What secrets are locked in the Cabinet?
Sitting physically next to Number 10 Downing Street, and connected to it by a door and passage, to which only some have access, is the building housing the British 'Cabinet Office' (CO). In Constitutional theory, the various ministries are headed up by an elected politician, appointed by the Crown on the advice of the Prime Minister (PM), who in turn holds that office at the discretion of the Sovereign, so long as (s)he holds the confidence of the House of Commons (HoC).
The Ministers effectively form the Government and meet as a 'Cabinet', when decisions taken are subject to the rule of 'collective responsiblity', meaning no member can dissent from them without resigning their post.
Around the PM there is a coterie of staff, both Civil Servants and others. In theory the PM holds ultimate decision-making power in the state; in practice the reality is far more nuanced, and the entity which is the CO, holds great influence over the PM and adopted policy.
To many, including Dominic Cummings (See below and 'Cummings (and Goings': https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/search?q=dominic+cummings ) this may replicate the 'frisson' between a notional democratic process and a 'Deep State'. Cummings even suggests the CO is responsible for a profound political malaise, that can only be cured by radical surgery.
I do not necessarily agree with anything Cummings has said or done, particularly in relation to the Covid episode that brought him to prominence, but the subject of the role and function of the CO, is a worthy one for contemplation and discussion, not least because in Britain we now have a department of state, employing over ten thousand permanent staff, yet with no identifiable practical ministerial responsibility!
We know it has direct and close links to the Secret Services (SS), the boss of the one often becoming the boss of the other; which SS employs a further around 20,000 personnel doing secret stuff (MI5: 5000+; MI6: 3000+; GCHQ: 7000+; Military Intelligence (MoD Military Intelligence): 5000+)
We may reasonably ask, "What do all those people do?" - but it is unlikely we shall be told.
The actions of the British Government, both overt and covert in respect of wars in Ukraine and Palestine, often at varience to public opinion, has brought the machinery of government and its effect on policy and action into stark relief.
For example how is it possible that a supposedly democratic institution such as the British Parliament could pass measures that criminalise people as 'terrorists', merely for protesting against violence and genocide? Was that really the result of the democratic system or the opaque chicanery of the Deep State as represented by the Cabinet Office? (TTV)
30.8.2025: Everybody knows that Israel intentionally kills civilians in their thousands, including women and children, and then lies through the teeth of plausible people like Regev. It's intentions are clear, its methods are utterly immoral. This has been going on for nearly two years now (leaving aside the 80 prior) and still no intervening military force to oppose them and protect the innocent. It is an unsurpassed international failure in which America is the principal villain and a grotesque, macabre charade, in which Britain also has played a despicable role. Applying rational argument, as Jon Snow does to defenders of a fascist, psychopathic regime is like small talk with Geoffry Darmer to understand the kick he gets out of killing and cutting up victims. (TTV)
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31.8.2025: I think you may have misread or misunderstood Locke. He came from an Anglican protestant background and never rejected Christian belief though he did subject it to reason, as he claimed to do to every subject. He is regarded as the father of empiricism and psychology but is not to be confused with Mill who introduced the 'greatest good for the greatest number' (amongst other ideas) nearly two hundred years later and from a different milieu. That latter concept has been used and misued by regimes of left and right, to raise the state above the individual and cause untold suffering. See how Israel defends the indefensible, merely replicating Hitler, Stalin Mao tse Tung and all other tyrants of the modern age. Locke on the other hand introduced the concept of inalienable human rights or 'freedoms' - to life, liberty and property, later adopted by the American revolutionaries, except they replaced property with 'happiness', an unachievable goal of any state, though it can perhaps do a few things to reduce human misery. It is the misinterpretation of science, more than anything that has undermined the concept of and need for religion or a belief in God. Politically, societally and individually the results are there for all to see. (TTV)
