Military History for the Modern Strategist

Michael O’Hanlon holds the Phil Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at Brookings, where he also is director of research and director of the Talbott Center in the Foreign Policy program. He teaches at Columbia and Georgetown universities and elsewhere. Earlier in his career, O’Hanlon worked for the Congressional Budget Office, the Peace Corps, the “gravity group” at Princeton University, and dairy farms in upstate New York. He is the author of some 20 books, most recently The Art of War in an Age of Peace: U.S. Grand Strategy and Resolute Restraint (Yale, 2021).

• ContentsPreface to the Updated EditionPreface and Acknowledgments1 The American Civil War2 World War I3 World War II4 Korea and Vietnam5 America’s Wars in the Middle East since 19906 Three LessonsNotesIndex

As anyone who is interested in military history can attest, an early step is finding a suitable ‘survey’ book—a foundational text that provides both overview and analysis, leading to other works for further reading. This can be a difficult balance to strike, between the barebones entries in the encyclopedia and thousand-page paperweights that cover every troop movement and intercepted communiqué. Both have value; however, for most readers of history, both are likely less than desirable. In Military History for the Modern Strategist, Brookings Institution senior fellow Michael O’Hanlon packages crisp recaps of America’s major conflicts from 1861 to 2022 with analysis of grand strategy, offering an excellent starting point for aspiring strategists looking to apply lessons from past conflicts to today’s and tomorrow’s challenges….Military History for the Modern Strategist arrives at a critical transition point in U.S. military history. White papers abound from civilian think tanks and military red cells about what ‘could’ happen, but the lessons of history are equally important in strategy planning. O’Hanlon says it best as he concludes: ‘Military history is fundamentally sobering. For that reason its value is hard to exaggerate.’ This book is a necessary historical guide that will help inform the hard decisions that the next generation of planners and strategists will have to make, when the United States once again goes to war.