It is hard to know where to start in reviewing a book like Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine, Sir Lawrence Freedman’s most recent capacious history of a military phenomenon. In previous work, Freedman has tackled strategy and nuclear deterrence—pretty much all of both.[1] Here, he sets out to examine “the interplay” between politics and battlefield decisions since 1945. It is 515 pages and examines, more or less, how wars have been run across 15 mostly well-known cases. President Harry Truman, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Cuban Missile Crisis are here, as are the recent US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with wars waged in and by Vietnam, Israel, and Russia. Given the topic, it should be primarily of interest to military historians and civil-military relations scholars.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review Essay 113
Lawrence Freedman. Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0197540671.
Review by Alice Hunt Friend, Independent Scholar
15 January 2025 | PDF: http://issforum.org/to/RE113 | Website: rjissf.org | X: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse | Commissioning Editor: Daniel R. Hart | Production Editor: Christopher Ball
It is hard to know where to start in reviewing a book like Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine, Sir Lawrence Freedman’s most recent capacious history of a military phenomenon. In previous work, Freedman has tackled strategy and nuclear deterrence—pretty much all of both.[1] Here, he sets out to examine “the interplay” between politics and battlefield decisions since 1945. It is 515 pages and examines, more or less, how wars have been run across 15 mostly well-known cases. President Harry Truman, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Cuban Missile Crisis are here, as are the recent US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with wars waged in and by Vietnam, Israel, and Russia. Given the topic, it should be primarily of interest to military historians and civil-military relations scholars.
But it is uncertain how much those groups will get out of Command. It is too loosely knit together and is too repetitive and reductionist of other, deeper studies (and, in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, of the very well-known dialogue between US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chief of Naval Operations George Anderson; even non-historians may recognize the dialogue from the movie version of Thirteen Days).[2] The basic limitation of this book stems from its ambition: an encyclopedia of war management cannot dwell on any single one of its many concepts. The result is a “greatest hits” of civil-military and military-military tension and not a few platitudes about politics, personalities, decision-making, delegation, strategy, tactics, regime types, autonomy, and control. Freedman observes that command structures in alliances are complicated, civilian and military leaders have overlapping responsibilities, military command is unavoidably political, and agents have more information than principals—“subordinate commanders invariably have a better grasp of their own situation” (498).
Command is best approached like a buffet, with its contents consumed selectively. In terms of contemporary topics, Freedman analyzes the recent Russian offensive operations in Ukraine. If one’s understanding of the Falklands War is limited to an episode of The Crown, Freedman provides a useful case study of that conflict.[3] There may not be much new for scholars who study these topics, and Command does not generate a different way of looking at the selected wars, wartime leadership, or leaders in general. But Freedman accessibly provides the essentials of these topics, including an excellent bibliography of those authors who have addressed these questions elsewhere.
By way of more detail, the book is a study of how leaders lead in war, part civil-military relations analysis and part multi-character study. There is something for everyone in the social sciences and the general military-curious public: history, political science, sociology, psychology. The chapters sweep across conflicts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the political nature of military command. The assertion here is that power relations among military leaders, occasional civilians, and those they command matter as much to the outcomes of the wars Freedman covers as relations between states. Of the influences on these relations, Freedman singles out personality—a combination of charisma (the capacity to inspire, persuade, and have a good relationship with others), willpower (or “resolve,” [3-4]), and judgment. He argues that this is true across types of war, from conventional armed conflict to “war among the people” (461).
Command itself is a fact and phenomenon. The first line of the book offers the Latin origins of its modern meaning, both in “noun” and “verb form” (1). Command is, yes, an order. It is also a state of mind, a psychological space some people inhabit (such people are almost exclusively men; the Falklands chapter marks the first appearance of a woman in the narrative, although Freedman’s review of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s command style is dismissive [214-247]). Command is also a structure, a hierarchical chain from the chief to the lowest rank of enlisted personnel. The argument that personality is dispositive in the outcomes of war flows from Freedman’s explanation that command is both a mental and social fact. People are (or are not) commanding in these stories; they persuade others, or they do not. Their charisma charms or their doggedness compels.
The book’s subject is obviously important, and the case selections offer diverse if not entirely systematic comparisons, but the narrative’s lack of focus abjures a deeper understanding. The topic in the subtitle, the political nature of military operations, is a case in point. Despite decades of civil-military relations theorists’ earnest insistence that an artificial divide between politics and military expertise is normatively a good thing, the two are inextricable from each other.[4] Civil-military scholars have only recently begun to discuss this in their work.[5] But Command’s brief foray into this topic robs readers of a more probing analysis. Instead, it leans on summary and simplification. The result is confusion. He shows the political impact of military commanders’ decisions in one chapter, and in another he writes, “in practice, few leaders can stay on top of both the political and military decision-making processes” (172). It is not clear what to make of these conflicting signals.
