This book reintroduces readers to the lives and writings of the greatest military minds of the modern era, writers whose ideas and teachings continue to shape the conduct of war in the 21st century.
The word "strategy" only came into usage in West European languages after the work of a Byzantine emperor was translated around the time of the French Revolution. Nevertheless, there was writing on strategy – relating political aims to the use of the military – also in Western Europe, well before this. This book surveys and analyzes the existing literature. It presents commented excerpts of the work of the Elizabethan writer Matthew Sutcliffe (who wrote the first modern comprehensive strategic concept) and translations into English of excerpts from the writing of the Machiavelli-admirer the Seigneur de Fourquevaux (1548) and his French compatriot Bertrand de Loque, who also went by the name of François de Saillans (1589); the Spanish diplomats and military officers Don Bernardino de Mendoza (1595) and the Third Marques of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1724-1730); the Frenchmen Paul Hay du Chastelet (1668) and Count Guibert (1770); and the Prussian contemporary of Clausewitz, Rühle von Lilienstern (1816).

Key concepts such as preventive war, the fight for the hearts and minds of the population to combat insurgents, the "democratic peace theory," and debates such as the preference for defense or the offensive, the desirability of battle, the purpose and function of war, the advantages of conscript or professional soldiers, can thus be shown to go back far longer than generally assumed and appear in a new light.