School of War - Ep 50: Lawrence Freedman on Command

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London and author of Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine, joins the show to discuss how politics and military command are inextricably linked. ▪️ Times  • 01:08 Introduction • 02:01 Command  • 05:44 Politics and generalship • 08:00 MacArthur myths  • 11:59 Educating future commanders • 15:50 France’s end of empire • 22:57 Democratic drawbacks • 27:51 Putin’s position • 33:49 Ukraine endgame • 37:27 Better off without Putin • 39:09 Winter is coming

Generals should stay out of politics, and politicians should leave the military alone to do what the situation calls for, within the intent of the commander-in-chief, right? Well, it's never been quite that simple. Not in America, not anywhere else for that matter. Today, we're going to speak with Lawrence Friedman about the burdens and complexities of high command, about political generals and militant politicians, and what the reality of leading in war actually involves. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. We shall fight on the beaches.

We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Honored to have with us today, Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman. He's the Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London. He was Professor of War Studies there and Vice Principal as well before.

He is the author, most recently of Command, the Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Professor, thanks so much for joining the show. My pleasure. So as I think some of our listeners will know, about a decade ago, you published another impressive volume called strategy. In some ways, this seems like a kind of follow-up. And so my first question for you is very broad. What is this book about?

How is command distinguished in your mind from an analysis or inquiry into strategy? And then I could add to that. How do you distinguish it, on the other hand, from sort of similar categories like leadership, for example? Right. So first, it's a ways of it's a, explain this a different book. The book on strategy was a history of a concept over over

long periods of time and in different domains, whereas this is a more sort of old-fashioned history looking in detail at particular episodes and trying to work out who did what and said what at a particular time. But there's a close link. The link is that strategy is about how ends relate to means. In the military sphere, how political objectives lead on on to discussion of the military instruments available for meeting them. And the place where that happens is command. So it reflects an interest in how policymakers and other military leaders and others in leadership positions address the big choices they face and how they decide.

And I'd say that's probably a recurrent interest in all my work. It tends to look at how decisions get taken. But command is a very special set of decisions. And it's obviously related to leadership more broadly, but it's a very special sort of leadership because it involves decisions of literally life or death. You're asking people, commanding people, ordering people to make moves that could lead them to their deaths or to them killing people. So it's a very special set of orders.

and precisely because of that, it has to be backed by a lot of authority. It can't just be an informal sort of leadership. It has to be backed by authority. So that's why I'm interested in the topic. I'd say there's two particular aspects that's worth noting about the way of approached it in the book. First, it's about post-1945 conflicts. I felt quite strongly that an awful lot, a very good stuff, a sort of complaint, is written

about the first and the second world wars or the Americans of the war, or so on. But there's actually not as much as you would expect written about the conflicts since 1945. The Cold War, though it involved quite a lot of warfare, actually at its heart, it's about nuclear issues and deterrence, something I've also written about. But there's an awful lot going on, which I think reveals quite a bit about contemporary warfare. The second was to address a debate that's very strong in the States and a bit in the UK between, what basically is about the proper relationship between civilians and the military.

And at its purest form, this is some Huntington's argument that the politicians provide the objectives and the military meet them. And there's sort of a deal between the two that they keep to their own spheres. Whereas in practice, I think I'm trying to show in this book, that doesn't work. They have their distinct responsibilities and competences, but the politicians need good military advice and the military need to be reminded all the time of the political objectives they're supposed to be achieving. On that note, you point out very early in the book that to be called a political general is, generally speaking, not a good thing. It's generally a term that's used pejoratively, but the spirit of the book is sort of devoted to showing the complexity of that. There are ways in which generalship is

inescapably political in ways in which politics gets a bit, I'm not sure that I think there's a corresponding phrase, but gets concerned with military affairs. So could you expand on that a bit? What does politics have to do with command? Well, it has a lot to do in a number of aspects. I mean, as you say, the reason why it often appears to people as being a slur to call somebody political is people think of it in terms of self-advancement or promoting one's branch above other branches, one genus above other units, seeking glory or whatever, playing bureaucratic games. That's how the word often gets used. But political obviously means much more than that.

