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Fascist and Liberal Visions of War: Fuller, Liddell Hart, Douhet, and Other Modernists. By Azar Gat. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-19-820715-8. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. viii, 334. $85.00.
This is a thoroughly researched, felicitously composed, but at times curiously argued work that nevertheless makes a very important point and deserves close attention from students of military thought. The author is well known to military historians for his two preceding books that examine the evolution of European military theory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as for several articles on various aspects of Liddell Hart's work over the past several years that have contributed positively to our understanding of the great theorist. This book, which extends the earlier studies into the twentieth century, contains two very focused and distinct arguments.
Gat's initial brief is to demonstrate an affinity, which he later refers to as an enthusiasm, of fascist societies, theorists, and other writers with fascist tendencies for machine-age warfare, a phenomenon that he restricts to combat involving tanks and airplanes. To accomplish this, he leads with his best cases: J. F: C. Fuller on armored warfare, Giulio Douhet on aerial warfare, and the "radical...