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Strategy (Military History)

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  1. Introduction
  2. The term strategy is difficult to define and to circumscribe. It was not used in the Occident until the late 18th century, and since then its meaning has changed considerably. Today, strategy is largely taken to mean, in its original military-political context, a comprehensive plan in pursuit of political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills between at least two sides in a conflict. These sides interact; thus, a strategy will rarely be successful if it shows no adaptability. This bibliography will not consider the now more popular use of the term strategy to refer merely to a complex plan in any walk of life. Strategy, in the aforementioned definition, can be taken to be either theoretical—with war in general in mind or a specific situation—or applied. Few applied strategic concepts have survived from earlier times, because for many centuries practitioners made do without writing them down. Once strategic concepts were generated systematically by governments, they were invariably compromise documents drawn up jointly by a number of actors, which usually deprived them of the coherence found in most of the single-authored theoretical works. Moreover, applied strategic concepts (or strategic concepts drawn up in times of peace for the eventuality of war) are often lacking in explicit articulation of the reasons why certain courses of action are preferred. Because they were more readily accessible, theoretical works have enjoyed more scholarly attention than has the fragmentary evidence we have of applied strategic concepts throughout history. Applied strategic concepts, in so far as these existed or can be surmised from circumstantial evidence (e.g., the Schlieffen Plan), will be discussed under other Oxford Bibliographies articles relating to individual wars.
  3. General Overviews
  4. The two most illuminating works on warfare through the ages are Delbrück 1975–1985, a four-volume survey from antiquity to the author’s own times, and Chaliand 1994, a reader containing excerpts from key texts, both from Europe and other areas of the world, again from antiquity to the author’s own times. Besides illustrating how war was prepared for and fought in practice, both deal with the art of war, emphasizing links with political, economic, social, or ideological (including religious) aims transcending narrowly military ones. This nexus is central to what would later be called strategy, even though the word did not feature in Western literature before the late 18th century. Liddell Hart 1967 (originally published in 1929) prepared the ground for a quantum leap in English-language writing about strategy by seeking out recurring patterns for success in war. The edited volumes Earle 1944 and Paret 1986, both consciously with the same title, anachronistically but justifiably use the term strategy retrospectively, to describe the works of the great writers on war in modern European history; they have defined the subject for generations to come, and several contributions in these two volumes have not been bettered. Chaliand 1994, Earle 1944, and Paret 1986 should be essential reading for any course on strategy. Kennedy 1991 is a collection of invaluable case studies across Western history. Heuser 2010 complements these collections in offering in the form of a monograph a full narrative of the development of thinking on strategy in its cultural-ideological context. Handel 1996, again essential reading on which generations of US officers were raised, contains great insights but is limited by the author’s ahistorical approach. Baylis, et al. 2007 is a widely used teaching aid for beginners, useful also for distance learning.
  5. Baylis, John, James Wirtz, Colin S. Gray, and Eliot Cohen, eds. Strategy in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Strategic Studies. 2d ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
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  7. The most useful handbook for an instructor new to the subject who is teaching a Strategy 101 course, with short texts covering aspects from theoretical and historical to contemporary and useful bibliographies.
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  9. Chaliand, Gérard, ed. The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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  11. The best anthology of texts dealing with war, containing approximately eighty excerpts, ranging from the Egyptian Kadesh inscription of c. 1300 BCE to the nuclear strategists of the 20th century, some translated into English here for the first time.
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  13. Delbrück, Hans. The History of the Art of War within the Framework of Political History. 4 vols. Translated by Walter J. Renfroe Jr. Contributions in Military History. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1975–1985.
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  15. Volume 4 originally published in 1920, in German. Delbrück’s last volume addresses the evolution of strategic thought, little of which had existed in medieval times, other than in the form of reiterations of Vegetius and concerns about restraints on war. We find allusions to Delbrück’s bugbear (fully developed in Die Strategie des Perikles [1890])—that there are mainly two forms of war, one focusing on the slow attrition of the enemy’s armed forces and the other on a decisive battle of annihilation.
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  17. Earle, Edward Mead, ed. Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944.
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  19. Published during World War II, this volume conveys an acute sense of the relevance of past thinking to very real problems of the present. In addition to Earle’s introduction, the articles by Felix Gilbert (on Machiavelli), Hans Rothfels (on Clausewitz), Jean Gottmann (on Bugeaud, Galliéni, Lyautey), and Gordon Craig (on Delbrück) are still points of reference.
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  21. Handel, Michael I. Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought. 2d ed. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1996.
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  23. Examination of the writings of Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and others. Very good on extrapolating general reflections on war, but without any attempt to reach a more thorough understanding of the texts by studying the use of language in its historical context.
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  25. Heuser, Beatrice. The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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  27. Survey of the evolution of thinking about warfare and its political aims from late Roman times. Shows how after centuries of a more balanced approach, the Napoleonic paradigm introduced a long period of obsession with victory at the expense of fruitful peace settlements.
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  29. Kennedy, Paul. Grand Strategies in War and Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991.
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  31. Collection of articles showing how comprehensive grand strategy has been in case studies ranging from ancient Rome to the Cold War, invariably including economic dimensions, alliance dimensions, considerations of domestic politics, and many other factors. Includes particularly interesting contributions by Dennis E. Showalter and Douglas Porch.
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  33. Liddell Hart, Basil Henry. The Strategy of Indirect Approach. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.
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  35. Originally published in 1929 as The Decisive Wars of History (London: Bell and Sons). This particular narrative of history is that wars have tended to end successfully for the side that sought to maximize its own strength by attacking an adversary not head-on but indirectly, exploiting weaknesses and using surprise and stratagems. The dichotomy of direct versus indirect approach recalls Delbrück’s attrition versus annihilation.
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  37. Paret, Peter, ed. Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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  39. This volume consciously updates Earle 1944, retaining some of the earlier articles while adding new chapters on such topics as nuclear strategy (Lawrence Freedman), the American way of war (Russell F. Weigley), and Soviet doctrine (Condoleezza Rice).
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  41. Origins
  42. The word strategy comes from the Greek stratgía or strategiké, meaning “generalship” or the “art of the general,” and is defined as such by Onosander before 57 CE. Surprisingly, no single equivalent Latin word has ever existed. Already in Aristotle’s Nikomachean Ethics (4th century BCE) we find a hint that many other skills come under it. Only the East Romans reflected more comprehensively on this term. An anonymous 6th-century text (Anonymous 1985) defines strategy as “the means by which the general may defend his own lands and defeat his enemy’s.” Here, we find also the hierarchical subordination of tactics (taktiké) to strategy, with tactics defined as the “science (epistéme) which enables one to organize and maneuver a body of armed men in an orderly manner.” Three-and-a-half centuries later, a work attributed to Leo VI c. 900 (Leo VI 2010) provides a very comprehensive discussion of the skills and subject matters a general should master in pursuit of his war aims, including politics and ethics. The translation into French and German of Leo’s work in the 1770s introduced the neologisms stratégie/Strategie into French and German, respectively, with the English strategy following suit. But even then the term was used for another century and more, even by such authors Clausewitz and Jomini (see Clausewitz 1980 and Jomini 1996, cited under Interpreters of Napoleonic Strategy), merely in the way in which the Byzantine Anonymous had defined it. Only in the 20th century did authors deliberately widen its definition explicitly to emphasize the varying political aims of wars, and, gradually, the definition given in the Introduction was arrived at. Put in these terms, however, one cannot but agree that the Greeks and Romans—and indeed the much less articulate protagonists of the Middle Ages—thought and acted with some notion of aims beyond that of battlefield victory, even if they—for once—lacked a word for it. Sun Tzu (perhaps c. 400 BCE) is seen as having similar concepts, but outside a Western tradition of language and concepts (Sun-tzu 2003). The most often cited early Western author is Vegetius (Vegetius Renatus 1996), in the late 4th century CE, although he does not really tackle strategy in the sense of the aforementioned definition, nor does the Byzantine emperor Maurice (c. 602) in his misnamed work (Maurikios 1984). Luttwak 1976 has given a much debated account of Roman strategic thinking in the famous absence of a word for it; Kaegi 1983 and Luttwak 2009 provide rich overviews of the at times impressively pacific succession of Byzantine grand strategies, although the latter study devotes too much space to pure diplomacy outside a conflictual context.
  43. Anonymous. “Peri strategias.” In Three Byzantine Military Treatises. Edited and translated by George T. Dennis, 10–135. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 25. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1985.
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  45. Originally published in the 6th century CE. This volume also contains Nikephoros Phokas’s Peri paradromes (known in Latin as De velitatione), a unique account on symmetrical defensive warfare (conducted by the overstretched Byzantine Empire) against irregular raiding parties.
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  47. Kaegi, Walter Emil. Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy. The Hellenic Studies Lecture. Brookline, MA: Hellenic College Press, 1983.
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  49. The older classic, which first outlines the East Roman Empire’s overall defensive-reactive strategy in contrast to the aggressive one of its many expansionist enemies.
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  51. Leo VI. The Taktika. Edited and translated by George T. Dennis. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae 49. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2010.
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  53. Originally published c. 900 CE. The title, added by later generations, is a misnomer, as the work really concerns and uses the word strategía, providing the earliest comprehensive definition, listing all its many subdisciplines, which the general must master, including tactics, logistics, fortification and siege craft, geography, medicine, history, politics, and ethics.