On the one hand, it means relating armed force to the challenges of the world. the external environment. And we've seen a lot in contemporary warfare, especially obviously counterinsurgency, where generals find themselves having to deal with all sorts of political challenges, whether it's dealing with local warlords or local allies in the same coalition. When you're dealing with allies, you have to worry about their political masters as well as your own. It's about dealing with NGOs. It's about dealing with the media and so on. So you have to be quite savvy to be able to navigate your... way through that sort of environment. And then it is actually also about knowing how to make your

organisation work. If all you're doing is barking out orders at the time and assuming that the people will do exactly as you say without understanding the organisations and the tensions of conflicts within it, then you're likely to make some big mistakes. You won't be able to bring it with you. So you do have to be political in that sense of, of, essentially, having a strategy for your, for you, that looks into your own organization as well as out into the external environment. So quite, quite reasonably considering the subject matter, the first chapter of the book and the first major detailed study in it is of MacArthur and Truman. And something that, you know, I, along with probably most people who listen, generally familiar, you know,

MacArthur was a bit insubordinate. Truman finally got fed up with him and let him go. But something that your analysis hammered home for me that I probably knew on some level, but not front of mine, was it was as much of, because of MacArthur's shortcomings on the battlefield that finally made him vulnerable to relief. So walk us through the lessons you take away from MacArthur's relief. Well, I think the one you've given is an important one. So first, MacArthur was a political figure. It was the most celebrated American. and military commander in service at the time, because Eisenhower was out, eventually obviously became president himself, but MacArthur had been the Pacific commander, then had been

essentially pro-consul of Japan. He was considered a candidate for a Republican presidency. He had lots of, sorry, he was considered a Republican candidate, potentially a Republican candidate for the nomination for the presidency. He never quite got there. And he was certainly more popular than Harry Truman, who was the president. So the first thing is that MacArthur was a political figure, and he knew it. The second was that nonetheless, he was supposed to be subordinate to the president and the chain had come out, and he was very unwilling to show subordination. He, when asked him, go to Washington, he met Truman in a famous meeting in Wake Island,

Truman had to do a lot more of the travelling than MacArthur did to get there. And when that meeting took place, Truman, in a sense, needed MacArthur as much as MacArthur needed Truman, because MacArthur had just been very successful in the Korean War attention in finding a way to catch the North Koreans by surprise in an amphibious landing and was pushing the back. So at that point, it looked like MacArthur couldn't do much wrong, and Truman had to respect him. But the key issue then became of how far do you push the North Koreans back? How do you unify the country on an anti-communist basis without bringing the Chinese into the war? The Chinese communists had taken over in 1949. This was late 1950.

And the consequence of that was that he pushed too hard. He ignored orders to be careful, and he brought the Chinese in, and that was catastrophic. And the United Nations forces under MacArthur's command were pushed back, and he didn't really do the job of recovering the position. The subordinates did the job for him. And then so the basic argument was that he was complaining that he was handicapped by Truman's foreign policies, particularly. his reluctance to have a war with China.

And so that was the basis for his dismissal. Truman said it was because he was insubordinate. But the key thing was also, as you indicated, that the chiefs of staff in Washington no longer had confidence in MacArthur. And so did that. That was true of many others as well. They thought he'd lost his touch. He was showing his age.

So if he carried on being successful in his battles, then despite disagreeing with Truman on foreign policy, he might well have stayed, but he'd lost his luster as an accomplished general. This conversation and the sort of nuance of your analysis of this incident, along with any number of others in the book, prompts a question for me about professional military education, especially at more senior levels. Though maybe that prejudice is that maybe we shouldn't just think about that. We should be thinking about education broadly.

