After watching the difficulty of sustaining large-scale ammunition, uh, production in the Ukraine war, what does the West's, the West's current defense industrial capacity tell you about how prepared modern democracies are for a prolonged war?

Well, they're not very prepared, of course.

Um, I mean, the United States is, uh, because it's the world, by far the, the world's largest military spender.

Um, but the other democracies are not particularly prepared.

I mean, they're, they're I think gambling on the fact that you can now, uh, wage war with a narrow technical front, whether it's drones or it's, um, uh, uh, cyber warfare, um, high-quality specialized aircraft and so on.

You don't need the big conscript armies anymore.

You don't need the tanks and, and guns you had in the 20th century.

Does the concentration of power in authoritarian systems create the same problem today, where leaders might receive information that just confirms what they already believe? And how much does that lead to potentially escalating issues or creating new conflicts or prolonging conflicts if they're only getting info they want?

Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Overy.

Well, thank you very much for those kind words of introduction.

And I want to start off by reminding us of the two strategic aims that bombing was supposed to have when it was undertaken in 1940.

The first is that it would unhinge the enemy's war effort.

The second thing is that it might produce a political dividend by profoundly demoralising the enemy population, compelling them to put pressure on the Hitler government and possibly producing surrender.

Now there are three things I think to observe first about these ambitions.

The first is that in 1940 or 39, when the RAF thought about doing this, there was no evidence that a sustained bombing campaign would do either of those things.

But what would that have done to address Anthony Beaver's point about facilitating the Soviet advance? In what sense?

We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we bombed that town, meaning Tokyo, had to be done.

Well, that was his view.

I mean, I write in the book about the various motives behind the shift to incendiary bombing of incendiary Japanese cities with high civilian casualties.

One was technical.

LeMay found great difficulty in bombing precise targets, which had previously been American doctrine, from height because of the extreme winds experienced over Japan.

And so in order to be able to make an impact, he decided to shift to low-level bombing by night instead of high-level by day, using only incendiaries to see what effect that would have.

And the second motive, you know, he was being driven to do this by Arnold, by Neustadt in Washington.

And what kind of plane did the British use?