Michael Baker

Eighty-three years ago - to be precise, between November 8 and November 16, 1942 - the first joint Anglo-American amphibious beach landings of the Second World War were launched. This also marked the first major blooding of the Americans in combat against the Axis powers - not in Europe but in the Vichy French-occupied North African territories of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The landings were codenamed Operation Torch and, though a vast flotilla of ships and landing craft (300 warships...

One of the key narratives of the current Ukraine war is the staggering scale of Russian losses on the battlefield, not just of their troops but their military hardware as well. Losses, moreover, for very little gain, territorially or otherwise. How and why this has occurred is an interesting question but it's not my primary focus here. Rather I want to say a word about these losses in the context of other Russian wars in the modern era. It's been calculated (in a recent report by the Centre...

As the United Nations assembles in New York this week, eight decades after its founding in 1945, all the signs are that the organisation...