London-based KOW readers may enjoy this new documentary film by Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known.

In The Unknown Known, Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris offers a mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, the larger-than-life figure who served as George W. Bush’s secretary of defense and as the principal architect of the Iraq War. Rather than conducting a conventional interview, Morris has Rumsfeld perform and explain his “snowflakes” — the enormous archive of memos he wrote across almost fifty years in Congress, the White House, in business, and twice at the Pentagon. The memos provide a window into history — not as it actually happened, but as Rumsfeld wants us to see it. By focusing on the “snowflakes,” with their conundrums and their contradictions, Morris takes us where few have ever been — beyond the web of words into the unfamiliar terrain of Rumsfeld’s mind. The Unknown Known presents history from the inside out. It shows how the ideas, the fears, and the certainties of one man, written out on paper, transformed America, changed the course of history — and led to war.

Screening times followed by Q&A with the filmmaker and venues may be found at the link above. Prof Theo Farrell, head of department here, who has seen the film (I have not) describes it as ‘very clever and compelling…riveting to watch’.

Yesterday saw some good pieces expressing discontent at budgets presented as strategy documents both here at home (in both senses of the word!) and in America, over at War on the Rocks. In national security terms, democracies seem to have lumped for a security/freedom balance which involves the secret conduct of military operations, backed by public strategy documents to give the public an inkling of what is going on in terms of defence planning. We (the public) don’t get to know the ins and outs of military affairs, but it is expected that the government tells us what is going on, what it is planning for, and, perhaps, a reason for shelling out mind-bending sums of money on aircraft carriers, next generation planes and so on. Unfortunately, as both articles point out, we now get budget documents dressed up as strategy documents. Time after time, the public is proffered a list of threats, and then ‘sold’ defence reforms as means of preparing for those threats, when in reality, the disconnect between the ‘strategy’ and the ‘solution’ is clear for most to see.

Last night I also happened to re-watch Louis CK’s most recent set, Oh My God, which I was lucky enough to see in person at the O2 a year or two back (you can purchase a copy for $5 direct from the man himself here). For those unwilling to watch the full thing, let’s cut to the chase, Louie’s “of course, but maybe…” skit. You can watch the full clip here, but some might consider the later bits offensive, so let’s stick to the, uh, least offensive piece of comedy gold:

Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. Hopefully, the good thoughts win. For me, I always have both. I have like, the thing, I believe the good thing, that’s the thing I believe and than there is this thing. And I don’t believe it, but it is there. It’s always this thing and then this thing. It’s become a category in my brain that I call “of course but maybe”.

I’ll give you an example, okay? Like of course, of course, children who have nut allergies need to be protected, of course. We have to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times, and anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies, of course, but maybe.

Maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die.

So that had me thinking about the “of course but maybe” of public strategy documents:

Of course governments need to tell the public about the threats that they face. Of course. In any democracy accountable to its people it would be fundamentally wrong for a government to make plans about life and death without giving the public an outline of what is threatening them. War is such a terrible thing that it would be fundamentally wrong for a democratic government to plan for it in secret, of course, that is so plain it doesn’t need explanation. And of course, the government needs to explain why it is spending money on tanks, planes and ships instead of hospitals. In an open society the public deserves to be spoon fed information at every step of this process, of course, but maybe.

Maybe if governments can’t admit their weaknesses in public, they should admit that, and do strategy in private. Maybe the spectacle of Western governments publishing report after report of half-squared circles is a sign of weakness to people that still treat international politics as a zero-sum game. Maybe if all the above is untenable, governments should make a stock front cover for future defence reforms: “The best we can afford, given current market conditions.”