How do you prepare officers for the nuanced realities of politics in command such that they are successful and, you know, such that the political objectives of their country are actually fulfilled? So that's sort of the broad question that you can apply it more narrowly, you know, in your country, in the UK, to your knowledge in the United States or anywhere else, you know, are there places that sort of get this educational aspect right? I have my own doubts here in the United States, but I defer to you. Well, I think it varies. I'm involved in education of officers in both the UK and to some extent in the US, a certain lecture to both. And obviously, if I'm lecturing, these are points I make. I think it's difficult because on the one hand, you've got the certain professional things you need to understand. And you're not much use if you don't know how to run your force. And you don't have a basic understanding of logistics and communications and all.

and intelligence and all those basic things. Military history helps a lot. That's one reason why I try to write books like this, not in the sense that military history used to be looked at for sort of timeless lessons of war that are bound to be repeated because most wars have very distinctive features. But because it tells you the questions to ask,

the things to look out for. So I think a good grounding in military history helps a lot because you can imagine circumstances in which choices have to be made, which go well beyond the obvious professional choices that you would expect whether to move this battalion, that direction or that direction. But how do you persuade allies to come along with you? What happens if the local population seems to be turning against you and is harboring terrorists? These are sort of questions that many commanders have had to become familiar with, but were not necessarily prepared for in advance, and often would therefore look to political advisors or some such to help them work it through.

But really, it has to be part and parcel of the command decision making, not just an area where you take advice. So I think that helps a lot. It's the advantage of militarism, which will obviously tell you a lot about. some of the professional or professional judgments you can have to make as well. To come back to the specific contents of the book, you have a chapter about, I mean, in effect, the collapse of the French Empire, the post-World War II French conflicts in Algeria, Indochina. And it seemed relevant to me. I mean, I don't want to overstate this, but, you know, in the United States today, we're coming off of a bad record in the Middle East that heavily relied

on elite formations within the American military special operations, sort of high-end elements of conventional forces, Marines, airborne troops, and so forth. And at the end of the day, we were not successful in Afghanistan. I think the situation is a little more complicated in Iraq, but one way or the other, I don't think it worked out exactly like anyone planned at the outset. That's certainly fair to say. And so you have a generation of officers, some of whom are out and about, participating in politics in the civilian landscape, who are coming off of that legacy of failure. Now, it's not as extreme as the reality was for France. I'd be curious to know, I think listeners would benefit from you describing that world a bit, because American listeners in particular may not be

that familiar with the post-war French experience, where you have, you know, America retains a very significant position in the world. You know, that was not really, for France, it was the collapse of that position, right? So it was more acute. But the similarity, similar, similarities are there. And then this became a real problem for French politics just to make a bit of an understatement. Tell us a bit of that story. I think we could probably fill in some of the facts here. And do you agree with sort of the premise of my question is something for Americans to play close attention to? Yes. I mean, interestingly, not necessarily for the right reasons. They do play a lot of attention to the Algerian experience for reasons I'll come on to in a second.

So the Indochina experience was the one that involved military defeat with the Battle of the MBM Fu. And what's interesting there, I think, or what's relevant there is at some point, the political leadership in Paris sort of lost interest. They knew that this was not something that they could sustain. And I think there's a rather tragic disconnect which you could see in Vietnam, for example, well where you're asking the soldiers on the ground to fight a war that the politicians in the homeland have lost confidence in and i think that that puts them in a very difficult position now there were some very particular factors that the met that even in that of promising setting they they could have done a lot better at dm bmbm food they didn't have to go out with with a

battlefield failure but that's but that's what they did and i think they underestimated the opponent, was critical in that failure. And that's something you see time and time again, especially when big powers believe that they're fighting less mature, less developed, less capable armed forces. You can see it now with Russia and Ukraine. So that's part of the story of Indochada. Algeria was very different because Algeria was much more part of France.

It was closest to France. It wasn't a distant colony. Alian or so French lived there, and a lot of the schemes for thinking about the future of Algeria involved much closer integration with France, which would never beat an option within China. So it was a much more painful experience to lose it. But what's interesting in the case of Algeria is a military would say they didn't lose it. They defeated the guerrillas. I mean, the methods they use, which is why it's not necessarily inappropriate set of examples to use.

were extra legal to say the least. They used torture and extrajudicial killing, and they felt the politicians knew what they were doing, but they wouldn't want to acknowledge it. But in the end, in a brutal way, it was effective. Yet in the end, they felt let down because the politicians still realized the situation over the long term was untenable.

