The word ‘strategy’ is a relatively recent import into Western languages, first appearing in English in the early nineteenth century (though it was in use in French rather earlier) as a direct rendering of the Greek word meaning ‘generalship’. For much of that century it was usually applied to the battlefield, meaning something close to the modern ‘tactics’, and it was not often applied to war at sea. Julian Corbett at the end of the century was the first to publish on the strategy of naval warfare, and he deliberately avoided the term ‘naval strategy’ as being too limited and parochial. The proper strategy for a naval power, he maintained, was a ‘maritime strategy’, one embracing both services and all arms. Since Corbett's time, ‘strategy’ has come to be applied ever more widely. It has long been casually used to refer to almost any sort of systematic or wide-ranging planning, not necessarily having any connection with war. In universities today a ‘professor of strategy’ is more likely to be studying business or economics than warfare. Even within a military context, ‘strategy’ has long outgrown its original meaning. In its modern sense it is not so much the art of the general as the art of the General Staff. It covers the whole organisation and management of war.

John Hattendorf has long taught and studied strategy in the broadest of senses. His published work ranges as widely in time and space and treatment as any one scholar could go in a single lifetime (if not several), but the focus of his work has always been on the proper employment of armed forces, especially navies. As befits a Professor of History seated in that most intellectual of naval establishments the US Naval War College, he has taken a particular interest in the study and teaching of naval warfare, in the ways in which navies think, learn, and act on what they have learnt. Naturally and properly, his instrument and theirs has been history. The present slips constantly between our fingers; the future, which it would be so convenient to know, is regrettably inaccessible; only the past (recent or distant) yields a great bank of evidence with which to study navies and the conduct of war at sea.