happens in history, you are not surprised. But you still are surprised, or shocked in the sense that this happened now. I think somehow you think it won’t happen again. So there’s that element.

The third point and I don’t have any experience…is that…in the 20th century, we have valued quite rightly the experience of those who have seen war and combat, firsthand. For whom this is an experience, this is not vicarious, but real and life-lasting. What this initially does, is it gives context to that experience. It helps us understand it. It helps those who have experienced it, to put it in context and it helps those who know those who experienced it, put it in context. That adds value to the experience itself.

Patrick Cronin:

Well, we’re out of time and I want to thank you so much for your insights. There have only been six Chichele professors who have studied, focused on military history and modern war at Oxford, in more than 100 or so years. That’s quite a tribute, in terms of those individuals, what they’ve left. I’m reminded of the words of Cyril Falls when he was writing one of his books, 100 Years of War: 1850-1950. He said, ”The author does not intend to wear the sad clothing of excessive modesty. 30 years of reading military history ought to be an asset of a certain value.” Well, I hate to say it, but you’re following in his footsteps. You have shown amply I think, Hew, that the value of history and military history, have a lot to say and thank you so much for your scholarship. Thank you for your presence today and on behalf of American University and Hudson Institute, thank you to Hew Strachan.

Sir Hew Strachan:

Thank you very much.