School of War - Ep 274: Lawrence Freedman on Strategists and Ukraine

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London and author of On Strategists and Strategy: Collected Essays, 2014-2024, joins the show to talk about a lifetime among strategists, and to give an update on the war in Ukraine. ▪️ Times 02:34 Essay writing 07:49 Michael Howard  18:42 Colin Gray 23:06 Timeless aspects of strategy 26:00 The goal of SDI 36:40 Tactics   41:20 Differences between tactics and strategy 45:01 Ultimate objectives  50:08 Sensible uses of nuclear weapons   52:24 Thatcher 53:59 Harsh winter in Ukraine Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Today, the great Sir Lawrence Friedman comes back on School of War talking about his new collection of essays on strategists and strategy. This is a great weekend, listen. We had a leisurely stroll through a series of topics. Strategists like Michael Howard and Colin Gray, politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and his Star Wars initiative, talked about the relationship of tactics to strategy. And of course, since it's Lawrence Friedman, we talked about the latest in Ukraine. Let's get into it.

Number 7, 19, which will live in India. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the rain situation in France. She'll fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing grounds. She'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today. Sir Lawrence Friedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College. author of many important books on strategy and war. He has a substack conveying his essays on the subject over the course of recent years. And most recently, in the subject of our conversation today, he's published a volume on strategists and strategy collected essays 2014 to 2024, which includes pieces from this substack, but also pieces that originally appeared elsewhere.

Sir Lawrence, thank you so much for coming back on School of War. Thank you, having me. You have a lovely sort of reflection in the introduction of this volume that got my attention in particular, just about the value of essays and essay writing and essay reading that Substack is sort of revived or at least given energy to on some level. And it struck me because this is how I grew up learning. I sort of fell in love with long but not book length pieces by writers like Christopher Hitchens, for example. and I learned a lot about the world through reading those essays in some ways much more than I was learning in high school for sure. Tell us about your own history with this genre or format

and how you came to it, especially in the last few years. Yeah, thank you. It's true. I mean, I think if you're in the academic world, you're used to a certain sort of article that's sort of mandated by the profession, which has to be very careful, has to be, make sure every statement you make is his source with lots of footnotes explaining the sources, clear methodological approach and so on.

And a lot of these essays are very important and useful and serious, but they can get a bit tedious. And often they're just not read, which is the sad part about a lot of academic writing. Whereas there's another tradition which comes from journals in the US, you would say, Atlantic or... or Fidelity Fair or wherever, that always allowed for a reasonable length. I mean, a newspaper article can be very influential and effective, but that's normally about 800 words, perhaps 1,000, and you can get a certain amount into that. An academic article may be 10,000 words,

but a lot of it taken up with footnotes. Three and a half, two and a half, three and a half thousand words, you really should be able to get into an argument with nuances and so on. And it encourages good writing. I was very fortunate, something I mentioned in the book, to have as my sort of supervisor and mentor, Sir Michael Howard, who was really an essayist, I mean, who wrote a lot for, I guess you call highbrow journals, and got a good audience because of that.

So if you've got something to communicate, you want to find a way to communicate it. Now, I think with the internet and the development of online platforms, There were opportunities for this. I mean, War on the Rocks, and said it was the first place I used that gave me an opportunity to get something out quite quickly on a developing topic

without going through all the rhythm of a peer review. Peer review has a lot of advantages, but not if you want speed. And then when Substat came along, my son was sort of becoming, I was a sort of professional journalist for a variety of reasons decided to make it go a bit, and then we had a conversation,

and a father and son combination would be quite interesting. He does UK politics and policies, actually doing more on American politics and policy. I do international, and it's really worked very well. You can control when you do it, how you do it, the length of which you do it, the timing, and if you're lucky, you get an audience, which we now have. So I found it really very useful. This is demanding, however, because if you signed up, as you know, even with a podcast,

once you agree to do something regularly, you've really got to deliver, otherwise you're letting people who have subscribed down. So it's a bit of a treadmill, but nonetheless, I've found it very rewarding and kept me on my toes. Yeah, I always think about this coffee shop that used to be in a neighborhood

I lived in as a young man, and I relied on it. I would go there for my coffee and breakfast sandwich every morning. And then one day I walked over there and they just were closed for some reason. They just weren't open. And I think I didn't go back for weeks. And I actually reflect on that now. If that was how annoyed I was that my breakfast sandwich,

there's probably some totally legitimate reason, too. They probably had some illness. It was a small business. It wasn't a big chain or anything. I mean, except that it's a small business. I mean, for not that it's a big business in general, but for people like Sam and me, it's our little business.

And if you want to keep customers, you've got to satisfy them, which is why I think, I mean, people, some sort of the way, resent the paying aspect of it, but, I mean, it doesn't matter so much to me, but, you know,

my son's a major source of income, and we put a lot of work into it. And I think if you do do that, people are prepared to pay, if they think they're getting something in return, where by no means the highest charges. So I think, But it is a contract, and you do have to fulfill your side of it.

