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Hello. Welcome to The War Pod, a podcast of the Remote Warfare Programme, a research initiative at the London-based peace and security think tank Oxford Research Group. This episode is a little different. We recorded a recent panel event run by the Project for the Study of the 21st Century, or PS21. On the panel was me, Abigail Watson, Conflict and Security

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Policy Coordinator at Safer World, Aditi Gupta from the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Drones and Women of Colour Advancing Peace and Security, UK, Josh Arnold-Forster, Defence Consultant and former Special Advisor to UK Defence Secretary John Reid, and Emma Salisbury, a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College specialising in emerging technology and the military-industrial

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complex. As you can imagine from the opening remarks, the off-the-record discussion was fascinating and wide-ranging. You can catch the next one by signing up to PS21 events. In the meantime, enjoy the show. In the wake of Covid-19, states around the world are being forced to reassess what protecting

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their citizens really means. To date, national security infrastructures around the world have focused on countering traditional threats – terrorism, great power competition and nuclear rivalry. The failures of current approaches are becoming clear. A recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies showed that the number of Salafi

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jihadist groups have nearly quadrupled since 2001, not lessened. As well as being unproductive, this approach to security has serious costs. An unprecedented number of civilians die in conflict zones today, and protracted instability and low-level violence is making communities and regions more insecure. At the same time, reliance on military approaches has meant the

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consistent sidelining and drawing away of resources from countering other existential threats that are not amenable to military solutions. The UK is no different. One month before Covid-19 hit the UK, the government trumpeted a rise in military spending of £2 billion to £41.5 billion by 2021, citing the UK's military force as the tip of the spear

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for a resurgent Britain. This figure is more than twice that dedicated to current global emergencies, including climate and ecological breakdown, and hundreds of times more than pandemic prevention. This is despite successive policy documents assessing pandemics as an urgent and Tier 1 risk for the UK. The international rules-based system is also under threat, with states around

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the world eschewing the certainties of international law in favour of agility and adaptability against adversaries, and preferably under the threshold of armed conflict. The UK's own defence minister recently praised the benefits of emerging military technology when presenting the UK's new integrated operating concept, a key feature being the ability to

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escalate and de-escalate up and down multiple ladders across different domains and compete below the threshold of war in order to deter war. An accompanying feature not trumpeted was also the shift of operations further from existing mechanisms and scrutiny and evaluation. Our panellists will cover in more detail just why non-military threats were and are not taken

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seriously, and what structures, skills and mindsets need to be changed in order to ensure security policy for all. What rings clear from the hard lessons now being learnt is that claiming something as a priority does not matter if this is not supported by decisive action, adequate resourcing and underpinned by clear strategy. Hopefully this discussion is a good place to start.

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First we'll hear from Abigail Watson, Conflict and Security Policy Coordinator at Safer World. Abby will speak about the need to broaden the definition of security, to include sustainable security, and focus the question around whose security is usually discussed in Western policy making. Then Josh Arnold-Foster, a defence consultant and former special advisor to UK

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Defence Secretary John Reid. Josh will outline how the dramatic consequences of Covid-19 might pave the way for finally taking the security threat from lethal pandemics seriously, but also that there remain serious structural and cultural barriers to this. And finally Emma Salisbury, PhD candidate at Birkbeck College specialising in emerging

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technology and the military-industrial complex. Emma will approach today's question from the emergent technology perspective, bringing together the issues of innovation, the integrated review, and standing priorities to meet current and emerging threats in a time of constrained funds. So now we'll hear from our expert panellists. First up we have Abigail Watson from Safer

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World on broadening the notion of security. Thank you very much and thanks for having me. I'd like to frame my remarks around two key arguments, as Aditi said in her introduction. The first is that security is not currently defined within the right time frames. And the second is that policy makers consistently fail to account for the security of people in conflict-affected

