S7E1: Avoiding Strategic Surprise: Lessons from NATO with Dr Florence Gaub

Hello and welcome to this first episode of Season 7 of Talking Strategy. It's a great pleasure to be with you again. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. In this season, my friend Professor Beatrice Husser and I will be talking to experts about some of the most important strategic issues affecting global security today, the history and implications of great power competition, deterrence in a multipolar world, and the future of the international order. We're delighted that this podcast is once again made possible thanks to our long-term partnership with Cornferry. As a leading global consulting firm specializing in strategy and unlocking performance across defense and commercial sectors, their passion for enhancing organizational and individual potential makes them ideal partners. I should say that the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Cornferry, Brucie or any other institution. And with that, allow me to hand over to my friend and colleague in Hamburg, Beatrice. Good to see you again and over to you. Thank you very much, Paul. I love it when colleagues from international relations theories, especially from critical security studies, tell me the future is unpredictable. Great. But how then do we plan for our defense? How do we avoid being caught out by strategic surprises? And in the long term, how do we make defense procurement decisions that will affect our children's generation? We have the right person with us today to tackle these questions, Dr. Florence Galb, a scholar practitioner straddling the divide between theory and practice with the most impressive CV of which I'm very jealous. Florence Galb is the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College in Rome. She worked at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris and as foresight advisor at the General Secretariat. She studied at the Ludwigs-Matsouminians University in Munich, at Sciences Po Paris, at the Sorbonne, before obtaining a PhD in international politics from the Humboldt University in Berlin on multi-ethnic armies looking there at Nigeria, Lebanon and Bosnia-Herzegovina. That was published in 2010. Florence Galb now specializes in strategic foresight. Advising on the future of defense. Florence Galb has been a member of the European Council for a long time. She is a member of the United Nations, and of course at EU level. She was also a reserve officer in the French Army with a rank of major. She has taught at the University of Potsdam, at Sciences Po in Paris, and at the College of Europe. Florence Galb's books include The Cauldron: NATO's Libya Operation that came out in 2018. Most importantly, quite recently, Future: A Manual. Florence Galb's books include The Cauldron: A Manual. Florence Galb's books include The Cauldron: A graphic novel, 2099, and a wonderful set of scenarios to help planning and exercise our minds, which is called What If: 12 Dragon King Scenarios for 2028, which was published at the NATO Defense College in 2025. Florence, what are the problems with planning and strategizing in an uncertain world? Hmm. Where do we begin? First of all, I think saying the future is unpredictable is a lazy response to the reality of human life, because that doesn't help us with getting ready for it. Secondly, parts of the future are, in fact, predictable, or if not predictable, then at least you can think about them in a certain way. And so let's take a step back for a second. What is the problem with the future? The problem with the future is that one thing will happen, but many, many more things can happen. And so the way you narrow this down in thinking about the future is not to get this one future right. It's to reduce the possibilities from seemingly infinite to, let's say, an actionable corridor of possibilities. So at the moment, this trope of uncertainty is being revived. We've had it before. We've had it in the '70s. You will remember this avalanche of books, The Age of Uncertainty. The age of uncertainty reemerges every time you have an increase in actors. I graduated from the Middle East into Strategic Foresight because of the Arab Spring. When the Arab Spring started, there was a huge debate about why didn't we see that coming. And essentially, the answer is because we didn't think that the people in the Middle East were an actor when it came to the future. So when you have new actors coming in, that makes it a bit more unpredictable because you have many more actors that can influence the future. And, secondly, when you have more information. Somewhat absurdly, because you have a lot of information. And, thirdly, because you would think that the more you know about the future, the more you can say actually with certainty what's going to happen. But the reverse is true. The more you know, the more effort you have to make to sort between the signal and the noise. And so a lot of people say it's just uncertain and there's nothing we can do about it. So to me, right now, we see, again, another push of information flow. And, of course, with the change in geopolitics, you know, with actors from Brazil to the Emirates and China, now actors playing a role that didn't play a role 50 years ago, that creates a bit more chaos in the system. Florence, thank you. Surprise is one of those things that has multiple meanings. Could you tell us what do we mean when we say strategic surprise? And