Fort Leavenworth, where Roger J. Spiller taught the army's finest for twenty-five years, is indeed a "school of war." There, among military professionals who had experienced war firsthand, Spiller honed his remarkable skills as an analyst and historian, scholar and teacher--skills that have made him one of the best-known and respected military historians of our day. This volume brings together Spiller's original and thought-provoking explorations of wars big and small and armies glorified and ignored. For each of these essays--whether on urban warfare or the Vietnam syndrome, battlefield psychology or the making of military history, and underrated vs. overrated generals--Spiller revisits his topic and his thinking, bringing fresh insight and a new context to an incomparable body of work. "In the School of War" further reveals the complex relationship between past and present in an understanding of the nature of war.