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Strachan, Hew, and Sibylle Scheipers, eds. The Changing Character of War. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. 564pp. $110
Academic strategists have been agonizing over whether war is changing its character or is being changed by any manner of influences, ranging from technology to "war amongst the people," since the fall of the Soviet Union. The tragedy of September 11th added impetus to this inquiry. The Oxford Leverhulme Changing Character of War program, which ran from 2003 to 2009, has been to date the most comprehensive attempt to answer the question. The essays in this work are the participants' considered responses to it.
The standout contribution among several extraordinarily useful chapters is Hew Strachan's on strategy in the twenty-first century. Strachan is a historian who, while aware of his discipline's fondness for the particular and aversion to the general, is concerned to rescue the study of strategy from political scientists who tend to use historical examples to justify sometimes-sweeping theoretical constructs. Historians may be tempted to dismiss everything as having passed this way before, which can sometimes cause failure to recognize genuine change and innovation. Political scientists, however, too often are oblivious to...