The evolution of strategy : thinking war from antiquity to the present / Beatrice Heuser.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 506-570) and index.

What is strategy? -- Warfare and mindsets from antiquity to the Middle Ages -- Warfare and mindsets in early modern Europe -- Themes in early thinking about strategy -- The age and mindset of the Napoleonic paradigm -- The Napoleonic paradigm transformed: from total mobilisation to total war -- Challenges to the Napoleonic paradigm versus the culmination of total war -- Long-term trends and early maritime strategy -- The age of steam to the First World War -- The World Wars and their lessons for maritime strategists -- Maritime strategy in the nuclear age -- War in the third dimension -- Four schools of air power -- Nuclear strategy -- From partisan war to people's war -- Counterinsurgency -- Wars without victories, victories without peace -- No end of history: the dialectic continues -- Epilogue: strategy-making versus bureaucratic politics.

"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"--Provided by publisher.