War, Peace, and International Relations. An Introduction to Strategic History

The next theme is the relationship between politics and war. Strategic history is all about the threat or use of organized viole ...

George Washington was not overly gifted as a military commander in the conduct of warfare, but he was truly outstanding at wagin ...

Paris itself. The purpose was to save France from what the soldiers saw as Charles de Gaulle’s betrayal of French Algeria. The a ...

important, even crucial, for shaping what, after all, the fighting is about. Why is one fighting? Unless the war is strictly a d ...

understanding of war requires contextualization. Military history exists in a context of other histories’ (Black, 2004: 243). Co ...

means necessarily a potent constraint upon decision for action. Not only may a state command the services of a quasi-religious i ...

to the net objective, and abstract, advantage of offence relative to defence. Nevertheless, a belief in the superiority of the o ...

Conclusion The literature on strategic history is thin. There is an abundance of military history, as there is also of political ...

Questions What is the difference between war and warfare, and why does it matter? Can the contexts of strategic history be rank ...

2 Carl von Clausewitz and the theory of war Introduction: theory for all seasons Strategic history offers a catalogue of horrors ...

It will seem strange, even implausible, to some people that an incomplete book written in the 1 8 20s can be as relevant to the ...

sociologist Raymond Aron. He claimed persuasively that ‘Strategic thought draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each ...

mechanized land warfare? Can air power win the next great war on its own? And so forth. The list of questions, each of enormous ...

This analysis makes constant reference to strategic ideas at two different yet connected levels. On the higher plane there is a ...

a tactical victory and adapt themselves to the newly created situation. Strategy is a system of expedients’ (Hughes, 1993: 47). ...

jousted creatively. But in Chapter 11 of Book 3 of On War, Clausewitz sounds distinctly Jominian: The best strategy is always to ...

Sun-tzu, by Michael I. Handel, claims boldly that ‘Jomini has traditionally been assumed to represent the positivistic if not me ...

have hoped. He concluded the passage with this sentence: ‘The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and ...

Clausewitz asserts that war has two natures: objective and subjective. The former comprises those qualities common to all warfar ...

Clausewitz’s trinity has been much misunderstood. Some recent commentators have proclaimed that we now inhabit a post-Clausewitz ...