John Keegan

Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan OBE FRSL (15 May 1934 – 2 August 2012) was an English military historian, lecturer, author, and journalist. He wrote many published works on the nature of combat between prehistory and the 21st century, covering land, air, maritime, intelligence warfare, and the psychology of battle. 

Keegan was born in Clapham to an Irish World War One veteran and was evacuated to Somerset when World War Two broke out. At the age of 13, Keegan contracted orthopedic tuberculosis, which subsequently affected his gait. The long-term effects of this rendered him unfit for military service, and the timing of his birth made him too young for service in the Second World War, facts he mentioned in his works as an ironic observation of his profession and interests. 

The illness also interrupted his education in his teenage years. However, it included a period at King's College, Taunton, and two years at Wimbledon College, which led to entry to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953, where he read history with an emphasis on war theory. After graduation, he worked at the American Embassy in London for three years.

In 1960 Keegan took up a lectureship in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which trains officers for the British Army. He remained there for 26 years, becoming a senior lecturer in military history during his tenure. He also held a visiting professorship at Princeton University and was Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar College.

Leaving the academy in 1986, Keegan joined the Daily Telegraph as a defense correspondent and stayed with the paper as defense editor until his death. He also wrote for the conservative American publication National Review Online. In 1998, he wrote and presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, entitling them War in our World. Keegan died on 2 August 2012 of natural causes at his home in Kilmington, Wiltshire. He was survived by his wife, their two daughters, and two sons.

In A History of Warfare, Keegan outlined the development and limitations of warfare from prehistory to the modern era. It looked at various topics, including the use of horses, logistics, and "fire." A key concept put forward was that war is inherently cultural. In the introduction, he vigorously denounced the idiom "war is a continuation of policy by other means," rejecting "Clausewitzian" ideas. However, Keegan's discussion of Clausewitz was criticized as uninformed and inaccurate by writers like Peter Paret, Christopher Bassford, and Richard M. Swain.

Other books written by Keegan are The Iraq War, Intelligence in War, The First World War, The Second World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Mask of Command, and Fields of Battle.

He also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict. With Richard Holmes, he wrote the BBC documentary Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. Frank C. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century." In a book-cover blurb extracted from a more complex article, Sir Michael Howard wrote, "at once the most readable and the most original of living historians."