Second paragraph of third essay (“Command of Kosovo Force 1999” by Mike [sic] Jackson):

In early 1997 I found myself commanding the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, or ARRC, in Reindahlen, Germany. Its headquarters is under operational command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR), and I therefore reported directly to General Wesley ‘Wes’ Clark. In May 1998, at SACEUR’s annual conference, Clark told his key subordinates: ‘things are beginning to hot up in Kosovo, NATO may have to intervene.’

A provocative title for an interesting book, a series of essays by senior British military officers and historians, partly about recent (in 2013) campaigns, but also reflecting on the place of knowledge and knowledge management in military structures and strategy. I have an odd connection with one of the editors, Sir Hew Strachan, which is that back in 1991, when his wife Pamela was a candidate for Cambridge City Council, I was her election agent. They have since moved to Scotland, and she has got ordained.

There is one frankly terrible essay here, but the other twenty-five are at least interesting and some are fascinating. For me personally the most interesting single piece was the second, by Sir Alistair Irwin, reflecting on the British Army’s role in Northern Ireland: “at no stage from start to finish was there anything that recognisably had the features of a campaign plan. I confess that I went through a stage of believing that this was a fatal and incompetent omission. Now I begin to believe that the circumstances were such that it was never possible to have one.”

All of the essays reflect on the importance of the political dimension of military operations, both in terms of political guidance from Whitehall which is clear without micro-managing, and also in terms of sensitivity to the facts on the ground and managing relations with local populations. I found it a lot more grown-up than some of the American analysis that I have been looking at recently. The military (or at least these military writers) recognise that the deployment of troops is normally only a part of solving a wider political problem, which will need to be solved by political means.

More than a third of the essays are about the Basra campaign in Iraq, where the consensus of the contributors is very defensive of the alleged successes of the Brits on the ground (the Chilcot report was a lot more damning). I must say that after reading a fourth essay how the British were really not humiliated by the locals, I was less rather than more convinced. About a quarter of the essays were similarly about the Helmand campaign in Afghanistan, which was obviously failing by 2013 though had not yet come to its catastrophic conclusion, and there even the most optimistic writers found it difficult to be upbeat. But the point made in both cases is that the problems faced by the military on the ground stemmed from political direction (or lack of it) given from London.

There is also some more cheerful analysis of Kosovo and Sierra Leone – the latter generally forgotten now because it was a short and successful operation. But the end of the book comes back to reflect on the British military’s approach to knowledge and learning, as well as its relationship to politics, in a much more reflective mode than I would have (perhaps unfairly) expected.

One of the more interesting works of military analysis that I have read recently, honest about the fact that there are shortcomings, if not always completely clear about what they are.

You can get British Generals in Blair’s Wars here (for a price).