Many books have been written about strategy, tactics, and great
commanders. This is the first book to deal exclusively with the
nature of command itself, and to trace its development over two
thousand years from ancient Greece to Vietnam. It treats
historically the whole variety of problems involved in commanding
armies, including staff organization and administration,
communications methods and technologies, weaponry, and logistics.
And it analyzes the relationship between these problems and
military strategy.
In vivid descriptions of key battles and campaigns--among
others, Napoleon at Jena, Moltke's Koniggratz campaign, the
Arab-Israeli war of 1973, and the Americans in Vietnam--van Creveld
focuses on the means of command and shows how those means worked in
practice. He finds that technological advances such as the
railroad, breech-loading rifles, the telegraph and later the radio,
tanks, and helicopters all brought commanders not only new tactical
possibilities but also new limitations.
Although vast changes have occurred in military thinking and
technology, the one constant has been an endless search for
certainty--certainty about the state and intentions of the enemy's
forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together
constitute the environment in which war is fought, from the weather
and terrain to radioactivity and the presence of chemical warfare
agents; and certainty about the state, intentions, and activities
of one's own forces. The book concludes that progress in command
has usually been achieved less by employing more advanced
technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of
existing ones.
General
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