People, ideas machines XIII: The origins and evolution of the Cabinet Office, the heart of darkness in the permanent governmentQuestions for the next PM: How might a *regime complete* government control the government? 'Reform' the Cabinet Office -- or *close* it?Bureaucracy is a bad European system of government, created by the use of permanent public officials, a system that does not, should not, and cannot exist in England. Palmerston to Queen Victoria, 1837 He is very depressed about the hopelessness of the present system of governing by 22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair. Edward Carson, recorded by Leo Amery, 21 July 1915 [W]hen he joined Asquith’s Cabinet [5/15] he was astonished at the lack of method, the absence of any agenda or minutes. He told Asquith this. The latter said that everyone who joined the Cabinet made the same observation but speedily became reconciled to the method of doing business… Bonar Law The Cabinet often had the very haziest notion as to what its decisions were. Curzon, 1918 [The Treasury] had shown neither foresight nor organising capacity, and had plunged the country into something like administrative chaos until the War Cabinet machinery came to the rescue. Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary, 27 October 1922 Unlike Cabinet Ministers who have their fame entombed in rows of bulging biographies, the great Civil Servants often hardly attain to the humble dignity of a footnote to history. A Civil Servant does good by stealth and would blush to find it fame; a Cabinet Minister does good by publicity and would resign if he failed to secure it! It is easy to decide which is the more indispensable to a nation’s welfare. The country easily survives the frequent changes of ministries; it hardly moved a muscle when a Labour Government climbed for a moment to office; but it would receive a staggering blow if the Civil Service suddenly took it into its head to resign tomorrow. Some Governments are in office but not in power; the Civil Service is always in office and always in power. Baldwin, talk to the Civil Service 1925 The function of the Cabinet Office is essentially one of machinery of Government and not of policy. It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the Cabinet Secretary has no duty of offering advice in any matter of policy or of interfering in any way with the functions of responsible Departments in this respect. Maurice Hankey, the first Cabinet Secretary The Secretary of the Cabinet is, in a sense, the ‘prime minister‘s permanent secretary’, to use a phrase of the … Secretary’s predecessor [Sir Burke Trend] on handing me my first brief in 1964; but his loyalty is, no less, to the Cabinet and the doctrine of Cabinet government... He advises also on the practices and conventions about the conduct of ministers in relation to collective Cabinet responsibility, as well as on other matters affecting collective responsibility and loyalty. PM Wilson reflecting on the role of Cabinet Secretary in retirement (NB. the phrase about loyalty being no less to the Cabinet, this is important as it is used by CO officials to justify not doing what they know the PM wants) I think it is a good idea to reassert the Civil Service being in the lead in Number 10. Jeremy Heywood, Cabinet Secretary, 2010. There are not two departments. I stress there is one department. There is one Cabinet Office of which Number 10 is a subset ... a business unit.’ Gus O’Donnell, Cabinet Secretary From the decision to elevate the general administrator, the mandarin, and grant to his corporation supreme influence, much of the present discomfiture of the country has followed. Hardly ever has so anachronistic a change occurred in a vital organ of a great empire at a worse moment. The discrepancy between tasks and means is still steadily increasing. Thomas Balogh, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, 1959 Bob, this setup is all wrong. The joint ought to be jumping — and it’s not. Your office ought to be quiet as a grave. Instead your office is jumping and the plant looks like a graveyard. Harriman, The Man Who Sold the Moon. (Analogy: the problem with a permanently ‘jumping’ PM Office while the entities that should be jumping are graveyards.) This blog concerns the heart of power in the British state — the PM’s office in No10 (PMO) and the Cabinet Office (CO) created in December 1916 out of the crisis of the Somme. The story of the CO’s creation 1916-39 helps enormously if you want to understand how and why core institutions of the British state became pathological, and what could be done to turn the dismal tide. It’s written not for the political class of SW1 generally, which (unlike the deep state) has demonstrated an intense anti-interest in these things, but for those few aspiring to be the next PM or helping the next PM, taking power amid the wreckage of both the domestic system and the post-1945 international security system and its institutions. In other words, it’s written for a tiny subset of the political class (Insiders) plus a subset of the deep state (Insiders) plus those Outsiders thinking about how to break the grip of Insiders, how to do regime change properly, and what a once-a-century burst of powerful, thoughtful energy looks like in detail. The most hopeful aspect of our deepening crisis is that crises also push elite talent into rethinking their priorities and this is happening in Britain among Outsiders. Money, talent and ideas are moving fast. The SW1 mainstream is almost entirely unaware, just as they didn’t see the spectral WhatsApp groups signalling the dramatic Silicon Valley shift 2021-3, but NPCs increasingly display blind panic: they can feel their loss of narrative control though their own information ecosystem acts as a multi-billion dollar denial-of-service attack against themselves, so they can’t see straight why their narratives