As a British infantry officer in the Royal Gurkha Rifles, Emile Simpson completed three tours of southern Afghanistan. Drawing on that experience, and on a range of little-known case studies ranging from Nepal to Borneo, "War From The Ground Up" offers a distinctive take on contemporary armed conflict. While most accounts of war peer down at the battlefield from an academic perspective, or across it as a personal narrative, Simpson looks up from the battlefield to consider the concepts that put him there and how they played out on the ground.

He argues that in the Afghan conflict, and in contemporary conflicts more generally, liberal powers and their armed forces have blurred the line between military and political activity. They have challenged the distinction between war and peace. Simpson contends that this loss of clarity is more a response to the conditions of combat in the early twenty-first century, particularly that of globalization, than a deliberate choice. The issue is therefore not whether the West should engage in such practices, but how to manage, gain advantage from, and mitigate the risks of this evolution in warfare.

"War From The Ground Up" draws heavily on personal anecdotes from the frontline, related to historical context and strategic thought, to reevaluate the concept of war in contemporary conflict.