GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
FIRST, WHAT is strategy? Where does it fit in the ensemble of military studies? What preliminary questions must be resolved so as to have an idea of what one is talking about?
The intellectual or physical actions of war are generally considered to belong to the realm either of strategy or tactics. It remains to establish the essential difference between the two. Etymology provides us with a useful approximation of the distinction. “Strategy” comes from the Greek word meaning “a military expedition, a campaign,” “tactics” from a Greek adjective meaning “ordered, regular.”2 Strategy treats the totality of war, embracing war as a whole and, especially, its directing principles. Tactics evokes the idea of clearly defined, regular movements that occur (if at all) only on the battlefield. Tactics is the world of detail; it governs combat, itself a detail of the greatest importance. Earlier authors, happily, offer clear and vivid reinforcement for this distinction.
At the end of the eighteenth century, an active period of military thought that heralded the grand transformations to come, Guibert wrote: “grand tactics is properly the science of the generals in chief, because it is the compilation of all military knowledge.”3 In Guibert’s day, the term “grand tactics” was commonly used for what we today call strategy. Napoleon never used the word “strategy,” preferring “grand tactics” or, his particular favorite, “the higher parts of war.” For Archduke Charles, “Strategy is the science of war. It sketches plans, it includes and determines the course of military enterprise; it is, properly speaking, the science of the generals in chief.”4 Marshal Marmont thought that strategy was “the part of the art of war that applies to the overall movement of armies.”5
The commentators on the wars of the Revolution and the Empire better expressed the distinction between strategy and tactics. “There exist,” said Clausewitz, “two absolutely distinct activities: tactics and strategy. The first orders and directs the action of combats while the second relates the combats to one another in order to arrive at the objects of the war.” This led the creator of modern military theory to two compressed and very expressive definitions: “strategy is the employment of battle for the object of the war; tactics the employment of troops in battle.”6 Jomini did not veer far from Clausewitz in noting that strategy encompasses everything that happens in the theater of war while tactics concerns fighting on the battlefield. Thiers,7 a layman whose intimate experience of the military events of his era makes him worth consulting, said that “strategy ought to conceive of the plan of campaign, embrace the whole theatre of the war with a single coup d’oeil, trace the lines of operations, and direct the mass against the decisive points.” Field Marshal von Moltke, whose functions in the course of the wars of the nineteenth century called upon him to operate exclusively in the strategic domain, expressed his concept in these terms: “Strategy indicates the best way to conduct battle; it dictates where and when one ought to fight. Tactics teaches how to make use of the different arms in combat; it says how one ought to fight.”8
More contemporary authors have maintained this distinction. Captain Gilbert9 addresses the problem in his Essais de critique militaire from the point of view of concentration and calls strategy “the art of moving forces in the theater of operations in order to concentrate them on the battlefield while tactics is the art of concentrating forces at the decisive point on the battlefield itself.” Von der Goltz10 holds an analogous view: “One defines strategy as the theory according to which one conducts and directs armies, tactics as how one conducts and directs troops.”
Bernhardi11 gives the following complete and satisfying formula: “Strategy is the art of leading troops to combat in the decisive direction and in the most favorable conditions.” For General Mordacq, strategy is the art of directing armies in the theater of war and tactics the art of conducting a unit on the ground.12 Captain de Vaisseau Darrieus extends this concept to naval war. “Strategy,” he says, “evokes the idea of preparation for which the end is battle, and tactics the execution of battle.”13 Let us finally note that Admiral Mahan14 placed the separation between strategy and tactics at the point and the moment when the opposing forces enter into combat.
These authors all agree on a single, generally accepted approach to defining strategy and distinguishing it from tactics, but dissidents exist. For example, General Bonnal’s15 lectures at the French army’s Ecole de Guerre in 1892–1893, while purporting to sum up the preceding definitions, actually offered the altogether new thesis that “strategy is the art of conception, tactics the science of execution.” Italian authors like Bonamico,16 General Marselli,17 Sechi,18 and Corticelli19 have established a similar distinction. For Sechi, “The conduct of maritime war belongs to maritime strategy, the execution of strategic conceptions falls into the realm of logistics when one is not in the presence of the enemy and of tactics when cannons thunder. . . . Thus we can say that strategy is the mind that thinks, logistics and tactics the arms that act.”20 Recently, Captain Laurent revived this idea. For him, “One means by strategy everything that addresses the conception and general conduct of operations. One means by tactics everything involved in execution.”21 Laurent’s approach has the important and controversial consequence that “everyone, at every level of the hierarchy, is at the same time commander and subordinate. In planning an operation, one is a chief; in carrying one out, a subordinate.”22 Marselli agrees. “Strategy,” he writes, “is not a princess marriageable only to a single commander-in-chief, but every soldier commanding a platoon applies, or ought to apply, strategy appropriate to the operation to be accomplished.”