You mentioned Michael Howard. A lot of the pieces in the book are quite personal and have an autobiographical angle, and some include that, but are really tributes to peers and mentors. The Howard piece was one of my favorite in the book, so I'm glad you raised it because I was planning to ask you about it anyway. Maybe for listeners for whom, you know, they know who Sir Lawrence Freeman is, they probably know who Colin Gray is. These are, you know, major authors as they were growing up and learning about these subjects.

But Michael Howard is a figure of an earlier time. Maybe they've heard the name, but they don't quite know much about him. Who was Michael Howard? So Michael was set up the Department of War Studies at Kings. I mean, he joined the college after the war. He had quite a distinguished war record, one of the military cross. And really, I think, established. war studies.

He was a military historian but went beyond that as a field of study that he was prepared to be interdisciplinary. He would look at the politics and the sociology and certainly at the ethics of issues. He made his name as a historian with the book on the Franco-Prussian War that came out at the end of the 50s.

And I think until, I mean, he died last decade, well into his 90s, and still very much all there right to the end. But he perhaps best known for collections of essays. I mean, this is... He was also a very influential figure for me because he took me under his wing when I arrived at Oxford in the early 70s.

And as I tried to point out in the essay, he were very different. I mean, he was a good public school, the guards, Christchurch, Oxford for an undergraduates I mean he was very much part of the establishment I came a sort of lower middle class Jewish boy from the north of England

a bit scruffy and gabbling around and he encouraged me I think he was pleased to have a Brit to work with because a lot of his students were wrote scholars, Americans and we stayed close right until his death so in that sense through all my career he was preysed And I think the approach I've tried to adopt, that is interdisciplinary, focus on what's

bothering you rather than trying to prove some methodological point, try to write for a wider audience and not just for your peers. All of these things I got from him, I wanted to emulate it. You talk about in the piece showing up not only with these, call them socioeconomic differences of background, but. You were coming as a young man of the left, I take it, and quite concerned about, you know, the social sciences and methodological questions and you encounter this man.

What were the wars, as it were, he was fighting intellectually? What was his intellectual lineage in these debates about the nature of war and of strategy and how did you sort of get pulled into those debates? It's an interesting question. I mean, I think he's first, he had a very practical approach because he'd been in the Italian campaign, he'd seen war at first hand. And I think he'd read a lot of his essays.

They're very influenced by his own experiences, which made him sceptical, I think, of grand theory because he saw how it all broke down when actually he got to the fighting end of everything. So he was skeptical of grand theory. It wasn't, and I hope is true with me, it wasn't that he was uninterested in the question of theory.

methods, he knew that they could be important. But he wasn't bothered about getting too much into that. It was the substance of the issues. And I think his generation, having been through the war, they'd have to confront the nuclear age. And he was one of the founders of the International Institute for Shia University for Studies, for example, which was set up precisely because there was concern in the UK

at the time that there just wasn't the intellectual capacity to cope with the ethical and strategic challenges posed by nuclear weapons. So for somebody whose training was to look back particularly into the 19th and early 20th centuries, he probably had some now to cope with the present because it was posing such different challenges. And I think that's what animated a lot of what he was doing.

And I think the ethical side of that bothered him. He worried about the relationship between morality and strategy. So it wasn't a simple academic exercise for him. It never was, just because of the way he entered it. Also, I think it's important to know with Michael that he had his own run-ins with the history department at King's College, which is why all studies existed came to exist as a separate department. and when I first got to know him, he wasn't part of the history faculty at Kings. A lot of historians didn't think of him as a proper historian, some still don't. And then he got the sort of the big chair at Oxford, the Chichley Chair of Military History.

He meant to everybody's surprise, he got the Regis Chair of History, which is the sort of top history job in the country, he says largely, because this was a sort of prime ministerial appointment, and Margaret Thatcher knew his name. But for whatever reason, I think he was always trying to demonstrate that he was a proper historian, but that he was able to do it in a modern way.

One of the things he did was to modernize history teaching at Oxford. He was a very activist sort of guy. If you could recommend one book by Michael Howard where people should start, where out they start? I started with a collection of essays. simply called Studies in War and Peace because I found out he was going to be my supervisor

and I thought I were to read something he'd written and I just sort of, I mean I can still I've still got my copy with all the sort of annotations and exclamation mark and it was just a revelation because I hadn't read anything like that before. My background was in the social sciences and I sort of remember reading it and thinking, gosh, I want to do this, this is what I want to do.

