I've always been interested in military history, but aside from Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Jomini, I've mostly read contemporary (i.e 1945-present) theorists on defense and national security. I've also had the fortune of meeting and corresponding with some of my intellectual heroes over the years as well. But lately I've been in a mad rush to read theorists who wrote between the time of Machiavelli and the 1930s. The rare and more obscure, the better (hello, G.A. Leer and Sigismund Schlichting?). Why would I be interested in theorists who wrote in a time, say, before airpower, nukes, and Facebook? Why pay attention to theories applicable a time when "strategy" was thought of as solely the marching of large armies from a base area? There's several reasons why I do, and why you should too.
First, you can see the bits and pieces of today's doctrines formed slowly--piece by piece--in old military literature. Jomini, Lloyd, Moltke, Schlichting, Foch and Caemmerer arguably created the bare bones of modern day campaign planning in their theories and judgments about warfare from 1800-1909. Many of these would be synthesized by Svechin, whose works on operational art and strategy created the modern "three-tiered" system we subscribe to today. By going back in time you can also see old ideas that are repeated today and why they didn't work. Some deficient old books of strategy are almost repeated word for word in today's classics.
Second, much of today's strategic theory isn't really providing answers to many questions about the future of the strategic art. One of my favorite works of recent strategic theory, Brigadier General Justin Kelly's monograph on operational art and strategy, pointed this out by saying that there has not really been a focus on "strategic art." And by strategy, Kelly is not really talking about today's definition of strategy (which encompasses everything from a plan to win a war to grand strategy), he is talking about strategy in the narrowly military-technical sense of the dynamics of winning wars.
I'm not alone in noticing this. Zenpundit and Kings of War have posted both posted exceptional entries about the problem of strategy in the West. That's why I've often tried to look for strategists and thinkers outside of America and England, or the West in general. By going back in time under piles of dusty books, I can look at how past thinkers dealt with the problems of their time--and perhaps this might point the way to why today's thought is not exactly working out that well.
Of course, we can't just raise old thinkers, zombie-like, from their graves and put them to service. Sigismund von Schlichting's thoughts on operational art and strategy were ground-breaking for 1903, as Donald Cranz and Antulio Echevarria respectively noted. Today, they are dated. But when you combine them with present strategy, they are valuable. A cross-comparison, say, of thinkers on small, super-empowered units from the age of JFC Fuller/Basil Liddell Hart to John Arquilla and Robert Leonhard would be a valuable project, since there is renewed interest in Distributed Operations type-concepts.
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