Hew Strachan: Arms Races and the Decision to go to War

Hew Strachan, Brennan Deveraux, Antulio Echevarria II, Michael Lynch, Jadwiga Biskupska, and Jacob Stoil

 

In this episode, members of the US Army War College interview Sir Hew Strachan, British military historian.

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Brennan Deveraux
Welcome to Conversations on Strategic Competition, the companion podcast to the US Army War College Strategic Competition Center. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government. Today, we are joined by Sir Hew Strachan, a distinguished military historian and renowned strategic thinker. After a riveting lecture given to the Army War College resident class, Sir Hew has agreed to continue the conversation on this podcast with a small group of War College faculty members, who I would ask to identify themselves for our listeners before chiming in with any questions. Professor Antulio Echevarria, the College’s professor of strategic competition and our host, will moderate the conversation. Dr. Echevarria, I’ll turn it over to you.


Antulio Echevarria
All right. Thank you so much, Hew, for a great lecture. Lots of Q&A afterwards. So that definitely shows some interest. We would like to press you a little bit further on the thoughts you have regarding arms races and their propensity or not, to lead to wars. So, over to you if you would.
           

Hew Strachan           
Tony, thank you very much and thank you for inviting me here in the first place. I could have said a few words about arms races in the lecture, but I thought it was best left to this discussion because what strikes me about arms races is they very rarely actually lead to war. We see them as inherently dangerous things that it creates a volatile rather than a stable situation.

But the reality is, of course, that very often they act as deterrence in their own right and that the competition is itself dictated by the industrial competition. I think arms races are a sort of post 1850 phenomenon in the sense that it implies technological innovation and industrialized warfare. It’s hard, I think, to no doubt an ancient historian will disagree with me and say that there is there are arms races in earlier civilizations, but I don’t think that’s actually terribly helpful, quite frankly, because the pace of technological change is sufficiently slow. That although the stirrup, the move from bronze to iron or whatever may be a change, it’s not sufficient of a change.

Whereas the point about arms races in the industrial age is that actually there’s a degree of direct competition, you are measuring yourself against another country in terms of your ability to generate weapons. And in the lecture, I mentioned a couple of rivalries in passing, which I think illustrate the point for me. The first is the challenge that Britain thinks it faces from France in the middle of the 19th century, the fear that with a Napoleon back on the French throne, that there will be renewed warfare within Europe. And, indeed, the manifestation of that after the Crimean War, when France and Britain have gone to war together against Russia.

With the construction of La Gloire, the first essentially iron, still wooden ship but iron, one of, no, it’s fully iron, fully iron construction. Anyway, Britain responds with the Warrior, an experimental ship which takes its technological innovation in terms of the development of iron building of ships, a stage further. And that arms race is then extended right up until the Entente of 1905.

You know, Britain is looking at France, France is looking at Britain in terms of their relative naval capabilities, and it is, I think, above all, at sea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that you get arms races because the margin, relative margin of technological advantage can have devastating effect. Tsushima, in 1905, in the Russo-Japanese war, it shows that in spades that the Japanese Navy has the edge at every possible level.

And at sea, that marginal difference seems to be able to have a truly decisive effect. So being one step ahead of your rival does seem to matter. But the Anglo-French naval arms race goes nowhere. It actually ends in Entente, and the Entente doesn’t come out of the arms race. It’s not that they’re so frightened of each other to do that. The Entente comes out of the need to sort out wider political issues to do with essentially who controls the Mediterranean, who has control of North Africa.

How they do that is to settle colonial imperial rivalries, of which maybe the arms race is a manifestation. But it is not a solution to the arms race itself. And the other naval arms race, of course, which is much more genuinely a naval arms race, I suppose, is the Anglo-German naval rivalry from 1904, 1905 onwards, precipitated above all by the launch of the dreadnought, and by Britain settling as differences with France, which means that Germany realizes that it is Germany that is in the, in Britain sites, and it is.

Although Britain maintains its trying to sustain a two-part standard, it can fight the next two naval powers in the world at the same time. It doesn’t, in all intents and purposes, is focusing solely on Germany. And this is the area of greatest military technological innovation at the time. I mean, these warships are cutting edge technologies with enormous sophistication in terms of their communication systems, their firepower, their speed.

These are all in combination. But where does that go? Well, of course it has practical application in the First World War. But the Anglo-German naval arms race does not cause the First World War. The argument that the world goes to war in 1914 because Britain and Germany are rivals, think of Paul Kennedy’s Anglo-German antagonism, that this is what causes the war is simply unsustainable.

At the beginning of 1914, Churchill, as First Sea Lord, says, “the situation actually looks calmer in relation to Germany that any time in recent history.” He’s pretty upbeat at that point. And Beckmann Harvey, the German chancellor, when he initiates talks between Britain and Germany to limit naval building, does so thinking it will be a way of loosening the ties between Britain on the one hand and France and Russia on the other.

