Holmes reports from his regiment’s frontline tour of duty in Iraq, on the day-to-day experience of infantrymen in 2006 in his Dusty Warriors: Modern Soldiers at War. His experience commanding in the Gulf War, UNPROFOR and Kossovo informs The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, Smith’s radical exploration of conflicts fought no longer as industrial absolute war, but as war ‘among the people’.