“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,” Mike Tyson famously once said. Vladimir Putin thought he could defeat Ukraine in three days. How did he get it so wrong? And what can we learn from his mistake? Throughout history, according to one of the world’s leading experts, wars have almost never played out as predicted. But if that’s the case, how are we supposed to prepare for future wars — like a potential one with China?
Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about two wars. No surprise that one of them is Russia and Ukraine. It’s not every day that a major land war erupts in Europe. And it’s also not every day that you see a country that everyone viewed as a military superpower proving itself to be so bad at… waging war.
The second war on my mind is different. Because it hasn’t happened yet. It might neverhappen. But if it does, it could make Russia-Ukraine look like a walk in the park. As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I’m talking about a possible invasion of Taiwan by President Xi Jinping’s China. And how that could escalate into the United States fighting its biggest conflict in Asia since the Vietnam War.
What ties those two wars together in my mind — besides my hope that one ends soon and the other never starts — reminds me of something that famous military thinker Donald Rumsfeld once said.
ARCHIVAL Donald Rumsfeld: There are known unknowns. There are things we know we know. That is to say we know there are some things we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know we don't know.
It’s clear now that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 fell into that category: an unknown unknown. Both from Russia’s point of view — Putin obviously didn’t count on his special military operation turning into such a humiliating quagmire — but from the West’s as well. How many national security experts and military planners in D.C. were predicting just how successful Ukraine’s resistance against the great Russian military machine would turn out to be? It seems obvious now. But, back then… not so much.
ARCHIVAL Pundit 1: So the Russian military is really an overmatch for the Ukrainians.
ARCHIVAL Pundit 2: Ukraine's military is badly outgunned.
ARCHIVAL Pundit 3: It's likely that the Russians will take control of Kyiv but not without a fight.
Given those unknown unknowns that are now all too known when it comes to Ukraine, these days it makes me wonder about China and Taiwan. What should we think about how that possible war could start and how it might turn out? What are we assuming today as a given that one day we’ll look back and say, shaking our collective heads… how on earth did we ever think that?
[THEME MUSIC BEGINS]
And so I reached out to an illustrious figure in the world of strategic studies, looking for some answers.
Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman of London’s King’s College is an historian and author, who has written about two dozen books over a career that spans almost half a century. Reading Sir Lawrence has really given me a broader view about how wars break out and how they are fought… how they are won… and lost… or, as he reminds us, how they end in a tragic muddle, more often than not.
At a time when so much in the world seems more dangerous and harder to predict than ever, I think you’ll find Sir Lawrence’s thoughts on the past, present, and future of war as illuminating as I do.
This is In the Room… I’m Peter Bergen.
[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]
Sir Lawrence Freedman: I think history tells you that once you try to predict what war’s going to be like in the future, you’re normally wrong.
Sir Lawrence Freedman was speaking to me back in April from his home in South London, just around the corner from the famed grass courts of Wimbledon. I know from my own time in London that it’s a lovely, peaceful part of the world. I couldn’t help but think of how at that very moment, in another part of the world, another day in a tragic war was unfolding. A war that brings to mind that quip by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson about Vietnam — first attributed to one of Napoleon’s advisors: ‘It’s worse than a crime — it’s a blunder.’
Peter Bergen: Sir Lawrence, you've written that you were surprised that Putin invaded Ukraine ‘cause it was so stupid. And I want to run a quote by you from former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. ‘As a general rule, the way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that makes no sense or is even self-destructive.’
Sir Lawrence Freedman: I think the hardest thing for an intelligence analyst to assess is when somebody's gonna do something stupid. [PETER LAUGHS] And you know, let's take an example, General Galtieri in 1982, invading the Falklands, which is a pretty stupid thing to do.
