A study of the strategy of war, trying to balance the desire to avoid war with the need to mitigate the cost in dollars and men when war becomes inevitable.

Part one: Waging war with limited resource, 1775-1815. -- A strategy of attrition: George Washington -- A strategy of partisan war: Nathan Greene -- The Federalists and Jeffersonians. -- Part two: Young America as a military power, 1815-1890. -- The age of Winfield Scott -- The founding of American Strategic Studies: Dennis Hart Mahan and Henry Wager Halleck -- Napoleonic strategy: R.E. Lee and the Confederacy -- A strategy of annihilation: U.S. Grant and the Union -- Annihilation of a people: the Indian fighters. -- Part three: Introduction to world power, 1890-1941. -- A strategy of sea power and empire: Stephen B. Luce and Alfred Thayer Mahan -- Strategy and the Great War of 1914-1918 -- A strategy of air power: Billy Mitchell -- A strategy for Pacific Ocean War: Naval strategists of the 1920s and 1930s. -- Part four: American strategy in global triumph, 1941-1945. -- The strategic tradition of A.T. Mahan: Strategists of the Pacific War -- The strategic tradition of U.S. Grant: Strategists of the European War -- Part five: American strategy in perplexity, 1945-. -- The atomic revolution -- Old strategies revisited: Douglas MacArthur and George C. Marshall in the Korean War -- Strategies of deterrence and of action: the strategy of intellectuals -- Strategies of action attempted: To the Vietnam War.