how does that differ from operational tactical surprise, for example? So neurologically speaking, surprise is an event that disproves something that you believed about the world, right? So anything that doesn't conform to your expectation qualifies as a surprise, from a surprise party to a surprise attack. So by definition, it has to do with you and your anticipation. And when we think about strategic surprise, that means a much larger belief about the world is affected than when it happens at the tactical level. So let's contrast the use of drones in Ukraine. That's a tactical surprise for Russia, was a tactical surprise, still is, I think, to some extent, because it's novel, because not just the technology is new, but also the way the Ukraines are using it. But that doesn't undermine how Russia generally thinks about the world, right? Strategic surprise is when a new element changes how you see the world. And here, the classical example is the invasion of Ukraine. Let's go to Germany, because I think, to me, that's a very good example for the others as well. The German government was convinced that Russia would not invade Ukraine, even when the evidence was really right there in front of them. And the reason for that was that their world view, their Weltbild, was completely resting on 1990 and this notion of friendship with Russia, that war is not just improbable, it's impossible. The invasion of Ukraine shattered that. So that is a strategic level surprise. And the problem with a strategic level surprise is it takes a long time to recover from it. You will remember also perhaps that when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, despite the non-aggression pact, Stalin disappeared for 10 days because he was so shocked by it. So shock is essentially a reaction to a strategic level surprise, can be a reaction to that. So a strategic level surprise will basically force you to change your entire world view. And neurologically speaking, let alone bureaucratically speaking, that's a huge task. Florence, you in your book, The Future Emanuel, have actually shown that most of the great strategic surprises, or in fact, all of them, were known in advance. And this is what you then home in on. You say it's actually denial. The crucial, the bizarre thing is that people knew this was going to happen, but couldn't believe it because it didn't fit into their world view. Could you elaborate on that? So this is an interesting aspect because it shows what happens when bias and bureaucracy go hand in hand. We actually just finished a study here also at the college where we looked specifically at intelligence failures and we come yet again to the same conclusion. So, you know, whenever a strategic surprise occurs, people think, oh, we need more data, we need more data, we need a bigger infrastructure, gather more information. And then we'll get the next strategic surprise before it actually happens. In reality, it's not the amount of data. There's always somebody in the system, if not several people, that understand what's going on. It is what the political decision making then does with that information. And in the vast majority of cases, it is, well, political expediency can play a role, but most of the time is denial because it undermines their world view. But also there's a perverse setup of the human mind. Let's say, I warn you of climate change. I warn you of a coming invasion. I warn you of a terrible disease. The bigger the warning, the impact, the less likely you are to act on it. And that's called the Cassandra effect from the figure from Greek mythology who saw the future, but nobody would listen to her because somewhat perversely, the bigger the task associated with accepting the strategic surprise as a reality, the less likely you are to act on it. And that is probably a trap we're going to keep falling into. Until we understand we don't need more resources for data, we need to fix the bias problem. We need to introduce red teaming regularly at the highest political level. And many political leaders simply don't want to be contradicted. Others, I know the example of the then NATO section Stoltenberg, his team, once a month, they would meet and discuss their assumptions. They would say, let's check our assumptions about what's going to happen. Are these still valid? I think this is an exercise that politicians probably generally should do. But especially when it comes to defense. But this is the only case I know where they did that. And I think it's a very laudable exercise. Florence, thank you. You made a point about the way time plays in and how sometimes you get very gradual changes that people identify but don't see the significance of. And then it becomes a surprise only at the very end, because a lot of countries did identify the risk of Russia's illegal invasion of 2022 in Ukraine, and other countries didn't. But how does this work in an institution like NATO, where you've got multiple perspectives, which can be, I think, very powerfully positive, but equally can, I imagine, create some friction? Our analysis looked at the fall of Kabul, the coup in Niger, and, of course, the invasion of Ukraine. But, you know, NATO doesn't have an intelligence system, so NATO relies on the intelligence provided by the member states. The conclusion was that the issue was never lack of information, because one member state or maybe several identified it in the way that it actually played out, but then to find agreement at the political level. Of course, NATO has 32 member states. There are differences. At least. 