And any of those collections of essays do that, use and abuse of history. another one. One of my favourites is a book called War on the Liberal Conscience, which is a collection of lectures altogether, because it actually speaks to a lot of issues that became even more important after he wrote it about how do you manage to combine political liberalism with a small hell. The US and UK can use liberalism in different ways,

but sort of classic liberalism and the responsible uses of power, accountable power, distrust of war, dislikable, with the fact that war seven of that times have to be found. And I think it's an extremely erudite, beautifully written, thoughtful introduction into those core issues

that are still with it, they don't go away. It's lucky that in most cases other people won't see them, but I always worry about my own marginalia that these really are hostages to fortune. And I've had two kinds of experiences with them where especially when I was younger, certainly undergraduate days,

I'll open up a book and wince and think, no, young man, you really completely missed the point. You have no idea what that paragraph actually meant. But now I'm also getting to an age where I'll look at stuff I said in my 20s and 30s and think, oh, that was actually quite well put. I'd forgotten that. That's a more sophisticated understanding than I have today.

It's always alarming when you, I find a lot of, I mean, because you know, so reached a great age, when you look back at stuff, and you forgot that you once had worked that all out by yourself and had written it down in quite clever way. And then, you know, 30 years later, you made exactly the same point believing it was still original. I did, I mean, about the first book that I did that made an impact, the one that got me in my job was the evolution of nuclear strategy. And then last decade, I revised it.

with a colleague Jeff Michaels. And it was a really odd experience going over stuff I'd written in my late 20s to partly to sharpen the prose and bring it up to date. And I felt a combination to be quite pleased with myself at some of the insights,

but really irritated at my verbosity. Why didn't I just get to the point? So I think it is quite sobering And even just doing a collection of essays like this, sometimes one forgets or one misremembers the positions one took. Actually, another reason why substack is good, because you can't escape. I mean, it's out there.

And if you said something silly, there's plenty of people who are going to remind you about it. But it keeps you on it. I mean, that's the thing that was thinking, aloud about my annotations and note-taking. Because an undergraduate had a very good friend. still a very good friend, who was a single mother, and I used to take notes for her. And she always said she could always tell how good the lecture was, because if it wasn't,

it was just full of little cartoons and doodles and so on, and not very many notes. So I'd like to shift to Colin Gray, the subject of another essay in the book, now appear, and strikingly similar to you in terms of origin stories. And then, of course, you deal with many of the same issues over the course of your careers, though from often different angles. Tell us about Colin Gray and where Colin Gray came from. Well, Colin is just, I mean, a little bit older than me, not that much, had similar interests, starting with nuclear strategy and arms control,

and then branching out. He spent quite a lot of time in the States. He worked at the Hudson Institute and then set up his own institute, and eventually came back to the UK to Reading University. and he wrote lots and lots of books about strategy. I mean, it was a constant theme in everything he did. And it's what made Colin interesting was he's constantly trying to get it right.

It's a conversation with himself, foremost. I mean, I had two, although we were sort of similar in background in many ways, and we knew each other reasonably well, we were very different. I mean, he started out on the hawkish side of the argument and I started out on the dovish side and that was part of it.

I became, I think, more of a historian, mainly because of Howard's influence, I guess. And Colin wasn't really, he didn't do big historical studies. He used a lot of history, he was very erudite. But if you read his stuff, he's sort of pulling examples from everywhere to try to help him make his point. He's very influential of a book called Strategy Bridge

in particular, really captured some very big ideas. And you always dealt with Colin that if you had a good point to make, he would acknowledge it and take it there. And he really went for you if you had a bad point, which was fine. So I wrote the essay in Park

I had a sort of slight guilt that I never really engaged properly with him while he was alive, and after he died, and this was being made. I wanted to do a proper assessment rather than just say nice things. And I think that the more I did it, the more I appreciated this sort of evangelical determination to promote strategy, that it's something that people should really think about and put time into.

There was a struggle to work at exactly what strategy was. How do you best define it? How do you explain to people why it's worthwhile? And one of the arguments we had towards the end after my strategy book came out, which he was, basically, it wasn't the way he would do it because he wasn't interested in business strategy and political strategy as I want. But I'd had to go at the idea of a master strategist.

My view is that strategy is something everybody has to do in some way, especially if they reach a senior position. And they can do it bad or worse, but some of it's going to be intuitive and so on. But I think Colin presented it as something that really is very challenging and difficult and requires rather special people to do it well. And I wasn't sure of that. So we argued about that. So we had, you know, we had differences.

We weren't of like mind at all. But, you know, it really ought to be possible to disagree and argue and challenge each other without falling out. And I think we managed that. One aspect of his work that you point to in your piece that struck with me as his own sort of evolving view on this question of, is strategy a body of knowledge which is, sort of unchanging and thus as a consequence, or at least partly as a consequence, it was formulated quite early. I think the line is if Thucydides, Sun Tzu, and Klaus Fitz did not say it, it's probably not worth saying or something like that. Or are there new things under the sun or new formula,

formula or, you know, are there, in fact, in the 20th and 21st centuries fresh things to be said about strategy? And having made that very blunt observation at some point in his career, you suggest that he was perhaps softening a bit. I think he was. I think, you know, there are clearly timeless features of strategy. If you read to Cidides or Pliny or, you know, anybody from the classics, you know, I recognized that. I can see what they were trying to do.

