Some Selected Publications and Papers

For those who may wish to dive a bit deeper and wish to explore the thinking behind Behavioural Conflict we have brought together a series of Books, Review and Papers that collectively provide, we hope, a reasonably broad resource for further research and enquiry. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us if further discussion is sought.

losing arab hearts and minds

From November 2002 to May 2003, Steve Tatham worked alongside American military planners in the Gulf, coordinating the huge media campaign that foreshadowed and accompanied the eventual invasion of Iraq. From first hand experience he witnessed how, in advance of the outbreak of hostilities, the US planned to win over sceptical Arab hearts and minds. Yet as the campaign unfolded, Tatham, the Royal Navy's public spokesman in Iraq, saw how differently the British and Americans regarded the media and how badly journalists from the Arab world, in particular from Al-Jazeera satellite television, were treated in comparison to those from coalition nations. His book is highly critical of how the United States handled its information war. Notwithstanding the best efforts of well meaning senior US officials, the mounting death toll, both military and civilian, saw the Americans all but ignore the Arab media , focusing instead on a largely acquiescent domestic press, one still obsessed with Al Qaeda's 9/11 attacks on the homeland and only too happy to fly the Stars and Stripes. Images of dead and captured coalition servicemen led to Arab channels being accused of bias against western forces, and such was the demonisation of some channels that many observers began to wonder if President Bush's declaration that 'you are either with us or against us' applied not just to nation states but also to the world's media.

combating serious crimes in postconflict societies

Published in 2006, Combating Serious Crimes in Postconflict Societies: A Handbook for Policymakers and Practitioners, is the product of two years of meetings and expert consultations with over 40 experts with firsthand experience in combating serious crimes in postconflict environments. Andrew Mackay together with a team of expert practitioners wrote the book which was edited by Colette Raush of the USIP.

The aim of the handbook is to provide a practical tool to brief individuals on, and to synopsize, the key issues in appraising and approaching the significant challenge of serious crimes. The handbook contains an overview of potential strategies and tools that may be employed in a society seeking to combat serious crimes. In addition, the book contains an overview of these strategies, discussion of the pros and cons of certain solutions, and references to additional materials and resources related to serious crimes.

It is important to remember that the handbook is not intended as a comprehensive treatise on measures to combat serious crimes or as an operational and tactical manual for law enforcement personnel investigating serious crimes.

An important component of the handbook is the inclusion of practical examples from countries dealing with special crimes. To aid in the development of serious crimes strategies, numerous real-life examples from previous and current postconflict societies and other countries that are dealing with serious crimes challenges are integrated into the handbook, including experiences from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, and other countries.

british generals in blair’s wars

British Generals in Blair's Wars is based on a series of high profile seminars held in Oxford in which senior British officers, predominantly from the army, reflect on their experience of campaigning. Andrew Mackay wrote a chapter that focuses on the role of Influence and the need to understand that the ‘Population is the Prize’. The chapters embrace all the UK's major operations since the end of the Cold War, but they focus particularly on Iraq and Afghanistan. As personal testimonies, they capture the immediacy of the authors' thoughts at the time, and show how the ideas of a generation of senior British officers developed in a period of rapid change, against a background of intense political controversy and some popular unease. The armed forces were struggling to revise their Cold War concepts and doctrines, and to find the best ways to meet the demands placed upon them by their political leaders in what was seen to be a 'New World Order'. It was a time when relations between the Government of the day and the armed services came under close scrutiny, and when the affection of the British public for its forces seemed to grow with the difficulty of their operational tasks.

Publications, a War Artist and Papers

The 52 Brigade tour of Helmand provided Andrew and Steve with the material they needed to begin the task of writing Behavioural Conflict. The tour also led to the acclaimed journalist writing Operation Snakebite which focused on the battle to retake the town of Musa Qala from the Taliban. Professor Theo Farrell also captured the change in approach to counter insurgency that the tour initiated in a number of academic papers and which led to his book Unwinnable. Perhaps the most definitive account of the Helmand campaign todate. The tour also led to the world renowned photographer Robert Wilson visiting Helmand as the official war artist. This led to his seminal book Helmand. We thought it would be of interest in including further detail and so have made available the opening essay by Andrew Mackay. Robert Wilson returned to Afghanistan in 2014 and produced a follow up Helmand Return that was exhibited nationally on billboards throughout the UK. The link below provides further detail of this unique and special art exhibition.

Operation Snakebite

Andrew Mackay met Stephen Grey in Musa Qala after the town had been successfully recaptured. Andrew had approved Stephen as an embedded journalist with 2 Yorks. Always unorthodox he subsequently agreed to cooperate with Stephen Grey in his writing of Operation Snakebite. They remain friends.

In December 2007, Stephen Grey, a Sunday Times reporter, was under fire in Afghanistan as British and US forces struggled to liberate the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala. Taking shelter behind an American armoured Humvee, Grey turned his head to witness scenes of carnage. A car and a truck were riddled with gunfire. Their occupants, including several children, had died. Taliban positions were pounded by bullets and bombs dropped on their compounds. A day later, as the operation continued, a mine exploded just yards from Grey, killing a British soldier.

Stephen Grey was an embedded with B Company, 2 Yorks, in southern Afghanistan during Operation Snakebite. Their mission: to take the Taliban stronghold of Musa Qala. For some this battle will be their last. In the thick of the fighting, Grey provides a breathtaking boots-and-bullets glimpse of combat chaos as British, American and Afghan forces struggle to secure a dusty little desert town known to be crucial to the drug trade. "Operation Snakebite" reveals everything you need to know about the brutal conflict in Afghanistan: from the political infighting and bureaucratic interference to the frontline troops soldiering on with unsuitable gear and poor intelligence.

