The Future of War

A History

By: Lawrence Freedman

Narrated by: Michael Page

In 1912, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, wrote a short story about a war fought from underwater submersibles that included the sinking of passenger ships. At the time, it was dismissed by the British generals and admirals of the day not because the idea of submarines was technically unfeasible, but because no one could imagine that any nation would be so depraved as to sink civilian merchant ships. The future of war more often than not surprises us less because of some fantastic technical or engineering dimension but because of some human, political, or moral threshold that we had never imagined wanting to cross.

As Lawrence Freedman shows, the future of war has a past and a present. Ideas of war, strategies for warfare and its practice, and organizing principles of war all have rich and varied origins which have shaped the minds of those who conceive the next war. Freedman shows how war can be studied systematically and empirically to provide a firm foundation for enlightened policy.

The Future of War - which covers civil wars to as yet unknown nuclear conflicts, proxy wars (real) to the Cold War (not), fashionably small wars to the War to End All Wars (it didn't) - is filled with insight and fascinating nuggets of military history and culture from one of the most brilliant military and strategic historians of his generation.

©2017 Lawrence Freedman (P)2017 HighBridge, a Division of Recorded Books

A good historical review of the progression of war

By understanding the history of war, maybe it is easier to predict the future. Good historical analysis, very brief future analysis at the end.

Go with cliff notes version!

Save yourself the thirteen hours for something more beneficial and just go listen to Lawrence Freedman talk about this book as a guest with CSIS.

Long on history but short on insights.

A lot of good history about what happened in the past but no real insight about what that might portend for the future.

more history than future. Wikipedia would be bette

Disappointed with this book. It's more history than future. The last few chapters cover the future but it's very lightly coverd.

Academic Meandering

What a disappointing book -- it reminds me of much of the literature I had to read during graduate school; 400 pages that do not really say anything that isn't self-evident, just rehashing Anglo-American history from the late 19th century to present as some sort of set up -- that you don't even get to the "future of war" until the last chapter, and, despite this set up.... to spoil it for you, the closest thing to a conclusion you'll get is that "war is unpredictable and you can't rely on past experiences to predict future circumstances"... is about all you need to know. Even the rehashing is so random and disorganized...after each chapter you're left asking yourself "so what?".

An example of this is one chapter where he goes into minutiae concerning the details about how casualties are counted and how there are discrepancies between the organizations that keep statistics, the methodologies, etc. literally... trivia like such and such organization counted 34.5 Million Soviets dead between 1941 and 1945 but they didn't count those killed due to hunger where as such and such organization estimated 64.2 Million but half of those were estimates based on flawed statistical methodologies..(these aren't direct quotes from the book). If that is important, fine...but he makes no effort to really make it relevant to not only the chapter but the implied theme of the book. If it were a book that just focused on just casualty statistics, there might be something to talk about, but even then he doesn't elaborate much more than to validate that these problems exist. It doesn't take a Ph.D. to know this.

I mean, with that in mind -- there are elements of this book that _are_ original and good and it would have been better if he just renamed the book and concentrated on that -- Throughout the book he randomly writes about the impact of literature (sci-fi, thriller, etc.) has on society's perceptions of war and even how it directly impacts policy. See -- this is a book that I think would be original and relevant.

So that is my main criticism of this book -- it's disorganized and doesn't really come to any real conclusions.