Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Well written, engaging. Highly recommended for anyone interested in military history. I felt that this book was well complemented with Keegan's "History of Warfare." Reading both together will give you an excellent introduction to the study of strategy and military history. "Strategy" helps to explain why/how some of the "History of Warfare" came to be, and the "History" provides more examples to flesh out the "Strategy." Strategy can seem slow at times, but it is a fascinating work.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointingly Simplified and Shallow
Review: When I first flipped through the book and read the reviews, it looked as if I was going to be getting into some serious in-depth and perceptive analysis. But the more I read of it, the more it started to sound like a high school thesis essay: Hart starts with a single, simple thesis-- that one should be indirect as opposed to direct-- and, evidently owing to his insecurity due to previous encounters with skeptics, feels obligated to devote the entire 500-odd page book to monotonously proving this point. He never goes into more depth into an area of history than the bare minimum he needs to make his argument, and his argument is always the same, showing precious little depth or insight. A concurrent disadvantage is that there is never enough info given on any historical incident that one would be able to draw any real independent conclusions, and therefore one is obliged to take his word for it.Basil basically thinks that he is amazingly smart and perceptive to realize that in war it is generally advantagious to be indirect-- to strike at weak points, take unexpected paths, try to imbalance your enemy etc. When I was twelve years old, having only gathered the barest of the bare snippits of military history in my head, and playing wargames (which I happened to not be very good at at the time), I figured this out pretty quickly. So basically I don't know about anyone else, but in my percpetion the Hart's thesis is a basic and obvious fact of strategy, and no one should need 500 pages to convince them of this. Added to the redundancy is a severe simplicity and shallowness in perception-- he analyzes every single historical incident solely on the basis of whether moves were direct or indirect-- there is no room for other factors, other figurings, other causes in his mind. He provides no room in his mind for the advantages of direct, orthodox strategies, and it apperently never occurs to him that there are usually good reasons (i.e. other than stupidity, which seems to be his opinion), why orthodox strategies are orthodox. It would be nice if we could always have an incompetent foe who would allow us to outflank him and be led by the nose, but this is not always possible-- war is the realm of the pragmatist, and the theories and ideas forwarded in this book are filthily romantic. In closing, I would say that Hart indeed forwards many good ideas, and gives many good examples, but these are in the muddle with such a shallow and careless mess that you would be better off simply reading REAL classics, such as Sun Tzu, and then studying military history in depth, and drawing your own conclusions based on these. I do not feel that B. H. Liddell Hart's book is truly worth it in any dimension.
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