are sinking. It will be interesting for those working in No10 now but I continue to think it’s extremely unlikely that Starmer will break the pattern of modern PMs: go along with the system, whinge more and more but do nothing more than tinker and shuffle NPCs and spin, then write the usual paragraphs of post-Thatcher memoirs about their ‘frustrating search for the levers of power’, then urge their successor to ‘respect our institutions’, i.e repeat the same pattern of uselessness, moral cowardice and failure. Yes, McSweeney and others would like to do more but the guy who promoted the guy responsible for pandemic preparations and response to be Cabinet Secretary is not the guy to do what’s needed. But 2-4 more years of our present disintegration may well generate a PM and team who return to the Vote Leave premise: tinkering and ‘respect the institutions’ is doomed, our institutions need profound regime change and this is fundamentally entangled with delivering what’s promised to voters, you can’t deliver for voters without regime change because the old Whitehall/Westminster regime will sabotage execution of priorities consciously and unconsciously. Perhaps the most interesting and deepest lesson from the history of the CO is how a) the players who set up the CO agreed it must *not* do a range of important things — such as control personnel, give policy advice to the PM, interfere in ministerial responsibility etc — yet b) it evolved so the CO now does all of those things they agreed in 1916-17 it would be disastrous for it to do, and c) there has been close to zero focused, knowledgeable, honest Insider discussion about the role of the CO for decades, so much so that MPs aren’t embarrassed to say ‘I don’t really know anything about what the Cabinet Office is and does’, and most ministers leave their pointless career without ever grasping the CO’s role in the pointlessness of their meetings. Ironically, the main criticism in the CO’s first years was that it would lead to too much power for the PM. But although it started out as the PM’s Office controlling the CO, the PM’s Office gradually dissipated its power to the CO which now controls the PM’s Office. If you watch modern meetings between the PM and Cabinet Secretary, they often involve the PM meekly asking for something and the Cabinet Secretary politely brushing them off. The body language and spoken language has shifted so the PM sounds like the supplicant and the Cabinet Secretary the chief. Over many decades, the system has evolved an emotional miasma around the PM’s Office to conceal the reality of the PM’s power and on occasion to suggest, subtly, that it just wouldn’t be proper for the PM to do X: well, theoretically PM, but in practice it would be seen as, well, ummm, undermining our institutions. Cue: startled panic — oh oh ok, sorry, I see, yes, well we can’t have accusations like that, I must follow the advice, but … there’ll be the devil of a row, still … nothing for it I suppose… And this pressure is applied with force when the system has to defend itself over its most stupid and indefensible actions, including promoting people for failure, one of its crucial functions and the defence of which is the clearest signal of whether you’re a true Insider or not. I vividly remember when I got the Trolley to reject various personnel appointments sent for his ‘approval’ — the usual sort of farce where the science guy in HMT dealing with the deep state was suddenly shifted to deal with cows in DEFRA, in the finest traditions of the meritocratic ‘Rolls Royce civil service’. The CO sends appointments in a clever psychological package: bishops etc, which no PM has actually decided in a century, go on top to condition the PM into mindless tick, tick, tick, on a Friday night. Then, after this set up, the operations of the deep state, logical only in its mad closed world, are there to be ticked with the same level of thought and interference as the Bishop of Coventry. When I suggested to the Trolley that he reject the mad appointments rather than tick them, he was startled: can I do that, Martin [PPS] gives me these as if I have to just tick everything?! Yes Prime Minister! He scribbled ‘No!’ instead of a tick. The PPS was called by the Cabinet Secretary: WTF is going on?! And the PPS said to me, ‘what’s going on you can’t do this?’ And I said, do you mean the PM does not actually control these appointments, it’s just a Potemkin constitutional convention now like bishops, because if that’s what you and the Cab Sec mean you should explain this to the PM…?Long stare… No, I don’t mean that, but, well, it’s highly irregular and although the PM can theoretically reject these appointments, it’s very unwise, and … YOU CAN’T! (See my covid testimony for other examples. My second covid testimony has not been published by the Inquiry because it criticises the Inquiry: logical.) One of the most interesting things about working in No10, something which really needs an artist’s eye to describe properly — historians cannot do it fully, see blog on Tolstoy and politics — is the subtlety of how this ecosystem has evolved and plays out in meetings, the courtiers of the CO and the modern, all too modern, sensibility of the characters who now become ministers and PM, the former weaving psychological spells and the latter conditioned to want, to need, to believe in them.
