OSINT and the changing character of warfare

A: Welcome to the World of Intelligence, a podcast for you to discover the latest analysis of global military and security trends within the open source defense intelligence community. Now onto the episode with your host, Harry Kemsley.

Harry: Hello and welcome to this episode of Jane's World of Intelligence. Your host, Harry Kemsley, and as usual, Sean Corbett, my co host. Hello, Sean.

Sean : Hello, Harry.

Harry: So, Sean, we very, very frequently say to our guests when we finish podcast how much we've enjoyed time speaking with them and wish that we had more time or indeed to invite them back. And I am absolutely delighted to say that we've managed to convince Phil Ritcheson to come back after I think it's about a year since we last spoke to you.

Phil: Phil.

Harry: First of all, Phil, thank you for joining us again.

Phil: Second helpings, It's a pleasure to be here. Wouldn't miss it. Thank you.

Harry: Thank you. So Phil, I read and reread your paper Strategic Challenges for Deterrence and the Changing Character of Warfare, which for the listener, if you're interested, there'll be a link to that in the show notes. What I was particularly struck by in that paper was your characterization of deterrence both historically and in the contemporary environment, but also your notes about the the character of warfare today and how how that is changing. Phil so what I wanted to do first is let's make sure are talking about the same thing in terms of what do we mean by character of warfare and then let's move on to how it's changing. So I'm going to ask you to help us with that first of all. And then of course, what we'll do from there, Phil is, we'll flow from that into so so what for intelligence. And Sean, I know you'll have plenty to say about that. So Phil, Phil, let's start there. We use a phrase like character warfare for a specific purpose. What do we mean in your words by character of warfare?

Phil: Yeah. No, and thank you again very much for the invitation to speak with both of you again. What that means is it's a reference to how nations principally but nations use military force to achieve their political goals. So it's recognizable to many in terms of armies and navies and air forces and such. Those are the tools that the state uses to implement its foreign policy objectives through the use of military forces. And what the character means is the way those forces are actually used. If you take a look over in the broad sweep of history, there have not been very many times when the way that warfare gets conducted has changed. And as a matter of fact, for much of Human history. It didn't change. It was primarily a human endeavor. And it was one, as one author, John Keegan, I think would put, was muscle. And that sufficed for centuries, arguably even longer than that. Where we are now is we're starting to see technological change accelerate. And that's been something that's happened over the last two, maybe 300 years in particular. So think in terms of things like the Industrial Revolution and what that implied for mechanization, what that implied for the speed with which armies could go across land, the speed and length with which navies could stay at sea, eventually having an engine that's going to propel aircraft across the skies. These are recent examples of how the character of war has changed. And there are other more specific examples. Technologically, you could even go back to Genghis Khan and the stirrup and allowing foot soldiers to be stabilized so they actually could use their bows and arrow better. You could go into the French and the English at Agincourt court in the 15th century looking at the longbow and what that actually means. You can get an island hopping campaigns that the U.S. marine Corps practiced prior to World War II and then implemented, and then certainly into things like nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. And to bring it into the future. Those specific technical things need to be complemented by two other things in order to be really effective in the change of the character of warfare. One is how it gets used and then how it gets used in a repeated way, which means from a military perspective, it's got to be doctrinate. You know, there has to be doctrine around it, how it gets used, how it can be trained against, et cetera, so that you can keep doing that. And what we're seeing today, and what I argue in my paper is that the character of warfare is changing because we're seeing different formations, different technologies being used much faster in more creative ways that are different than what we have been doing in the post Cold War environment with a focus on counterterrorism. And different still than the Cold War environment that we were in and World War II before that. Nothing is perfectly black and white. So you can always find some similarities. But what I argue, and others I think would say is that the character of war is changing and changing dramatically with the pace of particularly artificial intelligence than quantum, quantum hypersonics and the other kinds of advanced technologies that are around us today.