That’s one of the reasons they don’t work, is that he’s actually trying to widen it beyond the issue of naval construction. And when the crisis breaks in July 1914, Churchill already has the reserve fleet on standby. They’ve been doing their exercises and he decides not to demobilize that, but to keep them in, in essentially “in being” so they are ready if this crisis ends in war.

But at no stage is the threat of the use of the Royal Navy used in the unfolding of the crisis itself, because for Germany, that really seems immaterial. At that juncture, they’re thinking of a land war. This has begun in the Balkans. And by the same token, you know, famously, of course, there are joint exercises going on between the Royal Navy and the German Navy just as the crisis begins.

The… and the last stage of the crisis is the outbreak of the war between Britain and Germany. And Britain is the one, of course, that essentially is the aggressor, because Britain actually issues the ultimatum to Germany to get out of it, to get out of Belgium. But this the Anglo-German arms race in itself has not generated this war.

You know, there are other examples, the most obvious one being the Cold War itself, with the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in constant competition at every level, nuclear, conventional, over a protracted period. There is no war. And when the Soviet Union hits crisis, there is still no war. Both powers are able to negotiate their way out of this. Despite the fact that Reagan used that arms race to try, in many respects, to undermine Russia’s ability to sustain that.

But even that it is saying its military capability. So, in the end, my argument will be: states go to war for more serious reasons than arms races, that actually they go to war for deep political reasons and arms races are symptomatic of that rather than causes of right.

           
Echevarria    
Right, Symptomatic. Absolutely. Okay. So, Mike, you had a question.

           
Michael Lynch          
Dr. Michael Lynch from the Strategic Studies Institute. I’d like to tie the answer that you just gave to the lecture that you just had. And how do you see the quote unquote arms race between allies? For instance, Britain has always been a naval power and now most recently fielded two aircraft carriers and has even sailed those aircraft carriers as independent strike groups. How do you see that challenge to remain on a par with a larger hegemonic ally like the US?

           
Strachan        
It’s for Britain. I think the revolution military affairs of the 1990s is very interesting in this respect, because I remember so often British officers saying to me, “we have to be able to match the United States because we want to be interoperable with the United States.” In other words, what you’re doing is competing in order to say, “we’re still in the game and we’re still a good ally.”

That may come from being a subordinate ally in that context. And certainly the fear was that the pace of technological innovation in land warfare, at any rate, in 1990s was so great that actually the United States would discount its allies rather than see them as central. So that seems to me essentially the competition.

There is another dimension to it, of course, to which is arms sales. And the moment Britain is perhaps too hedged about by too many constraints in how it conducts arms sales. But to see the UK and France, for example, as competitors in the export market for military equipment, would be a helpful way of viewing that. It doesn’t mean that this is incompatible with being an ally. But what it does do, of course, is mean that you’re not necessarily converging, finding convergence in terms of equipment that there is, if you like, wasted effort in that rather than complementarity.

But if you then allow the hegemon in that situation to provide all the weapons, then if the hegemon decides to not support you, then you could find yourself in deep trouble.
           

Jadwiga Biskupska
Jadwiga Biskupska, Harold K. Johnson visiting chair of military history. I was hoping you’d indulge me in letting me shift the geography a little bit. I’m an Eastern European historian, so we’re heading to Eastern Europe. And I buy your argument that arms races are not necessarily a good, easy trigger for modern war, though it’s obvious why historians, why members of the public are going to be interested in them.

We can document them; we can quantify them. We can compare them. So, I’ll offer a hypothesis, and I’ll see what you have to say about it. In the First World War, in the Second World War, and since 2014 and 2022, the space in which alliance systems have been tested and found wanting is Eastern Europe. And I’m playing with that a little bit.

It’s southeastern Europe and then northeastern Europe, and then northeastern Europe and then northeastern Europe. Why might that be? Looking back to your lecture on alliance systems and their varieties. Why might it be Eastern Europe?

           
Strachan        
Well, I think at each of those periods is for a slightly different reason. So, I would think before 1914, there is, if you like, the legacy of not having thought through Eastern Europe sensibly in 1815, and particularly not having thought through sensibly what southeastern Europe would be in the position of the Ottoman Empire within that. And to that extent, the arms race issue is not central to what is happening.

I think in the interwar period, you’ve got a situation where you have created a sequence of independent states. It’s the legacy of the principle of national self-determination, very often unconstrained by a serious concern about the offensive of the states that you’re creating and their vulnerability. Therefore, if they don’t act together themselves to make an alliance that they perhaps can get security through collective defense rather than individual defense.

And I suppose this actually widens beyond Eastern Europe, that one of the challenges here is the more you pursue national self-determination, the more you’re in danger of creating states that actually do struggle to defend themselves in their own right, that therefore do become more ally dependent in order to find their security. And that then means, you know, whom will you help?

And the point, of course, about Eastern Europe, for Western Europe is how effectively can they be allies? I mean, the Western European states to be effective allies for Eastern European states because of distance and geography and how much they would need to be if they’ve got threats closer to home than that. And equally, of course, the other way around these European states, there is a similar what’s the offer that East European states can make to Western European states if they were to be allies?

