Annual Booklist 2021 : Craig Lawrence
Major General Craig Lawrence CBE is a retired British Army officer whose last appointment was as the Director of Joint Warfare at the Directorate of Joint Warfare. He is now an author of fiction and non-fiction and a lecturer at the Royal College of Defence Studies. https://www.craiglawrence.co/home.html
When I left the Army in 2016, I joined the staff of the Royal College of Defence Studies (RCDS) as I wanted to work in an environment that would allow me to continue researching strategy and strategic leadership as part of my job. I got a lot more than I bargained for because my first major task, other than running a syndicate, was to re-write the College’s guide to strategy-making. Titled Getting Strategy Right (Enough), the research for the book had to be completed in about six months, forcing me to read a huge number of books, pamphlets and guides in short order. This was a bit of a struggle, particularly as I was also working on another Gurkha history at the time, but it did mean that I became familiar with some excellent books. Since then, I have been working on another book on strategy and leadership and, again, this has meant many more hours of new research as neither subject ever stands still. My selection for this Christmas list is based on my research and consists of books that I feel add real value in terms of developing a better understanding of strategy and strategic leadership as they relate to the deployment, and command, of the British Army on operations.
Defeat into Victory by Field Marshal Viscount Slim. To my mind, this is one of the best books ever written on strategy and strategic leadership. Bill Slim’s candid explanation of how he arrived in Burma just in time to lead the longest ever retreat in British military history and then achieved the most remarkable turnaround, defeating a formidable enemy that, on paper, he shouldn’t have been able to, is not just a fascinating and well written read, it is also a source of numerous lessons that are as invaluable now as they were when the book was first published in 1956. What I most like about the book is that Slim’s humility shines through on every page. He admits when he made mistakes, blaming himself for his force’s failures, but is quick to praise others when things go well. Contrast this with the autobiographies of many of today’s senior leaders, where every failure seems to be someone else’s fault.
Slim: Master of War by Robert Lyman. I am so taken with Slim as an exemplar of senior leadership that I am using him as a case study in my next book. To help me better understand the man, I am leaning very heavily on this excellent book by Robert Lyman. To my mind, Lyman is the expert’s expert on Slim and the Burma Campaign and his insightful book provides a real understanding of what made Slim, and the way he commanded, so special. Well researched, easy to read and full of fascinating anecdotes, there are lots of lessons in it for today’s strategists and senior leaders.
High Command: British Military Leadership in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars by Christopher Elliott. I was so grateful this book had just come out when I was writing the RCDS guide to strategy as it is an absolute mine of lessons relating to senior leadership and strategy-making. What makes it particularly interesting is that the author, himself a retired major general, pulls absolutely no punches in explaining why much of our high-level decision making, and the strategies that flowed from this, was flawed during the Iraq and Afghanistan Campaigns. Although it’s an easy read, it is meticulously researched, probably because the book started off as a thesis for a PhD at Oxford. What I particularly like about the book is its analysis of the political/military interface and the relationship that existed between senior military leaders and leading politicians. In terms of lessons that we need to learn from Iraq, it is second only to the Chilcot Report (aka ‘The Report of the Iraq Inquiry’) which, to my mind at least, remains the most brilliant yet consistently under-rated analysis of strategic failure. If you haven’t read the report, and given it runs to 2.6 million words in 13 volumes this would not be a surprise, I strongly recommend a quick scan of the executive summary as it is well written and makes some extremely powerful points.
Counterinsurgency in Crisis: Britain and the Challenges of Modern Warfare by David Ucko and Robert Egnell. This is another fascinating book on the UK’s campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. But whereas Christopher Elliott’s book focuses on higher command, this one also looks at the tactical consequences of failures at the strategic level. It’s also a sobering reminder about the danger of hubris. In this case, the British Army’s belief that it could ‘do’ counterinsurgency and had little to learn from other militaries’ experiences of fighting insurgents. My favourite quote from the book, and one that I still use in lectures, is: ‘…strategy making for Basra and Helmand was marked by the failure to grasp the nature of the campaign, to adapt once new realities came to the fore, and to resource these efforts both politically and financially, to achieve a clearly established objective.’ In a single line, it tells you almost everything you need to do to create effective strategy. It’s a timely reminder that without clarity at the strategic level, whatever successes an army achieves at the tactical level are unlikely to have enduring impact.
Serve to Lead by The Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Nearly 40 years ago when I first completed a short commissioning course at Sandhurst, I, like every other cadet at the time, was given a copy of Serve to Lead, an anthology of thoughts on different aspects of leadership. I understand that the book was updated and republished in 2013 but I still have the original copy I was given. It’s a fascinating book, not just because it contains much sage advice that remains relevant but because its 94 pages provide a remarkable insight into what commanders who had spent years fighting long and bloody campaigns felt the most important tenets of leadership to be. It has been criticised for being outdated, for example the quotes in the copy I have are all by white middle-aged men, but it is valuable nonetheless. Regardless of their lack of representation, the views of Slim, Montgomery, Wavell and Churchill, amongst others, were formed over years of hard fighting on a scale that we will hopefully never see again and we would be foolish to ignore them. The book’s enduring value is that it contains all these views in a slim volume that is as easy to read on the loo as it is in the library!
With respect to a book I’d like to see written, the Chilcot Report was, as already mentioned, a remarkable achievement and a source of invaluable lessons in relation to strategy and strategic leadership. It has its critics but, to my mind at least, it provides as objective an assessment as possible of ‘whether it was right and necessary to invade Iraq in March 2003; and whether the UK could – and should – have been better prepared for what followed.’ Though not strictly a book, I would like to see a similar report produced in relation to the UK’s intervention in Afghanistan. This could be a commercial undertaking by an established author but the benefit of it being done at the behest of government is that the inquiry team has real authority, enabling it to summon people for interview and review official documents. However, at the time of writing, and despite pressure from several MPs, the Government has so far rejected a ‘Chilcot-style public inquiry’ on the grounds that ‘the benefits of an inquiry would not outweigh the costs of conducting it.’ This is a huge shame. Without a formal inquiry, and the detailed report that it would produce, those most in need of the lessons that such an inquiry would inevitably identify, so tomorrow’s strategists and strategic leaders, are more likely to make the same mistakes. That said, if the Government continues to refuse to initiate an inquiry, a cynic might suggest simply deleting the word ‘Iraq’ from the Chilcot Report and replacing it with ‘Afghanistan’ as many of the lessons might well prove to be similar. But that would be to miss the point. Although students of strategy and strategic leadership are interested in identifying why mistakes happened and how to prevent a recurrence, what matters to the families of the 457 members of the UK armed forces who lost their lives during the campaign is understanding why they deployed and, particularly as the Taliban has now seized power, whether their sacrifice was in vain. A Government report that explored the campaign might do this.