. . . I cannot accept this novel thesis that strategy and tactics should be seen respectively as conception and execution. By this definition, a commander is acting strategically when he conceives of an operation, but since his orders must also prescribe the dispositions for the execution of these orders, he is performing tactically at the same time. Similarly, the subordinate who acts tactically in executing orders must also act strategically in conceiving of their execution. Thus the definition leads in practice to the unworkable thesis that everyone, at every level of command, is simultaneously strategist and tactician. In envisaging dispositions for executing his plan, the supreme commander does tactics; in making a fire plan to suit a particular case, a vessel’s gunnery officer thinks strategically. The idea is an original one. Strategy is everywhere, at every level. It cannot be isolated as governing certain particular parts but is intermingled in the totality of war itself. There are no longer strategic operations since all military activity qualifies.23
A geometric diagram may help to depict the differences between the two schools of thought and show how the revisionists do retain a certain sort of distinction between strategy and tactics. Drawing the various levels of command on a vertical scale, one sees that the first set of writers place strategy on the higher rungs and tactics on the lower. Between strategy and tactics they place a horizontal separation. Within each of these two fields—strategic and tactical—operations retain their unity; conception and execution are never separated from one another.
The revisionists would bisect all of the levels of command with a vertical line constituting the frontier between strategy and tactics. Strategy, or conception, is on the left; tactics, or execution, lies to the right. The result is that, for any given operation undertaken by an echelon of command, the conception remains separated from the execution. Conception is deprived of its base, of its substance, of the shape that it assumes in execution. The whole left side, strategy or conception, is nothing but a collection of theoretical principles, an accumulation of abstract precepts—nebulous, obviously easy to formulate, but disconnected from the real, from the concrete, from everything that would give them force and strength.
I cannot therefore place myself among the proponents of this notion of vertical separation between strategy and tactics. They have, I think, wrongly charged the school that limits strategy making to the higher echelons with establishing a hierarchy to the disadvantage of tactics. Not at all. There is no more sense of superiority between strategy and tactics than between doctor and financier, architect and lawyer, industrialist and functionary. All operate in equally important areas. Without good strategy, the best tactics bring a feeble return; without tactical superiority, the best strategy fails.
I, more than anyone, have a horror of Byzantine arguments over words, of all the petty distinctions of the sterile scholasticism of the Middle Ages, of the pedantry of Moliere’s doctors. I have repeated the arguments solely to illuminate the premises of the subject and to define the object of the speculations that follow, and I hasten to end this introduction with a firm conclusion.
I remain, for my part, faithful to the system of the “horizontal separation,” that is, to the tradition accepted by the majority of the writers we have cited. In effect, there is already a sort of customary law, to oppose which is to upset the whole system without any compensatory benefit. . . . For me, strategy is nothing other than the general conduct of operations, the supreme art of leaders at a certain level in the hierarchy and of the general staff that serves them. Strategy prepares the battles, striving to bring them about under the best of conditions and to make them bring about the best results. Strategy links the battles together, controlling and coordinating them in accordance with the general inspiration of the campaign while reacting also to events. Guiding tactics, strategy gives it its head at the proper time. Strategy before and after battle, tactics during battle—from the beginning to the end of the clash of arms—that is the formula to which I rally.
The frontiers of strategy are not, of course, as well defined as the theory implies. . . . On the one hand, as we will see later, strategy has intimate, undissolvable links with policy. Some operations are so much half strategic and half political that they exist in a neutral region in which these two forms of activity cannot be disentangled. . . .24
Strategy’s neighbor at the other extreme is tactics, and the horizontal line that we have drawn between the two is only a symbol and cannot be a rigid barrier. Theoretically, tactics ought to begin only at the firing of the first cannon or torpedo, but one can hardly subtract from tactics all of the movements preliminary to battle on the pretext that they still belong to strategy. The moment of “contact” defined by Admiral Mahan as the threshold of the tactical realm is rather that after which close proximity renders an encounter inevitable. Also logically abandoned to the sphere of tactics are such operations as scouting and the navigation of naval forces which, by strict consideration of their distance from the enemy, ought to belong to strategy. Here again, there is a neutral zone disputed between strategy and tactics and constituting a territory of meeting and union rather than an isolating wall. Leaders of intermediate rank can alternate indifferently between tactical and strategic action.