And the offer is, with the powerful Germany, considerable, that we can actually act as a threat on the eastern frontier of Germany as well as the western or of any other central European powerful country. And it applied to some extent, of course, even when France was the hegemon within Europe, that this would that would be the effect.

But if you have if you have no major military threat in the center of Europe, then that changes the dynamic immediately, because presumably Eastern European states were least have had to look east recently in terms of whether threats are coming from. And that then calls into question for the states of Western Europe, how far their own interests are essentially affected.

           
Jacob Stoil     
Dr. Jacob Stoil, the research professor of Middle East Security over at SSI, the Strategic Studies Institute. And I’d like to start out by saying, I’m very glad that you brought up the naval arms race between Britain and Germany prior to the First World War, because the arms race caused the First World War seems to be one of these zombie narratives that’s been disproven more times than I can count and just refuses to die.

So hopefully, maybe this podcast will put a nail on that coffin, at least within the PME (professional military education) institution. But I’d like to go a little bit to think about parsing out this concept of arms races and whether there are different dynamics here. So, the arms races you gave an example of are all both technological, so qualitative if we will, and quantitative.

And each one has a clear winner. They go to a point where one side it becomes very clear can’t compete. And so, my first kind of thinking about this is do we see a distinction between the dynamics of purely quantitative arms races, where neither side can establish a clear qualitative advantage and where they’re more evenly matched? And I would think of this getting even more complicated when you look at states that have had repeated cycles of violence in a short period of time, India and Pakistan, Israel and Egypt, things like that, where the arms race is consciously gearing up for the next one that everyone expects, because the last one was very recent. And I was wondering what effects that might have. The second thing I was wondering is how does this fit if we look at arms race, it’s not just perhaps as arms. So, taking away from the arms race and more military capability race. And I think about the one of the dynamics in the Cold War is the US dominance in agricultural production.

That means that the Soviet Union, by the time you get to that moment of crisis, is entirely dependent on US grain for feeding its livestock. And so maybe they can compete in this military context. But they had lost years ago in the total defense context. How much of that dynamic is important to when we consider arms races and stability?

           
Strachan        
Well, that second question does seem to be inherently difficult because it requires the building of a causal relationship in the way in which you, you’ve done. I mean, if, clearly, whatever form economic strength might take with its agricultural, industrial can be part of the competition between states and the way in which they’re behaving. But then the question would also be, I suppose, whether the sophistication of the economy, if it’s agriculturally dependent, is actually up to sustaining an arms race in the technological sense, because actual industrial production may not be at the level where it’s sufficiently important in the state structure.

I’m slightly thinking of the hoof here as I tried to put that together. But what I would also say is a criticism of what I’ve just said in terms of the introduction, was this is all very high tech, major powers using the most advanced and sophisticated equipment in single platforms, each of which represents a massive investment. It looks very different, it seems, when you see an arms race between land powers, and that was seen to be a part of what you’re talking about, particularly, of course, when you move on to an agricultural economy and the way in which a country is put together.

So, the answer is that nobody talks about before 1914 or nobody much, David Stephenson does talk about his book on almonds in Europe before 1914, is the race to get quick firing field artillery. Every army is trying to do it. Every army has to do it. It’s mass production, unlike the building of warships, which of course is a highly expensive, capital-intensive business.

And we don’t see it. It becomes invisible. But yet, everybody knows that if they have to be effective players against other European countries, then they need to have quick firing field artillery to do that. Just as you know, every country by the late 1930s is thinking, where are they in relation to tanks and what sort of tanks will they have and how they will, how they will go?

And is there an arms race going on here? Well, I think part of the reason we don’t see it is that what’s happening, and the same would apply to India and Pakistan, and some of the more recent examples that you were giving is that you’re looking at much more diverse forms of armament spread over, particularly because they may involve land forces, which therefore don’t have a single technology that becomes the focus of what you’re doing.

So, it’s much harder to characterize those as arms races because, for example, quick firing field artillery may be offset by another weapon. Now that happens, of course, in arms races at sea, you know, the French decide to opt out of the battleship business for a bit and go to the whole and think about using torpedo boats as substitutes.

And again, of course, rather than fleet action as a way of fighting. So you can negate the naval power of another country, in other words, in innovate an asymmetric solution to the problem. In land warfare, it seems to be more, it’s not as clear cut as that, but you are still trying to think of ways in which you might want to counter the dominance of a field artillery, perhaps by constructing better defensive positions or using another form of artillery to counter field artillery for counter-battery fire or whatever.

So, there are nuances here which actually play out in ways that make the whole issue of an arms race less visible and less high profile.

           
Deveraux       
Sir, Brennan Deveraux, Strategic Studies Institute national security researcher. First, I love the artillery talk. I’ve got about a decade of artillery experience. I love hearing about it. As you talk about the arms race, and I’m specifically thinking the qualitative, that chase of the emerging technology, the real advantage that I think they’re aiming for. Do you think that where most of this conflict doesn’t come is because that perceived advantage really isn’t going to get to the point of, “I’ve created a machine gun and I’m fighting people with swords,” you know, I can completely win the fight. Versus the race itself, to your point, almost creating a deterrence by raising the cost, whether that’s cost in blood, cost in investment. “I’ve now created these 100 new ships, what if I were to lose 50 of them?” You know. And it elevates the conflict that way so that it’s more of a deterrent than.

