Ben Barry The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025 review, recensie en informatie boek over de recente geschiedenis van het Britse leger. Op 9 oktober 2025 verschijnt bij Osprey Publishing het boek van Ben Barry, de ex-militair en senior fellow voor oorlogvoering op land bij het International Institute for Strategic Studie. Er is geen Nederlandse vertaling van het boek verkrijgbaar.
Ben Barry The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025 review en recensie
- “Ben Barry combines the intimate knowledge of the insider with the objectivity of the strategic commentator.” (Sir Hew Strachan)
- “This is quite simply a superb discussion of the British Army’s engagement with thinking and doctrine over recent decades.” (Brian Holden Reid, Emeritus Professor of American History and Military Institutions, Department of War Studies, King’s College London)
The Rise and Fall of the British Army
1975-2025
- Auteur: Ben Barry (Engeland)
- Soort boek: militaire geschiedenis
- Taal: Engels
- Uitgever: Osprey Publisking
- Verschijnt: 9 oktober 2025
- Omvang: 496 pagina’s
- Uitgave: gebonden boek / ebook
- Prijs: £ 30,00 / £ 21,00
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol
Flaptekst boek van Ben Barry over het Britse leger 1975-2025
A new study of a critical period in the history of the British Army.
The last half century has seen society, technology, the character of conflict and the British Army itself all change greatly. From a low point in the 1970s, the Army’s war fighting capability increased in the 1980s in the face of a prospective war with the Soviet Union. This capability was then tested on operations from Kuwait in 1991 through to Afghanistan in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
There followed two decades of descent from this high plateau of military achievement. Mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a decline in support for military deployments. Cuts to defence funding and botched equipment procurements also meant the British Army of 2021 was only half the size of that of 1970, and with much key fighting equipment either obsolete or approaching obsolescence.
Ben Barry served in the Army from 1975 to 2010, often in key staff appointments, and has worked closely with the Army in the following decade. This new study draws not only on his personal experience, but also on a very wide range of written sources complemented by interviews to provide a new interpretation of this period that challenges the existing narratives.
Ben Barry was commissioned into the Light Infantry and later commanded its second battalion. He is now Senior Fellow for Land Warfare in the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies, Kings College London. He is the author of Blood, Metal and Dust: How Victory Turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq (Osprey), which was shortlisted for The Duke of Wellington Medal for Military History 2021, the British Army Book of the Year 2021, a finalist for the 2020 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award and awarded First Runner Up in the Templer Medal Book Prize 2021.
