Conversations with Strategy: Former MI6 Chief, John Sawers on intelligence and diplomacy

school of security studies my name is john gerson and i direct the center for defense studies and i'm delighted to have sir john saws joining us this morning to have a conversation um sir john is executive chairman of new bridge advisory a firm that he set up in 2019 and after a distinguished career in the foreign office um including stints as the british ambassador to egypt and also our permanent representative at the united nations so john became the 15th c chief of the secret intelligence service mi6 we're going to talk a little bit about his career but also the the journey that the world has taken uh in in the course of of of his his career so welcome sir john and thank you for joining us this morning well thank you thank you john and uh thank you to all your um your colleagues and students who are who are tuning in today and it's great to be back at king's college i hope to be back there in person before too long indeed and we we of course would like to be doing these uh conversations in person and online at the same time i mentioned that you started uh your career in the foreign office uh in the late 1970s um and with a variety of postings but i think that's quite a good way to take us into the fact that the foreign office you joined in the late 1970s must have been pretty fundamentally changed by the events of 1989 just just a decade later um all of these certainties of the cold war changed how did how did it feel on the front line well most people think about 1989 as um the collapse of the berlin wall and the tiananmen square and so on this great powers i was actually in south africa at that time um and i was uh working in the british embassy there on the whole question of of of prodding encouraging pressing uh demanding uh the south african um bring an end to its uh uh its apartheid system uh and promote uh change there and it my four years in south africa from beginning of 88 to the end of 92 it bridged some rock-solid state of emergency repression apartheid through to a real aspiration of hope with the release of nelson mandela and political prisoners and it was a real lesson to me of how peaceful change can be brought about uh by a combination of uh argument uh economic pressure through sanctions the degree of isolation and support for um communities who were badly in need of it both economically and politically and there was a huge argument at the time over the role of sanctions and margaret thatcher was famously pretty negative about them but on the front line i could see that some of those sanctions weren't particularly effective but others really were effective especially the financial sanctions in some ways the lessons of what succeeded and what didn't succeed in south africa have informed the debate about sanctions over the last 30 years that's interesting um how did those those lessons and and those those uh mechanisms fair when when you've got since your next crisis in the balkans not so many years later yeah well i i you know sanctions sometimes get a bad rap because they do cause um uh widespread uh harm we see the damage they do to individuals and to communities and populations um but they've also got areas where they've been successful and i think the balkans is a is a an example um certainly towards the end of the 1990s of how um sanctions did contribute to bringing down president milosevic in the same way that they helped bring an end to the apartheid system in in south africa um again it's not a silver bullet it wasn't as if sanctions were the sole answer it was a great combination of pressure and of course the 1990s was a particularly bloody decade in uh the former yugoslavia and we approached it i was working for douglas hurd after i came back from south africa i worked in douglas herd's office running his uh private office um and it was really the first post-cold war crisis uh in bosnia um where the americans said they didn't have a dog in the fight uh the european union proudly declared that this was the hour of europe but didn't have much to back it up um uh that the the russians supported the serbs the americans supported the bosnian muslims the germans supported the croats and the british and french were trying to keep the peace between them we were really muddling through because we hadn't really done this sort of stuff uh before the cold war was completely different it was a it was a fixed process proxy wars uh stalemate in europe um and suddenly we had a war on the european continent where all these values and all these countries interests were mixed in and we didn't really have the tools to to find a way through um and lots of mistakes were made on bosnia and uh hundreds of thousands of people died as a as a consequence of of the conflict there and that in some ways was a negative lesson learned of of how long it takes to orchestrate international efforts um and uh how peacekeeping can't be um if you if you're trying to preserve a piece you have to establish a piece in the first place um and there were some there were intellectual and policy errors made um as well as some political errors at the time in the end i think we found our way through on the balkans and for example the handling of the kosovo crisis at the end of the 1990s was um much more uh uh um well considered and well judged uh and effective than our handling of the bosnia crisis at the beginning of the 1990s um and uh my career in the 1990s took me from douglas hurt's office to a year at harvard uh to three years in washington uh running the foreign and defence policy um uh part of the british embassy in washington and then i came back and and was worked at number 10 as tony blair's adviser so that period of the balkans was so seared through me during that um during those uh during those years uh but we certainly learned a lot more about the importance of of effective military um uh uh intervention of how um uh the military can back up diplomacy and reinforce it uh and can uh can drive uh the uh policy delivery on the ground in a sense that was the kosovo was probably the high point of western military intervention um we had a successful intervention in sierra leone a year or so later which was also strikingly successful um but of course uh then came the decade of the 2000s and the never-ending wars and uh the uh the successes the the learned successes of the 1990s um turned into uh failures of the 2000s i mean just just before we move on from uh from the balkans i recall when when the british first sent uh forces into bosnia um the commander went there with his with his uh advanced team and and