Originally Posted by
SLXOwft
Declan, I've just finished reading it and found it a very engaging and informative read. I heartly recommend it to others.
Any chance you could give us an insight into what prompted you to write Borderline:An Oral History Of The Brexit Wars 2020 - 2022? Or do we have to wait until we've read it?
I just hope to God no armed idiots of either persuasion exploit the Bword mess.
Thanks for the recommendation firstly! To the second part, what mainly prompted me to write Borderline was that I was in a hotel for a few weeks and had pretty much finished the internet. It was a way of keeping mentally active at least.
The idea behind it was one I had come up with in broad terms earlier. Had I stayed in the Air Corps I was due to be giving the AirPower lecture block on this years Command and Staff course and thought a narrative based approach might lead to better retention of the material, compared to just reading out the ATP 49. Hence the continuing escalation of events to make planning any given operation more complex. I had to keep it somewhat realistic though so no hovertanks.
I basically took that idea, humanised it a bit more and localised it in places people would recognise. It would obviously have been a bit indelicate to be using Northern Ireland that way on an internationally attended course in an Irish military college, so the original dealt with the good old Fantasian forces from Wicklownia, who have traditionally been equipped with anything from small arms only to motor rifle brigades, depending on what size unit you were exercising at the time.
Like you I hope the book is way off the mark in terms of political outcomes over the next few months. All going well it’s just a bit of fiction or I’ll get an extra job with a crystal ball.