S6E20: Preparing for War: Adaptable Forces and Societies

Welcome to season 6 of Talking Strategy. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. And in this series, my friend Professor Beatrice Hussand and I talked to experts about strategy, strategic leadership and the strategic challenges facing nations today. In this season, we'll be taking the ideas identified in many Western security defence strategies and subjecting them to analysis through historic and contemporary lenses. This podcast is once again brought to you thanks to our long-term partnership with Cornfering. As a leading global consulting firm dealing in strategy and unlocking performance across defence and commercial sectors, their focus on organisational and individual potential means their ideal partners for this podcast series. I should also mention that the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Rusey or any other institution. Now, allow me to hand over to my friend and colleague, Beatrice Welcome, the chair is yours. Thank you very much Paul. Today our guest is Professor Olivier Schmidt, the head of research at the Institute of Military Operations at the Royal Danish Defence College. He was at the University of Southern Denmark from 2015 to 2024, last as director of the Centre for War Studies. He holds a PhD from the Department of War Studies, King's College London. His many publications include French Defence Policies and the end of the Cold War, which he wrote with Alice Pannini in 2020, allies that count junior partners in Coalition Warfare, which came out in 2018, and for our purposes the most topical, preparing for war, Hurst 2026. He's an Associate Editor of the European Journal of International Security. He's also a Reserve Officer of the French Armed Forces and has worked for the French MOT as desk for various positions. Welcome to this podcast Olivier. Thank you and good morning everyone. In your book Preparing for War, you touch on many of the problems of doing so within an alliance. Can you tell us about different national ideologies, which are possible obstacles to this coordination within alliances? National ideologies in Europe with regard to the recruitment of soldiers. It writes that an emphasize the alliance dimension a lot, probably because I work in teaching a small state in which the belonging to an alliance dimension is actually quite important for defence planning, so that probably shapes my understanding of the situation. I will start by saying that recruitment models are not technical choices only. They are primarily sediments of political history and threat perceptions, and this is precisely why it's so hard to harmonize across Europe. Recruitment is shaped by different civil military configurations and not only labour market logic. I'm French, I'm going to use a very French example, but our national history regarding recruitment of soldiers is shaped by the republican heritage and the model of the citizen soldier, as part of republic, every citizen as duty to contribute to the defence of the nation. So when President Jacques Chirac in 1997 decided to suspend military service, the Ministry of Defence was opposed to it because it was perceived as a potential break with a long-standing republican tradition and the Ministry preferred a mixed model of some professionalised forces and some conscript forces. Of course, the UK has a very different relationship with all volunteer professional forces, again because of different historical reasons. We are not going to go across all of Europe because we have different models, but I think the deeper point is that recruitment is downstream of the relationship between armed forces and civil society, fundamental. And we see different ways across the world to manage that relationship. In the book I'm quoting the Indian model where the armed forces are ethnic, but non-denominational units and the officers are expected to hide their religiosity so that it does not undermine cohesion. Of course, in an alliance framework, recruitment models drive everything else. They drive readiness because it's not the same thing when you have volunteer or conscript forces. They drive reserved mobilisation, but they also drive military strategy. If you have a brigade which is made up primarily of conscripts, it probably cannot fulfill the same functions as a professional brigade, especially when you think in terms of NATO, in terms of potential defending against Russia. The type of volunteer brigades that Finland is deploying is not the same thing as a conscript brigade and they probably have different tasks. So this kind of capability-based approach where you list I need X number of brigades, I need X number of divisions that actually is much more complicated than that because not all brigades and divisions are created equal. A lot of defence reviews at the moment are identifying the need for improving the relationship with industry. Could you talk to us a little bit about some of the obstacles to interstate defence procurement in Europe in the broadest sense, not necessarily just the European Union? Interstate defence procurement can be probably summarised as a kind of trilema that states have to decide and they have to decide where to prioritise. So on the one hand, states may want to have a lot of high tech development because there is a return on industry. The second priority, not necessarily correlated, is that you want your armed forces to be equipped with what they need. And the two of them may not be the same objectives because the industry might have different incentives