and said after the events that um you know the the relationship and the working between the industry defense foreign office and others you know what wasn't as as good as it became later let's put it that way and he when he arrived um he was told well there are 96 ngos that want to speak to the british commander and he had sort of five staff with him and he said and all of those ngo organizations knew more about the situation on the ground than he did having just arrived there um and and it took it was quite a steep learning curve and the impression was that um you know deploying force uh for the british anyway was easier than being effective in those early in those early weeks you know but because we we hadn't done intervention as you say for for for a long time and we didn't we didn't even have an embassy in bosnia at the time and when we did open up an embassy in i think it was 1994 uh the foreign office in his wisdom sent a particularly junior guy because he didn't have many people to manage and therefore it was a junior role whereas this was the i was in douglas hurt's office um and this was the most demanding and difficult issue on his agenda and we had um thousands of troops there and one sort of first secretary's level uh uh uh diplomats uh as the ambassador it wasn't his fault but it was he was completely out of his depth uh and i think this interplay between uh politics uh the military uh and what diplomacy the military and humanitarian assistance we we learned this painfully in bosnia about how this intersects it also some extent in somalia as well and um i think one of the lessons i draw is that diplomacy didn't have a sufficiently prominent role in those crises as soon as the military got involved the military took over and they claimed they didn't want to take over just the sheer scale and level of organization and sometimes force of personality meant the military did take over and the diplomacy was relegated to a secondary concern and but in the end of course dick holbrook in in uh uh in bosnia and uh the combined efforts of um nato leaders particularly tony blair in kosovo showed that actually the only way through this is through political leadership so towards the end of this of this period um you you found yourself as you said working at number 10 um at a time of blair's chicago speech of criteria for intervention as you mentioned a successful sierra leone on a small scale um how how was it speaking truth to power in those years um and do you think it it took us in a direction that that led eventually to the uh to the national security council model um this was of course the period dismissed by some as as sofa government yeah well it has some sympathy with tony blair and i do i'm not party political uh i've worked for um douglas hurd and john major for tony blair and jack straw for gordon brown and david miliband and for uh david cameron and and william hague and each of them in their way i mean one day i might write a book about it but not yet but each of them in their way was a was a public servant and and uh accepted advice from professionals like me um and and weighed it in the balance and so um i do have some in some ways the most effective politician of them all was tony blair uh and he was excellent at striking a balance between political concerns and professional analysis uh and advice so i never had any difficulty in providing him with advice and he didn't always accept it but there was no difficulty in the act of speaking truth to power and i think the sofa government bit came in because there were some members of his government who were just not reliable they just couldn't uh they couldn't resist going out and talking to the media as soon as a meeting was over um and in order to um you know we have to remember tony blair was at one to end of the political spectrum of his political party and there are plenty of people at the other end of the political spectrum who wanted to undermine him um quite apart from the the the tbgb's as we call them they row between tb tony blair and gb gordon brown and the uh which which ran through that time but um i i do think that um although cameron made quite a few mistakes as prime minister um i think the structure that he set up of a national security council was much better than the um uh than the much more informal style the so-called sofa government decisions uh that uh prevailed when tony blair was prime minister in some ways it was convenient for me because i was one of those sitting on the sofa and so you didn't have a big process to go through um but but in terms of machinery of government and um creating an environment where uh as we do now at the national security council you start with an intelligence briefing from the chair of the jrc the intelligence chiefs can can add and supplement that briefing you have professional advisors you have domestic people like the home secretary and uh maybe the business secretary around the table along with the foreign secretary and the defense secretary um and uh you have a common platform of information and an open argument around the table in confidence uh as to what the options are and what the consequences of the options are and that frankly is better than relying on the decisions of of one individual of course david cameron didn't always follow the nsc he took his decision uh to have a referendum on uh on brexit only consulting his political advisors uh there was no there was no sense of ways that where's the national interest here he ignored that question um and so even the cameron system wasn't foolproof but it was better than what preceded it so i mean this period saw interventions it it saw national action but also multilateral action uh you you you moved on from number 10 into uh middle east posting and then and then to the united nations now as you look back and you reflect how how have these institutions that today we are told uh that post-war concord act is is is fracturing how do you how do you view the well there's the scorecard for those multilateral institutions over these 20 years or so as we move into the naughties but multinationalism has institutions and it has processes i mean one job you didn't mention that i did was as political director in the foreign office which i did for four years between um egypt and new york uh and in some ways that was really rewarding because it was the interplay between um basically i was in charge of doing the hard grind on policy uh across the board for foreign secretaries and for the government of the day um and it meant using nato the united nations the european union as ways of of of building coalitions but also it means