Antulio J. Echevarria II reveals how successive generations of American strategic theorists have thought about war. Analyzing the work of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Billy Mitchell, Bernard Brodie, Robert Osgood, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Henry Eccles, Joseph Wiley, Harry Summers, John Boyd, William Lind, and John Warden, he uncovers the logic that underpinned each theorist's critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions about the nature and character of war. In so doing, he identifies four paradigms of war's nature - traditional, modern, political, and materialist - that have shaped American strategic thought. If war's logic is political, as Carl von Clausewitz said, then so too is thinking about war.

About the author:

Dr. Antulio J. Echevarria II had a distinguished career in the US Army and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the US Army War College Press, which includes Parameters. He is a graduate of the US Military Academy, the US Army Command and General Staff College, and the US Army War College. He holds a doctorate in modern history from Princeton University, and is the author of six books, including After Clausewitz (Kansas 2001), Imagining Future War (2007), Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford 2007), Reconsidering the American Way of War (Georgetown 2014), Military Strategy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2017), and War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War (Cambridge 2021) as well as more than one hundred articles and monographs on strategic thinking, military theory, and military history. He completed a NATO Fulbright Fellowship in 2000-01, and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Oxford University in 2011-12; he is a Senior Research fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and an Adjunct Fellow at the Modern War Institute. He formerly held the US Army War College Elihu Root Chair of Military Studies.