In sum, strategy is like the solar spectrum. It has an infrared, which is the realm of policy, and an ultra-violet, that of tactics. And just as the bands of the spectrum merge by invisible gradations, strategy also flows gradually into policy and into tactics. Policy, strategy, and tactics form an ensemble, a whole, rather than a triptych of clearly separated parts.
Characteristics of modern naval war have shifted the boundary between strategy and tactics to the benefit of the latter and thereby accentuated the imprecision of the earlier distinction.25 In an earlier day, before the appearance of submarines and aircraft, tactics was limited to areas where it was possible to encounter the enemy on the surface. Each belligerent tended to group his forces together, and the effect of this concentration on both sides was to reduce the possibility of their meeting and, in consequence, the number of zones of contact. Between these tactical arenas, islands speckling the liquid expanse touched by the war, were vast “blank spots” where no naval action took place and strategy held sway.
Belligerents could hardly do otherwise than concentrate their forces since to disperse them to cover the entire sea would result in certain destruction. Moreover, with the appearance of engines independent of the wind, considerations of range of action and resupply have intervened to circumscribe each side’s ability to manifest his power.
This aspect of former naval warfare at first seems to affect only the fleets26 and not to apply to forces employed to attack communications. Privateers’ actions rested on different principles, manifested in their dispersal and in the extent of their enterprises. Thus, the enemy threatened by commerce war could protect his merchant ships only by the ordinarily ineffectual methods of free navigation and patrolling routes or focal regions, and the number of points of contact was very great. But resorting to escorted convoys produced a situation analogous to that of the fleets. The raiders had then either to resign themselves to individual destruction or to unite in their turn into groups to attack and to protect themselves, whereby the vast and fluid expanse of the tactical field was again compressed into a few separate points. . . .
Dispersed operations do not, however, trouble the submarines. They do not fear isolation and can be left to themselves. Invisibility and the ability to make a safe retreat into the depths permits the submarine to contemplate with equanimity the solo counteroffensive that is the death warrant of the isolated surface vessel. Less hampered than surface ships by supply problems, the submarine can undertake very long cruises and has a noticeably increased field of operations.27
These two properties make available to the submarine forms and spheres of action forbidden to surface vessels. The submarine will almost always fight as a single cavalier.28 Though it is no more able than any other ship to cover the entire sea, it will, however, do so in the mind of the enemy, in whose imagination the submarine’s invisibility confers the gift of omnipresence. Fear therefore leads the enemy to take constant antisubmarine measures, just as if there were one to be found in every mile of sea. . . .
The influence of aviation is less marked but nonetheless real. Though visible, airplanes are extremely mobile and capable of rapid intervention in a situation. In defending against other airplanes, they are handicapped by the length of time necessary to leave the ground and gain the necessary altitude. Nor can defensive air units remain aloft forever. An aerial attack always has a good chance of passing through the defensive mesh. These are the inherent particularities of the air arm. The airplane’s rapidity of action parallels the submarine’s ability to dive and permits, although to a lesser degree, individual operations that are impossible for isolated surface ships.
Aviation, moreover, works in an entirely new sphere of action. Since it is able to attack points situated in the interior of the country (arsenals, airfields, important communications, urban centers, etc.) or to bomb or torpedo a fleet placed in a fortified base and protected against action by surface or submarine vessels, its presence greatly expands the theater of the war beyond the coasts. It can, moreover, be employed by either side, so both attacker and defender must concern themselves with it. In sum, the new tools of war have increased the area of the principal act of war—combat—and therefore the relative weight of tactics.
Accompanying the transformation of space is another transformation relating to time. When only surface fleets existed, their geographical separation created a parallel temporal separation between periods of combat. One did not meet the enemy every morning. Between two engagements there were often long delays for redeployment. By preventing surprise, reconnaissance gave fleets a sense of security and eliminated pressure for precipitate action. Nothing sudden was to be expected during these intervals of tactical ceasefire and mental rest. . . .
