Strategy reading list

As it’s coming towards the end of the year, there are a lot of ‘Best Of’ compilations around – books, restaurants, political gaffes or quotes, to name just a few – and this got me thinking. What sort of compilation might be helpful for a student or practitioner of strategy?

With that in mind, I posed this question via Twitter to a number of experts from across the world: “what three books do you think the modern strategy academic or professional should read?”

Here are their answers, listed in order of respondent:

Nathan Finney – US Army officer, author, and co-founder of the Strategy Bridge online journal

• Colin S. Gray; The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice.
• Carl von Clausewitz; On War.
• Winston Churchill; Painting as a Pastime.

Albert Palazzo – Senior Research Fellow, Future Land Warfare (Australian Army)

• Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.
• Williamson Murray, Alvin Bernstein, MacGregor Knox; The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War.
• Peter Paret, Gordon A. Chang, Felix Gilbert; Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age.
• J.C. Wylie; Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control.

Scott Cheney-Peters – Analyst and US Navy Reserve Officer

• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.

Andrew O’Neil – Head of School of Government and International Relations, Professor of Political Science, Griffith University

• Robert Jervis; Perception and Misperception in International Politics.
• Lawrence Freedman; The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy.

Malcolm Davis – Assistant Professor in China-Western relations, Bond University

• Carl von Clausewitz; On War.
• Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War.
• Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

Andrew Carr – Research Fellow, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

• Carl von Clausewitz; On War.
• Colin S. Gray; The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice.
• Bernard Crick; In Defence of Politics.

Ken Gleiman – Visiting Fellow, Australian Strategic Policy Institute

• Lawrence Freedman; Strategy: A History.
• Everett Carl Dolman; Pure Strategy: Power and Principle in the Space and Information Age.
• John Lewis Gaddis; The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past.

Lawrence Freedman – Professor of War Studies, Kings College London

• Colin S. Gray; The Strategy Bridge: Theory for Practice.
• Peter Paret, Gordon A. Chang, Felix Gilbert; Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age.

Raoul Heinrichs – Sir Arthur Tange Scholar, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

• Bernard Brodie; War and Politics.

James Brown – Director of Alliance 21, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

• Eliot Cohen; Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime.
• Emile Simpson; War from the Ground Up.
• Australia in the War of 1939-1945, Series 4 – Civil; Vols. I and II, The Government and the People.

Brendan Taylor – Head of the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

• Lawrence Freedman; Strategy: A History.