Review: The Evolution of Strategy Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present

Abstract

THE EVOLUTION OF STRATEGY Thinking War From Antiquity to the Present Beatrice Heuser New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 592pp, US$37.99 PaPerAfter a week's immersion in Beatrice Heuser's hefty volume, two words come to mind: encyclopaedic and erudite. The scope of the book is impressive, since it covers strategic thinking from late antiquity to the 21st century and examines every dimension of warfare including air power, nuclear deterrence, and guerrillas. The author is conversant with the three great European military traditions - English, German, and French - and seems to have read almost every strategic thinker from Leo the Wise (866912 CE) to David Petraeus, including many less-celebrated authors whose worth outstrips their fame.Heuser's approach is broad, but no one could say that her book is a mile wide but an inch deep. In fact, it has three great analytical qualities. First, it is focused. Its purpose, which Heuser clearly states from the beginning, is to examine how people from different times and cultures have thought about the link between political aims and the use of force - which is, incidentally, how the author defines with a capital S (3). Second, Heuser spells out unambiguously what she intends to examine, namely the evolution of the literature on strategy, not the ways that governments have tried to put various strategies into practice. The bulk of this literature is of western origin. Finally, she uses a set of key questions to examine the various texts she reviews: How was war perceived in different cultural contexts? As an inevitable part of the world or as something to be avoided or banned? For what aims were fought? How did belligerents see their enemies? How did they seek to defeat them? were the preferred means and methods of warfare? Was there a western way of thinking about war? Were naval strategy and air strategy distinct from classical approaches to land warfare? Where did key strategic concepts originate? Who picked them up and passed them along?The book is divided into six parts. The first contains a single chapter that serves as an introduction. It addresses the question What is strategy? The evolution of the term itself serves as a starting point for understanding why there is so much disagreement about the use of the concept and why it has changed so much over time (4). The book's second and third parts examine the evolution of strategy on land during two periods: first, from antiquity to modern times (chapters 2-4) and, second, from the Napoleonic period to the two world (chapters 5-7). Maritime strategy is the subject of part four, in which Heuser surveys the key themes and concepts that different schools of thought in France, Germany, the United States, and Britain developed from the age of steam to the nuclear age. Part five addresses the third dimension of war - the air. Air strategy emerged after 1914 and drew on many of the ideas that naval strategists had originally developed. Here, Heuser distinguishes again between the competing schools of thought - strategic bombing, military targeting, leadership targeting, and political signalling - that shaped airpower theorists' debates from the interwar period to the Cold War. Finally, part six covers asymmetric or small wars and the doctrines of counterinsurgency. In the epilogue, Heuser examines the search for new strategic paradigms since 1945.It is impossible to offer a complete summary of each part of this very rich book, but a short overview of the author's main line of argument is nevertheless illuminating. In Heuser's view, strategic thinking revolved for nearly two millennia around a number of enduring themes and debates: Are battles important? Should operations be offensive or defensive? Should be limited or not? How should armies be recruited or trained? are the enduring lessons of war? …