Sir John Keegan

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  John Keegan and Richard Holmes are eminently qualified to write such a book.
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  At the time of writing Keegan was Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the RMA Sandhurst, with many other military books to his credit.

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  Although Saddam struck the first formal blow, "What made war likely-even inevitable," argues Shahram Chubin, coauthor of Iran and Iraq at War (1988), was Iran's "neglect of, and disdain for, the (traditional) military balance obtaining between the two countries."[117] In the analysis of Efraim Karsh, editor of The Iran-Iraq War (1989), Iraq's invasion was preemptive, "an offensive move motivated by a defensive strategy."[118] Additionally, whereas the potential fruits of an attack were immense, the risks were minimal.[119] "Objectively," judges the military historian John Keegan, "the resort to force was a logical option."[120] Indeed, only force would have, as it did, thwarted Khomeini and kept Saddam in power.
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  The military historian John Keegan puts the number at 100,000.John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 69.
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  [120] John Keegan, The Iraq War (New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 61.

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  Sir John Keegan, the Daily Telegraph's military historian, seemed to value Irving higher than his victorious opponent in the recent libel action, Professor Deborah Lipstadt.

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  Published on: 11/1/2003    Last Visited: 1/1/2004  

  JOHN KEEGAN
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  by John Keegan
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  John Keegan, who has elucidated battle, leadership, naval command and several critical campaigns, turns his attention in this latest book to military intelligence.Agents and analysts who merely "tick over" in peacetime - running their operations and surveillance - are supposed to bring victory in wartime.Some states and forces have been more successful than others in what Keegan describes as a complex five-step intelligence process: acquisition, delivery, acceptance, interpretation and implementation.Rumors and abstract mutterings cannot be accepted at face value and instantly applied.They must be sifted, analyzed and fitted effectively into a plan of campaign.Some fleets and armies have done this brilliantly; others have faltered, misunderstood and failed.Keegan brings the tortuous process to life in a half-dozen case studies that will deepen your understanding of war.
  
  The book begins with Admiral Horatio Nelson's restless hunt for the French navy in the Mediterranean in 1798, a hunt that culminated in the battle of Aboukir Bay at the mouth of the Nile."Nelson's anxious and active mind would not permit him to rest for a moment in the same place," a contemporary wrote, yet somehow the admiral had to temper this natural restlessness with a cool study of French inclinations.Keegan wonderfully describes the sketchy nature of intelligence in the age of sail.
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  As Keegan concludes: "Kipling's Kim, who has survived into modern times only as the delightful literary creation of a master novelist, may come to provide a model of the anti-fundamentalist agent...far superior to any holder of a PhD in higher mathematics."448 pages • 6" x 9" • 16 pages of b&w photos
  
  About the Author: John Keegan's books include The Face of Battle, War and Our World, and The Mask of Command.He is the defence editor of the Daily Telegraph.

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  Published on: 11/8/2008    Last Visited: 11/8/2008  

  John Keegan
  
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  For other persons named John Keegan, see John Keegan (disambiguation).
  
  Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE (born 15 May 1934) is a British military historian, lecturer and journalist. He has published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime and intelligence warfare as well as the psychology of battle.
  
  Keegan is possibly the best-known British military historian of the 20th century. Although (unlike many other military historians) he has never served as a soldier, this is hard to discern from his books, which are as concerned with the experience of the common soldier as with the tactics and strategy of the generals. This is particularly evident in The (Illustrated) Face of Battle, which discusses in detail the effect of infantry and cavalry on each other, the effects of wounds and illness, and the morale of the troops, in three successive battlesâ€"Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Sommeâ€"which occurred in different centuries but in the same region. Like many military-history texts, this book has diagrams with boxes and arrows showing movements of infantry, cavalry, and artillery units; but he discusses the soldiers in depth. He has spent much of his life teaching officersâ€"and listening to them.
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  Keegan was born in Clapham, the son of an Irish Catholic family[1]. His father served in the First World War.
  