Previous PMs would be appalled at the impertinence of Gus O’Donnell’s candid statement about how the PM’s Office is seen as a subset ‘business unit’ of the Cabinet Office (above), and appalled at similar comments from other Cabinet Secretaries (below) — but most appalled, and amazed, at the MPs who let this happen, who proclaim their own castration as a ‘jewel of our constitution’, who rebaptise their castration as ‘defence of our meritocratic institutions against extremists’, when the system is, for example, promoting and honouring officials who should have been fired for killing people in covid. A PM could reverse this fast. A highly underrated fact about Britain is that, because of our unwritten constitution, a Live Player PM could change things faster and more effectively here than any other western country. And the crisis to motivate such change is deepening every day and will continue to deepen until the election because the old institutions are in a classic systems crisis, the normal historical cycle of regime change, in which they make their own problems worse, including by reinforcing memes among Insiders which stop them seeing reality. It’s a grander version of the Cameron-Osborne OODA-loop-as-denial-of-service-attack-on-their-own-perceptions-of-reality when they responded to ‘Turkey is joining the EU’ by calling their press conference on the roof of the hotel in summer 2016 to denounce ‘lies’ and thus spread like wildfire the meme that ‘Turkey is joining’. The story of the CO’s creation is told in A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the custody of Cabinet secrecy, by John Naylor.
At the end is a) a summary of crucial points and b) questions for an aspiring PM determined on breaking the cycle of regime failure, to ponder deeply before the next election. I explore the concept of ‘regime completeness’ — i.e the combination of things in a system (Leader, plan, team etc) which is needed — because identifying point solutions for particular problems cannot work in the systems failure we’re experiencing. For non-British readers, you can skip the main part of these Notes and look at the analysis at the end for some things relevant to all modern governments. Today there is a card-activated connecting door, about 20-30m from the Cabinet room, connecting No10 and 70 Whitehall (70WH) where the CO lives (which most people enter from the main entrance). If you’re standing in Downing Street looking at the famous No10 door, the Cabinet Room is straight ahead behind that door and this internal connecting door to the Cabinet Office is, say, about 50-70m away in a sort of 1 to 2 o’clock direction. No10 staff passes let you through to the CO and some CO passes let you into No10. (It’s also a security risk because if someone smuggled a weapon into 70WH all you’d need to do is take someone’s No10 pass, walk through the unguarded automated door, walk 20-30m and kill the PM: there’s no intervening security. You’d have a decent shot of then getting over the garden wall onto a waiting motorbike. Though the continued lack of drone defences for the PM, five years after I raised the issue and was told ‘there’s nothing’, provides easier methods.) Below 70WH are the COBR rooms and below them is access to tunnels that connect different parts of Whitehall. One tunnel runs from below the CO to the MoD and is used when demonstrations block Whitehall so the PM can walk through the connecting door, down the CO stairs, through the tunnel, then walk from the MoD to the Commons without leaving the secure bubble. Below all this are the nuclear bunkers and a list of people with access to this is known as the ‘Pindar’ list. The CO was born in the crisis of military failure in World War I and the widespread agreement that both a) the PM, Asquith, couldn’t do the job and b) the ‘machinery of government’ around him had proved deficient. The institutional structure that developed after the Northcote-Trevelyan ‘professionalisation’ of the civil service in the 1850s failed in important ways in the war, see Hankey’s excoriating comments on the Treasury (above) and similar comments about the Foreign Office by many. This story is connected to the debates in Whitehall from the 1890s through to 1914 about the rising German threat, the need to expand armed forces and the navy, changing technologies, the competing demands of imperial defence far from Europe versus the threat of a European hegemon and invasion, the tensions between defence spending and domestic politics and the reluctance of the rich to pay more taxes, Whitehall arguments over the Belgian guarantee which echoed the arguments of the 1866-7 crisis and 1870 crisis when Bismarck exposed the dilemma over deterrence — threaten, and perhaps deter but perhaps get embroiled in a war, or