Peter Bergen: Or Saddam invading Kuwait.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Or Saddam invading Kuwait or, or Saddam invading Iran. And again, you can see it in all the evidence we have about the run up to the Russia-Ukraine war.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster: It was an astonishing piece of political theater, played out on Russian TV. The protagonist, the president, Vladimir Putin alone, aloof, like a modern-day tsar, the supporting cast, members of Russia’s powerful security council… [MAN SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN] …the president listened, but looked like a man who’d already made up his mind.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: You know, again, when we look back at the history of the current war and especially Russian decision-making, we're going to be asking questions about how, why did they assume so badly about how the Ukrainians would respond to an invasion.
Peter Bergen: What’s your answer? I mean you did your doctorate at Oxford on Soviet strategy.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Indeed.
Peter Bergen: You've been monitoring the Soviets and the Russians for a long time, so how do they get it so wrong?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: So I think you've got a real problem of an individual, Putin, who's right atop of a system which he's created, which he's run for 20 years — more than 20 years — which is full of his cronies from, you know, ex-KGB, FSB, all of whom have an exaggerated belief in, in fakery and fabrication and their ability to manipulate people and events. Combined with quite a widespread Russian contempt for Ukraine, and a belief that this should be under Russian influence and not really understanding how it, how it had been allowed to escape Russian influence. So, plus COVID, which I don't think is irrelevant in all of this because Putin had isolated himself even more. It’s different from Soviet times because there was, there was actually much more collective decision making in Soviet times.
Peter Bergen: That's kind of ironic.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: It is, it is. And hubris can set in quite quickly and it’s actually linked to that underestimation of opponents, arrogance about your, your own capabilities and achievement. Um, not thinking enough about ‘what can go wrong? Every government makes stupid decisions now and again, but some are off the scale. And you know, of course if you're playing for high stakes and you get away with it, everybody will consider you a strategic genius. When the things that reasonable people would've expected to go wrong, go wrong, then you've got no excuses. It’s not only the stupidity of invading a sovereign country that was always likely to fight back, but to do it in such a way that almost guaranteed it would end up with the mess that we now have.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Russia and Ukraine on the brink of war and racing closer by the second…
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Troops move in right now, there are reports of explosions in several cities as Vladimir Putin issues a stern warning.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: The most significant military action in Europe in 77 years. Russia has attacked Ukraine with airstrikes. Missiles and troops.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 4: Mr. Putin urged Ukrainian troops to lay down their arms. And go home.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 5: Ukrainian authorities have handed out 18,000 weapons to civilians. Men ages 18 to 60 are not being allowed to leave the country, we're told. They're being ordered to stay and fight.
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 6: What do you make of this Russian retreat from Kyiv? Is Russia losing this war?
ARCHIVAL Newscaster 7: To Ukraine now, and news of a Russian retreat near Kharkiv, video posted on social media shows residents in newly liberated towns greeting Ukrainian soldiers. President Zelenskyy says more than 600 square miles of territory has been reclaimed over the last 10 days.
Peter Bergen: You say history is made by people who don't know what's gonna happen next.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, I think when anybody is trying to imagine the future, these things are always much clearer in hindsight. But when you’re having to work out, — let's take an example — how will Zelenskyy respond to an offensive coming at Kyiv on the 24th of February? Uh, Putin may well have had strong views about how that was likely to happen. It turned out to be completely wrong. Zelenskyy’s views about what was gonna happen might have turned out to be wrong if the FSB had found him. You know, so, I think the danger of a lot of thinking about the future is that it underestimates the importance of chance, arbitrary decision making, misperceptions, uncertainties, all of these things that actually affect the course of a conflict which we tend to write out sometimes too much in our histories because we like to see clear cause and effect. I think, you know, these are the sort of things that are very hard to anticipate in the future. The stuff that just goes wrong.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
One of the great cliches is that generals always fight the last war. Which can seem like a good idea, until the stuff that just goes wrong. Putin thought he could easily take Kyiv in three days. And we know how that turned out.
So Vladimir Putin got it totally wrong, as did a lot of other people, including many in the West. This got me thinking about how war is just a theory, or an intellectual construct, or a training exercise until it actually breaks out. Then everything is up for grabs. Perhaps the Ukrainian military, which always seems one step ahead of the Russians, is an exception and will continue to be. But with all the thinking and planning that takes place amongst the professionals of war, why is it so difficult to predict its future?
