"The origins of this book lie in the vision, advice, and acumen of Peter Richards, who died of cancer in 2009, aged fifty-eight. Peter invited me to edit a volume on warfare in a series of Illustrated Histories that he was developing for Cambridge University Press, and in 1993 he attended (and funded) a meeting of the contributors at which we thrashed out the overall framework of the volume and the common denominators for our chapters. Subsequently, Stuart McCready put together the images and designed the spreads. The result was The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare: The Triumph of the West, first published in 1995. A decade later, Eric Crahan of Cambridge University Press proposed and oversaw a new edition that extended the original text, which ended with the Gulf War of 1991. It appeared in 2009. Karen Anderson, Rachel Blaifeder, Nicola Chapman, and Deborah Gershenowitz have co-ordinated production of the present volume, which updates the previous version and takes the story down to March 2019. The contributors and I are very grateful to all of them for their enthusiasm, expertise, and hard work"--