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  55. Luttwak, Edward N. The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire from the First Century to the Third. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
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  57. Although criticized for using the term strategy anachronistically and also for having focused the book in such a way on the Roman Principate that the more aggressive previous period and the more defensive later period are excluded, this remains a magisterial text.
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  59. Luttwak, Edward N. The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
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  61. With the minutiae of Byzantine diplomacy included under “grand strategy,” but the message is clear: for the East Roman Empire the instrument of warfare was used sparingly when unavoidable, and soft power plus massive financial bribes were the preferred tools of overall strategy, including foreign policy.
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  63. Maurikios. Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy. Translated by George T. Dennis. The Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
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  65. Originally published c. 602 CE. The somewhat misleading title of this work, which is exclusively devoted to tactical and technical considerations, reflects the vagueness that still prevailed concerning the definitions of strategy and tactics.
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  67. Sun-tzu. The Art of War. Edited and translated by John Minford. London: Penguin, 2003.
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  69. Although it seems that Sun Tzu probably had great wisdom, without a thorough understanding of the connotations of the language in which he was writing or of the historical context of his times (400 BCE), any discussion of his concepts is based on guesswork rather than systematic understanding.
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  71. Vegetius Renatus, Flavius. Epitome of Military Science. Translated and edited by N. P. Milner. 2d ed. Translated Texts for Historians 16. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1996.
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  73. Originally published in the late 4th century CE as Epitoma de re militari. Devoid of reflections on the greater purposes of warfare, this book is, however, the direct and indirect model for all subsequent manuals on war, whether or not these include a discussion of political war aims.
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  75. The Art and Science of War in Political Context
  76. The Early and High Middle Ages were almost entirely devoid of fresh discussion of what today would be called strategy, while Vegetius was copied and read as the main war manual. From the late 14th century on, we find significant additions made to Vegetius, beginning with Bonet 1949 and Pizan 1999. Both works were among the first to be translated into English, and de Pizan’s can be termed the first officially sponsored war manual. Moreover, de Pizan, with her complementary works on good governance and peace, clearly understood the grand strategic, political purpose of warfare, which is also partly reflected in her book on war. Bonet 1949 and Heuser 2010a give a Catholic and a Protestant exposé, respectively, of the classic Just War Theory, which dates back to Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, based on the crucial argument that the God of the Israelites commanded war in certain instances. Both explain how this must go along with restraints in the prosecution of war. Machiavelli 1965 followed more in the apolitical footsteps of Vegetius, but again, Machiavelli’s other works, especially Machiavelli 2003, reflect his awareness of overarching political aims. Heuser 2010b presents an extraordinary comprehensive concept ranging from just war theory to the advocacy of a campaign against Spain, with all details of preparations and execution. Both it and Mendoza 1998 argue that if there is a just cause, and warfare is the last resort, it must be undertaken; however, both equally stress the need for clemency and good governance of any occupied territories if one emerges victorious. All these works, including Heuser 2010c, present defensive and offensive strategy as equally valid in general, applicable depending on circumstances; what to do in case of victory and in case of defeat is equally spelled out. Curiously, no consensus was ever found on whether one should speak of an art or a science of war. Clausewitz cut the Gordian knot by postulating that warfare is a social activity and, as such, the resultant of both.
  77. Bonet, Honoré. The Tree of Battles. Translated by G. W. Coopland. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 1949.
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  79. Originally published c. 1390 as L’arbre des batailles nouuellement imprimé et corrigé. Although written by a cleric, this has a bloodthirsty ring, inspired mainly by the God of the Old Testament, who ordered his people to go to war. In victory, however, the Christian prince must show clemency and magnanimity.
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  81. Heuser, Beatrice. “François de Saillans—Bertrand de Loque (1589).” In The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. Edited and translated by Beatrice Heuser, 50–61. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010a.
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  83. This chapter includes translated excerpts of de Loque’s treatise Deux Traités: L’un de la guerre, l’autre du duel, originally published in 1589 (Lyon, France: Iacob Rayoyre). The text, written by a Protestant clergyman (de Loque), gives an exemplary presentation of just war theory that includes an injunction to practice clemency after victory, except toward stubborn heretics.
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  85. Heuser, Beatrice. “Matthew Sutcliffe (1593).” In The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. Edited and translated by Beatrice Heuser, 62–86. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010b.
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  87. This chapter includes excerpts from Sutcliffe’s The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes, originally published in 1593 (London: Deputies of C. Barker). The text, written by a cleric (Matthew Sutcliffe), is all the more remarkable as the action it proposes—a preemptive attack on Spain—was implemented by the English fleet under the Earl of Essex three years later, with some temporary success.
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  89. Heuser, Beatrice. “Paul Hay du Chastelet (1668).” In The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. Edited and translated by Beatrice Heuser, 103–123. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010c.
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  91. This chapter contains Hay du Chastelet’s Traité de la guerre, ou Politique militaire, originally published in 1668 (Paris: I. Gvignard). While fully subscribing to the just war arguments, Hay particularly emphasizes the jus post bellum, the restraint and generosity with which a victorious general and army should act toward the defeated army and population.
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  93. Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Art of War. Translated by Ellis Farnworth. New York: Da Capo, 1965.
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  95. Originally published in 1521 as Arte de la guerra. Worth including here, as it is one of the earliest modern manuals on war, albeit one devoid of reflections on political purpose.
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  97. Machiavelli, Niccolò. “The Discourses on Livy.” In The Discourses. Edited by Bernard Crick; translated by Leslie J. Walker and Brian Richardson, 75–528. Penguin Classics. London and New York: Penguin, 2003.
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  99. Originally published in 1531 as I discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. The far more interesting work of Machiavelli, as he muses here about the political purposes of military actions.
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  101. Mendoza, Bernardino de. Teórica y práctica de la guerra. Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa, 1998.
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  103. Originally published in 1595. This soldier and diplomat never lost sight of the political aims of a war. He cautions against rashness, especially against giving battle, except in very favorable circumstances. He implicitly strongly criticizes the cruelty with which the Duke of Alba fought the insurgency in the Spanish Netherlands. Translated excerpts can be found in Beatrice Heuser, ed. and trans., The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 87–102.
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  105. Pizan, Christine de. The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry. Translated by Sumner Willard. Edited by Charity Cannon Willard. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.
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  107. Originally published c. 1410 as Livre des fais d’armes et de chevaleri. An original fusion of materials from Vegetius and Bonet, along with quotations from many other classical authors, emphasizing that war must be a last resort and constrained by rules.
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  109. The Enlightenment
  110. With the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment, religious arguments and points of reference receded and were replaced by very similar just war arguments that are now framed as norms of interstate behavior. Writers still saw the choice of a defensive or an offensive strategy as depending entirely on context, seeing no shame in either. De Saxe 2007, like Mendoza 1998 (cited under The Art and Science of War in Political Context) and Sun-tzu 2003 (cited under Origins), cautions against engaging in battle unless the circumstances are very favorable, and, like Sun Tzu, sees great advantage in prevailing without battle. Santa Cruz’s Reflexiones militaries (see Heuser 2010), a seven-volume work, is the most comprehensive treatise of all, covering most aspects of war, from naval warfare to siege warfare and counterinsurgency, and from preparations to what a victorious or vanquished army and general ought to do after battle or, indeed, the end of hostilities. Guibert 1977 approaches the whole subject of warfare from an original angle, advocating a comprehensive reform of France’s military, conditional upon France itself becoming all but a republic or constitutional monarchy, which would lead to an overall defensive posture that no peace-minded neighbor need fear. Lloyd 2005 equally dwells on the link between a state’s constitution (with despotic, monarchical, or republican governments) and its way of war. Besides Delbrück 1975–1985, Earle 1944, and Paret 1986 (all cited under General Overviews), Poirier 1985 and Gat 1989 provide the best overviews and analyses of writing about war and its political dimensions in this period.
  111. Gat, Azar. The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to Clausewitz. Oxford Historical Monographs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
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  113. Discusses works from those of the Habsburg general Montecuccoli to Jomini and explains Clausewitz’s writings in the context of the German-speaking authors of that general’s era.
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  115. Guibert, Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de. “Essai général de tactique.” In Stratégiques. By Jacques Antoine Hippolyte de Guibert, 127–476. Paris: Herne, 1977.
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  117. In addition to Essai général (1772), see De la force publique (1790), also published in this volume. Guibert designed a utopian state with a militia of citizen-soldiers to defend it. Guibert later moved away from this ideal and embraced a combination of militia, professional army, and interior police forces to give France more strategic options and protect it from civil war. Translated excerpts can be found in Beatrice Heuser, ed. and trans., The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 145–170.
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  119. Heuser, Beatrice. “Santa Cruz de Marcenado and Zanthier (1724–30/1775).” In The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz. Edited and translated by Beatrice Heuser, 124–146. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010.
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  121. This chapter contains excerpts of Reflexiones militaries, originally published in 1724–1730, in a heavily abridged version (Göttingen and Gotha: F. W. Zanthier). A famous work in its day, full of classical and biblical references combined with more recent historical examples, Reflexiones militares contains great wisdom.
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  123. Lloyd, Henry. “Continuation of the History of the Late War in Germany, between the King of Prussia, and the Empress of Germany and her Allies, Part II (1781).” In War, Society and Enlightenment: The Works of General Lloyd. Edited by Patrick J. Speelman, 375–478. History of Warfare 32. Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2005.
