Historian Interview: Sir Lawrence Freedman

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another special episode of War and Conquest. I have once again tracked down and managed to find someone to come on the show to enable my procrastination of not releasing the next episode. So today's episode, we will have once again another historian on the show to talk about their work. Today's guest is a author, historian, and I think the coolest of all, the first night that we've ever had on war and conquest. Oh, I would like everybody to put your hands together and give a nice warm war and conquest. Welcome to Sir Lawrence Friedman.

So this is, this may be a strange question to start with, but if there ever is some sort of military crisis that happens in the UK, can you, the queen call on you to defend the country because of the, you know, the old laws of chivalry, or is that just a formality at this point?

Well, first we have a king now, not a queen. Oh yeah, that's right.

She did die.

Um, so I'm a, I'm also a member of the Privy Council. Um, so in which I take an oath to defend the monarch and, uh, um, from all his many enemies. It's a bit of a formality, however, uh, So I don't think the king would take an awful lot of interest in what I was doing. And I'm probably getting a little bit too old for the government to call on me, but you never know. I would certainly be commenting on it in my sub stack.

Well, that's good. I mean, I figured it was mainly a formality, but you never know with like all these like traditions, you know, there's probably some fine print at the bottom of your certificate that says, you know, keep the armor polished.

You don't get anything in return, and it's purely an honor.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, not that I've ever stand any chance of being knighted, but it's good to know. So what made me reach out in the first place was I read your book on nuclear strategy.

Fascinating.

Nuclear war is sort of a dark, guilty pleasure of mine. It's not something that I have I don't like constantly study it, but every now and again, I find myself getting sucked into that rabbit hole. So what was it that for you that started you down that path all those years ago when you first decided, uh, decided to write that book?

Right. So I got interested in nuclear strategy and arms control. Um, when I was an undergraduate, um, This wasn't because of nuclear protest movements or anything like that, because this is, we're now talking the late 60s, and by and large, the big protest movements, they sort of revived later, but they died down in the early 60s. But it was because I did a course on science and technology in government, which looked at the role of scientific advisors on nuclear policy.

on weapons procurement decisions. I'd got into the whole logic of assured destruction and mutual assured destruction and stability and so on, which I'd never thought of before. Deterrence, I'd never considered it. I just found it intriguing about the way in which there was a logic to it. You could see the logic and how it was working through, but it was crazy at the same time. So I found that fascinating. Then when I decided on postgraduate study, I got drawn into these debates. And initially I was going to look at the role of scientific experts in policymaking and looking at the ABM decision of the late 60s, early 70s. But then a whole lot of intelligence material became available. So I looked at the intelligence debates instead.

And that got me launched into this area. And the very few people working on this at the time were now into the sort of early 70s. And maybe, I don't know, it's because the first strategic arms limitation talks were agreed and so on. People thought maybe the problem had been solved. But When I was starting in the UK, there were four or five other people outside of government seriously working on it. And then I went to IISS Institute for Strategic Studies. And that's where I was asked to do this history of nuclear strategy. So I started it in 1976.

So just to interrupt briefly, you're saying like at that period of time, there was nothing like, say like the Rand corporation in the UK that was discussing all of these nuclear issues and things like that.

No, I mean, the, um, I mean, there was the Institute for Strategic Studies, there was Chatham House and so on, but you're talking very few people. I went to Chatham House after IISS, I was put a year there and went to Chatham House. Um, And there was me and somebody else. And we did work on the British nuclear program, which the government didn't want us to do because it was all too secret. And I remember when we produced what I think was a pretty good report, which I was not the main author. Somebody says, leave these things to the Rand Corporation in the US. They know how to do them. So I thought we'd done a good job, but that was the sort of attitude that we just didn't have that sort of expertise. It changed, I think,

mainly because of the great nuclear debates that developed in the late 1970s. First, the decisions on cruise and Pershing missiles to come into Europe, intermediate nuclear forces, then the nuclear freeze movement in the U.S., The Reagan administration sort of revived anxieties about nuclear war and so on. So all of a sudden there was a market for this sort of thing and great interest. But until 77, 78, there wasn't an enormous interest. And there wasn't, in academia, there wasn't a particular call for nuclear expertise.

It's interesting because, I mean, granted, my, you know, knowledge of, like, sort of modern, like, history in the UK is limited. But at least from what I've gleaned, that seems like the very, like, British response. Like, we're going to invest in this military technology, and the second we don't need it anymore, let's just scrap it and forget about it until, like, the next crisis comes up.

Yeah, I mean, it's not wholly fair. I think the attitude was... Close to that, but slightly different. Basically, Britain had decided, well, Britain was the first country that demonstrated the potential of nuclear weapons during the Second World War. Then the Manhattan Project came along, and it was apparent that the UK couldn't begin to do anything on that scale.