Harry: Yeah, fantastic. So, Sean, I want to come to you in just a moment about the. If that's a revolution of military affairs, then within it there must be something that's affecting the intelligence community as well. So if this changing character of warfare is upon us as a continuum, it's always changing. The only certainty is change. Then what are the implications for intelligence? So Shaw, I'll come to you first on that and then Phil, perhaps you can fill in around Shaw in terms of what you can see as the implications for intelligence. Perhaps you can lead us then into the open source contribution to that as well. But let's go first of you to you, Sean, in terms of so what? So the change of warfare character is upon us. It's always been upon us. What do we think is changing then in terms of intelligence?

Sean : So I think the key thing, well, many key things there, one of them is pace the pace of change and can the intelligence community keep up? You know, we've spoken many times about the plethora of data. There's too much data out there to analyze, to absorb, to do the so what from a. Certainly the traditional way. So we've got to adopt AI. Are we there yet? No, I don't think we are. But there's two other elements to that as well. One is that everybody is a sensor and everything is a sensor. So the sheer diversity of, if you want to say intelligent sources or information source is such that somehow we've got to be able to bring those into the same place without the use of an Excel spreadsheet or a poor corporal who has got no time at all to do it. But also I think there's another factor is that everybody now is almost becoming their own intelligence analyst, intelligence officer, senior decision makers now are just getting flooded with information. We've spoken about it before, that you can almost at a sub level of way choose what information you're getting spread to actually then support your hypothesis. And so do you need the intelligence world at all now? Clearly, I'll say of course you do. But we've got to become more agile at using big data analytics, artificial intelligence, to do the mandraulic very timely stuff. So that still at the moment anyway, the human in the loop can then do. Okay, what does this mean? What is it the decision maker needs to know as opposed to everything that I know about a particular subject now one day will AI get there in terms of. I know the question you're going to ask and here's the answer. Maybe that's an interesting discussion.

Harry: So pace, scale and agility is what you've just said there in three words to summarize. I wonder, Phil, whether those three words are in effect crying out for More integration between the commercial sector and the government sector in this space, potentially perhaps straight across the OSINT divide. The reason I say that is because if you think about pace, scale and agility, well, pace, yes, okay, you can operate more quickly, but can you operate at that pace, at scale? And there are very few organizations that would claim to have all the analysts they need, all the compute power they need, et cetera, et cetera, for the world that they're living in. And then the ability to do that with agility means you're going to need to continually innovate. And again, I think the days when governments owned the innovation space, particularly in information technology, is long since passed. That is now well and truly in the hands of the commercial sector. There's no question in my mind that the commercial sector sector is a long way ahead in generic IT power and agility, and probably always will be. So does that lead us to conclusion that the open source environment, never mind IT as a source, but just the open source commercial environment, needs to be integrated to contribute to modern warfare? What's your thoughts on that, Phil?

Phil: No, and as usual, of course, there's too many thoughts in my head as a result of excellent comments made already. Yes, all over to that. I might use different words than pace, scale and agility, but I think the concepts are the same in my mind as well. What does that imply? Absolutely. I think there's a little bit of a hook back into the character of warfare. One of the things that's shifting and changing is that there's different operational domains. If you add space and cyber to the traditional ones of air, land, sea, undersea, that rounds out a lot of what people would understand. I think there's another one which we're poking at, which is the human dimension. It's the world of perception. It's the world of what is true, what is disinformation, what is real. And particularly for democracies, that creates a challenge. To your point, is commercial going faster than government? Absolutely. Is there more need to have commercial innovation and commercial capabilities integrated into government solutions? Absolutely. It leads to a cultural challenge, which I'm sure we'll come back to later. But the answer is yes. In my view, there needs to be a tighter integration on that government, that public and private sector alignment. In large part because you'll know this, the private sector is increasingly becoming part of the front line. If you look in the United States with the colonial pipeline attacks, there's a perfect example in the cyber infrastructure of something that had nothing to do with government, but Affected everything in socioeconomic categories in the eastern in the United States, driving up gas prices. There's a good example. You look at the proliferation of commercial satellites, some 9,000 plus satellites in space right now from 80 different countries and however many different companies. It's a staggering amount of commercial capability that's available to the government that is also at risk of being caught up in the shifting character of warfare. The one thing I might last point I might make is that there should be a large push on the technology side with the artificial intelligence, the machine learning agentic AI. How can we have these things used to enable decision making, operational planning, reaction time, intelligence analysis, et cetera? But something I think to pick up on what Sean pointed out, you're still going to need that human. So it's the right human machine balance to leverage the technology in order to drive towards these assessments and results that enable, enable decision makers and action takers at multiple levels.