The UK Defence Select Committee today released its considered opinion on Army 2020 (the plan the MoD published in 2012). So this is a very considered consideration. It is fair to say that the Committee were not overly impressed with what they had read or heard of the government’s plans. Echoing the thoughts of Mark Phythian and I at the time, the MPs concluded that the SDSR aimed to “fit a financial envelope [with]…serious implications for national security”. But that’s not news, and nor is the other significant conclusion one can draw from the critique, which of course relates to ongoing issues in the Ukraine, Syria and any other strategic shock queuing up in the wings.. which is that we are no longer equipped to deal with a shock of any magnitude. Even a Russian military that has suffered the transitional pains of the last twenty years looks across at what Europe (in general) has to offer, and Britain specifically (I would have thought) and will no doubt have concluded that they’re more scared about losing places at top British public schools via targeted sanctions than they are of the prospect of Cameron waving a military stick.

That should be a salutary conclusion for us. We are not yet reconciled to being a soft-power actor. And dare one even think about mentioning Milward’s ‘European Rescue of the Nation State’ thesis as a possible clue to the most sensible direction for the UK to travel if it is going to persist in neutering its military?

The reduction in the size of the army to 82,000 (from the 102,000 it currently stands at) is to be notionally offset by an uplift in reservists from 19,000 to 30,000, with a retention strategy for those being made redundant off the regulars. That particular proposal has come in for lots of Parliamentary criticism and the struggle to reach recruiting targets is probably the biggest of the threats to the Army 2020 plans. The current number is around 22,000. The Select Committee seem particularly vexed by the MoD’s ability to hit recruitment targets.

The issue I always felt with the plans for the Reserve was around the need to encourage or incentivise employers (particularly those with micro- or SMEs) to be flexible enough to accommodate active service, and post-service, in general terms and for those who might return with specific post-conflict needs. I think it’s a difficult ask regardless of the legislative framework, good employer practice or patriotic duty, and this may be coming through in the numbers. The Shadow Defence team is probably right to ask that the planned redundancies from the regulars are now halted whilst the reservists have such a critical short-fall.

The MoD have countered some of the conclusions of the MPs by saying that defence and security are reorienting to new threats, such as the ever-frightening threat of cyber-attack. For an alternative view of how frightening or not this is, check out our newly Professored Thomas Rid’s excellent book on the same. But if we were to accept that cyber warfare is existentially frightening or concerning the fact that defence and security resources are being seen in this zero-sum game is worrying, and unrelated to what we can see on the ground. The increase in cyber threats does not appear at a time (clearly) when traditional military threats are receding. Infact, there is a persuasive thesis to be made that those traditional threats are homing back into view: a well-crafted series of arguments has been made recently around China and Taiwan in the medium term, the same was made (shockingly in terms of its prescience) around Russia and Ukraine by Sarah Palin: it may just have been coincidental, however.

So, it’s stuck record time at Main Building, I think. Are we an interventionist medium sized interventionist power with a force structure to suit, or are we a soft-power actor, with a good level of military capability if premised around a soft-power disposition?

It seems nearly tedious to be asking such a question… when the same question can and has been asked since (pick the date of your choice, Sandys, Healey, Nott, Options for Change, SDR etc etc etc). Might be nice to answer it though, eh?

(Or perhaps we could answer a different question around what is the optimum security we can achieve with sub-2% GDP, which might lead to all sorts of different conclusions and further questions.)

It is an academic conceit to believe that there is one single unifying, underlying factor that is responsible for animating or driving social phenomena.  Usually, a scholar’s home department or discipline is touted as the codex, the intellectual skeleton key, to unlocking all that there is to know about whatever it is under discussion.  Supporting such elegant explanations for the mess we call life can be tempting…and often rewarding (in terms of reputation and money).  Samuel Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ is a case in point: strip away the extraneous stuff (the epiphenomena of power, money, etc.) and we find one, dominating ‘thing’ that drives human conflict.  [Sean Coombs provides an alternate explanation here.  Word.]

The events of the past few weeks have driven people to postulate such reductionist explanations for the conflicts in Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela.  [Personally, I think conflicts might just be like tropical storms and we were up to T, U and V in the alphabet...]  Allow me, Dear Reader, to play a few for you below.

