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

As well as such central pillars of his theory as the trinity, the climate of war and friction, there is a long list of powerful, ...

‘collateral damage’ is all but eliminated. When war against irregulars is waged ‘amongst the people’, as General Rupert Smith pu ...

28 War, peace and international relations Box 2.2Important subjects deliberately omitted from or treated only briefly in On War ...

Now, well educated with a grasp of the meaning of strategic history, equipped with themes, aware of context, and suitably armed ...

Questions Why is Clausewitz’s On Warwidely regarded as the best book ever written on the theory of war? Does Clausewitz’s theor ...

3 From limited war to national war The French Revolution and the Napoleonic way of war Introduction: two transformations In its ...

Map 3.1 Europe in 17 89 ...

chapters, technological change was unimportant for the conduct of war on land or at sea. But Britain’s substantial technological ...

time in the history of this country when, from the situation of Europe, we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace, ...

for just six) were not victories. By any standard, that is a remarkable military record. So formidable was revolutionary and the ...

‘grammar’ of war permitted (Clausewitz, 1976: 605). The enterprise was governed by the crucial political context. To curb desert ...

by – what else? – the financial crisis of the French state brought on by its inability to meet the debts it had incurred in aidi ...

harbinger of a superior new way in warfare. Notwithstanding the political hindrances to military effectiveness in 1792–3, the ne ...

coalition of divergent interests. In such a political context, the substitution of men and enthusiasm for professional skill pro ...

certainly inevitable, failure. Strategic history is a tale of means and ends. All too often, writers allow themselves to lose th ...

victory thus was his personal ability to grasp the essentials of a highly fluid situation. Another key was his ‘joined-up’ appro ...

imperial reserve in the elite Imperial Guard, a force that would grow to be 60,000 strong, but still they suffered. The Emperor ...

With respect to artillery, again little had altered technically for many decades. But the mobility of French guns was enhanced b ...

Napoleon’s military genius did not lie in any unique understanding of warfare and how to succeed at it. He did not know things a ...

or even whole armies. Some of the marshals were men of only modest talent (Chandler, 1998 ): prominent among the marshalate were ...