And therefore, the UK project was folded in to the American project. Then after the war, the Americans decided, the Senate in fact decided, under the Atomic Energy Act, not to include the UK. They weren't allowed to share secrets with us anymore. So the British decided that they had to have their own force. And this was pretty difficult, and they did it. And then in the early 60s, they almost couldn't cope anymore because... the missile they were going to use, the American Skybolt missile, was scrapped. So we went to Polaris, and then that was basically set it going. So the Polaris sales agreement of 1962 with the US is still, in effect, in force, still shapes the British nuclear force. It means that Polaris was followed

by Trident 1, actually just Trident 2, and we're now upgrading it again. So... There haven't been big decisions financially since then, but not conceptually. Conceptually, we were going to have an Nazi deterrent, and it had to be continual. And then the government sort of prided itself on it being minimal. So yes, we were going to be a nuclear power. We could do all these terrible things to the Soviet Union, now Russia, or anybody else. But we weren't going to make a song and dance about it.

It was going to be very low key. And we'd have the minimum that made it credible. So that was the basic attitude. It has changed in recent years because of Russia. But that was the attitude. So when I was getting in, when I was at Chatham House and we did this study on the British nuclear force with the labor government. Um, I did a little book that on, uh, called Britain and nuclear weapons and noted that between 1965, I think in 1980, there had been no parliamentary debate on Britain's nuclear force. Really? No problem. But no proper, uh, rationale for the nuclear force discussed in parliament issues with procurement and so on a few parliamentary committees have vaguely looked at it but nothing serious that changed then that

changed and from that point there has been parliamentary scrutiny we've had some serious debates but even then every time we come up to the question of renewing the force Everybody says that's to be a great debate, and there isn't really, because actually there's a political consensus that we should stay in the business and that we have to accept the costs. And note that the British force, what's now called the nuclear enterprise, which also includes attack submarines, nuclear submarines, and AUKUS, what we're doing with the US and Australia, accounts for a quarter, a quarter of the UK defence budget. So it's a big deal. But actually, if you look at defence debates these days, they barely touch on the nuclear side. They're all about limitations in

our conventional forces.

Because I follow a few other modern wartime historians. The one guy, he specialises on tanks. And it's interesting, he's talking about the Challenger tanks one two and now three and like it it seems like they're always the the issue that british tanks at least run into is like we have this great idea we built a few of them and then it's like oh we don't have any more money so now we're just going to keep like the same thing just rolling kicking the can down the road financially essentially.

Yeah i think one of the problems you have it's not unique to the uk is every service has its defining sort of technology um fast jets for the Air Force, carriers for the Navy, and tanks for the Army. And there's a genuine issue. I mean, I'm not one who argues about the obsolescence of tanks. I think you can see a role for them even in Ukraine. I mean, it's not a simple question that drones make them obsolete.

But they're problematic and they're expensive. And The UK is not going to be providing the main frontline ground forces. It'll be there as a role, but it's not going to be doing that. We have a small army now. So there should be a debate on do we need the next generation challenger? Not hardly at all.

Well, it's interesting with the challenger, especially as like a lot of the people who criticize that tank, it's like, the Challenger is doing exactly what it was meant to do, blow up obsolete Russian armor, which is 99.9%. Even if you're fighting against Russia these days, you're going to be fighting against obsolete Soviet armor. The T-17 never leaves the parade ground in Russia.

This is true. I'm not decrying the Challenger as a weapon. It's just that the problem is, as with so much kit these days, and it's very evident in the U.K., is you really want it to be very good, but that means you only have a few. And that's a very expensive way of doing business. And I think the challenge that's being posed by the Ukraine experience, not solely with tanks, is that they've demonstrated the ability to have mass of reasonable quality, not to use the term exquisite, but say 80%. but have lots of them. And that, I think, is the challenge for Western armed forces, certainly for European forces, is if you're in any conflict that goes on for any length of time, you'll go through your ammunition, you'll go through your high-end kit, and your

industry will struggle to cope. So you need means, which the Ukrainians have found, of generating capabilities that can be used in a mass way. Abundance, I think, is the phrase used now.

Yeah, I feel like, I mean, I don't think this is a controversial statement at all, but I feel like the Ukraine war is probably going to be the most studied conflict for, at least until the next major great power war, if we ever have one of those. You know, it seems like, of course, it always seemed like there's one of those looming on the horizon, but so far we haven't gotten there yet.

Yeah, I mean, Ukraine, I mean, First, it's really important. So analysts are drawn to it because it's ongoing and important. The Ukrainians are articulate, enjoy talking about what they've been doing, quite proud of themselves. As they should be. As they should be, and Russians less so. The speed of innovation has been absolutely stunning. I mean, just over the last two years, the changes in Ukrainian capabilities have been remarkable.

And it's continuing. So it's one iteration after another, which I think is quite a big issue when people say, well, you should just do what Ukraine does. But Ukraine's updating constantly because the threat against them changes. The Russians are updating constantly as well. And so you look back and you think, well, you know, if the war had ended after the first three months, we would have drawn completely different lessons to the ones that we draw now. because the drones that were being used then were quite big and expensive and quite vulnerable. You still had manoeuvre on quite a significant scale. And so you had inklings right from February 22 that it may not be as good for an army organised along traditional lines as they thought

it was going to be. But I don't think we had much idea We didn't imagine then that a Russian offensive would require people grabbed from the streets and sent in ones and twos to infiltrate urban areas in order to plant the flag so somebody could show that they've got a presence there. I mean, the challenges to offensive operations have been immense. And, you know, the Ukrainians now suggest with, Operation Vivaldi, that they've found some ways through.

