Like the Hydra of Greek myth, the British state has countless heads whose purposes and powers are unified at root. Some wield power directly; others act on behalf of the ruling class in less visible ways.

The bourgeois state reaches into all aspects of life, constantly developing its forms and methods. It responds ruthlessly to serious challenge, however small. In a period like this one, where a huge transfer of wealth away from the working class to an ever-smaller section of the oligarchy is well underway and a major war is in preparation, all bodies of the extensive state have to work harder to stifle opposition.

The more visible ‘heads’ of the British state – the armed forces, the police force, the monarchy, Parliament etc. – are not the subject of this series of articles, which will instead look at some of the smaller bodies performing essential functions for the state, often going unnoticed.

The Department of War Studies at King’s is ostensibly a university department but the function it performs for the British state goes well beyond the academic study of military science and strategy.

King’s College London (KCL) has a long association with the British military, going back to its foundation in 1829 by a group of reactionary politicians and churchmen wanting to establish a counterweight to the secular University College London. This group included the Duke of Wellington, victor at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and Prime Minister at the time.

Twenty years later, in 1848 – the year of revolutions across Europe and of the publication of the Communist Manifesto – the Department of Military Science was founded at King’s to provide an education for trainee army officers. Inaugurated at a moment of high anxiety for the ruling classes of Europe, the department’s later fortunes ebbed and flowed with the outbreaks and resolutions of wars. It was abolished after World War 1, but in 1927 the British War Office funded a new Military Studies Department at KCL with instructions to write the official history of the 1914-18 war. Telling ‘the national story’ has been part of its brief since then.

Today’s ‘trainee officers’ at the Department of War Studies (DWS) are more numerous and are no longer confined to the army; they take up their posts in a much wider array of organisations in a more extensive state apparatus. The purpose of training them remains, however, the same: to advance the interests of British imperialism.

The Department of War Studies sits within the School of Security Studies at KCL, part of what they describe as the largest faculty in the world devoted to the study of war. The teaching faculty is mostly drawn from British intelligence, the diplomatic service and the military; at least until 2022 that included former chief of GCHQ David Omand, former foreign secretary Malcolm Rifkind, former head of MI6 John Sawers and the former chair of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee Peter Ricketts. The list amply demonstrates the level of overlap between DWS and the core bodies of the British state. The department prides itself, indeed sells itself internationally, on the access it can provide to key individuals with recent hands-on experience of deciding on and directing affairs of state.

The Department of War Studies is structured along conventional academic lines, offering four undergraduate degree courses to approximately 1000 students. The BA in War Studies offers a long list of modules in its third year, focusing on areas of expertise currently required in posts that graduates will be applying for – cybersecurity, insurgency, globalism, terrorism, genocide etc. A list of titles of PhD’s awarded in the last 12 months likewise provides some insight into the research areas DWS is privileging: Revisiting NATO’s History Through Civil-Military Relations; Understanding Maritime Power in Putin’s Russia; An exploration of leadership and management of the UK's secret intelligence community; and others.

Students graduating from the department are rewarded with employment in think tanks, diplomatic missions and departments of defence. They also find jobs in risk analysis and Open Source Intelligence work in banking, international business and cyber security. The Department of War Studies is effectively a nursery to key administrators of the militarised surveillance state and the future architects of its foreign policy, inside and outside government.

The Department’s faculty members participate as experts in government defence reviews and enquiries, and they write official war histories. These documents and testimonies feed future research and, over time, disseminate information into the public realm.

When required DWS can act more rapidly in helping to form opinion. An example of how narrative control works in practice dates from February 24 2022the when Russia began its military operation in Ukraine. Along with other faculty bodies, the Department immediately launched a website page called Ukraine Explained and within 24 hours of what it designated the ‘full-scale invasion’ the site had published no fewer than 11 academic essays plus a Foreword by Lawrence Freedman, its erstwhile Director. The Department was clearly well-prepared and ready to define the way in which this event should be understood. A further dozen essays followed within a week.

In the absence of proper investigative reporting, these essays provided the instantaneous analysis and information the compliant media needed for the avalanche of news items that then followed. According to Wikipedia, in the first year of the war the Department’s output on this web page contributed to over 26,000 articles and news broadcasts for organisations like the BBC, Channel 4, Associated Press, Newsweek, and the Financial Times, along with many others. Shaping the news on this scale was central to the UK’s role in the US/NATO campaign in Ukraine and in generating widespread public support for it.

There is a similar profile to the Department’s work on Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. Straight after October 7th 2023, there was an immediate agenda-shaping series of articles, interviews and appearances by DWS staff in a range of media outlets – led, again, by Lawrence Freedman, who was straight out of the traps, publishing an influential article in the New Statesman on October 8th.

A closer look at Lawrence Freedman, referred to by colleagues as ‘dean of British strategic studies’, shows how senior faculty members at DWS work to shape British foreign policy. Freedman was the official historian of the Falklands War and co-founder of defence think tank the International Institute of Strategic Studies, whose major funders are Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Raytheon, Boeing, and Rolls-Royce. Freedman was Professor of War Studies at DWS from 1982-2014 and remains part of the Department as Emeritus Professor. Under his management the Department expanded significantly. According to Professor Joseph Maiolo, the period of greatest expansion took place after in 2001 after 9/11, with the launching of the ‘War on Terror’, at which point, he writes, ‘defence studies changed in scale and scope.’