So first you have a coup which brings which isn't quite a coup, almost a coup, but it creates a constitutional crisis, which brings general to go to power in the late 50s. They may believe that the goal, the hero, the Second World War, the leader of the Free French, would understand what they were trying to do and support them, and then they realized to their horror that he didn't, that he couldn't see a way through Algeria other than by giving it independence, he was prepared to negotiate, to negotiate by independence which he did. And that led to another attempted coup, attempted assassination of the Gaul, and eventually calmed down, and he prevailed.

So it's a complete breakdown of civil military relations, at least in this area. A lot of the military didn't go along with the plotters and stayed separate from it. And it shows, I think, the danger when you allow, you encourage the military to think they're doing exactly what the politicians want them to do, even if it's dodgy at times, and then, I mean, you just cut them loose. And of course, it is totally unacceptable that they react to them that way. But it raised lots of questions about where the loyalty of the military should lie. It was a question raised by MacArthur as well. is your loyalty to the political authority or is it to some concept of the state or the

civilization the state is supposed to represent and in the end you need to be accountable to the political authority but it's a tricky one especially if you think the political authority is acting in a wayward way but you have to rely on your political system to sort it out not not your own military action so I think the Algeria one is interesting for that reason but you'll see that a number of some quite celebrated American commanders in Iraq and into Afghanistan, like David Petraeus and Stan McChrystal, were very fascinated by the Algerian example and encouraged their own troops to sort of read up about it and sort of emulate in the better aspects, these sort of tough, hard paratroopers.

Well, I just, to that point precisely in the summer of 2008 in Quantico at I, infantry officers course, we were all reading as a set text, Gouloula's, you know, guide to counterinsurgency. We were not reading his memoirs. And, you know, with the sprinkling of knowledge that I had wasn't much about Algeria. It did strike me that there were pieces of the story missing here. And Gullula wasn't that influential. I mean, he wrote very fluently about how he understood what had gone on, but he wasn't the most influential French writers either. right you know to this question of the perception of what troops are are fighting for in their own minds versus the sort of reality it strikes me that in the american context we have the following

problem i'm just curious to know if you agree or if you think this is a bit off you know speaking from my own experiences of going to afghanistan but i think you can you can say of the generation that went to afghanistan and iraq until the relative end of the conflict the last few years where actually to the extent that it seemed mostly the politicians didn't want to talk about it. I mean, that was their preference just to not talk about it at all. But in the early stages when they were talking about it, when George W. Bush was talking about it, when Barack Obama sort of ran and then initially governed on the grounds, Afghanistan was sort of the good conflict of the two, right?

The picture was painted in very grand and dramatic terms, right? With Bush in particular, right? We were fighting a war against tyranny for freedom. Obama, you know, restricted the scope of that somewhat, but nevertheless, we were fighting for certain values of the Afghan government was going to be a certain kind of good government. And that was the good thing. And we were fighting the bad thing that was opposing that. And, you know, America is a democracy and people understand that kind of language and get

fired up by it. I certainly was. But at the end, in Afghanistan, if there was any case for remaining in Afghanistan in the final years of the conflict, and I personally, I think there was. and I can make the case. It's a much grimmer sort of tale of security and geopolitics and Indo-Pakistani tensions. And so, you know, that's not a case that's quite as easy to make in a democracy,

especially when they're going to be casualties. So how do, you know, how do democracies employ troops for sort of these grim security ends that don't, that there aren't so easily painted in shades of black and white? It's a very broad question. No, it's a very good question. Go ahead. I think it is a problem for democracies that we want to make every conflict, one of goodies versus baddies.

And they're described in very aspirational terms. Now, you know, there are some conflicts where, you know, there is a right and a wrong, and you've got to hang in there and it's tough. But actually, the political objective suggests. itself. You know, come back to the current war. If you're Ukraine, you know exactly why you're fighting, however tough it is. You know why you're fighting, maybe less sure if you're a Russian. The problem with the counterinsurgency campaigns is it was never that clear because you were fighting about what another country's government should look like. And that's quite a difficult

thing to be short, because if it's democratic, then how can you control what sort of democracy it's going to be what sort of policies it's going to follow which became the issue in iraqa i mean there wasn't actually a great problem in getting a moderately durable iraqi government at least by the end of the first six or seven years the problem was in getting more that was sympathetic to what you were trying to do as well and and so it becomes complex and you know if you when people look around and they see corruption and they see that this government has to be friends with other countries you don't like. So what are we doing? Why am we doing this? And I think it's best to be aware of that right from the start because sometimes that's an argument just not to do it

