Wilf Owen, Euclid’s Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today (Howgate Publishing, 2025)
It’s been a rough new millennium for armies. After the end of history ended abruptly on 9/11, US and NATO land forces spent twenty years pursuing counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, spending trillions of dollars to achieve strategic defeat despite the massive tactical overmatch they held against insurgent enemies. The US Army now grapples with an identity crisis, while European NATO forces are in far worse shape: belatedly rearming, but increasingly unable to man their shrunken formations. The West’s potential adversaries are hardly better off: The failures of Russia’s military reforms have been dramatically exposed since 2022, while China seems to doubt its army’s readiness for war amid relentless purges of the top ranks.
A major land war in Europe, now three years old, has certainly given a shot in the arm to discussions of ground combat—and to European defense budgets. But the grinding, attritional nature of the war in Ukraine, after the failure of Russia’s initial coup de main and Ukraine’s 2023 counterattack, has fueled a legion of technological determinists who argue that drones have revolutionized warfare. (The metastasizing US defense venture capital sector, now armed with political influence commensurate with its growth, may also be a factor in this latest RMA devil’s tattoo).
William F. (Wilf) Owen is having none of it. A British Army veteran, defense consultant, and editor of Military Strategy Magazine, Owen is a longtime analyst and commentator on military affairs, often in the pages of the British Army Review and the RUSI Journal. A naturalized Israeli citizen, he blends deep knowledge of two nearly opposite military cultures. Britain wields the original long-service, professionalized Anglosphere army, while Israel is the world’s foremost model for a conscript, reservist, nation in arms. In his new book, Euclid’s Army: Preparing Land Forces for Warfare Today, Owen has done something oddly rare in contemporary military writing: assembling an intensely practical primer on modern tactics and training, based around the idea of what an army division should look like and what it needs to fight today.
Euclid’s Army attempts to mirror the approach of the father of geometry by proceeding from axioms to more advanced propositions and conclusions. Owen mostly does this through the concept of the “Monash Division,” a deployable armored division named after the Jewish Australian general judged by one major historian to have been “the only general of creative originality produced by the First World War.” Owen argues that almost every nation on earth could afford to train and equip something like a Monash Division.
The Monash Division is governed by a simple imperative: Keep total vehicle numbers under two thousand in order to force simplicity, speed of movement, and affordability. The last criterion is the critical one. As a Briton, Owen comes from an army that broke both Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hindenburg’s Heer in one hundred days but is now functionally unable to deploy a full warfighting division. As an Israeli, he observes an army that can summon over five hundred thousand soldiers from a population of fewer than eight million—force generation capacity only possible through conscription, ready reservists, and a relentlessly pragmatic national security orientation.
America might seem insulated from Wilf Owen’s prerogatives. From the perspective of any uniformed foreign observer, the United States Army and Marine Corps are uniquely, indeed ridiculously, well equipped. US land forces boast a surfeit of gold-plated solutions to tactical and operation problems: $50 million attack helicopters to kill tanks, $80 million tiltrotors to conduct raids, $5 billion for an (at best) incrementally better battle rifle. But the United States quietly passed a major red line last year. In fiscal year 2024, spending on net interest on the US national debt surpassed defense spending for the first time. Aging platforms, recruiting struggles, and the skyrocketing cost of new weapons systems are threatening America’s tactical edge and strategic preeminence, while political leaders stare at an annual federal budget deficit of nearly $2 trillion. Restoring sensible but ruthless economy to American defense is not only overdue, but essential.
After a succinct but valuable summary of the Monash Division, concepts and doctrine, and training for war, Owen takes his readers through short chapters on infantry, cavalry, fires, air defense, and other supporting arms. He then moves on to broader examinations of offense, defense, terrain, and more niche subjects. A through line is a focus on the capabilities of “Rifleman Snotgoblin”—Owen’s far more evocative version of Britain’s “Tommy” or the US Army’s even blander “Joe.”
