Dan Snow's History Hit - The 20th Century Arms Race

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

The 20th century heralded a revolution in how wars are fought. From military strategy and planning to the weapons and equipment used on the ground, modern militaries have radically changed how they operate. So what major changes have there been? And what is the purpose of war in the first place?Dan is joined today by Mike Martin, a conflict scholar who specialises in modern warfare, to discuss its evolution and development over the past century.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Tomos Delargy.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Mike Martin's back on the pod. He's a senior visiting research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He's been on the podcast many times before. We talk about war in its widest and most general sense. Why humans do it. Why we fight, which was the title of a previous book of his. We talk about Ukraine, how the war in Ukraine is conforming to classical rules, if you like, practices of war and how it's different. And in this episode of the podcast, we invited him back because we talked about 100 years, a century of revolution in war, how war has changed so dramatically. Just over 100 years ago, my great-grandfather went to war on the field of Le Cateau in France.

He was riding a horse. It was the beginning of the First World War, 1914. He could see his enemy clearly. Troops engaged each other, standing next to each other, kneeling or lying prone on the ground, but firing at each other, much as their forebears would have done on the field of Waterloo or Culloden or the Battle of Blenheim. There was artillery, but the artillery engaged the enemy at relatively close range, like cannons would have done in those previous battles. They shot at anyone they could see with their own eyes. There were one or two aircraft buzzing in the sky above. Some dropped what my great-grandfather described almost as tin foil to show German artillery where they might want to aim, but that was reasonably rare at that point in the war.

My great-grandfather was injured a few weeks later and went home to convalesce in the UK. He arrived back on the battlefield in May 1915. He's written about his astonishment. It was like no battlefield he'd ever seen. He was a professional soldier. He'd seen war all his life. And yet 1915 presented something quite new. Smashed landscape.

Nothing moved during the day. If you put your head above ground during the day, you were likely to be shot. Airships in the skies above, artillery firing from huge distances behind the lines, indirect fire, the men living all day in bunkers, trenches, dugouts, huge problems with damp, with trench foot, causing more people to leave the lines than enemy action. This was a revolution in warfare, and it's continued to develop in the century in a bit that has followed. Mike and I, in this episode, we talk about those machine guns, those trenches, air power, tanks, and we get right the way through to the modern day, AI, hypersonic weapons. There's a quote often misattributed to Plato, it said, only the dead have seen the end of war.

And sadly, the 20th and 21st centuries, when we've made such enormous strides in every other conceivable field of human life, the evidence seems to be that war is enduring. And all of those enormous technological breakthroughs that I referred to have been driven by and have impacted war just as they have every other part of our lives. This is Mike Martin to talk us through a revolution in warfare. Enjoy. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again.

And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Mike, good to have you back on the podcast, buddy. Hi, Dan. If you're talking about the development of war in the 20th century, a century in which things change probably more than any other century in recorded history, First of all, what stays the same? You write so beautifully about the kind of purpose of war. What is it for? And how, despite all the technology, does the reason for going to war and the way of winning it endure? Humans is basically the central point of the two questions that you've asked me. So the purpose of going to war is, you know, war-settled

geopolitical questions that we can't resolve by talking, right? So it's basically politics, but with weapons and violence. And as a result, the aim of your war is to convince your enemy to do something that they didn't want to do, right? To impose your will on them. And that's the same if you're a hunter-gatherer with three of your mates taking on another band of hunter-gatherers fighting over a bison, as it is Xi Jinping thinking about how to invade Taiwan. Those psychological dynamics are exactly the same. So this thread of psychology and war is politics and war is about human beings and about imposing your will on the enemy. That's been the same. That's the nature of war, and that is the same throughout.

Now, of course, what has changed, which I think we're going to talk about today, is technology, which changes all the time. Obviously, there's plenty of war in the first decade and half of the 20th century, but let's start in 14. People will be familiar with some of the extraordinary battles of 14. Unimaginable casualties suffered among the French, who famously marched towards the enemy in red trousers. We've got the Battle of Lakato, the first British battle of the First World War. People on horseback, people fighting in daylight, sort of shoulder to shoulder, using rifles, using a bit of artillery.