to accept that there's that there are certain things you can do with armed force, but they're limited. And if you accept that, then you won't overreach in a way that we're probably overreached in both Iraq and Afghanistan. So there's this issue that we tend to think of strategies in terms of using means to achieve particular objectives and the objectives are set. Actually, the objectives have to change as you go along. Normally, you have to scale them down,

and that's what happened in Afghanistan. Actually, initially, they were scaled up. I mean, initially, it just went in to get bin Laden. But to get bin Laden, you had to get rid of the Taliban, and once you decided that there wasn't any deals to be done with the Taliban, which may have been a mistake, then you were into regime change. So it wasn't even the reason why you went in. Iraq, you went in for regime change, but without actually thinking about what would replace Saddam.

So these are very ambitious objectives. And I think, you know, the lesson, I think the two big lessons. At first, it's very hard to shape the government of another country when you're basically an occupying power. Secondly, you do need to talk about trade-offs. You do need to explain the things that military force can and can't do. Some things that are absolutely necessary for, there's a proper national security reason for it,

but other things exceed its capabilities. And I think that's, and politicians find it different. Because if you're putting people like you in a position of danger, then you need a really good justification for it. And it's hard to justify all of that on sort of notions of order instability and even international law. I think people want to feel that the world

will be a really better place for this war having been full. To shift gears a bit, you mentioned Ukraine. You've written extensively on the war in Ukraine since it began in 2014, but especially as its most recent phase. So I'd like to ask you for your view of where things stand.

And I should just say, it's the afternoon of Friday, the October 14th for anyone who's wondering, because things change quickly here. You know, on every, and there's no need to shut off the conversation on command, of course, because we have in the Russian context, a commander-in-chief who is in a crisis of his own making, facing many of the dilemmas, or some of the dilemmas that you address in the book. You know, on everyone's mind is this concern about nuclear escalation, as Putin's position, detainees, Maybe that's the best way to dive in here. What is your response to the widespread concern that Putin might attempt to work himself out of his troubles through escalation? So, I mean, I think the first thing to say, I mean, I was able to deal with this a bit in the book. And the initial mistakes Putin made, which again, underestimating the Ukrainians, arrogance, all of these things led to sort of initial blunders that the military didn't make worse,

from which they've never really recovered. So it's a good example. If you start off badly, it's hard to recover. And I think Putin has done all the worst things as a commander in chief because he's not only led his country into a war on sort of false pretenses, It's based on this apprehension about what Ukraine is about, that assumption that it lacks a national identity, it's not a real country.

So he did all of those things, and as a consequence of that, it's got it into a mess. A serious mess. And as you say, they're getting desperate. My view all along really has been that a lot would depend on what's happening on the ground. And I still think that and what's happening on the ground is that the Ukrainians have the initiative, Not one yet. The Russians, I think, over the last few weeks, the Russians are thrown everything into, at every level of this war, into trying to find a way to regain the initiative.

So you've got three main fronts, which is quite hard fighting. I think one or two of these will shift to the Ukrainian side soon and see. But there's also been upping, instead of scaling down the war rate, he's up them, so that now he's annexing four provinces and in Wignolowicz, he actually holds all the territory. He's mobilized the Russian population in a way that I think so far as hindered rather than helped. He's tried to put a lot of pressure on Europeans to abandon Ukraine, so far hasn't happened, and he's talked about nuclear weapons. I think we have to be incredibly careful on the nuclear issue because it's obviously scary. And we do have a nuclear power, but it's desperate.