• Geography.  Russia needs it’s ‘near abroad’ and will do anything to preserve it, including carving up Ukraine.
• History.  Thailand’s current political conflict is a repeat of 2010, 2008, 2006, 1993, 1991, 1973, 1970…all the way back to 1932.
• Nationalism.  The ethnic affinity of Russian speakers, regardless of where they are, explains why Moscow moved to seize the Crimea.
• Personality.  Nicolás Maduro ain’t Hugo Chavez and that’s why the people are on the streets.  Putin is Putin; Obama is Obama.  ’Nuff said.
• People.  The will of the masses cannot be denied.  The expression of this will explains what is happening in Bangkok/Kiev/Caracas.
• Class.  The Middle Class desire for more self-determination led to political upheavals in Bangkok/Kiev/Caracas.
• Ideology.  The attractiveness of the EU ideal is an unstoppable force, what with its democracy, social justice, and tolerance.  The battle in Kiev was one of progressives vs. reactionaries.
• Economics.  The West is doing nothing about Crimea because it fears Russian economic pressure, in the form of capital flight from The City or increased gas prices in Berlin.
• Psychology.  Vanity, misperception, egotism, megalomania–all explain why the leaders (on both sides of each conflict) made the choices they did, which led to the various crises.
• Gender.  The current political crisis in Thailand is driven by male non-acceptance of a female leader.
• The Internet.  The rise of social media–and the ease of communications that it, because of The Internet, engenders–explains why ideas can spread so quickly and globally, allowing people to see what they are missing.

It is surely the case that all these factors are at play in each of the conflicts mentioned–and a hockey-sock more besides.  As attractive as these theories may be, they are all–sadly–incomplete.  There is no one ‘master variable’ that can explain complex social phenomena like revolution, rebellion, and war.  Life is complicated and, therefore, so must our analyses be.  Solutions–if they exist at all–are unlikely to uni-dimensional.

We need holistic approaches to understand and hopefully resolve these kinds of social conflicts.  Young people of today, mark my words: Do yourself a favour and invest in developing a wide range of disciplinary tools.  Study history, but not to the exclusion of everything else.  By all means, learn economics, but not only economics.  [Good news!  KCL offers just such as thing in its War Studies Department.  Roll up!  Roll up!]  Learn a language.  Travel the world.  Experience other traditions and points of view.  Don’t drink your own bathwater.

And then when you are older, fatter, and grayer (or is that just me?) try and resist making catholic explanations based on the one or two things that you actually think you understand.  By all means make a contribution, but try to do it with a modicum of humility.

Now that would be powerful.

This morning while in a state of procrastinatory idling I was leafing through my copy of Joseph Lehmann’s The First Boer War. I’ve had it for ages and confess had not yet read it–a thing which I will rectify just as soon as I have finished the other thing I’m procrastinating on. Early on in it you find this passage (p. 14) which I found thought-provoking:

In 1815 a Boer named Bezuidenhout was charged with maltreating a Hottentot servant. When he resisted arrest, he was shot dead by soldiers attempting to seize him. Bezuidenhout’s friends and neighbours took up their weapons and resolved to sweep the British into the sea that had brought them. The effort failed. Five rebel leaders were condemned, though none of them had actually shed blood, and hanged at Slager’s Nek. The beam broke under the combined weight before they were dead. Despite the tearful entreaties of relatives and friends, the bean was repaired and the sentence carried out. The futility of further resistance was clearly demonstrated. Outwardly the farmers were loyal, but the rancorous memory of Slagter’s Nek ate into their hearts. A proud people can forgive the death of men in battle, but not their execution on the scaffold.*

*Eighty years later, after the Jameson raid, the same beam was brought to Pretoria with threats that it might be used a third time on British raiders who sought to destroy the Boer Republic.