don’t threaten, and perhaps watch Belgium get snaffled. I can’t go into all that here too but cf. The Weary Titan which explores these themes (part funded by Andy Marshall of the Office of Net Assessment). This period (1848-1914) is a critical case study for everybody in politics as it brings together most fundamental themes of modern politics, including the failure to create institutions able to think through crises of modern speed and scale as technology transformed politics and war and the spiritual crisis of modernity first and best described in Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche (blog). Deeply frustrated by these debates, Lord Roberts, last to hold the title Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, said to Balfour in July 1904 a decade before the war, ‘At times I despair of any improvement without some national disaster.’ British elites proved unable to create the right institutions to enable better thinking. The institutions which evolved after Northcote-Trevelyan hobbled and disincentivised better thinking. As I’ve pointed out many times, there was only one serious discussion between soldiers and politicians about the connection of military strategy and the Belgian guarantee (CID, 23/8/1911) and it was rather shambolic and definitely inconclusive. Asquith was extremely unsuited to what’s needed for getting to the heart of such a problem: relentless realistic probing about core priorities without wishful thinking and/or prevarication — are we prepared to see Belgium occupied, it yes/no then what does this imply, are we prepared to see France crushed like 1870 again, how do we deter Germany etc? The failure of Asquith and others to face these trade-offs persisted into summer 1914 and caused a fatal paralysis in British statements intended to deter. The result was the worst of all worlds: Germany thought we were making clear we would stay out, so we did not deter, then we felt so entangled we fought, so we fought without even the counter-factual benefit of possibly deterring and therefore avoiding the need to fight. The institutional failures continued into the management of the war. The crisis of WWI did not produce a political leader close to the abilities of Pitt a century earlier (see blog last year on Pitt and Metternich). In 1915 Asquith complained that the war had produced no great generals and Lt-General Wilson shot back, ‘No, Prime Minister, nor has it produced a statesman.’ Asquith embodied characteristics that have come to typify senior British politicians including a sensibility pathologically prone to push off thinking about the hard questions while avoiding organising things. Our party system had already evolved to promote people who are adept at schmoozing the party in-group to rise in its ranks but can’t do the job of PM which requires the art of schmoozing and, sometimes, its exact opposite: facing reality, focus on priorities and disciplined execution of complex coordination — all of which becomes more important as the scale of a crisis grows with technology’s development. Asquith had risen through the system to its pinnacle but was out of his depth from summer 1914. In 1916, the evolving crisis finally spat out Asquith and replaced him with Lloyd George (LG). LG had got to know Maurice Hankey (MH) well and they had much discussed the organisation of government. NB. The quality of people and institutions — and the underlying seriousness of our political culture — was much higher then than with Ukraine and they failed then. A fortiori Outsiders should not be surprised at the delusions and disasters of SW1 over Ukraine. I won’t repeat here what I’ve said many times about the deep reasons for the Westminster rot. See recent Oxford speech and my Q&A page (including how I actually spent my time in No10 versus the fake stories told about it). It is a systems crisis as I’ve said for twenty years and only systems politics, working on all of these, can fix the rot. Though I think I might have accidentally made ‘systems politics’, the right way of thinking about this, a sort of anti-meme among Insiders— ‘an idea with self-censoring properties, an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it’ (cf. this interesting sci-fi story). There are many Labour MPs and spads now in the same insane meetings as 2010-24. Many have quickly grasped that the NPC official story — Rolls Royce machine, only problem was Brexit and Tories, just needs grownups in charge — is junk. And they grasp that if they stick to it and, Sunak-like, try to pretend to voters and themselves that ‘the system works’, their project will cave in as Sunak’s did. Hence Labour ministers and spads, shocked by their crazy meetings, briefing the BBC that it ‘turns out Cummings was right’ about Whitehall.