Wilf’s examination of “Deploy March Sustain” is particularly laudable. Contending that “readiness is the test of any army,” Owen draws on Cold War and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) history to lay out realistic standards for units and armies. These lessons are already being recalled and applied: Another conscript-reservist force, the Finnish Army, created higher-readiness and very-high-readiness units in the wake of the 2014 Crimean annexation, as a hedge against Russian “little green men” and faits accompli. Owen argues for a division two-thousand-kilometer road march as a key readiness performance test. For those of us raised on facile stoplight readiness reporting, such a challenge should be both welcomed and dreaded.
Euclid’s Army sometimes reads like a belated broadside against the woolly-headed Western military thinking of the post-9/11 era. Tasked with nation building and man hunting in some of the most remote and austere regions of the world for the better part of two decades, the armies of wealthy Western democracies degraded intellectually and often physically. Buoyed by carefully curated history, most NATO militaries willfully went down the doctrinal cul de sac of third-party counterinsurgency. Even as their conventional capacity ebbed, their thinkers scribbled hills of hubris; armed with new “population-centric” doctrine, Western militaries could “change entire societies.”
Owen offers a simple corrective: “Using lethal force to break the collective will to endure in combat defeats any type of armed opponent in any environment.” Though he doesn’t use the perhaps fraught term, Wilf is on the counter-guerrilla side of the counterinsurgency debate of the early aughts. Transforming societies is far beyond an army’s remit.
Owen has argued in a host of other venues over the years that that much-invoked old T. E. Lawrence line—“Irregular warfare is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge”—is hokum. High-intensity, formation-level (brigade-level) warfare brings with it enormous violence, disruption, and requirements for speed and skill that outstrip anything demanded by lesser contingencies. This was near heresy little more than a decade ago, but today the old wine again drinks smoothly: “You can make a good soldier into an adequate policeman more easily than a good policeman into an adequate soldier.”
Owen is equally ardent in his antipathy to the myths of urban warfare. Drawing on operational research by the UK’s Defence Evaluation and Research Agency in the 1980s, he notes that urban operations are invariably a death trap for the defender, not the attacker. There are simple reasons for this. Truncated sight lines and complex terrain enable attackers to get close to defensive positions relatively easily and destroy or bypass them. Often equipped with healthy amounts of high explosives down to the squad level, modern armies are rarely subject to the tyranny of Battle Drill 6. Contrary to popular current narratives, Wilf notes that attackers’ daily casualties have almost always been far lower than those of defenders in recent urban combat operations all over the world. Wilf contends that five to ten days of annual urban training for any combat unit is sufficient. (The problem of urban scale, however, is unaddressed).
Owen’s thoughts on unmanned systems are a welcome corrective to the current waves of drone mania pulsing out ceaselessly from the war in Ukraine. Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) have been around since World War I. The ability of a UAS operator to find a target and then pass targeting data to a firing platform has existed for more than forty years. Loitering munitions are thirty years old. The IDF issued all infantry units with UAS sections nearly twenty years ago. Little about the drone use in Ukraine, Owen notes repeatedly in Euclid’s Army, is meaningfully new or surprising.
What has changed is the cost. UAS now provide a poor man’s air force, with major tactical impacts from the Libyan desert to the Donbas. But this is evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. The transparent battlefield is a myth, though a useful measure of the credulity of those who espouse it.
As Owen notes early on in his book, Archibald Wavell and Winston Churchill (or George Marshall and Harry S. Truman on this side of the Atlantic) “went from horse-mounted armies with no tanks or aircraft to nuclear warfare within their professional lifetimes. . . . No modern commander has ever seen anything like that rate of change.”
Dominance of the air domain and the electromagnetic spectrum remain critical to victory on land. A failure to establish that dominance, coupled with training and materiel deficiencies that hamstring maneuver and exploitation, has yielded the drone-scoured, nearly static battlefields of Ukraine. Drones, and countermeasures to them, will continue to evolve as part of the combined arms team.
Euclid’s Army is rife with practical digressions and reminders. Reverse slope defenses, communications architecture, the merits of mines, and the utility of wargames all come in for comment. In an infantry truism that bears repeating, Wilf notes that focusing collective training on reconnaissance and movements to contact will lift an organization’s overall level of proficiency more quickly and surely than repetitions of any other task.
