Reviews of Behavioural Conflict

Lieutenant General HR McMasters, US Army

Behavioural Conflict makes a compelling argument that influence must be an integral component of future military operations. In so doing, the book contributes signicantly to our understanding of contemporary armed conflict.  

Dr Neville Bolt. Teaching Fellow in the Department of War Studies, Kings College London

A change is long overdue – certainly in the world of military strategic communications. It has become axiomatic that information-rich message clusters be launched over horizons at (hostile) populations, both seen and unseen, in the hope of finding sympathetic targets and achieving behavioural change. Well, according to Andrew Mackay, Steve Tatham and their fellow contributors, it can no longer be a question of if but when we abandon this fallacy, and transform our own behaviour. What is called for, they plead, is a Copernican shift of perspective...

LCol Rita LePage, Canadian Armed Forces

Behavioural Conflict is written by two seasoned British military officers – Army Major General Andrew Mackay, who commanded 52 Brigade in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, and Navy Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, CO of 15 PSYOPS Group. The book is based on their work in preparing 52 Brigade to deploy to Helmand province. While the authors discuss previous conflicts from the Balkans in the 1990s, through Sierra Leone, Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Gaza, to the Iraq war, it is 52 Brigade’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) deployment that provides the case study upon which the book revolves.