There are a few things I like about this quote. The first is simple: I’m just fascinated by the story of the Boers and the British from the early 19th through the 20th century–and so should you be if you’re interested in contemporary strategic affairs. It helps to get a perspective on things. Take, for starters, the image of the global mega-power of the day locking horns with a tiny, rather backward and unsavoury, tribe and, frankly, getting a pretty fine shellacking. There’s little to say for the Boers at that time who were so rigidly religiously doctrinaire, inward-looking, and xenophobic that they make the Taliban seem a bit metrosexual by comparison. Their key redeeming feature, it seems to me, was a ferocious desire to be left alone and a readiness to do suicidally futilely brave things to get their way. As for the British, they seemed to be in another sort of trap that I find more than a little resonant with today. To be sure they wanted the gold and diamonds that lay in abundance beneath the feet of the Boers. But one senses too the need of the hegemon to impose order on an ‘ungoverned space’ and to enforce norms and sanction bad behaviour, in this event Boer enslavement of the indigenous people and generally wanton cruelty. These were rationalisations, of course, just not completely self-serving ones.

The second thing which occurred relates to the discussion had a few days ago here on KOW between Ken Payne and The Faceless Bureaucrat about the Prisoner’s Choice Dilemma and Rational Actors in general. How rational is it to hold a grudge so long and so hard that you preserve a hunk of wood against the possibility that someday you might hang the great-grandsons of your great-grandfather’s victimiser? It isn’t really, is it? But that’s how the world works much of the time, particularly when it comes to war. It’s hardly just the story of the Boers and the British. It’s also the story of: Irish nationalism (800 years old), Chechen resistance to Russia (200 years old), Israel and the Palestinians (a comparative newcomer if you date the start of that to Israel’s founding in 1948 but you might as well start earlier), and no doubt a thousand other such instances. This is what browns me off about security studies so often these days. I don’t really want to make a big argument here. Just a simple one: you can go a lot of good as a strategic thinker with a good grounding in political philosophy and a shedload of history.

Third, I think that last line is as good an encapsulation as any of the long-term problem of the confront and conceal approach to our current strategic dilemma. Our drones provide the role of scaffold, eminently well, it could be said–an effective and economical means of policing the worst recalcitrants. But how much rancorous memory eating at the heart are we laying down at the same time? Is my son’s grandson going to be schwacking some other fellow’s distant progeny with a plasma rifle somewhere on the Asteroid Belt because of things that are happening today? Probably, I think. The world turns round and round.

A play by KCL students, performed on 14/15/16 March, 7pm.

I’m your enemy; I’m also your friend. I’m a danger to mankind; I’m also your guest. I’m a particle; I’m also a wave.

In the first production from the School of Natural and Mathematical Sciences at King’s College London, memory, guilt and nuclear physics are thrown together in an explosive play about the uncertain nature of the universe – and of our own minds.

1924:   Two physicists, Niels Bohr and his soon-to-be protégé Wernher Heisenberg, come together at a conference. They go on to lay the groundwork for a second Enlightenment, the foundation of modern physics.

1941:  With Copenhagen under German occupation, Heisenberg – now chief scientist on the Nazi atomic research programme – visits his old friend Bohr, and Bohr’s wife Margrethe.  What was said remains unknown, but the conversation ended the closest friendship in physics and nobody, not even those who were present, has ever been able to answer the question: Why did Heisenberg come to Copenhagen?

In an afterlife where the three characters can move freely through their pasts, Michael Frayn’s play delves into that question, and in doing so explores collaboration and complicity, self-knowledge and self-deception, and how we distort our own motives and memories. Who is to blame for the atomic bomb – for bringing a beleaguered world to the precipice of annihilation? What is right in times of war, when your life, the lives of your loved ones, hang in the balance?

Thanks to Peter McBurney for the heads-up.

