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The Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth is where the Army sends majors to learn to think about war above the company level — to develop the operational art, strategic thinking, and institutional understanding that battalion and brigade command requires. The CGSC core reading list is the intellectual spine of the Intermediate Level Education program: the books on war, strategy, and military history that Leavenworth faculty have determined every field-grade officer should have read before they deploy at the lieutenant colonel level. The list emphasizes foundational theory alongside the history of how armies actually apply — and misapply — that theory in practice.
Keegan examines four commanders — Alexander, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler — to ask what heroic leadership actually requires and how the model has changed as armies have changed. His central argument: that the Homeric model of the leader who leads from the front, shares danger with his men, and makes himself visible in the decisive moment became impossible in industrial-age war, and that Grant's model — the commander who accepts invisibility, manages information, and leads through institutional will rather than personal display — is the model that works in modern war. Keegan's final chapter on the anti-hero, the democratic commander who cannot rely on divine right or personal charisma, is the best analysis available of what military leadership looks like in a society that does not celebrate martial values.
Knox and Murray edited this analysis of the major military revolutions from the gunpowder era through the information age — the moments when technology, doctrine, and organization combined to fundamentally change how war is fought. Their framework distinguishes between 'revolutions in military affairs' (technology-driven changes in military capability) and 'military revolutions' (changes that reshape entire societies and their relationship to war). The distinction is essential for thinking about AI, autonomous systems, and space: not every new technology produces a military revolution, and the institutions that bet everything on incremental technological advantage often lose to adversaries who changed the game. One of six CGSC core texts.
Boot's history of American small wars — from the Barbary pirates through the Philippines insurrection through Nicaragua and Haiti — makes the argument that unconventional conflict is not a modern aberration but America's default mode of military engagement. The United States has fought one major conventional war against a peer competitor and dozens of small wars, expeditions, and counterinsurgencies, most of which are forgotten except by military historians. The book is essential background for understanding why FM 3-24 was not a new idea in 2006, and why the institutional tendency to treat counterinsurgency as a temporary detour from real war is both historically illiterate and operationally dangerous. On the CGSC core reading list because Leavenworth has been trying to teach this lesson for decades.
Parker's edited survey of military history from the ancient world through the late twentieth century — the broadest single-volume account available of how armies have fought, organized, equipped, and thought about war across time and cultures. The book is one of the six core texts assigned in the CGSC/ILE program because it provides the historical context that makes everything else on the reading list legible: the evolution of tactics, the relationship between technology and doctrine, and the recurring patterns of military change that field-grade officers need to recognize in their own era. Dense but rewarding.
Murray and Millett's edited volume examines how the major powers developed their doctrine, organization, and technology between WWI and WWII — the case studies that determine how well prepared each nation was for the kind of war that actually began in 1939. The chapters on German armor development, carrier aviation, submarine warfare, and airborne operations are the foundational case studies for thinking about how militaries do or do not adapt to emerging technologies in peacetime. The pattern each chapter reveals — that successful innovation requires champions who protect new ideas from institutional resistance — is the same pattern every defense reformer cites today. One of six CGSC core texts.