This is rather like asking MacDonalds to incorporate awareness of the Italian "slow food" movement into its production process, though in fact it is something one imagines the US military do anyway with simulacra of Afghan compounds in Louisiana clearings. To this, Black somewhat awkwardly attaches his plea for more teaching of military history, which he feels is being excluded by Ivy League universities, even though the public can never get enough of it. A detached observer might argue that knowing all about the history of the Northern Ireland conflict has been less than helpful to the British Army's conduct of operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, at least from the perspective of the Americans who have had to clean up our mess.

The same author's War: A Short History is a much more successful enterprise in which he ranges effortlessly from about 35,000 BC to the present in under 200 pages. He is sceptical, throughout, about the terms and trends other academics get excited about — notably the putative early modern military "revolution" — and is impressively learned about warfare in 17th and 18th century China. Black feels that military history "often lacks intellectual sophistication". His own brief account of war through the ages is therefore an elegantly written and salutary corrective.