Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2020/Book reviews




 * By Nick-D

In May I reviewed a bad book about lots of walls. This is a good book about a single wall, Hadrian's in northern England. It was written by Adrian Goldsworthy, who is a prolific author on Roman history. I bought this book last year in preparation for a trip to the UK I was planning for this year. Obviously that's not happening anymore, but I decided to read it for escapist purposes!

This short (141 small pages) book provides a solid history of the wall, as well as good summaries of its design and how it functioned. Goldsworthy is upfront in noting that literary and archaeological sources on the wall are often limited, but provides a convincing account of why it was built and how it likely operated. He doesn't get into any nonsense regarding silly claims that walls are emasculating like the other book does, and clearly explains how the wall made sense in the context of Roman military and provincial strategy. Most notably, he explains that even while the wall couldn't stop an invasion as it was too modest in size and too lightly held, it was able to limit most attacks to ineffective raids as the barrier prevented horses and large groups from crossing. Small groups of raiders on foot would have been unable to cause much damage, and would have been easy prey for the many Roman cavalry units in the area.

The book's main flaw is its size. Goldsworthy is an expert in this field and seems to have a lot more to say about this topic, but often seems to not have enough room to flesh out his arguments. This is most notable in his descriptions of how the wall fitted into Roman grand strategy and operated on a day-to-day basis, which are fairly concise in comparison to his history of the wall and description of its structure.

Overall, this book provides a useful summary of this topic, especially for people like me who are not familiar with the wall.

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 * By Hawkeye7

This book is about the high command of the British forces (mostly the Army) in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the troops generally fought bravely and well, the British Army's performance was lamentable. Failings at senior level to develop a strategy and enunciate goals set the army up for costly and embarrassing failure in both theatres. The author, Christopher Leslie Elliott, was a career British Army officer Director of Military Operations in the UK Ministry of Defence from 1993 to 1995. The book doesn't cover the two wars in any detail; it is concerned with the high command.

The strength of the book lies in its analysis of the problems of high command. Some of these are specific to the British, but others are more familiar. There was the issue of whether the armed forces should be structured for the defence of the homeland—the most dangerous scenario, but also the least likely—or for what they have actually been doing for the last 75 years.

It is one thing to put the Prime Minister in overall charge, but he or she might not have any military experience. Then there is the dynamic between the Chief of the Defence Staff and the service chiefs. There was also the problem of the different backgrounds that the air, naval and army officers came from, and their frequent turnover, especially when the reasons for decisions were not recorded. In the British case, this was exacerbated by their training, which did not include university education or any training in strategy. These are issues that all countries have, and grapple with to some extent.

The British also had many problems of their own. They had created an organisational structure that presupposed that they would be fighting alone. This wasn't very realistic. In particular, it didn't correspond to the situation in Iraq or Afghanistan. They had a joint forces headquarters, but it was located in an underground bunker outside London. It was therefore out of touch with the tactical headquarters in the theatres, and curiously out of contact with MOD headquarters in London as well. This created numerous problems.

Furthermore, the MOD was subject to shrinking budgets. The role that the British forces attempted to undertake was beyond the resources available. Partly this was the result of Britain's peculiar self image of being a great power, which it no longer was, but there was also chronic misunderstanding on the part of the civilian components of the MOD and other branches of the government over how difficult the task was. This led to too few troops being committed. Fixing troop levels based on arbitrary numbers is an insidious problem that is by no means restricted to the UK. There was also a major and classic military failure: not providing a reserve in case things went west. While there are proposed solutions to some of the problems, other are more universal and intractable.

In all, a thought-provoking read for someone self-isolating at the moment.

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