32 biases and perception of the world. So the main issue was then identified as we can't just drop the intelligence on the member states and say, go and find out whether you agree on that, the next challenge for NATO. When it comes to strategic intelligence, it's six months to two years in advance. So we here at the college, we're looking at two to five years, and I will argue it's actually easier because it's further away. And when it's further away, people don't have as much of a stake in it. And when they don't have as much. When they don't have as much of a stake, they're happier to review their biases and playfully engage with the topic, which is one of the things that we're doing with our what-if scenarios. It's almost like inoculating people with a future that they don't expect, like gently familiarizing them with something that could shatter their worldview further down the line. But at the current stage, I will say that NATO's main challenge, it's not lack of political will, but to identify the right procedures or tools that would help the member states then come to a common agreement. Or at least, if they can't come to an agreement, identify what their assumptions are. Assumptions might be right or they might be wrong. But at the moment, I think, I always say the danger is at the assumptions level because they're often not spelled out. And I think the first step would be, let's spell them out. And then we can always come back and check whether we were right or wrong. So I would always recommend, identify your own assumptions. And crucially, then also identify under what conditions you would change your assumption. You are the one who has to do that. And then it's also. It's a lot easier for you to change your mind when you see, OK, I identified under these conditions. Now I can change my mind. Changing your mind, interestingly, I think is probably the most important skill you need in the 21st century. Because with the influx of information, with the speed and so forth, you will have to be able to change your mind. And surprisingly, a lot of people are not so capable of that. If I could follow up, because you've made the point that actually there are very few things that are not foreseeable. So have you found any mechanisms by which things that can be identified, but whose significance is not clear, can be brought up so they become more obvious for helping people change their mind and challenging the assumptions that you've just mentioned? So I wish I could find the secret sauce and bottle it, because I keep having this conversation with my team. So once a year, my team has to go out and bring a weak signal. So a weak signal, as you know, is an element that. might suggest that a change is unfolding. The only problem is when you find a weak signal, you don't know yet if it's just noise or indeed a signal. And so, first of all, you need the right people. And my team is diverse in terms of countries of origin, obviously gender, age, what they were trained in. But ultimately, it's their mindset. What do they pay attention to that gets them to suddenly find a ping? Okay, so for instance, my colleague Roderick, he just wrote a. What if about lab-grown soldiers? He wrote an article about what's technically possible. And for a reason or another, he thought that's interesting. I'm going to take it and spin this out into a what if scenario. And when I asked him, okay, but how, where did you find this one in particular interesting? Very often, the creative mind can't really say. They just know that something about it feels right. And like Roderick in particular, he's very good at that. So I think there's an element to thinking about the future, especially about these fringe futures, let's say, that is creative, that has to be divergent in thinking. And of course, bureaucracy hates both. Bureaucracy doesn't want divergence. Bureaucracy wants convergence. They don't want creativity. They want everything to stay exactly the same. So we have an inherent tension. This is why I said bias plus bureaucracy is going to make you basically predisposed to institutional blindness. So what you can do is you create these little islands, like here the research division in the Nature Defense College or elsewhere, in the institution, where people are protected from this normative aspect of bureaucracy, and they're free to play with the different weak signals that they're finding. And when I say play, it means that they take the weak signal and they tease it out. So now, of course, there's a review process. There have to be references. It can't be just aliens invading Earth. But I found that this way, this works really well. But I also wonder if it's scalable because it requires a degree of trust from the leadership and freedom that many bureaucrats don't have. I think it's a good question. But more importantly, if you have to think anything critically, then don't do it in public. But then how do you get to the point where you're being listened to? And that's you have to become a trusted advisor. And how do you become a trusted advisor? Well, you don't go on to social media and scream that you were right and nobody was listening. You keep giving policymakers options. And over time, they will build trust in you that you have their best interests at heart. And then they will start asking you