The Shaping of Grand Strategy: Policy, Diplomacy, and War

Williamson Murray · Richard Hart Sinnreich · James Lacey

Feb 2011 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

Within a variety of historical contexts, The Shaping of Grand Strategy addresses the most important tasks states have confronted: namely, how to protect their citizens against the short-range as well as long-range dangers their polities confront in the present and may confront in the future. To be successful, grand strategy demands that governments and leaders chart a course that involves more than simply reacting to immediate events. Above all, it demands they adapt to sudden and major changes in the international environment, which more often than not involves the outbreak of great conflicts but at times demands recognition of major economic, political, or diplomatic changes. This collection of essays explores the successes as well as failures of great states attempting to create grand strategies that work and aims at achieving an understanding of some of the extraordinary difficulties involved in casting, evolving and adapting grand strategy to the realities of the world.

About the author

Williamson Murray is Professor Emeritus of History at the Ohio State University. He has also been the Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, a Secretary of the Navy Fellow at the Navy War College, the Horner Professor of Military Theory at Marine Corps University, and the Harold Johnson Professor of Military History at the Army War College. At present he is a defense consultant and commentator on historical and military subjects in Washington, DC. Murray is co-editor of The Making of Peace (with Jim Lacey), The Past as Prologue (with Richard Hart Sinnreich), The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300–2050 (with MacGregor Knox), Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (with Allan R. Millett), and The Making of Strategy (with Alvin Bernstein and MacGregor Knox).

Richard Hart Sinnreich retired from the US Army in 1990. His active service included field artillery commands from battery through division artillery, combat in Vietnam, teaching at West Point and Fort Leavenworth, and assignments on the Army, Joint, and National Security Council staffs, as assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and as the first Army Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He helped establish and subsequently directed the Army's School of Advanced Military Studies, and has published widely in military and foreign affairs. Since retiring from the Army, he has worked as an independent defense consultant for both commercial clients and government agencies, and as the regular defense columnist for Lawton, Oklahoma's Sunday Constitution.

James Lacey has served more than a dozen years on active duty as an infantry officer and is recently retired from the army reserves. He is a widely published analyst and a Professor of Strategy at the Marine War College in Washington, DC, where he has written several studies on the war in Iraq and on the Global War on Terrorism. He also teaches graduate-level courses in military history and global issues at Johns Hopkins University. Lacey was an embedded journalist with Time magazine during the invasion of Iraq, during which he traveled with the 101st Airborne Division. He has written extensively for many other magazines, and his opinion columns have been published in National Review, the Weekly Standard, the New York Post, the New York Sun, Foreign Affairs and many other publications. He is the author of Takedown: the 3rd Infantry Division's 21-Day Assault on Baghdad, which has been hailed as 'a major and successful effort to fill in one of the major blank spots in our knowledge of Operation Iraqi Freedom'; Pershing (2008); and the forthcoming Keep from All Thoughtful Men (2011) and the co-editor of The Making of Peace (2008).