Book Review: War From the Ground Up by Emile Simpson, Book Review by Jacqueline L. Hazelton, Routledge
In War From the Ground Up, Emile Simpson reports on his struggle to reconcile the complex war he found in Afghanistan with what he identifies as the traditional binary conception of war. Simpson, formerly a captain in the British army, attended Oxford, was commissioned into the Royal Gurkha Rifles in 2006, and served three tours in Afghanistan. Though Simpson provides glimpses of his time as a soldier, this book is primarily about Simpson's intellectual exploration of war rather than a story of adventure or an analysis of types of conflict and policy options for meeting them.
War From the Ground Up is not Simpson's bildungsroman about Afghanistan, not the raw personal narrative of a young officer introduced to war and his journey through it to maturity. It is his intellectual consideration of how vastly Afghanistan differed from his education about war. The heart of the book is Simpson's thoughts on the disjunctions he identifies between the work of certain icons of military thought, most notably Carl von Clausewitz, and the war he found in Afghanistan. Simpson says, summarizing the value of his work: ‘I draw… on personal experience to look up from the battlefield and consider the concepts that put me there, and how those concepts played out on the ground’…