it's very close working with the french and the germans as part of the e3 on on the iran negotiations for example working with the americans french and germans on how we deal with russia and uh as a threat in europe um and uh and dealing with um allies on the ground in places like iraq and afghanistan um rather fragile structures that were emerging there um in the governments there and it's uh you have these these overlapping processes you have a domestic policy process you have a negotiation with close allies about what is the right way to do things and then you deliver that through the international institutions like the un like the european union the nato the g7 and so on and being involved in that process was fascinating obviously when i was political director i was at one end of that process um formulating the policy and um uh and working closely uh with um washington paris and berlin in particular about what the western approach should be and then when i went to new york uh it was a process of delivering that through the security council or through the un agencies or the u.n system um as my counterparts in nato and brussels were doing through their organizations as well so it was a it was a a a complex sort of sausage machine of um of you know issues emerging what do we do about it what do others think we should do about it how do we deliver that how do we create change on the ground and you know there were successes and failures but there's absolutely no doubt that the multilateral system in that entirety that doesn't mean taking things cold to the united nations expecting a solution to emerge it means using that entire uh sausage machine of of of of policy analysis of development of processing of negotiation of their delivery um has worked very well and and the uk was quite good at it um and we had that intersection as i say of our roles in all these organizations privileged position in the united nations um a leading membership of nato and of the european union and one of my sadnesses about brexit but quite apart from the politics of it and the economics of it one of my sadnesses about brexit is it's removed the uk from from that full cruel role in the transatlantic relationship uh which uh which we used to i certainly used to hugely benefit from when i was at number 10 when i was political director in the foreign office and again at the united nations well one of the areas where the eu generally has been regarded as as not as central of course is in is in matters of intelligence um you went from the foreign office into uh the world of of of secret intelligence um much smaller organization well i suppose not that much smaller than the finals but i mean smaller compared to the military that you've worked with and and the um um what were the challenges that that that were sort of highest on your list as you as you moved in as as c well i of course started my career at sea i had my first tap on my shoulder when i was at nottingham university um and uh i'd applied for the foreign office but then got some um sidetracked if you like and channeled into intelligence um what i found after a number of years in intelligence that actually i was more interested in policy and in ideas and in politics than i was in operations and and analysis and my natural home was in diplomacy so i was a bit surprised when i got tapped on the shoulder again this time by gus o'donnell uh who was cabinet secretary at the time to say um john we uh uh we we need you to go to vauxhall cross to run mi6 um and that was uh that came as a surprise i had to think about it quite hard but i realized that the service had the intelligence service had suffered [Music] damage to its reputation um in the aftermath of the faulty intelligence on iraq on being close to the americans on treatment of detainees in the counterterrorism efforts and the that presumption of trust in mi6 uh had um had uh eroded and so i when i arrived in mi6 i realized that my job was to modernize the organization um and it had been run by um uh internal chiefs of the previous 40 years and frankly the mi6 i left in the um in the beginning of the 80s uh hadn't changed much when i went back 30 years later the rest of the world had changed but the mi6 had not changed very much and i think that lack of modernization was part of the backdrop to the mistakes that it made as a service in the in the in the uh several years after after 9 11. it had poorly leadership at the time uh it was um uh dislocated from the rest of um of white hall and um it's uh it wasn't clear about it's its role in the um in that post-cold war year and it it just it had gone downhill a bit during the 1990s is the truth of it so when i went in i had i had three clear messages to the service which i summed up each in one word one was reputation second was alignment and the third was delivery reputation was about restoring trust and confidence in the service that we had to modernize our methods we had to account for ourselves better um to ministers to parliament to our partners in the intelligence community and to to the media as necessary and rebuilding that reputation was essential uh the second uh was uh uh alignment we had to be much closer to the customers and to our partners in intelligence creation than we had previously been there's a certain sort of there i said it's like arrogance in mi6 about the um and pride justifiable pride in the organization but the the quality of the operation was more important than the impact that it was having on policy uh and the sense of separation was valued uh in historically in the past whereas actually you only have an effect as an intelligence agency if you're very clear who you know what people need what decisions are coming up how your intelligence can act as a platform to better inform the policy making that's done either at senior official or ministerial level so alignment with the rest of government was was essential and the third was delivery um that we had a record of producing good intelligence uh with some uh you know major um uh shortfalls on uh on iraq in the run-ups the the iraq the iraq war but that's a big shortfall i know but the intelligence was good but the intelligence environment was changing it was becoming much more technology focused and we're at the early stages of the digital revolution now i don't take personal credit for this there are some very able people inside the service who realize that actually we need to divert our attention uh less from that sort of human um uh personal relationship as the foundation for building an intelligence relationship we need to rely much more on data and the counter-terrorism world