Gil Barndollar
It’s been a rough new millennium for armies. After the end of history ended abruptly on 9/11, US and NATO land forces spent twenty years pursuing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars to achieve strategic defeat despite the massive tactical overmatch they held against insurgent enemies.
The US Army now grapples with an identity crisis, while European NATO forces are in far worse shape: belatedly rearming, but increasingly unable to man their shrunken formations. The West’s potential adversaries are hardly better off: The failures of Russia’s military reforms have been dramatically exposed since 2022, while China seems to doubt its army’s readiness for war amid relentless purges of the top ranks.
A major land war in Europe, now three years old, has certainly given a shot in the arm to discussions of ground combat—and to European defense budgets. But the grinding, attritional nature of the war in Ukraine, after the failure of Russia’s initial coup de main and Ukraine’s 2023 counterattack, has fueled a legion of technological determinists who argue that drones have revolutionized warfare. (The metastasizing US defense venture capital sector, now armed with political influence commensurate with its growth, may also be a factor in this latest RMA devil’s tattoo).
William F. (Wilf) Owen is having none of it. A British Army veteran, defense consultant, and editor of Military Strategy Magazine, Owen is a longtime analyst and commentator on military affairs, often in the pages of the British Army Review and the RUSI Journal. A naturalized Israeli citizen, he blends deep knowledge of two nearly opposite military cultures. Britain wields the original long-service, professionalized Anglosphere army,
while Israel is the world’s foremost model for a conscript, reservist, nation in arms. In his new book, Euclid’s Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today, Owen has done something oddly rare in contemporary military writing: assembling an intensely practical primer on modern tactics and training, based around the idea of what an army division should look like and what it needs to fight today.
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