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countries when conceptualising security. In policy documents like the Build Instability Overseas strategy, the Global Strategic Trends documents by DCDC, and more recently in statements about what will and will not be included in the now very delayed integrated review, policy makers have acknowledged the need to broaden definitions of security to include

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long-term drivers and all of those impacted. Yet day-to-day planning continues to be based on much narrower conceptions of security, the implications of which is that our actions risk undermining global and national security in ways that policy makers still do not fully grapple with. So to the first of my arguments, that we don't measure security long-term enough. Covid-19,

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as Aditi mentioned, has not just been a health crisis. It's had huge implications for how we live our lives, interact with each other, and conduct international affairs. In this sense, the pandemic highlights the need for a more holistic approach which acknowledges the way in which national security is threatened by non-military challenges. This is not a new

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argument, and it's not something that the UK government has not already acknowledged. Yet, I worry that most national security decisions in the UK and around the world are still based on short-term conceptualizations of security, of killing members of a certain armed group, of building international relations with certain allies and other countries, or of solidifying trade

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deals. For this reason, me and a couple of colleagues at the Oxford Research Group developed an index in an attempt to measure this concept called sustainable security. This concept is based on the idea that to truly measure security, you of course need to understand and consider the use of force, but you also need to take seriously two other factors. The first is climate change,

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which is increasingly being recognized as a threat multiplier. For instance, a study of conflicts between 1980 and 2010 suggested that the risk of armed conflict outbreak is enhanced by climate related disaster occurrence in ethnically fractionalized countries. The second factor is equality and governance. Violent conflict thrives in conditions where there has been a

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breakdown in the relationship between state and society. When citizens see their own government as corrupt, unable to provide security and services, and where divisions within communities have emerged, non-state groups can fill the gaps left by the state. While these two other factors have profound implications on national and international security, short-term understandings

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of security fail to grapple with them, and as a result, decisions based on national security frequently make the world less safe. This relates to the second statement, that we don't include the security of those in conflict-affected countries. At Safer World, I work with the Security Policy Alternatives Network, which is a network of almost 60 organizations from Europe

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and the US, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Yesterday, we had a big policy event, where Asetan Diallo, who heads up a Malayan-based NGO, said the international community invests so much in the country, but they don't seem to appreciate what its people actually need. This appears to be the case in many parts of the world, where a failure to engage

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with the local population and understand the true drivers of conflict has risked causing more violent conflict in the places the UK and others are engaged. This has certainly been true of my own research into UK training of local, national, and regional forces in parts of Africa and the Middle East, where the emboldening of predatory state forces has further alienated civilian

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populations and exacerbated the drivers of conflict. In Somalia, the Oxford Research Group heard abuses by the Somali National Army has been a huge recruitment tool for al-Shabaab. In the Sahel, ORG, and International Alert, heard abuses by state forces is a major recruitment tool for armed groups. Experts have also noted that many Nigerians in the northeast of the country

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and in the rest of the country fear the army and the police more than Boko Haram, something that has recently been captured in the End SARS movement. In this sense, training activities undertaken by the UK and a number of other countries which do not take into account the views of those most impacted by conflict can end up creating more conflict in the long term. And

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to truly build a secure world for the UK and others, we need to go beyond nice policy documents that say we have to acknowledge long-term drivers of conflict, and we have to instead ensure that day-to-day planning is based on a conceptualization of security, which is longer term and includes all those impacted in conflict. Thanks very much, Abby. That was really interesting. I think

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will feed into a lot more discussions about not just how security is defined, but how success is defined, what is the outcome that we'd like to see. Next, we have Joshua Arnold-Foster, who will highlight the opportunities for change in the wake of COVID-19. Thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to discuss this absolutely fascinating subject. I mean, I just,

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having worked at certain points in my career on the sort of long-term strategic documents that Abby's talking about, I couldn't agree with her more about, you know, you can write all the long term policy planning outlines you want, but unless you actually implement it, you know, that there's not much point. What I was really interested in discussing is the issue of how the

