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WAR IN THE MODERN WORLD

Welcome to the website!

Most of the papers here are from my studies at King's College London in an online "programme" for mid-career British Army officers called War in the Modern World. About half were indeed British Army, including a captain who deployed to Afghanistan midway through the four years. (Alas, upon his return he dropped out of the course, left the army, and began to study law instead.) The rest of us were from militaries and civilian life, from a Danish pilot to an assistant to the prime minister of Singapore. I learned a great deal, and this website is to share it more broadly.

Trench warfare in the Donbas

(From the Wall Street Journal website, May 6)

Send in the clowns!

Okay, a Main Battle Tank from the 1950s can still wreak a lot of damage, but it's far from the Leopard 2 that European countries are slowly sending to Ukraine, let alone the US Abrams that's coming even more slowly. The US-based think tank, the Institute for War Studies, reported recently that "Russian forces may be deploying T-54/55 tanks from long-term storage to Ukraine to compensate for significant armored vehicle losses." You may not remember the T-54, but the Red Army developed it in the 1940s as a replacement for its WW2 armor, and it first saw combat quelling a Hungarian uprising on the "bloody streets of Budapest" (Jack Kennedy's words) in 1957. The slightly more modern T-55 is almost as old. Together they served Soviet Russian and Chinese interests in the Arab countries' wars on Israel, in North Vietnam's war against the South, in Russia's invasion of Aghanistan, and other conflicts around the world. And now these obsolete tanks seem to have made their way to Ukraine in Putin's desperate attempts to bail out his misadventure of February 2022. Bad cess to them, as my Irish mother would have said!

Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet

Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet is a lovely book -- and in half a century of reviwing, that's an adjective I've never used before. I loved the book because Megan Buskey's youth as a Ukranian-American was so like mine as a first generation Irish-American, and because her family's experience as part of Soviet Russia was so like that of the Polish girl I chased through England, France, and Italy in 1955. Ms Buskey seems quite unaware that what she calls "western Ukraine" was for much of history eastern Poland. Her family came from Staryava, which is actually west of the city of Lviv, which Basia Deszberg knew as Lwow, a vibrant Polish city. And just as the Deszberg women were exiled to Soviet Kazakhstan in 1940, so were Megan's mother and grandparents judged politically unreliable in 1947 and deported to Gulag labor in a Siberian coalmine. (Basia was comparatively lucky. Her sojourn in the Soviet Union lasted only two years, while the Mazur family had to stick it out for 20 before they were allowed to emigrate to America.) Read more on the Warbird's Book Club

Blue skies! -- Daniel Ford. You can send humanitarian aid through Razom for Ukraine (a tax-exempt US-based charity). Or donate to the military directly through the National Bank of Ukraine.

The essays (in more or less chronological order)