Freedman’s narrative does little to tie the cases together into coherent findings. One can cherry pick here without missing the bigger picture because the book does not provide one. The introduction is not structured like a guide through the material, thus Freedman rarely refers to it in the case studies. Freedman explains that the book explores “the interplay between… political and operational considerations” (12). This is followed by a series of platitudes: there are tensions between powerful people; communicating commands is tricky; some degree of autonomy is good, but superiors and subordinates tend to disagree about how much autonomy is best; and in times of “high drama, with clashes of personalities…human agency mattered” (13). This is all true but not in an actionable way. Freedman concludes that the cases show that war is various and unpredictable, meaning that the strategic and tactical choices expressed via command are shaped by many factors. In the end, “there is no simple pattern” (493).
As for insights into how the civil-military relationship shapes the strategic frameworks that drive operational choices, Freedman asserts that the distinction between civilian and military realms matters less than the face-offs between civil-military coalitions, which are alliances that form among officers and civilian leaders. Freedman notes that these coalitions form “between those in the national capital and those in the field,” and that is the “divide” that matters most (9). Conversely, Freedman also argues that militaries across countries and conflicts tended to lead civilians rather than vice versa, since civilians do not know enough about military matters either to competently or confidently make operational decisions. Other scholars have observed this tendency before, although with more allowance for variation among civilians. I was struck by the contrast with Eliot Cohen’s argument in Supreme Command that civilian leaders often know exactly what they are doing.[6] Freedman’s narrative tends to credit military accounts of civilian performance too readily. In the Falklands chapter, for example, he relays that First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Henry Leach felt that Margaret Thatcher “was displaying her ignorance of the state of the armed forces” (217). Perhaps, but it is apparent that Leach was motivated to be in the right, and the book contains no other perspective on the meeting.
It is curious that in a book about politics and how levels of war interact, Freedman generally dismisses the “high” level of politics in which civilians engage as less relevant to command. For example, in the chapter on President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, we are told that Truman weighed the political consequences of dismissing MacArthur, but there is scant discussion of the factors that weighed on his mind (24-25). Freedman devotes much more space to what he calls the “low politics” of operational execution than on the “high politics” of international relations, “out of which the objectives for military action emerge” (8). This neglects the place where politicians, who are the professionals in politics, add the most value and for which they are held accountable in any case. (Freedman explicitly acknowledges this latter fact [9].) The civilian role in command fades into obscurity here. That Freedman endorses the essential corrective that generals are political actors, a truth best explored by Risa Brooks,[7] is a welcome reinforcement. But it is curious that the book includes little discussion of civilians’ own political competence, and how their political perspective shapes how they exercise command.
Despite its treatment of civilians, the book’s emphasis on the interactions between politics and military command is a welcome addition to the field. Freedman quotes Hew Strachan’s argument that having a political sense just means that “officers have to be able to negotiate as well as to fight” (8). He then shows how different military officers negotiated domestic politics, both successfully and catastrophically. This seemingly common-sense point about the way war really works has been in perpetual struggle against the pseudo-Huntingtonian dogma that officers should be apolitical.[8] I hope war colleges and civilian institutions alike will put both Command and Cohen’s Supreme Command on syllabuses so that this bafflingly needless debate can be settled once and for all.
Alice Hunt Friend is an expert in defense policy and an affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. Friend has served in several roles at the US Department of Defense, most recently as the deputy chief of staff to the deputy secretary of defense. She has a PhD in International Relations from American University and was previously the Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Institute for Security and Technology, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and an Adjunct Senior Yellow at the Center for a New American Security. She is the author of Mightier Than the Sword: Civilian Control of the Military and the Revitalization of Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2024) and has been published in the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, War on the Rocks, Lawfare, and Just Security.
[1] Lawrence Freedman, Strategy: A History (Oxford University Press, 2013); Freedman, The Future of War: A History (Public Affairs, 2017); Freedman, Nuclear Deterrence (Ladybird Books, 2018); Freedman, Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (Oxford University Press, 2019).
[2] Movie buffs may recognize it from the dialogue from the Thirteen Days, directed by Roger Donaldson (Warner, 2000). The title of the movie is from Robert Kennedy’s book, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Norton, 1969), but the movie is based on Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow’s The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis by (Harvard University Press, 1997).
[3] The topic was recently treated in the popular television series The Crown, directed by Paul Whittington (Netflix, 2020).
[4] See, for example, Sharon Weiner, Managing the Military: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Civil-Military Relations (Columbia University Press, 2023).
[5] Alice Hunt Friend, Mightier Than the Sword: Civilian Control of the Military and the Revitalization of Democracy (Stanford University Press, 2024).
[6] Eliot Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (Anchor, 2002).
[7] Risa Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton University Press, 2008).
[8] Samuel Huntington was a Harvard University political scientist who served as the White House coordinator of security planning for the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter. See Brooks, “The Paradoxes of Huntingtonian Professionalism,” in Brooks, Daniel Mauer, and Lionel Beehner, eds., Reconsidering American Civil-Military Relations: The Military, Society, Politics, and Modern War (Oxford University Press, 2020), 17-40.