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actual impact of COVID-19 may change strategic assessment, and in particular, implementation of the necessary policies, the funding, the changes that are required to enhance our protection from the next pandemic, because there will be another pandemic at some point. It seems that this is a feature of just of human existence, if you like. And as Abby's pointed out, the risk of pandemics

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has been highlighted in various government assessments of future threats. But there's been some flaws here in how governments across the world have then sought to mitigate the impact of COVID. And I think something that we should all be paying attention to is the longstanding efforts by both academics, but more particularly various international organizations, World Health

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Organization, the One Health programs that the UN have been initiating to try and address the causes of pandemics. What do we do about food supply security? What do we do about the environmental impact of extending intensive farming, in particular, into areas of the world which have significant amounts of wildlife? I am certainly not a scientist or an epidemiologist by any

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stretch of the imagination, but it does seem as if there is this outstanding question. And just from a political perspective, we're now living in a world where we've seen 1.1 million people die as a consequence of this particular pandemic. And the economic damage, way too soon to assess, but it's many billions, many billions. So it then begs the question of what can be done to reduce

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the risk of another pandemic, not prevent another pandemic, but reduce the risk. This is where you then start to look at international regimes, regulatory regimes of the type that you see in other areas. So there's a list of international regulatory regimes that don't attract a lot of attention, but do exist and are funded and are implemented, ranging from the safety of

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civilian air traffic, to fluorocarbons, to just basic things on how the safety and regulation of nuclear power stations. There are international regulatory regimes for a whole range of things which don't attract a lot of attention, but do exist and are mitigating the risks of some of these things. Now, it does seem as if there is sufficient vested interest. And unfortunately,

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I would like to think that citizens of the world have a significant impact on those in power. But the reality is we live in a world where power isn't distributed equally. But nevertheless, when you look at the big insurance companies and the big banks, they will have a vested interest in looking at this problem anew. And certainly, the World Health Organization's give up on this.

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So you are looking at a situation in which there will be demands for action, there will from a range of different groups. Let's see how that pans out. But certainly, the academics in this field have been saying for some decades now, every time we have a pandemic, we always say the same things about how we need to change our ways, and yet nothing happens. So coming back to the point

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Abby made, you can read the academics saying, both from Ebola and from previous pandemics, we need to think about how we change what we do. And it's complex. Changing how you regulate food supply, it does involve looking at environmental factors, but it also involves looking at poverty. If one of your principal sources of supply of protein is wildlife that you don't really

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understand, there's an issue about how you tackle poverty, how you tackle public education, etc. So I think that will come up. I think that will start to be debated, not immediately. But in time, it will start to feature on international discussions. I think the problem though, is that we have structural and cultural problems about integrating

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the different factors in this broader definition of security that we all acknowledge we should be working for. But when it comes to actually implementing it, we don't do it. In the UK, a number of people have highlighted this problem. National Security Council that was set up 10 years ago was supposed to improve the ability of government departments to work together.

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Let's see whether or not we actually think the integrated review will do that. Because if you look at an issue, again, coming back to Abby's point about people-based security in developing economies, now, in theory, we say, well, we need to tackle the causes of conflict, which include corruption and inequality. So in theory, one would hope that if we're going to look at that,

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we would get the Treasury and the Bank of England and the financial regulatory authorities to consider how we tackle the issue of London being used as a laundromat for illicit money, whether that comes from states to the east or states to the south. How do we do that? How do we manage that process? Same goes for investments in British investments overseas. Are those

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investments helping or hindering conflict? Are our trade deals helping or hindering conflict, etc., etc.? I just remain uncertain as to the extent to which all of those different factors, the various government departments, either at the UK level or at the international level, are really looking at how they integrate conflict prevention into their, not just their planning,

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but into the implementation of how they do debt relief, how they do infrastructure, massive infrastructure programmes, and how they look at things which now are on the agenda, which is things like disinformation. That's enough for me. As I said, I'm very grateful for the chance to talk on this distinguished panel. Thank you very much, Josh. I think what you're