Of particular note is Freedman’s role in influencing and forming government foreign policy. For example, he helped prepare Tony Blair’s 1999 Chicago speech by offering advice and opinion in a letter in which he defended the then ongoing NATO bombing of Belgrade and advocated greater military intervention elsewhere. He mentions Saddam Hussein as a problem to be addressed. Some years later, after Iraq had been destroyed, he was appointed as one of four members of the seven-year long Chilcot inquiry into the UK’s role in the 2003 Iraq War, to ensure that whatever price had to be paid for the lies and the manipulation, it would not be too high and would not touch Blair. Freedman’s advice to Blair in 1999 – that intervention is both necessary and must be properly managed – can be read in full though it has been given more succinct and contemporary expression by the US Secretary for War, Pete Hegseth: ‘Maximum lethality; not tepid legality.’

While Department of War Studies courses and theses are tailored to the current needs of the governments of the NATO alliance and their arms industries, its many (often independently funded) research centres go further in that they have the explicit aim shaping those needs and intervening on decision-making. The King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence is one such.

The DWS has been central to the development of UK intelligence analysis both as a field of activity and as a profession extending well beyond the core intelligence agencies. Two of its key figures, Michael Goodman and David Omand, explained the need to create a new academic discipline in a 2008 paper for Studies in Intelligence. In making their case for the new course at Department, they refer to the American experience: ‘The CIA had recognized as early as 1960 how beneficial it would be to use universities as a means of intelligence training.’

Goodman is the current director of the Centre for the Study of Intelligence. Examples of its work alongside the Department of War Studies include its co-hosting of the month-long annual International Security & Intelligence Programme at Cambridge University where speakers have included former heads of MI5, MI6, GCHQ, the CIA and the French Security Services; and a one-day conference, Strategic Intelligence for Senior Executives designed to teach company executives ‘how to apply strategic intelligence at board level’ and offering ‘a peer network of global leaders’. Chair of the conference, which advertised itself as providing ‘a unique link between the worlds of business, government and academia’, was Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6.

The DWS’s flagship conference is the annual London Defence Conference (LDC), launched in 2022 and much favoured by prime ministers. It was at the 2023 conference and following the G7 summit in Hiroshima that Rishi Sunak first described China as posing an ‘epoch-defining challenge to us.’ The LDC 2025 was chosen by Keir Starmer to make a speech on May 8th, VE Day, a speech short on substance, long on patriotic symbolism – ranging from Churchill & bunting to lion hearts and the beaches of Normandy. He concluded by sharing ‘the pride of stepping into our national story’.

The connections between the British state, its universities, and the corporate frontrunners in the arms/war industries are made clear in the list of LDC 2025’s main sponsors – Palantir, Anduril, Exiger and Blackstone, specialists in supply chain logistics, asset management, data mining, counter-terrorism, intelligence and government surveillance, defence and security technology.

The opening speech at LDC 2025was given by retired Royal Navy Commodore, Neil Brown. He began by describing the UK military as ‘dangerously hollowed out’ and went on to outline pressing questions the conference was designed to address, introducing one of them, ‘How can the public debate on defence be won?’, as follows: ‘On the populist left and right an anti-defence argument is developing. The likely slogan is “welfare not warfare”. If the danger is defence fatigue, and voters thinking defence has already been ticked off the list, how can we educate leaders, officials, and voters of the risk and explain the responses required to deter our adversaries?’

Brown perhaps had in mind the Welfare Not Warfare demonstration, which had taken place two months earlier, and was highlighting its unifying potential. The ‘anti-defence argument’ he identified is indeed developing as he feared it would; in September 2025 the TUC reversed its position on the massive increases in defence spending the government is planning, switching from approval in last year’s motion to outright condemnation and launching a second slogan: wages not weapons.

Along with the other departments in the School of Security Studies, the Department of War Studies at King’s exerts influence in the British state. In the words of its own website:

“We are tackling some of the most critical security challenges of our time, from peacekeeping and counterterrorism to the impacts of climate change and emerging technologies. Through partnerships with governments, NGOs and industry, we turn research into meaningful, real-world solutions.”

One recent real-world solution was crafted by a DWS research centre, the Freeman Air & Space Institute(FASI) founded in 2020 and funded by the RAF via the Defence, Science & Technology Laboratory, ‘an executive agency set up by the Ministry of Defence’ and part of the National Armaments Director Group that oversees the implementation of the government’s Strategic Defence Review.

Like DWS, the Freeman Institute is an improver and facilitator of the war machinery of government essential to weapons production and war profiteering. It expedites matters. This can be seen in one short profile of its work, in this case a report written for the RAF two years ago into ‘risk-aversion’ in the air force (7). In a nutshell, this is a recommendation for a change of operating culture from one that minimises risk by maximising safety to one that embraces high risk – including operating outside the rules of engagement – as the price for combat effectiveness. It is one of the small, significant (and hidden from the public) moves in the readying of the UK military for war, defining this readying as “the shift in risk-appetite that takes place between peacetime and war”, as though the shift happens all by itself.

The FASI report is prefaced by a long quotation from Roosevelt rebuking those who aren’t willing to get their hands dirty in an hour of need; the quotation ends like this, “Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world.” Theodore Roosevelt Citizenship in a Republic, Paris, 23 April 1910