Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine

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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.” 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. Putin was far less successful in exploiting secessionist movements in eastern Ukraine, leading to a messy situation that “left Russia with a de facto annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk” while Ukraine became “almost a de facto part of Nato”, from which it was receiving weapons and other military assistance. Marinating in his imperial fantasies during the Covid-19 pandemic, Putin eventually convinced himself that he could simply take over Ukraine, repeating all the mistakes made in 1994. Like Saddam Hussein in 1991, despite catastrophic failure his regime seems coup-proof and in control of the domestic narrative. But for how long? The greatest strength of this book is its breadth. The conflicts chosen for study are worthy, including both those familiar to western audiences and ones which are criminally underrepresented. It was interesting to learn more about some of these such as the Arab/Israeli war of 1973 and the India/Pakistan conflict. The writing style is academic yet accessible, much like Freedman’s other work meaning it’s both a good starting point and one for a military history/strategy enjoyer.

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. Corn, Tony (9 September 2006). "Clausewitz in Wonderland". RealClearPolitics . Retrieved 30 March 2014. You say that they’ve got very limited options. One of the things that’s very striking is they may be, to put it crudely, running out of men — or they seem to be. They’re just unwilling to mobilise the population. Visiting Scholars and Practitioners – Lawrence Freedman". Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford . Retrieved 7 September 2020.

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At the end of 1996, the Russians cut their losses, and Chechnya remained a base for terrorist operations in the Caucasus and in Russia itself. Near the end of his presidency Yeltsin tried again, putting the operation in the hands of his heir apparent, Vladimir Putin, who mounted a carefully organised campaign in the winter of 1999-2000, learning the lessons of the first war. This soon brought Grozny – now in ruins – under Russian control, although a counter-insurgency operation had to continue until 2009. Contrary to Putin’s claims, Russia’s armed forces may instead be approaching a crisis point, not only as they face an increasingly challenging fight in Ukraine but because they risk the long-term degradation of their capabilities. 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. According to McNamara, their interchange escalated to his explosion: “There will be no firing of any kind at the Soviet ship without my authority… We’re trying to convey a political message, we’re not starting a war.”

The Russian military has shown that it is ready to withdraw from beleaguered positions – most seriously when it gave up on Kyiv and most recently when it abandoned Snake Island. Giving up on all of Ukraine would be a far more significant step, and no doubt this will be resisted for as long as possible. Russia may even hope that withdrawal can be managed with some dignity as part of a negotiated settlement. Letter Freedman wrote to John Chilcot explaining his role in the Chicago speech" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 18 April 2016. Miles, Oliver (22 November 2009). "Oliver Miles: The key question – is Blair a war criminal?". The Independent . Retrieved 20 May 2018. 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. 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 ]

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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. 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? 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.