Most writing about strategy - the balancing of ends and means by rulers and states in conflict with their adversaries - has focused on individual strategic theorists or great military leaders. That approach has its uses, but it normally ignores the messy process through which rulers and states have actually framed strategy.

Understanding how that process has worked or failed to work in the past is nevertheless of vital practical importance to strategists, and of the greatest interest to students of strategy and statecraft.

The Making of Strategy is about the strategic process. It consists of seventeen case studies that range from fifth-century B.C. Athens and Ming China to Hitler's Germany, Israel, and the post-1945 United States. The studies analyze, within a common interpretive framework, precisely how rulers and states have made strategy. The introduction emphasizes the constants in the rapidly shifting world of the strategist.

The conclusion tries to understand the forces that have driven the transformation of strategy since 400 B.C. and seem likely to continue to transform it in the future.