DIPLOMAT magazine’s website now has my recent article on this subject. It starts with a story:

Back in 1997 Prime Minister Tony Blair visited Bosnia. I accompanied him on the plane from Banja Luka to Sarajevo. During the journey the Prime Minister asked what had happened to his idea that former Conservative politician Michael Portillo be put forward as a strong British candidate for Bosnia High Representative.

The senior Foreign Office official gave one of those classic Yes Minister little coughs. ‘The Foreign Secretary didn’t think that that was such a good idea,’ he opaquely replied. In other words Robin Cook, who did not much like Portillo, had kicked Tony Blair’s proposal into the long bureaucratic grass, never to be seen again.

This exchange brought home to me a profound insight about power. Not only had a more than plausible initiative from the Prime Minister himself been deliberately ignored by some of his closest colleagues. The Prime Minister had not even realised that this had happened! It doesn’t matter how powerful you are, you still don’t know what happens to your orders once the person who received them leaves the room…

It goes from there from swords and spears to drones and cyber warfare, where finally the commander’s problems of Time and Space move into different dimensions.