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.

Foreword - Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman
Introduction - Frank Ledwidge

Part One: David Benest’s legacy
Chapter 1: ‘Not the British way of doing business’: Atrocities in military operations and how to avoid them - Aaron Edwards
Chapter 2: The military virtues: David Benest and David Fisher on when soldiers turn bad - Simon Anglim
Chapter 3: Legal accountability at the tactical level and the Overseas Operations Act - Nicholas Mercer

Part Two: Legal and moral accountability
Chapter 4: The Iraq war crimes allegations and the investigative conundrum - Andrew Williams
Chapter 5: From forgetting to institutional failure: The army as a non-learning organization - Matthew Ford
Chapter 6: Accountability, responsibility and culpability: Are British senior officers truly ‘professional’? - Frank Ledwidge

Part Three: Combat realities
Chapter 7: The operational design for Nad-e-Ali South, Afghanistan, 2011 - Oliver Lee
Chapter 8: Killing over winning: How fluid ethics turned success into failure for Britain’s special forces - Chris Green
Chapter 9: Must liberal democracies compromise their values in order to defeat insurgencies? - Louise Jones

Part Four: Myths, stories and memory
Chapter 10: The lonely death of Highlander Scott McLaren - Edward Burke
Chapter 11: Military myths - John Wilson
Chapter 12: Remembering the British soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan - Helen Parr

Bibliography
Authors’ biographies
Index