Harry: Yeah, perfect. And Sean, you and I've had podcasts and discussions about things like ethics and empathy and we've tried to blend that into this conversation about technology as well. And I think that further underscores, doesn't it, the reality about the human machine teaming aspects. Absolutely.

Sean : And I was just going to come back to what Phil said about the human dimension because ultimately that is really what we're talking about until we get machines on machines and we can all go away and do something else. You know, conducting war is an intensely personal thing. But if you look at, you know, in terms of, as I always like to do, look at the adversary, I do think in the west we have a, A, a greater constraint because we believe in democracy, because there are political implications, because of the ethics, all the rest of it. We are not fighting necessarily on the same playing field. If you're, if you're charging an autocracy, you decide what's going to happen and everybody follows you because they have to here, in terms of where we've got to warfare, you know, it's a huge great debate. Everything's signposted massively in advance. And then you don't have that element of surprise or even delivering the effect you want to because it's all been mitigated. So I think, I think that is really important. And you know, one of the things I really was interested in in the article was this deterrence theory is a whole podcast for another day. But you know, the credibility has to be measured against the capability as well.

Harry: Yeah.

Sean : And we talk about rational actors. So I'm sorry, Phil, if I'm going a bit, but I know this is a really important part. Who decides who is rational? Well, it's the person that is thinking about it. So you know, for us putting that, that, well, you know, Kim Jong Un is going to press a button because that's irrational thing to do because at the end of his, his, you know, his regime. But equally if he has that view that if I don't do this, this is the end of my regime, then then, you know, so, so this is where the, the understanding of individual and psychology comes in as well as everything.

Harry: Sure. I am actually going to put us into that deterrence discussion because it's the other part of your paper I liked. And by the way, in terms of the rational actor piece, I'm reminded, I don't know actually whether it was an actual statement or an urban myth, but I am, I do recall somebody talking about the nuke the moon strategy that was to show that you were so irrational, so unpredictable that you really shouldn't play with me because I will do something you really don't expect. And I think, as the perhaps urban myth story goes, that the general concern said he wanted to send a nuke to the moon to prove just how utterly crazy he could get and therefore shouldn't be played with. Now, urban myths aside, this rational actor piece is one part of the deterrence algorithm we want to play with. The other bit though, which I'm going to pull us back to is this communication element. The communication elements of deterrence which you talk about in your paper and you underscore how deterrence fails without credible communications for me, pulls into scope the narrative control that's often contested that you end up with nations trying to assert. Maybe it's mis and disinformation, but it's to try to assert a position. And that brings into scope again the psychology you were talking about, Phil, the perception, the understanding of. Because if we get that wrong, rational actor or not, bad decision to be made on bad, bad information, mis or disinformation. And I just want to pull that out. Is that something that the open source environment is even more likely to better solve or work against, to mitigate than perhaps the closed environment?

