Roots Of Strategy

The Art of War, Sun Tzu, 500 B.C.; The Military Institutions of The Romans, Vegetius, 390 A.D.; My Reveries on the Art of War, marskal Maurice de Saxe, 1732; The Instruction of Frederick the Great for his generals, 1747; The Military Maxims of Napoleon.

This collection contains the five greatest and most influential military classics written prior to the nineteenth century. The first, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, is not only the oldest military work in existence but is unquestionably the greatest military classic in any language. It has had little influence in the western world, but has guided Chinese and Japanese military thought for 2400 years. All the works contained in this volume are out of print in English and all are an indispensable part of an officer’s military education and the foundation of a military library. Saxe’s Reveries and Frederick the Great’s Secret Instructions to his Generals are newly translated by Major T. R. Phillips from the most authentic foreign editions.

Ardant du Picq's Battle Studies, Clausewitz's Principles of War, and Jomini's Art of War.

Strategic Intelligence is a form of meaning that promises the possibility of strategic advantage, dignity, the achievement of objective, and the fulfillment of potential in hostile environments. In The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence Gino LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of reason—arising in human experience, encoded as value, and born by culture as a strategic resource—has been encoded as values that have been memorialized in culturally authoritative sources in various Eurasian cultures for thousands of years. These sources have validated a strategic orientation in the world, legitimized the strategist as a heroic identity, and transmitted a coherent world view that enables the practitioner of strategy to overcome asymmetric threat. By excavating the provenance of strategic thought expressed in the cultural identity of the strategist in the most culturally authoritative mythological, literary, philosophical and religious sources, and excavating the underlying strategic values expressed in cultural products, LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of human rationality is one of the most basic structural dynamics of human meaning, and that the transmission of this strategic way of being and acting in the world offers hope for life’s underdogs.