than what the armed forces need. The third thing that you may want is basically keep the costs relatively low. So those things do not all go together and it's even worse in a multinational framework in which all states want all of that at the same time and of course it is completely impossible because not everyone can have the same return on investment for their own national defence bases. The optimisation of the needs for the armed forces may not necessarily be the same in a multinational framework and that makes cooperation difficult. And of course you usually want to cooperate to keep the costs relatively low. So that's the main incentives but it has peelover effects on the tools I mentioned which are written as the return on investment. The recent examples of the Franco-German cooperation about the future combat air system F-CAS but also the main ground combat system MGS really emphasises that tension. There is very clearly a difference of approach in terms of what the F-CAS should be and there is also a struggle about return on investment. Basically the French position is that that so should be the lead because it's a national company and they claim that they have the most expertise that so wants to keep benefiting from the state subsidies. But on the German side Airbus also says we want our industry to also benefit from this. It cannot only go to the French industry. What was the political project first pushed by President Macron and Chancellor Merkel also as a way to try to minimise cost developments for a six-generation fighter which is becoming extreme expensive for state-alone. That has peelover effects in terms of military readiness but also in terms of return on investment. And I think there will be similar difficulties with G-CAP program. I've heard about tensions between the Italian and the Japanese side also especially in that return on investment dimension. There's a tension here between adaptability and deficiency, the third point of your trilemma. The desire for mass is in danger of turning into a desire for mass that is all the same because that makes it easier to deliver economies of scale and is advantageous for industry. But of course if your adversary is then able to counter that particular capability you lose adaptability even though you've generated mass. One of the things I try to do in the book is define the four degrees of military change. The first one being adjustment which is a routine change like organization's change all the time. It's just very minor adjustments to the daily work of the organization. Then there is adaptation and this is basically kid doing the same thing but better with new tactics, new material or something. A good example I give is a MRAP deployment in Iraq. The US and British forces were engaged in counter-intergency but with the deployment of those vehicles they still are doing counter-intergency but better. It's a way to adjust to the situation. Innovation for me is a completely different thing. It's you fight in a different way. With innovation you have winners and losers in any kind of organization which explains also why innovation is quite rare because military organizations are really good at balancing each other and making sure that everyone is somehow happy which means that innovation stores and then there is disruption which is a complete transformation of the role of the organization. Adaptation is basically we keep doing what we want to do but in a better way. A lot of the adaptability in a way has to do with intellectual discussions and flexibility about how should we do our work in a better way. I actually think it's a good thing that major organizations professionally debate among themselves how to do their work because whenever they actually have to fight and have to to be engaged in combat, there will be a mismatch between how they expect to fight and how they actually fight, and they need to close that gap. And the time to close that gap will be shorter is they already have a kind of intellectual repertoire, they can draw upon basically saying, "Oh, I remember we discussed this several years ago, instead of starting from scratch, I can experiment with already pre-existing ideas." And that's one thing that is quite important, it is to have this kind of intellectual openness and debate, which is actually healthy because it provides resiliency for the organization. The second one is, as you mentioned, redundancy. Redundancy is the enemy of any ministry of finance because it's not efficient and it's considered waste in peacetime. But redundancy is probably what makes you so valuable and gives you the time to conduct an adaptation process when you are in wartime. It is basically what is going to buy you the times that you need to adapt to the realities of the battlefield. So you are mentioning this tension between mass and adaptability. I'll say that mass is actually one of the conditions of adaptability because even though the systems that you may have may not be ideal to the situation, not ideal is still better than nothing. And it might just give you the survival time that you need to actually adjust your doctrine and maybe deploy the systems that will be more appropriate to the situations you are encountering. And presumably, the point you make about debate is aided by being in an alliance despite the complexity because you're not just having that discussion with yourself, you're having it without those who provide different perspectives. That's a challenge in any kind of meet organizations. Meet organizations are organizations that