WHAT HAS BEEN CALLED the “Clausewitz Renaissance” in U.S. American and British military studies is the result of Michael Howard and Peter Paret's new translation of Clausewitz's book On War which appeared at a critical date in 1976, just one year after the last U.S. soldier had been evacuated from Saigon. Bernard Brodie, the eminent theorist of nuclear deterrence, had not only contributed a short introductory note on “The Continuing Relevance of On War” (50–64) but also a long commentary entitled “A Guide to the Reading of On War” (773–853), which was placed at the end of the book. Six years later, in 1982, the U.S. Army infantry colonel Harry G. Summers quoted Brodie's conclusion: “Clausewitz is probably as pertinent to our times as most of the literature specifically written about nuclear war,” and called his book On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War, with obvious nods to both the content and the title of the Prussian officer's work On War.

Summers had served as a squad leader in the Korean War, as a battalion and corps operations officer in the Vietnam War, and on the negotiation team for the United States at the end of that same war before becoming an instructor and distinguished fellow at the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.