What War & Military Thought argues
- War is among the most consequential of human activities and the most relentlessly studied: from a pharaoh's scribe at Megiddo to Clausewitz's Berlin lectures, every civilisation that fought also wrote down how — and why — it fought.
- Military thought is where strategy, statecraft, geography, and psychology converge: the treatise on how to win a war is inseparable from the philosophy of when, and whether, to begin one.
Primary works in War & Military Thought (8)
- Tjaneni — An Account of the Battle of Megiddo (−1457) — Book · read the full text
- Sun Tzu — The Art of War (−500) — Book · read the full text
- Thucydides — History of the Peloponnesian War (−400) — Book · read the full text
- Xenophon — Anabasis (The March of the Ten Thousand) (−370) — Book · read the full text
- Julius Caesar — The Gallic Wars (−50) — Book · read the full text
- Arrian — The Anabasis of Alexander (150) — Book · read the full text
- Carl von Clausewitz — On War (1832) — Book · read the full text
- Antoine-Henri Jomini — The Art of War (1838) — Book · read the full text
Chambers connected to War & Military Thought
- History — War and its record are inseparable: Thucydides, Xenophon, Caesar, and Arrian are read at once as founding historians and as the first war correspondents — the campaign narrative is the oldest form of history.
- Governance & Society — Clausewitz's maxim that war is 'the continuation of policy by other means' makes the conduct of war a branch of statecraft — the army is the instrument of the state's will when persuasion fails.
- Philosophy — From Sun Tzu's Tao of the general to Clausewitz's dialectic of absolute and real war, strategy is applied reason — the philosophy of acting under friction, uncertainty, and the will of an opposing mind.