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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leath, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm joined by Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman, the military historian and theorist,

whose new book is Command the Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. Sir Lawrence,

welcome. This is a book that ranges over a huge amount of ground, an enormous number of

different conflicts and different situations and types of

command. Can you try and give me a sense to start with? What was the sort of question,

if there was a question, that you were trying to answer in writing this book?

I think the question I was trying to address was the assumption that there's a clear

demarcation between the politicians who set the

objectives of a war and the military who fight them. And the military put a lot of effort into

demanding clear objectives and then the politicians to stay well clearly while they sort it out.

And it doesn't work like that that so part of my approach was to

demonstrate that that doesn't work but then find as many cases to show the different ways in which

the military influence political decisions and the politicians influence military decisions or the

political context influences the military decisions.

So that was sort of the underlying starting point.

Because the second aspect that I was very keen on was to show there's quite a rich military history

after 1945.

There's many books, excellent books, still coming out on the First and Second World Wars,

and obviously these are enormous climactic conflicts with masses of material still to explore.

But there's an awful lot that's happened after 1945 as well, and that gets less attention,

...