But I think if you look from the start, Putin has used the nuclear issue in order to deter. He has his red lines and they basically are that the US, NATO should not join Ukraine directly in the wall. He can't stop them providing assistance, but they shouldn't join directly. And that Russia itself, Russia proper than that should say, shouldn't be put under threat. I think he's murdered that one because of the annexation. But I think that's, I think we still suspect that's what he cares about. There's shown this reaction to the destruction of the Kerr, or partial destruction of the Kirsch Bridge. So that's, and Biden and NATO has respected those red lines.

that NATO didn't provide a low-fly zone. Biden has been very careful not to provide attack them, the long-range version of high Mars so that they can hit over enormous distances, the sort of accuracy they're hitting. Now, after the brutal attacks on Ukrainian cities the other day, Zelenskyy wanted a fast-trap membership of NATO, Biden said, hold on.

So I think that, you know, I think Putin knows that. that actually, that's the benefit he gets from nuclear weapons. And if he uses nuclear weapons, that's potentially lost because all bets are off there. Also, it's actually very difficult to use them. I think people assume it's just pressing a button. You know, the Americans are watching all the time. He knows American intelligence that will pick it up. They haven't tested these weapons ever really properly.

The missiles that would probably be used. Some of them have already been shot down. Some of them don't work properly. The whole thing might end an embarrassment. If you use too many of these weapons and you generate a lot of fallout, then the fallout could travel over Russia. Or, you know, if you're not accurate enough, Russian and Ukrainian troops are close together. So there's all sorts of reasons not to assume this is an easy option for Putin.

You can't say because this is a... a situation where so much depends on one man's decision making that he won't. Just, you know, that would be irresponsible. But it seems to be also irresponsible to dwell on this to the exclusion of so much else that's going on. And I suppose the final point to make is, although it's his decision, quite a lot of other people would need to be involved. And you've got a Russian society pretty fed up already about mobilisation and such like.

which has seen as many people leave the country, as has actually been mobilized and a lot of casualties. So I think Putin's political problems are actually much more severe than the fact that Ukraine keeps on coming. It also now starts to be, how does he shore up his base at home, how does it give Russians more confidence in his leadership? And I don't actually think using nukes as a way to do it. But as I say, when you have somebody who's taking so many bad decisions,

you can't put me the possibility that you might take some more. So stepping back then and seeing things in their full context, where do you think we go from here? We're in a phase of the war where things are going relatively well for Ukraine on a number of fronts, going badly for Putin. As you point out, he's got a serious set of domestic problems on his hands. How does this end, sort of prejudices, maybe it doesn't end? But where's it going?

I say, all wars end, but of course they don't. Some of them just dribble on forever and then return. And then that's a danger here. I find very difficult to see how both sides can sustain this for that much longer. I mean, you've got winter coming up. I think the Ukrainians are getting some excellent winter kit coming in. Canada and Finland recently have announced. they're supplying it.

I'm not sure where Russia's going to get its winter kit from, especially for all these characters that they've mobilised. So I think there's some big issues on the battlefield that may just decide it. My view of the end game for some time, it's not a prediction, it's just the best guess I could make as to how it could end, is at some point the military realized this just isn't going anywhere.

And they're getting seriously depleted. they can't reconstitute themselves already for a long time. And at a certain point, the officer corps, the loss of elite regiments, the loss of so much kit, years of defense production. And the loss of reputation is going to make it very hard for them to recover and do the other things that are a great power army are supposed to do. So if I was my most optimistic, I would say, this point is reached, you then get a call for a ceasefire, this is a conditional ceasefire on Russian

withdrawal, there are some issues that may yet be addressed like Crimea, we'll see, possibly bits of the Dombas, we'll see. But initially they have a ceasefire and then possibly a bigger peace conference to address issues like sanctions and reparations. crimes and all the many things that somehow have got to be addressed to say you brought this to a close. So it's difficult. Meanwhile, I think you've got this increasingly feebrile atmosphere in Russia itself. So who knows what might happen there? And one tends to assume something's got to give in Moscow before we're really sure this will end. It's very hard to see how other the Ukrainian government or anybody else can deal with Putin, given the way Putin's behaved

over the last year. So it's hard to see this with a clean ending. But the initiatives currently are with Ukraine. And it really is in the Ukrainian interest to get this over with as soon as possible. I don't think they want this to dribble on. That's why I think they're pushing quite hard at the moment. And I think by the Russians are pushing quite hard back because and they see that as well. I mean, I certainly agree. I think most people would agree that a very positive outcome would be Ukraine regaining most, if not all of its territory and the fall of Putin.

