I finished reading John Alger's The Quest for Victory: A History of the Principles of War a couple of days ago. I heard about the book when I first read Robert Leonhard's The Principles of War for the Information Age and looked at his bibliography. Leonhard is a genius in general (side note, I need to re-read that book )and I was eager to see where he had drawn his sources. Alger's book is a fairly dry look at the evolution of the idea of "principles of war"--which are now commonplace in most doctrinal manuals. Azar Gat covers the same ground but with a broader scope---although no focus on the "principles".
Alger is pretty ambivalent about the idea of "principles" but at the same time looks at them with an open mind. Although most people familiar with European military history probably aren't going to find the influence of Jomini in the 19th century a new revelation, it is still very striking how an analytical description of Napoleonic warfare was the guiding concept of operations for at least a century. If there is a flaw about the book, it is that it is narrowly focused on the principles that it sometimes misses the connection with the wider strategic and operational concepts that those principles were used to support in doctrine over the centuries. Alger's conclusion is not very strong as well, but as someone who tends to often not write strong conclusions either I sympathize. This is complicated material and often times there is not one or two clear lessons that can be taken.
If you have already read Gat I recommend picking this up, but it may be confusing otherwise. The issue of "principles" is a very knotty one, one that very much hinges on one's perspective on the philosophy of science, history, and the general theory of conflict. Jim Storr has pretty much explained the basis of how we should approach it. I'm waiting for his book's price to climb down so I can re-read it instead of the quick read I gave my library copy of it last year.
Next up for reading is Jonathan M. House's Combined Arms Warfare in the 20th Century and finishing my copy of Milan Vego's Joint Operational Warfare: Theory and Practice. The latter I read and re-read in installments--it is a large Naval War College textbook comprising about roughly 1,500 phonebook-sized pages and contains a CD-room filled with maps of the campaigns it cites.
Comments