Last week, John Kerry and William Hague, the foreign ministers of the US and the UK, met to discuss the scourge of sexual violence. Their discussion led to the publication of an article for the Huffington Post titled ‘Preventing Sexual Violence is a National Security Imperative’. In parallel, the United States announced a measure to prevent anyone who has ‘presided over or engaged in or knew of or conducted these kinds of attacks’ from receiving an entry visa to the USA. This June, London will host a Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, where the world will seek to ‘shatter the culture of impunity for these crimes’. In theory, most countries are already on board, with 140 of them having signed the Declaration of Commitment to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, put forward last September at the General Assembly.

Sexual violence is a scourge – something that humanity should not allow – yet it is ongoing and shockingly prevalent. Messrs Hague and Kerry should be commended for shining a bright light on the issue and the June conference in London will ideally be but a first step in changing norms, legislation, and practice.

But why did Hague and Kerry feel the need to use the rhetoric of ‘national security’ to galvanise action? Do we live in a world today where only ‘national security imperatives’ are worthy of consideration? Tangentially, the Federal Bureau of Investigations recently changed its ‘primary mission’ from ‘law-enforcement’ to ‘national security’ – perhaps because it, too, felt that national security is where it’s at. This obsession with national security risks not only blurring lines but banalising a term with great utility and whose use demands extreme clarity and care.

Ultimately, claims about ‘national security imperatives’ risk disappointment and distraction from a fundamentally important endeavour. The overview of current practice, bleak as it is, makes it quite clear that preventing sexual violence does not feature very high among states’ typical national security concerns. What tends to receive priority are those threats and dangers that affect negatively the wellbeing of a nation-state or its citizens. To frame sexual violence in such terms, it would be necessary to demonstrate how it, in a general sense and internationally, affects the security of all those states expected to act. On this front, though mass violence, whether sexual or otherwise, certainly has ripple effects regionally, or in the immediate neighbourhood, their implications for national security greatly diminishes for countries further afield. This is, after all, why the scourge of sexual violence has been allowed to persist: isolation, indifference, inactivity.

Given the nature and scale of the problem, it would be far wiser and more accurate to frame the prevention of sexual violence in moral terms: such violence is a crime against the values espoused by the international community, it is ethically and legally spurned and condemned through instruments of law, and structures are set up – or should be created – to prosecute this crime in particular so as to emphasise its seriousness and intolerability across the globe. The moral force of the argument should, on its own merits, be sufficient to advocate, convince, and generate change. A ‘name-and-shame’ mechanism could even be constructed to highlight the worst transgressors – those states (and non-state actors) whose security forces are the worst culprits. All of this and more could posit sexual violence within the realm of jus cogens, where it rightly belongs.

Most fundamentally, the moral argument is superior because states should respond to sexual violence not because it challenges their ‘interests’ but because it is anathema and cannot be tolerated. That in itself is, or should be, the most realistic foundation for action and if we fail on this count, appeals to national interest will likely fail too.

A final point is worth making. Hague and Kerry do not really talk about sexual violence ‘at home’: both frame the issue as something that occurs in other peoples’ countries, particularly in the Third World. The article cites the example of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and their prepared comments those of Sudan and Bosnia, Colombia, Guatemala, and Liberia. Their point is well taken – war and instability usually provide the setting for the most grievous episodes of sexual violence. But while the US, the UK and other likeminded nations look overseas for change, might it not be worth noting also the very real problems with rape and and sexual violence that these very same countries face at home?

Two years ago, in 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta estimated that there may have been as many as 19,000 rapes in the US military over the course of the previous year. Even if this number is off by some margin, the overall picture is still entirely unacceptable. The US Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated in 2012 that ‘nearly 1 in 5’ women in the US reported having experienced rape at some point in their life. As concerns Hague and Kerry’s efforts abroad, there is in other words a risk, particularly given the sensitivity about sovereignty, neo-colonialism and meddling in much of the developing world, that their drive to prevent sexual violence comes to be seen, much like human rights, as an instrument of Western interference. Perhaps a more inclusive, de-securitized approach is needed, one that looks inwards as well as abroad, and is fuelled by moral outrage rather than purported security concerns.

