The author provides an authoritative account of the problems the Prussian army faced in 1806, and after being disastrously defeated and their army practically destroyed, painstakingly rebuilt if to be able to take the field in 1813 against the French.
The author used impeccable sources for this study, including definitive German sources, including from the German General Staff, in constructing the narrative that explains both the defeat of 1806 and the resurgence in 1813.
"For any student of the Prussian army of the French Revolutinary and Napoleonic Wars this volume is a must. A worthy companion to Paret's excellent Clausewitz and the State and Yorck and the Era of Prussian reform, as well as Charles White's The Enlightened Soldier (on Scharnhorst) and Gordon Craig's The Politics of the Prussian Army, Shanahan's work is singularly noteworthy for effectively trumping the old Prussian legend of the Krumper.
The Krumper system was supposedly the method used by the Prussian reformers to build up a greatly reduced Prussian army following the debacle of 1806, where the Prussian army was completely defeated in three weeks by Napoleon and the Grande Armee, and the Prussian state was shattered. What Shanahan proves, using Prussian sources and archival material, is that the Krumper system was a failure. Reduced to 42,000 men by treaty in 1808, the Prussian fielded only 65,000 in March 1813 at the beginning of the so-called War of National Liberation against the French.
Further, Shanahan gives an excellent picture of the Prussian army as a whole from 1786, the year of Frederick the Great's death, until 1813, covering the defeats of 1806 and the Prussian army's deficiencies in leadership, training, tactics, organization, and administration that led to the disaster.
This volume is highly recommended and remains as a standard text, along with Paret's, White's, and Craig's studies, against the revisionist viewpoints on the reasons for the Prussian failures in 1806 that are the result's of 'new scholarship' from Prussian apologists."
Amazon.com: Prussian Military Reforms, 1786-1813: 9780404515201: Shanahan, William O.: Books
There are library copies around in universities, but seems a digital copy hasn't been done.
There is an interesting review of this book from 1947 on JSTOR: Stefan T. Possony
The Review of Politics, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Apr., 1947), pp. 268-271 (4 pages), which flags up the current issues related to this book. Fundamentally, it is a critique of decisions made by civilians at Versailles in 1919, which the author alleges, enabled the Germans to create the Wehrmacht in the 1930s. The author claims the focus was on the Krumper system, forgetting that allowing a professional army cadre to remain from 1919 was the key to the rapid expansion of the Wehrmacht.
The Krumper supplied 32000 or 4/5 of the official Prussian army after 1806, so his claim that it was not relevant is debateable. However, the review is most interesting in flagging up how things moved in a very similar way in Austria and Prussia during the 1800s. There was plenty of correspondence between army officers, but how much of it was just similar thinking and how much was adopting the other's ideas would require a lot of research. Shanahan makes a fair point that the Scharnhorst/Gneisenau reforms were more evolutionary than revolutionary, which is reflected in the cross-fertilisation with Austria.
Austria led the way on making the Chief of Staff the key figure in leading the staff, which was adopted and developed by Prussia. financial constraints meant that many Austrian conscripts were brought in and trained for a few weeks in the 1801-5 period, before being Beurlaubte (sent home on furlough), which is probably the origin of both the Krumper system and the proposed 1807 Austrian reserve battalions. The Austrian 1769 regs, like the French 1791, were very Prussian and Frederick the Great had developed conscription systems, which led to the Landwehrs of the later wars.
The point about cadres is illuminating. Austria's leadership was hardly in action between 1763 and 1788. but was decimated in the 1790s. This influx of younger replacements and the commissioning of NCOs to officer the Landwehr in 1809, followed by the conscription of troops to form the Landwehr provided the basis of Austria's recovery in 1813. Prussia saw these effects later after 1806, but on a similar way.
Originally written in 1945, there must be question marks over "The author used impeccable sources for this study, including definitive German sources, including from the German General Staff, in constructing the narrative that explains both the defeat of 1806 and the resurgence in 1813." Hittle's discredited nonsense on staffs dates from 1944.
The Google Books ref adds a note from the publisher: "Interprets German militarism after Napoleon's failure to prevent Prussia's military recovery after the defeat of Jena."
If only they started reprinting it