The Fog of Peace and War Planning: Military and Strategic Planning under Uncertainty

(Strategy and History Series)

Overview

Given both the importance and the difficulties involved in military planning, existing research has tended to focus almost exclusively on immediate pre-war and wartime periods surrounding the First and Second World Wars and has neglected peacetime periods and the specific challenges that planners must face. This volume sets out to examine and analyse how governments and military organizations planned for an uncertain and potentially threatening future during four different peacetime periods spanning from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of the Second World War. For each period the authors have explored how the changing nature of military technology and hence of warfare affected military planning and provided a number of case studies designed to illustrate the challenges and opportunities planners faced within their respective periods. Finally the book discusses what lessons can be drawn from past cases of military planning.

This book will be of foremost interest to students in military and strategic studies as well as military college staff, policymakers, and think tanks.

Talbot C. Imlay is an Assistant Professor of history at Laval University. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and an M.A. and B.A. from University of Toronto. Professor Imlay is the author of several articles and the monograph, Facing the Second World War: Strategy, Politics and Economics in Britain and France, 1938–1940 (Oxford University Press, 2003). His research interests include international history, European politics of the 19th and 20th centuries, and economic and military history.
 

Monica Duffy Toft is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Toft was a research intern at the RAND Corporation and served in the U.S. Army in southern Germany as a Russian voice interceptor. Her research interests include international relations, nationalism and ethnic conflict, civil and interstate wars, the relationship between demography and national security, and military and strategic planning. Professor Toft is the author of numerous articles and the monograph, The Geography of Ethnic Conflict: Identity, Interests, and Territory (Princeton University Press, 2003).