Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed

An innovative collection of essays about the strategic reasons for Confederate defeat, edited by Christian Keller and written entirely by U.S. Army professors and students. Topics include military and political leadership, intelligence failures, economic and diplomatic issues, and the significance of the Trans-Mississippi Theater.

Southern Strategies is the first-ever analysis of Confederate defeat using the lenses of classical strategic and leadership theory. The contributors bring over one hundred years of experience in the field at the junior and senior levels of military leadership and over forty years of teaching in professional military education. Well-aware that the nature of war is immutable and unchanging, they combine their firsthand experience of this truth with solid scholarship to offer new theoretical and historical perspectives about why the South failed in its bid for independence.

Southern Strategies confirms the reality that the outcome of the American Civil War cannot be boiled down to one or two simple reasons. It offers fresh and theoretically novel interpretations at the strategic level that open new doors for future research and will increase public interest in the big questions surrounding Confederate defeat.