The Future of War: A Historyhappens to be the title of one of Sir Lawrence’s most interesting books. It tells the centuries-long story of how soldiers, writers, and politicians have worried and planned and dreamt about future wars. And how their theories often backfired when it came to the unexpected reality of the battlefield.
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Peter Bergen: Sir Lawrence, how does history help us understand how people have tried to predict the future about war?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, I think history first tells you that when they try to predict what war’s going to be like in the future, they're normally wrong. Sometimes they're wrong because the prediction is just difficult. But also because most predictions are made with an agenda. I mean, people are trying to make a point. If you pay attention to what I'm saying about the future, then you'll be able to do something about it and we'll have a different future.
Peter Bergen: I’m not sure if you're a baseball fan or not, but there's a baseball legend called Yogi Berra who said: “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” So, I mean, there's a whole war industry that is about predicting the future, but you are saying that, you know, most, most likely, they're gonna get everything wrong.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Yeah, it doesn't necessarily matter because it's a way of talking about the issues. The basic point of these conversations is to make you think about possibilities of which you were not aware otherwise.
Peter Bergen: Which brings me to the Eisenhower line that you like:
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Oh, yeah. “Plans are useless. Planning is essential.”
Peter Bergen: What did he mean by that, do you think?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: That, that if you just trust what the plan tells you, you may well get yourself into trouble, but the process of planning brings individuals together, forces them to argue about what they're trying to do. You know the issues. And if you have to make adjustment as time goes on, you can make the adjustments. In the end, you are dependent upon the decisions being made by others: how much they've thought about what you are planning to do and prepared for it. So if, if you're not, then yourself prepared to adjust, you'll get into trouble.
Peter Bergen: I love how you begin your great book on strategy. “Everyone has a plan ‘till they get punched in the mouth,” by that great strategist Mike Tyson.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Indeed, indeed. It's a much loved quote. If you're fighting Mike Tyson, you work out every possible way you can imagine to surprise him, take him out, but in the end, he'll knock you flying.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
Peter Bergen: The people who thought about the future of war… who tends to get things right and who tends to get things wrong?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Let's take, you know, one of the greats who people always talk about: H.G. Wells, who is known for his fiction but was actually I think what we would now call a public intellectual. He wrote his books with a political purpose. So he wrote books before the First World War that had, you know, sort of rather dire portrayals of air power.
ARCHIVAL The World Set Free: Secretly the Central European power had gathered his flying machines together, and now he threw them as a giant might fling a handful of ten thousand knives over the Low Country. And amidst that swarming flight were five that drove headlong for the sea walls of Holland, carrying atomic bombs. From north and west and south, the allied aeroplanes rose in response and swept down upon this sudden attack. So it was that war in the air began.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: So just before the First World War Wells wrote a book, The World Set Free, in which he introduced the idea of an atomic bomb.
ARCHIVAL The World Set Free: With both hands the bomb-thrower lifted the big atomic bomb from the box and steadied it against the side.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: The atomic bomb was called the atomic bomb because that's how Wells described it.
ARCHIVAL The World Set Free: He craned his neck over the side of the aeroplane and judged his pace and distance. Then very quickly he bent forward, bit the stud, and hoisted the bomb over the side… When he could look down again it was like looking down upon the crater of a small volcano. In the open garden before the imperial castle, a shuddering star of evil splendor spurted and poured up smoke and flame towards them like an accusation.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: So, you know, that's one example where, where there's a sort of interaction between theory and fiction and practice. But when you actually look at The World Set Free and his description of how they're fighting, how they're using nuclear weapons, I mean, they're, they're things they're just dropping out of biplanes. [SOUNDS OF A BIPLANE] You know, it, it, it doesn't seem like the nuclear warfare we know. But nonetheless, Wells was somebody who shaped thinking about atomic weapons when they… And he also, I mean, just to give another example, he designed a tank. And it was an enormous thing. A great big vehicle that would be incredibly vulnerable and cumbersome on a battlefield. But when during the First World War, they got round to designing tanks, Wells was what they had in mind. That's what they thought about. So why, you know, it's a very good example about how you can be remarkably accurate.
