More on War

by Martin van Creveld

"War is the most important thing in the world," writes Martin van Creveld, military historian and author of the monumental work, The Rise and Decline of the State . The survival of every country, government, and individual is ultimately dependent on war - or the ability to wage it in self-defense. That is why, though it may come but once in a hundred years, every country must be prepared every day.

In spite of the centrality of war to human history and culture, there has long been no modern attempt to provide a replacement for the classics on war and Sun Tzu's The Art of War , dating from the 5th or 6th century BC, and Carl von Clausewitz's On War , written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

What is needed is a modern, comprehensive, easy to read and understand theory of war for the 21st century that could serve as a replacement for these classic texts. The purpose of the present book is to provide such a theory.

Genres: Nonfiction, War, History

232 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2017

About the author

Martin Levi van Creveld is an Israeli military historian and theorist.

Van Creveld was born in the Netherlands in the city of Rotterdam, and has lived in Israel since shortly after his birth. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he has been on the faculty since 1971. He is the author of seventeen books on military history and strategy, of which Command in War (1985), Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (1977, 2nd edition 2004), The Transformation of War (1991), The Sword and the Olive (1998) and The Rise and Decline of the State (1999) are among the best known. Van Creveld has lectured or taught at many strategic institutes in the Western world, including the U.S. Naval War College.

- wikipedia.org

Reviews

[Tony Selhorst]

Van Creveld has written dozens of books on war, always trying to gasp the ever changing transformation of warfare after the end of the Cold War. One of his best known volumes is the 1991 Transformation of War, how warfare would at the end of the Cold War. In his new book, "More on War", he renews Sun Tzu's, Thucydides's, von Clausewitz's and Jomini's theory's on war and warfare. He does so by reviewing their most important writings on strategy and adds theory's on what he sees as omissions in these classical theory's. These omissions concern economic-warfare, war at sea, law in war, insurgency, cyber warfare and nuclear warfare. An excellent-short-easy read.

[Alex Courtney]

If you're already the kind of person who reads and studies military history and strategy there aren't any new ideas in here. Not bad, it just doesn't advance any conversations.