This highly readable and authoritative history of American military operations examines the campaigns and the changing practices that have helped to define Western warfare. Beginning with Anglo-American skirmishes in the early seventeenth century, the narrative moves on through the War for American Independence and the development of a professional officer corps in the early nineteenth century to the Civil War and the two great total wars of the twentieth century. The volume concludes with five chapters on the more limited wars of the nuclear age. The text is supported by a wealth of photographs and maps throughout.

Robert A. Doughty, U.S. Military Academy, and Ira Gruber, Rice University, led a team of eminent military historians in the development of this text. Each of the authors, drawing on his own field of expertise and focusing on specific campaigns, examines not only military operations but the technological, social, and political developments that affected those operations. The result is a uniquely valuable account of warfare in the Western World.