Think of battle or conflict as existing on a kind of chessboard. The chessboard’s center can be physical—an actual place like Marathon—or more subtle and psychological: the levers of power within a group, the support of a critical ally, a troublemaker at the eye of the storm. Take the center of the chessboard and the enemy will naturally break into parts, trying to hit you from more than one side. These smaller parts are now manageable, can be defeated in detail or forced to divide yet again. And once something large is divided, it is prone to further division, to being splintered into
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