  At the age of 13 Keegan contracted orthopedic tuberculosis, which has subsequently affected his gait. This illness interrupted his education during his teenage years; however, his education included two years at Wimbledon College leading to entry to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953. Following graduation he worked at the American Embassy in London for three years.
  
  In 1960 he was appointed to a lectureship in Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the training establishment for officers of the British Army. Holding the post for 36 years, he became senior lecturer in military history during his tenure. During this period he also held a visiting professorship at Princeton University and was Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar College, a visiting professorship.[2]
  
  Leaving the academy in 1986[3] Keegan joined the Daily Telegraph as a Defence Correspondent and remains with the publication as Defence Editor, also writing for the American conservative website, National Review Online.
  
  In 1998 he wrote and presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, entitled War in our World.
  
  Keegan was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Gulf War honours list and later, in the Millennium Dome honours list, he was knighted.
  
  The long-term effects of his tuberculosis rendered him unfit for military service and the timing of his birth made him too young for service in World War II, as mentioned in his works as an ironic observation on his profession and interest.[4]
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  In A History of Warfare, Keegan outlines the development and limitations of warfare from prehistory to the modern era. It looks at various topics, including the use of horses, logistics, and "fire". One key concept put forward is that war is inherently cultural. In the introduction, he rigorously denounces the idiom "war is a continuation of policy by other means", rejecting on its face "Clausewitzian" ideas.
  
  He has also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict.
  
  Frank C. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as being "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century".[5] In a book-cover blurb extracted from a more complex article, Michael Howard wrote: at once the most readable and the most original of living historians.[6]
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  An article in the Christian Science Monitor calls Keegan a "staunch supporter" of the Iraq War. The article quotes Keegan: "Uncomfortable as the 'spectacle of raw military force' is, he concludes, that the Iraq war represents 'a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.' "[7] He frequently justifies the war by making comparisons between it and other, more popular wars, such as both World Wars and the Napoleonic Wars.
  
  Criticism
  
  Keegan has also been criticised by peers, including Sir Michael Howard[8] and Christopher Bassford [9] for his critical position on Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer and writer on military philosophy.
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  Keegan is described as profoundly mistaken and Bassford states that Nothing anywhere in Keegan's workâ€"despite his many diatribes about Clausewitz and 'the Clausewitzians'â€"reflects any reading whatsoever of Clausewitz's own writings.
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  Atlas of World War II edited by John Keegan (London: Collins, 2006) ISBN 0-00-721465-0 (an update of the 1989 Times Atlas)
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  Snowman, Daniel "John Keegan" page 28-30 from History Today, Volume 50, Issue # 5, May 2000. Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John Keegan" Categories:,1934 births | Living people | People from Clapham | Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford | British historians | British military writers | World War I historians | English historians | English journalists | Knights Bachelor | Officers of the Order of the British Empire | British military historians

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  Published on: 7/4/2009    Last Visited: 7/4/2009  

  Sir John Keegan Potomac Books - Sir John Keegan
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  Sir John Keegan
  
  Sir John Keegan served as Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and as the Defence Analyst for the Daily Telegraph. He is the author of many books, including The Face of Battle, Six Armies in Normandy, Battle at Sea, The Mask of Command, The Second World War, A History of Warfare, and The Iraq War. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, received an OBE in the Gulf War honors list, and was knighted in the Millennium honors list in 1999. He lives in Wiltshire, England.
  
  Books by Sir John Keegan :
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  Foreword by Sir John Keegan

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  by JOHN KEEGAN
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  Keegan never tries to ram his learning down your throat. Where other authors have struggled to explain how Britain could ever allow itself to be dragged into such a war in 1914, Keegan keeps his account practical. The level of communications that we enjoy today just didn't exist then, and so it was much harder to keep track of what was going on. By the time a message had finally reached the person in question, the situation may have changed out of all recognition. Keegan applies this same "cock-up" theory of history to the rest of the war, principally the three great disasters at Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The generals didn't send all those troops to their deaths deliberately, Keegan argues; they did it out of incompetence and ineptitude, and because they had no idea of what was actually going on at the front.
  
