Meilinger has produced a remarkable work that challenges the received wisdom of Clausewitz's On War, offering another paradigm as to how to wage combat in our modern global environment. In his wide-ranging historical and analytical treatment, Meilinger argues for a new lower risk, lower cost method of employing American military force that capitalizes upon air power, special operations forces, and generating local indigenous support. Extremely well-written, Thoughts on War represents a major contribution to current military thought. For depth of historical research and operational understanding alone, it should be read by all military professionals.
~John A. English, author of Patton's Peers: The Forgotten Allied Field Army Commanders of the Western Front, 1944–45
Thoughts on War offers relevant and refined ideas about warfare. By challenging conventional military doctrine, revisiting classic principles of war, and reflecting on the American military experiences, Meilinger presents a new strategic and operational paradigm for how to fight and win tomorrow's wars with reduced risk and cost. This book will appeal not only to military professionals, but to scholars and civilian policymakers as well.
~Colonel John Andreas Olsen, Royal Norwegian Air Force, editor of Routledge Handbook of Air Power
The dozen essays in this volume address a broad range of subjects. Their individual quality affirms the breadth of Meilinger's scholarship and the depth of his perception. Yet each piece speaks as well to a common theme: movement away from the Clausewitzian paradigm of war as cataclysm towards a paradigm of indirect means and asymmetrical methods that lower costs and risks. Meilinger's demonstration of the perils and consequences of using new weapons to fight in old ways merits wide circulation and serious discussion.
~Dennis Showalter, recipient of the 2018 Pritzker Military Museum and Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing
For too long, military options offered to meet the needs of national security, and military strategies have been burdened by anachronistic tenets of classic military theorists who formed their theories in the pre-industrial age. Thoughts on War makes clear that warfare is fundamentally changing and a new paradigm of war has emerged. This book is a work of significance and a must-read by all involved with national security institutions—particularly the US military.
~Lt. Gen. David Deptula, USAF (Ret.), Dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies
Once in a generation comes a book on military affairs that demands instant attention—and this is one such. Erudite, provocative, and insightful, Phillip Meilinger's Thoughts on War ranges widely across the fields of military science and history, skewering cherished icons and showing how misinterpreting the past has led to a dangerous complacency that has afflicted military thinkers and commanders alike. This timely work demands discussion in every war college and should be on the shelf of every professional service member in America's joint forces.
~Richard P. Hallion, former Johnson Chair of Military History at the Army War College, former Historian of the US Air Force, and curator of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum
In this impressive tour de force on the art of war throughout the ages, Phil Meilinger, long an accomplished expert on airpower, offers a rich and informed survey of the entire sweep of organized combat from earliest historical times until now. Along the way, his documentation is exemplary for its breadth of coverage in exploiting the most pertinent past writings on strategy and warfare. His masterful closing chapter succinctly recaps his main findings, with special attention paid to the often decisive part played by airpower in American combat experience from World War II to our very different and more technology-dominant wars of the early 21st century. In all, Thoughts on War is the most all-embracing tutorial on its subject in a single volume that I've ever read, presenting in a non-tendentious and easily digestible way a virtual smorgasbord of instructive insights into all aspects of the military profession.
~Benjamin S. Lambeth, Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and author of The Unseen War: Allied Air Power and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein
Thoughts on War offers some interesting ideas for the military historian.
~The New York Military Affairs Symposium Review
