The confusion of thought which has led to the misconceptions about defence as a method of war is due to several obvious causes.  Counter-attacks from a general defensive attitude have been regarded as a true offensive, as, for instance, in Frederick the Great’s best-known operations, or in Admiral Tegetthoff’s brilliant counterstroke at Lissa, or our own operations against the Spanish Armada.  Again, the defensive has acquired an ill name by its being confused with a wrongly arrested offensive, where the superior Power with the positive object lacked the spirit to use his material superiority with sufficient activity and perseverance.  Against such a Power an inferior enemy can always redress his inferiority by passing to a bold and quick offensive, thus acquiring a momentum both moral and physical which more than compensates his lack of weight.  The defensive has also failed by the choice of a bad position which the enemy was able to turn or avoid.  A defensive attitude is nothing at all, its elements of strength entirely disappear, unless it is such that the enemy must break it down by force before he can reach his ultimate objective.  Even more often has it failed when the belligerent adopting it, finding he has no available defensive position which will bar the enemy’s progress, attempts to guard every possible line of attack.  The result is of course that by attenuating his force he only accentuates his inferiority.

Clear and well proven as these considerations are for land warfare, their application to the sea is not so obvious.  It will be objected that at sea there is no defensive.  This is generally true for tactics, but even so not universally true.  Defensive tactical positions are possible at sea, as in defended anchorages.  These were always a reality, and the mine has increased their possibilities.  In the latest developments of naval warfare we have seen the Japanese at the Elliot Islands preparing a real defensive position to cover the landing of their Second Army in the Liaotung Peninsula.  Strategically the proposition is not true at all.  A strategical defensive has been quite as common at sea as on land, and our own gravest problems have often been how to break down such an attitude when our enemy assumed it.  It usually meant that the enemy remained in his own waters and near his own bases, where it was almost impossible for us to attack him with decisive result, and whence he always threatened us with counterattack at moments of exhaustion, as the Dutch did at Sole Bay and in the Medway.  The difficulty of dealing decisively with an enemy who adopted this course was realised by our service very early, and from first to last one of our chief preoccupations was to prevent the enemy availing himself of this device and to force him to fight in the open, or at least to get between him and his base and force an action there.

Probably the most remarkable manifestation of the advantages that may be derived in suitable conditions from a strategical defensive is also to be found in the late Russo-Japanese War.  In the final crisis of the naval struggle the Japanese fleet was able to take advantage of a defensive attitude in its own waters which the Russian Baltic fleet would have to break down to attain its end, and the result was the most decisive naval victory ever recorded.