Mrs Thatcher respected her military advisers not least because they understood the demarcation lines between their jobs and those of the politicians – and never forgot with whom, in a democracy, the buck stopped. He argues that “closed systems” – armies with little or no intellectual tradition, with low tolerance for internal dissent and a healthy culture and acceptance of negative critique from subordinate officers are doomed to failure.

In war, the key tussles are often between generals and leaders

It is also because commanders in one realm must possess the ability to work with other command structures, including those of other branches of the armed forces and allies. Why I think there are some signs of desperation on the Russian side is that some are beginning to recognise that an energy crunch is not going to lead to a betrayal of Ukraine. During the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet admirals put their submarines in a “terrible predicament”, notes Sir Lawrence, by insisting they loiter in the Sargasso Sea while staying undetected. C arl von clausewitz, the Prussian general and theorist of war, is much-quoted and little understood. Once the challenge was to coordinate infantry, artillery and cavalry, then came armoured brigades and air power.In the latter, the military command and the political power are the same thing – such as ­Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or Saddam Hussein in the two Gulf wars, or (and this book is bang up to date) Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Divisions and divisional operations have become increasingly heterogenous, involving deep integration of diverse joint and multinational elements; the geographic, temporal and functional span of command has also increased with complexity.

Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to

All of those things will now be gone over and we’ll get a better understanding of why they weren’t the great force that they thought they were. King’s argument is that there has been a substantial shift from a more or less individualistic form of command as practiced in the twentieth century to something which he describes as ‘collective command’. Managing any organisation of this size would be a challenge for a chief executive to ensure that the different parts work effectively and as much as possibly in harmony. Here, commanders have to reconcile their political and military functions; often, they fail to do so satisfactorily.Compared with Winston Churchill, his successor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee hardly offered a heroic model. Acknowledging that the Americans may err on the side of excess, to look after some 20,000 personnel a US Army Divisional HQ would have as many as 400 people, ten times the number required during the Second World War. It was on the basis of his performance in testing circumstances that he was promoted to Corps Command and eventually to taking charge of the 8th Army before becoming the Commander of 21st Army Group in Europe. I think they just exhausted themselves in the summer, taking not a very large amount of Luhansk, which left them with a limited capacity to cope now.