All this has changed. The submarine has the capacity for continuous action, at least where it matters, which is in the opponent’s mind. The enemy can be expected to appear anywhere and at any time, and such is the danger from submarines that one must react instantly to any hint of their presence. Aviation presents the same problem, though less intensely because the defender has somewhat more time to react. Still, within the range of operations of enemy aircraft, the periods of complete rest at anchor can be nothing but a distant memory. The tension of action is never releaxed completely. . . .
Combat has thus been extended in time, as well as in space. The line of demarcation between strategy and tactics, fluid enough in the past, moves discernibly to the advantage of the latter. . . . Those who execute strategy at sea will always experience tactical problems and must be ready to react at this level. Only the highest military leaders, theater commanders, for example, remain wholly in the strategic domain. . . .29
Moving to another order of ideas, one finds that some authors have described strategy in ways that trespass not only on the realm of tactics but also beyond the events of war itself. Admiral Mahan’s broad definition—“Naval strategy has as its goal to create, to favor, and to increase the maritime power of a nation in peacetime as well as in war,”30—introduces a “peacetime strategy,” composed of all measures serving to augment naval force. These measures undeniably are strategic, for they have the effect, in Bernhardi’s expression, of leading to battle under the most favorable conditions. The most important element of peacetime naval strategy is the acquisition, creation, development, and organization of naval bases. Great Britain’s occupation for naval purposes of Cyprus, Egypt, Aden, Weï-Haï-Weï, and so many other places illustrates the point admirably. Similarly, the preparation of Rosyth before the 1914 war and the creation of Singapore thereafter were essentially strategic acts. France with Bizerte, Germany with Jiao-Tcheou, the United States with the Hawaiian Islands, have proceeded no differently.
The strong roots in the American navy of this concept implanted by Admiral Mahan are evident from a lecture by Admiral Schofield31 to the press during the American maneuvers of 1924. Like Mahan, Schofield naturally included naval bases and new construction in peacetime strategy, but he offered a new and striking ingredient—international conferences—that he doubtless saw as a means of using treaties to clip the wings of annoying rivals—totally disarming those unable to defend themselves around a green table. The Washington Conference in 1922 taught us, and it would be unforgivable to forget, that disarmament and other conferences can be strategic moves on the part of our rivals or adversaries.32
Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon33 distinguishes the strategy of peace, which prepares for war, from wartime strategy, which conducts it.34 In The Art of Naval Warfare,35 British Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge36 expands at length on what he also calls the “strategy of peace.” He places under that rubric a very large and varied set of measures including the simplification of administration, the establishment of naval programs and the characteristics of ships, the constitution of supplies and stores, the establishment of naval bases, the functioning of services, training of personnel, preparation of plans of operations, and organization of the intelligence and mobilization services. Clearly, every preparation for war is included. “The action of strategy never stops,” says Bridge, and he shows its effect in the considerable development of United States naval power, which has not participated in a naval war since that of the Secession.37 Properly speaking, preparations of this sort constitute naval policy, and their realm borders that of policy as a whole; this is the “infrared” of strategy.
To achieve its ends, strategy calls upon two elements—principles upon which to base its conceptions and methods for their execution.38 The principles of strategy form a collection of evident truths derived from the experience of the past and from relations of cause and effect that one observes in the manifestations of military activity across the ages. These principles are independent of the instruments of action and, consequently, of the two variables, time and milieu, of which those instruments are a function. They form a permanent body of doctrine, or as close to such as anything in human affairs can be. Few in number and easily surveyed, the principles are limited to some major rules of action and common-sense guidelines.
