Strategic Studies: A Reader

The second edition of Strategic Studies: A Reader brings together key essays on strategic theory by some of the leading contributors to the field. This revised volume contains several new essays and updated introductions to each section.

The volume comprises hard-to-find classics in the field as well as the latest scholarship. The aim is to provide students with a wide-ranging survey of the key issues in strategic studies, and to provide an introduction to the main ideas and themes in the field. The book contains six extensive sections, each of which is prefaced by a short introductory essay:

• The Uses of Strategic Theory
• Interpretation of the Classics
• Instruments of War, Intelligence and Deception
• Nuclear Strategy
• Irregular Warfare and Small Wars
• Future Warfare, Future Strategy

Overall, this volume strikes a balance between theoretical works, which seek to discover generalisations about the nature of modern strategy, and case studies, which attempt to ground the study of strategy in the realities of modern war.

This new edition will be essential reading for all students of strategic studies, security studies, military history and war studies, as well as for professional military college students.

Thomas G. Mahnken is currently Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography and National Security at the US Naval War College. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He is the author of Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941 (2002), (with James R. FitzSimonds) The Limits of Transformation: Officer Attitudes toward the Revolution in Military Affairs (2003), Technology and the American Way of War Since 1945 (2008), and Uncovering Ways of War: U.S. Intelligence and Foreign Military Innovation, 1918-1941 (2012). He is editor (with Emily O. Goldman) of The Information Revolution in Military Affairs in Asia (2004) and (with Richard K. Betts) Paradoxes of Strategic Intelligence: Essays in Honor of Michael I. Handel (Frank Cass, 2003). He is co-editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.

Joseph A. Maiolo is Professor of International History in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, UK. He is author of The Royal Navy and Nazi Germany: A study in appeasement and the origins of the Second World War (1998) and Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War 1931-1941 (2010); co-author of An International History of the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2004, 2008); and co-editor (with Robert Boyce) The Origins of World War Two: The Debate Continues (2005). He is co-editor of the Journal of Strategic Studies.