William H. McNeil, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force and Society Since A.D. 1000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). A comprehensive analysis of the development of military power over the past thousand years by a famed world historian. ISBN: 0226561585

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species (Basic Books, 2002). Purely a book on biology, this approach to the sources of evolutionary--and thus strategic--innovation should affect your understanding of strategy in the human domain. ISBN 0465043925 (Paperback.). See Hardcover.

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (W.W. Norton: 1999). Geographer Diamond asks why the civilizations of Eurasia, esp. the West, have such complex material civilizations, providing a rich, multi-factor analysis--a valuable contrast to V.D. Hanson's interesting work on the cultural origins of Western military superiority. ISBN: 0393317552

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power (Doubleday: 2001). This is a seriously flawed but also very interesting study of the character of Western warfare. The author is a classicist and contemporary political polemicist. ISBN: 0385720386

Gary A. Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions (MIT Press, 1997). Klein, a cognitive psychologist, spent a decade watching fire-fighters, critical care nurses, pilots, nuclear power plant operators, battle planners, chess masters, and others making split-second decisions on the job, acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. This book is a clear and engaging account of his findings, and it offers historians and military theorists a more realistic model for understanding the behavior of military and political decisionmakers than many have followed in the past. ISBN: 0262611465

John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Westview, 2003). Lynn is an expert on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century warfare, esp. French, but here he has written a sweeping look at the cultural aspects of warfare in contexts ranging from classical Greece and India to medieval and modern Europe, Japan, and Egypt. More important, he has done so without succumbing to the "war & culture" crowd's tendency towards single-factor analysis, and his discussion of Clausewitz--despite some over-reliance on Azar Gat--is sensible and insightful. ISBN: 0813333725

Mitchell M. Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science At The Edge Of Order And Chaos (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Waldrop tells us the historical development of the birthing ground of Complexity science, the Santa Fe Institute. However, his main subject is complexity science itself and its implications. As one reviewer puts it, "He not only tells you what Complexity IS, but WHY you should care about it." As with James Gleick's Chaos, this is must reading for any 21st-century Clausewitzian wannabe. (See Alan D. Beyerchen's essay on the connection.) ISBN: 0671872346

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987). In this now-classic work, Gleick, formerly a science writer for the New York Times, depicts the beginnings of Chaos theory, which draws on the seemingly random patterns that characterize many natural phenomena. It explains the thought processes and investigative techniques of Chaos scientists, illustrating concepts like Julia sets, Lorenz attractors, and the Mandelbrot Set with  sketches, photographs, and wonderful descriptive prose. Must reading for any Clausewitzian. (See Alan D. Beyerchen's essay on the connection.) ISBN:  0140092501

Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics (New York: The Free Press, 1994). Neither a 'profoundly original book' nor an attack on the state (both characterizations made by other reviewers), this is an intelligent and incisive investigation of the simple truth--long known to sophisticated military and political historians but seemingly a revelation to many modern academics--that the origin of the modern state and of modern politics lies in the overwhelming need for societies to exercise some control over the endemic internal and external violence that is inherent in human nature. ISBN: 0743237781.

Robert Drews, The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe ca. 1200 B.C. (Princeton University Press, 1993). A fascinating exploration of a major military mystery by (Johns Hopkins, 1960). ISBN: 0691025916

Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Simply one of the best books we've read in years. Unlike the faux-anthropological nonsense published in recent years by academic historians, it gives us a genuine look at the anthropology of war--the author is an actual anthropologist and archaeologist. Looking at warfare among pre-state, pre-literate  peoples from the stone age to the present day, Keeley convincingly demonstrates that prehistoric warfare was more deadly, more frequent, and more ruthless than modern war. ISBN: 0195119126.

John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Is history a science? Gaddis answers these and other questions in this short, witty, searching look at the historian's craft. Historians combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists, paralleling in intriguing ways the "new sciences" of chaos and complexity, but not the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning within static systems seems divorced from the world as we know it. ISBN: 0195171578