Phil: Yeah. Again, excellent comments. And if you'll permit, if I could go back and just sort of sweep up two comments and then I'll come back to that one. There was, I have some factoids in my head about trust of AI. I was recently informed, talking to an expert who reminded me of some, some polling that had been done that compared China and Russia and this maybe won't be a huge surprise. Autocracy, democracy, excuse me, China and in the United States. And it was about the trust of AI. And the point was that about 70% of those polled in China hold in China. We can pick that all apart. 70% said they were totally trusting of AI, which kind of matches because the CCP wants to have China be an automated state, an AI state by 2030. So everyone's on board. Got it. In the United States, you have a large area of distrust. Only 30% would say they actually trusted it. And trust that. And you can see that bear out within terms of the pace of adaptability, back to scale that we talked about in the beginning, whether in government or not. We scale arguably slower because there's some mistrust of what it is that we're actually dealing with. But it has consequential results, I would argue. For example, there's over 100 data centers in China today. About 10% of those are aligned to the PLA 2000 algorithms have been approved. 15 large language models we can get into. Is it OpenAI? Is it deep seek? Is it really good? May not really matter. It reminds me of the arguments that existed 20, 30 years ago about proliferation and counter proliferation. And part of the argument was, well, if they can't get the best technology, who cares? And eventually everyone realized, well, bronze metal technology counts and it can still create a bad day for people. So we can argue about whether how good it is or not. But it may be missing the point that there is a surging focusing on China right now, a surging Chinese effort to develop their AI and to become more accustomed with it. Second point, real quick, integration has come up a couple of times and I want to just sort of throw in, you know, some current affairs. If you look at the recent Israeli strikes against Iran, there is a good example of the strategic integration of platforms and things that we recognize from one era of warfare with artificial intelligence and maybe things that are part of this new era brought together in a synthesized way for obviously strategic effects. Operation Spiderweb is probably another good example example. Their pager campaign is another example. These blending of sort of clever classified and open source related tools and mechanisms to achieve strategic effects. And with that as a hook to go into your question on the comms in the narrative, I think the answer is yes. Open source intelligence is a part of what. There's a revolution in military affairs, which he used up front, which is the right reference. There's a revolution in intelligence affairs as well, which is a Compliment and it focuses on software development, on AI, on open source intelligence. Open source intelligence in my view is a part of that. That human machine balance is a part of that. How best to manifest it in a way that is trusted, verifiable, validated, ethical for us, particularly as Western democracies. But open source intelligence is a part of that. And the more that it gets aligned with artificial intelligence, the more it be accelerated in its capability to detect false narratives or at least flag them for review and to maybe even address encounter quickly. You could imagine in this world of agentic agents, chatbots for artificial intelligence having some delegated authority to it to as soon as it sees something to to reflect truth back onto that. So you can see how AI and osint that I think can and should be considered not only for upfront narratives and warning in terms of an intelligence perspective, but also in conflict. Making sure that you are communicating in the right way in a way that may be designed to deter deterrence either before the conflict happens or inside maybe as some form of escalation control where true narratives getting to the appropriate decision makers with clarity and accuracy can have a strategic effect.

Harry: Yeah, that brings to mind for me that idea that we've seen some examples of in the Ukraine conflict where it was clear to the intelligence community that Russia were about to try and operate a false flag operation or two and they were pre briefed by allied forces that that was what was about to happen and then they didn't happen. Now, whether there was actually a connection or not is not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is if you have AI able to look into things and pre debunk, pre falsify things, we might actually get the point where we start to unravel this myth and disinformation which will help us be demonstrably legitimate in our narrative. Whereas the opponents would be less so. So that would require a level of integration of intelligence capabilities that we don't currently see in the way that I think we're going to need to. But we'll come back to that point later because I think there's a cultural issue there. Let me bring that to you Sean, in terms of this idea that AI, agentic AI having some sort of delegated authority. By the way, we're going to need to get past the headline of that to debunk the world's view that suddenly AI is running the war, but getting the culture right in the intelligence community, in the operation community, to actually accept that that's a bit of a Challenge isn't, is.