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  125. At the end of his history of the Seven Years’ War, Lloyd added some insightful general reflections on warfare, including the identification of the political system as a variable in the conduct of war, building on his vast international experience.
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  127. Poirier, Lucien. Les Voix de la Stratégie: Généalogie de la stratégie militaire, Guibert, Jomini. Géopolitiques de la Stratégie. Paris: Fayard, 1985.
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  129. Partly a highly philosophical development of Poirier’s own ideas on the evolution of military strategy, partly a metaphysical commentary on Guibert and Jomini.
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  131. Saxe, Maurice de. Reveries on the Art of War. Translated and edited by Thomas R. Phillips. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007.
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  133. Originally published in 1732 as Rêveries sur l’art de la guerre. Mainly about tactics, logistics, recruitment and all the classical subjects of a field manual but widely read in its own times and throughout the following century, if only to dismiss the French marshal’s lack of enthusiasm for battle.
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  135. Small Wars, Insurgencies, and Counterinsurgency
  136. There seem to be no manuals on how to stage an insurgency and fight superior forces with irregular armed forces until the early 19th century. Rühle von Lilienstern 1817–1818 emphasizes that even major war always contains an element of such “small war,” which indeed would continue to be the case for all subsequent major wars. By contrast, literature on how to counter an insurgency goes back to writings on Roman history, and then to Machiavelli, to Mendoza (see Mendoza 1998, cited under The Art and Science of War in Political Context), and especially to Santa Cruz de Marcenado (see Heuser 2010, cited under The Enlightenment). Impressively, all advocate clemency against the bulk of the insurgents, and particularly the population, whose support is to be sought and won through good governance, justice backed by force. Lloyd 2005 (cited under The Enlightenment) acknowledges that insurgencies arise not from the wickedness of the insurgents but from serious causes, real or imagined. Especially Santa Cruz thus prescribes a host of measures to isolate the leaders of the insurgency and to address all possible grievances without creating new ones. Writings on how to stage an insurgency have their roots in writings on how states should use irregular but professional forces alongside regular armies. Grandmaison 1777 is the first widely read published text; many others followed this model. After the experience of the irregular warfare and harassment to which Napoleon’s forces were submitted in Spain during the Guerrilla of 1808–1812 and the Russian campaign of 1812, several writers drew lessons either for the use of irregular warfare against occupying forces (see Le Mière de Corvey 1823) or for how to suppress them (see Bugeaud 1883 and Lyautey 1944, Lyautey being Bugeaud’s disciple but also critic). Rink 1999 is a groundbreaking work that explains this link with partisan warfare (professional soldiers engaged in special operations).
  137. Bugeaud, Thomas Robert. Oeuvres militaires. Paris: L. Baudoin, 1883.
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  139. With his experience of the Spanish Guerrilla, Bugeaud developed brutal means of repressing resistance against French colonialism in North Africa. Originally published in 1832. Translated excerpts can be found in Chaliand 1994 (cited under General Overviews), pp. 744–746.
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  141. Grandmaison, de, Major General. A Treatise on the Military Service, of Light Horse, and Light Infantry, in the Field, and in the Fortified Places. Translated by Major Lewis Nicola. Philadelphia: Robert Bell, 1777.
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  143. Originally published in 1756 as La petite guerre, ou Traité du service des troupes légères en campagne. Of purely tactical interest, devoid of political considerations, but the model for the subsequent literature. Available online by subscription.
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  145. Le Mière de Corvey, Jean Fréderic Auguste. Des partisans et des corps irréguliers. Paris: Anselin et Pochard, 1823.
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  147. Drawing on his experiences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815), Le Mière de Corvey ponders how to learn from the Spanish Guerrilla to use the mobilization of the population as a whole against an occupying force. Clausewitz took his ideas on people’s war from this author. Translated excerpts can be found in Chaliand 1994 (cited under General Overviews), pp. 662–670.
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  149. Lyautey, Louis Hubert Gonzalve. Rayonnement. Edited by Patrick Heidsieck. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.
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  151. Lyautey articulated the famous oil-spot, or oil-slick, theory about how to spread France’s civilizational acquis to civilize and pacify colonies. Also includes Lyautey’s “Du rôle social de l’officier”, an article originally published in Revue des deux Mondes (15 March 1891).
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  153. Rink, Martin. Vom “Partheygänger” zum Partisanen: Die Konzeption des kleinen Krieges in Preussen, 1740–1813. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999.
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  155. This excellent piece of research also focuses on the effects of lessons of the Vendée, the Spanish Guerrilla, and the Tyrolean uprising on the Prussian campaign against Napoleon.
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  157. Rühle von Lilienstern, Otto August Johann Jacob. Handbuch für den Offizier, zur Belehrung im Frieden und zum Gebrauch im Felde. 2 vols. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1817–1818.
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  159. In a long section in Volume 2, Rühle spells out the interconnectedness of major war and partisan warfare, deploring that the latter, in his day, was seen as an unfashionable subject for reflection. Translated excerpts can be found in Beatrice Heuser, ed. and trans., The Strategy Makers: Thoughts on War and Society from Machiavelli to Clausewitz (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010), pp. 171–190.
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  161. Interpreters of Napoleonic Strategy
  162. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars represented a watershed in warfare and, consequently, in strategic theory. If one is skeptical about figures quoted by the authors of antiquity, it is likely that Europe had not seen armies the size of those of Napoleon’s and his adversaries’, nor had as large an area of Europe been drawn into such hostilities. Guibert 1977 (cited under The Enlightenment) seems to have prophesied such a quantum leap in warfare, linking it intimately to the transformed nature of a society in which the interest of the people would be paramount, as is shown in Chickering and Förster 2010. Nevertheless, foreign thinkers were slow to understand the ideology-related dimension of this revolution in warfare and concentrated on tactical and operational levels. Clausewitz 1980 deliberately excludes reflections of political war aims. Few works show an understanding of the impact of the French Revolution: Rühle von Lilienstern 1817–1818 (cited under Small Wars, Insurgencies, and Counterinsurgency), which reflects bitterly on the absence of just war intentions, and above all Jomini 1996, which articulates the nexus between varying causes of wars and war aims on the one hand and their effect on particular prosecution of war on the other. Rühle’s explanations allow for the conclusion that some—including Napoleon (see Esdaile 2008)—wage wars not with a predetermined grand strategy subordinated or fixed war aims in mind, but selfishly, in pursuit of their own glory through military victory, reactively exploiting any opportunity presenting itself. Bond 1996 shows how in the age lasting from the Napoleonic Wars until, in the author’s view, the late 20th century, strategists became obsessed with the quest for victory through the means of an ever more total form of warfare.
  163. Bond, Brian. The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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  165. A compact, well-written narrative of 19th- and 20th-century strategic developments in their historical context.
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  167. Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
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  169. Addresses the question of whether these wars contained not only the germs of totalitarian democracy (Talmon), but also the seeds of total war.
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  171. Clausewitz, Carl von. Vom Kriege. Edited by Werner Hahlweg. Bonn, Germany: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlag, 1980.
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  173. The most innovative parts are the first three books and the last book (originally published in 1832); between these parts are traditional sections dealing with defensive and offensive wars and with the standard Vegetian field manual subjects, plus additional themes that have since joined the standard repertoire, such as the characteristics of the general. Also published as On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (rev. ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).
  174. Find this resource:
  175. Esdaile, Charles J. “De-Constructing the French Wars: Napoleon as Anti-Strategist.” Journal of Strategic Studies 31.4 (2008): 512–552.
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  177. Argues ably that Napoleon did not have a grand strategy from the word “go.”
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  179. Jomini, Antoine Henri, Baron de. The Art of War. Translated by G. H. Mendell, and W. P. Craighill. London: Greenhill, 1996.
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  181. Originally published in 1837 as Précis de l’art de la guerre. The most politically conscious of Jomini’s several publications, this—and not Clausewitz—deals at considerable length with different causes of wars (and, related to that, war aims) and how these affect the conduct of war. Contemporaries, however, homed in on Jomini’s tactical-operational discussions, not on these reflections on grand strategy.
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  183. Strategists of the Long 19th Century
  184. Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder would be the key practitioner of the Prussian adaptation of Napoleonic warfare, and as such, his views, never systematically recorded but pieced together from many different documents, have been taken as pointers toward success. Especially Moltke’s works of the 1950s–1970s are strongly marked by his militarism and bellicosity. A collection of his writings can be found, albeit poorly edited, in Moltke 1911. But elsewhere, too, war was undergoing another quantum leap in industrialization, mobilization, and destruction, as the collections Förster and Nagler 1997 and Boemeke, et al. 1999 (both cited under Secondary Literature on the Long 19th Century) show. After their humiliating defeat in 1870–1871, the French thought they could identify the reason for Prussia’s success in Moltke’s and his colleagues’ education at the War Academy, which had once been led by Clausewitz and then Rühle von Lilienstern, and, based on Clausewitz’s understanding of Napoleon’s genius, they determined that Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (Clausewitz 1980, cited under Interpreters of Napoleonic Strategy) must hold the secrets of Prussia’s success. Gilbert 1978, Foch 1918, Colin 2011 and many other works thus developed a new gospel of the offensive, based on a distorting and selective reading of Napoleon’s campaigns and of Clausewitz’s and Jomini’s works (see Clausewitz 1980 and Jomini 1996, both cited under Interpreters of Napoleonic Strategy). But the cult of the offensive was shared also in Prussia: Goltz 1914, Caemmerer 2010, and Bernhardi 2010 fully embraced it, and it was espoused in a derivative fashion also in Britain and the United States. Besides, the Prussian thinkers, and Colin, underscored the impact of new technology, which they believed implied that one had no choice but to try to overwhelm the enemy as quickly as possible, reinforcing their preference for the offensive. Whereas the French feared Germany’s superior numbers, however, Bernhardi persuaded himself and many of his readers that the Germans were a weak little nation surrounded by a huge number of hostile neighbors, jointly superior in numbers, and could only hope to win a future war by retaliating first. This led all major players at the outbreak of World War I to have an offensive strategy. There were few dissenters: Jaurès 1977 advocates a defensive strategy for France, and its author was assassinated for attempting to stem the tide of war lust in 1914.
