Why was the British army so ill-prepared to fight the second world war?

Conflict comes highly recommended. Two former chiefs of the defence staff, Generals David Richards and Nicholas Carter, praise it for identifying key lessons from the past appropriate to the future. A former MoD strategic adviser, Sir Hew Strachan, says it will ‘challenge the professional and enlighten the generalist’. The US marine corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis, ‘the warrior monk’, says it is ‘a clear-sighted assessment of war’s future’. And the late Henry Kissinger called it ‘an exceptional book, written by two absolute masters of their profession’.

Kissinger had been General David Petraeus’s champion since the latter’s fall from grace as head of the CIA following the exposure of an affair in Afghanistan with a subordinate officer, the wife of a former officer. As a past national security adviser and secretary of state, he features large in the book. Air and naval endorsements are evidently yet to come.