Strategic Reading Program

Twenty-eight essays by the field's leading scholars on the development of Western strategic thought from Machiavelli through the nuclear age. Paret edited the standard reference for the study of how military thought evolved alongside the political and technological circumstances that shaped it: Jomini, Clausewitz, Mahan, Douhet, Liddell Hart, and the theorists of guerrilla warfare, nuclear deterrence, and limited war. Not light reading. The indispensable graduate-level introduction to why military strategy looks the way it looks and why every generation has to rediscover the same arguments about the relationship between force and policy.

The most comprehensive single-volume account of strategic thought ever published — from the Greek city-states through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Freedman covers military strategy, political strategy, business strategy, and the theory of change across three thousand years with the rigor of an academic and the clarity of a practitioner. The central argument: that strategy is about managing an irreducible gap between aspiration and the means available to achieve it, and that this gap has always been the central problem of anyone who has ever tried to accomplish anything against resistance.

Mearsheimer's offensive realism — the argument that great powers inevitably compete for regional hegemony because the anarchic international system provides no guarantees of security, and that states therefore maximize power rather than optimize it — is the most systematic challenge to the liberal internationalism that shaped American foreign policy after the Cold War. His predictions, dismissed when published in 2001, have been borne out by Chinese behavior and Russian revanchism in ways that make the book more relevant with each year. On the Army War College and CJCS reading lists as the theoretical counterweight to the liberal institutionalist assumptions that most senior officers absorbed in their undergraduate education.

Brzezinski served as National Security Advisor under Carter and wrote this framework for American grand strategy in Eurasia in 1997 — arguing that control of the Eurasian landmass remains the central prize of geopolitical competition, that maintaining American primacy requires managing the relationship between Europe, Russia, China, and the pivotal states of Central Asia, and that Ukraine is the geographic pivot on which Eurasian power balance turns. Published twenty-seven years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the book reads as the analytical foundation for understanding why that invasion happened and what its strategic consequences are. On the Army War College reading list as the framework that makes current events legible.

Halberstam spent years investigating why the most credentialed, capable men in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations made the series of decisions that produced Vietnam. The answer is not stupidity. It is the particular kind of institutional failure that occurs when smart people optimize for appearing confident rather than being honest, when the costs of dissent exceed the costs of error, and when the system selects for people who tell leadership what leadership wants to hear. The book that every person who has ever written an optimistic assessment of an operation that was going badly should be required to read.

Kennedy's 1987 study of the relationship between economic strength and military power across five centuries — from the Habsburg empire through the Cold War — made the argument that 'imperial overstretch' (the gap between military commitments and the economic base to sustain them) has been the common cause of great power decline. The historical analysis is meticulous; the contemporary application was immediately controversial. On the Army War College and CSA reading lists because the question Kennedy is asking — how long can a dominant power maintain primacy, and what signals that decline has begun — is the question senior American military leaders need frameworks for thinking about.