actually was uh was that was where we where we where we led this um and in some ways the tradition of mi6 was the the james bond figure the case officer in the field uh was the was the um the key person in any intelligence operation a bit like the fighter pilot um and has a massive support team but the fighter pilot in the raf is the person who is the uh has the highest status and we we realized actually the most important person in any operational team was the data analyst and it was the data analyst who could pull together data interrogated work out who we needed to be targeting where the weaknesses were in an opponent's defenses where the points of access might be um and the case officer simply did what the analyst basically told him to do him or her to do and i think that was a revelation a revolution rather revelation to some as well uh on on how intelligence works so those are my three messages reputation alignment and delivery i mean these in these years and in the in the decade before you became c of course the the another huge change for mi6 was the close working with with the with the military in the in these long term deployments and and some of your well later your staff but some of your predecessors as well you know i have talked about how those relationships have been lost in in in the decades before um sort of perhaps cold war relationships which obviously were close where the the the assessments were all about uh the military challenge in many respects and the politics but by by the 2000s it all had to be rebuilt and and and the the question has been raised a number of times at kings is um as we've moved away now from these big deployments um how will that be maintained i mean are you confident that that intelligence's close alignment with with the rest of whitewall um can survive a non-operational decade or two well john i don't think we should um create another war just to make sure that the intelligence and military communities are are working closely together it's certainly true that in a time of crisis where there's an existential cold war crisis like we have with the soviet union uh or a hot crisis as we had in the balkans and uh iraq and afghanistan that they they generate you only you only survive and threaten and prevail if you can integrate all your assets and actually one of the things we're witnessing in the united states and the failures um of some of their policies in uh um is that failure to integrate all the all the different aspects of american power to make it more than the sum of its parts um i think we could say that's part of the problem they're facing in afghanistan at the moment um the uh i think for the uk um i've been like most of you i expect i've been studying and working on the integrated review which came out uh last week and i think this just a very title this the understanding the efforts on diplomacy on the military on intelligence on development they do need to be integrated across a single policy if you want to be really effective um i mean diffid who i have a lot of admiration for um and the work they did they they they spoiled it slightly by having a rather isolationist view of themselves a bit like mi6 in the 1990s um that they thought that they were a bit different that they didn't have to obey the rules of everybody else now i frankly uh have reservations about this complete dismantling of david and its integration into the fcdo um because i'm not sure if that is going to enable uh that high reputation and thought leadership that differed had in the international development community i'm i'm not sure that we'll be able to continue but on the intelligence side um i think i i hope that one of the legacies that i left behind in the service after i i left i know alex younger certainly has taken it forward and i think richard moore wants to as well um is that sense that we are only part of a whole we are only one cog in the machine and whilst we do some very unusual things and we have some brilliant people and some legal um uh uh powers to uh that we can use in the right conditions which which make us a you know um take us into dangerous places uh to do very difficult things um we are nonetheless just one part of the government machine and we should never lose sight of that and i think the military are sort of learning that as well uh and the fact that they're not you know struggling in the markets of basra or the uh or the or the um you know the hot and dusty parts of afghanistan um they're going to be deployed in smaller units they're going to be much more technology dependent uh and that's the sort of revolution which the intelligence community has gone through as well over the last 10 years and i think this shared use of technology platforms this shared deployment in relatively penny packets in different parts of the world to do leadership education intelligence building training in an integrated way i think will help keep up those uh those um those relationships but obviously they won't be as close as when you're working on some nighttime operations in baghdad and going from you know an mi6 officer going with a special forces unit to attack a a particular um isis or whatever uh holdout and getting intelligence there using again and going on to the next target two hours later and going on to the next target two hours after that that develops a sort of blood brotherhood um in battle that you can't replicate but we don't want to have those battles in order to just replicate that uh that spirit i mean it's interesting what you say obviously everything's becoming technologically enabled i guess traditionally though mi6 called itself a human organization um you seem to be describing a future that that is probably going to be not just uh technology enabled but but but technology centered um is this the beginning of the end of of of of the distinction of intelligence emphatically no um the um signals intelligence sigint and technical intelligence continue what people are saying to one another they can tell you uh what is being written down or been communicated from one person to another but it doesn't tell you what's inside the head of people and what human intelligence tries to get at is intent as we always say in our business uh threat is a combination of capability and intent sigins and military intelligence can tell you a lot about capability but it's human intelligence and only humans that can tell you about intent um what people are really thinking now we don't always get it right it's an art as much as it is a science but that is the essential element that mi6 brings to um uh to uh thinking about risk and threats and uh and challenges