  While The First World War is not afraid to point the finger at those generals who deserve it, even Keegan has to admit he doesn't have all the answers. If it all seems so obviously futile and such a massive waste of life now, he asks, how could it have seemed worthwhile back then?
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  Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the doomed diplomatic efforts to avert the catastrophe; he probes the haunting question of how a civilization at the height of its cultural achievement and prosperity could propel itself toward ruin with so little provocation; his panoramic narrative brings to life the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend - Verdun, the Somme, Gallipoli - as with profound sympathy, he explores the minds of Joffe, Haig and Hindenburg, the famed generals who directed the cataclysm.
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  Keegan misses a few facts, such as failing to mention the taxicab drivers who ferried French troops to the front in the First Battle of the Marne (also known as the Miracle of the Marne), as well as why Moltke the Younger was abruptly relieved of command (failing to mention he suffered a nervous breakdown). The taxicab incident is considered by some as unimportant but it should have been mentioned; however, absence of Moltke's breakdown definitely is a oversight. I'm not an expert on WWI but a few other mistakes no doubt are present. Keegan shows bias, which all historians do, mentioning the Turkish deportations against the Armenians as "the Ottoman government's undeclared campaign of genocide against their Armenian subjects", which, if you read The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide by Guenter Lewy, is not so clear cut (then again, Lewy's book was published in 2007, after Keegan wrote his book, but my point is that Keegan has his prejudices). Also Keegan seems (to me) to praise the British soldiers excessively, he may have had a UK reading audience in mind, though that may be just my prejudice. All in all, a competent, workmanlike history of WWI. I liked some of his other books better.
  
  Authoritative, comprehensive but few surprises which may be the point. Keegan is a very reliable historian. He takes a steady, thoughtful, thorough approach to the build up to the first world war and then leads his readers step by long step through the war. While readers will find little to argue with I will venture to guess that they will find little to delight or astound them either. The sections on Serbia and the Eastern front in particular offer interesting reading though the book in general feels like a textbook.
  
  Essential Reading for background on World War One This is an outstanding book, and essential reading for anyone needing an introduction to World War I. This war was quite different from the one that followed it. The mindless human sacrifice - millions of men walking arm in arm into the face of enemy gun fire - made somewhat explicable by John Keegan. Not that the lunacy of armed conflict can ever be justified or rationalized, but at least the causes can sometimes be explained, and Keegan does that as he meticulously lays out the political and military landscapes that started the war in 1914, and ultimately led to its conclusion with the armistice of 1918.
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  One of the best known military historians writing today is Sir John Keegan. A former faculty member at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, Keegan is now the defense editor for "The Daily Telegraph. He made a name for himself as a historian with "The Face of Battle."
  
  It is hardly surprising then that Keegan decided to write a general account of World War I. During this conflict, the British Army grew to its largest size ever, but the four years of this war initiated the decline of the United Kingdom as a power in world affairs. The book presents the Great War in the elegant prose that readers have come to expect from Keegan.
  
  The author brings his expertise to bear in many important ways. He shows that the von Schliefen Plan was intellectually flawed from the get go. It could never have worked. Technological limitations, primarily those in communication, made it almost impossible for commanders to exert the type of control they had had in the past, or would have again in the future. At the same time, weapons with heavy firepower and the wealth of industrial nations allowed the combatants to put huge armies into the field on a scale larger than ever before.
  
  Keegan focuses primarily on the experiences of the British Army. The Germans receive second billing. The French get much less attention even though they had more divisions in the field than their allies on the other side of the English Channel. Western Europe is the main area that Keegan discusses. Naval warfare, the Eastern Front and operations in Africa and Asia get far less attention.
  
  According to Keegan, the ultimate factor in the allied victory was the sheer number of American troops that began arriving in France in 1918.
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  Some historians have argued that the British and French Armies, particularly the British, had improved over the course of the war, but Keegan rejects this view. He believes it was simple raw numbers that crushed the Germans. Mass industrialization is clearly an important factor in this war as Keegan shows in convincing fashion during the earlier stages of this book, but to believe that it is the only factor is taking a good argument a little too far.
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan

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  by John Keegan
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  John Keegan, a senior instructor at Sandhurst, the British Military Academy, speaks for soldiers who were present in the fray.
  