And in my book on strategy, you know, I started with apes because they know how to form coalitions, they deceive each other and so on. So I think there are aspects. aspects of strategy that are unchanging. And you can still look at Klausovitz. I mean, Sun Su, I think, is very aphoristic, so you can always find a Sunsou quote to some of your purposes. And some of the most famous Sunsu quotes turn out to be made up.

So it's not, they don't even come from Sun Tzu. But you can read Klausovitz for profit still. But it's not a sort of, you shouldn't use it like, you know, the Marxists would use Marx or Lenin, as if it's, the absolute truth and you can't deviate from it. And, you know, having conversations now prompted by AI and experience of the wars we've been through, which some of it, Kausovic, would have well understood

and could have joined in happily, others he would found bewildering. So, you know, obviously this is a subject which has to change, especially in the military sphere. I think one of the values of remembering the classics is it stopped you're getting too obsessed with new technologies because otherwise you can assume that every bit of new technology changes everything and warfare will never look the same again,

whereas in practice, there's certain features that just keep on repeating themselves. You mentioned that over the course of your careers, but especially early on, you tended to approach questions from a more doveish angle and gray from a more hawkish angle. You have a separate piece collected in the book on Reagan and Star Wars in the Strategic Defense Initiative, where I assume this was one of those times. It's just funny, just before we convened this morning, Sir Lawrence, I recorded an episode on the big week of nuclear news that we had last week with the end of new start and the

version of this Chinese nuclear test. And as you know, you know, President Trump is calling for the creation of Golden Dome. So what's old is new again, it seems. And so maybe say a word a bit about, well, about you and about Colin Gray. I don't know if he would have been at Hudson at the time and sort of under the umbrella of Herman Kahn, But what were these debates in the early 80s about Star Wars? And where did you come down and where did he come down? And what, if anything, seems relevant today from all that?

Well, I mean, it actually goes back further than that with me because it starts with my thesis under the supervision of Michael Howe in Oxford, which was on the way the US intelligence community assessed Soviet strategic arms development and the influence on policy. And the big debate then of the late 60s and early 70s was anti-ballistic missile, anti-blistic missile defensives. And this was a bitter as any that followed,

and I think set the terms for what followed, because in the sense it was the one the doves won, although many of the hawks could point out in a rather perverse way, because the argument was that to have stability in the nuclear age, you had to recognise the dominance of the offensive, because then you have mutual deterrent, whereas if one side had a breakthrough in missile defence that would be a source of instability

and would mean that a first strike became a possibility so you have this sort of slightly perverse logic that the defence good and defence bad which understandably a lot of people sort of recoiled that but I sort of accepted that logic and the basic problem was that it didn't seem to me to be so much a policy choice as just a fact of life that if you tried to set up a defence,

the offence could normally beat it, especially when you're talking about nuclear weapons because not many needed to get through in order for it effectively to have failed. And the defence would have to protect against large numbers of targets, not being sure when an attack could come against what it would be directed, what the tactics would evolve, and then when you had multiple warheads on individual missiles,

it all became harder. So my view embedded quite early on was that whether or not you would like to see a defence against nuclear attack, good luck. I mean, it was just very unlikely. So when Star Wars came along, I think that was mine

and most people's instinctive response, and it was right, and Star Wars never, the Strategic Defence Initiative never lived up to the claims being made for it. And, I think my view, at the time was, if you really want to deal with the nuclear threat,

you're going to do better with disarmament than you are with defences, or you could have a combination of the two, which some people suggested. Of course, disarmament turned out, pretty tricky, as we've seen as well. So I was always skeptical, and I remained skeptical about Golden Dome. I mean, I don't think the US can afford what it will involve, and if you look at particular challenges with it, you just look at the defense of Guam, which we've pointed out to be a number of times is a good test for missile defences. It's complicated and expensive, and a lot of the systems don't work.

Now, I think the polarisation of the debate was a bit unfortunate, though, because I think what it did was lead to a skepticism about all defenses under all circumstances. Whereas in practice, and I think this became quite clear when we came to Desert Storm in 91, and the Iraqi scud attacks and so on. Actually, defences in some cases can be very useful, if only in morale boosting, and pretty important. I obviously were seeing this daily in Ukraine at the moment. So I think there were very special circumstances with defence against nuclear-tip missiles

that in most, and I think the arguments then still hold very strong, but it migrated over into conventional defenses, and I think we've got over there now. We can see where conventional defense really does make a difference and is important. Well, I want to draw this out a bit, if you'll allow it. I think it's sort of incontrovertibly the case that the Doves won the argument back in the Cold War, just for the fact that Reagan in the end doesn't see it through and sort of has his own turn towards arms control as well. So rightly or wrongly, that the doves win the policy argument,

