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THE Indirect Approach was Basil Liddell Hart's opening bid for the supremes.1 It became his signature tune. Together with its close cousin, or evil twin, the British Way in Warfare (a parallel gestation) it signalled a new phase of his grapple with the conjectural art of butchering one's neighbour. Announced in 1927, first developed in book form in 1929 (mistitled The Decisive Wars of History), supplemented by a compendium flagging the British Way in 1932, it was four times further elaborated by its restless author, in 1941, 1946, 1954, and 1967. The work lacked a patron of the traditional kind-Machiavelli dedicated The Art of War to the Florentine nobleman Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi "because it is usual to address things of this nature to persons who are distinguished by their nobility, riches, great talent, and generosity"-but it prospered nonetheless. Sales, initially unremarkable, mushroomed gratifyingly with every new edition. The 1954 sold over 50,000, the 1967 over 100,000 in hardback in the United States alone.2 Used as a vade-mecum by various statespersons (Brandt and Nehru), numberless strategists (armchair and armipotent), and the militarily curious of many lands-a Chinese edition came out in 1994-it continues to live an active and inspirational life to this day, not least in the "manoeuvrist approach" of official British defence doctrine.3
Part prescription, part idealization, part excogitation, Strategy: The Indirect Approach (as it became) is as near as Liddell Hart ever got to a treatise, an essai general, of his own. Characteristically, this was achieved more by accumulation than by design. It was started too soon, distended too much, and finished or unfinished too late to produce a truly satisfying whole. Like Voltaire, Liddell Hart was the master of the brief form. Appropriately enough, the Indirect Approach is encompassed in a grab-bag of a book concealing a number of brief forms at once radical and fundamental, not merely provocative but also profound; material chiselled in a sculptor's way, as he once put it, a single chapter containing "more pure ore-little as that may be-than any whole volume that I have written." It was Clausewitz's ambition to write something "that would not be forgotten after two or three years, and that possibly might be picked up more than once by those who are...