Author: Edward Mead EarlePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
Makers of Modern Strategy
Author: Edward Mead EarlePublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Military art and science
Languages : en
Pages : 580
Book Description
Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age
Author: Peter ParetPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400835461
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 950
Book Description
"Authoritative and convincing."—New York Times Book Review The classic reference on the theory and practice of war The essays in this volume analyze war, its strategic characterisitics, and its political and social functions over the past five centuries. The diversity of its themes and the broad perspectives applied to them make the book a work of general history as much as a history of the theory and practice of war from the Renaissance to the present. Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age takes the first part of its title from an earlier collection of essays that became a classic of historical scholarship. Three essays are repinted from the earlier book while four others have been extensively revised. The rest—twenty-two essays—are new. The subjects addressed range from major theorists and political and military leaders to impersonal forces. Machiavelli, Clausewitz, and Marx and Engels are discussed, as are Napoleon, Churchill, and Mao. Other essays trace the interaction of theory and experience over generations—the evolution of American strategy, for instance, or the emergence of revolutionary war in the modern world. Still others analyze the strategy of particular conflicts—the First and Second World Wars—or the relationship between technology, policy, and war in the nuclear age. Whatever its theme, each essay places the specifics of military thought and action in their political, social, and economic environment. Together, the contributors have produced a book that reinterprets and illuminates war, one of the most powerful forces in history and one that cannot be controlled in the future without an understanding of its past.
Modern Strategy
Author: Colin S. GrayPublisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198280309
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 412
Book Description
Modern Strategy explains how strategic reasoning makes sense of the great complexity of war on land, at sea, in the air, in space and even cyberspace.
Makers of Ancient Strategy
Author: Victor Davis HansonPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834252
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Book Description
Timeless lessons from the military strategies of the ancient Greeks and Romans In this prequel to the now-classic Makers of Modern Strategy, Victor Davis Hanson, a leading scholar of ancient military history, gathers prominent thinkers to explore key facets of warfare, strategy, and foreign policy in the Greco-Roman world. From the Persian Wars to the final defense of the Roman Empire, Makers of Ancient Strategy demonstrates that the military thinking and policies of the ancient Greeks and Romans remain surprisingly relevant for understanding conflict in the modern world. The book reveals that much of the organized violence witnessed today—such as counterterrorism, urban fighting, insurgencies, preemptive war, and ethnic cleansing—has ample precedent in the classical era. The book examines the preemption and unilateralism used to instill democracy during Epaminondas's great invasion of the Peloponnesus in 369 BC, as well as the counterinsurgency and terrorism that characterized Rome's battles with insurgents such as Spartacus, Mithridates, and the Cilician pirates. The collection looks at the urban warfare that became increasingly common as more battles were fought within city walls, and follows the careful tactical strategies of statesmen as diverse as Pericles, Demosthenes, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Caesar, and Augustus. Makers of Ancient Strategy shows how Greco-Roman history sheds light on wars of every age. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David L. Berkey, Adrian Goldsworthy, Peter J. Heather, Tom Holland, Donald Kagan, John W. I. Lee, Susan Mattern, Barry Strauss, and Ian Worthington.
Strategy
Author: Sir Lawrence FreedmanPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199349908
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 768
Book Description
Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world's leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives. The range of Freedman's narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strategies of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad, the strategic advice of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, the great military innovations of Baron Henri de Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz, the grounding of revolutionary strategy in class struggles by Marx, the insights into corporate strategy found in Peter Drucker and Alfred Sloan, and the contributions of the leading social scientists working on strategy today. The core issue at the heart of strategy, the author notes, is whether it is possible to manipulate and shape our environment rather than simply become the victim of forces beyond one's control. Time and again, Freedman demonstrates that the inherent unpredictability of this environment-subject to chance events, the efforts of opponents, the missteps of friends-provides strategy with its challenge and its drama. Armies or corporations or nations rarely move from one predictable state of affairs to another, but instead feel their way through a series of states, each one not quite what was anticipated, requiring a reappraisal of the original strategy, including its ultimate objective. Thus the picture of strategy that emerges in this book is one that is fluid and flexible, governed by the starting point, not the end point. A brilliant overview of the most prominent strategic theories in history, from David's use of deception against Goliath, to the modern use of game theory in economics, this masterful volume sums up a lifetime of reflection on strategy.
The Strategy Makers
Author: Beatrice HeuserPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0275998274
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
This book reintroduces readers to the lives and writings of the greatest military minds of the modern era, writers whose ideas and teachings continue to shape the conduct of war in the 21st century. The word "strategy" only came into usage in West European languages after the work of a Byzantine emperor was translated around the time of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, there was writing on strategy – relating political aims to the use of the military – also in Western Europe, well before this. This book surveys and analyzes the existing literature. It presents commented excerpts of the work of the Elizabethan writer Matthew Sutcliffe (who wrote the first modern comprehensive strategic concept) and translations into English of excerpts from the writing of the Machiavelli-admirer the Seigneur de Fourquevaux (1548) and his French compatriot Bertrand de Loque, who also went by the name of François de Saillans (1589); the Spanish diplomats and military officers Don Bernardino de Mendoza (1595) and the Third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1724-1730); the Frenchmen Paul Hay du Chastelet (1668) and Count Guibert (1770); and the Prussian contemporary of Clausewitz, Rühle von Lilienstern (1816). Key concepts such as preventive war, the fight for the hearts and minds of the population to combat insurgents, the "democratic peace theory," and debates such as the preference for defense or the offensive, the desirability of battle, the purpose and function of war, the advantages of conscript or professional soldiers, can thus be shown to go back far longer than generally assumed and appear in a new light.
Pure Strategy
Author: Everett C. DolmanPublisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0714684988
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Book Description
A stimulating new inquiry into the fundamental truth of strategy - its purpose, place, utility, and value. This new study is animated by a startling realization: the concept of strategic victory must be summarily discarded. This is not to say that victory has no place in strategy or strategic planning. The outcome of battles and campaigns are variables within the strategist's plan, but victory is a concept that has no meaning there. To the tactical and operational planner, wars are indeed won and lost, and the difference is plain. Success is measurable; failure is obvious. In contrast, the pure strategist understands that war is but one aspect of social and political competition, an ongoing interaction that has no finality. Strategy therefore connects the conduct of war with the intent of politics. It shapes and guides military means in anticipation of a panoply of possible coming events. In the process, strategy changes the context within which events will happen. In this new book we see clearly that the goal of strategy is not to culminate events, to establish finality in the discourse between states, but to continue them; to influence state discourse in such a way that it will go forward on favorable terms. For continue it will. This book will provoke debate and stimulate new thinking across the field and strategic studies.
Clausewitz and the State
Author: Peter ParetPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691131306
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 500
Book Description
Originally published in 1976, Clausewitz and the State presents a comprehensive analysis of one of the significant thinkers of modern Europe. Peter Paret combines social and military history and psychological interpretation with a study of Clausewitz's military theories and of his unduly neglected historical and political writing. This timely new edition includes a preface which allows Paret to recount the past thirty years of discussion on Clausewitz and respond to critics. A companion volume to Clausewitz's On War, this book is indispensable to anyone interested in Clausewitz and his theories, and their proper historical context.
The Evolution of Strategy
Author: Beatrice HeuserPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113949256X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.
The Making of Strategy
Author: Williamson MurrayPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521566278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 702
Book Description
This volume focuses on the processes by which rulers and states have framed strategy from the fifth century BC to the present.