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xix Set Introduction War is a complicated business. Due to the importance that civilized humans have given to it since the very beginning, it simply cannot be taken lightly. For this rea- son alone the search for the multifaceted answer of how to achieve victory in war has consumed the mental efforts of kings, soldiers, and wise men for millennia. The destructive physical nature of war makes its practice something that demands a civilization’s energies and best thinking. When societies have seen war as some- thing to be taken lightly, they have paid for it with military failure. For this reason to unearth the core of any historical period, to understand a society’s politics, eco- nomics, and especially its social structure and mores, one must study how a soci- ety conducts and thinks about war. For how war is conducted is inseparable from how a society thinks about it. To ignore the mental process that is assigned by a culture for the conduct of war is to just see the movement of armies or fleets in a vacuum, obscuring understanding. The student of history cannot, therefore, avoid the study of conflict and those that gave its conduct direction. To understand war we must understand the military thinker, the Philosophers of War. What then qualifies someone as a “philosopher” in the art of war? The general definition often given for that word is of someone that seeks wisdom and is an ex- pounder of a theory or specific area of experience. This being the case the writers and practitioners of war included in this work fit neatly. All of them had, from the course of experience in war, or through the study of it, come to develop theories they felt of merit. In some cases these theories never made it to paper, but their practice was likely dynamic and brought about change. This then is the philosophy part that these writers looked to create a systematic way to get at knowledge about the conduct of war, specific or general. It is for this reason too that many famous military commanders do not warrant inclusion. The simple practice of war, how- ever successful, is not to be equated with the actual study of war. For this reason, great generals such as George Washington or Alexander the Great, to name but two, are not included. This work, the Philosophers of War, is a collection of what might be called pro- fessional or intellectual biographies of these individuals that had some originality