But it's painstaking stuff, rather than the sort of rapid offensive maneuvers that people like to imagine land wars being.

It's interesting because this war is, I mean, especially now that the lines have more or less stabilized, it's become almost like a siege. And that's why one of my most favorite things to study historically are sieges because you put people under immense amounts of pressure. It's amazing how they innovate. Like there's nothing makes humans innovate more than like the threat of imminent death. And so, you know, you have the Ukrainians are on the back foot. It's like, oh, let's just, you know, keep throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks. And in the process, you know, they've written, there's been about, you know, a hundred different revolution and military affairs in the course of this one

four year war now. Sorry, three-day special military operation.

I think, and what you're seeing, I think, I mean, there's quite a lot of fluidity and movement at the front, but there's a clear focus of battle on the so-called fortress cities, and it is sort of like a siege of those cities. But what's interesting is when you're adapting over time, then things that you just wouldn't have time to do become the norm, like the Ukrainians have built lots of tunnels and so on. So they spend a lot of time underground because as soon as you put your head out and can be seen, you're done for.

So there's a series of adaptions being made which are very specific to Ukraine. And I think there is an issue when, please God, we get a chance to look at this in retrospect rather than as an ongoing war. there'll be questions about the singularity of this conflict. There are very specific conditions that make certain things possible, one of which is the protracted nature. The other is a lot of the fighting, the civilians have fled. There's been no attempt made, despite the fact the Russians claim to be liberating territory to spare it, So cities have been battered and ruined and so on. There's all these bleak urban landscapes in which people are fighting. So there are things you can learn from this for elsewhere, but it's

been shaped by very Ukrainian conditions. And so it may look, you know, obviously a Taiwan war would be different because it would be more maritime and so on. Even in the Middle East, it's been a different sort of conflict to the one that we have in Ukraine.

Well, I mean, it's especially because, I mean, most of the great powers of the world have been training and equipping their forces for the last three decades to do counterterrorism. and, you know, counter-terrorism and, you know, near peer conflict or, you know, worlds apart when it comes into, you know, how you deploy your troops and use your resources.

Yeah, I mean, although, I mean, that's true, but I think that there's a sort of, well, you know, we used to make this distinction or this idea of asymmetric war, that you have the Western forces that fought along classical lines, distinguished between combatants and non-combatants, Then you have the war, quotes and quotes, war on terror with, and showed how you could fight and disadvantage Western armies through ambushes and insurgencies and guerrilla tactics and so on. And we got sort of, we didn't do particularly well against that. And then we thought, well, we're going back to great power war.

But say, look at the Houthis. they're fighting the Yemen civil war or the way that the Sudanese civil war is being fought. And it's a merger of techniques. You have sort of old-fashioned guerrilla warfare, but you also occasionally have more modern forms of warfare. And then what I think is the equalizer in a lot of this, it has been for Iran, it is for the Houthis, different ways, maybe for Ukraine, is the ability to strike long-range targets, targets a long way away, with high-quality drones or missiles that are very hard to defend against. All sorts of armies are using that now, and with great effect, because it doesn't need much to get through to make an impact, say hit the airport in Riyadh, and you put the

whole Saudi development program at risk because Saudi doesn't seem to be a safer place as everybody thought, equally the Emirates. So there's a sort of emerging, I think, that's taking place now, that if you can get a long-range strike capability, you're going to have an advantage. or a possibility of retaliation that you wouldn't otherwise have had. So while it remains true that the defence is stronger on land, I think that is still the case, the offence is definitely stronger in the air. And a lot of militias, apparent militias like the Houthis have realised that.

It's interesting because like as you were talking, I was just thinking like there was a way of like these two topics that we've talked about. They're kind of like converging here because you think about like the old days of theory, like would not like the Ukraine situation, for instance, be like a textbook need for a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon?

Like would the thinkers of the old like back in like the 70s and 80s been like, well, why don't we just pull our troop backs, you know, drop a few, you know, nuclear howitzer shells on there and then try to exploit the breakthrough?

Well, I mean, they might have done if, if, uh, against opponents who didn't have nuclear weapons themselves. And when the issue of tactical nuclear weapons first came along, um, it was initially, uh, assumed that they would favor the defense because the, uh, offensive force would have to congregate would have to gather and provide a lucrative target and then then it was realized well actually you could blast a hole through the defenses um and then once you imagine both sides using these weapons uh all you could imagine was escalation to full scale nuclear use so now if you start to imagine them being used without um the risk of retaliation, then you're into different concerns. I mean, the Russians, I don't think the Russians never really threatened

Ukraine itself with nuclear use. They threatened NATO because they don't want NATO to get involved. It would sort of be an odd thing to do to claim that you're liberating this territory and nuke it. But it's also a question of, well, What's tactical? I mean, I never liked the phrase tactical nuclear weapon because any use of nuclear weapons would be pretty strategic. But do you use a few?

