Dimitri’s Reviews > Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age > Status Update

The 1923 idea of a People's War sounds too 1945:

It was to be a most brutal kind of warfare that knew no rules & employed terroristic means of execution-style attacks against enemy commanders as much as against the population, poison gas, kidnapping, flooding and general destruction of infrastructure, in short, a mixture of scorched earth tactics with conventional operations.

MAHAN: "The one particular result which is the object of all naval action, is the destruction of the enemy's organized force & the establishment of one's own control over the water.. The sound general principle that the enemy's fleet, if it probably can be reached, is the objective paramount to all others; because the control of the sea, by reducing the enemy's navy, is the determining consideration in a naval war."

[Moltke after 1871] advocated a strategy based on defensive-offensive operations. No longer seeking a rapid decision marked by decisive battles, he planned to operate offensively, moving into enemy territory east & west [allocating equal forces to the two fronts!] to disrupt mobilisation & occopy easily defensible lines & have the enemy suffer heavy casualties in futile attacks against German defensive firepower.

At its best the Prussian general staff system institutionalized combat efficiency by ensuring that in a given situation different staff officers, educated to a common fighting doctrine, would arrive at approximately the same solution for making the most effective employment of available forces.

Even more interesting was Engels discussion of the possible strategy of a western campaign... The real danger to French security he considered to be its weak Belgian frontier because in spite of European treaties "history has yet to show that in case of war Belgium's neutrality is more than a a scrap of paper" With Paris fortified, France could defend itself offensively on the frontier [or] a final stand on the Aisne

We often speak as tough the 18th century discovered the worship of the machine but this is a half-truth. It was the 17th century that discovered the machine, its intricate precision, its revelation of mathematical reason in action. The 18th century gave this notion a Newtonian twist, whereas the 19th century worshipped not the machine but power.