num_pages: 339
description: Many books have been written about strategy tactics and great commanders. 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 historically the whole variety of problems involved in commanding armies including staff organization and administration communications methods and technologies weaponry and logistics. And it analyzes the relationship between these problems and military strategy.In vivid descriptions of key battles and campaignsamong others Napoleon at Jena Moltkes Kniggrtz campaign the ArabIsraeli war of 1973 and the Americans in VietnamMartin van Creveld focuses on the means of command and shows how those means worked in practice. He finds that technological advances such as the railroad breech-loading rifles the telegraph and later the radio tanks and helicopters all brought commanders not only new tactical possibilities but also new limitations.Although vast changes have occurred in military thinking and technology the one constant has been an endless search for certaintycertainty about the state and intentions of the enemys forces; certainty about the manifold factors that together constitute the environment in which war is fought from the weather and terrain to radioactivity and the presence of chemical warfare agents; and certainty about the state intentions and activities of ones own forces. The book concludes that progress in command has usually been achieved less by employing more advanced technologies than by finding ways to transcend the limitations of existing ones.
language: English
title: Command in War
publisher: Harvard University Press