Written by C.E. White, this book is the story of Scharnhorst, the leader of the Prussian military reform movement of the early 1800s, as a military educator. With other young officers, Scharnhorst realized that if the Prussian army, which had changed little since the time of Frederick the Great, fought Napoleon, it would lose and lose badly.

Instead of just waiting for it to happen, he put together a group of officers who thought as he did, the Militaerische Gesellschaft, and they worked out a program of reforms for the Prussian state and army. Prussia’s defeat at the battle of Jena opened the door to these reforms, which in turn laid the basis for the German army’s development of maneuver warfare in the early 20th century.

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Robert Doughty’s definitive history of the development of Second Generation warfare in the French army during and after World War I. This book is in the canon because the U.S. Army and Marine Corps learned modern war from the French, absorbing Second Generation war wholesale. As late as 1930, when the U.S. Army wanted a manual on operational art, it took the French manual on Grand Tactics, translated it and issued it as its own. The Seeds of Disaster is essential to understanding why the American armed forces act as they do.

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Bruce Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics, is the story of the development of Third Generation maneuver warfare in the German Army in World War I. It is also a book on how to change an army. Twice during World War I, the Germans pulled their army out of the Western Front unit-by-unit and retrained it in radically new tactics. Those new tactics broke the deadlock of the trenches. However, Germany had to wait for the development of the Panzer divisions in the 1930s to turn tactical success into operational victory.

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Martin Samuels’s Command or Control?, compares British and German tactical development from the late 19th century through World War I. Its value is in the clear distinctions it draws between the Second and Third Generations, distinctions the reader will find useful when looking at the U.S. armed forces today.

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Also by Robert Doughty, The Breaking Point is the story of the battle of Sedan in 1940, where Guderian’s Panzers crossed the Meuse and then turned and headed for the English Channel in a brilliant example of operational art. Here, the reader sees the Second and Third Generations clash head-on.

Why does the Third Generation prevail? Because over and over, at decisive moments, the Third Generation Wehrmacht takes initiative (often led by NCOs) while the French wait for orders. What the French did was often right, but it was always too late.

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While The Breaking Point contrasts the Second and Third Generations in combat, Martin Van Creveld’s Fighting Power compares them as institutions. It does so by contrasting the U.S. Army in World War II with the German Army. What emerges is a picture of two radically different institutions, each consistent with its doctrine. This book is important because it illustrates why you cannot combine Third Generation, maneuver warfare tactics with a Second Generation, inward-focused, process-ridden, centralized institution.

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Martin Van Creveld’s The Transformation of War is asily the most important book on war written in the last half-century. It lays out the basis of Fourth Generation war, the state’s loss of its monopoly on war and on social organization. In the 21st century, as in all centuries prior to the rise of the nation-state, many different entities will fight war, for many different reasons.

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