Some Principles of Maritime Strategy by Julian Stafford Corbett - The Original Classic Edition Finally available, a high quality book of the original classic edition.
This is a new and freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you.
Enjoy this classic work today. These selected paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside:
It discloses, in short, that naval strategy is not a thing by itself, that its problems can seldom or never be solved on naval considerations alone, but that it is only a part of maritime strategy-the higher learning which teaches us that for a maritime State to make successful war and to realise her special strength, army and navy must be used and thought of as instruments no less intimately connected than are the three arms ashore.
...On the whole then, when men speak of the Napoleonic system they seem to include two groups of ideas-one which comprises the conception of war made with the whole force of the nation; the other, a group which includes the Cromwellian idea of persistent effort, Fredericks preference for the offensive at almost any risk, and finally the idea of the enemys armed forces as the main objective, which was also Cromwells.
...The first value, then, of his theory of war is that it gives a clear line on which we may proceed to determine the nature of a war in which we are about to engage, and to ensure that we do not try to apply to one nature of war any particular course of operations simply because they have proved successful in another nature of war.
...In it he classifies wars into nine categories according to their political object, and he lays it down as a base proposition That these [pg 30] different kinds of war will have more or less influence on the nature of the operations which will be demanded to attain the end in view, on the amount of energy that must be put forth, and on the extent of the undertakings in which we must engage.
...Let it suffice for the present to mark that it gives us a conception of war as an exertion of violence to secure a political end which we desire to attain, and that from this broad and simple formula we are able to deduce at once that wars will vary according to the nature of the end and the intensity of our desire to attain it.