Where, then, did Xerxes and Napoleon go wrong? They failed, Clausewitz would probably say, to perceive “truth at every point,” which in these instances meant landscapes, logistics, climates, the morale of their troops, and the strategies of their enemies. They missed what their own soldiers understood: that Greece and Russia were traps, just as the English Channel was for the Spanish Armada. “The good general,” Clausewitz concludes, “must know friction in order to overcome it whenever possible, and in order not to expect a standard of achievement in his operations which this very friction
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