[3] He commanded a platoon in the Falklands War of 1982, surviving the bombing of RFA Sir Galahad,[4] and was promoted lieutenant on 25 January 1984,[5] captain on 11 October 1987,[6] and major on 30 September 1991.
[7] He had three tours of Northern Ireland, where one of his roles was as an intelligence officer in Republican West Belfast, and he also served with the British Army of the Rhine and the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus.
[14] In July 2004, Black wrote of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that George W. Bush and Tony Blair had "cooked the intelligence books on both sides of the Atlantic".
[15] He has been critical of all three major British political parties on Afghanistan, writing in 2010 "The Iraq War was a two-party stitch-up between the Labour government and an eager Conservative opposition.
[18] On that subject, he has commented "MI5 director general Jonathan Evans's persistent unwillingness to accept that his agency could have thwarted the 7/7 bombers if they had been more on the ball shows the petulance of a losing football manager".