Command in War is an extremely ambitious work of military history, a study of command over millennia and six major types of war, using case studies from antiquity, Napoleon's battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian-Austrian War, World War I, Israeli battles in 1967 and 1973, and Vietnam, to examine the organization, processes, and technologies of command.

The theory is extremely robust, if somewhat idiosyncratic and limited in scope. Van Creveld is interesting in how information is taken in by commanders and used to manage uncertainty, so that orders may be given to forces to destroy the enemy. The first and last chapters are particularly well-constructed, containing Van Creveld's general theories on the best organization of an armed force: tactically flexible, self-sufficient units, with just enough formal structure to manage their logistical needs, and loosely controlled with robust informal back-channels. All the technique and technology of modern command, control, and communications is of little help.

The case studies are more uneven in quality. The sections on ancient warfare and Napoleon are strongest. I have come to agree with Van Creveld that strategy before Napoleon was non-existent. The best that a commander could do was guess to place himself at the decisive point of a battle and bull through with sheer physical force. The limitations of horse couriers made actual control of a campaign from a central point impossible. The staff, such as it was, would consist of the commander's household and a Quartermaster General in charge of scouting, selecting where to camp, the baggage train, and all the millions of details that made up the army. Napoleon's staff was still bound to him personally (though by charisma rather than feudal obligation), but Napoleon standardized some procedures of strategic intelligence and was the first to successfully direct multiple independent formations towards a single strategic end, although even the master of warfare ("the most competent man who ever lived" by Van Creveld's estimation) forgot to give orders to a third of his forces at a crucial battle and essentially blundered into the enemy. Likewise, the Prussian General Staff was far less powerful and formalistic than common history suggests--more informal sinews that occasionally managed to bring divided corps together than autocratic masters of battle.

This book gives a good sense of the imaginative and elegant letters and brave cavalrymen that characterized Napoleon's campaigns, and the rising tide of paperwork and schedules that entirely failed to manage the chaos of trench warfare. Where it is weakest is in the modern sections. Radio-based mobile warfare is clearly new in its relative independence from fixed lines of communication and physical space, yet the treatment of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is reduced to incoherence and the psychology of the various Israeli commanders, when it could've been the most robust part of the book. Van Creveld has a better perspective on the Vietnam War, where colonels in helicopter turned the 'directed telescope of command' into a paralyzing instrument of over-control, and statistical methods directed the army into doing what could be measured rather than what mattered. The heart of modern warfare; fast-moving combined arms operations linked through the 'hot medium' of voice radio, is sadly absent from the book.

For what it's worth, the nods towards the visible future of command, via technologies like Blue Force Tracker and streaming video via drone, seem to have turned out to be mostly right, which is an worthy bit of foresight. The conclusion, that the problems of command are intractable, that centralization is as harmful to military operations as chaos, and that the burden of technology may be greater than the benefits, are likely eternal truths.