Sean : And it's already seen that, you know, how do you trust something which is an algorithm that you don't understand, particularly when it is that black box technology, when you don't understand how, how the result has come out. And that's back to basic tradecraft. Okay, what are my sources? How credible are they? Come with an answer. Well, you know, and you've heard me say this before, it's the same as a black box, is the same as an analyst. If you run the scripts or the analyst does this assessment or her assessment several times and they're wrong, as evidenced by what actually happens, then that analyst is probably not going to survive very long. Same as the algorithm actually, because if it's garbage in, garbage out, then you know, to discard it. And we're seeing a lot of that. So I don't think necessarily AI is as material mature as sometimes we think it is, but of course in advancing so quickly that we would expect it to get there. While I'm talking, I've got to say that it can't all be about the AI fair. We've been talking about this intensely human piece and against simplistic threat equals capability plus intent plus opportunity. I think there's one element of intent that all exquisite collection capabilities we've got within the intelligent community etc probably can't get to because it's about psychology. Now this is where you we can have another debate about what is open source intelligence as opposed to open source information. You know, intelligence, as we've discussed many times before, is incomplete set of information to answer a specific, specific question. So that psychology is as much, people have as much a right within the open source domain to, you know, conceptualize what someone's thinking as they do within the intelligence community.

Harry: Yeah.

Sean : And may have more tools to be able to do that.

Harry: No monopoly of grid ideas or answers in the classified environment, certainly not on those ology environments, the sociology, psychology, et cetera. Phil, let me turn the corner one more time here and go back to this note about commercial and government organizations being more integrated, working closer together, because I genuinely believe that's the only way we're going to get this right at the scale and pace and necessary agility to use those three words again. What do you think the role is though? How do we overcome the cultural problems, the procurement problems, the contractual problems? How do we get around those problems? Because I don't think there's many folk in the defense industry community, national security industry that haven't at some point and probably regularly Said, damn, the government procurement process is so slow. I'm spending months and months and months going round in circles. And then you're hearing the same sort of conversation on the other side of the table from government colleagues. But nonetheless, we still take months and months and months to get things. How do we get, how do we start to correct that? Integration of commercial industry, the digitization of the battlefield, these things you've mentioned in your paper, how do we actually get there?

Phil: Yeah, I think it's a great question and of course the answers are always easier to say than to actually implement and complex entities and organizations and ecosystems. I mean, I don't know, maybe I'll take the glasses half full approach first. I mean, you can see some things that are happening that are different in this country. In the United States, there is a push for efficiencies not only in terms of personnel, but also in terms of contracts. So the more flexible mechanisms that are quicker to let, quicker to respond to and quicker to agree to are becoming more sort of normalized. I'll say you still have some of the other traditional or traditional contract mechanisms in place, but there's a shift in change. The rhetoric is helping push this and this prior to the current administration, you know, if you looked at some of the wordings from warnings of, from Admiral Aquilino, for example, former commander of Indo Pacom, you know, he, before he retired was warning of the need to be faster, the need to be integrated, the need to have in Our System, Title 10 and Title 50, Defense and Intelligence, work more closely together. In the course of my government career, I can find many examples of how we are much more integrated and far faster than we were on September 12, 2001 than we were on September 11, 2001. That said, back to the changing character of warfare. One of its primary features is speed. And it's speed across operational domains, which defies sort of a lot of the organizational approaches that we have and the contractual approaches that we have. So part of it is recognizing that we need to move faster. Part of it is recognizing that we have a threat landscape that is more dynamic and I think more dangerous than it has been possibly at any time in human history. And so that is all about a need for speed. And again, we're saying it, I think it's being internalized. How we actually do that, I think is going to remain a challenge. A couple more quick comments. You'll see in our system, and it's not exclusive to Western democracies, but the role of the startup you're sort of disruptor companies who are able to do things a lot faster, which is good because commercial is showing itself to be able to generate capabilities that result ultimately in a lower cost per shot. Air quotes for all listeners. It's costing less to shoot something down or to take on a capital sort of platform. You look at the Ukrainians and what they've done with their commercial UAV and their single point of view. UAV is going after main battle tanks, Operation Spiderweb, which is a brilliant execution that didn't cost very much except for time, but took out an extraordinary number of Russian strategic bombers in part of their strategic inventory. So that is being seen. We are seeing the effects of algorithms on top of UAVs that are able to have these very precise effects. We're seeing the advantages in the Middle east and you're starting to see it reflected back in our mechanisms inside the budget. The recent budget that is put out has actually a lot of good language with respect to emerging threats that reflects lessons learned from inside of Ukraine. So you're starting to see the system shift and change. Look at stitching those gaps and seams together across Title 10 and Title 50, all with the mind of being faster in terms of warning, assessment, operational decision making. I will end though with saying that for everything that has been done, many of us will be concerned that it's not enough. And if you put it into a coalition context or into an alliance construct, my good friends at NATO are not prepared to deal with what would need to be dealt with in the future battle space. So more needs to be done as part of that. How can we take a little bit more risk, where appropriate, on integrating commercial solutions in order to be more operationally effective? And that will accelerate with more requirements being identified for commercial providers and budget set aside to match those requirements.

