“A properly schooled officer never arrives on a battlefield for the first time, even if he has never actually trod the ground, if that officer has read wisely to acquire the wisdom of those who have experienced war in times past.”
By: Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, USMC (ret)
Reading
Williamson Murray and Richard H. Sinnreich, eds., The Past as Prologue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Roger Nye, The Challenge of Command: Reading for Military Excellence (Wayne, New Jersey: Avery Publishing Company, 1986)
John E. Jessup, Jr. and Robert W. Coakley, A Guide to the Study and Use of Military History (Washington, DC: United States Army, Center of Military History, 1979)
Tactics
S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command in Future War (Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1978)
John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: The Viking Press, 1976)
Charles B. Mac Donald, Company Commander (New York: Bantam Books, 1947)
Paddy Griffith, Forward Into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1981)
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness (New York, The MacMillan Company, 1963)
Operational Art
Michael D. Krause and R. Cody Phillips, eds., Historical Perspectives of the Operational Art (Washington, DC: United States Army, Center of Military History, 2005)
Richard W. Harrison’s The Russian Way of War: Operational Art, 1904-1940 (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2001)
Strategy
Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War Peace and Strategy (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International, 2007)
Williamson Murray, Richard Hart Sinnreich, and James Lacey, The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
Decision Making
Martin Van Creveld, Command in War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985)
John Keegan, The Mask of Command (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books, 1987)
Gary Klein, Sources of Power (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1998).
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
[Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein, “Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree,” American Psychologists, September 2009, 515-526. This journal article explains the similarities and Differences of the authors of the two books above.]
Understanding the World
Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Theory
John I. Alger, The Quest for Victory (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982)
Frans Osinga, Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (The Netherlands: Eburon Academic Publishers, 2005).
Antulio J. Echevarria, II, Clausewitz and Contemporary War (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2007)
Future War
Colin S. Gray, Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).
Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper currently holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at Marine Corps University. Lieutenant General Van Riper retired from the United States Marine Corps on 1 October 1997 after more than 41 years of commissioned and enlisted service. In the course of seven tours in the Fleet Marine Force, he saw duty in each of the three active divisions, commanding at every level from infantry platoon to division. He experienced combat during five of these tours.
