Roger J. Spiller – författare

This book is an abridged edition of the critically acclaimed, three-volume Dictionary of American Military Biography (Greenwood Press, 1984). The scope of the original work encompassed a much wider range of people than soldiers; it included politicians, scientists, inventors, explorers, physicians, and humanitarians who had a significant impact on American military history. This new edition focuses on the most distinguished and important battle commanders in American history from colonial times to the present. Each essay incorporates the latest scholarship on the life under study, depicting the background, education, professional development, and accomplishments of the most notable practitioners of the art of war. Unlike most works of this genre, American Military Leaders offers critical appraisals of its subjects. The essays were contributed by some 100 military historians. Cross references and bibliographies are provided. There is a new introduction and an enhanced reference index.This careful abridgement of an acknowledged classic guide to military history can be used as a supplementary text for courses on the evolution of war and American military history. Professional soldiers will welcome its emphasis on battlefield warriors and military history buffs will find it both insightful and enjoyable reading.

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A classic of military thought that merits a place alongside the works of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, Battle Studies was first published in Paris ten years after the death of its author, French army officer Charles Ardant du Picq (1821–1870). Updated to provide a more complete and accurate biographical and historical framework for understanding its meaning and import, this edition—deftly translated, introduced, and annotated by noted military historian Roger Spiller—offers a new generation of readers the benefit of Ardant du Picq’s unique insight into the nature of warfare.Nothing, Ardant du Picq asserts, can be prescribed wisely in an army “without an exact understanding of its ultimate instrument, man, and his morale at the defining instant of combat.” Accordingly, Battle Studies, the first systematic exploration of human behavior in the extremities of combat, focuses squarely on the tactical realm its author knew so well. Eschewing grand military theories and strategies, Ardant du Picq draws on his real-world experience, especially during the Crimean War and the Siege of Sebastopol where he was captured, to examine what motivates a soldier to fight, what creates cohesion or disorder, what gives a commander tactical control, and what makes reason give way to instinct: in short, “the essence of the science of combat.”

A classic of military thought that merits a place alongside the works of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, Battle Studies was first published in Paris ten years after the death of its author, French army officer Charles Ardant du Picq (1821–1870). Updated to provide a more complete and accurate biographical and historical framework for understanding its meaning and import, this edition—deftly translated, introduced, and annotated by noted military historian Roger Spiller—offers a new generation of readers the benefit of Ardant du Picq’s unique insight into the nature of warfare.Nothing, Ardant du Picq asserts, can be prescribed wisely in an army “without an exact understanding of its ultimate instrument, man, and his morale at the defining instant of combat.” Accordingly, Battle Studies, the first systematic exploration of human behavior in the extremities of combat, focuses squarely on the tactical realm its author knew so well. Eschewing grand military theories and strategies, Ardant du Picq draws on his real-world experience, especially during the Crimean War and the Siege of Sebastopol where he was captured, to examine what motivates a soldier to fight, what creates cohesion or disorder, what gives a commander tactical control, and what makes reason give way to instinct: in short, “the essence of the science of combat.”

Fort Leavenworth, where Roger J. Spiller taught the army's finest for twenty-five years, is indeed a "school of war." There, among military professionals who had experienced war firsthand, Spiller honed his remarkable skills as an analyst and historian, scholar and teacher—skills that have made him one of the best-known and respected military historians of our day. This volume brings together Spiller's original and thought-provoking explorations of wars big and small and armies glorified and ignored. For each of these essays—whether on urban warfare or the Vietnam syndrome, battlefield psychology or the making of military history, and underrated vs. overrated generals—Spiller revisits his topic and his thinking, bringing fresh insight and a new context to an incomparable body of work. In the School of War further reveals the complex relationship between past and present in an understanding of the nature of war.