Cathal J. Nolan. Allure of Battle.

The best book on warfare I have seen for a long time. Though heavily drawing on J. F. C. Fuller in structure and method, it relinquishes its romantic enchantment with Frederick the Great, Napoleon, his unabashed racism ("brutes" and "asiatics") and adds some fresh material. I am willing to excuse his forgetfulness that the capital of Russian Empire was St. Petersburg, not Moscow, and his totally uncritical opinions on Anglo-Saxon (UK and US) commanders and their methods of warfare. The latter probably appeared to placate the neocon Party cells now existing in any major publishing house, US or British. After all, the words like SNAFU, JANFU and FUBAR did not appear in the US Army/Navy WWII jargon out of nowhere.

But his brilliant insights, for instance, that Frederick the Great, though a great battle commander, achieved what he did mostly through careful diplomacy, smart war propaganda--British  broadsheets touted his "invincibility" and whitewashed his defeats--and a sheer luck of the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth and chaos of an interregnum uncovers careful thinking and desire to avoid stereotypes, no matter how entrenched.  In fact, Frederick was the one who invented modern total war fought not only on the battlefield, but simultaneously on economic, diplomatic and propaganda fronts. Again, Nolan completely glosses over British defection of Frederick after their colonial designs on the French were fulfilled, the one he himself nicknamed "Perfidy of Albion". What was considered a clever exercise of Realpolitik, not only costed British its American colonies but also made Pitt unable to resist Russian, Prussian and Austrian expansion at the expense of Turkey and Poland. Cathal Nolan's book is highly recommended as an antidote to haphazardly researched and poisonously opinionated books, which are advertised through all search engines, first and foremost, on Amazon.