Of course, you know, that sort of there's a, the implicit part of your, your description there is there's a class of people in Russia, you know, a sort of a tear down, a couple tiers down from Putin, leaders in the military, et cetera, who are. prepared to solve that problem or steer Russian politics in a direction that it is post-Putin. I mean, you know more about the subject than I do. Is there such a group of people who are capable of thinking in that way? I think there's a lot of people in Moscow thinking that they'd be better off without Putin. That's almost certainly true.

But they're not sure what else they agree on. And so there's quite a diversity of view. The biggest challenge to Putin has come from the hard right, has come from the nationalists. I mean, they're the ones who've been pushing for mobilization. They're the ones who are pushing for the missile and drone attacks on Ukrainian cities. They want a much tougher push. I mean, the sort of nice and moderate types are either in prison or exile or being killed. So I think, though I'm sure that the Russian military are very worried.

about where this is going, and are still in a sense following orders, at some point, you know, this could all prove very brittle, but it's just very difficult as an outsider, or indeed I suspect even as an insider, to know precisely how and when that will happen. I suspect it could, you know, it could be on the streets. I mean, it could be, or mutinies, or, you know, it doesn't take very much to all of a sudden trigger and explosion of popular. feeling or indeed feeling amongst all these conscripts that have been sent with the rusty old rifles and poor kit into a very hazardous war. So it's hard to know whether spark will come or when it will come, but it's equally hard

to see how this can last indefinitely. We're coming into the winter. Things are getting colder. Did the Europeans hold together in terms of their energy challenges, inflation, etc.? It's very tough. Britain's demonstrating that at the moment. But it's not, interestingly, the Ukrainians aren't blamed for this. I mean, I think the Russians are blamed for it.

So it's putting a lot of governments under pressure. Some people are better than others, but it's not an easy time. But I don't think it's going to, there's no indications at all that this leads to abandoning Ukraine, not at the moment. I think if we get to the spring, and this is still going on, and if there is still a sense of deadlock, then I think news will change. I think the argument that, you know, come on, we need to find a diplomatic outcome, which is very hard to see what that looks like in a moment in terms of some sort of grand bargain.

But I think those sorts of arguments will be heard much more. But at the moment, I think while Ukraine looks like it has the initiative and has been doing well, while Russia is behaving so appalling me, committing war crimes on a sort of daily basis, then I think, you know, by and large, we just have to accept that this is one of those situations which knock our societies back as well, which we have to make our own sacrifices, but not anything like the sacrifices being made by the Ukrainians. In the United States, obviously, we're very concerned about China, the other side of the world. What is the Chinese interests with regard to Ukraine?

How are they watching this unfold? How is they thinking about Taiwan affected by this? I mean, there's an obvious way, right, which if Putin gets away, but that they think they can get away, of course, we all sort of see that. But, you know, specifically right now, are they invested in Putin's success because of that? You know, how is this, how do they think about this? I think they distance themselves more and more, I think. I think they're quite cross with Putin.

because, you know, he had Z declaring undying friendship a few weeks before this happened. I don't think. I'm not sure that Zee was told it was going to happen. And then he's failed. I mean, so nobody wants to be associated with failure. Some of the Russian kit, the weapons that they're supposed to be done, haven't performed very well. American weapons have performed very well indeed. It's a reminder, as you indicate, that taking Taiwan may not be so easy,

that there are very many pitfalls in military operations, especially when he tried to take over people who were apt to fight back. So I think Zee is not happy about the way this has developed. I don't think it's the biggest issue that he faces at the moment, but it's certainly leading him to distance himself from Putin. I think he sort of saw an advantage at something that kept the Americans preoccupied on Europe a bit away from thinking about the Indo-Pacific, but actually hasn't quite worked out that way. As we've seen, the recent announcements, the Biden administration is still pretty focused on China.

And the things they've learned from sanctions against Russia is that the best sanction they've got is to deny microchips, because that's what's done for the Russian defense industry that may well do a bit for the Chinese now. Sir Lawrence Friedman, author of Command, Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Thank you so much for joining the show. Fascinating conversation. Good to talk to you. Thank you. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.