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-Martin 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.
Industry Reviews
One of the finest and most perceptive military historians writing in English today...Van Creveld has marshaled more than enough historical evidence--and with great depth and richness--to support his conclusions. -- Robert L. Goldich Armed Forces and Society One cannot but admire the author's excellent discussion of how modern technology has complicated command and the processes of command; of the interaction of this complication with the political complexities of Vietnam; and of the uses and limitations of systems analysis in general, and in Vietnam in particular. -- Trevor Dupuy Washington Times I can think of few books on military subjects of greater originality and importance than Martin van Creveld's scholarly and fascinating dissertation on command in war...The subject is examined in depth, supported by a wide historical base, with a perceptive, unprejudiced eye, and the result expressed in clear prose of high literary merit. -- Michael Carver Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies Journal [Van Creveld] provides us with a vivid historical narrative of the significant steps in the evolution of command systems from the Greek period to the Vietnam war: the birth of the nation-state regular army, the rise of the science of military strategy, the advent of new communication technologies, the development of means for mobilization, and the emergence of computer and space technologies. Ethics
