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Updated: June 23, 2025
Since before Sun Tzu and the earliest chroniclers of war recorded their observations, strategists and generals have been tantalized and confounded by the elusive goal of destroying the adversary's will to resist before, during, and after battle.
Great strategists have their eclipses. The greatest follies are often composed, like the largest ropes, of a multitude of strands. Take the cable thread by thread, take all the petty determining motives separately, and you can break them one after the other, and you say, "That is all there is of it!"
Such automatic and complete co-ordination is desirable not only in preventing the unnatural barrier between the civil and the military authority which exists in some countries such as ours, but in lightening the labors and enlightening the deliberations of the strategists.
The triumvir, Power, has under him all the magistrates of arms, of artillery, of cavalry, of foot-soldiers, of architects, and of strategists; and the masters and many of the most excellent workmen obey the magistrates, the men of each art paying allegiance to their respective chiefs.
Side by side with the overtowering political achievement of Bismarck and the more congenial life work of Roon, the minister of war, Moltke's service to his country and his king stands unchallenged in historical significance. He has indelibly inscribed his name on the tablets of history as one of the world's greatest strategists.
We must have risen a good deal in their estimation as strategists, for they were fairly out-generalled by chance, while they must have thought it was design.
Sure enough, there he was, coming up behind the bank. The Subaltern heaved a sigh of relief. "D'you know what this is all about, sir?" "No," said the Captain, as much as to say "How should I?" "We had better hold on here, and wait and see what is to be done," he added. Arm-chair strategists may not know it, but a man who has not learned how to "wait and see" is not much use in tactical warfare.
The course that Japan has followed for the past ten years in Asia has paralleled the course of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and in Africa. Today, it has become far more than a parallel. It is actual collaboration so well calculated that all the continents of the world, and all the oceans, are now considered by the Axis strategists as one gigantic battlefield.
This is a truism; but it is necessary to insist upon it, because professional, and especially professorial, strategists and tacticians almost invariably ignore it. That which we have seen and know has not only more, but very much more, influence upon the minds of nearly all of us than that of which we have only heard, and, most likely, heard but imperfectly.
Russia might at once have gained an overwhelming advantage had she seized and controlled the lines of communication between the Japanese islands and the continent of Asia. Her strategists can scarcely have failed to appreciate that fact, and would doubtless have acted accordingly had they obtained a few months' leisure to mass an overwhelmingly strong fleet in the seas of China and Japan.
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