Harry: Yeah, I have to say I agree with everything you've just said. My concern is that we will only need one bad actor in the commercial environment to do something nefarious in the more flexible agile world, and the procurement system would start to lock up again. And we've seen that before with some fairly large and some small contracts here in the uk, which have created a very bad context for this change that we need. But anyway, we could spend too long on that in this conversation. Sean?

Sean : Yeah, just one quick one, actually. It's about the perceived risk that governments are prepared to take and it kind of leads into what Phil was saying. So, in the uk, my personal view, risk of being slightly controversial is that we are still over reliant on the big primes always go to the big primes because they can absorb the risk, et cetera, et cetera, without really acknowledging that most of those primes go to SMEs to actually deliver the capability, because a lot of primes don't have their own capability. What that does, though, is that passes on the risk to the SME that either doesn't survive or whatever, and it puts extra processes in place, which means things get delivered late, expensive, and not what it says on the tin. And then if you multiply that exactly as Gil said, and we had a debate about this just recently actually over, you know, the, the primacy of securing your interests in your own defense industrial base, it then becomes national. Yeah, yeah, we'll do that in the coalition as long as you use our company.

Harry: Right.

Sean : And so it's back to the cultural issue of, you know, are we in this to, to have better capability or look after national interests?

Harry: Yeah. Let me pull us out of the procurement world and back into the world of deterrence. And this change of.

Phil: I'm sorry, just one more point. And the, One of the things, one of the other things I think will be is a lesson learned for all of us. And here I'm thinking both of the NATO alliance in particular, as well as the United States is. We're seeing what it takes to actually support the Ukrainians through our industrial base and the challenges that we have. So you can be a prime or you can be small, but you can't avoid what is clearly obvious, which is that we have struggled to keep pace what is required to push that weaponry out, which means it's forcing you to have a reckoning, as it were, with, okay, well how do we change that? And the primes can take risk and they can change the way they need to do things, and probably they should in some areas, so they can be more supportive. But you also need to open up the environment where these new disruptors have the chance to match capability with what people are talking about. For example, direct to user. How do you get to that tactical user in a disconnected environment? Well, you gotta use leverage, commercial capability and technologies. Right. Get the satellite image right onto a phone, get the analysis right there to him or her. And oh, by the way, you're probably going to be doing that with some friends because we don't normally like to go into a fight by ourselves. So then you've got shareability through unclassified. So again, it's kind of obvious when we're talking about it like this. It's harder to implement. But I think you will continue to see the pressure against the larger classified system to start adjusting and adapting so that we can be effective for our own national interests as well as that of our allies and partners.

