Command in War

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. First Printing. Trade paperback. Good. vii, [5], 339, [1] pages. Maps. Notes. Works Cited. Index Cover has some wear and creasing. Ink note on rep. Martin Levi van Creveld (born 5 March 1946) is an Israeli military historian and theorist. In 1950, his family immigrated to Israel, and Creveld grew up in Ramat Gan. From 1964 to 1969, he studied history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned an MA. From 1969-71, he studied history at the London School of Economics and received a Ph.D. Van Creveld's doctoral dissertation on Hitler's strategy in the Balkans during the early years of World War II was published as a book in 1973: "Hitler's Strategy, 1940-41. The Balkan Clue." After completing his Ph.D. in 1971, van Creveld returned to Israel and began teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He became a professor in 1988. In 2007, he began teaching at Tel Aviv University's Security Studies Program. Van Creveld has lectured or taught at countless civilian and military institutes of higher learning all over the world. This is the first book to deal exclusively with the nature of command itself, and to trace its development over two thousand years from ancient Greece to Vietnam. It treats the whole variety of problems involved in commanding armies, including organization and administration, communications methods and technologies, weaponry, and logistics. And it analyzes the relationship between these and military strategy. In vivid descriptions of key battles and campaigns, he focuses on the means of command and shows how those means worked in practice. He finds that technological advances all brought commanders not only new tactical possibilities but also new limitations. The one constant has been the search for certainty--about the state and intentions of the enemy; about the environment in which war is fought; and about the state, and activities of one's forces. The book concludes that progress has usually been achieved less by employing technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of existing ones.