Description

Military History Book Club  Feb 8, 2024

Command by Lawrence Freedman

Prestonwood CC, 15909 Preston Road, Dallas, TX. Please arrive by 7:30 a.m. to order from the menu.  Breakfast is $15.  Discussion starts at 7:30 and ends at 9:00. (New Start Time)

The discussion will be guided by the returning team of Tom Ingram, Tres Fife & John Caldwell. 

Command in war is about forging effective strategies and implementing them, making sure that orders are appropriate, well-communicated, and then obeyed. But it is also an intensely political process. This is largely because how wars are fought depends to a large extent on how their aims are set. It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. In  Command, Lawrence Freedman explores the importance of political as well as operational considerations with a series of 15 vivid case studies, all taken from the period after 1945. Over this period, the risks of nuclear escalation led to a shift away from great power confrontations and towards civil and proxy wars, and advances in communication technologies made it easier for higher-level commanders to direct their subordinates.

Freedman covers defeats as well as victories. Pakistani generals tried to avoid surrender as they were losing the eastern part of their country to India in 1971. Iraq's Saddam Hussein turned his defeats into triumphant narratives of victory. Osama bin Laden escaped the Americans in Afghanistan in 2001. We learn about insubordinate generals, such as Israel's Arik Sharon, and those in the French army in Algeria, so frustrated with their political leadership that they twice tried to change it. 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.

This will stand as a definitive account of the blend of military affairs and politics.

 

RSVP to Bob Epstein @ macabee1948@gmail.com