The War for Karabakh: Strategy, Technology, and Victory: Strategy, Technology, and Victory (Paperback or Softback)

The 2020 Karabakh War ended nearly three decades of military stalemate, transformed the South Caucasus, and ignited a global debate: had drones and precision weapons fundamentally changed warfare?

In The War for Karabakh: Strategy, Technology, and Victory, Liam Collins and John Spencer challenge the familiar "drone war" narrative. Their central finding: Azerbaijan's victory grew from decades of strategic preparation, military reform, effective leadership, and disciplined combined-arms operations. Technology mattered-but understanding how it was employed matters more.

Drawing on battlefield reconnaissance, official military records, operational maps, open-source intelligence, and interviews with more than one hundred military commanders, government officials, and combat veterans from Azerbaijan and Armenia, Collins and Spencer reconstruct how the war was planned, fought, and won. They connect decisions made at the highest levels of government with the battlefield actions that determined the outcome.

The book traces the conflict from the First Karabakh War through Azerbaijan's twenty-six-year military transformation, the 2020 campaign, and the decisive 2023 operation that restored Azerbaijani control over the region. Detailed accounts examine the breaching of Armenia's prepared defenses and the battles of Hadrut, Fuzuli, Gubadli, and Shusha, revealing how strategy, operational art, force design, and adaptation shaped the fighting.

Drones and precision weapons proved enormously valuable. Their effectiveness, however, depended on their integration with training, tactics, leadership, and a national strategy that coordinated diplomatic, informational, economic, and military power. By examining those relationships, the authors explain what technology-centered accounts miss-and what military leaders and policymakers can learn from the conflict.

Combining rigorous scholarship with practitioner insight, The War for Karabakh connects the campaign to urgent questions about military innovation, deterrence, alliances, and the preparation of forces for future conflict. It offers military professionals, policymakers, historians, defense analysts, and students of strategy a detailed operational history and a framework for assessing claims about the changing character of war.

For anyone seeking to understand why armies win, this book moves beyond the weapons themselves to the strategy, institutions, and decisions that make them effective.

Liam Collins is Director of the Madison Policy Forum, Senior Fellow with New America's Future Security Program, and Distinguished Military Fellow at the Middle East Institute. A retired US Army Special Forces colonel, he conducted multiple combat and operational deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, South America, and the Horn of Africa. From 2016 to 2018, he served as executive officer to the US Senior Defense Advisor to Ukraine, working closely with senior Ukrainian military and government officials on defense reform. He holds an MPA and a PhD from Princeton University.

John Spencer is Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern War Institute at West Point and Co-Director of the Urban Warfare Project. A retired US Army officer with more than twenty-five years of active-duty service, including two combat deployments to Iraq, he is widely recognized as one of the world's leading experts on urban warfare. An award-winning scholar, author, and military analyst, Spencer has advised senior military leaders and governments worldwide. His research is grounded in extensive fieldwork in modern conflicts, including Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, Israel, Lebanon, Gaza, and India.