I was recently reading an account by a senior British commander of his time in either Iraq and Afghanistan. One of things he said was that he and his colleagues had failed to properly take tribal dynamics into account. Earlier this week I was reading the text of some British lectures written on the subject on Frontier warfare. There was no date on them but the campaign most referred to took place in 1897. As there is no mention of aircraft, my guess is that the lectures written sometime before the First World War. One of the things stressed in the very first lecture was the need to study and get a firm grip on tribal dynamics. So, it's a little bit of a puzzle as to why more than 100 years later that British commanders failed to properly take them into account. Did no-one from the British Army go to the Ministry of Defence archives, the National Archives or onto the internet to see what previous campaigners had found out through bitter, and bloody, experience? A careful reading of what recent senior British officers had to say about their time in Iraq or Afghanistan strongly suggests that they hadn't even digested the lessons of Northern Ireland. Of course there are many differences between Armagh and Helmand, but there were also common threads running through the conflicts in both.