ABSTRACT
No one reads Antoine-Henri Jomini to find answers to current military questions anymore, as many apparently do with his contemporary Clausewitz. But, according to John Shy, it is Jomini who deserves the ‘dubious title of founder of modern strategy’, due to his methodological isolation of war from its political and social context, and, as a result, ‘turning warfare into a huge game of chess’. 1 Jomini instigated the modern way to theorise about war:
He began, not indeed the study of war, but the characteristically modern, systematic study of the subject in the form it has retained ever since…. His Précis probably did more than any simple book to fix the great subdivisions of modern military science for good and all and to give them common currency. 2