that we face now what is the role of technology in that well i described the role of data analytics in planning operations if you want to penetrate um the you know the iranian nuclear weapons program or the chinese cyber program you need to have that facilitated you can't you don't meet these people at cocktail parties you don't uh you don't have access to them like we had some access to the russians during the cold war um uh where you had diplomats and negotiations and international organizations in order to access these people you need it to be technology facilitated and also the the uh the way technology has evolved with um uh with very strong surveillance capability um in places like russia and china indeed all around the world there's much stronger surveillance capabilities just not restrained by the law or privacy or human rights in in places like russia and china um well that actually gives an advantage to the home team um that the mi5s of this world are in a stronger position with that uh technology than the mi6's in this world are as we as you know we're the ones who have to go out and forage in difficult places um and the mi5 play defense at home now this is a very important role um but the new technology environment means that the traditional means of false identities and [Music] false credit cards or whatever they don't they last more than five minutes in a modern hostile environment it needs your offensive operations your intelligence collection operations have to be intelligence uh facilitated and intelligent sorry technology facilitated and technology protected as you go out and operate them and during my time uh i think when i arrived in in mi6 in a space of just five years of my leadership um we uh moved uh the proportion of our effort that went on technology facilitation from about 35 percent of the government of the agency's resources to just shy of 50 um and i realized early on that my predecessor's goal of building the service by increasing the manpower was actually the wrong goal to be pursuing that a bit like the army today you actually needed fewer people but more capability and more technology uh in more investment in technology and different skills in order to deliver more output just having more people that wouldn't wouldn't achieve it well i was going to actually ask you about how did you find the the challenge of recruitment and of diversifying your workforce when when you were there i mean is it still work in progress well i i think is a bigger work in progress now um i mean as i say my goal was to um the biggest goal wasn't building up the size of the service we needed to keep on recruiting we need to recruit different people and the old method and i was recruited by the tap on the shoulder at university um there's still a bit of that going on but the the risk is that um that you end up recruiting people who are you know traditional traditionally seen as as intelligence officers when i joined i was i was uh i was diversity uh i went to a comprehensive school i went to a redbrick university i studied science this was not the normal sort of person that mi6 recruited in the 1970s who'd gone to public school oxbridge done ppe or the classics or whatever um and uh it was a different approach but the john saw style diversity was not good enough because i was um white middle class and male 1 um and many of the demands of the service were for people with much more diverse human skills intellectual skills personal qualities and who could mix in and build relationships with people who are very different and so women were a hugely important part of our operational component and made us much more effective we weren't recruiting women just because it was the right thing to do to be fair and but actually women were vastly better at some operational targets tasks than men were not generalizing obviously um but and likewise if you have people from ethnic minority backgrounds it takes people by surprise they're not expecting that a british intelligence officer would be a black woman with a baby but a black woman with a baby can be a much more effective cover for an intelligence person than being a former military officer who's transferred from the guards into uh into mi6 i mean you you hinted about uh um targets for intelligence operations of course um you mentioned the integrated review um i wonder if you might say something about uh this debate about china uh about whether it's an opportunity or a threat and i suppose uh russia which you've touched on um but also our alliances um we we've gone through a period of quite significant uh questioning of of some of those structures under the trump administration uh the bride administration hasn't settled in yet um the bridges have set out their that their stall uh in these in these documents over the last two weeks um are we getting it right i mean where where were you on on how we should treat china for example well i i thought first of all i thought the integrated review was a really professional effort and i commend the work that's gone into it i mean um as you and your colleagues know i wasn't in favor of brexit i think it's a it's a an act of self-harm by the uk but we've done it now and now we've got to make the most of it and we've got to find the right way forward and there are areas where the where there will be advantages there will be more openings um i i think the um review measured on china uh it's its language was in some ways more european than it was american and the specific paragraph does balance the threat to our security and our values from china with the importance of trade and and investment opportunities but if you take the review as a whole china permeates through it every reference to technology every reference to uh human rights and our values um every um refuge to refuse uh reference to um uh uh economic um standards and uh and so on these are all direct or indirect references to china um and clearly the most the biggest transformation in the world in the last 20 30 years has been the rise of china it's an obvious thing to say um but i do think china's taken a different direction recently in 1990s there was still a debate going on in china about um how open they should be and what direction they should take in some ways in a very ugly way tiananmen square in 89 was a open manifestation of this this battle going on inside china and hong kong and the one with country two systems um left open the possibility that china could become a bit more like hong kong as well as hong kong becoming a bit more like china but i think iron entered the chinese seoul at uh in after the financial crash i think