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saying about the mismatch between those ambitions and thinking about tackling the root causes of conflict and insecurity, you see it in, for example, the trustee prevention approach and UK's national approach, the conflict stability fund. But what you then see is a mismatch in actual resources. So I've got a figure here, March 2020 budget allocated £30.8 billion to

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the MOD for the fiscal year of 2020-21. But by comparison, the FCO and DFID's budget for the same year were £1.1 billion and £9.6 billion. So next we have a final panellist who will now look at the question of security from the perspective of emergent technology. Please go ahead, Emma. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for having me. I'm likewise really grateful to be on

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such a distinguished panel. I mean, the word security just covers such a wide range of issues. The threats that we have to learn to deal with are only going to get more complex and more interrelated. I think as Abby and Josh have explored, we've got some big themes that really hit us hard this year, which has been climate change and zoonotic pandemics. But what I want

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to come into here is more of a military perspective. So the theme I'm going to add in is that of emerging technology. I'm sure many of you are tired of reading endless op-eds and articles and think pieces on how things like AI and drone swarms and cyber warfare are going to change our threat space. But the reason that these comments are so widespread is because they are true.

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These technologies are not confined to the defence or the security arena, but they do impact upon it in ways that we may not yet have fully realised. It's becoming increasingly clear that the West's major adversaries, Russia and China, are unlikely to engage in conventional warfare with us, but they will use methods and technologies, both old and new, that fall under this threshold to

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display their strength, secure their nearer aboards and to make incremental gains. We as a nation have to look carefully at our approach to this kind of global context. Only if we are at forefront of these new technologies can we hope to address the security challenges they will bring. And our armed forces in particular need to be able to adapt to the changing nature of warfare.

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While big traditional weapons platforms like carriers, stealth fighters and armoured vehicles will doubtless have their place in our defence mix for quite some time to come, we do need our forces to be able to utilise emerging technologies. And the key thing is we need them to be able to do so quickly, efficiently and affordably. As General Nick Carter said as part

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of his recent announcement of the new operating concept, we must chart a direction of travel from an industrial age of platforms to an information age of systems. He identified some particular areas of focus in his remarks, including smaller and faster capabilities to avoid detection, electronic warfare, stealth technology and ever more sophisticated networks of systems.

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However, he noted that it is predicting what combinations of these new technologies will be needed that's the really challenging part here. One way in which I think we can boost our chances of handling this challenge well is by looking at British innovation. We are very lucky in this country to have a combination of excellent universities and lots of defence companies of

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all sizes. Many of these are also at the forefront of their fields. And what I think is that the government to work together to solve security problems was encouraged by Number 10's commitment to instituting a British ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which builds on the successful model of innovation, which was exemplified by the American version during the

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early stages of the Cold War. I do have some quibbles with those plans. I've written about it recently in War on the Rocks, if anyone's interested. But I do think that if we take a for our security. I'm sure many of us hope that the Integrated Security and Defence Review will explore these matters deeply. And I know that a lot of you will share my concerns that recent

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reports of delays to the Comprehensive Spending Review due to COVID may mean that the Defence Review's recommendations will not be costed, nor will they be placed within the context of forecast defence budgets going forward. But even without these important details, what I do hope is that the review will set out the nuts and bolts of how Britain is going to adapt to this

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new threat space. Our security as a nation going forward hinges on how we cope with emerging technologies, how we cope with AI, how we cope with cyber warfare. And if we kick these decisions into the long grass, I think that's a risk that we shouldn't be willing to take as a nation. Thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We hope you enjoyed the discussion as much as we

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did. ORG is closing at the end of the year and the Remote Warfare Programme, including this podcast, will move to safer world under the new name of the Security Policy Change Programme. For now, you can listen to all previous episodes of our podcast free of charge in the ORG site by following the link at the top of the page. We look forward to you joining us soon. Thank you.