           
Strachan        
Well, yes. And of course, you know, influential figure when I was at Cambridge, on the Steinberg when he wrote about German naval building, called his book Yesterday’s Deterrent, Tirrpitz said enough when he was heading the Reich. The Naval Armaments Office suggests that is how he saw that sort of fleet. But Jonathan, when he wrote that book, put it very firmly in Cold War context.

You know, this is a… It wasn’t that crass. It wasn’t that there was an element of that. I think one of the other issues here is that if you, is the problem of obsolescence, you know, if you do, you take the moment when you have a small advantage over the other side, assuming you’re both engaged in some form of arms race and you see a small relative advantage on whatever weapon system it tells, which might just have a decisive effect.

Do you take that moment to go to war? And the answer, broadly speaking, is states don’t actually take that moment to go to war. I mean, partly because for reasons we discussed, they actually go to war, probably for other reasons not to do with that. And the reason you have got these weapon systems in the first place is those underlying causes are there.

But even then, you don’t see two adversaries. Very, very… I’m trying to think of a good example of actually deciding to go to war precisely because they think they have that advantage at that moment. I mean, maybe the 1973 Yom Kippur War is that is that a moment when Egypt thinks they’ve got this marginal advantage over Israel and there is a chance to, you know, regain control of the Sinai that moment? Possibly.

I’m sort of thinking. But then the point here is you do have to act quickly because the advantage will go. You know, I was thinking of these remarks. I thought, well, look at Stalin in 1939 that he has got the largest and most advanced armored force in the world at that point, but then becomes a wasting asset because actually, it’s outdated.

I mean, fortunately, the Soviet Union has addressed that problem in time enough to have a very effective main battle tank in the Second World War. But there is a, you know, there is suddenly having been in a pole position, having got all the fruits from the five-year plans and, and the driving of industry for, for military production.

What do you do with it? And the answer is not much. I mean, sure, you’ve got to fight in Finland, but it doesn’t go very far, as far as the Soviet Union is at that point. And it’s not been very effective.
           

Deveraux       
Just really quick if you can flip the narrative. So we look at the aggressor capitalizing on an advantage. I often think of the loss, when we talk more in the nuclear is where we bring it up, in general I think it’d work for arm races. If I thought my adversary was about to get an advantage. Could that necessarily kind of flip that narrative that I might have to engage? Because if I don’t, I’m now going to have a new threat.

           
Strachan        
There’s certainly, I think what you see in a lot of the nuclear arms race, a lot of both NATO and Soviet Warsaw Pact efforts are essentially about stability as an object in itself. So, you know, when Ronald Reagan goes for SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) in 1983, you know, what worries the allies but also worries to some extent, the Russians, is the instability that will now come into a system that had seemed stable, and therefore there is pressure not to innovate in order not to undermine the stability which you’ve created in that system, even if you’re trying to seek relative advantage. So, it does. Yeah, but you have to proceed warily.

           
Stoil
Jacob Stoil, again. I think, had a separate question that I’ll reserve the right to ask in a second, but I actually want to follow on from this discussion for a second and think about if we have to differentiate really between arms races and sudden capabilities changing, which are not arms races necessarily. So given that we are in the month of April, I still believe in 2026.

Obviously, the Iran situation is fairly heavily on people’s minds, and it strikes me that that might go to what you’re saying, which is not that there was an arms race necessarily between Israel and Iran on nuclear capabilities, but that there was a perceived moment where the strategic situation would be altered by the introduction of a new capability. And so that leads to war rather than an arms race moving kind of up and down.

And it seems to me, when we talk about nuclear arms races, there’s a point that reinforces stability because there’s a point of non-remunerativeness. Right. If both sides achieve sufficient second-strike capability and have sufficient nuclear weapons beyond a certain point, the old logic of MAD, of mutually assured destruction, then it seems to me that there’s a point of non-renewal when it comes to an arms race.

Right? Okay, so I have more nuclear weapons than you have. That’s fine. You still will wipe my country out regardless of how many more I drop on you. Right? So, do you think that we should section off nuclear arms race a little bit from this talk? And because it has its own dynamic, once you hit a certain point, obviously for countries to only have a few devices, this is very different or don’t have second strike capability. But should we section this off from the theory and put it in its own box?

           
Strachan        
Well, we do tend to put nuclear weapons in its own box. In your reference in some ways to Iran. seems to me to show that. I mean, one of the extraordinary things about the current crisis in relation to Iran is how the nuclear issue much of the time isn’t present in the discussion. There you have two, assuming Israel’s nuclear weapons are being part, you have two nuclear weapons owning powers in the business and one aspirate nuclear weapons owning power, it would seem.

