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Good interview, but to focus on one point, I am always troubled by variations on the claim 'there is no longer a boundary between peace and war'. A (long) thread of heretical thought follows for @UKACSC @HCSCShrivenham @MOD_DCDC @icsc_l @edwardstrngr https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/ben-wallace-interview
I can't decide whether the claim is wrong, or confused about what it is attempting to say.
If it is highlighting that states can take hostile or aggressive acts which don't involve violence, or wish to conceal the perpetrator, this is hardly news. It is statecraft as has been pursued for centuries.
This was *the* defining feature of the Cold War, named ironically because the West and the Soviet Union acted very aggressively towards one another, but never went to war in terms of direct and acknowledged fighting.
You can argue that globalisation has accelerated the pace at which this can have an impact, and some new developments like cyberspace provide new tools, including for non-state groups, but that doesn't warrant the headline assertion.
If we are saying the term 'war' doesn't have a meaning, then that's something we don't believe ourselves. War can broadly be thought of in terms of the phenomenon and the legal state of affairs in existence.
In the first case, it's the use of violence to achieve a political end. An act can be hostile without being war. The danger of using war as a metaphor (as in Kennan's 'political warfare') is that we forget about the character of violence itself.
In the second case, we clearly *do* think that war is defined, because we spend a lot of time emphasising our adherence to the Law of Armed Conflict and appropriate behaviour 'in war', contrasting this with our adversaries.
We can't simultaneously seek to extol the virtues of an international order, and a 'rules-based system' and then say that the term 'war' is meaningless and there is no boundary with 'peace'. I suspect @PatPorter76 has views on this!
I should acknowledge here that there *is* a lot of inconsistency over declarations of war, and what constitutes an 'act of war' is ultimately a political decision. So the 'threshold' is ambiguous: but this has *always* been the case.
I am also mildly depressed by the short-term memory loss which seems to afflict some of our thinking, which seems characterised by presenting everything as new. We already talked about a 'spectrum of conflict' to fill the gap between friendly relations and war.
Fuzzy thinking on 'hybrid warfare' and 'grey zones' follow this trend, where we jump from buzzword to buzzword without building firmly on the foundations of existing understanding.
This matters because - I think - the argument affects how we resource and organise state capabilities. The military is the only organisation in the UK that can legitimately use violence against our enemies. It needs to understand how a range of capabilities complement violence.
And so, like our adversaries, it should invest in those capabilities *where they support the military's core task*. Only once this is done should additional resources be put in the 'nice to have' areas.
If the military diverts resources onto areas that other parts of the state should cover, then it is a weakening of our overall state machinery. Covering the slack left by others should be a last resort; we should apply the same principles as military aid to the civil authorities.
The concept also creates moral hazard; as I always paraphrase @brooks_rosa's book, if everything becomes war, then the military becomes everything. The same is true if we decide war has no boundaries: the risk of creeping militarisation grows.
Broadly we seem to have stumbled into the fact that other states have become better at using coercion, and to excuse our flat-footedness we are coming up with conceptual changes to explain how everything is 'new' when we should have just remembered our history!
The risk is that in doing so we become confused about how to respond and organise ourselves, and allow an over-extended military to compensate for the weakness of other areas, which will come back to bite us when violence rears its ugly head (as it always does eventually).