Peter Bergen: Fascinating that a writer would be more right than, say the professional military class about these, atomic weapons, tanks, aircraft in warfare.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, as you know, there are lots of examples where the professional biases of the services led them to play down possibilities. There's a long history. Well, to just take the example of the U.S. Air Force and, and missiles, it couldn't bear the idea of pilotless aircraft. So it played down what missiles can do. The Russians weren't so bothered, so they got, at least at one point, looked like they were getting ahead in that. There's a famous case from, again, from before the First World War, when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about submarine warfare. And the Admiralty in the UK thought this was appalling because he was assuming attacks on merchant ships, which would be quite improper.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: And, you know, it's those sorts of biases that, that often mean that quite important developments are missed. The machine gun was well known about before the First World War, but they weren't being produced in numbers until people suddenly realized there were rather an effective way of dealing with charging infantry. So the lack of imagination sometimes can be as surprising as just how vivid the imaginations are.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
It was actually late in World War I that French prime minister, Georges Clemenceau is thought to have coined the phrase “generals always fight the last war.” And Sir Lawrence tells the story of what Clemenceau might have had in mind. He explains how World War I was shaped by a now little-remembered European conflict four decades earlier, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
[MILITARY DRUMS]
France under Emperor Napoleon III was supposed to be — or at least thought itself to be — Europe’s great military power. Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, was in the process of unifying the different states of Germany into an empire.
[MILITARY MUSICAL FLOURISH]
Prussia’s modern war strategy of rapid mobilization, force concentration, and lightning fast maneuver warfare won a famous, unprecedented victory at the Battle of Sedan, on France’s border with Belgium. Prussian forces surrounded the French and, in little more than a day, captured over 100,000 enemy troops – including the French Emperor himself. It was known, in military circles, as the “decisive blow,” the 19th century equivalent of America’s “shock and awe” strategy during its invasion of Iraq in 2003. In the years before World War I, what happened at the Battle of Sedan was seen as the future of warfare…. It wasn’t.
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Peter Bergen: The battle of Sedan was a key part of your book on the future of war. Why did it influence the run up to World War I?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, Sedan is quite interesting. I mean, you, this is the Franco Prussian War in 1870. And the, the point about that was that the French were beaten essentially by superior German operations. They almost sort of goaded into a war which they should have thought better about. And then, the Prussians were ready for them and they were defeated. And that shaped the First World War because it meant that the German general staff stuck to a very classical assumption about how to win a war, which was based essentially on decisive battles, which you had to win very quickly, to move quicker than the enemy. And of course, as soon as they failed to do that, everything got bogged down. And the First World War turned into this war of attrition.
Peter Bergen: But this idea of a decisive blow is very enticing. Whether it was the beginning of World War I, or whether it's Pearl Harbor or whether it's Putin in Ukraine, right?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Exactly, If you're going to initiate a war, you want to initiate it on the best possible terms. And if you think the only way you can win is to take out the enemy army, then that leads you to put a lot of weight on the possibility of surprise, and gaining your victory that way. And this is an idea that remains incredibly strong. There are plenty of examples of very effectively implemented surprise attacks, which have nonetheless led eventually to defeat like Pearl Harbor, like Operation Barbarossa, which was the German attack on the Soviet Union. The case of Putin's attack on Ukraine was an example of an incompetent surprise attack, but many, you know, you can do it in efficient ways and still lose. So this idea of the decisive blow is very strong indeed. And there are examples — Israel in 1967 is one that comes to mind — examples of genuinely decisive battles that are over quite quickly. But there are as many more that don't have the effect that you wanted to see.
