David Betz | |
|---|---|
| Occupations | Academic, professor |
| Years active | 2002-present |
David J. Betz is a Canadian academic and researcher in the field of war studies. [1] He is professor of war in the modern world at the Department of War Studies, King's College London, having joined the department in 2002.
During his tenure at King’s College London, Betz has published extensively on warfare, counterinsurgency, and cybersecurity. In 2011, Betz argued that concerns about cyberwarfare had close relation to the alarmism found in military circles over aviation a century earlier in Cyberwar Is Not Coming. [2] In Carnage and Connectivity (2015), Betz analysed the impact of global connectivity on military power. In 2017, he co-authored Putting the Strategy Back into Strategic Communications, advocating for a more robust strategic foundation in communications theory. [3] [4] Betz also addressed the application of ethics and morals in modern battlefield contexts in War, ‘Moral Forces’, and the ‘Virus of Strategism’ (2014). [5]
Betz has since found a wider public audience with the publication of Civil War Comes to the West in Military Magazine in 2022, which relied on comparative analyses, drew on the work of other experts in his field, and applied these insights to Europe and North America in an age of growing racial and political polarisation. He was particularly inspired by the work of How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Rohr Professor of International Relations Barbara F. Walter. This has since been followed by another entry to the two-part series. [6] [7] [8] Betz has featured on several widely viewed British podcasts, including Triggernometry and Maiden Mother Matriarch, discussing the risk of civil war in the UK based on Civil War Comes to the West. [9] [10]
Betz' 2024 book The Guarded Age: Fortification in the 21st Century [11] has been reviewed for the US Naval Institute, with reviewer Lieutenant Colonel Dillon Fishman describing it as "a trenchant social commentary that speaks to an audience broader than specialists". [12]
Betz's work has been criticised by some as being in the "porous space between the extreme right and its more mainstream variants", helping to give "air of respectability" to ideas like race war, "that would until recently have been considered beyond the pale". [13] While, in the New Statesman, Phil Tinline compared Betz's predictions to "the fear Enoch Powell stoked in April 1968 in his “rivers of blood” speech." [14] However, American conservative commentator Rod Dreher commended his work, writing in European Conservative: "What makes his warnings especially chilling is that he delivers them calmly, driven by data and logical analysis. He is the furthest thing from a wild‑eyed apocalypticist shouting on a street corner." [15]
Betz's message has gained far more attention this year, thanks to podcast interviews like this one… What makes his warnings especially chilling is that he delivers them calmly, driven by data and logical analysis. He is the furthest thing from a wild‑eyed apocalypticist shouting on a street corner.