What Are You Currently Reading? 2016

[davidbfpo]

The fourth book was 'Defending the Realm: The Politics of Britain's small wars since 1945' by Aaron Edwards, pub. 2014. Somehow I missed this at the time until found a few months ago.

The author set himself a high goal, according to the publisher's summary on Amazon:

This is the first book to detail the tactical and operational dynamics of Britain's small wars, arguing that the military's use of force was more heavily constrained by wider strategic and political considerations than previously admitted.....Defending the realm? is the definitive account of the politics of Britain's small wars.

Link:https://www.amazon.co.uk/Defending-r...ding+the+realm

The book looks at the 'defending' in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is a very moot point that the British Army has developed a culture and structure to capture it's experience - repeatedly shown in the Afghan campaign. When the deployment to Helmand started a copious open source resource by a US civil engineer was not consulted online or with the author. Whatever it learnt was not consistent.

Far worse at learning were the civil servants, in the various colonial administrations, and the police too. A persistent feature was the neglect of police intelligence-gathering via the local Special Branch; their focus was on political intelligence and suspected subversion - not the prospect of violence, let alone insurgency. Setting up for COIN was hard and took time, all too often defeat loomed

Understandably there is a long chapter on Northern Ireland, known as Operation Banner August 1969-July 2007. There is no a mention of the "dirty war" aspects, e.g. the collusion between Loyalist paramilitaries and parts of the state nor their part in the violence. No mention of the eventually successful intelligence system that reduced violence so much.

A good book, but with faults and several strange claims e.g. the CIA & SIS smuggled most weapons into Afghanistan during the Soviet period! That was done by ISI who they both cooperated with.

Perhaps he has written about this subject since Chilcot was published?