And yet, actually, most of the time, the commentary has not focused on the danger of nuclear use. I mean, for sure, the president made his remarks about civilization and so on. And that implied, at least for some, that there could be possible nuclear use. But that was, the fact that that came as a shock, showed how little people had actually factored into their imaginations that these were states with interests in nuclear weapons at war with each other, which during the Cold War would have generated a much more urgent response from parties who would see the danger.

So, I would be saying, actually, in some ways we need to integrate rather than separate them off in order to be more aware of what the implications are. That one of the dangers of putting them in a separate category. And I see why you’re saying, because, you know, the bigger you can expand your arsenal and actually effectively get no greater destructive power or no greater deterrent effect, you’ll get just as much, you would argue, from having the number of warheads that country like Britain and France does, because you could still do an awful lot of damage with that, as having the scale of arsenals that that the Soviet Union as it was, or Russia as it is today, and the United States and China have. But the consequence of separating them off is, we’re probably not taking them with enough seriousness. That’s what I that’s simply what I would say. I think.

           
Stoil    
Absolutely, I can see that argument. And my initial question was actually going to be, I think I, by your hypothesis of arms race, I’m pretty well convinced of this. I came in fairly convinced. And you’ve further convinced me that arms races don’t cause conflict and are in fact symptomatic of what’s going on in the strategic dynamics.

If we’re going to use symptom, continue with the symptomatic analogy for a second. One of the ways to diagnose what’s going on in a body is to look at the symptoms package and try to determine, well, this is, looks this symptom looks similar to that symptom, but they’re distinct. It seems to me that we have, if not arms races, then military competition over mobilization, over quantity, etc. that is driven by the opening pre-phases of a conflict.

And I think of Germany and France leading, or Prussia and France leading up to the Franco-Prussian War, where there is that technological competition, but there is also the quantitative competition. And again, before the First World War, and certainly on Germany’s case, before the Second World War, right. We do see them trying to rapidly expand, the other countries, intermittently trying to keep up.

And we see these arms races that are not part of that cycle. Do you see in your work a way to differentiate to an observer, to an analyst, to a theoretician, and to someone who has to look at what’s going on and go, “well, this, this arms race here is a hallmark of actually the stable competition in the system.” “And this one is because everyone’s gearing up for war.” How would observer tell the difference between the two?

           
Strachan        
Well, I think it just depends how systemic you think your approach is to all this. How far are you looking at states which behave in ways that are consistent and believe they’re subscribing to a form of international order in doing so, maybe to their benefit? And how far do you actually say everything is much more contingent than that?

And in the hands of individuals who may behave differently. So, you could have a state that is a reliable systemic performer, a stable influence that has a degree of superiority, is engaging in regular updates of its weapons and its arsenals in order to sustain that position. And you don’t see any immediate threat from that, but you might then have a change of government, and that state then has the capability which could use offensively or erratically or whatever, as, as, as a consequence of that.

So how much are you describing an order which, which is seen to be stable and needs to be kept stable? And my reaction as a historian to that question is that’s a fool’s errand. It won’t always be stable. I mean, there are moments of stability and moments of instability, and things change. And the challenge is to recognize when that change is dramatic and when it’s important.

And we’re very bad at doing it. But that but that is, is precisely the difficulty. We tend, of course, to think, you know, one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Cold War arms race is that people now look back on that as essentially a good time, because two sides balanced each other out in to create a stable system, and each had a form of direct communication or indirect communication through the hotline.

And they controlled it very effectively. And it was less chaotic and less confusing and less uncertain to the world of which we now face. Laurie Martin, I remember in a book on, I can’t remember the title that talked about the Cold War being the deceleration of history. Because actually the pace of change was glacial, despite the fact that this was a highly advanced technology being set one against the other.

But my point here would be that always you had the madman argument. At what point would somebody behave irrationally as it was seen to be the thing that worried the political scientist in terms of how you factor that in? And even if you don’t put that in, the historian would say, “well, actually a Hitler would act, would use that capability.”

And that is a, that depends on one individual. So, the way in which one individual obviously able to command a state and support. So, I think that the, you’re still begging a question as to who’s actually going to cause the war and how that will be precipitated.
           

Stoil    
Can we look at the arms races themselves though to see a difference there somewhere. If I’m looking at the arms race, that’s an arms race that symptomatic of stability and some that are symptomatic of instability.

           
Strachan        
Well, yes, I think you can. Of course, you can see elements and of course you can see arms races that begin in circumstances of instability, which is precisely why the arms race might take off. And then it becomes a symbol of stability. And you also see arms races which have become symbols of stability, because actually each partner to this race has innovated in step with the other, and suddenly there’s a quantum leap.

And then the question is, what will there be a temptation for the side that has achieved the quantum leap to exploit that? And that’s really the point at which we think there might be war if we’re thinking of this is, of course, a cause of war. But what we on the whole don’t see is that happening.

           
Lynch
I’d like to go back to the… Michael Lynch again… I’d like to go back to the qualitative arms race among allies, the United States, as you pointed out, it is often a race between foreign military sales. But the United States has for a long time depended on not just smart weapons, but exquisite weapons. And that often prices allies out of out of the picture. You may be able to buy an exquisite weapon, but only one. So how does that strain and or an alliance?

