Clausewitz's On War: A Biography (Books That Changed the World). By Hew Strachan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). ISBN: 0871139561. Strachan, one of the world’s foremost military historians, offers some answers to many of the problems posed by Clausewitz's writings. He explains how and why On War was written, elucidates what Clausewitz meant, and offers insight into the impact it has had on conflict, and evaluates its continued significance in our world today.

Decoding Clausewitz: A New Approach to On War (University Press of Kansas, 2008). By Jon Tetsuro Sumida. ISBN 9780700616169. Sumida contends that Clausewitz invented a method of reenacting the psychological difficulties of high command in order to promote the powers of intuition that he believed were essential to effective strategic decision-making. In addition, Sumida argues that Clausewitz's primary strategic proposition is that the defense is a stronger form of war than the offense. This concept, Sumida maintains, must be understood in order to make sense of Clausewitz's positions on absolute and real war, guerrilla warfare, and the relationship of war and policy/politics. Here is the Preface and Table of Contents. Here is the preface to the (revised) paperback edition (2011). See Reviews.

Clausewitz in the Twenty-First Century.
Edited by Hew Strachan and Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Oxford University Press, September 2007). ISBN: 199232024 .
This is the proceedings of the
March 2005 Oxford University
conference on Clausewitz in the 21st Century .

See discussion by Andreas Herberg-Rothe and Tony Echevarri; Review by James Woudhuysen in Spiked.

NOW AVAILABLE!
from Oxford University Press
and in Oxford Scholarship OnLine

Clausewitz's Puzzle: The Political Theory of War. By Andreas Herberg-Rothe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0199202699. Estimated publication date: April 2007. See reviews in English and German of the German edition. See the publication announcement from OUP. And see this discussion on Sonshi.com.

Clausewitz Reconsidered (Praeger, 2009). By H.P. Wilmott and Michael B. Barrett. ISBN: 0313362866. The authors assess Clausewitz's theories, examining their viability at a time when asymmetric warfare and "war" conducted by and against nonstate actors is increasingly common and state control often ephemeral. The basis of the book's analysis is an examination of war over the last four centuries, since the Thirty Years' War, including the Cold War and subsequent conflicts. This starts with the rather odd assumption that war today is far more endemic and brutal than when Clausewitz tried to explain it. This volume explores that alleged paradox and shows that if anything, we can anticipate further uncontrolled violence. The authors conclude that Clausewitz and On War have assumed a status akin to holy writ, but are obviously dated. The aim of Clausewitz Reconsidered is to bring the master's theories up to date, providing the current generation with a new basis for thought and analysis.

On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). By Carl von Clausewitz as translated by Peter Hofschröer. ISBN: 0806141085. This is a translation of Clausewitz's Der Feldzug von 1815 in Frankreich (Berlin, 1835). The translator uses Clausewitz's campaign study (which focuses equally on all of the top commanders of the campaign) to continue his personal vendetta against Wellington. Clausewitz, however, did not share this prejudice. Ironically, given its artificial focus on Wellington, and unlike On Waterloo (truth-in-advertising: a Clausewitz.com production), it contains only Clausewitz's campaign study, not Wellington's reply, Clausewitz's post-battle letters, or essays by other scholars. But buy both and let us know what you think.

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

Azar Gat, The Development of Military Thought - The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992). This is a useful and important book, though Gat is an uncommonly pompous academic and tends to take his own insights a little too seriously. ISBN: 0198202466.

Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2001). Gat continues both to have some good ideas and to take all of his own ideas rather more seriously than the evidence (or the nature of reality) can support. ISBN: 0199247625.

Jehuda L. Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and Their Impact on the German Conduct of Two World Wars (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986). ISBN: 0313244383.

Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, by Michael Handel (Cass, 3rd ed, 2001). ISBN: 0714681326.

The Book of War. (The Modern Library, February 2000). Clausewitz and Sun Tzu in one book. With an interesting introduction by Ralph Peters. ISBN: 0375754776.

Roger Parkinson. Clausewitz: A Biography. New York: Stein and Day, 1971. Reissued 2002. This book is poorly regarded by many, but it does have some strengths in covering Clausewitz's personal life and experiences. Softcover ISBN: 0815412339.

BUY
[NOT from Amazon.co.uk]

Audio MP.3's of the first four
books in Clausewitz's ON WAR
(the Graham translation)

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See Bibliographies of relevant works in English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish/Portuguese, and other languages

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E-book versions of On War (apparently only Books I-IV, of eight).
(Full 8-book text on-line HERE)

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Another E-Book version
of On War
(MicroSoft Reader format)
Item# B0000523UU

Actually, this one seems to have disappeared.
But we like the graphic, so
we're retaining it for display.