The Strategist: How to Think About War and Politics

An authoritative introduction to strategy-its enduring essentials, its inherent challenges, and the ways it will change in the twenty-first centuryWe live in a world in which America’s previous dominance has disappeared, violent states seek to remake the global order, and war itself has taken new forms.The Strategist is the definitive guide to the use of military means to achieve political ends.In this incisive book, Eliot Cohen addresses the deceptively straightforward questions at the heart of strategy, the reasons why strategists often choose badly, and the ways in which strategy, inevitably imperfect, can be improved. Who is the enemy? What are our means? What is the sequence in which we should act? Why do we believe we will succeed? These are some of the seemingly elementary questions all strategists must answer, and success or failure rests on choices that may also seem simple, such as selecting campaigns and deciding when to launch a war and when to stop it.Yet devising effectiv