are experts at creating cohesion because cohesion is what makes you survivable on the battlefield. You want your fellow soldiers to fight along you and you create cohesion to make sure that they fight alongside yourself. And the problem with cohesion is that it has a dark side. The dark side is that any kind of challenge to that cohesion can be very easily constructed as a reason or as a threat to the overall cohesion of the armed forces themselves. I think that this tension is particularly important in meet organizations because of this existential need for cohesion that does not really exist in other kind of organizations, especially civil and organizations. Because there is always this fundamental tension between we need to be cohesion to be able to fight, but we need to have a debate which can be constructed as a reason in order to be adaptable. Again, it's a dilemma in the sense that there is no solution to it. It's an enduring tension, but effective meet organizations actually need to be able to construct a space for that debate to happen without perceiving it as a potential undermining of cohesion. Usually I think in Western need areas, it's constructed around professional needs or education. So PME time usually is a space where the kind of debates might happen if the PME construct a loss for it. Could you tell us a little bit more about what you think the most effective way is in professional military education to prepare officers not only for their next job, but perhaps for what's going to happen in their careers in the next 20 to 25 years? It's a constant discussion we have with our colleagues. Some of our officers will get further education when they reach the rank of colonel or general, but for many of them it will be the last education they have for their entire career. So we feel that we need to equip them with intellectual tools that will be useful for them for the next 25 years and to give them this kind of habits of questioning and thinking about what's happening around them. So the solution we have settled on at the moment is that we need to reconcile training and education. We need to train our officers to be competent staff officers and so they go through the NATO doctrine, they have war games, they participate to exercises and so on, just so that they are socialized and they know what will be expected from them if they go to a NATO job. For example, all you see work in an operational staff and for us that is training, they need to have that. But we have constructed our NATO reparations module with one part training and one part which we call education. What we try to do is provide them with the intellectual tools to question and understand what is happening around them. So we have discussions about, for example, command and control, we have readings and discussions about the role of the commander, what is the influence of the commander on the decision making process. How does the staff work from a sociological perspective, the staff basically works as a super computer, which is providing solutions to the commander that needs to arbitrate between several of them. What does that mean for staff to be this kind of very efficient machine? What does that mean for artificial intelligence to come into the staff process? How is it going to affect the idea jobs? How do emotions come into play in terms of the way you regulate your emotions as a commander? How does that affect your decision making? That's one part of the common and control discussions that we have. We also provide intellectual history of the different operational concepts starting with Alan Battled, FX-based operations, now multi-domain operations and so on. What I call the conceptual burger of Western military concepts. MDO, multi-domain operations, is basically an accumulation of a lot of different pre-existing concepts over time linked together by a technological infrastructure, which is supposed to make everything connected and everything work together. But if you look at MDO's, this kind of history of military concepts, you see manual warfare, you see network centric warfare, which is added as a kind of layer, you see a lot of FX-based operations still because that's the way we conduct our thinking and all this is connected through this kind of new technological infrastructure. So again, our goal here is to say we have this operational concept within NATO at the moment, but it doesn't come from nowhere. There is a history behind it and that history itself is loaded with assumptions about what is going to work in war or not. And if we have assumptions, we also have blind spots about what's going to work or not. And we want our officers to know the doctrine and know the concept, but also understand where the doctrine and the concept come from so that when the next concept will come in five ten years, they are able to put it into a kind of intellectual history of how Western military think they are going to win. I don't know if it's perfect, I don't know if we could do something differently, but this is how we think about it at the moment, trying to articulate those two dimensions of teaching them how to be self-reflexive, but also training them into being competent staff officers. And it's hard because as academics, we are basically optimizing to be reflexive and critical. We never really train at actually doing anything else. Those officers have to do both. For them, it's a higher order and a higher demand that what we asked from normal protection marks, civilian students. Can I come back to the budgeting again? If a bureaucracy