Writings about Strategy from Antiquity to the Present

What is it about?

Strategy - the use war for the ends of policy – has been implicitly written about long before writers explicitly pondered the link between warfare and its political ends. Until the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, most writers on warfare turned to the Ancients for guidance, believing that warfare had not changed, despite technological changes. Even beyond the watershed of 1792-1815 writers on war sought to identify eternal principles on the conduct of war. From Napoleon until the end of the Second World War, most writers on Strategy became obsessed with the quest for decisive or ‘annihilation’ battles at land or at sea. Moreover, from the mid-19th century, the perception of war as a struggle of entire nations against entire nations gained influence. Civilians of the other side began to be targeted deliberately, first in naval blockades, later through aerial bombing. The Second World War marked the second watershed. Nuclear weapons showed the extreme consequences of such warfare, and Western cultures recoiled. Henceforth they would rather lose wars than use all means available to win them. This did not, however, put an end to war on lower levels of intensity, nor to the bureaucratic politics obstructing rational Strategy-making.

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Why is it important?

The benchmark of strategic thinking is often seen to be the literature from Clausewitz until the Second World War. This, however, was an exceptionally amoral and ruthless period in the much longer history of writing about strategy, resulting in particularly ruthless wars producing tens of millions of deaths in the two world wars. What was lost in this period was the notion of a just war. This book shows that we would do well to rediscover strategic thinking before Clausewitz, as no victory leads to lasting peace unless the peace settlement is perceived as just or at least acceptable by all sides.

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