...if you like well written books on military history that will generate a tiny truthful glimpse into the future, read this book and all books by Martin Van Creveld. The man is as insightful on military affairs as a mortal human male can get...and he knows how to write so the reader will understand these insights. This book reflects a small portion of this man's genius.

War has been both a hugely important activity and a challenging subject for thinkers. This very good historical survey of military thought gives you a sense of the kinds of challenges that war presents to a thinker. The author is described as Israel's most prominent military historian with fifteen books on military history and strategy to his credit, and it is clear that he has actually carefully thought about the subject. Besides indicating the things that must be considered (for instance, understanding the enemy's strengths and weaknesses as well as your own, the political effects of violence, and technology), he attempts to describe what each of the chief surviving documents on military theory (by Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and others) has contributed. There are nice descriptions of the changing nature of war. There is a helpful time line, an annotated list of thirty-four leading military thinkers, a decent index, and a list of recommendations for further reading. I found two minor faults: He repeatedly mentions "operational art" as intermediate between tactics and strategy without offering any clarifying definition of operational art to go with his definitions of the other two, and he lists Grotius' "The Law of War and Peace" in the time line but neglects to mention it in the text or the index. I suppose the misleading phrase "tactics, operational art, and strategy" is just an unusually sloppy attempt to introduce the question of lines of operation, a feature of war that he eventually points out first became important in the eighteenth century.