"It is not a waste of time for those concerned with the military problems of today and tomorrow to improve their understanding of those of yesterday." The concluding sentence of Lord Carver's panoramic military history of the 20th Century is sound advice for national security professionals whose careers will shape the policies of the early decades of the next century. Methodology is critical to successfully pursuing a work of such scope, and Lord Carver's approach is quite sound, if somewhat tedious. The author seeks to paint a canvass composed of seven different, but overlapping, subscenes that equate to the histories of the armed forces of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States of America, Japan and China, from 1900 to 1986. The result is a work that requires no little patience on the part of the reader in order to wade through detailed and repetitious passages to glean the useful nuggets from the seven vignettes and, finally, to profit from viewing the effort as a single piece of historical analysis.