Harry: Yeah, I agree, Phil. We had a conversation recently about the European commitment to spend more money in defense, and then that being translated through to the NATO conversation we've seen quite recently with the summit, and we were talking about the disparity between Eastern European, their spending plans and those that are more distant from Moscow, and how that pressure, that real world pressure, supersedes even the politics that are necessarily going to be in place for them to have to overcome spending changes. And therefore there's a zero sum gain in terms of budget, which means other things have to suffer. You can spend more money on defence. But again, I'm going to move us out of that conversation on the procurement and government spending and move us back into this world of deterrence and the changing character of warfare. So for the final part of this conversation, Phil, I want to take you back to your paper where you talk about the fact that China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, all individually changed over the years in terms of their actual threat to the world around them and internationally and arguably now increasingly collaborating between them, which I think generates a whole new world. You make that quite clear in your paper. A whole new world of challenge in terms of how do you deter them, how do you engage that problem and indeed prepare, if you need to, for the defense against those organizations, collectively or individually. So what do you see as the big changes there that have generated this circumstance where you've got these four nations which are considered to be the major challenges for the Western world, What does that do in terms of the character of warfare and the need for deterrence or the ability to deter?

Phil: Yeah, no, no, no, excellent question. I think some of the things that have changed are won't be too surprising. I mean, the end of Cold War, obviously, arguably a unipolar moment for the United States that got upended on 9, 11. We leapt into counterterrorism operations, which we absolutely should have done, and we did with allies and partners around the world. But I think as we got further away from that time, particularly the Cold War, you started seeing power adjustments and power shifts in large part. Many of these other countries were rising. China's rise, however halting, however they may want to frame it, has been impressive, particularly economically. Parts of the international system started fraying at the edges, whether it be that liberal democratic order, small L, small D, the rules based order, however you want to characterize it, it started fraying at the edges a little bit. I think there are some other reasons that I don't want to go too far down this path, but things like nationalism, things like populism, things like a sort of a swing back against globalization by those who did not benefit from that have all come together into this kind of generational moment for sure, I think where the old system shifted and changed and with that became opportunities for, well, hey, the United States is still the predominant power. It reflects something that is part of yesterday. And here I guess I'm voicing maybe a little bit of the Chinese argument what about our tomorrow. We see ourselves having an ability to not necessarily do what it is that the United States might like or Western democracies. And so you see this alignment of interests and, and a strong, strong strategic partnership and relationship between our two countries that is not reflected in the Russia, China for example, but there's enough of an overlap with their primary interest to be more accountable in international affairs, to be accounted for in international affairs that cooperation makes sense. And so we see that in the battlefields of Ukraine, where there's a lot of dual use technology and other kinds of, of support and equipment going from China to Russia. North Korea took the fairly arguably extraordinary measure of deploying some 10,000 troops to support with Russia against Ukrainians in the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. There Iran maybe not too surprisingly said, okay, well you can use our shahats and you're seeing extensive remanufacturing and use of drones by the Russians, including last, last night with 750 or something that were launched. So I think what we're seeing is a shifting in the international system that allows for cooperation amongst four who might not necessarily cooperate geographically but have political and economic interests in doing so. And last point I might make is that it's not the full on axis powers kind of thing from yesteryear because obviously they don't have the, that kind of alliance and treaty commitment set up. And you see even in the current Middle east crisis, for instance, China did not come to the fore. North Korea did not come to the fore. Russia did not really engage. There's still a very strong line of national interest. I've got my fight over here I need to worry about. So you may not see the dedicated supporting and supported actions that you would find amongst an alliance, but you absolutely have a strategic alignment of four nations who have an interest in everything from displacing the dollar to countering US and Western foreign policy to rebuffing NATO actions and activities and undermining the US and Western positions in key areas to include the Middle East.

Harry: Yeah, perfect. Thank you. Sean, do you want to come back on that again?

Sean : There's an awful lot to pick up there. I mean, we've got a whole different debate.

