Editor’s note: Recently, the Clements Center of the University of Texas at Austin and the King’s College London War Studies Department held an important conference on the “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States in the larger context of grand strategy. Many WOTR friends and contributors were involved, including John Bew, MLR Smith, Kori Schake, Tim Hoyt, Ryan Evans, and — of course — Lawrence Freedman, who gave the final keynote lecture on a subject near and dear to WOTR readers: strategy. Read Freedman’s Strategy: A History if you haven’t already. And if you have, read it again!
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Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King’s College London since 1982. His most recent book is Strategy: A History (OUP, 2013). He is a Contributing Editor at War on the Rocks.
I am struck by how much Professor Freedman’s comments about the big defence strategies and white papers that nobody reads resemble those in disaster management for things like controlling oil spills or nuclear accidents. Professor Lee Clarke of Rutgers has a great book on this called ‘Mission Improbable – Using Fantasy Documents to Tame Disaster’. See Professor Clarke’s homepage for more information: http://leeclarke.com/