276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine

£15£30.00Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

But I don’t think there’s much at the moment that will allow him to seriously change the course of the war.

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

So do the Russians abandon Kherson, which some think would be the most sensible thing for them to do to reinforce all their positions in Donetsk and Luhansk? But regrettably we see that on our TV and smartphone screens all the time now, and it is depressing to ask why we cannot seem to learn the lesson that giving one man too much power often leads to disaster. The responsibilities of command grow with rank but the immediate challenges may be at their most intense at the lowest levels, for example when a lieutenant must lead a platoon into a combat. And if you can’t do that, if the Ukrainians start to make inroads into the Russian positions there — which it looks like they’re maybe starting to do — the whole rationales for the war starts to crumble.

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. You have to hand it to the Scottish government: the deletion of WhatsApp messages is good preemptive news management, whether accidental, by default or deliberate. Hitler sacked 11 of his 18 field-marshals and 21 of 37 colonel-generals, often micromanaging battles from his headquarters. Command is the authority which an individual in military service lawfully exercises over subordinates by rank or assignment’. That this hasn’t damaged its standing as the world’s pre-eminent power is a tribute to America’s enormous economic and cultural strength.

Command by Lawrence Freedman | Waterstones

At the other end of the scale, Che Guevara in Congo in 1966 and Igor Girkin in Ukraine in 2014 both tried to spark local wars to suit their grandiose objectives. And of course, they can make life difficult for the Russians in Crimea just by controlling supplies there, and so on. It is clear from Freedman’s account of the command element of the Falkland campaign that the British had two immediate priorities. Just occasionally our view can be clearer than that of the commanders in their headquarters; for instance during President Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s maladroit bombing of Belgrade in 1999, when the White House and Downing Street became increasingly panicky in their claims that Serbia’s resistance was collapsing when it was clear to us that it wasn’t. These changes on the battlefield have prompted a change of tone in Russian media coverage of the war.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. For some weeks, there’s been speculation that Ukraine was poised to launch a counter-offensive near Kherson in the south of the country.

Freedman | Substack Comment is Freed | Sam Freedman | Substack

In modern times, commands are usually obeyed, since refusing a command is an act of insubordination, even mutiny, which military institutions punish unhesitatingly.In addition, the accuracy of modern weaponry means that there is now less tolerance, at least in western democracies, for armed force to be used as a blunt instrument so that civilian casualties are no more than unfortunate and regrettable ‘collateral’. I mean, he’s understood that what he needed to do is to get more support from the west, and that was absolutely vital, even beyond sort of, you know, Churchill in 1940, understanding he had to get the Americans on side. Every major enemy the US has come up against knows that Washington’s attention span is brief, and that the one hope of success lies in clinging on, despite the overwhelming firepower. So in the end, like you know, with any organisation, when things go badly wrong, especially when you started off holding all the cards, the only explanation is some pretty poor decision-making and leadership, which is what command is all about.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment