Book Review of The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by General Rupert Smith
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Authors
Smith, Rupert
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2007-06
Date
June 2007
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
That recent decades have been a time of transition in military affairs is by now a tired cliche. However, despite the profusion of theorists that have attempted to explain, define, and label the changing mode of warfare, the nature of this transition remains a subject of heated argument. Earlier this year, former Deputy Supreme Commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, General Rupert Smith of the British Army, offered his take on this subject in The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World. The premise of Smith's book is that industrial war, the model which emerged from the French Revolution and which predominated until World War II, has declined in relevance because of the advent of nuclear weaponry, increasingly successful insurgencies, and its own high cost, and has thus effectively ceased to exist.
Type
Book Review
Description
Series/Report No
Department
Organization
Center on Contemporary Conflict (CCC)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funding
Format
Citation
Strategic Insights, v.6, issue 4 (June 2007)
Distribution Statement
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.