Owen also questions some old verities. In the aftermath of Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon, some IDF officers were widely attacked as “plasma screen commanders.” This was to be expected in an army with an unparalleled (and often bloody) tradition of officer leadership from the front. But Owen argues that the critique was also professionally illiterate. Unlike in the 1980s or 1990s, battalion and brigade commanders today should have a far better picture of the overall tactical situation than their subordinates. Above the company level, the idea that rapidly gaining and using accurate and relevant information comes from “being shoulder to shoulder with junior NCOs, binoculars in hand, as bullets splash the ground around you, is at best moronic.” Moral example and shared risk remain intrinsic elements of effective combat leadership on the emptying battlefields of the twenty-first century—but this should not be confused with effective command and control.
In other instances, the tried and true is still true. To a US Army that is yet again tweaking its physical fitness test, Wilf offers two very simple and cheap physical tests for the infantryman: an eighteen-kilometer (eleven-mile) march with fifty pounds plus weapon and water in three hours in reasonable temperatures, on two consecutive days; and climbing an eight-meter rope—with arms only—twice in two minutes.
For all of its breadth, Euclid’s Army is hampered by a lack of basic diagrams. Occasionally a point or comparison is fleshed out graphically, but the Monash Division is laid down only in words. Though Owen rightly notes that tables of organization and equipment (TOEs) don’t survive contact with reality, his reader is left begging for at least a one-page wire diagram.
There is also the question of what a division of two combat brigades, as Owen proposes, gets you in a major war. Between them, Russia and Ukraine boast around three hundred combat brigades, the majority of which are currently holding frontage. Again: Britain, with an active duty army that fits in Wembley Stadium with room to spare, cannot field a single armored division today. And the British Army is still among NATO’s better funded and most capable ground forces! One is far more than none, and Owen rightly warns against building formations that cannot be properly trained and equipped. But a critic of the concept of maneuver warfare, watching a war of attrition rage, might find a few more words to discuss reserves, mobilization, and the very clear constraints on a new, far smaller, British Expeditionary Force (BEF). The first BEF, of 1914, boasted the finest marksmen in Europe, while the second, in 1940, was the first fully mechanized field army in the world. The BEF of World War I essentially ceased to exist in a matter of months; the World War II version was lucky to escape the continent by the skin of its teeth. Quality only gets you so far.
These quibbles aside, Wilf Owen has written a sharp and enjoyably punchy book that is well worth the time of any serving soldier or militarily conversant civilian. Euclid’s Army is “not a cookbook,” nor is it a book about the future of war; Owen invokes a phrase in his adopted Hebrew that finds the shortest path to ridicule is prophecy. What he is attempting, in eighty thousand or so words, is to lay out what can be done to prepare for warfare today, using existing equipment and concepts, applied with intellectual rigor and unremitting attention to economy.
Military professionals might be put off by the breezy way Owen covers rules of engagement, military manpower, or information operations (“Warfare is about killing and breaking will. Information Warfare is about political opinions mostly consumed on a small screen in a café. They are not the same”). But for American soldiers reared on reading lists littered with shallow strategy and the worst banalities of the airport bookshop nonfiction rack, Euclid’s Army offers a welcome fixation on the problems and practicalities of fighting in 2025.
Like Georges Clemenceau, Wilf Owen judges much to be above the soldier’s pay grade; his focus is warfare, not war. The where and the when of war are unknowable, while the why and the who are not his concerns. For the 99 percent of soldiers serving below the strategic level, the what and the how of modern warfare ought to be more than enough to chew on.
Gil Barndollar is an MWI research fellow. US Marine Corps veteran, and serving National Guardsman.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image: Members of 3rd United Kingdom Division conduct a rehearsal of concept drill during Warfighter Exercise 25-4 at Fort Hood (then Cavazos), Texas, May 28, 2025. (Credit: Sgt. Jose Escamilla, US Army)