for advice and say, OK, which one of these would you think is the best? That is a long process. And of course, it doesn't take place in social media. It's behind the scenes. And I think for some people, that's just not enough. But I think you need to check your ego at the entrance if you want to be good at this. Florence, also, you must admit that there are incredibly few people who are in your position of actually getting the ear of anybody. I'd say 99 percent of academics, whether they're working on climate or whatever, will never get anywhere near a decision maker. So you are in an incredibly privileged position to even have that access to the ears of people. Yes, I am conscious of that. But my recommendation would be for people like that is to create what I call school of fish. Because, yeah, I have access to people, but they wouldn't listen just to Florence because Florence says so. They will take something into account if they hear it from several people that they trust. And so creating these alliances of like-minded people or groups, I think that is the way to go. When I was not in the position that I'm in now, I would always try and find others that shared my essentialities. And then eventually you pitch that to somebody who has access, who eventually will then hopefully pitch it to the decision makers. But, yes, it is arduous work. If the reality was we could just publish an article and say, this is going to happen, you should do something about it, and then people will do something about it, I would love that. But unfortunately, the reality is it's a really long and winded road. Could I move you now then from the ability to see what is coming towards you and into what happens if you don't get it right? Because. For an organization like NATO, you obviously want to try to identify what the risks are, what the threats are, but also have to be prepared for having got it wrong. And Mir Finkel's book on flexibility, admittedly, it's conditioned at the battlefield. It says that there's no point trying to be more and more accurate about the future. What you really need is the flexibility to respond to whatever the future throws at you, because there will always be surprise. So I think there's going to be a hard truth here. There's a German expression, you can't wash yourself without getting wet. So if you want to get into the business of the future, and especially the risky future, there is no way you can protect yourself against mistakes. That's why I think futures is also something that aggregates over time. You get better at it over time. So maybe don't start with the huge work on whether World War Three is just around the corner. Maybe just start with, I think the Syrian government might hold another six months. Then the most important thing is keep track yourself. Of your own assessments of the future. This is something most foresiders don't actually do. And I'm very surprised I call it foresight hygiene. I think it's the easiest way to get better at this. You know, you can just take a little notebook and write down. Today, I think the Syrian government has until July 27. Probably it will fall before that. And then in July 27, you check back. Then you can give yourself a score. This is actually from Phil Tetlock's super forecasting, the Breyer score. And then over time, reflecting on how good you were. We'll make you better. We'll also give you a clearer sense of where you can express high certainty predictions. And there is no harm in saying, I don't know. Sometimes it's just an area where it's just 50/50. And in 50/50 cases, I think it's our duty to say this is literally tossing a coin. I do not know which one is more likely. This is also something that many foresiders don't dare doing because they think that their reputation depends on being, well, you know, the Oracle of Delphi. We're not the Oracle of Delphi. We're more like doctors, and we will sometimes have moments where we just don't know. I'm often asked what I got wrong. The one example that comes to mind is one of my first strategic foresight products was our futures, three scenarios for 25. So obviously, when you have three scenarios, one of them will obviously be the correct one. But when I went back and revisited them, I noticed that my pessimistic scenario was the most wrong. That got me to reflect on why that was the farthest from reality. And I really liked it. I really liked it. I realized that my own bias, because I wanted the Arab states who were acting with repression to fail. And so this is a classical example of the bias of wishful thinking. As a supervisor, my role is to protect the people that make a prediction and get it wrong. So far, we haven't had a dramatic case. But I think any institution expecting 100% accuracy would be well-placed to move into a dictatorship because that doesn't exist. And if you expect it, you will only create blind spots. You will make people scared of expressing. And then you actually undermine the whole exercise. Your team's role is to help NATO think about potential futures. The force design team, their job is to think about the kind of forces that they need. And they would not wish to be constrained just by the potential futures you're describing. They would need to have more opportunities, more flexibility built into the system. What is the relationship that you need to create between your team and those of the NATO force planning people in order to help construct? The right