The methods are the means, the fundamentals of employment, the technical factors that one utilizes to apply the principles. Their study is of special interest because, without methods of execution, the principle remains in a philosophical state—an abstract word, a pure affirmation without tangible form, in sum, a dead thing. The crux of military problems lies in the use of appropriate methods to achieve a satisfactory application of the principles to each particular case. The method is so strictly governed by material things that combinations seemingly inferior from the point of view of principle, theory, and art prove necessary, given the technical conditions and one’s circumstances. The conception must suit the realities. “As real circumstances enter the picture, the conception increasingly loses its artistic elements; above all, the progress of armaments compresses the range of conception. . . . Conception exists only in relation to execution.”39 It is because of this troublesome difficulty that many writers on strategy say nothing about methods of execution and instead remaining safely encamped in a sententious enunciation of principles.40
Strategic methods obviously depend on tools and, consequently, on the times and the milieu. The importance of the latter ought to be kept constantly in mind by those who try to transpose to naval warfare certain modes of conducting land war. That they depend on the times should lead us to adopt for our own use the systems that have proved useful in the past only after intense scrutiny.41 We are in an essentially changing realm. Certainly, strategic methods are less contingent on changes in armament than are tactical methods. Though functions of time, they have small coefficients.42 Nonetheless, one must not forget that they do change.
Strategy as a whole, as an ensemble of principles and methods, varies because the latter component is not constant. Those who defended the once-favored dogma of the immutability of strategy apparently considered only one aspect of the question and failed to pass beyond the realm of principle. Of course, faith in this semi-permanence is such a soft cushion, it so well serves the natural human taste for minimizing effort, that one can hardly wonder at its advocates. “The extreme generality of the principles of strategy is an accomplice to mental laziness. It relies on eternal and self-evident truths to produce results whenever necessary.”43
For example, British strategy has often been praised for imperturbability and immutability. Political and military at the same time, this strategy has permitted brilliant and continuous successes against whatever nation—Spain, France, or Germany—threatened the European equilibrium and British naval superiority. The salient features of that strategy are well known. Britain distracted the perturbateur44 on the continent in order to lead him to a major land effort that would diminish his resources for naval action. Britain would then sweep him from the sea and tighten the pressure by interrupting his maritime communications. What remains of this strategy today given the existence of new machines and new situations?
A maritime rival, the United States, has appeared on the horizon. Against her, the method of continental diversion is completely inoperable. She had nothing to fear on her land frontiers, especially given her strong affinities with Canada. Against the United States, Britain must have recourse, as in Washington in 1922 and Geneva in 1927, to the fragile and uncertain system of arms limitation conferences.
A material effort on land no longer absolutely bars a nation from simultaneous naval competition with Britain because the airplane can be involved in land and sea war simultaneously. The resources that the adversary devotes to aviation in order to increase his land forces can be fully utilized in the maritime struggle and thereby modify the balance of surface naval forces. Moreover, the advent of the submarine has virtually nullified the notion of sweeping the enemy from the sea because it remains able to act in the face of superior surface forces. As for maritime communications, they cease to be important when the adversary is none other than Russia supported by the Asian continent, a block that threatens Britain while laughing at sea lanes because it has everything that it needs. Against Russia, it is necessary to act on land either through foreign mercenaries or with one’s own forces, in spite of horrific memories of the pill that had to be swallowed in Wellington’s day and during the 1914 war.
The existence of rivals or enemies against whom the ancient methods are impotent, the diminished predominance of surface units, and the unaccustomed dangers represented by the airplane and the submarine are the new elements of Britain’s strategic problem and explain the unhappiness, anxiety, and malaise that manifests itself there. Such feelings are to be expected in minds that, having had faith in the permanent efficacy of a particular strategy, have just been awakened to its obsolescence and the imperious necessity for change.
To avoid such serious difficulties, one must abjure the illusion of invariable principles and remain ever attentive to the evolution of strategy and, especially, of its methods. Having studied analogous past situations in order to illuminate a question and to identify the appropriate doctrine, one must ask whether the conclusions remain correct in our day and what modifications are required in view of the day’s technology or that of the foreseeable future. Every discussion of strategy requires that an effort be made to understand the actual conditions and to eschew the mental laziness that leads one to treat strategy as purely abstract. Otherwise, one cannot do useful work. Because they have forgotten this truth, so many of the strategic analyses produced in recent years have had only limited and antiquarian interest. They declaim general principles from the safe high ground of empty formulas while changes occurring all around them demand novel ideas and original applications.
Is strategy an art or a science? A good subject for those with the mentalities of the Blues and Greens of Byzantium and for those with time to waste but one that I cannot avoid touching lightly upon in passing. Personally, I believe that strategy, like war itself, of which strategy is only one face, is an art. The expression “science” evokes an element of absolute certainty, of relations of cause and effect crystallized into rules so invariable and rigid that they become veritable laws, governing everything and impossible to escape. A scientific law asserts that the same scientific observation will always give rise to the same result, just as a mathematical formula generates the same answer whenever the same numbers are used. War is not at all like this, and strategy less so than tactics. Instead, strategy is, at least for the most part, an art. One sees the intervention of individuality, of personality, in a word, of psychological and moral factors, which play no role in science.