You can see the enemy. I think the Duke of Wellington would have recognised it. He'd have been impressed with some of the accuracy. And what happened to that battlefield? How did it change? The machine gun happened to those battlefields. We'd had machine guns in sort of the end of the 1800s, but really to see them deployed in force,

and like many new technologies, the cavalry officers said, oh, we shouldn't have too many machine guns because, you know, the spirit of the men and all the rest of it, we want them to charge into the enemy. Very quickly, it became immediately obvious that if you have more machine guns and they're well placed, a team of two can hold up a thousand of your opponents. And there's no counter to that. At that point, there weren't any other countervailing technologies to deal with that.

other countervailing technologies to deal with that and so more than anything else it was not just the invention but the ubiquitous deployment of the machine gun by both armies that created the trench systems because the countervailing technology at that exact point so 1940 is just get underground like lie on your belly and use your bayonet to scrape away the surface and just try and get inches lower and lower and lower. And by the way, that is still the countervailing technology, right? If you look at what's happening in Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, there are two opposing trench systems there. They won't be as extensive as those in the First World War,

which were built up over years, so they had secondary trenches, communication trenches, all the rest of it. But actually in Bakhmut, the trench hasn't changed. It's still eight foot, right? So six foot person's hidden. It's still got a fire stack. It'll have sandbags. It'll have a parapet.

It'll have some sort of device enabling you to look over the edge of the trench. That hasn't actually changed at all. That's the interesting thing about these pictures from Ukraine. Everyone's like, oh, I thought trenches were a First World War technology. But you look at the fighting in Eastern Congo in our lifetime. You look at fighting in Sarajevo, in the conflict there. People have been underground since this moment, haven't they? Absolutely. And heaven forbid were Tunbridge Wells to come under air attack, the first thing I would be doing is either looking for a hole in the ground to get into with my family or digging one myself.

That's a happy thought. In the First World War, you've also got, as well as I'm unable to fire a machine gun four, 500 bullets every minute, you've got artillery is increasingly powerful, isn't it? And that's something, again, that endures, you know, the dominance of artillery on the battle. There's an old expression in the First World War, wasn't there, that the guns take ground and then humans move in to kind of hold it.

Can you tell people why artillery is so dominant? Artillery can be dominant, provided you have enough guns and enough shells because there is really no other way to escape it apart from digging into the ground and if you dig into the ground that then slows you down. You know not only men it's really useful against supplies right which you can't dig into the ground you can't you know this ammunition and petrol and diesel and spare parts and you know all the logistics which are utterly vital they're very very hard to protect from artillery they take up huge areas of ground imagine a shipping container park right that's exactly what the logistics hell of an army looks like thousands

upon thousands of shipping containers you know artillery is not a precision weapon it's an area weapon and it's perfectly designed either for troops that are in the open that are not dug in or for logistics now the one problem they had in the first world war of course was that the artillery wasn't that accurate that's both because of manufacturing you know famously the royal artillery is still called the drop shorts because the first world war the amount of propellant wasn't sufficient to get it where it needed to be but also because to get artillery where you need it to get you a need to be able to observe where you're landing that artillery and then you need to be able to communicate back to the guns and both at those times observation of remote things and communication was very very rudimentary so that limited somewhat the efficacy

of artillery at that time plus everyone was dug in right right well mike you've just teed up perfectly the next kind of turn of the wheel which is how do you then break that stalemate if there's a muddy shell pitted field in front of you a smashed landscape covered by artillery and machine guns how do you get across that beaten zone what you do is you get a tractor and you armor it and you put some tracks on it so they can go across the mud aka you invent the tank i mean this is one technology but really what it is is the beginning of all the reinvention of Previously, we used cavalry to be mobile on the battlefield. What the tank enabled us to do is, in an era of artillery and machine guns

and all that stuff you've listed, it enabled us to break through enemy trench systems. It enabled us to ignore machine gun fire. I mean, the machine gun literally just bounced off. And so that was the countervailing technology that suddenly opened up the battlefield again. So know machine guns and artillery created a bit of a hiatus neither side was able to get over those technologies suddenly the tank and more broadly armored mobility and armored warfare suddenly opened up the battlefield again and you mentioned

the artillery kind of visibility and accuracy helped by well first of all just artillery getting a bit better and the maths and the physics and learning about barrel wear and wind and stuff but also planes up above with radios communication spotting intelligence that sort of it so you can actually get to a point where you can call in artillery and you go left a bit right a bit that's perfect you're right on target now and the gunners can talk to people up in the air. That communications and spotting is surely very important as well. Yeah, and they had that in a very rudimentary fashion in the First World War. They used balloons, artillery observation balloons were huge, and then the Royal Flying Corps did a bit of it.

