The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present - Hardcover

Heuser, Beatrice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521199689 ISBN 13: 9780521199681

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Is there a 'Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial new account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy - the employment of military force as a political instrument - from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.

About this title

Book Description:

This magisterial account traces the history of Western thinking about strategy from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius onwards, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Heuser explores themes ranging across land, sea, air, nuclear and total warfare.

About the Author:

Beatrice Heuser is Chair of International History at the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Reading. Her widely-translated publications include Reading Clausewitz (2002) and The Bomb: Nuclear Weapons in their Historical, Strategic and Ethical Context (1999).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0521199689
• ISBN 13: 9780521199681
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 594