The Evolution of Strategy Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present [Hardcover]

A comprehensive survey of the development of strategic thought over two millennia, ranging across land, sea, air and nuclear warfare.This magisterial account traces the history of Western thinking about strategy from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius onwards, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Heuser explores themes ranging across land, sea, air, nuclear and total warfare.This magisterial account traces the history of Western thinking about strategy from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius onwards, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Heuser explores themes ranging across land, sea, air, nuclear and total warfare.Is there a Western way of war' which pursues battles of annihilation and single-minded military victory? Is warfare on a path to ever greater destructive force? This magisterial new account answers these questions by tracing the history of Western thinking about strategy  the employment of military force as a political instrument  from antiquity to the present day. Assessing sources from Vegetius to contemporary America, and with a particular focus on strategy since the Napoleonic Wars, Beatrice Heuser explores the evolution of strategic thought, the social institutions, norms and patterns of behaviour within which it operates, the policies that guide it and the cultures that influence it. Ranging across technology and warfare, total warfare and small wars as well as land, sea, air and nuclear warfare, she demonstrates that warfare and strategic thinking have fluctuated wildly in their aims, intensity, limitations and excesses over the past two millennia.Part I. Introduction: 1. What is strategy?; Part II. Long-Term Constants: 2. Warfare and mindsets from antiquity to the middle ages; 3. Warfare and mindsets in early modern Europe; 4. Themes in early thinking about strategy; Part III. The Napoleonic Paradigm and Total War: 5. The age and mil“)