Unwinnable

Professor Theo Farrell was the Professor of War in the Modern World at the department of of War Studies, Kings College London from 2005 - 2016. From 2013 - 2016 he headed the Department of War Studies, London.

Andrew Mackay had several interviews with Theo and one of the chapters in Unwinnable deals with his tour of Helmand and focus that was placed on securing the population, developing governance and becoming less focused on and more focused on developing non-kinetic, non-fire power capabilities. Theo makes the point that from this point onwards a more nuanced approach is taken with successive Brigades putting in increasing effort into governance but also seeking to find other ways to use the military instrument for influence

Afghanistan was an unwinnable war. This definitive account explains why.

It could have been a very different story. British forces could have successfully withdrawn from Afghanistan in 2002, having done the job they set out to do: to defeat al-Qaeda. Instead, in the years that followed, Britain paid a devastating price for their presence in Helmand province.

So why did Britain enter, and remain, in an ill-fated war? Why did it fail so dramatically, and was this expedition doomed from the beginning? Drawing on unprecedented access to military reports, government documents and senior individuals, Professor Theo Farrell provides an extraordinary work of scholarship. He explains the origins of the war, details the campaigns over the subsequent years, and examines the West’s failure to understand the dynamics of local conflict and learn the lessons of history that ultimately led to devastating costs and repercussions still relevant today.

‘The best book so far on Britain's recent war in Afghanistan’ International Affairs. ‘Masterful, irrefutable… Farrell records all these military encounters with the irresistible pace of a novelist’ Sunday Times

HELMAND

52 Brigade, stationed in Edinburgh, were told in the autumn of 2006 that they would form the Brigade HQ around which the Helmand Task Force would be organised. As the brigade’s tour of duty was drawing to a close in early 2008 their commanding officer, Brigadier Andrew Mackay, took the unusual step of inviting Robert Wilson, a cocial photographer, to work as a war artist recording the life of the troops. Wilson’s role was quite different to that of a photojournalist. he arrive with a tripod and a large camera with which he could make photographs of exceptional detail.

His photographic language had a formality unseen since the very first photography of war in the Crimea one hundred and fifty years ago. beside his records of the landscape and daily life behind perimeter walls, Wilson made portraits of the soldiers, the Afghan troops and children. His studies of the British soldiers on their return from weeks on patrol stand as a historical document. They are both delicate and monumental. Mark Holborn. Editor of Helmand.

From General to Strategic Corporal: Complexity, adaptation and influence

This paper represents nearly two years of work and active consideration – both in the academic domain and in the field of conflict – of the problems confronting the British military in contemporary and future conflict. At its heart is the belief that future campaigns will need to focus on altering the behaviours of others, either in advance – and therefore deterring conflict – or as a coupled component in the process of combat and post combat operations. It takes the deployment of 52 Brigade to Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as its principal case study and examines the thought processes – falling outside more conventional military wisdom and training – that lay behind the Commander’s decisions to mount an influence-led deployment, one that specifically sought to reduce hard kinetic engagement and place the consent of the population at the centre of the operational design. Indeed the paper argues that success in battle will demand as much understanding of social psychology, culture and economics as it does military art and science. It examines the corporate structures available within the MoD to support that decision and, finding them lacking, suggests not only how a new strategic communication structure might evolve to meet future demands but also how the provision of education, learning, unlearning and relearning at every level, from Commander to strategic Corporal, is likely to be the pre-eminent factor in success in future conflict.

Instability, Profitability and behavioural change in complex environments

The world's supply of easily accessible resources is rapidly declining. With the global population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, additional arable land and resources will be needed to satisfy growing demand. This will require agricultural and extractive industries to venture into more complex and unstable regions of the world.

Since the scale and profitability of production is closely related to a stable operating or production environment, in order to be successful firms need to foster stability in the areas they operate. Traditionally this has been attempted through the use of development projects and/or security mechanisms. However, as can be seen in places as varied as Afghanistan, Mozambique and the Niger Delta, this approach has significant limitations. In some cases, far from mitigating problems, security policies have actually fostered instability and severely disrupted multi-national corporations' (MNC) production. One leading policy research organization noted that 36 percent of all global mining projects have been delayed because of public opposition, with over 70 percent of those being delayed by between one and four years.

The Effectiveness of US Military Information Operations in Afghanistan 2001-2010: Why RAND missed the point

This paper challenges the findings of a 2012 RAND study into US Information Operations (IO) in Afghanistan. Whilst agreeing with RAND that if the overall IO mission in Afghanistan is defined as convincing most residents of contested areas to side decisively with the Afghan Government and its foreign allies against the Taliban insurgency then the US mission has failed, it fundamentally disagrees with RAND's conclusions and subsequent recommendations. As operations in Afghanistan draw to an end and critical eyes retrospectively examine the 13 year long mission it is vital that IO is not discredited; the paper finds its original intent laudable but argues its application has been very poor, based upon outdated and failed models of communication, an absence of intelligent customers and an over-reliance upon marketing and PR techniques which were never designed for conflictual societies.

Steve Tatham Papers

Steve Tatham is one of the UK military leading thinkers and practioner’s of the role of Strategic Communication and Influence. Please scroll down to view a selection of 9 his papers.

the application of Target AuDience AnalysiS

NATO Strategic Communications - More to be Done

Social media the vital ground can we hold it?

US government information operations

strategic communication: a primer

qatar: a little local difficulty with dr mohammed El katri

strat comms and influence with dr lee rowland

sOLUTION to Russian propaganda

training humans for the human domain