Modern Land Warfare from Iraq to Ukraine
Osprey Publishing, 2025, Hard Back ISBN 978-1-4728-4684-6, eBook ISBN 978-1-4728-4685-3, ePDF ISBN 978-1-4728-4682-2, 288 pp
Written by: Leigh Neville
Reviewed By: Matthew Hall
‘Future war’ has a habit of arriving early, and in unexpected ways. In Boots on the Ground: Modern Land Warfare from Iraq to Ukraine, Leigh Neville attempts a hard thing: to give a practical, non-technical survey of how contemporary land warfare has evolved since Iraq and Afghanistan, and what the Russo–Ukrainian war is demonstrating under modern sensors, drones, precision fires, and electronic attack. The purpose of the book is straight forward and useful for a professional audience – to provide an understanding of recent (and major) battlefield developments (without drowning in engineering detail) while also providing discussion on current capability trade-offs in major systems, discourse on tactical adaptation, and prompts for future force design. Taken together, the ambition and scope of the book invite consideration of the author’s perspective. Neville is an Australian‑based military historian and defence writer specialising in modern land warfare and special operations forces. While he is neither a former military practitioner nor a conventional academic, his credibility rests on a substantial publication record with Osprey Publishing, underpinned by postgraduate studies in international affairs and sustained, practitioner‑informed research. This background positions Neville as an informed defence commentator whose strength lies in synthesis and translation for professional audiences.
The core problem, as Neville indicates within this work, is the contemporary shift from a period of wars of counterinsurgency (where one side has almost complete overmatch on their opponent), to wars where peer and near-peer militaries may contest all domains (ground, air, sea, space, cyber and information) simultaneously. Using the military of the United States as his baseline, the author provides a pragmatic definition of ‘near-peer’ adversaries. These are forces or nations which may not match the US in scale, but can nonetheless field modern, expensive systems and are trained to use them. Such a categorisation matters. As Neville indicates, ‘near-peers’ could include a range of military forces across the globe. This is therefore not a niche study of one theatre, but an encompassing look at how high-intensity land warfare is being shaped by precision, sensing, and survivability competitions.
The book itself is organised into chapters, each of which focus on a specific capability such as main battle tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, air defence and air support, indirect fires, uncrewed systems and electronic war, infantry, and special operations forces. It then closes with a discussion on what recent developments may mean for ‘future war’. The connective tissue across these chapters is not so much a single unified theory of contemporary or future warfare, but instead a series of questions: what still works, what has been superseded, and what adaptations are being forced at the tactical edge?
There are several discernible strengths to Boots on the Ground as a book. Firstly, Neville is disciplined in ensuring accessibility throughout, without being simplistic. The book is, as he states, a ‘non-technical overview’ aimed at readers who want to understand how capabilities are employed and why they matter. The prose is plain-spoken, and the book’s structure makes it easy to lift a chapter into a discussion on professional military education (PME) or for a tutorial. This is in keeping with his other publications where he favours categorisation, myth-busting, and practitioner-facing synthesis. For example, in Guns of the Special Forces: 2001–2015 he explicitly pushes back on ‘urban myths’ and treats equipment debates as contextual rather than ideological. That habit carries into Boots on the Ground, the book is at its strongest when it refuses single-factor explanations and instead emphasises trade-offs (cost, mass, survivability, training burden, and adaptation speed).
As a second strength, the book’s best sections translate contemporary battlefield friction into concrete implications. The discussion of uncrewed systems and electronic warfare (EW) is an example: Neville highlights how services such as Starlink have altered communications resilience in Ukraine and notes that Russian forces have sought to adapt by attacking terminals and exploiting the electromagnetic environment. Even if readers disagree with elements of the framing, the point is operationally productive - survivability and tempo are now tightly coupled to signature management, EW literacy, and rapid adaptation cycles. Framing the situation in this way prompts professional readers away from treating drones and EW as ‘enablers’ that sit adjacent to manoeuvre, and toward treating them as integral to manoeuvre itself and as capabilities which need to be integrated across all levels especially the tactical. Thirdly, Neville keeps faith with the enduring logic of close combat without romanticism. His chapter on infantry drives the central corrective to technology-driven determinism, reminding the reader that, in the end, battles often ‘come down to infantry’. This is not a mere slogan – it is a reminder about command and control on contested ground, where strategic terrain, population, and physical occupation still matter. For Australian readers, this proposition provides an anchor for force design debates. The core problem is not choosing between high-tech and ‘boots’ but integrating protection, fires, information, and sustainment so infantry can close and hold under ever-present observation and disruption.
Interestingly, the book’s very accessibility is also arguably its greatest weakness. Boots on the Ground it is a panoramic survey, not an evidentiary deep-dive. Neville relies heavily on open-source reporting and web-based references, and the notes section includes extensive URLs rather than a conventional scholarly referencing or citations. This increases the risk of rapid dating as such links will get redirected or die. Claims will be overtaken by events, and this fact limits the book’s utility for readers seeking a more contestable, traceable argument base for doctrine or capability submissions. In essence, Boots on the Ground is an excellent introduction and useful for orientation and framing, but less reliable as a definitive reference text. Unfortunately, Neville’s final chapter on ‘future war’ is necessarily speculative and perhaps less useful then the rest of the work. Neville acknowledges this candidly, admitting that some predictions will be ‘wrong’ and others only ‘partly correct.’ Such honesty is professionally valuable, but it also highlights what the book cannot do, namely provide the kind of falsifiable forecasting that would justify strong procurement conclusions. Readers should therefore treat the future discussion as a prompt for disciplined discussions and experimentation rather than as a roadmap.
Boots on the Ground offers two practical takeaways for Australian land forces. First, tactical proficiency now includes EW and signature discipline as a baseline soldier skill. If resilient communications (and the denial of enemy communications) can materially shape combat effectiveness, then training systems should embed spectrum awareness, emissions control, and counter-UAS behaviours from section level upward—not as ‘attachments’ but as habitual drills. This has implications for authority delegations, collective training design, equipment, and resourcing of the opposing force. Second, the book reinforces that survivability is the organising problem for modern manoeuvre. Ubiquitous sensing compresses decision time; precision fires punish predictability; and adaptation is continuous. Neville’s insistence that infantry remains decisive should be read as a force design challenge. Infantry must be protected, networked (selectively), sustained, and backed by fires that can operate in contested conditions. That points toward the need for integrated combined-arms teams optimised for deception, dispersion, and rapid reconstitution rather than for linear ‘platform counts.’
In sum, Boots on the Ground is a strong professional primer on contemporary land warfare: readable, structured for rapid uptake, and anchored in the realities of adaptation under modern targeting and electronic contest. Its limitations are real but they are acceptable given the author’s stated intent. This reviewer recommends it for junior to mid-career officers and non-commissioned officers (platoon to battalion level), capability staff, and PME instructors who need a well-organised framework to discuss Iraq-to-Ukraine continuity and what changes actually mean for training, force design, and tactical culture. It will not replace doctrine or detailed technical studies, but it will sharpen the questions that professionals should be asking before they write doctrine, buy equipment, or design mission specific training. The book’s value also lies in how it compresses a sprawling topic into a coherent set of categories and dilemmas that can inform PME discussions.
