H.R. McMaster shares his extensive experience of strategy-making and strategic leadership as a military officer, academic and former United States’ national security advisor.

‘The Iconoclast General’, H.R. McMaster has a distinguished record serving his country. Commissioned from West Point into the armoured cavalry, he retired as a Lieutenant General after thirty-four years’ service, including operational service in Iraq and Afghanistan. His success in fighting counter-insurgency campaigns saw him involved in the development of the United States’ Army and Marine Corps’ counter-insurgency field manual (FM3-24). One of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in April 2014, he was described by Lieutenant General (retired) David Barno as ‘the 21st century Army's pre-eminent warrior-thinker’.

Appointed by President Trump, H.R. McMaster served as the 25th National Security Advisor between February 2017 to March 2018. His account of his time in the White House is described with typical balance and candour in At War With Ourselves. Consultation, bringing top leaders together and getting them to thrash out what the problem is and what one should do about it, and then to issue directives to a (sometimes) reluctant bureaucracy, that was his recipe. In this episode, he describes how the National Security Strategy of 2017 was negotiated during his time in office, the methodology, some of its main tenets, and how it was translated into policy making. And how an historical perspective offers lessons and consolation today.

A historian by training, he has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on the flaws and inadequacies of U.S. strategy in the Vietnam War, and now lectures at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He hosts the podcast series Battlegrounds: Vital Perspectives on Today’s Challenges and is a regular on GoodFellows, both of which are produced by the Hoover Institution. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

The world’s first independent air force owes its survival and shape to its ‘father’, Hugh Trenchard. We explore how with the RAF Museum’s Dr Harry Raffal.

Described as ‘the architect and patron saint of modern air power’, Marshal of the RAF Viscount Hugh Trenchard (1873–1956) was the first Chief of the Air Staff (January–April 1918 and 1919–1930).

An army officer badly wounded in the Boer War, he was among the first British military pilots and the frontline commander of the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War.

The RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, and Trenchard set firm foundations for its survival and development, often against bitter hostility from the other Services. His administrative skills, realism, tenacity and willingness to be unpopular created an organisation that saved the nation during the Battle of Britain.

His friend TE Lawrence (Season 3, Episode 7) argued that ‘The RAF is the finest individual effort in history. No other man has been given a blank sheet and told to make a Service from the ground up. It is your single work…’

Following retirement from the RAF, Trenchard was appointed as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, where he set about a substantial reform agenda with the same single-mindedness.

Dr Harry Raffal is Head of Collections and Research at the RAF Museum. His doctorate, from the University of Hull, explores RAF and Luftwaffe operations during the evacuation of Dunkirk. He is a Committee member of the RAF Historical Society and the British Commission for Military History, and Vice-Chair of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aeronautical Heritage Group.

The 3rd Marquess of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732), soldier, diplomat and scholar, pioneered humanist ways to prevent or suppress insurgencies in his Military Reflections.

In his time, Marcenado was the most widely read Spanish author on war. He drew on his own rich experiences of the Spanish War of Succession to complement his erudition based on existing publications from antiquity to the Age of Enlightenment.

In a work comprising 11 volumes, he examined subjects ranging from the ethical question of whether it is right to go to war, to the leadership qualities required in a general, to the merits and dangers of battle or the recruitment of soldiers. Intended as guidance for practitioners, his work set standards in both erudition and the human approach to war. This applies particularly to his thoughts on how to prevent, contain or pacify insurgencies. Marcenado was also a diplomat charged with negotiating on behalf of his kingdom to end the Anglo-Spanish War of 1727. His writing on war thus transcends the merely military, and the greater political dimension behind it can already be discerned.

Dr Pelayo Fernández García of the University of Oviedo – our guest for this episode – is the greatest living expert on this Spanish thinker and practitioner, whose ideas are strikingly modern even for our times.