The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War (2010) pdf

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 culture that influences 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