Lawrence Freedman: ‘Autocracies tend to make catastrophic decisions. That’s the case with Putin’
The military strategy expert and author of a new book on conflict says the flawed thinking behind Russia's invasion stems from the inability of those at the top to take responsibility for mistakes
Russia's war against Ukraine has been hampered by failings experienced by autocratic states during conflict, according to a far-reaching new study of command in war by one of the UK's most prominent academics in the field.
Command, a wide-ranging analysis of post-second world war conflicts by the leading strategic studies expert Lawrence Freedman, examines a series of well-known conflicts, from the Cuban missile crisis to the French defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu, through to the Falklands war and Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, up to the present war in Ukraine.
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