Synopses & Reviews
This book is designed to explain the core, the essential nature of war, peace, and strategy. It could even be described as a user's guide. The popular and the scholarly literature on these three closely related topics is vast, a fact that reflects both the enduring grim reality of the human condition and an insatiable public appetite for the vicarious thrill of military dangers faced by others. Fighting Talk (FT) provides a unique window upon the most important of subjects. In addition to explaining the nature of war, peace, and strategy, and the relations among them, FT takes the logical next step and proceeds from understanding to advice. Stated bluntly, this book tells its readers (a) what war, peace, and strategy are, and (b) how to conduct them successfully, or, at least, how to increase prospects for success. The highly unusual organization of FT is vital for its mission and its appeal to readers. Because it consists of forty mini-essays, albeit grouped broadly by theme and ordered so as to present some approximation to a story arc, FT can focus exactly on its message. This book comprises a strategist's working assumptions about strategic history and how it operates. It is rare for authors to expose their assumptions at all explicitly, let alone in this fashion where they are highlighted and serve as the guide to the story, analysis, and policy prescriptions.
Review
"Attributing his inspiration for this work to the seminal military thinker Carl von Clausewitz, Gray has come up with 40 maxims of military strategy that he believes cover most of the intellectually essential elements for the education of a strategist and presents them accompanied by short explanatory essays. They are grouped into sections on war and peace, strategy, military power and warfare, security and insecurity, and history and the future." - Reference & Research Book News
Review
"[Gray] has sustained and enhanced a reputation as the English-speaking world's leading strategic thinker. Gray's work has always eschewed abstraction for empiricism. His theoretical studies never fall prey to wishful thinking or mirror-imaging. His strategic analyses incorporate strong historical elements. Fighting Talk, though unpretentious in structure, represents the distillation of a career's worth of study and reflection in these contexts." - The Journal of Military History
Synopsis
Gray presents an inventive treatise on the nature of strategy, war, and peace, organized around forty maxims. This collection of mini-essays will forearm politicians, soldiers, and the attentive general public against many—probably most—fallacies that abound in contemporary debates about war, peace, and security. While one can never guarantee strategic success, which depends on policy, military prowess, and the quality of the dialogue between the two, a strategic education led by the judgments in these maxims increases the chances that one's errors will be small rather than catastrophic.
The maxims are grouped according to five clusters. War and Peace tackles the larger issues of strategic history that drive the demand for the services of strategic thought and practice. Strategy presses further, into the realm of strategic behavior, and serves as a bridge between the political focus of part one and the military concerns that follow. In Military Power and Warfare turns to the pragmatic business of military performance: operations, tactics, and logistics. Part four, Security and Insecurity examines why strategy is important, including a discussion of the nature, dynamic character, and functioning of world politics. Finally, History and the Future is meant to help strategists better understand the processes of historical change.
About the Author
COLIN S. GRAY is Professor of International Politics and Strategic Studies, and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies, University of Reading, England. He is the author of nineteen books, more than three hundred articles, and several dozen reports for the government. His work is often cited in the fields of arms control, maritime strategy, nuclear strategy, and strategic culture.