  185. Bernhardi, Friedrich von. Germany and the Next War. Translated by Allen H. Powles. Classic Reprint series. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2010.
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  187. Originally published in 1912 as Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Stuttgart and Berlin: J. G. Cotta). Foreigners making peaceful noises really wanted to mislead the Germans into trusting them. Instead, Germany must take advantage of all technological developments to hit hard and hit first. The political leadership might define war aims but must never involve itself in its conduct. Bernhardi expressed similar views in his Vom heutigen Kriege, published in the same year, translated by Karl von Donat as On War of Today (1912).
  188. Find this resource:
  189. Caemmerer, Rudolf von. The Development of Strategical Science during the 19th Century. Translated by Karl von Donat. Charleston, SC: Nabu, 2010.
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  191. Originally published as Die Entwicklung der Strategischen Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Baensch, 1904). This is an early discussion of individual authors and their writings, covering Bülow, Jomini, Archduke Charles, Clausewitz, Willisen, Moltke, and Schlichting.
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  193. Colin, Jean Lambert Alphonse. The Transformation of War. Translated by L. H. R. Pope-Hennessy. Charleston, SC: Forgotten Books, 2011.
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  195. Originally published in 1911 as Les transformations de la guerre (Paris: Flammarion). Colin also gives an overview of the evolution of warfare since the 18th century and Frederick II of Prussia. In his predictions for the immediate future, Colin was very similar in mindset to von der Goltz; both were fascinated by all the new technology and saw it as inevitably paving the way for an ever more destructive way of war.
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  197. Foch, Ferdinand. The Principles of War. Translated by Hilaire Belloc. London: Chapman and Hall, 1918.
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  199. Originally published in 1900 as Principes de la guerre: Conférences faites en 1900 à l’École supérieure de Guerre (Paris: Berger-Levrault). Faced with Germany’s larger birth rates, France could only substitute morale, will power, and training for numbers. From Clausewitz, Foch distilled the motto “victory equals will.” Following Jomini and Clausewitz in his undated note of late 1820, Foch was the first to list formal principles of war.
  200. Find this resource:
  201. Gilbert, Georges. Essais de critique militaire. Paris: Hachette, 1978.
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  203. Originally published in 1890. A polemical apotheosis of the offensive, based on worship of Napoleon and the desire to get France’s own back on the Germans by emulating them.
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  205. Goltz, Colmar Freiherr von der. The Nation in Arms: A Treatise on Modern Military Systems and the Conduct of War. Translated by Philip A. Ashworth; edited by A. Hilliard Atteridge. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1914.
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  207. Originally published as Das Volk in Waffen (Berlin: Decker, 1899). Of the old “peace-makes-peoples-decadent” school, von der Goltz not only welcomed war but also was convinced that, for the time being, wars could only pit entire nations against each other; it is such a clash that he exhorted his countrymen to prepare for.
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  209. Jaurès, Jean. L’Armée Nouvelle: L’organisation socialiste de la France. Paris: Editions Sociales, 1977.
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  211. Originally published in 1911 (Paris: J. Rouff). This brilliant piece follows in the tradition of Guibert 1977 (cited under The Enlightenment). Jaurès extrapolates from France’s republican ideals that France should have a militia, or conscript army, with which it should adopt a defensive strategy, which in turn would cause world opinion to be on France’s side in case of German aggression.
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  213. Moltke, Helmuth von. Kriegslehren: Die operativen Vorbereitungen zur Schlacht. Vol. 4, Part 1 of Moltkes Militärische Werke. Edited by Großen Generalstabe. Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1911.
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  215. An unscholarly edition of Moltke’s works by the historical division of the chiefs of staff on the eve of World War I; no more scholarly edition of his collected works exists.
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  217. Secondary Literature on the Long 19th Century
  218. Liddell Hart 1933, while misinterpreting some writers, was the first to question the validity of the Napoleonic paradigm, the pursuit of victory in battle at all costs (see Heuser 2010, cited under General Overviews). Gat 1992, following in this tradition, traces the influence of Napoleon’s earliest interpreters on the later writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries who selectively homed in on the concepts of the decisive, or annihilation, battle and the offensive, eclipsing or dismissing all parts of the works that discussed the advantages of the defensive. The collections Förster and Nagler 1997 and Boemeke, et al. 1999 show that elements of “total war” concepts can be found here and there in earlier wars, but that the ideas we associate with the concept since Ludendorff 1936 (cited under Total War and its Alternatives) were not fully developed before the 1930s. Heuser 2010 (cited under General Overviews) shows that this hankering for military victory, the Napoleonic paradigm, made many strategists—theoreticians and practitioners alike—blind to the need to keep their eyes on the peace that should come in the aftermath of war. Although some practitioners throughout history stand accused of this fault, theoreticians both prior to the French Revolution and again since the world wars have recognized this flaw.
  219. Boemeke, Manfred F., Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster, eds. Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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  221. Further exploration of the impact of Social Darwinism, the scramble for colonies, and industrialization on warfare.
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  223. Förster, Stig, and Jörg Nagler, eds. On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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  225. Fascinatingly shows how the American experience influenced the German conduct of war, but also traces parallel independent developments.
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  227. Gat, Azar. The Development of Military Thought: The Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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  229. An excellent analysis of how the disciples of Clausewitz and Jomini, under the influence of Social Darwinism and militarism, dwelled increasingly on the centrality of battle and unlimited war between entire nations—what would later be defined as total war.
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  231. Liddell Hart, Basil Henry. The Ghost of Napoleon. London: Faber and Faber, 1933.
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  233. The narrative covers the development of strategy from Napoleon to World War I, and in it Clausewitz stands accused for having made subsequent thinkers obsessed with the pursuit of victory at all costs, through decisive battles of annihilation.
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  235. Total War and its Alternatives
  236. As the Chickering and Förster 2000 collection, as well as Förster and Nagler 1997 and Boemeke, et al. 1999 (both cited under Secondary Literature on the Long 19th Century), shows, there was a fairly linear development from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of 1792–1815 to the two world wars. These works have also given the key definitions of total war, the first of which concerns total mobilization on one’s own side, defined in this way by the Frenchman Léon Daudet in 1918. If this definition is applied, there are elements of total war in the French Revolution’s Convention call for mobilization of the entire population in 1793. The second definition comes from the World War I field marshal Erich Ludendorff’s eponymous book (Ludendorff 1936), in which he identifies the adversary’s entire nation—down to the infant in the cradle—as an enemy to be fought. Ludendorff’s anti-Semitic (but also anti-French, anti-Catholic, and anti-Freemason) views aimed directly at genocide and shared much with the strategy actually implemented by Hitler. The views of the Italian Douhet (Douhet 2009) and indeed the British Trenchard (Trenchard 1994) (both cited under Early Air Power Thinking) on the uses of air power also went in this direction. By contrast, Fuller 1923, Liddell Hart 1933 (cited under Secondary Literature on the Long 19th Century), and Liddell Hart 1941 tried to find ways in which to move away from the mass slaughter that World War I had produced on the Western Front by learning from the German successes on the Eastern Front and by fully exploiting the mobility made possible by the invention of the tank. Although Fuller’s right-wing leanings and Liddell Hart’s sympathies for appeasement would stigmatize them, they would both become quite famous for their exploration of possibilities in warfare for avoiding a head-on confrontation with enemy armies where they were at their strongest. Both authors saw themselves as prophets of the blitzkrieg warfare that the Germans developed quite independently. As Gat 1998 shows, fascist and liberal views of war could converge to an amazing extent in the need to make the most of new technology in order to avoid a repetition of the World War I stalemate of the trenches.
  237. Chickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge, UK, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
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  239. The realities of World War I are measured by definitions of total war, finding that the normative ideal was not fully realized. Notwithstanding that, the horrors and suffering of that war in absolute numbers topped previous major wars of Europe and the United States.
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  241. Fuller, J. F. C. The Reformation of War. London: Hutchinson, 1923.
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  243. Contains Fuller’s famous eight principles of war, with little acknowledgment to Foch, whom Fuller followed closely. The principles still dominate British and U.S. military doctrine. Fuller updated these ideas in his On Future Warfare (London: Sifton Praed, 1928).
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  245. Gat, Azar. Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and other Modernists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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  247. Explores the interest, on both extremes of the political spectrum, in the possibilities held out by technology, in pursuit of ideologically founded war aims.
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  249. Liddell Hart, Basil Henry. The Strategy of Indirect Approach. London: Faber and Faber, 1941.