In which case, have you made the relevant difference while all hell breaks loose around you because the Indians and the Chinese and everybody else unloads because you've broken the nuclear taboo? But if you use a lot, then... You're into mass death, and who knows what sort of response you're going to get. So it's actually quite difficult to imagine scenarios in which they would be used, simply because once the first nuclear weapons are used, nobody's that confident of being able to contain the escalation.

I forget where I saw it. Some book I was reading years ago, but I think it was Kennedy who said it. They were talking about the idea of limited versus massive retaliation. And I think Kennedy was saying something along the lines of, if I can shoot a guy in the chest with a six-shooter revolver, what's the point of dumping an entire magazine from a machine gun into him?

He's going to be just as dead, or it was something along those lines. He was like, why do we have to fire all of our nukes at them all at once? Like, why not just shoot a few and then see what happens?

Well, that was the argument. I think we just reached a point now where any use of nuclear weapons would be such a shock, seen as such a transformational event, that it's not the sort of thing you're going to do lightly. It's a really big deal. And I think what we've seen in Ukraine is the Russians keep on making these sort of figures like Medvedev and so on, make these dark threats. Don't you dare join NATO, Finland and Sweden, otherwise terrible things may befall you. Don't send tanks to Ukraine, Britain. Don't send missiles, France. Don't let them hit targets in Russia, America. And all these things still happen because nobody finds... believes that for each of these still incremental steps, anybody's going to risk nuclear war.

And in a way, what's happened is it's underlined the stigma that would be attached to any nuclear use. It still feels like it would be a very big deal. And as the Russians have unfortunately demonstrated, if you want to escalate, if you want to hurt, there's plenty of ways of doing it without having to go to nuclear weapons.

When you were just talking there, it made me think. I don't know how often you go to the movies, but this was a years-old one. Did you ever see the movie By Dawn's Early Light before?

Oh, yes. That was a long time ago, though.

I was thinking of the thing where the Russians, the dead hand fires 15 ICBMs, and the Russian president calls, and he's like, well, we're willing to accept you shooting 15 back for an appropriate amount of casualties. you cannot respond or we can escalate this to a full.

It's.

A fantastic movie. It was on Amazon Prime for a while. I don't know if it still is, but I definitely.

Recommend it to everyone. It was Failsafe, the movie Failsafe, where they sort of agreed that because this thing is now going to hit Washington, we're going to hit Moscow, we accept that you're going to take New York out and then we're going to call it quits. You know, I... This conversation, it's very hard to imagine these actual conversations, but that's why the hotline was created. So you could talk about how you manage a conflict, even while it's reaching that stage.

I think the best part of that movie was, by Dawn's early light, is they actually show the real system. It's not actually like a phone. It was like the teletype where they.

Send it in Russian and it transcribes it. The idea of a red phone that you pick up and say, yeah. I don't know.

If I was ever the president, I would have a giant red button installed in the White House, especially during foreign– it could be completely useless. It could just light up if you touch it. But I would put like a giant one in the Oval Office just to make a point.

I don't think you should suggest that to your current president.

Yeah, he would do it too. maybe a little bit of gold plating around the edge his name right across the center i can see it you put in the new ballroom that's not completed yet so speaking of uh media i don't know Have you ever heard of non-credible defense before? Have you encountered that at all, or no?

No.

Oh, you're in for a treat. I prepared for this eventuality. Non-credible defense is a page on Reddit. It's the opposite of credible defense, where people actually have logical ideas. discussions about you know wars and militaries and geopolitics non-credible defense is just people making jokes about the situation and over especially i mean i discovered it after the ukraine war and some of the some of the things here have been absolutely incredible so i want to i want to share a few with you just to uh give you something new to do if you're ever bored on your computer so i figured i'd start one with a uh a royal navy one for you Can you see that?

Or is it too small? No, I can see, yeah. Invincible, Victory, War, Spike, Vanguard, yes.

Yeah, that's the sort of.

We have our great warriors. Yeah.

This was... I'm sure you heard it, but a lot of the Russian media like One of the more absurd conspiracy theories is, like, Boris Johnson had gone to Ukraine and, like, undertaken a commando raid. So somebody made this video of a little satire right here.

Hello, boys.

I'm currently flying over the Black Sea, refueling for my last mission as Prime Minister. I have developed a plan that simply cannot fail. As I am still the Prime Minister... Myself along with these two different fighters enjoy diplomatic immunity. Do not worry, the four 1000 pence laser guide bombs I'm carrying are seen in diplomatic bags. As such, no one can attempt to destroy these bags. My friends, the coach bridge.

Will be no more. This is what I call going out with a bang.

So that, that's, that's more or less like the silliness you see.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's all like this one. You have, you know, oil facilities destroyed, Greta Thunberg, zero Ukrainian armed forces, more than 300. It's, um, I didn't know if you had encountered that. So I figured I would, um.

Thank you. I shall follow it up.

So some of, some of the things are a little unhinged on there. You know, they're not all gems, but, um, There's some hilarious jokes. For the longest time, that was where the whole Three Gorges Dam discussion on the internet came. That was fueled by non-credible defense, where they were just like, oh, let's go to war with China and blow up the Three Gorges Dam so we can kill 25 million people with floodwaters. That was the source of that internet running joke for a while.