           
Strachan        
I think the, it’s strange in alliance, because actually if an alliance were really functional and in this respect, no alliance is truly functional, the state capable of producing exquisite weapons would produce the exquisite weapons, and the state that couldn’t produce the exquisite weapons would produce the mass of less important assets. So, in all those debates about, you know, do you have carriers or do you have lots and lots of small and more expendable vessels?

There should be a division of labor here, but there isn’t. But the aspiration is always there to achieve it. Though there is maybe a de facto division of labor, just because the less rich ally has no option but to go down the other route. But very often that isn’t how it’s seen. And of course, if you’re trying to sell on the open market, the exquisite weapon becomes the asset that you think you’re going to be able to sell more effectively.

Is this changing? I mean, you know, have drones changed the argument? I suspect not. But there are clearly still strong desires, driven I think, partly by defense industries, partly by essentially pork barrel politics and so on that, say, exquisite weapons are still the desirable objective when it might well be. And it goes back to something that Jacob already said that when actually the way to go with this is to engage an arms race that is about mass, about quantity, not about quality.

But we tend to see it through the prism of quality rather than quantity. And that is partly because the, the temptation, for any state, if it lacks mass, is to use the exquisite solution as a substitute for mass to look at quality as a way around the problem.

           
Lynch
We are running into that problem with drones because we’re shooting exquisite weapons at drones that are relatively inexpensive, and that, that curve is going to go against us pretty quickly.

           
Deveraux       
Can I ask a follow on? So going back to something you said before, I think, though, there is an opportunity to look at the arms race, not as a… oh sorry, Brennan Deveraux again, Strategic Studies Institute… to not look at it necessarily, we’re both reaching for that same capability, but we’re reaching for asymmetric capabilities. Right. So, we might be able to produce exquisite missiles, but we could be in an arms race with a potential adversary who figures out that they can undermine the ability of us to use those.

Or if you look at Russia, Ukraine, look at the naval vessels. Right. So if I could if I could sink a large ship or destroy aircraft without having to have a large ship or aircraft that might throw a wrench in kind of how we often perceive what is an arms race or who we’re having an arms race with.

Do we have to have an arms race with China, or can we have an arms race with a competitor who might not be on that same level?


Strachan        
It’s interesting when you use that specific example of what’s happening or happened in the Black Sea, that you’re in a situation which is one of war. So, there is an arms race going on of a sort. But because it’s in wartime, we see that as a natural form of the competition that happens within war and the pace of innovation, which very often will be asymmetric in its results, in the sense that you will counter a capability with a different sort of capability.

But during peacetime, and I think particularly during the Cold War and the years of deterrence, where nuclear weapons were the dominant factor, the tendency was to think symmetrically. And that then raises the question of whether that is simply about something we talked about, which is the need for stability, or whether it is that you look at your enemy and you say, “My enemy has ten of whatever it is, frigates or of nuclear weapons or whatever. I need ten, too. And they have to be very similar in order to neutralize that capability, in order to, you know.” So, I think the tendency is to think symmetrically in peacetime, asymmetrically in wartime, because you’re seeking a relative advantage in wartime, which you’re not necessarily seeking in peace time.

That doesn’t apply. But it could be if you’re looking for an indicator of an arms race that could go into war, that actually the moment that the competitor decides to go asymmetrically, is that the moment when actually they’re thinking no longer of using this to sustain stability, but actually to seek war and fight effectively.

           
Deveraux       
Because they’re actually fighting for that relative advantage they can apply. Interesting.

           
Biskupska     
Jadwiga Biskupska. I can’t resist the opportunity to ask you a bit about the special relationship, since your king is visiting and we’re coming up on 250 years of our independence, our American independence, and you are used to studying things in the long durée and I will make the judgment that the Anglo-American relationship has been worse than it is now, but it also has been better.

What would you say, as a historian, about maintaining that relationship in the next generation, in the next ten years? What are the factors that are key to that maintenance?

           
Strachan        
Well, I think it depends whether you’re viewing a relationship. You know, what is the purpose of the relationship? Is the purpose of the relationship a military purpose? Is the purpose strategic stability? Is the purpose trade? Is the purpose that, you know, that there is, the United States effectively came out of the revolution and the break with Britain in the first place, and therefore, it’s part of a long-standing relationship with what was a, is a former colony, you know, now very distant and remote in terms of where we sit today. I think the challenge has been we’ve tended to see it as a military relationship and, and a military relationship which has become progressively less and less equal.

And after Suez, which of course, has been much in people’s minds in the last few weeks. After Suez, Britain did accept that it was no longer a great power or had to accept the low longer. It was a great power and of course, that it was already shedding empire before that anyway, with Indian independence. But that then accelerated under Macmillan’s prime ministership in the early 60s.

So, what was the substance of the relationship to be? And the challenge for Britain always was how that it wasn’t just a relationship at that stage between Britain and the United States. It was Britain’s relationship with Europe because could, in military terms, Britain be the offshore aircraft carrier of their war in Europe and therefore would be vital to American reinforcement and resupply and so on.

