Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine

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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. 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. 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 ] Freedman, Lawrence (4 October 2018). Nuclear Deterrence. illustrated by Duncan Smith. London: Ladybird Books. ISBN 978-0-7181-8889-4.

Command: the politics of military operations from Korea to Command: the politics of military operations from Korea to

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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One issue that has intrigued Freedman, as well as other analysts, is why Putin – whose use of force had been limited in scope before Ukraine – embarked on such a dangerous and badly prepared-for gamble in Ukraine. Well, because it means that Russia is likely to lose a war. And I’ve felt right from day one that Russia wouldn’t win this war because I could never quite see how they could. But that was never the same as losing the prospect of a stalemate or a long war of attrition. And again, I always thought in the end the Ukrainians would come up. But now we’ve reached a position where the Russian options have narrowed enormously, and there’s all sorts of grim possibilities that might still await us. But by and large, I think this is very much the beginning of the end of the war. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. 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.

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to

Judith Freedman". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012 . Retrieved 19 December 2012. His wife is Judith Freedman, Pinsent Masons Professor of Taxation Law and a Fellow of Worcester College at Oxford University. [24] They have two children, Ruth and Sam. Sam is an education policy expert who was a Senior Policy Advisor to the then Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove from 2010 to 2013 and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government. [25] Selected publications [ edit ] Commanding is nevertheless a challenge, even if commands must be obeyed. In this broad survey of command in war since 1945, Lawrence Freedman brings to bear his extensive knowledge to explain the many complexities commanders at the highest level must now face, from grasping new ways of warfare to managing military organisation and supply and, above all, coping with the mercurial behaviour of their political masters. If there is a theme to Freedman’s book, which ranges from the Korean War to Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, it is to be found in the tensions and conflicts between military leaders and the politicians who call the shots that he documents. How often must a supreme commander have wished he were free to do what he wanted? Usually, politics has to be factored in. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial?

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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.” Yes. I mean, in the sense that you could have a meltdown, radiation released. It’s not the same as a tactical nuclear weapon. It would create an emergency and again, you know, the Russians are in charge of this place. It’s their responsibility. And the vulnerability is not because of shelling. The vulnerability is because they’ve detached it from the grid and relying on diesel fuel to keep it going. If that runs out, there’s a problem. That’s where the issues are. So the remedies to make the thing safe, which so far they haven’t availed themselves of. So it’s a worrying situation. But again, it’s not one that I think would change the course of the war. And finally, I mean, most of your career, or the beginning of it anyway, was during the cold war when the whole west was preoccupied by the Russian military threat, the idea that they might conventionally have the force to sweep through western Europe and so on. Are you surprised that this great, you know, “superpower”, as we used to refer to it, turns out not only to not be able to sweep towards western Europe, but not really to get out of eastern Ukraine?

Command: Individual or Collective? A Review of Anthony King’s Command: Individual or Collective? A Review of Anthony King’s

Current research & consultancy projects: Lawrence Freedman". King's College London . Retrieved 25 November 2009. 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.

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. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned there the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Is that really possibly the most dangerous potential flashpoint right now? And have the Ukrainians surprised you? They’ve certainly surprised the Russians. They’ve turned out to be a pretty effective fighting force and appear to be becoming more effective with the passing of time, unlike the Russians.

Command by Lawrence Freedman | Waterstones Command by Lawrence Freedman | Waterstones

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. The big theme,” said Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, “is that autocracies are very bad at this. A lot of most catastrophic decisions come from autocratic decision-making. That is certainly the case with Vladimir Putin but also Saddam Hussein and even [the Argentine military dictator Leopoldo] Galtieri during the Falklands war.” Corn, Tony (9 September 2006). "Clausewitz in Wonderland". RealClearPolitics . Retrieved 30 March 2014. Freedman, Lawrence (2013). Strategy: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-932515-3. 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.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. 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.