War From The Ground Up

Product Description

As a British infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles Emile Simpson completed three tours of Southern Afghanistan. Drawing on that experience & on a range of little-known case studies ranging from Nepal to Borneo War From The Ground Up offers a distinctive perspective on contemporary armed conflict: while most accounts of war look down at the battlefield from an academic perspective or across it as a personal narrative the author looks up from the battlefield to consider the concepts that put him there & how they played out on the ground. Simpson argues that in the Afghan conflict & in contemporary conflicts more generally liberal powers & their armed forces have blurred the line between military & political activity. More broadly they have challenged the distinction between war & peace. He contends that this loss of clarity is more a response to the conditions of combat in the early twenty-first century particularly that of globalisation than a deliberate choice. The issue is thus not whether the West should engage in such practices but how to manage gain advantage from & mitigate the risks of this evolution in warfare. War From The Ground Up draws heavily on personal anecdotes from the frontline related to historical context & strategic thought to offer a re-evaluation of the concept of war in modern conflict.