  For examples, Keegan selects Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815, and the Somme in 1916. What is common about them, what is different? Agincourt was hand-to-hand combat, thrust and cut--a fearful and personal encounter. At Waterloo, 400 years later, the battle was still largely personal. As it swayed back and forth, men on opposite sides came to recognize the same individuals they had fought off in previous charges.
  
  Keegan closes his book with the Somme.
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  I have read many recent historical works of John Keegan including has book on WWI and the Price of Admiralty.
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  THis work lives up to the highest academic standards that I have come to expect of Keegan. e provides new insights in three epic battles ,He wets your appetite for history ,he makes it real and interesting
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan
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  by JOHN KEEGAN

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  by John Keegan
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  "Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living military historians . . . A History of Warfare is perhaps the most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written."--The New York Times Book Review.
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  Keegan sets out on a bold crusade to discredit Carl von Clausewitz and fails - miserably.
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  1) Keegan is oblivious of the fact that Clausewitz's phrase "war is a contiunation of politics by other means" is the antithesis in a dialectical argument, whose thesis is the point that "war is nothing but a duel [or wrestling match, a better translation of the German Zweikampf] on a larger scale. His synthesis, which resolves the deficiencies of these two bold statements, says that war is neither "nothing but" an act of brute force nor "merely" a rational act of politics or policy. This synthesis lies in his "fascinating trinity" [wunderliche Dreifaltigkeit]: a dynamic, inherently unstable interaction of the forces of violent emotion, chance, and rational calculation.
  
  2. Keegan limits the Clausewitzian definition of politics to western, secular government-based power. This is totally wrong. Clausewitz made no limits on the term "politics" - it is Keegan who does that, claiming that pre-state cultures cannot possess a certain cultural or religious policy that can lead to war.
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  John Keegan takes issue with the classic dictum of Carl von Clausewitz that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
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  Keegan proceeds in this clearly written volume to make his case that organized violence in the form of war is not on a continuum with political endeavor. Keegan takes a holistic view in this survey of warfare; placing war in a cultural, geographic, and economic context across time. In so doing, Keegan dissects and dismantles Clausewitz and the one-dimensional view of war as a "tool" of foreign policy.
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  But as other reviewers have noted, Keegan proves himself to be up to the task. And he accomplishes it in fewer than 400 pages too (similar to his accomplishment in The Second World War, a standard work of less than 600 pages which should be required reading for every high school senior).
  
  After his first chapter, which is an overview of "War in Human History," Keegan divides those following according to four key technical advances known to history: "Stone," "Flesh" (specifically horse flesh), "Iron" and "Fire.
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  In my opinion, Keegan not only successfully shoots down the notion that war is a wholly-rational Clausewitzian enterprise, he also points out most clearly both the past consequences and the future dangers of treating it so.
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  Therefore ultimately -- and surprisingly somewhat naively -- Keegan fails at the impossible task of divorcing war and politics from the same continuum by treating the latter as if it were a wholly-rational enterprise itself.
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  Right or wrong, Keegan is a military historian of the first rank who ought not be ignored.
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  Keegan explains with many examples that war predates politics.
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  Its not that Keegan would have prevented WW I, but his analysis of what war is and how it should be prosecuted could have helped separate the political mire (which outlasted the War and led to WW II) from the actual combat. Perhaps fewer deaths would have occurred.
  
  Ambitious in scope, engaging in style Few books in the market provide a better general overview of the history of warfare since the dawn of war-making. In this ambitious piece of work, Keegan ranges effortlessly across epochs and continents to tell the story of more than four millennia of world history.
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  Keegan offers something more for the informed reader through the inroads he makes into military philosophy.
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan
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  by John Keegan
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  by JOHN KEEGAN

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  by John Keegan
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  John Keegan, a senior instructor at Sandhurst, the British Military Academy, speaks for soldiers who were present in the fray. ...

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