is given more money to spend, there tends to be a proclivity to spend more on what we already have approved, rather than invest in different types of technological research, knowing full well that several of them are going to fail, which is a more risky thing and yet necessary. What I call budgetary ideologies in the book are unspoken assumptions about what governments should and should not do in terms of their public spending and finances. And I would argue, have done a lot to shape the structure of Western armed forces since the end of the Cold War. Western's budgetary ideologies probably had much more impact than any kind of threat assessment in terms of shaping what Western armed forces look like at the moment. So an example, there is this widespread understanding among Western countries that public spending should be optimized and a way to do it is through outsourcing and privatization. And you see this ideological understanding, having an effect in the United States in the 60s and the 70s, that logic hits European countries in the 80s, 90s and had an effect on Western European armed forces because they were incentivized to outsource a lot of what they used to do. This kind of budgetary ideology is a logistical philosophy of flow management of ammunition, a stockpile, just in time logistics, all the kind of things adopted across most NATO countries because that was how logistics was supposed to operate. It's a supply chain world-delivered because eventually the market has an interest in making those just in time deliveries work. It will work except if the market just cannot do it because there was a war going on. The war in Ukraine has made the cost of that ideology brutally visible. And this is why a lot of our militaries are trying to restock and replenish at the moment because we are very short on ammunition and we are short on stocks. So sorry. just two examples of this kind of budgetary ideologies and how they shape the way Western Armed Forces has developed for the past 40 years. They were much more impactful than any kind of threat assessment into explaining what our Armed Forces look like. Believe you, what we haven't done there is then factored in the question of time, that if you want to buy something now, then with limited capacity within the industrial system, there's a long lag between placing an order and actually having a delivery. And I wonder how you factored in the question of time and how we accelerate this when you can't buy the stuff that merely replenishes existing stocks. If I can plug a book I edited with my colleagues, Tim Röning and Amelita Ysen on wartime a few years ago, we try to approach this issue of how to manage time from different angles. Yes, of course, procurement is subject to several timelines and big tickets items, such as aircraft carriers, are going to lock in the beta organization into a specific direction for 50, 60 years. There is no way to manage it in a way other than being aware of the past dependency that such decisions can create. My impression is that those past dependency effects are usually underestimated by major organizations and political leaders alike, because usually a procurement decision is presented as a very rational choice at a specific moment in time, because of the way we expect to fight at that specific moment in time. So of course, the construct through which a procurement decision is presented makes it almost the only possible choice, not only procurement, but also training cycles, recruitment cycles, maintenance and so on, which actually constitutes a huge part of the activities of a military organization. The second thing is that it closes potential alternative ways of thinking about how to fight. We make procurement decisions based on an expected way of fighting, but we should also keep a lot of debates about alternative ways of fighting. Right now, within NATO and considering the current and potentially future US administrations, a lot of discussions are around, okay, how do we fight without the US? And the default answer is that we have to compensate for the lack of US assets in specific capabilities such as long-range strike, missiles, satellite capabilities and so on. And of course, if we want to fight like the US, we cannot do it without those capabilities and replenishing those capabilities in a very short amount of time, it seems to be a very daunting task. So the answer, in my view, should not be, how do we fight like the US without the US? It should be, how do we fight as Europeans in a different way? Our military strategy will probably look something quite different because our current military strategy is based on speed maneuver in order to dislocate Russia's military system, right? If we combine long-range strike capabilities, we are going to blind their seat you and if we blind their seat you, we'll be able to dislocate their entire military system. That's basically the high-intensity US way of fighting. If we cannot fight that way because we don't have the capabilities, we need to think about different ways of doing it, probably through denial where we make the Russian maneuver almost impossible, we trade dilemmas for the Russians from central Europe to the Nordic space to the Atlantic in which we will disrupt their supply chains in Africa, in Asia and so on. Yes, that will be sabotaged, but if we have to fight, that's probably something we have to do. But we need to think about the different way. If we lock in specific capabilities, we foreclose alternative ways of thinking about how we fight. You've described a very