Hilarious.

Yeah. But, so I'm sure, well, I don't want to assume, but like I'm assuming once the Ukraine war is over, there is going to be a massive surge of books, you know, coming out, people writing on the conflict. Do you plan to be one of them?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've been writing on it since, well, actually since 2014. And I've been doing regular sort of substack commentary and so on. So, Yeah, I mean, I'm going to do one. Looking at the strategic choices that have been made, and it's not just a sort of simple this happened and that happened, but why did Putin invade?

Why did Zelensky resist the idea that Putin was about to invade? Why did the Russians fail? Why wasn't the Kursk, sort of Kharkiv offensive followed up? And so on and so forth. So I want to look at strategic decisions rather than just straightforward history. But this matters, as you discussed earlier, there's an awful lot of material out there and some very good stuff. So you need to, I mean, some people no doubt will just do sort of enormous volumes of sort of day to day. There's very good books already written on the Ukrainian experience about what it's like to live through this. there's some quite technical stuff out there. I mean, there's already a massive, I mean, I've got tens of books already that have been produced

on the war. And some of them seem quite dated.

Which ones would you recommend? Because like I've been looking, you know, when I was doing the prep for this interview, like I was, well, just also out of my own curiosity, I was looking for books on the active war, but almost everything I found was like, the lead up to it, like the political things, or talking about the 2014 invasion?

I mean, my mind's gone blank. I mean, there are books that have got sort of collected essays. The Ukrainians now have produced a series of volumes on individual battles, the Battle for Kiev, the Battle for Kursk, Bakhmut, and so on. And they come out of one of the Ukrainian war colleges or something. Obviously, they have a point of view, but they're pretty detailed, and I found them really useful. And then you have to... I mean, there's a certain amount of actual history, but a lot of it, because the war's ongoing, is actual commentary. on what's happening at the moment and, you know, what should happen next.

So a lot of it's sort of within agenda, seeking to advise Ukrainians or NATO or even the Russians what they should do next. And the reason there's so much about the origins of the war in the first days is it seemed such an amazing story. It was this well-advertised invasion that did actually take place but didn't go as advertised because the Ukrainians fought back and the Russians were embarrassed and so on. So I think that's when a lot of people decided to write their books and they covered that period. But then it became all more difficult because 2023 was not as good a year for Ukraine as 2022. So people became a bit less sure about how to pitch them And I think that's continued since. So,

I mean, what I felt when I was making my pitch to the publisher for a book is I don't intend to finish it until the war's over because you can soon just get overtaken by events, as has happened to quite a number of pieces.

Yeah, it'd be like writing a book on a sports team before the playoffs were over. You want to be able to give people a conclusion before.

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it's possible to keep up, as I tried to do, keep up a running commentary on what's going on. And I think in that you sort of hone your ideas and decide what's important. And, you know, I have started writing this book and while I've been doing so, I've gone back over things I've written.

I don't think it's that bad. But, you know, there's some things that, well, you didn't get that right or you were too optimistic there or maybe too pessimistic somewhere else. But, So it's quite hard to get it right. And you realize that because you focus on one particular thing, other things were going on that you missed completely. I mean, it's just unavoidable and that's how it's going to be.

So the advantage at some point is you can take a deep breath, look back and pick out what you want to pick out. You're never going to be able to tell the whole story in a single volume. And it'll be just different to the running commentaries. There's just stuff we didn't know about that we now understand better.

Yeah, well, because I mean, I get that. That's part of the issue, because like some of the Ukraine war was really what got me like really into geopolitics, because like when I was younger, I got into like regular politics for a while. And then I realized, like, I'm just getting upset about things that I have literally no control over, like the elites don't care about my opinion anymore.

So I kind of, you know, just stopped for a while, but it was Ukraine that like got me and I started, I found some YouTube channels that I like people talking about the war and like modern events. And then, you know, that started the ball rolling on, you know, me, you know, getting back into it. And like a lot of them have done like what you were talking about. Like they do like, I mean, cause you can pretty conclusively write books, you know, a story about 2022 to 2025. Cause like it's over. But like you said, you can't really, there's no ending to the book yet because.

You can talk about the.

Initial offensive and, you know, the the failure and, uh, you know, the Kursk offensive again.

And there's big, you know, so there's big debates still going on amongst Ukrainians about where were they right to defend Bakhmut. Um, so that's, you know, uh, and your attitude to this to some extent will depend on what happens. Uh, And also, you know, at the start of this year, I thought the Ukrainians were doing pretty well, and they were doing pretty well. Now, what's happening with Starlink at the moment, that's going to make a big difference. If the speed of Starlink is continually held out, and I have no idea whether it will be, I suspect it'll come back again, but I don't know. But that makes a big difference because that affects the medium range drones and so on, which was the big Ukrainian asset. On

the other hand, the Ukrainians are still doing quite well at the front line and the Russians haven't particularly found new tactics as yet. But, you know, I think the assumptions you make on the basis of the last two months developments can become outdated quite quickly. um and it's not just because of the technological advances and the sort of duel between offense and defense it's also because of political decision making uh you know which takes us back to your president and the difficulty of actually work you know and the lack of a consistent policy that's followed all the way through and it's all these sort of zigzags that we have to.

