The Strategy as an art is the balancing of defined goals and available means by governments and states to cope with competition and conflicts with their opponents. Most studies on strategy focus on the major forms of strategic theory or on the great strategists, an approach that has its usefulness but usually overlooks the chaotic process through which governors and states define the frameworks of their actions. Understanding how this process was defined and flourished or failed in the past is crucial for those who plan strategy and is of vital interest to those who study it.

This collective study on the genesis of strategy has as its object precisely this process. In its seventeen chapters, cases from the entire spectrum of history are listed (from Pericles' Athens and the Ming China to Hitler's Germany, Israel, and post-war United States) and it is analyzed how exactly states and governments produced theoretical thought and applied strategy. Emphasis is given to the constants that define the phenomenon in the rapidly changing international framework.

Strategy is above all a continuous adaptation to changing conditions and successive circumstances, in a world dominated by the random, the uncertain, and the ambiguous. The most important factors that influence it are geography, historical experience, the nature of the regime, ideology, religion, mentality, economic power, and the way in which government and military institutions are organized. The sum of the essays in this book tends to show that the genesis of strategy was and is different from country to country, the product of "national character" or "strategic culture". In the overall assessment of the choice, an understanding of the forces that transform strategy over the centuries and will continue to do so in the present and future is attempted.