sophisticated ecosystem that incorporates the technology, the equipment, the doctrine, the people, the training, the education, and also the organizational elements. That's pretty complicated. So, where have you seen this ability to harness the ecosystem working well and what would be some of the characteristics that we might take from that, thinking about broader application? You need three things to make that ecosystem work in an effective way. So first one is that you need networked people. People need to know each other from different backgrounds, whether military, civilian authorities, industry so that they can have those kind of informal connections in case of conflict. So having the informal knowledge pre-existing and informal networks actually saves time and really matters in order to make the ecosystem function. And I think it was acknowledged pretty early on since World War I. The Royal College of Defense Studies in the UK was built upon that principle of connecting high-level meet-to-run civil and leaders and a few years after the RCDS France-Estability instituted for higher national defense studies, which is basically the same idea, putting together high-level civilian and meet-to-reauthorities. The second condition is having the right leaders able to leverage and work those different connections that's really difficult to do because every society has a different way of promoting and assessing the qualities of a leader. What is expected from leadership in France is actually sociologically quite different from what is expected from leadership in the UK and Germany. And that by the way also makes international corporations sometimes difficult because there are different expectations about what the leader should be. And the third criteria is that you need an ongoing learning cycle at all stages. And that's also really hard to do. There is a joke in the US that it's actually lessons observed and not truly learned. If you want to learn lessons, you need to be willing to change your organization and you need to be willing to consider being a different leader. Also, learning is hard because experience per se is partial, it's constructed. All of us here, we could observe the same situations and we could probably derive different lessons from it because we have different backgrounds and we have different perspectives on what's happening. So also learning from experience is quite hard and you need to institutionalize this kind of critical thinking about learning within the organization itself. The problem is that typically it's a kind of unit and lessons learned or critical thinking about learning entities. They are the first victims of any kind of budgetary cuts because they are seen as being redundant. There is this kind of expectation that people are smart enough so they can theorize their own lessons in terms of creating flexibility and adaptability. Organizational capacity for learning is actually quite critical. And with your research, where have you seen this being done well? NA Fox has this wonderful book on British Learning during World War I. She shows how those officer networks that were formed at the centers at the staff college in clubs because of the particular social ability of British officers at the time, combined through regimental ties, network to people and socialized people, those informed networks became the conduits through which flexibility and adaptation happened. It was also combined with the French learning during World War I. One of the things France did well during World War I was to bring together different types of officers within the armed forces for the purpose of the learning process because they were mobilized. So a lot of the expertise that was existing in civil society was actually brought into the armed forces themselves. There were the technicians, those who identified problems but most importantly identified the solutions. There were the managers. Sometimes the solution was identified, they knew how to work the bureaucratic process and then you had the mentors, usually senior officers or generals, who could see that something needed to be promoted. Any kind of ecosystem working in such a way will be conflictual somehow because people will want to promote solutions that users are going to resist and the conflict is not a bad scene per se if it's managed properly. It is actually a sign of the organization trying to change and trying to adapt itself. So I'm using the World War I example here deliberately because it was such a total war that it forced both the military and civil society to interact with each other in ways unprecedented. We can learn quite a lot actually from those kinds of civil and military interactions during World War I. One of the key takeaways is that bringing different officer profiles or expert profiles in the armed forces actually facilitated the functioning of the ecosystem. Thank you. Both of the examples you've given earlier are in war and a lot of the literature on effective military adaptation is situated in the context of wartime. How do we get ahead of that curve and actually create more adaptive organizations in peace time that allows us to start maybe on the front foot? Yes, there is a lot of literature on wartime adaptation. You're right because this is where we can observe it more easily. because that the ultimate test, right? The organization has to survive, and that creates a very strong, external pressure, very strong incentives to change. How do you prepare? There are specific things that probably can be done. The first one is in every