Ground Truth

Frank Ledwidge is a Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Law at the University of Portsmouth, UK. He is the author of several books, including the best-selling Losing Small Wars (2011), which was selected as a 'Book of the Year' by The Times.Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, UK. He is the author of numerous books including Strategy in War and Peace: A Critical Introduction (2017) and War: A Beginner's Guide (2016).Helen Parr is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Keele, UK. She is the author of Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (2018) which won the Templer Medal Book Prize, the Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History, the Longman-History Today Book Prize and was Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

After twenty years of almost unbroken wars of choice, the ethical deficiencies in the operational conduct of war by Western armed forces, has largely been ignored by scholarly critique - this volume addresses these deficiencies. It features analysis by some of the UK's leading soldiers, veterans and scholars working in the fields of military ethics and contemporary conflict.Individual chapters discuss problems ranging from the practicalities of how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign in one of the most challenging combat zones in the world, to the failure to account properly for defeat during military conflicts, among many others. The book addresses questions perennially raised about the role of the military in a democratic society and the extent to which its ideals are compromised in fighting wars of choice. Finally, the contributors look at remedies and solutions to these compromises by examining how previous generations faced similar problems and acted to solve them, and look ahead to see what lessons can be applied in a very different future.

Draws on a wide range of case studies across the past twenty years of British military engagement

Foreword - Professor Sir Lawrence FreedmanIntroduction - Frank LedwidgePart One: David Benest's legacyChapter 1: 'Not the British way of doing business': Atrocities in military operations and how to avoid them - Aaron EdwardsChapter 2: The military virtues: David Benest and David Fisher on when soldiers turn bad - Simon AnglimChapter 3: Legal accountability at the tactical level and the Overseas Operations Act - Nicholas MercerPart Two: Legal and moral accountabilityChapter 4: The Iraq war crimes allegations and the investigative conundrum - Andrew WilliamsChapter 5: From forgetting to institutional failure: The army as a non-learning organization - Matthew FordChapter 6: Accountability, responsibility and culpability: Are British senior officers truly 'professional'? - Frank LedwidgePart Three: Combat realitiesChapter 7: The operational design for Nad-e-Ali South, Afghanistan, 2011 - Oliver LeeChapter 8: Killing over winning: How fluid ethics turned success into failure for Britain's special forces - Chris GreenChapter 9: Must liberal democracies compromise their values in order to defeat insurgencies? - Louise JonesPart Four: Myths, stories and memoryChapter 10: The lonely death of Highlander Scott McLaren - Edward BurkeChapter 11: Military myths - John WilsonChapter 12: Remembering the British soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan - Helen ParrBibliographyAuthors' biographiesIndex