But often it would be through either dropping messages back on the guns or whatever. So throughout the 20s, certainly by the time the Second World War happened, that was a system that was working much more effectively. Okay, so we're getting across the beaten zone. We've worked out some tactics how to counter machine guns and artillery. What are the next big breakthroughs moving through to the end and beyond the end of the First World War? So I think the 20s was about the coming of air power specifically bombing right air to ground bombing and like most technologies i mean we've had it recently haven't we with cyber everyone gets very excited and cyber warfare is going to solve all of our problems and we won't need

infantry anymore that was what the 20s was like with air power and at the time britain was probably the predominant user of military air power. And we had at that time, you know, a fairly far flung set of possessions in the British Empire. You know, as always, arguments in London about how can we manage to manage this huge set of territories? And Air Power Evangelists came along and said, oh, you don't need an division in iraq or somaliland or wherever you can actually do it via air power and this is the way you know if you've got rebellious tribes or whatever you know using the language of the time then we can use air power it was actually called air policing need to say it didn't work very well because warfare is about humans

and when they really had political problems to solve, they always had to send the troops in. But the development of air power, whilst not very useful against civilians, certainly changed the balance in terms of using it against opposing military forces because you could wipe out enemy formations with air power and that really changed the balance progressively through the 20s and 30s as those planes became longer range, more aerodynamic

so on and so forth and there was that great quote which is the bomber will always get through and so there was some sort of depression if you like wasn't there that there's almost nothing we can do now because someone can take off from germany or from wherever fly across our airspace and rain down death and destruction and And that was combined with this kind of pessimism that the urban proletariat would then smash up cities enough and the urban proletariat would rise up and sort of string up all the politicians. I mean, it was a very, very dystopian view of the future of war at that stage. I mean, that trope, actually, that if we bomb enemy civilians, they'll descend into panic and we'll just then walk into the city. We see that again, you know,

to come back to the current war in Ukraine, that's exactly what Russia thinks is going to happen when it bombs Ukrainian cities. Of course, the opposite almost always happens, which is that civilians become more defiant and they say, well, if you're going to bomb our cities, we're definitely going to fight you. People feel like their backs are against the wall. Bombing of civilians actually often achieves the exact opposite effect to what people intend. Of course, it relies on this assumption that the enemy civilians are of lesser moral worth, of lesser moral character than your own troops, who are sort of steely-eyed dealers of death. And that's exactly what the Russians think of the Ukrainians, that they're morally inferior. And if we bomb them, they'll just panic and fall

apart. It's what Hitler thought about Londoners in the Blitz, you know, and they always get the opposite result. And Stanley Baldwin, who made the comment, the bomb will always get through, British Prime Minister, he was also wrong. Funnily enough, humans develop ways to counter the bomber trying to get through, right? Yeah, and so this was the next countervailing technology

and that's, today we'd call it an integrated air defence system, but what it was again first pioneered by the brits was in the late 30s the invention of radar so you have a bunch of radar stations spread around that give you coverage and then those are linked by communications to a static air defenses so guns that are going to fire so you say all right you've got a flight of bombers coming towards you and also to fighter aircraft so those aircraft are sitting at readiness and you can scramble them very very quickly up into the air communications are good enough that you can then give them a steer go here you'll intercept them over this area and then you can

attack them we call that integrated air defense at that time, it was about getting fighter aircraft and air defence onto the enemy bombers before they got to their targets. Just as the machine gun once looked dominant, and you can't imagine anything that could stand up against it, you get a situation in the Battle of Britain where the huge German formations fly over the Channel, fly over the coast of Kent, and actually they are countered. The Brits are able to deploy fighter planes, the Spitfires and Hurricanes fly up, picking off these German bombers and exact a terrible price for every German raid over Britain.

