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. 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] Student Services Online Navigation link in category Student Services. Press escape key to return to main menu Yeah. I mean, you mentioned there the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Is that really possibly the most dangerous potential flashpoint right now?

After the crisis McNamara complained to Kennedy about Anderson’s “insubordination” and the CNO lost his job. Fifty years on this story underlines the abiding challenge of “command and control” in the nuclear age. Collaborate with King's Navigation link in category Research & Innovation. Press escape key to return to main menu

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Ukrainian soldier speaking in foreign language] Izyum was, is and always will be Ukraine, says this soldier. [Ukrainian soldier shouting in foreign language] This is territory which Russia fought hard to take — lost in the space of days. Corn, Tony (9 September 2006). "Clausewitz in Wonderland". RealClearPolitics . Retrieved 30 March 2014. In my last piece I asked whether Ukraine could win its war with Russia, to which I answered that it could, although it was not yet clear whether it would. In this piece I want to expand on one of the reasons I came to this conclusion. Command and control are particularly difficult when the contrasting perspectives of air, navy and ground commanders are exacerbated by national differences in Nato or UN operations. A classic example of “too many cooks” is Kosovo 1999: the Nato campaign to stop Serbian atrocities against Kosovar Albanians. Its head was General Wesley Clark, the US supreme commander in Europe, who was answerable both to the US president and the Nato secretary-general yet had no forces directly under his control. Clark got into ferocious arguments with General Mike Short, head of the US Air Force in Europe, about the focus for the bombing campaign.

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Freedman 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. Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience Navigation link in category Our faculties. Press escape key to return to main menu That was Lawrence Freedman speaking from Washington and ending this edition of The Rachman Review. Thanks for joining me and please listen again next week.

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? Visiting Scholars and Practitioners – Lawrence Freedman". Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford . Retrieved 7 September 2020.Freedman’s case studies range widely. Once the official historian of the Falklands war in 1982, he distils his two volumes on that conflict into a crisp study of the problems of “command in theatre”, when the army, air force and navy have different priorities and the government is acutely sensitive to the politics of public morale and international opinion. There are several chapters on generals who used their control of the armed forces to seize political power, such as Yahya Khan in Pakistan. Freedman is particularly interesting on Saddam Hussein, a revolutionary leader with no military experience, whose totalitarian rule enabled him to “coup-proof” his armed forces – but at the expense of battlefield effectiveness. Yet that same totalitarianism enabled him to survive a catastrophic defeat in Kuwait in 1991 that would have toppled most Western leaders, because he controlled the narrative by which the war was represented at home. “Saddam the political leader could rescue Saddam the military leader.”

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. Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I’m Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week’s edition is about the stunning change in the war in Ukraine. The rapid advances by Ukrainian forces in the east of the country have changed the momentum of the conflict. Suddenly, Russian defeat looks like a real possibility. My guest this week is Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London and author of a new book, Command: The Politics of Military Operations From Korea to Ukraine. So, is this the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine? 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 Life Sciences & Medicine Navigation link in category Our faculties. Press escape key to return to main menu Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King's College London. He was Professor of War Studies from 1982 to 2014 and Vice-Principal from 2003 to 2013.He was educated at Whitley Bay Grammar School and the Universities of Manchester, York and Oxford. Before joining King's he held research appointments at Nuffield College Oxford, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 1996, he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. In 2003, he was awarded the KCMG (Knight Commander of St Michael and St George). In June 2009 he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.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. 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.” 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] 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.