Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict

The most successful film franchise of all time, Star Wars thrillingly depicts an epic multigenerational conflict fought a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. But the Star Wars saga has as much to say about successful strategies and real-life warfare waged in our own time and place. Strategy Strikes Back brings together more than thirty of today’s top military and strategic experts, including generals, policy advisors, seasoned diplomats, counterinsurgency strategists, science fiction writers, war journalists, and ground-level military officers, to explain the strategy and the art of war by way of the Star Wars films.

Each chapter of Strategy Strikes Back provides a relatable, outside-the-box way to simplify and clarify the complexities of modern military conflict. Strategy Strikes Back gives Star Wars fans and aspiring military minds alike an inspiring and entertaining means of understanding many facets of modern warfare in a book as captivating as Star Wars itself.
 

Max Brooks is a writer, public speaker, and senior fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point, and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the author of World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War and The Harlem Hellfighters, among other works. Brooks, and the other coeditors of this book, edited Strategy Strikes Back: How Star Wars Explains Modern Military Conflict (Potomac Books, 2018).

John Amble is the editorial director at the Modern War Institute and a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve.

ML Cavanaugh is a senior fellow at the Modern War Institute and a U.S. Army strategist with global experience.

Jaym Gates is an acquiring editor for Nisaba Press and Falstaff Books, as well as a freelance editor and author.

Stanley McChrystal is a U.S. Army general (ret.) who led the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq during the Persian Gulf wars and was top commander of American forces in Afghanistan.