kind of force and respond to Beatrice's opening, which was, it's all very well saying the world is uncertain, but it doesn't particularly help move anything forward. So interestingly, we have excellent relations with the military structure, which doesn't have a problem at all with thinking about the future in a, let's say, more disruptive fashion. So that's both Allied Command operations and Allied Command transformation. I'm not sure why that is. I think it might be a combination of military institutions being very open to direction. But we have a crisis today and we have to act on it today, which is true and fair enough. But then you can't just discount the future. And I think the emotional and cognitive labor that has to be done at that level is just higher, as identified in our analysis. So the relationship means, so we tried ambassadorial level, we failed. Now we're trying desk level because we think people need some distance from the day-to-day work or distance also to the responsibility of care. So we're trying desk level because we think people need some distance from the day-to-day work or distance also to the responsibility of care. has behaved in recent terms in ways that wouldn't have been anticipated. I wonder, how is that manifesting itself, that internal shock within an alliance system? I just wrote an article with a colleague of mine that was also published in Foreign Affairs. NATO is always in crisis. We went into the archives of SHAPE and found that essentially since 1948, before NATO was even created, the Allies have had always two sources of disagreement. One was, of course, the United States. Of course, always defend spending. And the other was Allied behavior outside of Allied territory. So the first major crisis was, of course, the Suez Crisis. But there were at least five crises after that. Very often, spending and outside activity, let's say, go hand in hand. And so when you say surprise, people forget that NATO's had several of these crises before, especially in the 70s. The more serious recent one was the invasion of Iraq, which also Henry. Kissinger described as basically the death of NATO. So the reason I say all of that is not to minimize the current crisis, but actually it leads me to the conclusion that NATO, the setup, the structure, its ambition is always vulnerable and therefore always in crisis because neither side always feels like they're getting exactly what they want out of it. Now, to come back to your question, what does that do inside NATO? I think, interestingly, within NATO, things are more stable than in the world. It's a wider public. Between the arrival of Trump in the White House, the return in the White House, and the Hague summit, I think there were a few months where there was a little bit of, let's say, jitters on what's going to happen. But with the Hague summit, I think even with all the drama that you can see in the public eye behind the scenes, things are going actually pretty smoothly. Everybody understands that American repivoting to Asia will have consequences on Europe. We're already seeing it now with Iran. the fact that the United States cannot cannot sustain a two-theater operation, a two-front war, so to speak. It's in the national security strategy since 2018, but I think it was even in the one before. That is why Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump, too, always emphasize the Europeans have to do more. Now, this is an interesting example, actually, of strategic surprise, because the elements were all there. Everybody knew the Americans don't have enough strategic enablers for us and them. So should it come to a war with China, we will not have their enablers, so we are vulnerable to Russia. So we always knew that, but we always kicked the can down the road as Europeans because we thought, well, surely Russia won't attack. Surely we'll have a new president in the White House who doesn't mind that we don't spend enough. It's a classic example of a strategic surprise that actually wasn't won because it was pretty obvious. Even if the rhetoric from the White House and this government in general can be very venomous, I don't think NATO is actually on the brink of dying. That's very comforting news, Florence. Thank you very much. You are way ahead of us in thinking through what we can say about the future, how we can think of possible developments and of dangers that might lurk out there. Thank you so very much for sharing your reflections with us today, and good luck with continuing to nudge chief decision makers out of their comfort zone. Thank you, Beatrice. Thank you for joining us for this RUCI podcast brought to you in partnership with Corn Furry. If you would like to catch up on any of our earlier episodes or any of the other topics we have covered, please visit your usual streaming platform or try our webpage at ruci.org. And to hear about future episodes, you can follow RUCI on social media. In our next episode, we'll be examining the idea that we are witnessing the return of realpolitik in international relations and the future of the world. Thank you for joining us. And how power is wielded by states. Discussing this with us is Professor John Bew from King's College, London. As well as being an academic, he has advised numerous British prime ministers and was the author of the UK's national security strategies in 2021, 2023 and 2025. We very much hope that you can join us there. Thank you. Thank you.