[MUSIC SURGES, THEN SHIFTS]
Sir Lawrence Freedman: I spent seven years of my life going over what had gone wrong in the Iraq war. Of course a lot of that is what had gone wrong after the invasion. I mean, the actual military operation was perfectly successful. It was the aftermath which was where all the trouble started.
The Iraq War. There’s probably no better example of how hard it is to predict the outcome of war than the bitter American and British experiences in that protracted conflict. And when the UK government held public hearings into what went wrong, Sir Lawrence had a front row seat as a member of its official Iraq inquiry.
ARCHIVAL Inquiry Speaker 1: I turn to Sir Lawrence Freedman now.
ARCHIVAL Sir Lawrence Freedman: You have just mentioned your letter that has been declassified and put on our website. Perhaps you could give us a gist of the nature of the threat to the UK from Iraqi agents in the event of an effort to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime?
One of the main findings of that inquiry was that U.S. president George W. Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair took their nations to war based on a false premise: that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was prepared to use them.
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ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: The Iraqi regime possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.
ARCHIVAL Tony Blair: The point that I would emphasize to you is that the threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability, that threat is real.
And any evidence to the contrary — like the fact that UN arms inspectors hadn’tactually found any evidence of WMDs on the ground in Iraq — was ignored.
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Sir Lawrence Freedman: One of the things that's so striking is the fixation with this weapons of mass destruction issue. It's a very good example of cognitive biases in operation and how they can be influential. So, I think when one looks back, the decision making, it wasn't that these were bad people taking malevolent decisions, but that they got so fixated on certain assumptions that they didn't stand back and ask slightly different questions about, ‘Well, what if they don't have weapons of mass destruction? Are we sure?’ And a lot of, you know, good historical analysis has now been done on decision making, which shows that even where people have had doubts, once they've made a decision, and the closer they get to implementation, the more confidence they show or feel obliged to show in the decision that they've made.‘The Iraqis haven't told us everything. Maybe they, maybe they've stockpiled, maybe they're building new chemical weapons.’ All of these possibilities turned into an absolute article of faith. So that when the inspectors actually got in, instead of letting them get on with their job, as soon as they weren't confirming your article of faith, they become suspect.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: So this immensely damaging decision, which still has repercussions, was based on the basis of strongly held beliefs, rather than hard evidence. I think one of the things that happened after 9/11, for example, is a threat that people had warned about, not quite in the terms in which it happened because the view was that only states could do that sort of thing. But what tended to happen after that is almost every nightmare somebody had: ‘we got it wrong with 9/11, it could happen here too.’ So it validated all sorts of threats that on close examination were not quite so serious.
Peter Bergen: Like the idea that al-Qaeda would deploy nuclear weapons?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Yeah. Yeah. And, or, or would get them from Saddam Hussein, which, as we know, led eventually to the Iraq War. So the sort of fusion of different threats, the traditional nuclear non-proliferation worry with the new terrorism worry came together with an absolute nightmare. And you couldn't just dismiss it and say it's not gonna happen because clearly these guys would've liked to have done it if they could. So you can't just say, you know, ‘Don't get carried away.’ What you can say, ‘Okay, now we know this is something to worry about. What can we do to ensure it doesn't happen?’ Which, as I suggested before, is the useful thing about these sorts of prognostications.
Peter Bergen: Before Colin Powell died, who obviously was the leader of the last successful Gulf War. I asked him a direct question, “Did George W. Bush ever ask you your advice on whether to attack Saddam Hussein in 2003?” And the answer was no. So Bush, even in a democratic system, basically had made up his mind. He's the commander-in-chief in the American system, and it happened.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: In the U.S. in the months leading up to the war everybody knew what was likely to happen. And there were immense debates. I mean, Bush just couldn’t escape the issue. You know, Colin Powell could have resigned. I mean, he had that option.