around that time they concluded that america was in decline that the chinese system was better than the american system and that china's rise was inevitable and they didn't need to make compromises to the west and by the time xi jinping came to power that was deeply established as the received thinking in china and she was chosen because he was a representative of that school of thinking and we're now in a situation where uh china is much more assertive the days of hide and bide of uh long in some ways the trump era has reinforced their conviction that america is in decline we will see what happens through biden and what happens after biden because the chinese think in decades not just in four year periods of western governments um the uh and i do think that uh china is a systemic challenge it's a systemic rifle now the chinese system is not one of invading other countries um in a sense they're more subtle than that um i'm sure your students start their studies with sun tzu and old theories of of chinese warfare where you you maneuver your opponents into defeat before without shooting about firing a shot um the uh uh i think that is still part of the chinese mentality but the range of powers that china has um economic uh technology increasingly military their determination to separate themselves from the western system which we will see i think we'll obviously see now in the technology world i think we will see over the next 10 to 15 years in the financial world as well they do not want to be dependent upon the dollar that creates too much um vulnerability for them um and they do want to draw other countries into a dependent relationship with them xi jinping has been open about this he wants to ensure china is less dependent upon foreign countries and that foreign countries are more dependent upon china and that is a strategy they're pursuing and we see what happens to um countries in southeast asia that take cambodia and laos or whatever what happens um there when they become completely dominant on china china takes their their their politics yet it's case like australia which are economically dependent uh upon china biggest trading partner um and they become the the target of very severe bullying by uh china i think for us in europe my concept of china is it's essentially a a land power yes we talk about the south china sea and the first island chain and these sort of ideas of how china is projecting its power in a naval sense but britain and america for obvious reasons were great powers through our maritime capability i think china is focused more on uh the eurasia land mass it sees itself as essentially a land power that wants to dominate the eurasian land mass and at their end of it they're making a very good job of that and we're seeing the other end of the eurasian land mass and at the moment the european economy is about the same size as the chinese economy a bit bigger but if we got to the position that australia is in and our economy in europe was just a third or a quarter the size of china then i think china would treat us like they treat australia and that is something we need to really think and think about in a long term strategic way and i think the integrated review makes some good moves in that direction right well well thanks john i think we'll move on to some questions uh because i've had i've had uh too much of a go so far uh i mean first of all um my colleague professor vigano in uh uh national mathematical sciences asks um are we getting cyber security and general security in cyberspace right in your opinion well this is a rapidly moving target and it's something which i talk to a lot to my commercial clients in my new advisory role and each time we think we're making progress uh we do good things in this country like setting up the national um cyber security center uh we set out uh basic minimum standards for companies to abide by and and all this helps improve cyber hygiene cyber awareness every big company has this as a top risk on their board agenda but then things like solar winds happen and you have an operation which um i'm assured by my former colleagues uh originating from russia uh uh it probably involved over a thousand russian software engineers uh to manage this operation over a period of nine months to a year it's a massive operation and they had access to tens of thousands of entities um and were able to pick and choose the hundred or so they really wanted to strip bear over the period of nine months that they were in and this is a scale of operation that we've not seen before we talked about sort of wannacry there's all north koreans sort of throwing their um their fairly basic skills and seeing what they pick up we talk about not petya the russian attack in ukraine which went viral and brought down a number of major companies um and that was three years three or four years ago but we're now in a new realm with solar winds uh of a highly sophisticated cyber attack um orchestrated could only be orchestrated by a hostile government and we've seen with a recent attack on microsoft uh a similar attack possibly coming from uh from from china um the the scale of state threats is getting greater and greater so uh i i i was struck in the integration review about the um uh uh a cyber operations center a a cyber force i think it's called um which to my mind is a way of being clear that we have offensive cyber capabilities as well as defensive ones i think we need to get into a world of um of cyber deterrence i think we need to be clearer about our doctrine on cyber and i think one of the things that we can do during the biden administration is bring together a small group of democratic allies to work out what we really think what our posture really is on cyber uh and and communicate that to hostile powers and to hostile crime groups or or or terrorist groups to be clear that um there are certain uh barriers here certain thresholds uh above which uh there will be consequences and you have to what set out what those consequences are but i think there's the technology keeps on advancing but our doctrine and policy is struggling to keep up with it thank you um brian mccloud on a sort of national security structures question um points out that the the structures even with the nsc seem to move and change and evolve with each prime minister uh of course they have to to some extent but she asks whether those those those strategic decision making structures ought to be a little less flexible and that prime ministers need to be to be guided into a certain system rather than being able to you know share the role of cabinet secretary with the national security advisor on