Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine

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And I mean, obviously, this has been a fantastic week for the Ukrainians, but something like a fifth of their country is still occupied by Russia. How rapidly do you think they could make progress? And they talk about retaking Crimea. Do you think that is now on the agenda? 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. 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.

Command by Lawrence Freedman review: when generals get drunk

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

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DeGroot, Gerard (13 December 2013). " 'Strategy: A History' by Lawrence Freedman". The Washington Post . Retrieved 24 November 2014.

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

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. 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 ]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. 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. Judith Freedman". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012 . Retrieved 19 December 2012. 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? In a recent article, Lawrence Freedman argued that the events in Ukraine are of historic importance. So when I got him on the line from Washington, where he was doing the rounds, I asked Sir Lawrence why he thinks the current developments are indeed historic.

Command - Penguin Books UK Command - Penguin Books UK

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] 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 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. 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 ]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. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned there the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Is that really possibly the most dangerous potential flashpoint right now? 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.

Command by Lawrence Freedman — the politics of the battlefield

Freedman, Lawrence (2022). Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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] 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. 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? 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.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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. Yeah, they don’t have enough troops. They’re very thinly spread. They’ve avoided general mobilisation, although some people in Moscow are calling for that. I think it’s just too late. First, you’ve got to persuade people to come along. Secondly, somehow you’ve got to train them. They’re not going to be very inspired by veterans of this war telling them what awaits them. It takes you know weeks, months before you get them into the field. So they have to play now with very limited resources. They don’t seem able to move them around to different parts of the area of operations, nor do they seem to be using them very well. I think they just exhausted themselves in the summer, taking not a very large amount of Luhansk, which left them with a limited capacity to cope now. 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.”