Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine

Product Information

Using examples from a wide variety of conflicts, Lawrence Freedman shows that successful military command depends on the ability not only to use armed forces effectively but also to understand the political context in which they are operating. Freedman held positions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) before he was appointed, in 1982, Professor of War Studies at King's College London. He was head of the department until 1997. In 2000, he was the first head of the college's School of Social Science and Public Policy. From 2003 to December 2013, he was a Vice Principal at King's College London. He retired from King's in December 2014. He was appointed a Fellow of the college in 1992. He was appointed a Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford in the Blavatnik School of Government in 2015. [7] Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’

Book Review: “Command” by Lawrence D. Freedman

Christopher Clark, "'This Is a Reality, Not a Threat'" (review of Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History, Public Affairs, 2018, 376 pp.; and Robert H. Latiff, Future War: Preparing for the New Global Battlefield, Knopf, 2018, 192 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 18 (22 November 2018), pp.53–54. Inevitably, this interaction is markedly different in western democracies than it is in totalitarian states. In the latter, the military command and the political power are the same thing – such as ­Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Saddam Hussein in the two Gulf wars, or (and this book is bang up to date) Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Freedman characterises such leaders as men (and they are inevitably all men) surrounded by sycophantic generals who have learnt that the best way to survive is to agree with everything the leader wishes to do.One of the things they’ve always emphasised is, you know, war is unpredictable. So obviously, anything we say about what’s likely to happen now has to have all sorts of caveats around it. But how do you expect the war to develop over the next couple of months? Judith Freedman". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012 . Retrieved 19 December 2012. I think the only ‘theory of victory’ the Kremlin has at the present is that the west turns on Ukraine because of the energy crisis. But the surprise there is that Moscow has not asked for a ceasefire now. That would put Zelenskiy on the spot because he couldn’t agree to one.

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to

It is clear from Freedman’s account of the command element of the Falkland campaign that the British had two immediate priorities. The first was what they termed a “moral victory” over the Argentinian junta – in other words, to simply frighten them, to terrorise and intimidate them. The second was to achieve an “operational victory” – to go ashore and defeat a demoralised enemy. Which I guess brings us to the topic of the book you’ve just brought out, which is command and the importance of military command. How much do you think what’s happened in Russia, both at the sort of top political level and on the battlefield, is a failure of command? At the heart of the problem, Freedman believes, is the rigidly hierarchical nature of the Kremlin’s decision-making and how those at the very top are immune to responsibility for mistakes. Even then it took until May to focus on what they could do – artillery barrages on a narrow front, a tactic for which Ukraine had no easy response, except to take heavy casualties until western weapons systems began arriving.”You say that they’ve got very limited options. One of the things that’s very striking is they may be, to put it crudely, running out of men — or they seem to be. They’re just unwilling to mobilise the population.

Command by Lawrence Freedman | Goodreads Command by Lawrence Freedman | Goodreads

Lawrence Freedman is the dominant academic authority in Britain and the English-speaking world on the way modern wars have been fought. Rational, liberal-minded, clear-sighted, he has drawn on a lifetime of experience for his new book. ... Command is the history of our time, told through war. It's a wonderful, idiosyncratic feat of storytelling as well as an essential account of how the modern world's wars have been fought, written by someone whose grasp of complex detail is as strong and effective as the clarity of his style. I shall read it again and again. John Simpson, The GuardianFreedman predicts (not unlike Sabina Higgins) that eventually, the war in Ukraine will falter and stall to a deadly stalemate and ultimately to a negotiation. Unless Putin presses the nuclear button. Yeah, I think that’s an important distinction. I mean, the view was that a lot of your best units get used up and suffer in the early stages of the war. And certainly the Ukrainians lost quite a lot in the fighting in Luhansk and Donetsk in the summer. But I mean, they did mobilise, unlike the Russians, they are training people up. The UK’s got a big training centre now which I think there’s some evidence that may have made a difference. And they’re pretty determined people. So I think they have upped their game. They’re strategically quite canny and they’ve got the advantages of fighting on terrain they know and the real motivation. I mean, some of the forces facing them in Kharkiv were pretty cobbled together. It’s not as if they’re taking on the Russia of February. But that just indicates that they’ve played quite a clever strategic game themselves, first to stay in the war and then to turn the tables on the Russians.

Command by Lawrence Freedman review – inside the war room

Lawrence Freedman is one of our most distinguished military historians. In his thoughtful new book Command, drawing on decades of study, he looks at the marriage of authorities that takes place in the running of wars since 1945: where political power meets military expertise, and who ends up having the final say. If you, you know, look at Chechnya, say, which is one of the chapters in my book, similar things were happening there. I think people thought that the Russians must have sorted out some of their problems because since Chechnya, their military operations have been at least successful. I mean, Georgia in 2008 showed quite a lot of problems. But their operation in Crimea, which didn’t involve a lot of fighting with the way they beat up the Ukrainians in 2014, suggested that they were in pretty good state, and Syria, of course. So the assumption was that they’d made great strides in modernisation, but it turns out they haven’t. And, you know, the postmortems in Moscow, I think, will show a lot of corruption, the problems of very hierarchical organisations. All of those things will now be gone over and we’ll get a better understanding of why they weren’t the great force that they thought they were. They clearly thought they were, and they turned out not to be. Also, they just don’t treat their troops well. And, you know, there’s a sort of stoicism on the Russian side, which is still evident. They haven’t all collapsed in a heap in the fighting. But there’s not a lot of loyalty shown by officers to men and men to officers. And that, again, affects your ability to fight. So, no, I wasn’t wholly surprised. And I think it was pretty evident, even on day one, that there were big inefficiencies in the way that the Russians were using their armed forces. The book needs a bibliography, trying to find a reference in the notes leads the reader on a search through numerous notes when you just have a last name and an op.cit. to guide you. The Argentinian invasion of the Falklands in 1982 was an existential threat not to Britain itself, but rather to a certain idea of Britain. Mrs Thatcher asked the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Henry Leach, whether it was feasible to recapture the islands, and he replied that “we could, and in my judgment (although it is not my business to say so), we should”. The prime ­minister asked him what he meant, and he told her “because if we do not… in another two months we shall be living in a different country whose word counts for little”. Leach knew it was not his place to set a political objective, but he used his military knowledge to inform a politician of a likely political consequence of not using the armed forces. Despite these complaints, I would recommend reading because there is no doubt that Freedman knew what he was talking about and gave valuable insight into various conflicts and their conduct. I’m giving this a 4/5 because a 3/5 is unfair and a 3.75/5 does not exist here.The greatest strength of this book is its breadth. The conflicts chosen for study are worthy, including both those familiar to western audiences and ones which are criminally underrepresented. It was interesting to learn more about some of these such as the Arab/Israeli war of 1973 and the India/Pakistan conflict. The writing style is academic yet accessible, much like Freedman’s other work meaning it’s both a good starting point and one for a military history/strategy enjoyer. Lawrence Freedman, former professor of war studies at King’s College London, is first and foremost an academic. His latest work, Command, is a philosophical reflection on the nature of command in warfare from the aftermath of the second World War to the present day. Current research & consultancy projects: Lawrence Freedman". King's College London . Retrieved 25 November 2009. Corn, Tony (9 September 2006). "Clausewitz in Wonderland". RealClearPolitics . Retrieved 30 March 2014.