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  251. A new edition of The Decisive Wars of History (London: Bell, 1929). As the alternative to the pursuit of frontal battles of annihilation, Liddell Hart identifies a pattern of warfare aiming to strike not at the enemy’s strongest point, but to defeat him indirectly. This division of war into two categories, direct versus indirect confrontation, is similar to the dualism proposed by Delbrück.
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  253. Ludendorff, Erich. The Nation at War. Translated by A. S. Rappoport. London: Hutchinson, 1936.
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  255. Originally published as Der Totale Krieg (Munich: Ludendorff, 1935). This is the closest we have, other than the ravings of Mein Kampf, in terms of a German strategy for total war, aiming not only at victory over enemy nations, but also at their extermination.
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  257. Early Writing on Naval and Maritime Strategies
  258. After some interesting ideas on naval strategy tucked away in 16th-century philosophical treatises or in books about ship building, or in larger treatises on war, such as Heuser 2010b (cited under The Art and Science of War in Political Context), there was a long and widespread silence on this topic until the late 19th century, as navies passed from sail to steam. Two tendencies emerged, one stressing each technological innovation, with the conviction that it had changed everything, the other placing more emphasis on long-term historical trends. The latter included works that have left a more lasting legacy, such as Colomb 1891Mahan 1911 (among many other writings from Mahan), Daveluy 1905, Corbett 1988, and Castex 1929–1935. Those emphasizing historical continuities nevertheless disagreed on implications. Mahan, influenced by Jominian interpretations of Napoleon’s decisive battles, and under the spell of Trafalgar and other British exploits, set the course of several naval strategists toward a total devotion to the offensive à outrance and the quest for naval battles of annihilation. In this, he had followers in all countries, such as Daveluy and Castex in France. Corbett, by contrast, was a thorn in the side of naval strategists, arguing persuasively that naval strategy should be subordinated, as maritime strategy, to a bigger view of strategy integrating both what could be achieved at sea and what must in the final instance decide wars, namely, action on land. Wegener 1941 and Groos 1929 take a third approach, emphasizing the unique geostrategic problems and options of individual naval powers and criticizing the German navy for having mindlessly followed the big-battle obsession of other powers. Those stressing technology also came to divergent conclusions among themselves. One group of French writers and practitioners, known as the Jeune École, saw in technology opportunities for a distant blockade of a superior enemy, to starve his nation and hit him at his weakest point (Røksund 2007). This basic reasoning would later be taken up by air power advocates. An excellent collection of articles on many strategists from across the world and across time can be found in the series of publications on naval strategy edited by Hervé Coutau-Bégarie (Coutau-Bégarie 1990–2007).
  259. Castex, Raoul. Théories stratégiques. 5 vols. Paris: Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1929–1935.
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  261. A scholarly and immensely comprehensive survey of literature on naval/maritime strategy. When it comes to Castex’s own thinking, however, we encounter a late adherent of the offensive à outrance, with not a little sympathy for Mahanism.
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  263. Colomb, P. H. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. London: W. H. Allen, 1891.
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  265. The Briton Colomb could still complain that little had been written on naval strategy; he saw the command of the sea—a concept going back to Francis Bacon—as crucial to naval strategy, whereas later authors doubted that such command could be secured permanently. Electronically reproduced by Nabu Press in 2010.
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  267. Corbett, Julian S. Some Principles of Maritime Strategy. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 1988.
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  269. Originally published in 1911 (London: Longmans, Green). The earliest of the top 20th-century writers, Corbett is first class, not only on maritime strategy but also on strategy in general. While building on Clausewitz, Corbett went on to develop an original and rich body of reflection that, of all authors listed in this section, has best stood the test of time.
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  271. Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé, ed. L’evolution de la pensée navale. 8 vols. Paris: Fondation pour les Études de Défense Nationale, 1990–2007.
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  273. An impressive and comprehensive multiauthor work, bringing together well-documented articles about the development of naval thinking in a dozen countries over several centuries, including the reprint or first translation of a few original treatises.
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  275. Daveluy, René. Étude sur la stratégie navale. Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1905.
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  277. Here, this French officer applies the land strategists’ fixation with the annihilation battle to naval warfare, and the terminology is very comparable to that of Goltz 1914 (cited under Strategists of the Long 19th Century).
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  279. Groos, Otto. Seekriegslehren im Lichte des Weltkrieges: Ein Buch für den Seemann, Soldaten und Staatsmann. Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1929.
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  281. Corbett’s foremost disciple in Germany, Groos, like Wegener, attacked the Mahanian tendencies of the German navy, with its fondness for preparing for a great naval battle. Groos combined this Corbettian realism with a geostrategic approach.
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  283. Mahan, A. T. Naval Strategy Compared and Contrasted with the Principles and Practice of Military Operations on Land: Lectures Delivered at U.S. Naval War College, Newport, R.I., between the Years 1887 and 1911. Boston: Little, Brown, 1911.
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  285. Part of a series of historical studies of British naval prowess written by this prolific American. Mahan was subtler than his fans, which critics give him credit for, but by and large he devoted much space to the role of major battles at sea. Electronically reproduced by Nabu Press in 2009.
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  287. Røksund, Arne. The Jeune École: The Strategy of the Weak. History of Warfare 43. Boston: Brill, 2007.
  288. DOI: 10.1163/ej.9789004157231.i-242Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  289. As of the early 21st century the best overview of the scattered writings of the very diverse members of the Jeune École, which cannot be found in one single edition anywhere.
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  291. Wegener, Vizeadmiral Wolfgang. Die Seestrategie des Weltkrieges. 2d ed. Berlin: E. S. Mittler & Sohn, 1941.
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  293. Originally published in 1929. Wegener argues that simplistic Mahanism is inappropriate for his country, and that a tailor-made geographic approach would have been a far better strategy
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  295. Early Air Power Thinking
  296. The classics of air power thinking—a term created in analogy to sea power—owe much either to Mahanianism or to thinking similar to the reasoning of the Jeune École. They argue that in order to avoid another war of stalemate, with mass casualties in the trenches, one should impose an “air blockade,” by which Macmillan 1941 actually means a bombing of enemy cities. Much like Fuller 1923 and Liddell Hart 1941 (both cited under Total War and its Alternatives), with regard to land warfare, all these works explore the possibilities presented by the new technology. It is not surprising that Douhet, who enjoyed the support of Mussolini, espoused a strategy that deliberately aimed to target the enemy population in order more easily to persuade the enemy state as a whole to submit (see Douhet 2009). It is surprising, by contrast, that Liddell Hart (Liddell Hart 1925) and Trenchard (Trenchard 1994), a founding father of the British Royal Air Force (RAF), had very similar views. Douhet shared with Mitchell (Mitchell 1925) the conviction that air power could take on many of the functions previously executed by the navy, fanning interservice rivalry. Spaight (Spaight 1938) was one of the early critics of this approach, demonstrating its inhumanity and immorality. Biddle 2002 shows how, despite the divergent doctrines of the US Army Air Force (USAAF) and the RAF, both were reduced by the limits of the technology available to them and by the enemy’s antiaircraft defenses to a strategy of indiscriminate nighttime bombardment of population centers, which found its horrible culmination in the “conventional” bombings of German cities and Tokyo and in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The promises of technology Mitchell and others dreamt of in terms of precision had not yet been fulfilled by the time World War II took place. The precision that the US air power theorists hoped for, and indeed the early doctrine of what was still the air arm of the US Army before and during World War II, was only achieved in the 1970s. A different, deluded hope, hinted at by Liddell Hart 1925, was spelled out by Faure 1935—namely, that the mere threat of extensive (“strategic”) air bombardment of enemy cities might have deterrent qualities, a view shared by the advocates of a strong bomber force in Britain. This view would have a strong impact on subsequent nuclear strategy. Budiansky 2003 provides the best comprehensive and analytical history both of the military use of aviation and of air power strategy.
  297. Biddle, Tami Davis. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
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  299. Seminal archive-based research tracking the RAF’s doctrinal debates and procurement decisions, explaining how and why the high ideals of the USAAF culminated in the carnage-bombing of Dresden and the use of nuclear weapons in Japan.
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  301. Budiansky, Stephen. Air Power: From Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II—A History of the People, Ideas and Machines That Transformed War in the Century of Flight. London and New York: Viking, 2003.
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  303. This weighty tome gives an excellent overview, building on a huge literature and primary sources, which are copiously quoted and well marshaled in support of excellent analysis.
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  305. Douhet, Giulio. The Command of the Air. Translated by Dino Ferrari. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009.
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  307. Originally published as Il dominio dell’aria (Rome, 1921). Advocating population targeting, applied preemptively or indeed even preventively, Douhet saw no defense against enemy air power. As a Fascist and thus a typical international relations “realist,” Douhet had no qualms about contravention of international norms and treaties, as only the stronger and more determined side would win, and treaties were mere paper.
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  309. Faure, Pierre. L’Avion tuera la Guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 1935.
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  311. In an earlier work of 1931, Faure showed himself a Douhetian believer in the offensive, arguing even that armies were in part becoming superfluous. This later work explores the deterrent qualities of air power.
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  313. Liddell Hart, B. H. Paris, or, The Future of War. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1925.
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  315. Implicitly following Douhet, Liddell Hart promotes air strikes on the enemy’s capital city, to “paralyse the nervous system of the enemy country,” to hit the enemy’s weakest, not strongest, point, as blockades take too long to take effect. Bottom line, fewer people (albeit mainly civilians) would lose their lives in a future conflict than in World War I. Ultimately, the threat of such a war might change “the spirit of man” to become more pacific.
