Chapter 1 analyzes the ideas of the naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. It describes his life and his "America," which was socially and politically at war with itself. This chapter also discusses how the core principles Mahan borrowed from the Swiss military theorist Jomini – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – were brought from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. It ends with an explication of the traditional model of wars nature, which saw armed conflict as an extension of the competitive side of human nature.

Chapter 10 analyzes the thinking of John Warden. It describes his life and his America, which transitioned from malaise to rebirth. Warden saw enemies as integrated but targetable systems. His theories set the stage for twenty-first century airpower theorists who would build on his model of war’s nature, which was materialist because it assumed one’s will to fight could be diminished, if not completely reduced, by attacking one’s material capacity to resist.

War and conflict often force men and women to take decisions they had never considered during peacetime. In his 1845 novel Twenty Years After – a sequel to The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas describes a scene in which one of the book’s main antagonists, a man known as Mordaunt, reports to Sir Oliver Cromwell after a battle with the guard regiment of King Charles I, which resulted in the King’s capture:

Chapter 4 analyzes the ideas of Thomas Schelling, especially his bargaining model of war and his concept of strategic coercion. His "America" was also that of Brodie and Osgood. This chapter examines the limitations of both bargaining, which presupposed a shared process of arriving at tacit and explicit agreements, and coercion which assumed consent was a binary – yes, no – process. Both implied US commanders might need to exercise restraint in war just as they were gaining the upper hand, an idea most would have found ridiculous. Schelling’s model of war’s nature was also that of a coiled spring, though he introduced greater uncertainty into the model because tacit agreements can be broken without warning, or might never have existed in the first place.

This chapter retraces the mindset with which troops arrived in East Prussia by examining the behavioural patterns they carried over from the Eastern Front. Most of these men had previously fought in the Soviet Union, and the actions of the troops who fell back into German territory reveals that their frame of reference had been barbarised by their years of war on the Eastern Front. The wider implications of this calloused outlook for what constituted normality – the ‘lowered resting heart-rate of the Wehrmacht soldier’ – were evident during the defence of East Prussia. With the war’s call for the annihilation of ‘sub-humans’, the majority of orders on the Eastern Front encompassed civilians, and it was thus the soldiers’ perception of civilians that had undergone the greatest perversion. This altered attitude towards civilians ensured that the Wehrmacht was increasingly prepared to include German civilians in the defence of their home soil. For the majority of troops East Prussia was the last in a series of defensive battles and the retreat onto German soil did not necessarily signify a change in day-to-day behaviour. As a result, soldiers had little motive, and even less opportunity, to alter their frame of reference.

The year 1945 will ultimately be considered as one of the most violent in German history. For the East Prussian capital of Königsberg it was its final year, since on 4 July 1946 the city was rechristened Kaliningrad after the recently deceased Soviet President Mikhail Kalinin, who, as the political scientist Richard Krickus somewhat sarcastically noted, ‘never visited the place’.1 Königsberg was in a death struggle for its status as a German city, a battle it would ultimately lose. Four years later, all German citizens had been expelled and in the years that followed the new Russian authorities sought to erase all signs of what they considered to be ‘Prussian militarism’, culminating in the destruction of the ruins of the Königsberger Schloss in 1968.2 During the siege, few people envisioned themselves as part of a German future for Königsberg. This study highlights that the concerns of the principal actors did not centre on their role in the Third Reich; rather, it reveals how strongly people clung to their immediate local environment and how this impacted behavioural patterns.

War’s Logic provides a fresh perspective into twentieth-century American strategic thought. More to the point, it offers unique insights into how several of America’s prominent strategic theorists conceived of armed conflict. The title stands for a general way of thinking about war. It refers to the reasoning that underlies a theorist’s critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions regarding the nature and character of war. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, war’s logic is invariably political in nature. Similarly, readers of this book will note the American way of thinking about war was frequently political in nature. While War’s Logic covers ground similar to that of Russell Weigley’s classic, The American Way of War, it differs from his work in three important respects.

Chapter 2 analyzes the ideas of the airpower theorist William (Billy) Mitchell. It describes his life and his "America," which in the words of period novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was "careless and confused." Mitchell, like his America, pursued his goals aggressively regardless of the consequences. This chapter also discusses how Jominian first principles – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – figured in Mitchell’s thinking. It ends by explaining how Mitchell’s model of war’s nature was essentially the same as Mahan’s, the traditional model.

Chapter 7 analyzes the ideas of Joseph Caldwell Wylie especially his theory of strategy as control. It describes his life as well as his practitioner perspective, which served to inform his theory of strategy and his idea that war is a discontinutation of policy as much as it is a continuation of it. This chapter also discusses his contribution to the traditional model of war’s nature, which he helped to enlarge.