Professor Sir Paul Newton

We spoke to Professor Sir Paul Newton, Director of the Strategy and Security Institute, about how the Institute came into being.

Running away to join the army

"There’s a family tradition of running away from home to join the army. One day in 1937, rather than ride his butcher’s bike over the hill to Honiton, my father rode to Exeter and joined up as a private soldier. So I grew up in the army, around officers and soldiers, and I enjoyed what I saw then as the ‘excitement’ of military life.

"At 18 instead of university I went into the Southampton recruiting office, and at 19 I was at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where I spent most of my time cold, tired and confused, discovering that I lacked a natural sense of direction the hard way. But I was also introduced to the intellectual side of the army, and started thinking about the cerebral side of soldiering, for example where the soldier fits in society.

"In 37 years of uninterrupted military service I’ve had amazing opportunities. It’s been incredibly varied and there’s also been a lot of full-time education, including a year at Cambridge studying for an MPhil. So my move towards academia has happened gradually over quite a long time. When I was heading the Intelligence Department at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters in 2005 I realised how little I knew about the politics, society, and culture of Iraq itself despite serving there. Someone said I should meet a guy at Exeter called Gareth Stansfield. We got on, and from Steve Smith and others, I was given some excellent – often challenging – advice. Gareth and I worked together before I went back to Iraq in 2007, and again last year through the Libya crisis, and we’ve worked together via Chatham House too."

Conceiving the Strategy and Security Institute

"Somewhere along the line, someone suggested that we should try and make this informal arrangement into something more official at the University of Exeter. The proposal gradually took shape last year to form the Strategy and Security Institute, to look at ‘applied strategy’; how ‘strategy’, which includes making choices based upon poor information and under intense pressure, is constructed, how it’s conceived, and how it’s executed.

"In forming SSI we’re deliberately building something interdisciplinary. If we can’t teach and research in an interdisciplinary way, we won’t be able to address the needs of strategists. As we saw in the early days in Iraq, if strategy is no more than a set of disparate activities then it fails; diplomats, economists and military people all do their own thing. The aim of strategy is to unite levers of national power and influence in a common framework for purposeful action."

Research as public service

"In terms of research, the Strategy and Security Institute is a broad church. We’re attracting people interested in doing varied and fascinating research connected to problems of contemporary security. I’m particularly interested in doing work that’s going to be relevant to the policy community, those people now facing the kind of problems that I faced when I was an officer, working with diplomats or facing insurgents. I want to help those who come after me do better than I did in these incredibly complex situations. They won't all be like Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan, but those conflicts have important things to teach us.  

"SSI is already active: this is a bit like sprinting whilst putting on your socks. For example, I spoke last week at a closed conference run by the Chief of General Staff which was attended by every senior officer of the army, providing some context against which they should be viewing the major defence reform they’re undertaking, Army 2020, which will see the British Army reduced by 20%. Last month I was part of an MOD sponsored group, which visited India to discuss our experience of defence transformation. And Gareth and I are both involved in the Global Strategic Trends programme that will inform UK’s choices as it goes into the next Security and Defence Review.

"It’s often said that being in public service is a vocation, not a job. I don’t feel that I’ve ended my connection with public service by coming to the University of Exeter. There’s definitely a public service dimension to what I’m doing here and what I aim to help the University accomplish."