I wonder if all the Hawks, you know, if Colin Gray were back and with us commenting on the events of 2026 and where the United States may be going after last week's big week of news on these questions, is the improvement in the technology of missile defense, which seems to me to be pretty demonstrable between the 1980s and today. If you look at Israel and Iran in 2024 and then the 12-day war in 2025, I mean, things do get through and perhaps Sir Lawrence, which you'll tell me as well, that's all you need to know, because if there's nuclear tips, all you need is a couple things to get through,

and it's failed. I don't know. I mean, it's, you know, if you have a system that's designed really to protect your own capabilities as some sort of counterfeit, perhaps the problem with the hawks all along, and you suggest this in your essay, is that they're making this claim that this is to protect populations. And the truth is there is no defense system, even with 2026 technology, so comprehensive,

that you're going to reliably in the face of a massive barrage of enemy nuclear missiles or nuclear weapons one way or the other actually prevent any American city from being bombed. But if instead you're thinking about things in more of a counter-force way and they're trying to take out our capabilities and we're trying to take out their capabilities, you actually have to defend a lot less. to pull that off and the technology to defend it is getting better.

What's wrong with that line of argument? No, I don't think there's anything right. I mean, I don't think one should be dogmatic about these things these days. I still think it's the case that if you want to protect against a Russian nuclear barrage, you've got your work cut out, whatever the improvements and sensors and interceptors and so on. And that's probably increasingly true with China. China as well. I mean, by all means look at it, but it's going to be tough.

Obviously, if you're dealing with Iran from North Korea, you know, we've had a book and a TV program that postulated a single North Korean nuclear shock, triggering Armageddon. You know, famously in House of Dynamite, the intercept didn't work. So you're always going to have that nagging doubt that if you're going to be dependent at a moment or technology that's never been tested in the right way to see you through the crisis. But when you're talking about Israel's Iron Dome or the efforts by Ukraine to protect its infrastructure and so on, it's going to be much more patchy, much more patchy. And nobody would suggest that Israel, well, I think some people would suggest that Israel was wrong to develop

and dome, but it's certainly, strategically, it's helped them a lot. Because given the threat that they were facing for Khamas and Hezbollah, it could cope. It could cope pretty well. And the Iranians were sort of at the edge of their range against more sophisticated threats. Or let's say, Hamas and Hezbollah had coordinated their actions on 7th of October 23, and everything had come at once, Israel would have been caught. So, I mean, these things are not black and white. Ukraine shoots down a lot of incoming Russian missiles and drones and so on.

It doesn't quite shoot down enough, especially when the weather is extremely cold. So I don't think one should be dogmatic about it. Technology, as you say, has improved in ways I wouldn't have expected. and the speed of decision-making, which AI helps with in terms of identifying an incoming threat, working out what you've got to meet it and so on, working out whether it's worth dealing with this because its trajectory is leading somewhere important as opposed to somewhere irrelevant. All of this is a step forward, but we can see that even the best defenses can still get overwhelmed. There's so much else we could talk about from the volume, but we have limited time.

And so I think I want to take you to your piece on tactics, which is really a piece, ultimately, about the differences between tactics and strategy. And in a way, your most recent answer sort of takes us there, that these questions of strategy when we're talking about nuclear exchanges pretty quickly merge with questions of tactics at a high level. But I'll just say this in praise of the piece, which I really do recommend, is it has the this quality that I used to, I had this reaction to it that I often had reading Charles Crowdhammer back in the day where I would finish one of his columns and think to me, this

reveals plenty about me, but nevertheless, I would read one of his columns and think to myself, well, yeah, obviously, that's obviously true. And then I would think, well, if it was so obviously true, why didn't I say it? Why didn't I write it? And this, it was sort of, it was these things that seem very commonsensical, except they're not articulated enough and certainly not by me. So what inspired you to clarify what tactics actually is? And why has tactics fallen into low repute compared to all of the ink spilled on questions of strategy? Yeah, I mean, I know it's actually what inspired me

because I was one of the contributors to the Hull Brands' makers of modern strategy and I wrote a piece about how the term has been used over the last few centuries and so on. and I was doing a session on behalf of the book and it suddenly struck me while we're talking that there's no makers of modern tactic and that tactics tends to get disparaged that's sort of a lowlier activity

and this was just a sort of thought that occurred to me while I was talking and the more I thought about it afterwards the more I thought actually this it's a more serious thought than you thought you were making at the time. I was sort of vaguely joking about it. Nobody becomes the vice president for tactics. You have lots of vice presidents for strategies in organizations.