And so the airspace, again, like the battlefield of the First World War, it becomes contested. You see, it's amazing how human beings, this is arms race, isn't it? It's fascinating. And then, you know, you have a technology that comes along and it sort of puts war into hiatus

because there's nothing you can do about it. You just have to put up with it. So you end up with a trench system or you end up getting bombed or whatever. And then someone comes up with a countervailing technology and then back on. The rules of psychology come back into play and it's a game of cat and mouse

and you're trying to, you know, impose your will on the enemy commander. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about the revolution in warfare more after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. You think about the oft-lamented stalemate of the First World War, particularly in France and Belgium, where the front line moves very little for years on end, imagine 20 years later, you've got Hitler kind of rampaging, well, both across France and Belgium as well, but also across Russia, you know, hundreds and hundreds of miles, great holes torn in front lines using aircraft and mobile artillery and tanks. Counter to that, right, what today we call manoeuvre warfare, what the Germans call blitzkrieg,

you know, this idea of moving armoured formations with artillery and air support rapidly to dislocate and confuse your enemy. The only way to deal with that is to have your own combined arms force that's able to outthink your opponent, right? And the French and the Brits just didn't have that force in sufficient numbers and sufficiently trained. The French famously had the Maginot Line, right? Where they're going to sit in defences. And that's what the Russians are doing in Ukraine at the moment. We'll see how well that goes over the next couple of weeks. Yeah, very interesting indeed. Russians building gigantic field defences at the moment and trying to just cling on to what they've got. But in the Second World War, interesting that Russians embraced manoeuvre warfare as well and were able to push the Germans all the way back to Berlin.

One of the advantages of manoeuvre warfare, if you do it right, is you can perhaps sustain fewer casualties with attrition warfare, right? But the Russians seem to combine attrition warfare and manoeuvre warfare in one go. Although attrition is part of manoeuvre, but they were perfectly happy if they didn't have the tanks to do a right hook and dislocate the enemy, they were perfectly happy to stick 20,000 infantry soldiers with 10,000 rifles going up the middle, you know. We should talk about a little bit the war in the Pacific and naval power. You get this extraordinary combination of aircraft and ships together, which means the era of big gun battleships dominant on the world's oceans for hundreds of years when ships basically were floating artillery platforms that comes to an end these battleships can fire 20 miles away or

so but with a plane on a deck of a ship you can strike hundreds of miles yeah absolutely i guess there's two things really that come out of the second world war one is missile technology which we'll talk about in a minute but then yeah aircraft carriers absolutely and for a long time during the second world war the war in the pacific probably up to really the contemporary era aircraft carriers were seen as almost unbeatable because you could sit over the horizon and fly your fast jets and you know the americans have got whatever they've got 10 or 12 aircraft carrier battle groups to enable them to project power in a way that can't be countered of course now the counter that's coming in is hypersonic missiles so missiles that fly at multiples of the speed of sound and if you can get those to skim the sea they're pretty

difficult to defeat and also drone swarms and uavs you know and so rather than sending in one expensive missile to try and take out the ship you send in 10,000 micro drones that swarm and they're networked by AI so they've distributed processing across the swarm so that as they approach the ship like a flock of starlings if you like adopt different configurations and have different bits of the swarm get targeted the distributed processing rearranges them in the sky to escape being targeted and you only need a few of them to get through. So that makes big ships very vulnerable. Super excited that we just spent a good chunk of our defence budget on two enormous aircraft carriers, Mike. But as a proud fan of the Royal Navy, I'm sure that they've worked all this out

and there will be ways of wrapping those ships in layers of defensive technology. So aircraft carriers come out at the end of the Second World War, bestriding the world's oceans. You mentioned missile technology and so let's finish on the Second World by talking about these two linked innovations or certainly the Americans would eventually link them. One is the German use of ballistic missiles. The first man-made object to enter space is a V2 rocket in the Second World War and as the Germans are investing vast amounts of money in their rocket technology to be able to strike targets a whole continent away, the Americans and Brits, I should say, are working on nuclear technology. Yeah, and I think I'd add a third technology there, which is space. So those three things

come together. So I guess famously, the flying rockets, the V1s and the V2s, and that sort of reawakens the fear of the air because they're much more difficult to counter. And of course, the nuclear bombs over Japan, all of the German rocket scientists ended up being brought into the American space program. And when we think about the space program, we think about NASA, Apollo, landing on the moon all of that kind of good for humanity stuff but really that was an outcrop of intercontinental ballistic missiles like being able to fire nuclear bombs to land on moscow or to land on washington you know depending on who you are and linked to that are the first satellites, really, platforms to enable the powers to track incoming ballistic missiles, right?