Peter Bergen: Right.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Colin Powell believed in the weapons of mass destruction story and that somehow they could influence and control events. Basically back to this idea of the decisive attack from the Franco-Prussian War, You don't think about the second, third, and fourth move, just the first one. There was never much doubt that the U.S. could topple Saddam's regime. The issue was they never thought of what they were gonna put in its place.
Peter Bergen: Machiavelli said, you know, more than half a millennium ago, “Wars may begin when you please, but they do not end when you will.”
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Indeed. I think that the biggest, [SIR LAWRENCE LAUGHS] there's one lesson reinforced, uh, recently is that it's easier to start a war than to end one. And one of the problems with war is that however specific your objectives may be when you set it in motion, as soon as you have set it in motion, there's another objective, which is about reputation and credibility and sticking with commitments and so on. And that over time could, can be important even when you've forgotten why you went to war in the first place.
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ARCHIVAL Newscaster: A four star Air Force general is now predicting war with China. He writes in a memo that Beijing will likely invade Taiwan while the U.S. is distracted by the upcoming presidential election. He says, quote, “I hope I'm wrong. My gut tells me we'll fight in 2025. “
That four star general was not the only one to make a prediction about a possible future war with China. CIA chief Bill Burns was only a little bit more optimistic when he recently reported that China’s President Xi Jinping has instructed his military to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027. I wondered whether Sir Lawrence thought that lessons learned from history would affect China’s potential plans to set off a major war in the region.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, you'd hope the Chinese would learn that things never go quite as you expect. There are many pitfalls. It's difficult to take over a country where you're not welcome. Which is the lesson, you know, we've sort of learned after, after Iraq. So the lesson you want President Xi to think about is military force seems to be a way of solving all sorts of problems at a stroke because you don't have to bargain with people. You don't have to compromise, you don't have to negotiate, you don't have to try to accommodate their concerns and their interests. You just impose your will. That's, that's the attraction of armed force. But unfortunately people have a will, have their own concerns and interests, are scared of what it might mean to live under the occupation of a hostile power, and so even though they're gonna be taking horrible risks for themselves and their families, they don't see much alternative and they fight. And, it's not an easy task to take over Taiwan. I mean, both Ukraine and Taiwan have spoken about the porcupine strategy.
Peter Bergen: What does that mean?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: The porcupine strategy is basically lots of prickles come out and you hurt yourself if you're trying to pick it up.
Peter Bergen: So the, the idea that, the Taiwanese would be armed by themselves and by the United States in such a way that the Chinese would be taking a very nasty bite.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Their first decision anyway is gonna be whether they put the squeeze on with a blockade with the risk that the Americans and others will then try and break it.
Peter Bergen: But isn't the idea that they would do it so quickly that they would get inside the United States' decision cycle? If you look at the United States and its allies, even about when Putin invaded Ukraine, it took a while for people to kind of get themselves organized and it took a long time for effective weapons to get in theater. So the one of the Chinese lessons must surely be if we get inside the United States’ decision cycle, we can kind of pull this off potentially.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Maybe, but I mean, if you look back, I mean, one of the things that they should have noticed is American intelligence is pretty good these days, including on China. That the Americans called it pretty accurately, and the British, about what was likely to happen with Ukraine, and they did act on that. It meant that the Ukrainians had dispersed a lot of stuff before the Russian attack took place and quite a lot of weapons, defensive weapons had been sent over before the Russians arrived. The anti-tank weapons and so on that helped the Ukrainian forces were sent over, you know, in the weeks before the war. And they'd been training and so on. So it's one thing to, to sort of plan these things on desktop exercises. It, it, it's quite another thing to actually work through all the things that could go wrong once you try.