Could Britain be within Europe to do that? Should Britain be separate from Europe to enable that to happen? And so, it’s not just about that relationship with Britain in Europe, one could argue, although plenty of Europeans might have got so fed up with Britain that they would not argue it, that Britain strengthened, certainly militarily, the position of Europe collectively, and that that provided a counterweight to the United States rather than that connectivity which it provides in terms of how It would like to see itself.

And then you get in a situation where we get back to the notion of allies being competitors rather than partners, that Europe, if it were functioning effectively, would actually be a much greater competitor to the United States than it currently is, because it’s too disaggregated to deliver that. And it itself is marginalized. So where does this line go in the future?

I’m assuming that actually Britain could only really achieve any real leverage from within Europe. And it still has to address that question. Plenty of people of course in Britain are now beginning to say that must now reenter the political debate, although it’s become very difficult in Britain to have that discussion, given how painful the whole independence referendum was in the first place, there was actually quite an interesting discussion.

It must have been on radio for last week, with the argument essentially being that you wouldn’t go down a referendum route again if you think how tight the referendum was in reality and how, you know, a day difference might produce a different outcome, a different presentation of the arguments, it was, it seems to be crazy ever to go to a referendum without a 60% guaranteed majority for saying, you know, the deal is if there is 60% for that and it’s consistent, then we do have to change.

But actually, if it’s 51% to 49% on that particular day, you need to have 2 or 3 bites at this cherry. But the argument essentially would be that referendums being something that Britain doesn’t necessarily do, is that you would have a party that stood for election on the basis that you would be going back into Europe, although the deal would be a bad one compared with what Britain had before.

And the reason I’m going down that particular rabbit hole is if that were to happen, that would recalibrate in some respects to the relationship between Britain and the United States in very different terms. It seems to me whatever the Kings visit is doing, and I think the King is an excellent ambassador for Britain in this context, and from that point of view, it’s good timing.

I think it’s particularly important he is here in the 250th anniversary, the governments being keen to stress, but what it is doing is holding the thing together at the time being that’s it’s sticking tape. There has to be substance to it as well as the sort of cosmetics which will come from his visit and his capacity to, to actually to communicate.

He does communicate as an individual. Quite apart from his role as a monarch, he is capable of striking the long term in terms of what he says in ways that actually, I think resonate with people when he does it. But whether he can achieve that during this visit, of course, is the big question.
           
Stoil    
Going back, since this is the great power competition corner, I suppose it’s called, or the podcast.
           

Echevarria    
Strategic competition.

           
Stoil    
The strategic competition, not just great power, right? And again, as a Middle East specialist, I entirely am very glad for that and buy into the idea that you can have competition in lots of different directions. It’s actually on that issue that I’d like to focus for a second, which is, as we are talking about these arms races and the stability it felt dare I say slightly Eurocentric, in that when we look at these arms races, they, you’re entirely right, did not cause wars anywhere within the European continent. I entirely buy that. And nor did they cause direct confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States. Entirely buy that. But with the exception of the nuclear issue, the technologies developed in them were used elsewhere.

And as a historian who began his life as you well remember, is a historian of empire at war and colonial war, it seems to me that there’s a trick we’re missing, perhaps in our discussion, which is that the outlet for these tensions and the outlet for these arms races, with the exception, perhaps, of naval, is not where we’re looking. That the outlet is how these powers and those engaged in strategic competition use the very same technologies to pursue those asymmetric advantages in a state of persistent warfare, even when they’re allied.

To go to the question of alliances, I think of Anglo-French competition in the Middle East and Africa during the interwar period, for example. Right. That may be really the focus of the discussion is acknowledged. Yes, arm races can be a symptom of stability in the central theater, however you want to call it. However, when we take a global lens, they actually may still be causes of war, just not where we’re looking.

           
Strachan        
Yep, I would accept that entirely. I mean, I think that if you look at the application and even if you look at, you know, the whole issue of warships, if you think, and this is in the 19th century, what the warship delivers is a floating battery that has more firepower than any artillery that will deploy, be deployed in a colonial context.

So, the bombardment of Alexandria, for example, is a case in point is, is and the readiness to use naval bombardment as a form of direct intimidation, coercion, and so on implies that this isn’t just about stability, it is about change. Absolutely. So, the intervention in Egypt, and that applies to, you know, I actually thought it was you started speaking.

I thought, well, you know, this is going towards the Maxim gun. You know, this is where we’re off to because clearly here is a product of European competition. But the advantage it gives you in colonial warfare is devastating. And so this is about application, not about anything else. And the disparities, the famous disparities, for example, that of whatever it is, 48 deaths in Kitchener’s force and thousands in the case of the Sudanese.

And it’s a very, and of course, this is a series of conflicts which after if we if we stick with the idea that the arms race is to do with industrialized warfare more than other forms of warfare, that they’re more acute. This, it is industrialization coupled with the course of advances in medicine and cartography and various other things, that give the imperial powers that leverage, which they don’t have before 1850 to the same extent, but they have in spades after 1850.