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  317. Macmillan, Norman. Air Strategy. London: Hutchinson, 1941.
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  319. Spells out the links between what might be achieved by naval blockade—such as that practiced by Britain in World War I—and what might now be achieved by city bombing.
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  321. Mitchell, William. Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power—Economic and Military. New York and London: Putnam, 1925.
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  323. Focuses on the defensive use of air power against enemy air power and shipping, coupled with targeting of the “enemy’s manufacturing and food centers, railways, bridges, canals and harbours.” Excessively optimistic about the precision that might be applied in this context, Mitchell did not aim to generate mass civilian casualties. Reproduced in Roots of Strategy: Book 4, edited by David Jablonsky (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1999).
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Spaight, J. M. Air Power in the Next War. London: G. Bles, 1938.
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  327. Foresees the horrors of World War II city bombing, including its moral dilemmas and its clash with the norms of warfare—especially the injunction to spare noncombatants.
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  329. Trenchard, Hugh. “The War Object of an Air Force.” In The Art of War in World History: From Antiquity to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Gérard Chaliand, 905–910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
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  331. Also referred to as “Memorandum of 1928.” Makes the case for population targeting disguised as “dehousing workers” to sap morale.
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  333. Nuclear Strategies
  334. Nuclear strategy was the child of both air power thinking and naval strategy. Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some respects seemed to confirm Douhetian claims, the subsequent Cold War arguably stayed “cold” in Europe and limited to nonnuclear warfare elsewhere because of the deterrent effects of nuclear weapons, which bomber forces in the interwar period had aspired to but which, owing to the weapons’ technical shortcomings, had not been realized. Within days or weeks of Hiroshima, a number of writers and government officials came to understand what the new weapon implied; these realizations found expression in Castex 1929–1935 (cited under Early Writing on Naval and Maritime Strategies), Liddell Hart 1946, Brodie 1946, Brodie 1959, and Blackett 1962. There was some initial optimistic hope that nuclear weapons had abolished major war altogether. Some French writers (and populations in some other European countries) transferred Faure’s wishful thinking (Faure 1935, cited under Early Air Power Thinking) from air forces to nuclear weapons, proclaiming as late as 1987 that “war is dead,” or that, given missiles and aircraft, one could safely proceed to disbanding the other two services (see Gallois 1976)—interservice rivalry taken to its extremes. It became evident with the Korean War in 1950, however, that the nuclear powers merely recoiled from initiating another total war, whereas they did engage in wars throughout the world, some of which can only be described as major from a local perspective. Western strategists devoted much thought to how to ensure that this fear of nuclear war, assumed to exist on the other side as well, would continue to hold, while playing on it vis-à-vis the Soviet Union so as to deter it from attacking the NATO area or other Western allies with conventional weapons only. These strategists also sought ways in which to counter nonnuclear aggression and other military operations by playing on the danger of escalation to a nuclear level vis-à-vis the Soviet Union (and indeed its ally and then soon-to-be nuclear competitor China). At the same time, they faced the problem of self-deterrence, or paralysis. This dilemma was explored in differing ways by the aforementioned works, but also in Kahn 1960, Beaufre 1965, and Schelling 1966. A great deal of the literature on nuclear strategy, especially that derived from economics (systems analysis, game theory), pretended to universal and general applicability, but much of it was in fact extremely dependent on the narrower political and technological circumstances of its own period, as shown in the magisterial and authoritative overview Freedman 2003.
  335. Beaufre, André. Deterrence and Strategy. Translated by R. H. Barry. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.
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  337. Originally published as Dissuasion et stratégie (Paris: A. Colin, 1964). Inspired by Liddell Hart, but also by Clausewitz, Beaufre here presents what is perhaps the most coherent and logical discussion of how strategy ought to be formulated, given the limitations imposed by the wish on all sides to avoid nuclear escalation.
  338. Find this resource:
  339. Blackett, P. M. S. Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962.
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  341. This is the key British work on operational research (what in the United States is called operational analysis), containing two seminal articles on the subject that built on the work done in the British Admiralty in World War II.
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  343. Brodie, Bernard. Strategy in the Missile Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959.
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  345. Echoing Liddell Hart’s grand narrative of strategy since Napoleon, Brodie sets out the security dilemma of one side’s growing strength, by worrying neighbors and rivals, indirectly creating greater insecurity.
  346. Find this resource:
  347. Brodie, Bernard, ed. The Absolute Weapon: Atomic Power and World Order. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946.
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  349. This includes the American security analyst’s and former chief of naval operation’s famous formulation that in future, the chief purpose of the military establishment must be to avert wars, not to win them. If both sides owned nuclear weapons, a nuclear war could surely not be won in a meaningful way.
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  351. Freedman, Lawrence. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. 3d ed. Basingstoke, UK, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
  352. DOI: 10.1057/9780230379435Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  353. Excellent updated edition of the definitive overview of the evolution of nuclear strategy.
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  355. Gallois, Pierre M. L’adieu aux armées. Paris: Albin Michel, 1976.
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  357. Gallois takes Douhetian arguments to their logical extreme: nuclear weapons guarantee a state’s security, as they deter any rational state from attacking. Gallois invented the formula that deterrence equals the product of the terror inspired by the military means available and the credibility of the commitment to use them.
  358. Find this resource:
  359. Kahn, Herman. On Thermonuclear War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960.
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  361. Kahn’s concern was how to apply a strategy that used deliberate and credible planning for use of nuclear weapons to America’s and NATO’s deterrent strategy.
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  363. Liddell Hart, B. H. The Revolution in Warfare. London: Faber and Faber, 1946.
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  365. Liddell Hart’s earliest reactions to Hiroshima quite logically dovetailed well with his rejection of mass warfare after the previous world war and with his rejection of total war in any form.
  366. Find this resource:
  367. Schelling, Thomas C. Arms and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966.
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  369. The major lasting contribution on nuclear strategy from an economist and games theorist, introducing concepts of bargaining and “compellence,” and devoting great attention to abstract calculations of “interests’ and negotiations that reflect the American homo oeconomicus. These, as critics have noted, may not apply to all regimes of different cultures.
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  371. Writing on Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies from the Late 19th to the Early 21st Centuries
  372. Unlike the literature on insurgencies and counterinsurgencies discussed in Small Wars, Insurgencies, and Counterinsurgency, Callwell 1996 is immensely cynical and indeed racist in its discussion of how to subdue revolting colonials. It stands in stark contrast with Lawrence 2005a and Lawrence 2005b, whose author lost his heart to the Arabs as he fought alongside them for their independence from the Ottoman Empire. His explanation of how a weak force of insurgents might exploit the weaknesses of a numerically much superior occupation force is striking in clarity and neutrality of analysis. Mao 2000 and Giap 2004 develop independent strategies for a successful insurgency, both based on Marxism-Leninism, albeit tailored in each case to the particular situation of the respective country. The works of all three insurgency authors have the added poignancy of being based on or prescriptive for practice supervised by them. Debray 1974 provides an eyewitness analysis of the ideals and shortcomings of Che Guevara’s strategy. Trinquier (Trinquier 2006) brought to the American Vietnam War the cynical experience of France in Algeria, and Fall (Fall 1994), that of the French Indochina War. Both, together with Galula (Galula 2006), wrote specifically about counterinsurgency (COIN) aimed at Communist-led insurgents, who had the particular advantage of being backed by strong external Communist powers. The views of all three authors were thus dominated by the notion that fighting Communist-led insurgencies in a worldwide Cold War context was somehow different from anything that had gone before, and their focus on this claim makes them somewhat problematic in a post–Cold War context. Nevertheless, the works of all three underwent a renaissance after the Cold War, when first events in the disintegrating Yugoslavia and then in Afghanistan and Iraq revived a specific interest in COIN throughout the English-speaking countries. Under the guidance of David Petraeus (Petraeus 2006), these and other lessons were incorporated into his Field Manual 3–24 (2006).
  373. Callwell, C. E. Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. 3d ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
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  375. Originally published in 1899 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office). Callwell’s dated terminology and condescending imperialism makes distasteful reading in many places. There are, however, some insights built on bitter experiences that anybody with more humanitarian concerns would ignore at their peril.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Debray, Régis. La guérrilla du Che. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974.
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  379. This analysis of Che Guevara’s strategy (and its failure) by his French follower contextualizes it by explaining the situation in Bolivia and the way in which plans got out of hand in the actual Bolivian campaign.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Fall, Bernard B. Street without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 1994.
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  383. Originally published in 1961 and reviewed in 1989 by Dorothy Fall. The American academic Bernard Fall analyzed the Vietnam War and as early as 1964 argued that America was unlikely to win.
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  385. Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. PSI Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
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  387. Originally published in 1964 (London: Pall Mall). Like Trinquier, Galula built his analysis on his experience in Algeria but put more emphasis on the need to win over the population or to assure at least its neutrality.
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  389. Giap, Vo Nguyen. People’s War, People’s Army: The Viet Công Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries. 2d ed. Hanoi, Vietnam: Thế Giới, 2004.
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  391. General Giap, with his French education, presented a strange mix of Vietnamese nationalism (copied from the French model) and Maoist ideas; he sought to keep China out of his movement’s fight so that Vietnam would not become a satellite of China.
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  393. Lawrence, T. E. “The Evolution of a Revolt.” In T. E. Lawrence in War & Peace: An Anthology of the Military Writings of Lawrence of Arabia. Edited by Malcolm Brown, 260–273. London: Greenhill, 2005a.