Peter Bergen: The Chinese do have one pretty big problem, which is they haven't fought a major war for a long time. I mean, we're coming up on the 70th anniversary of the end of the Korean War, which was the last time the United States and the Chinese fought, and since then the Chinese really haven't fought any particularly large war. So does that affect their calculus or is it immaterial?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Oh, I think the Chinese are very conscious of this, I think. They, they are aware that their combat experience is limited and managing major operations, especially at sea, is a big deal. And, you know, there's basic command issues that come along for a system in the communist tradition, which is very top down, very much following orders and not necessarily giving latitude to individual captains or even if they've been officially given the latitude that they know how to exercise it. So I think there are big issues for a country that, you know — possibly sensibly — has managed to avoid a major war, to suddenly believe that they can leap into one especially if it's one that may involve them in getting involved in a clash with the United States and its allies. So all of these things you, you hope will make them cautious, but you can't be sure.
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I often think about how my view of the world is affected by how much time I spend analyzing — and frankly, worrying — about the national security threats that we all face. War, in my view, is simply part of the human condition and Sir Lawrence has devoted his life’s work to thinking about it. I was wondering what studying war for half a century had taught him about humanity itself.
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Peter Bergen: Do you have a view of human nature? Because I think this is very important about when we think about the future of war, because I think if you have a slightly tragic view of human nature, you're gonna have a different view about the future of war than say, you know, the Steven Pinkers of the world who say that war is getting less lethal and we're all getting nicer to each other and sort of, we're all gonna have this kumbaya moment. So, what is your view about war as part of the human condition?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Well, I'm, I'm very much on the tragic side. I think most historians have a keen sense of tragedy because we know how too often things have been set in motion on the basis of optimistic assumptions about what would happen next. And it often hasn't turned out that way.
[SOUNDS OF GUNFIRE, EXPLOSIONS, SIREN]
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Now we're suffering an absolutely calamitous situation in Europe that's a result of one person's perverted decision making. So it's always important to keep in mind that the, the decisions, even in the best of times, are made by fallible human beings in often dysfunctional organizations because that's the nature of, of how decisions get made. They're not made with perfect information by wholly rational beings.
Peter Bergen: What do you worry about most?
Sir Lawrence Freedman: You know, as I said before, I have a, I have a rather tragic view of these things. I started my career working on nuclear issues and I think that's a thing to worry about. There's a lot that we're gonna think about after this particular war is over. And while I think a lot of the concerns about Putin using nuclear weapons to save face is completely overdone and not particularly helpful, it would be unfortunate if the alternative lesson was drawn, assuming that Putin doesn't use nuclear weapons, that we've overdone the concern in, in the past. I think it's still something to worry about. Even if you find that the specifics of a situation create actually very few incentives to use nuclear weapons.
Sir Lawrence Freedman: You know, I got interested in Russia, Ukraine in 2014. I wrote a book about it. And to find yourself watching unfold a conflict which has brought so much misery and destruction and suffering, so unnecessarily, based on such faulty premises that is gonna end up not achieving what the perpetrator thought it was gonna achieve and with enormous damage to his own country. I find that worrying enough. I mean, I, as somebody who follows the current war very closely, I find it's upsetting on a daily basis. People like me spend our time, you know, sort of, the big geopolitical developments, tough strategic concepts, thinking in a very dispassionate way how armed force can be used. But all of these things are very human, they come back to the fallible human beings, but also the vulnerable human beings who've done nothing wrong, who a year and a half ago felt, you know, had their lives to look forward to and things to do, and now find that it's all been ruined because this idiot thought he could have a legacy for himself that would recreate a Russia that has long gone and will never reappear.
[MUSIC PICKS UP]
Sir Lawrence Freedman: Sometimes, you know, as the Ukrainians have found, you've got no choice. You've gotta go to war. And sometimes having done so, you're pleased you did because the alternative was much worse. But a lot of misery still resulted from that. So I keep on coming back to the fact that you just have to remember the human side of war and the human costs of war.
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If you want to know some more about some of the issues and topics we discussed in this episode, we recommend The Future of War: A History and Strategy: A History both by Sir Lawrence Freedman,and his most recent book Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. They’re all available on Audible.
CREDITS:
IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original. Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.
This episode was produced by Paul Berczeller with help from Jamila Huxtable.
It was mixed by Bart Warshaw.
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Please note: This episode includes excerpts from the BBC.