Navigate so um This is a hypothetical here. I know it's always dangerous with hypotheticals, but do you think had Ukraine been given all the equipment that it was promised in 2023 by all the different Westerns, had it all arrived before their counteroffensive, do you think that would have changed the war, or do you just think they just still lacked the offensive punching power to knock Russia out?

I think the counteroffensive is going to be one of the things that people look at very carefully and and i think the problem was it's not just a question of kit they had kit it is a question of air power they didn't have the air power that we would have required to do what the ukrainians were intending to do um it was to some extent the imposition of american concepts um you know this is what you have to do if you're going to be um have a proper offensive. This is how you do it. This is how we would do it. But Ukrainians could never do it how the Americans would do it, again, because they didn't have the air power. And they advertised. So everybody knew where the offensive was going to be directed

against because they wanted to get to the sea. So I think all sorts of things went wrong with it. and it had a very bad long-term effect. I mean, it really set the Ukrainians back because of that. If they'd had a more modest concept, they might have done better. So, yeah, I mean, one's going to ask these counterfactuals inevitably. I think what had happened is that, I think I would include myself in this, the Russian failure, which lasted till essentially November 22, excuse me, lasted until November 22 when they evacuated Kherson, gave unwarranted optimism that the Russians were all a shambles and the Ukrainians with a bit of determination and the right kit could press through. But, you know,

what happened from September to, 1922 is the Russians putting double down, immobilized, changed their command at least for a while. And they had a strategy. And they knew what they were doing. I think the Russians then lost their own way. Excuse me, I'm stuck in my throat. The Russians lost their own way. oddly, from late 23, when it was pretty clear the counteroffensive had petered out, and they started on their own offensive. And you just have to look back at early 24. You know, all the advantages the Russians had then, far more artillery, aircraft, glide bombs, whatever.

Congress then refusing to pass... the supplemental that would give Ukraine more equipment and so on. And the Russians still didn't manage to... I mean, they made some breakthroughs, they made some progress, but basically they'd been on a constant defensive since late 23, which hasn't produced the results they expected and at the moment, if anything, has been slightly pushed back. So, I mean... If you put those two experiences together, the basic conclusion is offensive operations are pretty difficult, however you do them.

It's interesting because I know a lot of people draw comparisons between the First World War and this war because conditions are a lot of the same. That was the last episode I just did. The whole concept behind it was the First World War was always unwinnable. Like, the power of the defensive at that time period was so strong compared to the ability of the offensive that, like, no matter what you did, no matter what strategy you follow, like, the Schlieffen plan is always going to fail. Like, it's always going to end up in that sort of trench warfare with two sides just lobbing artillery at each other for the next four years.

Yeah, I mean... I mean, that's what happened, so we tend to assume it was inevitable, but, you know, the miracle of the man and all that, I mean, sometimes it doesn't take very much for you to get different outcomes. I mean, by and large, attempts to win wars quickly don't end well. And it took, you know, it was basically exhaustion that meant that the Allied offensive in eventually was successful. The Germans had just done for, really, because they'd been fighting for so long with the background of a blockade. But, you know, there are other parts of the Great War where, you know, Middle East and so on, where it wasn't French warfare, it wasn't deadlocking in the same sort of way.

Well, it's like the line I had written for the next upcoming one, like discussing the Schlieffen Plan. It's like it wasn't tactics that the Germans needed. It was another 40,000 trucks.

Yeah. And then they hadn't thought through the politics. I mean, I think, you know, the Schlieffen Plan was sort of a very good example of German focus on the operational art. without any consideration of the political consequences of operating the way they did, which was to bring the British in when it was touch and go whether the British would have come in otherwise. And the focus on mobilisation and this sort of conviction, which was understandable if you looked at the Franco-Prussian War, but less so if you looked at the American Civil War, that wars would be over quickly.

It's fascinating because the Schlieffen Plan is one of my favorite historical operations of all time. Because on one hand, like you said, it's brilliant, like mobilizing and getting 1.5 million men to their jump-off locations in 15 days with steam trains and the telegraph, no portable radios. But on the other hand, it's brain dead. It's like Britain has said, basically, this is the only thing that's going to get us into this world war. If you invade Belgium and the Germans are like, yeah, let's invade Belgium. It's a great idea.

Yeah, quite. Yeah. I mean, you know, that's a point I tend to try to make about most military operations is if you don't give them political context, then they're even, I mean, it's just, you know, the, the Russian opera invasion of Ukraine fell because it was premised on the idea that Ukraine was an artificial state without any legitimacy in the, the population in the East would more likely support the Russians and Kiev and so on and so forth.

So they got surprised.

I think it's kind of, you know, it seems to be like the dictator's paradox, because when dictators get to a certain point, their propaganda that they put out is so good that they begin to believe it themselves. It seems like throughout history, whenever a dictator reaches that jump over point they're like oh yeah we're invincible we can do whatever we want. We can purge half the army of anyone competent because they're a threat and then still win a war somehow. There's going to be Putin saying it's the color revolution. That's what keeps him up at night most nights, apparently.