major war, there is a kind of purge of generals that happens at the beginning of the war, because all of a sudden the organization realizes that they are basically not fit for purpose. And it happens in every case we can sink off in September 14th, the French fired about 800 generals and promote a lot of colonels that actually perform well under that oil while the generals mentally collapsed. German do the same, we see the same thing in World War II. France does not have the time to do it in World War II, but it happens in the UK, it happens in Germany, it happens in the Soviet Union, it happens in the US. We just saw it recently in both Russia and Ukraine since 2022. So there is this kind of first shock where people spend their entire career in a peacetime organization and are promoted according to the incentives of a peacetime organization actually are not fit for purpose within a wartime period. So the important thing here is that you need to have a sufficient number of potential replacements at the lower ranks that you have three colonels for one general position. You don't have enough potential candidates to actually absorb the replacements needs. The first thing that you need is to create that diverse number of officers in peacetime, many of them may never become generals, but in wartime they are those two basically field of ranks once you have fired your generals. Is it as simple as just changing the incentives in peacetime to make sure you get the right people or is that inappropriate because the demands of a peacetime organization are very different to that of a wartime one? I think the latter, I think the demands of a peacetime organization are quite different from a wartime organization. A good wartime general can be a terrible commander in peacetime for a lot of different reasons, be personality wise, be it in terms of their common styles and IDs and so on. And at the same time, a good peacetime general would know how to get budget for the services, who knows how to organize the daily functioning of the organization, making sure that everything is daily bird in time, that troops get their training, that they get their mobility, may not be a good wartime general and can actually mentally collapse under the stress during wartime. It's a different set of qualities and both are very important. The organization needs to be able to foster those different types of profiles so that in case of need, there is a replacement at hand within the armed forces themselves. You need to train your patterns, you need to train your eyes and hours, you need to train your Montgomery, but you also need to train your bureaucrats. Second thing is that if you have an active military debate before the war, you tend to become much more adaptable during the war itself. And having those kind of active military debates is actually one of the conditions of the survivability of the organization. We talked about the networks within the armed forces themselves, but also outside of the armed forces, Israel is actually a really good example of how the armed forces and civil society are heavily networked. It's a function of the size of the country itself. It's a function of the existence of the very peculiar military system in which almost the entire population goes through the armed forces and forge networks there. And I don't think that every country should operate the Wetzahal operates, but it's an example of how to connect civilian and military elites. And the last component is what in the Nordic countries, we call total defense. There is also this need to prepare civil society in advance to understand that they might be called upon to support the armed forces, but also that they have to be self-reliant for some time in case of a high-intensity conflict, because the anti-streative resources of the state will be busy somewhere else. And basically, if you are not an emergency for the states, and if you are self-reliant, you actually contribute to the overall fighting power because the state does not have to spend resources on you. - Thank you very, very much, Shalegyev. You are a first-class example of an academic being able to analyze the military really and lot of the time with much better understanding than many a practitioner has, based on a wealth of knowledge and also insights that you have, historical and present. Your great advantages, of course, that you have a foot in both camps. You're both an academic analyst, but you've also got the Reserve Officer Training. So I think this has been incredibly insightful for us. Thank you for having joined us today. - Thank you. - Once again, thank you for joining us for this RISI podcast and partnership with Cornferry. If you would like to catch up on any of our earlier episodes, please visit your usual streaming platform or try it at our webpage at Reese.org. And to hear about future episodes, you can follow RISI on social media. We continue the theme of adaptation in our next episode. We will be talking to Dr. Jack Wattling about Ukrainian adaptation in war. As one of the UK's foremost commentators on Ukraine, and author of Statecraft, the new rules of power in a divided world published in 2026, and the arms of the future, technology and close combat in the 21st century, published in 2023, that draws very much on his experience in Ukraine. Jack will be sharing his analysis of how the Ukrainian armed forces have adapted to neutralise the advantage of what many sort was a materially superior adversary. We very much hope that you can join us then. Thank you. (upbeat music) (gentle music)