And there's only so many routes they can take. They needed to put satellites in specific places. So, for instance, if you're firing a missile between Russia and the US, the missile's going to go over the North Pole. It doesn't make sense to send it around the South Pole. The North Pole's the shortest route route it gives the shortest reaction time so you need to position a few satellites there to be able to detect those incoming missiles and then decide what you're going to do are you going to strike back or whatever so yeah those three technologies and out of all of that came all sorts of things like gps

satellite reconnaissance like secure global communications, all sorts of spin-offs from the combination of those three technologies. And that leads us on to what you do about rockets. As you say, there's now a hiatus. So the Soviets and the Americans developed the technology to strike each other with nuclear weapons, carried on rockets that you cannot intercept, right? Like the German V2s. Absolutely nothing you do about it.

Londoners found that particular aspect of the Blitz so dispiriting because a V2 rocket, the first you knew of it was the impact itself. It's uninterceptible. And yet we have developed ways to intercept. We've managed to kind of, it's like shooting down a speeding bullet with another bullet. We have worked out ways to intercept certain kinds of rockets now, haven't we? But certainly not hypersonic ones. No, and we got to a stable position, you know, a hiatus during the Cold War, where both sides had more nuclear weapons, specifically on intercontinental ballistic missiles, to wipe out the other side.

And both sides had what's called a guaranteed second strike capability. So if one side launches missiles, you'd have the warning, but you knew that they didn't have enough missiles to target all of your delivery systems, so you would be able to launch a second strike, which comes back to the psychology. So the first side's never going to launch their first strike because they know that they're going to have some missiles coming back, whatever happens. And that created a balance, And that was reinforced by arms control treaties in the 70s, 80s and 90s that, for instance, they limited short range missiles because short range missiles have no warning. So you could get them off and you'd have no chance

to respond. So they'd limited those. They limited anti-ballistic missile shields right so they deliberately outlawed defenses against intercontinental ballistic missiles because if everyone's vulnerable then we're all safe is the thinking and so they had a series of treaties that actually reinforced this hiatus in this troika of missile nuke and space technology and you just mentioned hypersonic missiles and there are a few other technologies as well but what hypersonic missiles are is they can travel at say 20 times the speed of sound which means you can get from Moscow to Washington in 15 minutes that then upsets the balance because you don't have time to detect it respond work out what to do you know all

the rest of it there's no decision making. And so that suddenly makes nuclear dynamics much, much, much more unstable. Actually, that was a hiatus in nuclear affairs in missile technology. That was a hiatus that we wanted. That has largely kept the world free of nuclear war since 1945. And the invention of these new technologies or the bringing of anti ballistic missile systems or hypersonic missiles has suddenly upset that balance. And all of a sudden, that becomes a much more unstable system happy news always the bringer of optimism martin the internet happened didn't it in the late 20th century how has the digital space changed war oh wow that's that's join us next week for an entirely new podcast that's i mean it's pretty hard to say isn isn't it? Because it's still changing. I

can't look back on the invention of the internet and say, that's what's happened. We're right in the thick of it now. I mean, what the internet's done is it's created a global communications medium. And what that's then done is it's collapsed borders and it's disempowered the nation state. And previously the nation state was the building block of our international system. the nation state and previously the nation state was the building block of our international system and obviously states made war against each other and so on and so forth and this is really the key question that world politicians need to answer over the next say 20 years is what is the relationship between online and offline do we have a borderless online world if it's global in that case then why do we have borders in the physical world? Alternatively,

well, we've got borders in the physical world, so do we want to have borders in the online world? Previously, if you look at what communications technologies have done, so let's say the invention of writing or the printing press or the telephone is they've collapsed borders and they have forced us, us being humans, to come up with new ideas to govern ourselves suddenly you know if you've got writing and you can administer a territory that's a hundred times the size of what you could administer before suddenly you've got to think of new ways of governing people and this is where these sort of universal ideas about democracy or socialism or whatever all of these came out of say the industrial revolution right because suddenly people were moving cities and connected with each other and we had to actually they weren't just going to sit there and be told what to do so with the great franchise movement in the 1800s in