Someone will have to rebuild the PM’s office and the core of power. And this necessarily involves the critical question: do you try to ‘reform’ the Cabinet Office, or do you close it? I think all Labour attempts to reform the CO 2024-29 will fail, its horrors will continue to metastasise, and ideas such as simply closing the CO and the PM actually controlling the centre of power — a ‘crazy extremist’ idea — will become increasingly ‘mainstream’. (There is an intense power struggle underway now (summer 2025) between Wormald, other parts of the deep state and political forces. Some want rid of Wormald. Others want to reinforce him and extend their control of No10, including by manipulating the appointment of a ‘No10 Permanent Secretary’ — which could easily be one of those things spun as ‘the PM gripping the operation’ which is actually *the operation gripping the PM*. Little of this power struggle has leaked out other than No10 spad unhappiness with Wormald.) It will greatly help those working on a potential serious regime to understand why and how the current system was built. The current system, obviously, is not what LG and MH built in 1916-18. It’s constantly evolved. It changed a lot under Cameron-May when officials grabbed a lot of power for themselves while pushing ministers and spads away from involvement or even sight of the CO machine, especially with the National Security Secretariat which is now over 500 officials with effectively zero ministerial responsibility. Our ancestors who built functioning institutions which preserved our civilisation would be amazed to wander around the complex today, through the connecting door, and watch all the meetings of officials only. The officials took over, they run the place, the Cabinet Secretary took the politicians’ power, they use pre-meetings to control the Potemkin meetings with the politicians, they just give scripts to the politicians to read out while decisions are taken elsewhere, ministerial responsibility is now all fake — and the politicians barely seem to notice, never mind care — they would say to each other in amazement. Then they would look at institution after institution outside Westminster and it would all make tragic-comic sense. To those thinking about 2028/9, remember — our biggest allies in radical change in 2020 was a subset of deep state officials themselves. A serious regime will have unexpected allies as well as bitter enemies. Comments [in square brackets] from me, bold is my emphasis… (I won’t here go into the ravings of SW1’s NPCs in recent weeks as they thrash around in every more absurd Narrative Whiplash. Their cycle will continue to deepen and accelerate as it has since 2016: radicalise to the Left, tell themselves fantasies about public opinion and ‘the centre ground’, blame their problems on a) techbro-driven fascist radicalisation and b) idiot voters fooled by fascist disinformation, and demand louder and louder a return to pre-democratic ideas of censorship of political news ‘to defend democracy from fascism’. It’s inherently comic yet also worrying because the heart of it is the collapse of consensus reality among elites as technology breaks the old centralised information ecosystem, and the emerging political struggle between networks who each think of the other as a mix of delusional and evil is a struggle with a tendency to violence. Cf. The pathological simulacrum and the cycle of narrative whiplash. Also cf. Jon Askonas on modern media, on consensus reality, and on conservatism and technology.) Series on People, Ideas, MachinesXII: Theories of regime change and civil war. Notes on Turchin’s book. And on Timur Kuran, preference falsification/cascades, how sparks start prairie fires. XI: Leo Strauss, modernity and regime change — and an update 20/5: Notes on: On Classical Political Philosophy X: Freedom's Forge — the story of American business and industrial production in World War II. Incredible contrast between the America of WWII and now viz building things. Highly relevant to current debates on tariffs, supply chains, AI/drones/robotics etc. IX: IX: A) Britain's 'Organization of Victory' under Pit 1793-1815 and B) Metternich & European Community. How Whitehall-1795 was more like SpaceX-2025 than Whitehall-2025 is. Real meetings. R&D taken seriously. Procurement and infrastructure taken seriously. Over 230 years Whitehall has gone backwards. VIII: CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, 'a wilderness of mirrors', covert operations, assassinations, moles & double agents, disinformation. A blog on Angleton and the broader history of the CIA and US elites’ attempts to understand the political world. The long-term failures of the CIA on critical geopolitical issues, their security failures and penetration by the KGB, the fundamental problems of building effective intelligence agencies and integrating their work in an overall institutional structure — these deep problems are all extremely relevant to today as Washington increasingly can align on just one thing, hostility to China. Given this history we should not bet on the Washington deep state outperforming the PRC on intelligence and in many areas it seems the PRC has learned lessons from America’s victory over the Soviet Union better than Washington learned them. VII: On RV Jones, Scientific Intelligence in World War II, how Whitehall vandalised the successful system immediately after the war. Many issues explored in the RVJ blog are relevant to those interested in the future of AI, ‘safety’, and security. VI: Alanbrooke diaries, incredibly relevant to today’s problems and what military ‘strategy’ really is. V: Colin Gray and defence planning. What’s the difference between ends, ways, means? What’s the difference between strategy, tactics, operations? Why such confusion? What is defence planning, how does it fit with strategy? IV: Notes on The Kill Chain — US procurement horrors, new technologies, planning for war with PRC. III: More on fallacies of nuclear thinking / strategy / deterrence. If you read this and the earlier one you’ll see that almost everything the media says about Putin and nuclear threats is wrong / misguided and, worse, so is much of what is said by international relations/historians/military academics. II: Thinking about nuclear weapons I: On innovation in militaries, when does it succeed/fail — e.g why US got ahead on aircraft carriers, RAF defence in 1930s.
On rationalism and politics (2022). And some other related stuff pre-No10… On high performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, ‘Seeing Rooms’, UK crisis management (2019) On AI, nuclear issues, Project Maven (2019) On the ARPA/PARC ‘Dream Machine’, science funding, high performance, and UK national strategy (2018) |
