Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2022/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

Australian Force Somalia 1992-1993 is the latest book in the very useful Australian Army Campaigns Series. It was written by retired Australian Army officer Bob Breen and covers the deployment of an Australian infantry battalion group to Somalia during late 1992 and early 1993 under Operation Solace. Breen notes that it is his fourth book on the topic, with the first - the excellent A Little Bit of Hope: Australian Force Somalia 1993 - being based on the research he did when deployed to Somalia in 1993 to assess the mission and determine what lessons needed to be learned.

As is common for books in this series, Australian Force Somalia is aimed at junior officers in the Australian Army. It is 200 pages long, and is very attractively presented, with excellent photos and maps. The book provides a good summary of this little-remembered Australian Army deployment, and highlights the key lessons learned from it. These include a focus on excellence in small unit tactics and a need to get logistics right (the Army in 1993 was very good at the former and pretty bad at the latter). There's also a good discussion of the very pragmatic, but somewhat short-term, approach to civil affairs that was applied as well as the role of intelligence at the battalion level. Breen argues that these lessons remain relevant to the modern Army. Given the book's audience, it is surprising that this is the first work in the series on a post-Cold War Australian Army deployment. The series' focus in World War I campaigns over recent years is hard to understand given that the Australian Army is obviously never going to fight another war like that one yet is gearing up for potential conflicts in Australia's region, so hopefully further works on recent deployments are under preparation.

The main weakness of this book is that Breen struggles at times to condense his previous works into the format. He alludes to the poor relationship between the battalion commander (the current Governor-General David Hurley) and the Australian national commander in Somalia, but doesn't go further. Likewise, Breen notes repeatedly that shortages of spare parts were a major problem, but doesn't really explain what this involved. More broadly, as the root cause of the sustainment problems seem to have been the supply staff in Australia having a peacetime mentality while an infantry battalion was in harms way on the other side of the world, it would have been interesting if there had been a discussion of the cultural problems that led to some of the almost absurd problems that cropped up.

Overall, this is a very useful introduction to this topic. It is likely to be of interest to a pretty wide readership, including people interested in Australian military history and those who'd like to know more about the nuts and bolts of battalion-level peacekeeping deployments.

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