britain came out of that urbanization which in turn was brought about by technologies and things like the telegraph and all the rest of it so we are at a point of change and we haven't come up with the new system for governing ourselves what does that mean for war no idea i think a more important technology that we should be thinking about is ai actually when it comes to war because we've spoken throughout this podcast about this thread of psychology that runs through war so war is the same if you're a hunter-gatherer as if you're Xi Jinping because it's about imposing your will on the opponent and it's attack and there's deceit and bluff and ruse. And these things are all the same,

whether you're throwing rocks or throwing intercontinental ballistic missiles. But AI, for once, means that some of the decisions about war might actually be taken by an artificial brain rather than a real brain and artificial brains might be fantastic and brilliant and fast and all the rest of it but they're not wired in the same way that brains that have evolved on the african savannah 50 000 years ago are wired and so they think in a different way and what that means is that these dynamics this thread of psychology that runs through war, if you have artificial systems making decisions about who to kill, what to kill, what the strategy is, suddenly war might look completely different and we don't know what it's going to look like. And that, more than anything else, might give us pause for thought and make us think very hard about what we do with the development of these systems because obviously it has a potential to transform so many areas of human life and i'm not anti-technology i think technology is a force that

moves forward but we must work out as with the internet and communications we haven't even worked out how to digest the last technology yet we need to think about how to digest ai and what that means for human society because we really really really haven't thought that. We're all trying to work that out. I mean, it feels like this month alone is there's so many breakthroughs going on in AI that we are all just scrambling. Have you got the $20 a month thing? Buddy,

Dan Snow is currently on the beach. You're looking at a fake Dan with a fake voice. Yeah, this is... You see, this interview is of a higher quality than usual, therefore Dan is not conducting it. I thought that, actually. I noticed that. No, I'm not paying my 20 bucks, no. Are you doing that? Are you testing it all out?

Yeah, because it's pedestrian, but there's some surprising insights. So what do you do? You Google yourself, right? When you get a new technology. So I thought, well, let's see what it comes up with. There were some factual inaccuracies about where i'd been a fellow or which book i'd written or whatever but like you know broadly the kind of cv was fine and then it said some quite interesting stuff about my research areas right and my thinking

about war and it said i was a sort of proponent of moral war. I was a just war theorist and all this kind of stuff. And I'm not, I'm none of those things. But I do talk about war in quite a moral human way. The thread for me is about humanity and psychology running through war. And it's an outgrowth of human society. It's something that I don't think we'll ever get rid of. It's the human phenomenon, if you like. And what I thought was its summary of my research interests were not just a simple Google. It had watched all my videos, read my books, all the rest of it, and it had synthesized what it felt were my research interests. And it got them wrong. I'm not a just war theorist, but actually it had come up with something very interesting in that it had recognized that I speak about war in a very moral human way. And that for me was very, very, very insightful.

I have absolutely no interest in checking what an incredibly advanced, intelligent form tells me about my own career. Like, I don't want to know. What do people say about Dan? No, no, no, no, no, no. not going there. And I would appreciate you not looking. Cancel that subscription. Mike, that was a galloping tour through over 100 years of war. Last question. You've been on the battlefield yourself. You're watching very closely what's going on in Ukraine. Are there enduring aspects that you recognise in the kind of warfare that we're looking at in Ukraine? Yes. Everything I see in Ukraine is entirely within the canon of warfare,

as we understand it. It is entirely a psychological battle. Look at the Ukrainian counter-offensive that started and will be going on over the next few months. That is a psychological battle to outwit and overload the Russian decision-making to cause them to collapse. Watch. It's going to happen over the next few weeks. And that is entirely in keeping with warfare going back for millennia mike marth thanks very much

coming on the podcast tell everyone what your brilliant new book is called oh it's called how to fight a war and it is literally that it's basically machiavelli for the 21st century it speaks to the commander-in-chief you the reader of the commander-in-chief it advises you on how to form your strategy sort out your morale get your logistics. It advises you on how to form your strategy, sort out your morale, get your logistics going. It advises you how to fight a war. But Mike, what if Putin's henchmen read it? What if he falls into the wrong hands? The problem with Putin is not that there isn't good advice within the Russian government structures, it's that he doesn't listen to any of it, which is, by the way, one of the pitfalls that I talk about in the strategy chapter. Thank you, Mike, for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Dan.