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  395. Originally published in 1920 in The Army Quarterly. Lawrence claims to have developed his concepts from scratch, and thus seems to have been unfamiliar with Le Mière de Corvey and others, but otherwise builds on great erudition.
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  397. Lawrence, T. E. “Science of Guerrilla Warfare.” In T. E. Lawrence in War & Peace: An Anthology of the Military Writings of Lawrence of Arabia. Edited by Malcolm Brown, 274–284. London: Greenhill, 2005b.
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  399. Originally published in 1929 in The Encyclopedia Britannica. This is an updating of Lawrence 2005a.
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  401. Mao Tse-tung. On Guerrilla Warfare. Translated by Samuel B. Griffith II. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
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  403. Originally published in 1937 as Yu Chi Chan. Mao spelled out for China a three-phase approach, which he himself followed with his revolutionary army, progressing from insurgency to ultimate military victory in a regular war. Mao himself emphasized that this was not a recipe that would fit all revolutionary movements the world over.
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  405. Petraeus, David. “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq.” Military Review 86.1 (2006): 2–12.
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  407. Lists a number of crucial insights gained from firsthand experience and developed further through this intellectual engagement with the wide literature on COIN. Petraeus was subsequently given the chance to apply the thoughts put forth in his Field Manual 3–24 (2006), referred to by Heuser in “The Cultural Revolution in Counterinsurgency” (Journal of Strategic Studies 30.1 [February 2007]: 153–171) as “the cultural revolution in COIN.”
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Trinquier, Roger. Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency. Translated by Daniel Lee. PSI Classics of the Counterinsurgency Era. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
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  411. Originally published as La Guerre modern (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1961). Trinquier’s approach in several respects resembles Callwell’s; he has no sympathy for the insurgents and clearly comes down on the side of torture if it can lead to the discovery of the adversary’s plans. He is seen either as a hard-nosed “realist” or as frankly immoral.
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  413. Western Strategic Theory since 1945
  414. In the period 1945–1991 most writers on strategy hailed from the United States, Britain, or France and on the Communist side, the Soviet Union. These states were deeply involved in the Cold War and were nuclear powers. Accordingly, strategic writing, even when attempting to take a holistic, grand strategic approach, tended to be dominated by the dimension of nuclear war. Coming from economics-based games theory, Schelling 1960 explores possibilities of negotiating with an adversary so as to find mutually acceptable compromises. The logic proposed by Schelling presupposes “cool-hearted” behavior, which, according to American economic culture, would be regarded as rational, a notion that has been criticized since as not taking sufficiently into consideration the possible enormous variations caused by different beliefs, such as the culture-specific value attached to an individual human life as opposed to society as a whole, or the value of this life compared with an afterlife. As a great fan of Schelling’s, Lawrence Freedman (Freedman 1998, Freedman 2004) summed up and further developed his and Patrick Morgan’s concepts of deterrence and coercion. Coming from a somewhat different angle, Luttwak 2001 explores both the logic and the counterintuitive aspects of interaction between adversaries in a hostile relationship, but again partly eclipses metaphysics. The author of many works on the subject, Colin Gray put forward a work on strategic theory (Gray 2010) focusing particularly on the different cultures, processes, and aims of political leaders and the military as their instrument, a divergence bridged precariously by strategy. André Beaufre’s works on strategy (Beaufre 1965, Beaufre 1967) present an ideal type, outlining what to take into consideration in tailoring a strategy to fit a particular security problem for any power while maximizing room for maneuvering, despite the danger of nuclear escalation, which could lead to self-deterrence, that is, fearful paralysis. Beaufre describes how strategy should be formulated, free from bureaucratic politics. Wylie 1989 makes a case for the need for a common strategic theory, not least to pass lessons from past experiences on to following generations of officers. In light of the American failure in Vietnam, Summers 1982 proceeds in the opposite way, namely, prescribing for the United States a strategy of what the US military could do well (major war focused on the Napoleonic paradigm) and cautioning against engagements that demand a strategy at odds with Napoleonic strategy. In the early 21st century, Freedman, Gray, and Luttwak are the three most important living writers on the subject.
  415. Beaufre, André. An Introduction to Strategy, with Particular Reference to Problems of Defense, Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy in the Nuclear Age. Translated by R. H. Barry. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.
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  417. Originally published as L’introduction à la stratégie (Paris: A. Colin, 1963). A systematic approach to the formulation of strategy, in the French Cartesian tradition. A disciple of Clausewitz, Beaufre emphasized the interaction (“dialectics”) of the two opposing sides, underscoring that strategy must not stay fixed after the outbreak of hostilities, but be adapted in response to the enemy’s often unforeseeable reactions.
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  419. Beaufre, André. Strategy of Action. Translated by R. H. Barry. London: Faber and Faber, 1967.
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  421. Originally published as Stratégie de l’action (Paris: A. Colin, 1966). How Western powers could counter the indirect approach of world Communism that sought to weaken the “free world” through anticolonial uprisings and other proxy wars. Although the leadership of both sides would shrink from risking nuclear escalation, its threat was both a possible paralyzing and a possible enabling factor.
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  423. Freedman, Lawrence. Deterrence. Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2004.
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  425. Complementing Freedman 1998, this volume provides a masterly synthesis of existing arguments and works, reflected through case studies, followed by Freedman’s own conclusions.
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  427. Freedman, Lawrence, ed. Strategic Coercion: Concepts and Cases. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
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  429. The adviser to successive British governments on various aspects of their security policies here edited a series of articles aptly summarizing an extensive literature, rooted in concrete case studies.
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  431. Gray, Colin S. The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
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  433. Another adviser, chiefly of US administrations and military, Gray, like Luttwak (see Luttwak 2001), provides a comprehensive summary of his strategic theory as it has developed since the 1970s.
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  435. Luttwak, Edward N. Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace. 2d. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
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  437. A long-standing security adviser of successive US administrations, Luttwak casts into a coherent whole several of his previous articles and commissioned studies.
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  439. Schelling, Thomas C. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960.
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  441. The “study of conscious, intelligent, sophisticated conflict behavior—of successful behavior—is like a search for rules of ‘correct’ behavior in a contest-winning sense.” (p. iii). This definition is derived from games theory, but Schelling tries to apply it to conflict resolution, with and without the use of force.
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  443. Summers, Harry G., Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1982.
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  445. A proponent of a selective interpretation of Clausewitz, Summers contributed greatly to the revival of the Napoleonic paradigm in the late 20th century and prepared the way for the US strategic concept of AirLand Battle.
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  447. Wylie, J. C. Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute, 1989.
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  449. Following Herbert Rosinski, Wylie conceives of strategy as either sequential or cumulative, the former being a strategy in which each step/phase builds on the previous step/phase, whereas the latter is a strategy of attrition in which many individual independent actions cumulatively lead to an overall effect.
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  451. Soviet Strategic Theory
  452. In the absence of a free debate among academics, which only materialized in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, under Gorbachev, Soviet literature on strategy is mainly found in doctrine, about the interpretation of which little argument was allowed, and then only in classified military journals. Aleksandr A. Svechin, who from 1918 taught at the Red Army’s military academy (later called the Frunze Academy), provided the first authoritative framework of Soviet military doctrine (Svechin 1992), for officers in the 1920s and early 1930s. Although his emphasis on defensive strategy and a patient strategy of attrition was later disowned by Stalin, his concepts formed the general foundation of the Soviet Union’s strategic defensive reaction when attacked by Nazi Germany in 1941. The early development of Soviet strategic debates, including the very impressive concepts of Tukhachevsky and Frunze, are well covered in Rice 1986, which takes the story up to the Great Patriotic War. The Cold War period is most comprehensively treated by Glantz 1992. After World War II, Soviet officers had to await the 1960s for the next authoritative formulation of strategy, in the form of a collective work signed off on by Sokolovsky (Sokolovsky 1963), as senior officer of the authors’ committee. Sokolovsky himself had participated in the final battle for Berlin in 1945, and the leitmotif of the entire book is one of the offensive—never again to let Russia be devastated by an invasion, but to turn any attack around and go over to the counteroffensive as soon as possible. Gorshkov 1979 deviates from the emphasis in Sokolovsky 1963 on all-out war by intriguingly exploring ways in which the Soviet Navy could be used outside war, or at least outside major war scenarios, as Till 1982 and Herrick 2003 explain ably. MccGwire 1987 extended this interpretation to all Soviet strategy since World War II, at least when Cold War political aims were concerned: had an actual war broken out, the Soviet Union would have sought to avoid nuclear escalation but would have preempted Western use by first strikes if at all possible.
  453. Glantz, David M. The Military Strategy of the Soviet Union: A History. Cass Series on Soviet Military Theory and Practice. London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992.
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  455. Glantz, the author of a series of voluminous studies, especially of Soviet operations in World War II, draws a large canvas of Soviet military strategy, albeit still from a limited source base; the Soviet archives began to open as this volume was published but have since become impenetrable again.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Gorshkov, S. G. The Sea Power of the State. Oxford and New York: Pergamon, 1979.
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  459. Whereas at the time of Sokolovsky’s writing, Soviet strategy revolved around major war, Gorshkov’s work marked the move of Soviet naval strategy from a mere component of a grand strategy for World War III to include also the projection of power in peacetime or limited conflicts.
