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. Current research & consultancy projects: Lawrence Freedman". King's College London . Retrieved 25 November 2009. Lawrence Freedman is one of our most distinguished military historians. In his thoughtful new book Command, drawing on decades of study, he looks at the marriage of authorities that takes place in the running of wars since 1945: where political power meets military expertise, and who ends up having the final say.

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

Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ Sir Lawrence David Freedman, KCMG , CBE , PC , FBA (born 1948) is a British academic, historian and author specialising in foreign policy, international relations and strategy. [1] He has been described as the "dean of British strategic studies" [2] and was a member of the Iraq Inquiry. [3] He is an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London. Judith Freedman". University of Oxford. Archived from the original on 27 May 2012 . Retrieved 19 December 2012.Funder reveals how O’Shaughnessy Blair self-effacingly supported Orwell intellectually, emotionally, medically and financially ... why didn’t Orwell do the same for his wife in her equally serious time of need?’ 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? 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.”

Command by Lawrence Freedman — the politics of the battlefield

At the heart of the problem, Freedman believes, is the rigidly hierarchical nature of the Kremlin’s decision-making and how those at the very top are immune to responsibility for mistakes. And since Russia’s first plan to topple Ukraine with a coup de main against Kyiv collapsed within the first few weeks amid fierce Ukrainian resistance and Russian logistical incompetence, Moscow has struggled to find a credible plan B.

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] 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? Divisions and divisional operations have become increasingly heterogenous, involving deep integration of diverse joint and multinational elements; the geographic, temporal and functional span of command has also increased with complexity. Military missions have become deeply politicised and even at a low level military force has to be applied with precision and proportion …

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

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?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. You may change or cancel your subscription or trial at any time online. Simply log into Settings & Account and select "Cancel" on the right-hand side. Freedman, L. Command: Individual or Collective? A Review of Anthony King’s Command: The Twenty-First-Century General (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Yeah, I think that’s an important distinction. I mean, the view was that a lot of your best units get used up and suffer in the early stages of the war. And certainly the Ukrainians lost quite a lot in the fighting in Luhansk and Donetsk in the summer. But I mean, they did mobilise, unlike the Russians, they are training people up. The UK’s got a big training centre now which I think there’s some evidence that may have made a difference. And they’re pretty determined people. So I think they have upped their game. They’re strategically quite canny and they’ve got the advantages of fighting on terrain they know and the real motivation. I mean, some of the forces facing them in Kharkiv were pretty cobbled together. It’s not as if they’re taking on the Russia of February. But that just indicates that they’ve played quite a clever strategic game themselves, first to stay in the war and then to turn the tables on the Russians.

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

In his early academic career, Professor Freedman concentrated on the Soviet strategic threat, Britain's nuclear deterrent and the evolution of the trans-Atlantic Alliance. Lawrence Freedman is the dominant academic authority in Britain and the English-speaking world on the way modern wars have been fought. Rational, liberal-minded, clear-sighted, he has drawn on a lifetime of experience for his new book. ... 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. John Simpson, The Guardian The book needs a bibliography, trying to find a reference in the notes leads the reader on a search through numerous notes when you just have a last name and an op.cit. to guide you. 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? B: The Australian Naval Institute published a review of Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine was published on 24 February, just as I had finished the chapter on Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War. Tim Coyle’s assessment that “Command must be an essential read for leaders at all levels.” I completely agree.

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