Yeah, I think so. The interesting thing is we still don't know what Putin knows. I mean, there's still this mystery about why he and Gerasimov keep on making these claims of Ukrainian, of Russian advances and so on, which are clearly not true. I mean, it's not, you know, independent military analysts who do all sorts of clever things with satellites and so on, or just look at YouTube videos, tell you it's not true. There's no, this stuff can't, can't be confirmed. Some poor sod's been sent to wave a flag and then been shot, and they're claiming that represents Russian control. So is this just a function of the Russian army, which wouldn't be unusual for any army, which is that complacent news travels up because nobody wants

to admit to losing ground or being in deep trouble? Or is it because they know just how difficult the situation is at the front, but they don't want to say? And so this is a decision taken at the higher level to project this optimism. I have to say, I tend more, there's a big debate on this, I tend more to the former view, I think. I think they are systematically misled. And because I doubt if either Gerasimov or Putin browses the internet, they're not aware of contrary views to what they hold and nobody dares tell them.

But you would have thought by now somebody would have pointed out that this victory has been imminent for three years now and we still haven't got.

It. It's like, is that just a transition a little bit? Is that kind of like the worry with China too? Like eventually Xi Jinping, is this going to purge enough of the people who say no to him that eventually he's going to be like, yeah, today is the day we're going for Taiwan.

Could be. I mean, my guess is at the moment there's not any sense. They'll just assume over time Taiwan will come their way because Taiwan will have no confidence that anybody's going to come to their aid. And I think the reasons the purges have taken place in China are probably more to do with internal party battles than they have with the sycophant seat. But this is obviously an element of that. It is dangerous when a single leader has been in power for so long without nobody daring contradict them. That's when you make your big mistakes.

It's interesting because the more I study the internal workings of these different, well, not always with dictators, but you find it more there. It's like reading some of these accounts reads like some badly written high school drama it's like oh this person you know is jealous of the office space that this other guy has so he's you know starting to like say oh this other guy is like they're accusing each other of like sedition and like honestly i don't know if you've seen the movie but the death of.

Stalin oh yes it's great.

Fantastic movie but it's like All of that seems so exaggerated, and the more I read about the inner circles of a lot of dictators, I'm like, well, you know, the inspiration came from somewhere.

It's got more humor than they probably have, but basically, that's what happened.

I do think Steve Buscemi was a great pick to play Khrushchev. Not quite as fat, but the attitude and the hairline, definitely. They look very similar.

I get accused of looking like Khrushchev.

I honestly think you look more like Gorbachev without the Burke mark, but, you know.

I'll take it.

Could go either way. So speaking of Khrushchev, you know, I think that was really what got me into like the nuclear field as it was, was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because, you know, that's, you know, an inherently... fascinating nuclear debate, because that's probably arguably one of the closest we've ever come to actually, you know, engaging in some kind of nuclear war with each other, especially, you know, with all the generals and the XCOM files, basically almost forcing Kennedy's hand to go to war with Cuba.

Yeah, I think Kennedy, and for that matter, Khrushchev never intended to go to nuclear war. I think Kennedy had made up his mind this was not going to end with a nuclear war. I mean, it's very fatalistic, Kennedy. I mean, it always strikes me when you read the transcripts that he's always imagining how things could go badly wrong, even with a blockade of ships and so on. And which is why I think that they played around with this sort Turkey missiles at the end which my view was unnecessary because I think Khrushchev had already, I mean the deal wasn't a difficult deal to imagine we'll take out our missiles, you promise not to attack Cuba so I you can imagine how a nuclear war could have occurred and certainly if Kennedy had gone for airstrikes that

would have put one thing could easily have led to another, given that we know nuclear weapons were already in Cuba at that time. So it would have been dangerous. But in the end, the last place the Soviets wanted to fight a war was 90 miles away from the American mainland. I mean, it's the worst place to pick if you're going to have a confrontation with the United States.

Especially when you only have a few actual intercontinental.

Ballistic missiles they have very little yeah.

It'd be curious to see I mean I'm sure some writer has written you know a hypothetical you know alternate reality fiction about it but like if we had decided to go to like full nuclear war could we have quote unquote won it considering I mean Europe definitely is getting shafted but.

So we know that not with Cuba but with Berlin some people in the NSC worked out, once they found out how few Russian ICBMs there actually were, and they'd been expecting hundreds and there were about six, they said, well, actually, a first strike is possible. The difficulty was they had lots of medium-range missiles. So Whereas if I found it hard to retaliate against the United States, they could have done against Europe. And so it just didn't go very far and nobody was quite sure how it would all work out. But that's probably one of the few points when that option actually did exist.

I mean, the other obvious one is, you know, post-World War II until 51, you know, when the U.S. has unlimited, well, It didn't have.

