What’s Modern About Modern Strategy?
Francis J. Gavin
August 5, 2020
Editor’s Note: This article is the introductory essay for Vol. 3, Iss. 3 of the Texas National Security Review. Please check it out the volume here.
As the world sunk deeper into a deadly global conflagration in 1941, Princeton University professor Edward Meade Earle gathered a group of eminent scholars to discuss the history and practice of military strategy. The seminar eventually produced a landmark collection of essays, Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. The book, which was updated in 1986 by Peter Paret, quickly became a classic.
Three things in particular are notable about the 1943 volume, which included some of the best military and political historians working in the middle part of the 20th century. First is the focus on individuals: leaders such as Frederick the Great and thinkers like naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. The second is an understanding that conflict had become all-encompassing, dominating every aspect of society. Given the total mobilization of the World War II, when every element of the economy, political system, and even information was tightly controlled and exploited by the state, this frightening perspective was understandable: “When war comes it dominates our lives.†Third, the essays focus on the physical elements of war: the movement, clash, and material and human destruction between massed groups of men and machines fighting to destroy each other. Certain themes appear over and over again, across
https://warontherocks.com/2020/08/new-elements-of-modern-strategy/
