REVIEW ESSAY OF CHANGING OF THE GUARD AND BLOOD, METAL AND DUST

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ John Fialka, ‘Why China is dominating the Solar Industry’, Scientific American, 19 December 2016. Article available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-dominating-the-solar-industry/. Accessed 26 July 2021.

² This figure was true of British attitudes in November 2018. A fuller account of attitudes toward intervention is available in, Flora Holmes, ‘Public Attitudes to Military Intervention’, British Foreign Policy Group, January 2020. Report available at: https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/01/public-attitudes-to-uk-military-interventionism/. Accessed 31 July 2021. Paul Cornish, Nigel Biggar, Robert Johnson and Gareth Stansfield, ‘Interests, Ethics and Rules: renewing UK intervention policy’, Changing Character of War. Report available at:

http://www.ccw.ox.ac.uk/news/2020/2/12/interests-ethics-and-rules-new-report-from-rob-johnson. Accessed 31 July 2021.

³ Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Viewpoint: Why was the biggest protest in world history ignored?’, Time Magazine, 15 February 2013. Article available at: https://world.time.com/2013/02/15/viewpoint-why-was-the-biggest-protest-in-world-history-ignored/. Accessed 19 August 2020.

⁴ Alex Callinicos, ‘Anti-war protests do make a difference’, Socialist Worker online, 19 March 2005. Article available at:

https://web.archive.org/web/20060321084247/http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=6067 Accessed 19 August 2020.

⁵ The population of Iraq in 2003 was approximately 25 million.

⁶ Michael Asher, Shoot to Kill: a Soldier’s Journey Through Violence (London: Cassell Military 2004).

⁷ John Hockey, Squaddies – a portrait of a subculture (Exeter: Exeter University Press 1986); Richard Holmes, Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War (London: HarperPress 2006).

⁸ Letter from Army Secretariat to Brigadier Ben Barry, 8 September 2016. Released under a Freedom of Information Request, FOI2016/07003/77396.

⁹ Transcript of evidence from the official website of the Iraq Inquiry: http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/236689/2009-12-14-transcript-riley-wall-s2.pdf. Accessed 28 July 2021.

¹⁰ Transcript of evidence from the official website of the Iraq Inquiry: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/54043098/transcript-iraq-inquiry. Accessed 28 July 2021.

¹¹ Department of the United States Army, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual: U.S. Army field manual no. 3–24: Marine Corps warfighting publication no. 3–33.5 / foreword by David H. Petraeus, James F. Amos & Lt Colonel John A. Nagl (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 2007).

¹² Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations – Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London, Faber & Faber 2010); Frank Kitson, Bunch of Five (London: Faber & Faber 2010); Robert S. Thompson, Defeating communist insurgency – experiences from Malaya and Vietnam (London: Chatto & Windus 1966).

¹³ Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag – The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (London, Pimlico 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the hanged: the dirty war in Kenya and the end of empire (New York, NY: W.W. Norton 2005); Matthew Hughes, Britain’s pacification of Palestine: the British Army, the colonial state, and the Arab revolt, 1936–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019); Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2012); Karl Hack, Defense and decolonization in Southeast Asia: Britain, Malaya and Singapore, 1941–68 (Richmond: Curzon 2001).

¹⁴ See for example the work by Thomas Mockaitis and Ian F.W. Beckett. Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60 (London: Macmillan 1990); Ian F.W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies – Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (London: Routledge 2001). It should be noted that Professor Beckett has since observed that ‘the increasing depth of primary research is constantly forcing a reconsideration of what seemed so certain a quarter of a century ago … ’ quoted from Ian F. W. Beckett, ‘British counter-insurgency: a historiographical reflection’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 23/4-5 (2012), 789.

¹⁵ Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade (London, Penguin 1987); John Gooch and Elliot Cohen, Military Misfortunes – the anatomy of failure in war (New York: Free Press 1990).

¹⁶ See Jamie Doward, ‘In no man’s land: anger as publisher puts book criticizing army on hold’, The Observer, 18 August 2019. Article available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/18/writer-aghast-publisher-halts-history-of-british-army-book. Accessed 21 July 2021. A follow up story appeared after The Changing of the Guard was published. See Sian Cain, ‘“A terrifying precedent”: author describes struggle to publish British army history’, The Guardian, 23 July 2021. Article available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/23/author-describes-struggle-to-publish-army-history-simon-akam-the-changing-of-the-guard. Accessed 3 August 2021.

¹⁷ M. L. R Smith and David Martin Jones, The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency – Strategic Problems, Puzzles and Paradoxes (New York: Columbia University Press 2015).

¹⁸ Matthew Ford and Jeffrey Michaels, ‘Bandwagonistas: Rhetorical Redescription, Strategic Choice and the Politics of Counterinsurgency’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 22/2 (2011).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Ford

Matthew Ford is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex. Matthew worked as a strategic analyst at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory, an agency of the UK Ministry of Defence. He has written on counterinsurgency, organization change and military innovation. His forthcoming book is called Radical War: data, attention and control in the 21^st century (London: Hurst & Co, 2022). This examines the fallout and dysphoria as expressed in a media ecology that emerged during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.