The simple principles that govern strategy are not chains but flexible guides leaving free play to the creative imagination and to the human spirit in situations that are themselves enormously variable. Precisely here lies the essential character of art, which never entirely breaks free of principles nor, even, of rules but still manifests itself in an unlimited variety of ways.45
If strategy has a scientific side in its methods of implementation, which depends on machines whose construction and operations are the creations of science, so too, for the same reason, does art. The painter also employs materials—brushes, fabrics, or colors—of known physical properties and susceptible to chemical analysis and fabrication. Similarly, the painter observes the laws of perspective, which are absolutely mathematical in their essence. If he stops there, however, in contemplating his tools, creation never happens; art manifests itself only in their manipulation. It is the same in music. Musical notes obey perfectly understood physical and mathematical laws, but a physicist, however expert in acoustics, is not a composer because he does not achieve the artistic creation that is the marriage of those sounds whose elementary structure he knows so completely. In summary, in strategy as in art, science furnishes the materials and the methods. To accomplish the definitive creation, however, requires their composition by means of an intellectual effort that is free and powerful but respectful of certain principles—art.
Art has no country, and the artistic point of view allows us to behold the great strategic writings, regardless of their time or place of origin, with admiration and envy. Just as international finance and religion have no boundaries, just as there is a workers’ international and an international diplomatic fraternity, so there is an international world of art and a military international, itself a branch of the artistic international.46
Strategy, like all human activity and art itself, rests on theory. If inspiration and imagination reign there, they acknowledge the principles that form their underlying technique. The theory of strategy can be learned. It is learned in a special manner, half through books, half through practice, when, as is generally the case, it is not possible to learn through personal military experience. Such experience is rare enough and only brings strategic illumination to those on the highest rungs of the hierarchy or in their entourage. It does not prepare others for the strategic tasks that might be in the future. For these, theory is the only path and study an obligation. The doctrine of innate ideas, fashionable at a certain epoch, has long since yieided to general disbelief. “The adage,” said Archduke Charles, “that one is born a general and that one has no need of study to become one, is one of the most dazzling errors of our century, an offspring whose parents are laziness and pusillanimity.”
In the introduction to Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Corbett pleaded the case of theoretical study of strategy in particularly happy terms. “At first sight nothing appears more unpractical, less promising of useful result than to approach the study of war with a theory. . . . The truth is that mistrust of theory comes from a misconception of what it is that theory claims to do. It does not pretend to give the power of conduct in the field; it claims no more than to increase the effective power of conduct. It is only education and judgment that the great authorities pretend to obtain by means of theory.”47
Shared theoretical study ought to create between commanders and subordinates an intellectual solidarity or, as we say in France, unity of doctrine. Certainly, Corbett, like all students of the question, was not unaware that the value of theoretical study is limited by the infinite variety of things that can happen in war. There is always the danger of asking more from a theory than it can give. But theory at least allows one to establish the “normal case,” a gauge against which one can compare other situations so as to temper one’s original conclusions to specific circumstances. For Corbett, strategy is like meteorology. Meteorology’s laws are subject to considerable variation from the norm, but one cannot deny that the sailor’s art demands study and knowledge of its laws. It is an element, not in itself sufficient, but absolutely necessary to the seaman’s education.
The study of strategy includes both principles and means of execution. The latter study is based on the positive method, on examining the material premises that, not being particular to strategy, in themselves exercise a considerable influence on tactics. We need not review those technical matters here as long as we remember that they affect strategy as well as tactics.
The study of principles ought to be conducted in a certain manner and with certain precautions. The results that one reaches through theory are almost exclusively approximations of principles verified by observation of a large number of cases. That is to say, theory rests in large part on the historical method, which works only when employed with critical acumen. In deriving lessons from history, one must distinguish general truths from ephemeral ones and retain only the former so as not to commit the dangerous error of brutally transplanting ideas from one period to another to which they are entirely alien.
