// WAR LIBRARY
The Reading List.
Military history, strategic doctrine, and competitive theory. 25 years of study on how to win.
Lisa See — applied to strategy
“Read a thousand books, and your words will flow like a river. Read a thousand battles, and your decisions will flow like doctrine.”
Sun Tzu
The Art of War
The oldest and most misquoted strategic text. Most people know the quotes. Few people have applied the principles under pressure. 'Know your enemy, know yourself' is a pre-game checklist, not a fortune cookie. I run through it before major GT events.
Carl von Clausewitz
On War
The most honest book about war ever written. Clausewitz didn't dress it up — war is governed by friction, chance, and the fog of incomplete information. Every Warhammer round is a Clausewitzian exercise: your plan was perfect until the dice happened.
Robert Coram
Boyd
The biography of John Boyd, who invented the OODA Loop by refusing to stop thinking. Boyd's insight — that getting inside your opponent's decision cycle beats superior resources — is the foundation of how I approach tournament play. Faster loop wins.
B.H. Liddell Hart
Strategy
The definitive case for the indirect approach. Frontal assault is expensive. Finding the unexpected angle is not just clever — it's strategically efficient. Every Eldar list I've built is a Liddell Hart list.
Erwin Rommel
Infantry Attacks
First-person accounts from a company commander in WWI. The lesson isn't Rommel's genius — it's the granular reality of small-unit decisions under pressure. This is where I learned that execution discipline at the small scale wins before the big strategy even matters.
John Keegan
The Face of Battle
What combat actually feels like for the soldier in it, not the general directing it. Keegan changed how I think about the human element in strategy. In Warhammer, I think about what each squad is being asked to survive. It sharpens target priority.
Philip Tetlock
Superforecasting
The scientific case that probabilistic thinking can be trained and improved. Competitive gaming produces thousands of decision points — Superforecasting is the framework for being honest about what you predicted vs. what happened. I track my deployment predictions.
Nassim Taleb
Antifragile
The follow-up to Black Swan. Don't build for robustness — build for systems that improve under stress. My Astra Militarum lists are designed to be antifragile: they function under fire because redundancy is built into the doctrine, not bolted on.
Various
The Art of the Campaign
A collection of historical campaign analyses covering Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon. Each campaign is a case study in how strategic vision either survived or failed contact with operational reality. Required reading for any grand strategy player.
Games Workshop
Warhammer 40K Core Rules
Most players treat this as a reference. I read it like a legal document — looking for precedents, edge cases, and interaction chains that others miss. Tournament edges come from the same rules everyone has but fewer people have actually read.