Yes, sorry about going AWOL yesterday, "Events, dear boy, events". Also, to be honest, for once I really didn't have much to say - so treasure the pause, it doesn't happen very often! This morning I am bringing you two 'pre-book reviews'. I use that phrase because they are books which I have started and which have already impressed me - or perhaps 'depressed me' is a better description! The first is Losing Small Wars by Frank Ledwidge and its sub-title British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan says it all. I have only just finished Chaper One and already I am deeply depressed. Chapter Two begins with two quotes which give you the flavour:
I don't know how you could see the British withdrawal from Basra in 2007 in other light than as a defeat.
Col. Peter Mansoor, BBC, Secret Iraq, Oct 2010
Roderick Lynne: To what extent was this happening under the aegis of an overall strategic plan?
General Salmon: We were working to a set of objectives. There was no overall strategic plan.
Evidence of Maj. Gen. Andy Salmon to the Iraq War Enquiry, 2010
And we haven't even started on Afghanistan! This first book, I suspect, is going to concern itself mainly with what is called the 'operational'. This is the area of military activity which lies between tactics, the way in which individual troops set about their tasks on the battlefield, and strategy which concerns itself (or should!) with where and why one's armed forces are committed in the first place. Thus, the operational covers the decisions of the force commander and his staff as to how and where and why his troops should operate 'in country'. From other sources it has been clear for some time that the British army failed miserably in the 'operational' in both Iraq and Afghanistan and I hope these books will provide some reasons for it.
The second book is of a very different order and can only be classified as military philosophy in the style of Karl von Clausewitz. War From the Ground Up: Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics written by Emile Simpson, a former Gurkha officer with several tours in Afghanistan to help convince you that he knows where-of he writes. I must also add that it resembles Clausewitz's famous book, On War, in that its prose is not of the easiest but even so, despite having only reached page 27, I suspect it is worth persevering with not least judged by the calibre of the 'rave reviews' it has engendered including this from Sir Michael Howard, no less:
Emile Simpson's War from the Ground Up is a work of such importance that it should be compulsory reading at every level in the military; from the most recently enlisted cadet to the Chief of the Defence Staff ...
I fear these two books between them are going to confirm my worst suspicions concerning the intellectual feebleness of our senior commanders and when I consider the dead and the maimed my blood boils.
When I have finished them I will comment again.