Since the historical method will not serve us in treating machines known only in our own time, we will have to call upon the positive method to fill the gap. Outmoded methods can be distinguished from those valid today by means of intellectual exercises in which one imagines a strategic problem from the past and asks how to resolve it using the material means of our own day and whether the method once recognized as good or bad remains so at present.48 Finally, above all, one attempts to integrate the application of today’s weapons with the stable part of the lessons of the past and, if possible, to extend this application to the immediate future. All of this naturally requires numerous exercises, on the map and in reality, that permit not only the application of known theoretical notions but also the acquisition of new ones.
In a word, the study of the interaction between principles and contemporary practice is a particularly important and obligatory part of strategic theory, without which the subject is an empty one. Moreover, the study of naval strategy ought to be accompanied by that of land strategy. Many maritime authors have insisted on this point, and I, recalling to mind everything that the study of war on land has taught me, am of their opinion. The method is fruitful as long as one takes account of the change of milieu, just as the employment of the historical method requires acknowledgment of changes over time. But, if this reservation is very important for strategic methods, it is less so in matters of principle. Here, the transpositions are more appropriate, and they offer an valuable contribution to the sailor’s military education. . . .
1. Raoul Castex, Théories stratégiques, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (Paris: Société d’Editions Géographiques, Maritimes et Coloniales, 1937): 3–27.
2. More directly, “tactics” derives from 
(an arrangement of troops) and 
(to draw up troops).
3. Jacques Antoine Hippolyte Comte de Guibert (1743–1790), author of Essai générale de tactique (1772) and Défense du système de guerre moderne (1779). Although the Essai divides tactics into “elementary” and “grand,” coinciding roughly with distinctions between tactics and strategy, Guibert’s general thrust was not to narrow the scope of “tactics” but to expand it to encompass everything related to military activities. See R. R. Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: From Dynastic to National War,” in P. Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy. 3rd ed., 91–119, 107.
4. Archduke Charles (1771–1847), son of Emperor Leopold of Austria and author of Principles of the Higher Art of War and Principles of Strategy (1814) is best known for his notion that certain geographical points constituted the “keys to the country.” For a survey of eighteenth-century strategic thought, see Azar Gat, The Origins of Military Thought (Oxford, 1989).
5. Auguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont (1774–1852), Duke of Ragusa, marshal of France from 12 July 1809.
6. An uncharacteristically positive reference to the German thinker. Clausewitz’s distinction between strategy and tactics appears in On War, book 2, chapter 1 (Howard, 128) and book 3, chapter 1 (Howard, 177).
7. Orleanist in 1830, Bonapartist in 1848, leader of the provisional Republic’s bloody suppression of the Commune in 1871, and president of the Republic from 1871 to 1873, Louis Adolphe Thiers (1797–1877) remained throughout these political twists a stalwart supporter of the professional over the conscript army.
8. As Chief of the Prussian General Staff from 1857 to 1888, Helmuth Karl von Moltke (1800–1891) masterminded the three wars of German unification. Rejecting the notion that war could be scientific and its operations predictable (“no plan survives the first clash with the enemy”), he emphasized staff training to ensure that the actions of subordinate officers would conform to the commander’s will even after he had lost the ability to control events directly.
9. French army captain Jean-François-Georges Gilbert (1851–1901).
10. Freiherr Colmar von der Goltz (1843–1916) argued that the offensive continued to be possible in spite of contemporary technological developments. His Das Volk im Waffen (1884) (translated as The Nation in Arms, London, 1906) advocated universal conscription on the French model.
11. Head of the military history section of the German General Staff, Friedrich Adam von Bernhardi (1849–1940) contributed to the “cult of the offensive” by arguing that decisive victory remained possible if contemporary nations were willing to absorb large losses. For Bernhardi’s fluence on German policy, see Loren K. Campion, As Bismarck Fell: The Restive Mind of the German Military (Greenville, NC, 1976).
12. La Stratégie. Historique. Evolution (Paris: Fournier, 1912): 15. Clemenceau’s military adviser during World War I, Jean Jules Henri Mordacq (born 1868) wrote over twenty books on strategy including Etudes stratégiques (1910), Essais stratégiques (1912), Politique et stratégie dans une démocratie (1912), and La guerre au XXe siècle (1914).
13. La guerre sur mer (Paris: Challamel, 1907): 11. Captain Gabriel Darrieus (1859–1931) was Castex’s mentor. See introduction, 22, and Coutau-Bégarie, Castex, 45, 126.
14. Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) remains America’s most influential naval writer. His distinction between strategy and tactics, found in The Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660–1783 (New York, 1957): 6, reflects Jomini’s Précis.
15. General Henri Bonnal (1844–1917).
16. Dominico Bonamico was the leading Italian naval writer of the 1880s and 1890s. See Castex, Théories, vol. 1, 53.
17. Nicolo Marselli, La guerra e la sua storia, 3 vols. (Rome, 1904).
18. Professor at the naval academy at La Spezia and author of Elementi di arte militare marittima, 2 vols. (Livorno, 1903, 1906). Admiral Giovanni Sechi retired from the Italian navy in 1920, Castex, Théories, vol. 1, 53.
19. Lt. Colonel Carlo Corticelli, author of Manuale di organica militare: eserciti italiano, germanico, austro-ungarico, francese e svizzero (Torino, 1892).
20. Elementi di arte militare marittima, Livorno, 1905, vol. 1, 74 (author’s note).
21. Introduction aux études de stratégie (Paris: Challamel, 1927): 5 (author’s note).
22. Compare Clausewitz’s distinction of ends and means in war, On War, book 3, chapter 1 (Howard, 177).
23. This is essentially the opinion of Corticelli, who, in his Manuale di Organica (Turin, Bertolero, 1900), thinks that strategy is not simply a part of military science but rather its synthesis (author’s note).
24. The interaction of policy and strategy is the subject of chapters 10–12.
25. Note the addition of material considerations to a theoretical discussion.
26. “Les forces organisées.”
27. In this regard, the German cruisers Moewe, Wolf, and Seeadler, ships with a very great range of action, marked an intermediate step between the surface steam cruiser and the submarine (author’s note).
28. In fact, German submarines proved far more effective in World War II when operating in packs rather than alone. This paragraph surely reflects Castex’s remembered frustration with France’s exaggerated fear of German submarines in 1914.
29. For the intrusion into British strategy during the Falklands War of the cruiser Belgrano, see Sandy Woodward, One Hundred Days: The Memoirs of the Falklands Battle Group Commander (London, 1992). Omitted here are three paragraphs describing parallel developments in land war.
30. Influence (author’s note).
31. Frank Herman Schofield (1869–1942).
32. Similarly, one must be alert to the grave dangers for France implied in many League of Nations transactions in Geneva and must resist them resolutely when necessary (author’s note). Personal reasons for Castex’s antipathy to peace conferences are revealed in chapter 16.
33. Sir Reginald Hugh Spencer Bacon (1863–1947).
34. Some Notes on Naval Strategy (London, 1901) (author’s note).
35. London, 1907 (author’s note).
36. (1839–1924).
37. Castex offers no explanation for omitting the Spanish-American War.
38. Here Castex integrates the historical and material approaches.
39. General Debeney, The Chef. Centre des Hautes Etudes Militaires, 1925 (author’s note). Commander of the French First Army in 1918, Marie Eugène Debeney (1864–1943) was commandant of the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre (1919–1924) and Chief of General Staff (1925–1930).
40. Castex’s objection to much of the output of the historical school.
41. Castex, however, goes so far in criticizing the “unjustified” eclipse of weapons in La liaison des armes sur mer as to suggest that the fireship and the ram were both abandoned prematurely.
42. In spite of his denial that strategy is a science (below, 21–22), Castex loves analogies, however awkward, from mathematics and physics.
43. Commandant Z. and H. Montéchant, Essai de stratégie navale (1893): 6. This passage represents, as we will see, one of the work’s rare judicious observations (author’s note). A major formulation of the theories of the Jeune Ecole, Essai de stratégie navale, was written pseudonymously by Paul Fontin and J. H. Vignon.
44. For the theory of “perturbation,” see chapter 19.
45. Castex ignores Clausewitz’s important suggestion that war is neither an art nor a science, On War, book 2, chapter 3 (Howard, 148–50).
46. Castex takes this unpromising metaphor to extreme lengths in chapter 4.
47. Sir Julian Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, Eric J. Grove, ed. (Annapolis, 1988), 3–4, cited hereafter as Corbett, Principles. See above, xxxvii for a discussion of the attitude towards Clausewitz evidenced in this misquotation.
48. For an example of the method, see chapter 9.