a whim uh and then change their mind i mean you know do we have structures that are worth uh embedding uh um for the future well it's it's a valid question but um in some ways i i have great admiration for the way in which the americans have embedded their interagency process um and the way in which when i was working in the embassy in washington in the 1990s i could um uh feed into my contacts in the in the pentagon at langley in the in foggy bottom of the state department and the nsc at the white house and in various congressional years what british concerns were knowing how that interagency process would come together um and uh it really worked really effectively much more so in the sense than the british um interagency process we didn't really exist at that stage and then of course along comes donald trump and uh you know you try telling donald trump uh you've got to um listen to this intelligence review you've got to weigh the views he just throws it out of the window and one of the one of the reasons why uh america made a a a a catalog of of errors during the trump era was because the interagency process simply collapsed and i think what we're seeing now under the biden administration is a much more sophisticated uh group of people using the interagency process as it should be used so um i think my answer to your colleague is you can take a horse to water but you can't make them drink if that horse is donald trump he won't drink uh with uh curiously with boris johnson although he has some uh curious or character qualities he is quite admiring of the public service and he does listen uh to people even if you don't always see the evidence of that and watching him um evolve as a leader through the pandemic has actually been quite interesting to see how dependent he's become on scientists and uh how the big mistakes he made early on in the process and was not listening to scientists enough and how the big thing he's got right which is the vaccine program how he is listening to scientists um and entrepreneurs he listened to them at the right time on the right issue thankfully um i think we it is right to develop these interagency processes we've got the jic the joint intelligence committee which has existed for i don't know 50 years or more you probably know better than i do it's even 70 years i think the jig has existed for um we've got the um the chief of defense staff overseeing all the military there's very good military civilian integration there we've got the national security council i think these are all good structures to use in government um but you've got to have ministers who actually respect them and want to use them thanks uh lots of questions coming in now so i'm going to be be short and try and throw a lot of curveballs at you so dale addison asks um do you think things would have been different or turned out differently in syria if the british uh mi6 and the chief of defense staff had gone down a route with political guidance or agreement rather to arm train and equip the free syrian army um rather than the policy we adopted the the cds at the time david richards and i were very clear at the national security council that if we wanted to make a strategic difference we needed to get involved in a in a more substantial way um david cameron and the politicians view they were scarred not surprisingly by iraq and afghanistan was that we couldn't get involved in another war but just because we couldn't do everything doesn't mean we we should do nothing trouble was we ended up with a position where we did enough in terms of arming and equipping the opposition to keep the war going but not enough to prevail enable them to prevail and that was true uh of of us and the french of the americans of uh our arab partners in the gulf and so on we did enough to keep the suffering going but enough not enough to bring it to an end um and uh i our advice in 2012 after the conflict has been going on for a year was that only the sort of um interventions of uh air zones and um and and direct military engagement um of uh of of protecting um the opposition on the ground would be enough to to to turn the tide um unfortunately that has proved right but it took another um the suffering is still going on in syria i mean some would say that the biggest influence of the british was to have had the parliamentary vote just before the decision by obama uh not to implement the red line but uh anyway um so cameron's mistakes um sophie lane asks you've touched on us a little bit but with regards to the integrated review um why is there so little reference to europe brexit and the commonwealth well um well they're two different questions um uh the the big sort of um the ghost of the feast is the european union uh and uh one of the drivers along with china and technology of the review is brexit and uh whilst the review is quite strong on um uh uh on the nation united states on nato and working with france and germany and italy and ireland and so on it it it really underplays the importance of the european union i think there's a post-brexit hangover on both sides of the channel we're seeing it in this vaccine row we're seeing it over the northern ireland protocol and frankly in a world which is as contested as it is we we both sides need to get over this hangover we have common values with our continental colleagues we have very similar approaches to business and to international standards we we have a similar view of the world we really do have to get beyond brexit but i fear for political reasons on both sides of the channel um that both sides at political level will continue to pick at each other continue to pick the brexit scab so that it can carry on bleeding uh uh for both sides political advantage it's not a pretty picture a number of observations and questions about about china which i'll sort of group together a little bit um thomas duffy uh was interested in your suggestion of china as a as a eurasian power of course the us and others have noted that the chinese navy has expanded dramatically uh in the last years but he asks if they are land power um should we expect this chinese naval the pla navies uh to quest and decline uh in in effect um um because fundamentally as uh you know as you argue they are land power um and an anonymous uh questioner asks whether uh xi jinping's focus is reflective of systemic behavior or rather the individual leader i mean you seem to suggest that china had changed before you became a leader and i wonder how far that um it is the system yeah well let me take those two i mean china's not going to roll back its investment in in the navy it it wants to be um a