Foreign Policy listed the “Top 10” books as recommended by the US Military Academy at West Point:
- On War, Carl von Clausewitz, 1832. I’ve read this, but perhaps it’s better in the original than in translation.
- Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Julian Stafford Corbett, 1911.
- History of the Art of War Within the Framework of Political History (4 volumes), Hans Delbruck, 1920. I’ve read the first three volumes, and keep meaning to dig out the fourth to finish the series.
- The Command of the Air, Giulio Douhet, 1921.
- Battle Studies, Ardant Du Picq (Du Picq died in 1870 with the book incomplete: it was finished after his death based on his notes.)
- The Art of War, Antoine Henri Jomini, 1838.
- The Art of War, Niccolo Machiavelli, 1521.
- The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783, Alfred Thayer Mahan, 1890. I started reading this one several years back and never got back to it. Another one I should dig up and finish.
- The Art of War, Sun Tzu, 4th century BC. I never read this, partly because it was pushed relentlessly as a “business book” in the 1980s, so I just avoided it. The excerpts I’ve seen quoted do seem to show its value for pulling out vague aphorisms…
- The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, 4th century BC. Thucydides did not complete the work, with the last several years of the war still to be fought. Xenophon’s Hellenika picks up the thread (literally the first words of the book are “And after this”.
John Arquilla comments on the list and adds some recommendations of his own:
For those drawn to West Point’s recommendation to read Thucydides, I suggest taking a look also at Sallust’s The Jugurthine War. Jugurtha of Numidia (today’s northern Algeria) fought a bitter guerrilla war against Rome, some 50 years before Julius Caesar’s great campaigns, that Sallust captured with verve. He also spoke to the corruption of Roman character that came with protracted exposure to this kind of fighting.
Hans Delbrück, whose four-volume history of ancient, medieval and early modern warfare that West Point selected, can be nicely complemented by Lt. Gen. John Bagot Glubb’s The Great Arab Conquests. His survey of the sweeping seventh-century victories of Muslim warriors is of the highest analytic and literary quality, a principal observation being that much of the world of that time was shaped by the irregular “pirate strategy” the Arabs adopted. That is, they used the desert as an ocean and came raiding from it, again and again, with startling success.
[. . .]
I’ll conclude with recommendations that reflect an important debate. Robert Taber’s War of the Flea argues that little can stop the weak from wearing down the strong with insurgent warfare; Lewis Gann’s Guerrillas in History is a brief but thorough survey that shows how often irregulars have been beaten in the past. Both books were written over 40 years ago, and both remain exceptionally timely. Indeed, Abu Musab al-Suri, al Qaida’s deepest strategic thinker, lectured on Taber at the “university of terror” that used to operate in Afghanistan.
I can second the recommendation for Taber’s War of the Flea, but most of the others he recommends are new to me … more to add to the reading list.