So the numbers of colonial campaigns that go badly wrong they’re there. The Isandlwana in the Zulu War or Adwa and the Italians, they’re, but they’re massively outweighed by a very one-sided tactical outcomes, which absolutely depended on materials superiority; this is a product of an arms race.
           

Stoil    
And then with the competition aspect, do we see the foreign military sales aspect being part of this? Because it occurs to me it’s not just uni-directional, right? It’s not just the industrialized power going around the world and doing things. It’s the industrialized power and its armed competition rival who is supplying to a local adversary. Thus we can see in modern times, potentially China or Russia supplying and certainly in the Cold War, the product of the arms race against the US, to US adversaries in these countries and vice versa.

So, should…. if we look more globally, do we see arms races as actually quite part of conflict but just one step removed, right. The European arms race both sides supply to their proxies to fight each other.
           

Strachan        
I think there is that. I don’t know if it’s necessarily proxy war, although it can clearly be that. I think the other thing you need to think about here too is at what point do you get arms sophisticated arms going to market side Europe? And the answer is very often after major war because there’s too much kit around.

So, your reference to what happens in the Middle East between the wars. You know what is France going to do with all the light tanks they’ve suddenly produced? The answer is they send them to Syria and they send to North Africa. And they think these are very good for the control of the populations, you know. So there is a way in which you’re doing that.

And similarly with the British use of airpower. You know, you suddenly think this is an easy system of colonial control. And you, you apply it in what is in a very complex and asymmetric context for disproportionate effect. But that depends on abundance. If you’re actually quite scarce resources, then you will hold on to them, because you may well need them in more critical and closer theaters than you’ve got in the colonial context.

And I think the other thing that relates to that, too, is that what you find in 19th century warfare very often is what’s actually happening. And I suspect this applies in the 20th century as well. In fact, I know it does. Is that what you’re sending out the obsolete weapons rather than the current weapons. So, you’re still maintaining a marginal technological advantage over your colonial adversary or the colonial adversary supported by your European partner or your European opponent, or in the Cold War context, you know, the adversary supported by the Soviet Union as opposed to the United States.

You’re still creating a margin of difference by giving them out of date stuff and current stuff. We do it to Ukraine, you know, a kit which actually European armies were getting rid of suddenly find a fresh purpose.

           
Echevarria    
We have time, I think, for one more question. Go ahead, Brennan.

           
Deveraux
Brennan Deveraux, SSI. To follow up specifically on Ukraine, I feel like there’s almost a blend of some of the things we were talking about today. If we look at the proxy fight, the United States and Russia aren’t necessarily in an arms race. Although if we look at just the modernization efforts of the United States, Russia, China. Ukraine, there was a huge push, at least early in the war, to exactly what you’re talking about.

Here are some older systems. Here’s just body armor, like things, things that just help in a conflict. But then if we take it back to kind of that qualitative and the emerging tech specifically in the asymmetric world with the drones, Ukraine can almost become this test bed against actual Russian equipment. So, then we’re going back to what you talked about before, because it’s in that state of conflict that we’re having this innovation cycle kind of inside and a little bit outside of the conflict itself, because United States is not part of the conflict.

And we’re not necessarily sending over our best exquisite systems. Although HIMARS makes an appearance, things like that. I’d be curious kind of your thoughts on that, on kind of how this very strange not quite proxy support situation, you know, really throws a wrinkle in what is, you know, an arms race.

           
Strachan        
It does throw an…  But also, it’s become a two-way process, hasn’t it. So, the demand for patriots, for HIMARS, for ballistic missiles, but at the same time a realization that there is a model here in other respects for innovation that goes the other way. And the question is how seriously you take that. You know, some would say, “well, actually the response in the US is that the reason that this war has become bogged down is these are two inadequate and inferior military powers that don’t really have the capability to achieve victory.”

And in as far as either party is concerned, and this is therefore an inappropriate model, that isn’t how most European states are viewing it. And that is a potential argument that the whole thing has a high-tech, high-end solution with exquisite platforms and so on and so forth, and that therefore the flow is one way. But the experience of most conflict is actually that very rarely do you get that degree of superiority. For all we’ve just been saying in relation to colonial warfare, there are moments of really decisive effect. Actually, if there are other responses, and that includes geographical familiarity, mass, ability to think in other ways of fighting, and above all, the ability to dodge the battle in the first place and fight in other ways in with forms of regular warfare. Which of course will not necessarily involve higher weapons but might involve different forms of technology.

           
Echevarria    
And on that note, I think we’ll have to bring this to a close. Thank you again, Hew, for a great discussion. And thank you, everyone.

           
Strachan        
Thank you all very much. And thank you for engaging. That’s been very stimulating.

           
Lynch
Thank you.


Biskupska     
Thank you.
           

Stephanie Crider      
You can find more resources and information about the Strategic Competition Center at ssi.armywarcollege.edu/Research-Commentary/Strategic-Competition-Center. For more Army War College podcasts, check out Decisive Point, Conversations on Strategy, SSI live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.