1. Introduction : command as politics
2. Supreme commander : Truman and MacArthur
3. The fury of the legions : the French army in Indochina and Algeria
4. Keeping control : the Cuban missile crisis
5. The very model of insubordination : Ariel Sharon and Israel's wars
6. Civil war : the surrender of East Pakistan
7. Orders from on high : responses to North Vietnam's 1972 offensive
8. Command in theatre : the Falklands campaign
9. Dictator as supreme commander : Saddam Hussein
10. Command in a fragile state : Guevara, Kabila and the Congo
11. Command in a faltering state : the Russian invasion of Chechnya
12. Too many cooks : Kosovo in 1999
13. From hybrid conflict to all-out war : Russia fights Ukraine
14. The war on terror : the battle of Tora Bora
15. A tale of two surges : Iraq 2006-7
16. War among the people : fighting the Taliban and Isis
17. Past, present and future of command.

Throughout history, the concept of command - as both a way to achieve objectives and as an assertion of authority - has been essential to military action and leadership. But, as Sir Lawrence Freedman shows, it is also deeply political. Military command has been reconstructed and revolutionized since the Second World War by nuclear warfare, small-scale guerrilla land operations and cyber interference. Freedman takes a global perspective, systematically investigating its practice and politics since 1945 through a wide range of conflicts from the French Colonial Wars, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Bangladesh Liberation War to North Vietnam's Easter Offensive of 1972, the Falklands War, the Iraq War and Russia's wars in Chechnya and Ukraine.