According to Freedman, the Royal Navy under the command of Rear Admiral John “Sandy” Woodward was very enthusiastic about the mission – using aircraft carriers recently targeted for destruction in swingeing defence cuts. The army and Royal Air Force were less enthusiastic, with Air Chief Marshal Sir Michael Beetham and Chief of Staff General Sir Edwin Bramall concerned at where the Royal Navy was bringing them – on such an extended projection of force – and “to where it all might lead”. Moral vs operational victory And on the flip side, the Ukrainian command looks pretty triumphant right now. I remember at the beginning of the war a lot of people in the west saying, “Well, you know Zelenskyy, he came up through reality television, the kind of worst possible person you could have in charge in a war”. And yet he’s been a pretty inspirational and effective leader. Instead, Putin is still acting as though he expects more from this war than he has already got. Why I think there are some signs of desperation on the Russian side is that some are beginning to recognise that an energy crunch is not going to lead to a betrayal of Ukraine. In the long term, that signals the risk of deep damage to Russia’s economy.”

Command by Lawrence Freedman | Waterstones

Yeah. I mean, you mentioned there the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Is that really possibly the most dangerous potential flashpoint right now? DeGroot, Gerard (13 December 2013). " 'Strategy: A History' by Lawrence Freedman". The Washington Post . Retrieved 24 November 2014. 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? Freedman, who is of Jewish heritage, was educated at Whitley Bay Grammar School, the University of Manchester (BA), University of York (BPhil), and University of Oxford, where he was a student of Nuffield College ( Fellow 1974–75) and the Faculty of Social Studies. [4] [3] His DPhil thesis, submitted in 1975, was The definition of the Soviet threat in strategic arms decisions of the United States: 1961–1974. [5] He also then held a part-time lectureship at Balliol College. [6] Career [ edit ]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. Freedman was the official historian of the Falklands campaign, and author of The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, published in two volumes (London: Routledge, 2006). [10] Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a bit less of that now. I mean, clearly, the American weaponry has been a game changer. I think it’s legitimate to complain that it would have been rather good to have had this earlier because there wouldn’t have been so many Ukrainian losses. I mean, they suffered badly. I mean, the infrastructure of the country is battered. They’ve lost tens of thousands of military and civilian lives. It’s been pretty painful, but they have been forged as a nation in a way. It’s always been a nation. But this is a source of remarkable unity in Ukraine, and they’re pretty pleased with themselves. They’ve shown enormous resilience and now some serious military acumen. They’re not certainly not gonna stop now. They’re not gonna listen to anybody telling them that they should try and cut their losses and do some deal. The danger, I think, for them is that they get overextended, that they just push a little bit too far and leave some forward units vulnerable. And again, if you were thinking about an army that showed more aptitude than the Russian army had, you would sort of try to imagine how they would be trying to lure forward Ukrainians in and ambushing them, and so on. But I’m not sure they can cope with that. But that’s the danger for the Ukrainians, is hubris sets in with them like it started with the Russians and they suddenly find themselves with a more difficult military situation than they anticipated. 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. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial.

In war, the key tussles are often between generals and leaders

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? Of course, the other thing is the possibility of some kind of radical escalation by the Russians. And those people I’ve spoken to who are warier about writing Russia off think that Putin can’t accept defeat and that therefore he’ll do something like either mobilise or use tactical nuclear weapons or start heavily bombing civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, that things could get really quite ugly. In many cases, the commander is also a politician, even a head of state. Here, commanders have to reconcile their political and military functions; often, they fail to do so satisfactorily. Freedman finds this most common in dictatorships. Among the examples he cites are those of General Yahya Khan, who took power in Pakistan in 1969 in the vain hope of preventing East Pakistan from seceding, and Saddam Hussein, who managed to hold on to power through ruthless repression but was a hopeless supreme commander with a poor understanding of his enemies, fantasies about Iraqi military might and a command style that included executing subordinate commanders who in his view had failed (three hundred alone in 1982 during the messy Iran–Iraq War). They might well have learned from Hitler that being head of state and supreme commander is a recipe for disaster and gives the professional soldier, who might judge things more rationally or settle for less, little room for manoeuvre. The decision by Stalin in late 1942 to stop trying to be the supreme strategist and give Zhukov and the Soviet General Staff the job of fighting the war surely ranks as one of the few examples where a dictator understood his limitations. 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.”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. 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. Even now, six months into the war, Freedman struggles to understand the logic of the Kremlin, not least its tactic of creating a wintertime energy crisis in Europe to undermine support for Kyiv. There are no incentives to tell the truth on the ground to the higher command. They are all part of the inner circle Lawrence Freedman

Lawrence Freedman: Command | The Spectator Lawrence Freedman: Command | The Spectator

Letter Freedman wrote to John Chilcot explaining his role in the Chicago speech" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 April 2016. Freedman, Lawrence (2013). Strategy: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932515-3. Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, has written a new study about command in military conflicts. Photograph: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images Formatting and Grammar. I do not know if I simply had a rotten apple copy of this book but what I do know is that the grammar and formatting of sentences was, in some instances, atrocious. Whole sentences were joined together without spaces and I had to do a double take of countless sentences and paragraphs because I simply could not understand the way in which they were written. Whilst it did not detract from the content of the book, it certainly made the reading experience far less enjoyable.

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Under his supervision, generations of students, as well as officers in Her Majesty's Forces learnt about the changing nature of war, and Britain's military history.