The wars since 9/11, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, have generated frustration and an increasing sense of failure in the West and the blame has been attributed to poor strategy. Strachan, one of the world’s leading military historians, reveals how these failures resulted from a fundamental misreading and misapplication of strategy itself. He argues that the wars since 2001 have not in reality been as ‘new’ as has been widely assumed and that we need to adopt a more historical approach to contemporary strategy in order to identify what is really changing in how we wage war.