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James McNeill's avatar

I’m not an academic, a historian, and did not serve in the military. I’m a fairly serious student of history and I try to read good books on the subject. I have a small collection of books on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wanted to understand why both went so wrong. Two books I would recommend as a short cut. Firstly An Intimate War by Mike Martin, recommended to be by Adrian Weale. And secondly Unwinnable by Theo Farrell. It seemed to me that (1) we failed to really understand the enemy, their motivation, community, timescales, (2) the politicians didn’t have a clear objective, or at the very least had shifting objectives, (3) politicians were terrified of casualties and constrained the options available to the professional military, (4) the Army was repeatedly asked to do too much without the appropriate resources. As ever happy to be corrected.

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Nick Champion's avatar

As ever, very well thought and put Robert! I’m hoping that volume will come; post Ukraine and our international proxy support to a peer on peer conflict rather than just look at Iraq and Afghanistan as a stand alone conflict and the context of the firm and function of our military.

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