I was one myself. So I started to think about it, and the more I thought about it and just think about it in popular culture and so on. Actually, we focus on tactics all the time. It's the most interesting stuff people do, because unless you get your tactics right, you can have the best strategy in the world,

and it's just not going to get anywhere. And the famous line from Sun Tzu, which I quote, is one of the mythical ones. It was made up a couple of few decades ago. Everybody quotes it, and I'd quote it, embarrassed to say, until one day I checked it and realized it wasn't there. But people play it down, and in practice you move forward with tactics

if you don't have good tactics. Anybody who's worked in an organisation, and had a managerial responsibility. It knows you can have the best ideas in the world, but if you can't persuade people, if you can't work around bureaucratic obstacles, if you can't find the money, if you can't spend the money sensibly,

it all fall apart. So that was the origins of the piece and what I wanted to say. And I almost thought of calling the book in praise of tact. Because I think it is probably the most original piece in the book in some ways. and it's one that I keep on coming back to it in lectures and so on now,

because I get tended to ask to talk about strategy, nobody ever asked me to talk about tactics. But you've got to be able to implement. And it also goes to, I think, one of the big problems with a lot of strategy making and policy making, which is the disconnect between the strategists or the planners and the doers. people have big ideas and it all looks very clever, but they never check it with it. If they don't check it with the people who are going to actually have to put it into practice, it's going to go wrong because the people who can put it into practice will tell them that won't work. It doesn't happen like that. You don't understand the systems.

We haven't got the resources for them. Oh, whatever. So that's why I think it's something that's worth banging on about. Just to sort of prompt you to give us the crux of the argument, let me Let me pose a question to you like this. I think it would be possible to come up from the kind of tactical education that I had in Quantico, Virginia, which gives you some, I mean, they sort of gesture in the direction of strategy, but without getting too much preoccupied by it. But you know, you learn this sort of classic, or these days classic hierarchy, there's tactics, then there's operations, then there's strategy, then there's grand strategy. And it would be possible to walk away from that summary introduction and think, well, these are all kind of the same thing. They're just operating at different scales and on different timelines.

tactics is, you know, the firefight or the gun battle one way or the other that you're in today. Operations is a series of them and the coordination of them. Strategy is the war. You know, I don't need to. I think most listeners will appreciate the way in which there's a way of understanding strategy and tactics. It's just differing in their scale, in their time horizons, but fundamentally being the same activity. What differences in kind are there between tactics and strategy? They are fundamentally the same in the sense

you've got to understand what your opponent is trying to do as you're trying to, on the assumption the opponent is trying to work out what you're trying to do and you're both trying to get in each other's way and stop it happening. So there are, in part, usually, the reasons you've indicated, it's hierarchy. And if you can say, this is the mission,

this is what we're trying to achieve, then you had it over to somebody else to achieve it. And as it goes down the chain of command, the message can get a bit lost or simplified or whatever. And it may, by the time it reaches the bottom, be totally unrealistic or be misspecified. And those at the top don't understand the problems, you know, why it's not happening and so on. So there's a command issue here, especially in the military sphere. Now, one of the interesting things is because of the technological developments and communications, Senior commanders can now watch the tacticians,

they watch the junior officers trying to implement what they're supposed to be doing. It can interfere. Nightmare. Which is one sort of set of problems because they're still not seeing things like the junior commander's season. Equally, of course, the junior commander confide us for the so-called strategic corporal

can find themselves in a position where they're taking massive decisions in practice, but they're presented as being tactical. So I think, They are part of a piece and should be understood as being part of a piece. Hierarchy and organisational challenges means that one, at the top you're supposed to see the big picture and at the bottom you concentrate on the little picture. And there's a granularity in that which obviously makes a difference with tactics.

I think what I was really getting at is tactics is about implementation. It's about making sure that what you want to happen does happen. You can think about the future with strategy, but you move forward with tactics. And that's where the drama comes and a lot of the challenges come. Strategy can look really great when it's set out in the PowerPoints or in the three-page memo or whatever. But unless somebody can actually turn this into practice,

then it'll just be so many words. Yeah. And you can think of all sorts of examples all. around us every day of great strategies let down by terrible tactics. Well, and as you point out, this is why you get all sorts of movies about tactics and battles, but not as many about strategy. It's very few movies about people scratching their heads and writing long memos. That's not very dramatic or exciting.

Yeah. I think just on this difference with implementation being the key. Yeah, that's really what I was getting at. Yeah, no, no, and it's important. I mean, I think about my time as a lieutenant and a captain. If I was ever sitting around ruminating about what my ultimate goal here was, the system had badly broken down. And I actually probably was once or twice, is the truth. But that because the system had failed, really, I should know my goal. And someone should have given it to me, whereas a strategist, certainly a grand strategist, if you're Henry Kissinger sitting there in the White House, you are on some level ruminating about what, what am I trying to do here? What is the system? What is the American place in the world that I am trying to. to bring about. And maybe you change your mind about that. I think there's something else, which is also part due to my view of strategy, I think too much strategy starts with ultimate objectives and works backwards. How do we get to this far better state of affair? And then, you know, through a series of steps from where we are, we'll get there.