Harry: Yeah, before you do that, because I know that's the direction we're going to go, let's pull ourselves out of that rabbit warren because we're going to run out of time. Let me ask you to help the audience take one big takeaway from this conversation in terms of deterrence and the changing character of warfare. Phil, I'll come to you in just a moment. What I would like the audience to take away from my perspective is this sense of importance of the communication environment in that very complex world of the changing character warfare for deterrence. Now, I have a very strong bias towards the need for us to resolve. Mitigate the mis and disinformation world we live in. I believe, I personally believe that to be at the root of many of our ills in the Western democracies of the world. But that's another matter for another day. And given I feel that way, I genuinely believe that's something we need to address. And I do believe open source has a large part to play in that. With the right technology, with the right integration between commercial and government entities, that, for me, would be my takeaway. I'll come to you last, Sean, if you don't mind. Phil, what would you want the audience to take away from this conversation for you?

Phil: I will try to be short and sharp with respect to deterrence. It's an inherently fallible strategy. It has failed more times than it has succeeded throughout history. I think in my mind, that puts more pressure on that balance of communications credibility. But capability is where I'll land, because I think the capability that we need to be thinking about are those capabilities that are part and parcel of the change in character of warfare. And those consist of of integrated military capabilities that we have right now blended with increased commercial capability. And I think matching that, RMA is the revolution in intelligence affairs. You put those two things together, RMA and ria, you have better capabilities for the United States, better capabilities for Western allies and partners, which I think creates, again, the ability, the capability that can be credibly communicated in order to try to deter. But it being fallible and things being very fluid and unstable right now, you need to be prepared to get on with it in a new character of war.

Harry: Yeah, just for. I let loose, Sean, on his thoughts, I agree with all of that. And the fact that the capabilities we need are in themselves changing rapidly is another need, another underscore of that need for agility and speed. Because let's be clear, we go back three years. Yes, we were talking about unmanned vehicles of one sort or another, but boy, are we talking about them now. And by the way, by the end of the conflict, which we hope will end soon in Ukraine for the right reasons, with the right outcome, there will be another change that we haven't even thought about yet that's coming. So, you know, buckle up, ladies and gents. This is a constantly changing beast. Sean, your takeaway for the audience.

Sean : So for me, in the last 40 minutes, the, the sheer breadth that we have to cover just to actually address the character warfare. I mean, I start to write down, I feel the whole page. So we can't possibly repeat that now, Neither should we. But that just shows the complexity now that we are dealing with. There is so much to consider, so many inputs that we need to take in account, all levers of information advantage, if you want to call it that, to actually even be able to understand, let alone counter.

Harry: Yeah.

Sean : Those threats out there. So, of course, open source information, intelligence data has to be a key part.

Harry: Yeah. We've often talked about all of government response to things. I think it's now all of governments, plural, operating together in alliances. And by the way, if it wasn't already complex enough to get multiple parts of government to talk to each other, doing that across multinational boundaries is no easy challenge. And I think we've seen plenty of examples of that in recent times across the our own Western alliances. Well, Phil, as ever, time is against us. So I'm going to pull stumps on the conversation for now, but not before I've said another very, very sincere and big thank you to you for your time effort in the conversation today. This was second helpings for you. If you're up for it, if your appetite persists. I sense there are two or three more conversations, if not more, that we could bring you to. So if you're willing. We are certainly keen to get you back and have another conversation very soon. But thank you very much for joining us today.

Phil: Thank you, Harry and Sean, pleasure as always. Yes, I have a large appetite, so let me know when the next time is and look forward to the next conversation. But I've enjoyed this immensely. Thank you.

Harry: Thank you. Thank you very much, Phil. And for the listener, thank you for taking the time to listen to us all the way through as ever. If there are any questions, anything you would like us to address in terms of topics we cover in the World of Intelligence, we have done that numerous times to respond to listeners as requirements. We're happy to do so. But in in in short, thank you for listening and we look forward to speaking with you again very soon. Take care. Bye bye.

A: Thanks for joining us this week on the World of Intelligence. Make sure to Visit our website janes.com podcast where you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Google Podcasts so you'll never miss an episode.