Description: Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.
Review Quotes: 'Echevarria traces the evolution of American strategic thought and how it influenced U.S. military theory and the conduct of war over the last 125 years. This book will be immediately essential to all security studies programs, and invaluable to any student of war trying to discern how the American Way of War has evolved.' Frank G. Hoffman, author of Mars Adapting: Military Change in War (forthcoming)