Dr Michael Knights is a military historian by training, an expert on the Middle East by chance, and a front-line observer of modern warfare by choice. He came to this crossroads by a long and winding path. Before graduating from King's College London Department of War Studies, Mike had done pretty much every low-paid job under the sun, between periods of wandering the Arab world as an itinerant backpacker.
He graduated with a new PhD on Saddam's Iraq just as the invasion happened in 2003 and the rest is history. Mike's life since then has been a classic post-9/11 story: embedding with the US-led coalition and the armed forces of Iraq, the Kurdish Peshmerga, Yemen's tribes, Lebanese fighters, the UAE and Saudi Arabia as they fought enemies like Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Iran-backed militias amidst the chaos of occupation, withdrawals, the Arab Spring, and the ISIS war and its aftermath. He is called upon as an advisor to Western government, military and the intelligence community decision-makers.
Mike is a passionate believer in the value of contemporary history because the memories of participants fade and distort so quickly - both those in smoke-filled rooms and the corridors of power, and those in the trenches. In his view, contemporary history can only make sense if the author has been there and seen it with their own eyes, walked the ground, and lived with the participants.And military history has to be backstopped by sumptuous, detailed mapping and the best participant photographs available. As we enter a new era of immersive military history, the reader will increasingly become the experiencer through augmented reality and geospatial walk-throughs of the battlefield. The military historian has to be at the forefront of this change, whether they are chronicling the wars of today or those of generations past.
