The Centre for Grand Strategy and School of Security Studies invites you to attend the launch of Sir Lawrence Freedman’s recently published book Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Throughout history, the concept of command -- as both a way to achieve objectives and as an assertion of authority -- has been essential to military action and leadership. But, as Sir Lawrence Freedman shows in this book, it is also deeply political.

About the book: Military command has been reconstructed and revolutionized since the Second World War by nuclear warfare, small-scale guerrilla land operations and cyber interference. Freedman takes a global perspective, systematically investigating its practice and politics since 1945 through a wide range of conflicts from the French Colonial Wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bangladesh Liberation War to North Vietnam's Easter Offensive of 1972, the Falklands War, the Iraq War and Russia's wars in Chechnya and Ukraine. By highlighting the political nature of strategy, Freedman shows that military decision-making cannot be separated from civilian priorities and that commanders must now have the sensibility to navigate politics as well as warfare.

We will hear from the author, Sir Lawrence Freedman, with some remarks from Dr Maeve Ryan followed by a Q&A session.

You can sign up for the event here.

 

About the Speakers

Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London. He was the official historian of the Falklands Campaign, and a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War ('the Chilcot Inquiry'). He has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the Cold War, and comments regularly on contemporary security issues. He is the author of The Future of War, Strategy, (a Financial Times and Economist book of the year) and A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, which won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military Literature.

Dr Maeve Ryan is a Senior Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, where she co-directs the Centre for Grand Strategy. At the heart of this centre is an ‘applied history’ approach, which aims to bring more historical and strategic expertise to statecraft, diplomacy and foreign policy. Maeve directs the centre’s major research projects and impact activities, including the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy, the Forum on Future British Strategy, the World Order Study Group, The Engelsberg Programme for Applied History, Grand Strategy and Geopolitics (in partnership with the University of Cambridge; supported by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation); the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme, ‘Interrogating Visions of a Post-Western World'; the Maymester Summer School, and the Philip Leverhulme Prize-funded project on the origins and future of the idea of ‘world order’. Along with Professor Alessio Patalano, she also co-directs the centre’s new Indo-Pacific Programme.