Very many bombs until 50. Then they started churning them out. If you look at the debates that took place about using nuclear weapons with Korea, one of the issues that comes over very strongly is we're just going to be seen to be using these against Asians. That's not going to go down very well in India and and other places like that. And uncertainty about actually how you would use them effectively. So I think you've got this transitional period, which is reinforced once you have the first test of thermonuclear weapons. You can't treat these as any other weapons.

For a while, NATO was trying to say, no, you can't treat them as any other weapons. will use them if necessary. And the idea of a nuclear taboo is something Eisenhower and Dulles complain about with each other. You know, people, there's too much stigma attached to the potential use of these things. But eventually they just accept these are very hard weapons to actually use.

I mean, obviously, the counterpoint to that is like the famous Curtis LeMay quote about Korea. It's like, so we didn't drop the nukes and we went and bombed every North Korean city down to the ground anyway, so we may as well.

It didn't. They did. I mean, the casualties from classical air raids and going right through to Vietnam were extremely high. It was only in the 70s the Americans decided that they didn't have to use... air power that way because they had smart bombs but before that um you hadn't... Just at the end of the Second World War, the worst that rained was the firebombing of Tokyo. It wasn't Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Yeah, the Korean War is a fascinating one. I feel like it's especially applicable now because I feel like At least in the United States, I feel like mentally we're at that place. It was like, you know, Korea happened after World War II. We're like, oh, we're invincible. Let's not, you know, invest that much in the military. And then, oh, we'll just nuke everybody if it comes to war. And then it's like, oh, wow, we need, you know, boots on the ground now. And they're all poorly equipped. They're poorly trained. There's only a few of them around. Like, I feel like, you know, Western countries are kind of like in the middle of that, like being caught with their pants down kind of moment. It's like, oh, we

were complacent for too long and a lot of things that we shouldn't have let go by the wayside we did.

Yeah. I think we have a piece of evidence which I guess we felt we were entitled and it's taking a long time to catch up. I think we are. I mean, I'm not wholly gloomy about it, but it's taken a long time.

I also think that the governments are making it seem a little bit worse than it is. Like, oh, we don't have any missiles anymore. We don't have this. I kind of think some of that is, you know, disinformation.

Yeah.

Because it seems like a lot of Western countries sort of undersell their performance where like Russia and China like to oversell them.

Yeah.

You know, one of the most famous being like when the F-15 came out. It's like, oh, that the Russians unveiled the Foxbat that's, you know, the Western designers think is like a high, you know, high speed intercept or a high speed fighter. So it's like, all right, let's just make the F 15 to beat this theoretical fighter.

And it's, you know, when it comes out, it's miles better than anything the Russians have.

Yeah.

I don't know. I, have you ever read John Toland's book in mortal combat before on Korea?

I did a long time ago. Yeah.

I highly recommend that book to everyone I talk about. Cause it's, it's, Some of the stories that he gets, I mean, John Toland, that's his thing. He goes out there no matter what and gets his interview. I wish he was still alive at the end of the Ukraine war, because I imagine some of the interviews that he would find for his book on that war would be absolutely incredible.

I mean, this is a man who found a bunch of survivors on the Japanese side of the war in the Pacific to get first-hand interviews on. He can find anybody to interview.

Yeah. Yep. There's plenty of people who can be willing to talk about it, I'm sure. Yeah.

Well, I mean, a lot of them, you don't even need to interview them. You can just watch the footage they post from their GoPros or their drone footage.

Yeah, no, we've got plenty of snuff movies coming out.

A lot of exploding turret carousels from the T-72s.

Yeah. I've got to go quite soon. Oh, do you? Okay. Sorry. No, it's fine.

Um, was there anything else? Like, I mean, you were talking about, you know, your impending book on Ukraine. Do you have any other work coming out? Anything else you want to promote while you're here?

Well, the main thing I want to promote is my Substack comment is free because that's what I, um, because I write on something weekly on that, um, on various conflicts around the world. So if I could use this for advertising, that's what I would do.

Just after we're done, just send me the link and I'll put it in the link to the episode in the video so people can check that out.

Yeah. So the last one I did was on the hooties and I'm doing one on what actually is going on with Ukraine at the moment and so on. So that's the main thing I write. And while I'm also trying to write this book on the war, but I've got a bit of time to do that.

Yeah, well, it seems like current events are definitely going to keep someone like yourself busy for the foreseeable future.

Well, I fear so. I mean, like I always used to say, I've got a backlog, so I don't need any more wars. But unfortunately, they keep on coming.

Yeah, it seems like every time you turn on the news every other week, there's another new conflict you've got.

There's a lot of conflicts that people just don't even think about, like Sudan and so on, which are pretty grim and deadly. All right.

Well, thank you for your time. This has been a great interview. I'd love to have you back again, you know, the next time you've got some free time. And definitely check out his books. The two that I've read was The Nuclear Strategy and the– what is the other one? What's the name? The Ukraine one, the title? Yeah, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy.

Ukraine and the Art, yeah, which is about 2014 and thereafter. Yeah.

They're both on Audible. That's where I read them, but– About half the catalog is on Audible at this point, at least the ones that I've seen. But yeah, definitely check him out. And thanks for coming on.

My pleasure. Good to talk to you.

Historian Interview: Sir Lawrence Freedman

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