Alexander the Great: Lessons in Strategy (review)

Books about Alexander the Great tend to belong to one of two camps. The Macedonian camp began with the memoirs of Alexander’s marshals and continues with analytical works that compare Alexander to generals from the Napoleonic era through World War II. The other camp, which can (alas) be called the Greek one, began with biographies by Greek intellectuals in Alexander’s court and continues with scholarship that envisions Alexander as a Western adventurer who came to grief in Afghanistan and India. In Alexander the Great: Lessons in Strategy, David J. Lonsdale (hereafter L.) has written an analytical work that views Alexander in a contemporary light, not that of World War II, and that regards his Central Asian campaigns favorably.

L., who is a lecturer on strategic studies at the University of Hull, begins with a chapter that summarizes recent strategic thinking: along with Clausewitz, cited for the notion of an army’s “center of gravity,” Michael Howard and Colin Gray figure here because of their interest in social and political factors, as does Edward Luttwak because of his description of “disharmony” among aspects of strategy. The next chapter, on ancient Greek war, is derivative, and may be skipped in favor of chapters three through five. In considering “Grand Strategy” (ch. 3), L. observes that defeating the Persians was only the first act in a drama that Alexander knew would change politics. L. also observes that the Persian army had not one, but several centers of gravity, among them the person of King Darius. In “Military Operations” (ch. 4) and “The Use of Force” (ch. 5), L. touches on two familiar topics, Alexander’s combined operations and battlefield leadership, but he also gives close attention to the topography and culture of the Near East and the Balkans. L.’s Alexander used local knowledge to improve his counterinsurgency operations against the rebels and independent tribes of these regions. Citing the British writer Charles Callwell, who said, “Prestige is everything in this kind of warfare,” L. shows that Alexander knew how to adapt his fundamentally Greek army to alien conditions.

L. also implies that Alexander’s concern for his prestige reflects a different concept of political legitimacy than the one found in modern war. For Alexander, prestige was the source of legitimacy. In modern war, political popularity is the source of legitimacy, and so popularity, not prestige, is the desideratum. Disturbed by this change, L. quotes Clausewitz’s warning, “do not blunt your sword in the name of humanity.” These words capture a facet of Alexander. Willing to sheathe his sword, he was never willing to blunt it.

To go farther in this direction, L. would have had to recast his sixth and last chapter, which is only a summary, and considered the social as well as political character of ancient war. Such an approach would have made this valuable book even more so. But within the limits of a Clausewitzian concept of war as politics, L. has sketched an Alexander of more than historical interest. In the decades of Near Eastern warfare that now loom, Western armies should not forget the example of the small, professional force that Alexander led so successfully against enemies easier to rout than to defeat.