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  461. Herrick, Robert Waring. Soviet Naval Doctrine and Policy, 1956–1986. 3 vols. Studies in Russian History. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2003.
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  463. Like Till before him, Herrick concludes that the Soviet Union had a mainly defensive naval doctrine, especially once the Gorshkov doctrine was published in the mid-1970s. This would not prevent the Soviet Union from maximizing its global influence through the instrument of the navy.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. MccGwire, Michael. Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1987.
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  467. This British intelligence analyst emphasizes the nuclear and naval dimension: the USSR, while seeking to maximize its political influence throughout the world, had overall defensive political aims in the Cold War. These translated into a complex nuclear strategy, however, in which the Soviet Union sought to minimize the destruction that NATO nuclear forces might wreak on the USSR—albeit with potentially highly destructive effects.
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  469. Rice, Condoleezza. “The Making of Soviet Strategy.” In Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age. Edited by Peter Paret, 648–676. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986.
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  471. Examines the debates between the first Soviet commissar for war, Leon Trotsky, and the leading Soviet military thinkers, such as Tukhachevsky and Frunze in the 1920s and 1930s and during the Great Patriotic War.
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  473. Sokolovsky, Vasily Danilovich, ed. Military Strategy: Soviet Doctrine and Concepts. London: Pall Mall, 1963.
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  475. Marxist-Leninist doctrine never made allowance for great changes caused by technology. Consequently, the fundamental tenet that socialism must ultimately emerge triumphant from any global conflagration underlay early Soviet military strategy, presented here by a consortium of official military strategists.
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  477. Svechin, Alexandr A. Strategy. Edited by Kent D. Lee. Minneapolis, MN: East View, 1992.
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  479. Originally published as Strategiia (Moscow: Gozvoenisdat, 1926). An imperial officer from a military family, Svechin himself participated in the Russo-Japanese War before joining the Communists in the Russian Revolutionary Wars. This book became the main textbook for Russian officers studying at military academies and introduced Clausewitzian concepts into Soviet strategy, including the strength of the defensive. The book was required reading until Svechin was purged by Stalin.
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  481. Till, Geoffrey. Maritime Strategy and the Nuclear Age. New York: St. Martin’s, 1982.
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  483. Writing in a Corbettian tradition, Till gives an excellent overview of the developments of the main concepts of naval/maritime strategy since the 16th century.
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  485. Naval and Maritime Strategy since 1945
  486. Lambert 2010 provides the most succinct and useful introduction to the subject. Whereas there had been interservice rivalries between army and navy for the budget since armed forces became state monopolies, the arrival of the air forces in the early 20th century added new competition. Armies could never claim to replace navies entirely, nor vice versa, but some air power authors claimed just that: namely, that the third service could in large measure perform the roles that armies and navies had held hitherto and at less cost in terms of casualties to one’s own side. The invention of missiles in World War II would lead to similar arguments. Although many plausible arguments have been put forward as to why and how navies can still fulfill certain functions in the most cost-effective and flexible way, the Cold War and subsequent periods have found naval strategists more sober and humble than their predecessors. Works still mainly take the form of Mahan- or Corbett-style historical overviews, leading to roughly convergent overall conclusions about the limits and possibilities of late-20th-century navies (see especially Till 1982, cited under Soviet Strategic Theory, Cable 1994, and Hattendorf 2000). Gretton 1965, Martin 1967, and Hattendorf 2000 are particularly conscious of the nefarious effects of interservice rivalry and bureaucratic politics on strategy making. Like Gorshkov 1979 (cited under Soviet Strategic Theory), Cable 1994 focuses primarily on the special usefulness of navies as instruments of “gunboat diplomacy,” force projection through direct or even subtle, latent threats. Luttwak 1974 applies the thinking of Schelling and others about the instrumentalization of armed forces outside a World War III scenario to naval strategy. Hill 1986 provides a Corbettian reexamination of the purposes of naval forces for a United Kingdom that by now is clearly no longer on par with the world’s superpowers and yet uses them as generators of influence. The generalizations attempted here about “second-tier powers” are slightly odd, as there are so few of them. Grove 1990 attempts a methodical analysis of naval power to provide a framework for understanding what the future might bring that has stood up remarkably well as an analytical tool despite the global strategic changes that have ensued. As a comprehensive work on the evolution of naval strategy, the eight-volume Coutau-Bégarie 1990–2007 cannot be surpassed. It covers the development of thinking on naval warfare throughout the West, with essays written by speakers with access to the many languages needed. The contributions by Enzio Ferrante, Bruno Colson, and Werner Rahn are particularly noteworthy.
  487. Cable, James. Gunboat Diplomacy 1919–1991: Political Applications of Limited Naval Force. 3d ed. Studies in International Security. New York: Macmillan, 1994.
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  489. Although primarily a historical overview (much as Mahan’s works were), the text ends up showing most persuasively and coherently how naval forces have been used for coercion and deterrence.
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  491. Coutau-Bégarie, Hervé, ed. L’evolution de la pensée navale. 8 vols. Paris: Fondation pour les Études de Défense Nationale, 1990–2007.
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  493. Originally, fewer volumes seem to have been planned, and so articles on the post-1945 period are found in various volumes.
  494. Find this resource:
  495. Gretton, Peter. Maritime Strategy: A Study of British Defence Problems. London: Cassell, 1965.
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  497. Gretton here explains the dangerous divergences between what he identifies as NATO’s naval requirements for peace and war and bureaucratic politicking, resulting in incoherent overall strategies for NATO.
  498. Find this resource:
  499. Grove, Eric. The Future of Sea Power. London: Routledge, 1990.
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  501. A comprehensive and methodical breakdown of all roles best fulfilled by navies and reflecting the security context of the last decades of the Cold War.
  502. Find this resource:
  503. Hattendorf, John B. Naval History and Maritime Strategy: Collected Essays. Malabar, FL: Krieger, 2000.
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  505. A historical analysis in the Corbettian tradition that produces particularly wise conclusions, not least about the noxious effects of bureaucratic in-fighting among the services. Hattendorf’s many other works, especially on British and US naval history and strategy, are also outstanding.
  506. Find this resource:
  507. Hill, J. R. Maritime Strategy for Medium Powers. London: Croom Helm, 1986.
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  509. Focuses on the naval needs and options of second-tier naval powers, themselves limited in number, although not as limited as world powers. The former should not try to challenge the dominant power on its terms, but must seek to maximize their own particular strengths, usually geographic.
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  511. Lambert, Andrew. “Sea Power.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare. Edited by George Kassimeris and John Buckley, 73–88. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010.
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  513. The best short introduction; should be on every reading list.
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  515. Luttwak, Edward N. The Political Uses of Sea Power. Studies in International Affairs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.
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  517. Given Luttwak’s interest in the political instrumentalization of the threat of military force, navies lent themselves particularly well to be used for this purpose, as instruments of “suasion.”
  518. Find this resource:
  519. Martin, L. W. The Sea in Modern Strategy. Studies in International Security. London: Chatto and Windus, 1967.
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  521. Tackles the challenge posed to navies by aircraft and missiles and squarely concedes that the debate cannot be about whether navies are still the only means to certain ends, but only about whether navies can perform certain tasks best or, at least, most cost-effectively.
  522. Find this resource:
  523. Air Power Thinking since 1945
  524. It is often said that all the principal contributions to air power thinking were made before World War II. Nevertheless, at least two thinkers must be noted, whose structured and sophisticated views on the use of air power took earlier thinking further: these are John Boyd and John A. Warden III (Warden 1998, Warden 1992), both Americans; their works are analyzed in exemplary fashion by Osinga 2007 and Olsen 2007, respectively. Boyd, in his identification of a sequel of reactions and actions of air pilots, which became famous as the OODA-Loop, ended up making a significant contribution to the understanding of any decision-making process. Warden was yet another disciple of Clausewitz, developing further a couple of lines from Vom Kriege (Clausewitz 1980, cited under Interpreters of Napoleonic Strategy) about the need to target an enemy’s center of gravity. Warden identified this as the regime itself and its key communications hubs, with the aim of knocking it out or paralyzing it, with minimal deaths to be inflicted on enemy civilians. A variant of Warden’s concept was applied in the Persian Gulf War, in 1991.
  525. Olsen, John Andreas. John Warden and the Renaissance of American Air Power. Washington, DC: Potomac, 2007.
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  527. Warden managed to introduce his views at all levels of the US government, up to finding a certain amount of acceptance among the highest leadership in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, at great cost to his own career (he never became a general).
  528. Find this resource:
  529. Osinga, Frans P. B. Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd. Cass Series on Strategy and History. London and New York: Routledge, 2007.
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  531. This is an excellent exposé of Boyd’s complex works and their importance for a range of fields of research.
  532. Find this resource:
  533. Warden, John A., III. “Employing Air Power in the Twenty-first Century.” In The Future of Air Power in the Aftermath of the Gulf War. Edited by Richard H. Shultz Jr., Robert L. Pfaltzgraff Jr., 57–82. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL: Air University Press, 1992.
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  535. This is a summary of Warden’s concepts, which he managed to introduce into US planning in 1991.
  536. Find this resource:
  537. Warden, John A., III. The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat. Rev. ed. San Jose, CA: toExcel, 1998.
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  539. Warden here explains his Clausewitz-based plans for knocking out an enemy regime in a way that would inflict minimum casualties on either side, sparing particularly civilians. First published in 1988 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press).
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