My view of strategy is it starts with the here and now. In practice, you've got a problem that's trying to solve and the job of the strategist, is to work out what to do about it. I mean, after all, a lot of strategy is responding to somebody else's initiative. And, you know, going back to this movie, House of Dynamite, they clearly had no idea what to do. When all of a sudden, they're a pretty preposterous scenario, but anyway, they didn't know how to deal with it.

So, I mean, I think strategy gets stuck with the high objectives and the assumption that you're taking an initiative to get to this far. better place, whereas actually a lot of strategy is reactive ad hoc, trying to make sense of a developing situation. And that's why it more easily merges into tactics, whereas if you have this more exalted view of strategy, then it is a very different activity from tactics. Because tactics is here and now, whereas strategy might be about these great visions for the future. Though it's funny, even though I just invoked Henry Kissinger a minute ago as the example of somebody who, you know, to judge by his later writings, you know, you're sort of sitting around ruminating about national destiny. The truth is, if you read his memoirs, and this is the point I make the students with some frequency, White House here is, I think, is a fascinating, extremely well-written book. And what it involves is, even though it's happening at the strategic level of national affairs, it's just chock full of tactics. And by tactics, I mean, who do I, if I want to achieve objective,

here on Tuesday, I want to achieve policy objective X. Who do I call? What do I say to them first? Who do I not call? Who do I make sure doesn't know that I called whom, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the business. That's the job. Kisinger's success, however it's viewed in history, was he was a master of bureaucratic

intrigue. I mean, he knew how to make the system work. He knew it was ruthless in doing so. And, you know, would dissemble, makes stuff up, or whatever. I mean, in the last, in my book, on command, I looked at the Easter campaign in 1972 against the North Vietnamese offensive. And it's fascinating, just reading the memos and the stuff

and seeing how Kissingham was trying to manipulate everybody because he wanted the peace process to carry on. And his view, I mean, it's a fascinating clash because his view was, at Nixon's, view was somehow you've got to browbeat the North Vietnamese into providing concessions on the peace process, while the commanders in Saigon were desperate to try to stop North Vietnamese offensives. I wanted to use available air power for that purpose and that purpose only, rather than worrying about coercing Hanoi. So it's a very interesting clash of strategies.

This is genuinely strategic issue, but it comes down to how do you use your available air force. If I have one nagging fear about all of this, just because we've spent so much time today talking about nuclear affairs, you know, the world of, well, of the Second World War, where you have Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill consulting with the military chiefs responsible for ultimate decision-making. But then things take days, weeks, months to play out, you can sort of assess the fruits of your decisions. It's formulated. It's brought back to you for a new. political decision. I'm oversimplified and it was obviously a lot more stressful than that, but nevertheless, you know, if push ever came to shove at the nuclear level, both our systems of governments are launched in the UK and the United States, both nuclear armed countries,

really require our senior politicians, our prime ministers and presidents, they will suddenly have to be tacticians and what will definitionally possibly be the greatest war ever fought. and it will potentially all be over, or at least unalterably defined in a few hours, if that. That gives me pause. That occasionally worries me. Because it is a different business tactics. You know, it's... Well, I mean, the problem is that there are no good tactics for these situations.

I mean, if you're faced with a nuclear war, you've already failed because deterrentices failed. And I think we use the phrase deterrence has failed too loosely. When anything happens, we don't like. We think, well, we fail to deter them. But if nuclear weapons are being used, a deterrence has failed. And deterrence works because nobody knows quite what will happen, what the sequence of events will be, how escalation will take place.

And that's because it's very difficult to come up with sensible uses of nuclear weapons, because they all depend on the psychological effect on the decision-makers at the other end unless you're confidently you can actually manage a disarming first strike, which at the moment still is beyond anybody's reach. So the problem you've got,

which is why, you know, fortunately, in a way, scenarios for nuclear war remain pretty difficult to work out and seem to depend on Madn-North Korean leaders at the moment. Because of that, the Terrance sort of holds as basic uncertainty about how it would all work out. And, you know, again, going back to House of Dynamite, I mean the bewilderment of the president when in the quarter of an hour,

which I think would be a compressed timeframe, but in a quarter of an hour, it's got to work out what to do next, is none of the options presented to him making any sense at all. All of that sort of ran true, except I don't think a serious military commander would have asked him to make that sort of decision and order them out. That's why the scenario doesn't work.

But if you look, a lot of presidents, when they have this introduction to the Seop, they used to be, and I mean, they don't want to do it. They find it revolting. They don't, you know, Reagan famously, he didn't want to be confronted by those sort of decisions. And good, you know, you can understand why.

But at the same time, this is their responsibility. They've got it. I once had a conversation with Margaret Thatcher because she was, as a conversation while she was in office, and the military were urging to take part in Wintech, the NATO crisis gave. And she really didn't want to because she thought it was a waste of time. And they were worried on this point that politicians just don't want to get their heads around. It's just too difficult. And they assume when they get to that point, there's not much that can be done anyway.