maritime power as well but i think that is a way of extending um its area of defense it it wants to have a sort of quite a you can't have a sphere of influence on the in maritime waters but uh it does want to control the south china sea it doesn't want the u.s navy to be um patrolling between taiwan and the mainland as as it did 20 years ago and now can no longer do it wants to be able to push back its opposition further away so that they china's got greater freedom uh within particularly within the first island chain of operation and that it controls and dominates uh those those areas um so i think they'll continue to want to do that i think the string of pearls um approach there's still something going on about that in the in the pacific uh sorry in the indian ocean uh with their efforts in pakistan sri lanka the maldives djibouti on the african coast and so on um so i think they will continue to build up their their maritime capabilities but i i stick by my view that fundamentally they see things in terms of land and that's why the belton road is so uh you know the maritime road oddly uh um is a reinforcer of the belt which is stretching um china's influence across across eurasia and on she um uh it's a mix of the two of course i i i do think xi jinping emerged through the system uh because he and his people also won the arguments about the direction of marxism leninism inside the inside the party so in some ways he's a product of that but equally his personal um uh approach his uh his high appetite for risk we see much higher risks being taken by she than we have under a huge in tao or jiang jimin or or deng xiaoping i think there is a human aspect to this i don't really subscribe to the great man theory of history but i do think leaders have a big influence on their countries um and can can nudge things in one direction or another and i think she is doing that in china uh uh asks what's better for the world a china that's open or closed to the rest of the world i kind of know the answer um you know exactly in the long term it has to be open but let's not be naive about this um i remember the time when um the anniversary of the uh nanking massacre uh when the chinese opened up a little portal for hostility towards japan and i think got overwhelmed i mean the uh if if china had an open political system you'd see forces of chinese nationalism which would be very hard for the chinese to control and be pretty ugly uh in the region as well um so um each country has to evolve gradually um i think it's a great shame uh that um china is is undermining and destroying the one country two systems in hong kong because i think there are real benefits there for china and i think this taiwan issue is going to become really uh tough over the next 15 years because you you'll be hard-pressed to find a single person in taiwan let alone a political party that wants to be incorporated back into the mainland um uh especially given the direction that china itself has taken so it's um obviously in the long run an open china is better um but it can't happen overnight um but for the last seven years it's been going the opposite direction right we're coming close to our uh to our time limit uh john but but a couple of uh questions i'll throw a throw at you and you can give very short answers if you like so um one interesting one is is how far you think the intelligence community in britain is well placed to support the indo-pacific tilt if it goes ahead which is talked about in the in the ir quite well i think we've got a good reach i mean i work closely with counterparts in india um in uh obviously australia new zealand part of the five eyes um and we have a means of communicating with the chinese uh on intelligence channels which i think is worth using and uh to be clear uh uh areas where we can work together genuine counter-terrorism issues uh but equally be clear about what our values are and what we weren't subscribed to and i think having those uh uh uh it requires a pivot obviously it's basically a pivot away from counter terrorism and away from supporting the wars in iraq and afghanistan but the but you know the people are highly adaptable uh and i'm sure we can do it i'm afraid to say that uh i'd like to continue and i'm sure everybody else would we we've come to 12 o'clock um and uh you've done a great job in in fielding a range of questions i apologize to those whose questions i haven't managed to turn to or that they're still in the chat function um so john can i thank you very much indeed um obviously the university is delighted to have you as a visiting professor um and has had and has benefited from it for a number of years but thank you also for today where you've very gainly taken on a pretty wide range of questions and uh and areas of specialisms i think if there's a career to uh to look to for many of our students and friends uh something as diverse as yours is is an amazing model but thank you very very much indeed for your time today well pleasure thank you and i i very much look forward to re-engaging in person uh with the staff and and students at uh at uh uh at king's and let's hope we'll be able to do that this summer thanks and i'll hand over to charlie laiderman um who's the convener of these of these conversations thanks charlie thank thanks to you both thanks to jonathan john for a really fascinating discussion and to all of you who asked questions it was uh the range of this of the discussion was was was really excellent so thank you on that and just um finals of advertisements on the next two events that are coming up um firstly we have moira andrews next week who'll be talking about the interaction between law and strategy someone who's been in the um in the seat of government and as a legal adviser to the foreign and commonwealth office as it then was and talking through the interrelationship between those so particularly those of you who are looking for a career in law she will provide some really fascinating insights into that and then the following week we'll have kevin o'brien who'll be talking to us about the role of digital security within strategy so we've got a great programme of events and it's yeah we want to as many of you with us as possible but um just before we end up i just want to thank again john and sir john for a great discussion to danielle mckevin for um for setting this up and um yes just a real um highlight i think uh of our calendar this year so thank you thank you all very much thanks thank you

Channel: War Studies KCL

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Length: 60min 8sec (3608 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021