When I’m not reading or writing, chances are I’m rowing. It comes in handy when your research is about groups, identity, and conflict.

Henri Tajfel once proved that a distinct and powerful group identity could form on the basis of liking for Klee or Kandinsky paintings. Little could be more spurious reason for a group bond than that. Except perhaps belonging to an Oxford college crew. Haslam and Reicher, proteges of Tajfel, write about the dynamics of leadership within social groups – especially that of the prototypical leader. I think about that when watching coach and cox, who are about as far from the typical rower as could be.

Aronson and Mills, meanwhile, entertainingly demonstrated that groups which are harder to join are valued more highly by members than those that are comparatively easy. And now, reading Dominic Johnson’s ‘Overconfidence and War‘, I am reflecting on the self-serving bias that makes me think I’m a far better oarsman than I am, despite all contrary evidence. Rowing, then, is truly research.

[The still above is from Jamie Hewlett's beautiful video of Aussie national scullers training recently: http://vimeo.com/86873599]

Prior to disappearing up a mountain to write a book (and thus completely missing the invasion of Crimea) I stopped into Oslo’s town hall, where they were exhibiting the final round of entries to remember those killed by Anders Breivik on the 22nd of July, 2011. Two aspects of the competition stuck out in my mind. First the actions of Breivik created a problem, where a large number of the dead were far from a major population centre. This isn’t a new issue, for example, the Flight 93 memorial is located at the crash site of the fourth plane in the 9/11 attacks. This did, however, create the requirement for two memorials: one near Utøya, and another in Oslo. The problem is that Utøya is a divisive issue in itself – some want to return to the island to re-use it, others want to leave it as a permanent memorial to the dead. The official Utøya memorial site is located near to the island, with a clear view of it. What I find interesting is that the artist selected for the final memorial, Jonas Dahlberg, had a radically different interpretation of what the memorial should entail from his fellow competitors. Whereas the other artists and architects, for better or worse, considered the memorial as culminating in a view of Utøya from the land, Dahlberg instead designed a memorial with the rather audacious concept of slicing through the land itself to create an artificial ‘wound’ in the landscape. Dahlberg intends to connect the two memorials by using the rock taken from this site to build the memorial in Oslo.

This leads to the second interesting point, which is that the Oslo memorial is intended to be two stages – a temporary memorial and a permanent one – reflecting the fact that the government quarter in Oslo is currently undergoing major renovation. Artistic responses to this requirement were interesting, for example, Olav Jenssen’s entry stated quite plainly that the ‘temporary’ memorial should be permanent. Personally, I thought that Paul Murdoch’s permanent entry was the most interesting, as it created something of a private world for a memorial space in the middle of a capital city. Even so, one of the key points that I think the competition showed was that it is possible to negotiate between the need for a permanent memorial and the (utilitarian) needs of contemporary cities in a way that avoids the unseemly recriminations over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site. One of the reasons that I think this issue is important is that it reflects how ‘we’ let terrorists dictate our future. The need for permanent, unchanging, memorial sites to commemorate mass casualty attacks will always impede the growth and expansion of cities. Finding a way to incorporate public memorials into the ongoing development of a society in a way that allows it to continue growing is important. Even though I might not like the winner on aesthetic grounds (it isn’t my place to say who ‘should’ have won), the competition as a whole reflects a mature attitude towards the place of public memory in society.

We don’t litter our site with counters of ‘shares’, there are no ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons, and we don’t urge readers to log in with their social media accounts to comment — in fact you’re welcome to give a fake email address and stay entirely anonymous (note that WordPress logs IP addresses by default, though). Surely you know how to solve that problem.

But we know you need your fix. So a link to every post will now get pushed out to KoW on Google+ (that’s new), to Facebook (relaunched), and to Twitter (now automatically).

The above is a detail from Marcia Nolte’s Corpus 2.1.