In early 2002, Sir Lawrence Freedman invited me to deliver that year's Liddell Hart Lecture at King's College London. Only after I had accepted, did he reveal that the invitation came with a caveat: ...I had no choice as to the subject. I was to speak about Sir Michael Howard, whose 80th birthday would fall on 29 November 2002, and the dimensions of military history. Freedman thought this particularly appropriate because I had just taken up the Chichele Professorship of the History of War at Oxford, a chair which Michael himself had held between 1977 and 1980. Despite his comparatively brief tenure of a chair which dates back to 1909, I was already used to scholars, especially from overseas, telling me that I had Michael Howard's job. Belonging to a generation which had come of age when Michael Howard dominated the field, and deeply conscious of my own personal debt to him for his support and encouragement throughout my career, I was apprehensive, almost to the point of terror. Michael was an Olympian figure, and even – as Maurice Pearton once put it to me – 'vice-regal'. The lecture was delivered on 3 December 2002 in the Great Hall at King's, and Michael Howard was sitting in the front row, directly opposite the lectern. Michael died on 30 November 2019, the day after his 97th birthday. The lecture is now published in tribute to him. It is unchanged, except for minor editorial tweaks. It is important to remember that Michael revealed much more about his early life and wartime service than I was privy to in 2002 when in 2006 he published his memoir, Captain Professor: A Life in War and Peace. One story not included in that book was Michael's recurrent nightmare, which he told me in response to the anecdote with which the lecture begins. In his dream, he is travelling in a London taxi in the early evening. He looks out of the vehicle's window to see a poster, advertising a Mozart concert at the Albert Hall to be given that night. Below the programme of music is the line, 'conducted by Michael Howard'. Michael loved Mozart, but as a listener, not a performer. Michael too could know fear, as he acknowledged in Captain Professor.
The first world oil war Winegard, Timothy C
The first world oil war,
2016, 20160927, 2016, 2016-09-27, 2016-10-27
eBook
This original and pioneering study analyzes the evolution of oil as a catalyst for both war and diplomacy, and connects the events of the First World War to contemporary petroleum geo-politics and ...international aggression.
Winfried Baumgart's masterful history of the Crimean War has been expanded and fully updated to reflect advances made in the field since the book's first publication. It convincingly argues that if ...the war had continued after 1856, the First World War would have taken place 60 years earlier, but that fighting ultimately ceased because diplomacy never lost its control over the use of war as an instrument in power politics.With 19 images, 13 maps and additional tables as well as a brand new chapters on 'the medical services', this expanded and fully-updated 2nd edition explores* The origins and diplomacy of the Crimean War* The war aims and general attitudes of the belligerent powers (Russia, France, and Britain), non-belligerent German powers (Austria and Prussia) and a selected number of neutral powers, including the United States* The characteristics and capabilities of the armies involved* The nature of the fighting itselfThe Crimean War: 1853-1856 examines the conflict in both its Europe-wide and global contexts, moving beyond the five great European powers to consider the role and importance of smaller states and theatres of war that have otherwise been under-served. To this end, it looks at fighting on the Danube front, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Caucasian battlefield, as well as the White Sea and the Pacific, with final chapters devoted to the Paris peace congress of 1856, the end of the war and its legacy.This book remains the definitive study of one of the most important wars in modern history.
Michael Howard and Clausewitz Strachan, Hew
Journal of strategic studies,
01/2022, Letnik:
45, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The English translation of Carl von Clausewitz's On War by Michael Howard and Peter Paret has had a major impact on how Clausewitz is read today, especially in the United States and Britain. Howard ...in particular was determined to make Clausewitz doubly relevant - as one soldier speaking to other soldiers and as an author whose views on war had continuing purchase. However, the result is a text which, in reflecting the issues of its day, is not fully reflective of what Clausewitz himself said and has itself become dated.
The practice of strategy is different from strategic theory. The latter was largely developed by professional soldiers from the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars, and compared the present with the ...past to establish general truths about war. It used history as its dominant discipline until 1945. The advent of nuclear weapons made history seem less relevant, and prompted the inclusion of other disciplines; deterrence theory also made strategic theory more abstract and distant from the practice of war. Since 9/11, the experience of war has forced strategy to become less theoretical and to do better in reconciling theory with practice.
If electorates are not informed about and involved in the making of national strategy, they cannot be expected to identify with the objectives of that strategy.
Over the last decade (and indeed ever since the Cold War), the rise of insurgents and non-state actors in war, and their readiness to use terror and other irregular methods of fighting, have led ...commentators to speak of ‘new wars’. They have assumed that the ‘old wars’ were waged solely between states, and were accordingly fought between comparable and ‘symmetrical’ armed forces. Much of this commentary has lacked context or sophistication. It has been bounded by norms and theories more than the messiness of reality. Fed by the impact of the 9/11 attacks, it has privileged some wars and certain trends over others. Most obviously it has been historically unaware. But it has also failed to consider many of the other dimensions which help us to define what war is — legal, ethical, religious, and social. This book draws together all these themes in order to distinguish between what is really changing about war and what only seems to be changing. Self-evidently, as the product of its own times, the character of each war is always changing. But if war’s character is in flux, its underlying nature contains its own internal consistency. Each war is an adversarial business, capable of generating its own dynamic, and therefore of spiralling in directions that are never totally predictable. War is both utilitarian, the tool of policy, and dysfunctional.
Since 2010, the UK government has conducted a strategic review at five-yearly intervals, a pattern which it has maintained, at least formally, despite the strategically destabilising effects of ...Brexit and the Trump administration. Accordingly, on 26 February 2020 the Prime Minister announced the next iteration, albeit one which would he maintained go beyond the parameters of a traditional review . COVID-19 understandably delayed the publication of the Integrated Review until March 2021. This article examines the results, using the prism of strategy to examine the review s coherence. Global Britain in a Competitive Age is as aspirational as its original ambition suggested it should be, but is light on specific policies and their delivery. The accompanying publications from the Ministry of Defence contain more substance, but their implications are not sufficiently aligned with either foreign policy or the possible eventuality of armed conflict, nor do they allow for capabilities commensurate with the scale of the task which Global Britain anticipates.
To Arms is Hew Strachan's most complete and definitive study of the opening of the First World War. Now, key sections from this magisterial work are published as individual paperbacks, each complete ...in itself, and with a new introduction by the author. The First World War was not just fought in the trenches of the western front. It embraced all of Africa. Many of those who fought this white man's war were black. The dangers they confronted went beyond those of the battlefield. They fell prey to malaria and dysentry, and they were attacked by lions and crocodiles. But it was a vast and spectacular theatre of operations, in which great personalities - thrusting German officers like Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, or big-game hunters like Peter Pretorious - could impose themselves. Embracing the perspectives of all the nations who fought there, this is the first ever full account of the Great War in Africa.
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