How to join the British Army: The ULTIMATE insider's guide for anyone who wants to join the Army

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The British Army Military Book of the Year (BAMBY) is an annual book prize which aims to encourage soldiers to read as part of an informal approach to professional military education. The prize has been running since 2008, with a gap in 2017. The competition is judged by serving personnel of all ranks from Trooper to Colonel, they read all seven books over six months and hand in their judgement in September each year. Previous winners have been:

This collection includes seven of the most famous military texts of ancient China: The Art of War, Wuzi, Wei Liaozi, Taigong's Six Secret Teachings, The Methods of the Sima, Three Strategies of Huang Shigong, and Questions and Replies Between Emperor Taizong of Tang and General Li Jing.Tiger Fear - Such was the lethal reputation of Tiger tanks, that often Allied troops were spooked by the appearance of any German heavy armour, mistakenly thinking that any Panzer IV was a Tiger waiting in ambush! Edition was released in October 2000. All army books were initially replaced by a get-by list in Ravening Hordes, distributed for free. Mr Craighead, who was also awarded an MBE by the late Queen earlier in his SAS career, says the book is a metaphorical story about a wolf who becomes a sheep dog. However, it is of high moral and educational value to any reader. It provides significant historical value and expounds the threats the Indian military faces to protect the nation from rogue neighbours. And so to the debacle of the British army in Iraq, which came after years of senior soldiers telling journalists, politicians and everyone else that they were emphatically not like the Americans, because the UK had seen low-intensity conflicts in Northern Ireland and Yemen and Malaya and so understood how to “win hearts and minds”. When I was reporting on the conflict I accompanied patrols in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, given to the British by US planners to look after while they headed north to Baghdad. The soldiers wore berets, not helmets, and were led by sergeants bellowing “Salaam alaikum” in strong regional accents at disconcerted local residents.

The book’s dense, detailed narrative opens in 2002 with a veteran specialist giving a virtuoso display of armoured warfare on a Canadian training ground. He receives fulsome praise from his superior officers even though this type of combat is unsuited to the wars his comrades-in-arms are about to fight – and in spite of the Nazi officer’s uniform he is found to be wearing underneath his British one. These new translations bring to light several texts that display an understanding of strategy and warfare that still has relevance millennia after their original publication. From the 11th-century AD onward, these texts became required reading for Chinese military officers.

Multibuys

A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin's tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe. Another reason, which author Simon Akam explores in great detail in his excellent and valuable book, is that the British army has made great and often very effective efforts to close down any criticism, constructive or otherwise. The publication of the book was fraught with difficulty as the military establishment closed ranks. (The original publisher was Penguin Random House, which put the book on hold, telling Akam there was a “quite unprecedented level of withdrawal of support and co-operation for the book from multiple sources”). This alone goes a long way to substantiating the author’s powerful accusation that the army, a reflexively defensive, instinctively conservative and opaque institution, has limited ability to adapt to change, whether military, social or political. And this means things go wrong.