We look at a rich mix of militia tactics and anti-fascist politics in a British bestseller from the dark days of 1940. Tom Wintringham’s New Ways of War was a response to the acute national crisis Britain faced in the summer of 1940. He sums it up himself in the opening lines: ‘In September 1939,… [Continue Reading]

Continuing our review of military classics, Military Times looks at A J P Taylor’s controversial publication on the causes of the Second World War. For a book about events a quarter of a century in the past, the storm raised by the publication of A J P Taylor’s book on the causes of the Second… [Continue Reading]

We review Colonel C E Callwell’s famous Late Victorian counter-insurgency manual, Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice. The military academies are buzzing with counter-insurgency theory. Recent wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere are putting a premium on anti-guerrilla doctrine. Little wonder, then, that Colonel C E Callwell’s Small Wars, a century-old manual… [Continue Reading]

A classic text on the conduct of warfare, and one of the oldest and most successful of all military treatises. Is war profoundly varied and changeable, or are its basic principles eternal? The answer, as any reading of Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War makes clear, is both. No general today need concern himself with the… [Continue Reading]