James Wylie’s Military Strategy retains a following, but its impact has been marginal.4 Wylie first began to set down his ideas in the early 1950s, partly as reflections on his Second World War experience. He worked in concert with another admiral, Henry Eccles, whose thoughts followed a similar path. Both of them put questions of power at the heart of their analyses. Both wondered what that meant in terms of an ability to assert “control.” As naval officers in the Mahan tradition, they believed that control was the objective of strategy.
