Dr. Robert Lyman on the common misunderstanding of the nature of war and even their own imperial history among British voters:

I’ve been involved with the practice and study of war for the past 44-years. I have five degrees in history and the study and practice of war, and I have written 19 books on the subject and have contributed to the writing of 10 more, with 3 more of my own in train. The net result of this, observing international events and Britain’s response to them over recent times, is to conclude that Britain – and Britons – have a problem about war. The problem is that at a very fundamental or essential level we simply don’t understand it. I see eyebrows rising everywhere at this assertion, protests arising in the usual places to suggest that if we don’t understand war, how on earth did we create an empire? Worrying swathes of academia and our impressionable young – I know, I’ve taught them – believe that Britain is and has been a nation of rapacious warlords that conquered a major part of the world by the use of violence and disrespect for others. We don’t have time to refute that silly nonsense here, apart from observing that the primary nature of the British Empire wasn’t one that was secured or maintained by violence.

But, to the subject at hand. A product of long decades readying, studying, teaching and writing about war has led me to the conclusion that as a nation, both politically and culturally, we are too squeamish about the practice of war to be any good at either preventing it, or preparing for it. Put simply, our problem is that we are just too nice. Centrist Dads spend their entire lives seeking compromise, and worrying when a middle way cannot be found. It is only when, deep into a war we hoped wouldn’t wash up against our shores, that we come to the shocking realisation that people are trying to destroy us and as a result we find ourselves forced into the process of trying to master the business of organizing violence on a massive scale, and unleashing it as effectively as we can against our enemies. We always seem to be playing catch up, because we haven’t prepared adequately in the first place for the inevitability of war in a fractious world.

[…] Kit Kowol’s superb (and recent) Blue Jerusalem describes in embarrassing detail the ignorance evinced by politicians and military thinkers in the 1930s who hoped to avoid the sharp end of war by buying only bombers, or ships, or of relying on persuading the enemy population to coerce their leaders into ending a war they had themselves started. Perhaps if we dropped leaflets on Herr Hitler he would see the error of his ways, and end all this silliness? Very few people in Britain on the eve of the Second World War could bring themselves to comprehend the extent of the fascist animus either for democracy in general, or the Jews in particular, both seen by the Nazis as preventing the creation of a Grosse Deutschland and allowing Germany to regain her status as primus inter pares in continental Europe. It was only as Belsen was liberated nearly six-years later that the penny seemed to drop in the befuddled British mind that these people were bad, really bad, after all. It is one of the accepted reasons for the Allied failure to destroy the railways feeding Auschwitz: decision-makers in London or New York never truly comprehended the scale of the slaughter then underway across Occupied Europe.

This is where are again. Evidence for the worryingly widespread intellectual softness that dominated political thinking through the 1930s, which I would describe as a Centrist Dad problem, is everywhere. At an event last year with General Lord Dannatt where he gave what I considered to be a pretty straight forward talk on the security threats facing the UK, and what we should do about them, I overheard a comfortable middle class couple at the end complaining that he was being “too pessimistic”. They couldn’t see any cause for alarm. I was almost too shocked to reply. These are the sort of people who cannot quite understand why Hamas and Israel don’t just kiss and make up. It must therefore be Israel’s fault that there is no two-state solution in the Middle East. I read this sort of commentary every day in the broad sheets. It is particularly well expressed by the weekly output of two well-known podcast blatherers, archetypical Centrist Dads, one a retired politician – you know the two I mean – who consistently demonstrate that they have a fragile grasp on the animus that is generated in the hearts of those who despise us, no real understanding of the security steps we need to take to prevent it, nor of the kind of war required to eliminate such threats.

The starting point of these blatherers is what the journalist Jake Wallis Simon and the security commentator Andrew Fox describe as the “Wykehamist proposition”, which is that we should treat all people, hostile or otherwise, on the basis of our own benign ideological predilections. Accordingly, if we want to prevent someone attempting to kill us, regardless of the enemy’s motives, all we need to do is to sit round a table together, assume we all want the same positive outcomes from our conversation, and proceed amicably to resolve our differences. The sad reality is that this is not how the world works, nor is it how humans behave. If they have been to taught from childhood to despise you and everything about you, to the extent that they want to kill you – as Hamas and its ilk see Jews – no amount of so-called Wykehamism is going to persuade them to do otherwise. I suggest that the opposite approach is required. We need to treat threats to ourselves and our friends seriously, both in political and in military terms, and prepare accordingly. As General Lord Dannatt and I suggest in our book, stern, decisive military active to prevent Herr Hitler from remilitarising the Rhineland may well have prevented the entire Second World War from breaking out at all. To understand how to deal with war and threats of war, we need a political class that understands the scale of the threat we face and is prepared to undertake decisive action to nip hostility in the bud when it might occur. If we can resolve our differences amicably then of course we must always do so. But where an enemy does not want to play this game we must be determined to use force – and if necessary extreme violence – to protect our interests, and our people. This might involve dropping leaflets over the Ruhr but it might also entail dropping incendiaries on Berlin. In other words, to defend ourselves as a country, we must have the capability and the willingness to exercise the full-throated management of violence. We must also accept that it is the legitimate function of other democracies – like Israel – to do the same.