Tell us more about the conversation. What did she say to you? What she said. She had been to one of these exercises before, and she said, didn't I bomb Cuba? I had no idea how this arose, but it was a good line. We have just a couple minutes left, and I would be remiss if I didn't ask you for your thinking,

on the latest in Ukraine. You follow it closely. You cover it regularly in your substack. We're recording this on Monday, February the 9th. It's a cold winter. The Russians are going after Ukraine's ability to heat their country, the diplomatic flurry, the pressure from the Trump administration to somehow bring the fighting to a close.

That's maybe less neutral than it ought to be as a statement. Just give us your sense, Sir Lawrence, of where we are and where we might be headed in the weeks to come. Three things. First, I remember I was actually having a conversation with somebody in Ukraine this morning. It's very tough, but they're coping with difficulty, and they will see it through.

I mean, what has made the difference this time has been the harshness of the winter. Last winter was relatively mild when they coat. So it's very tough, and it's cruel. I don't think it'll decide the war. I don't think Putin is prepared at the moment to make the concessions necessary to get, I mean, to give up on more outrageous demands.

And I think one of the important consequences of the totality of the Trump administration's policies is they actually have less leverage now on Ukraine than they did a year ago. I mean, Ukraine really doesn't want to fall out with the administration. They'll do everything possible to stay on side. But they're not going to give up a whole chunk of territory because Trump wants them to.

And I don't think Putin is ready to accept that he's not going to win, that he should cut his losses. I think on the third area, which is the front line, what strikes me is just what is monumental failure, the Russian offensive, has been. Whatever happens now, they may press forward. They may break the Ukrainian lines at some point, though increasingly, I'm doubted.

But this offensive really began in late 23, with a lawful lot going for Russia. Ukraine demoralized after the offensive hadn't gone well, Congress cutting off its funding, real problems with mobilization of manpower, Russia having superiority in manpower and artillery, and everything else, it seemed, at the time. Some early breakthroughs in 24.

and yet here we are. Pocross was about to fall in August 24. Still going. And I don't think people call out the failure of the Russian offensive in February 22. But I say whatever happens now, they spent a couple of years, over more than two years, with so little to show for it and so many lost,

seems to be one of an extraordinary military failure. And I think the nature of the battlefield now, makes it very different for I decide to mount effective offensive just because the follow-through is so hard. So, and you don't get again the impression from talking to Ukrainians, following Ukrainian sources, that they're particularly gloomy about the military prospects for the coming months.

It's difficult. You know, all wars are difficult. And, you know, lots of people die and there's a lot of suffering. But I don't get the feeling that things are as critical for Ukraine as certainly they appear to me to be this time two years ago. Now, these are dangerous statements to make, and somebody will say, hi, look at what you said, and then the Russians break through.

I just find it difficult to expect. Now, if they don't break through, there's going to be a moment in the spring when Putin is going to have to contemplate the fact that the Ukrainians didn't capitulate because of the suffering imposed on them over the winter, the lack of progress on the front line. But I would say it's still lack of progress,

even if they do make, get a few more cities, at another city or a town or a village or whatever. And the economy in trouble. The Russian economy is in trouble. So at some point you have to think there's going to be a reckoning. The problem is for Putin, this is existential. He believes it's existential for Russia.

It's certainly existential for him. And to give up would be to admit a terrible failure because although this is a ceasefire now would hardly be considered a victory for Ukraine because so much of their territory is occupied

it's hardly a victory for Putin because of the objectives he set for himself so you know it always seems like the next few months are critical and this war's now been going on longer than the Great Patriot Soviet Union's great patriotic war so it can go on long

But you do have a feeling that in the Kremlin, there must be some of the view that Trump gave Putin his best chance of ending this war with some sort of dignity. And, you know, a president that was... Clearly wanted to do a deal, wants to do a deal with Putin, but Putin just didn't give him enough. And that, again, may be seen as a diplomatic failure

to go with the military failure. I may be being too optimistic. It's not particularly optimistic because it's just the war carries on when people keep on dying. But if it's going to end, it's going to end in the Kremlin. I mean, that's where the decision to end it will be. Because the Ukrainians don't have much choice. They've got to keep on going. Lawrence Friedman, the book is called On Strategists and Strategy,

collected essays 2014 to 2024. It is the nature of a podcast that's only an hour long that we could only really cover a couple of things in the book. There are plenty of other. I love the pieces that we're. we just made reference to, but there's great reflections in there on metaphors drawn from chess for military strategy and sort of investigating the origins of the term stalemate and how relevant it is and reflections on poker and John McDonald and journalism. I wish there were more books, more collections like this. And so thank you so much for making this contribution and for coming

on School of War. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you.