It is the more necessary to insist on this point, for the idea of making a piece of territory your object is liable to be confused with the older method of conducting war, in which armies were content to manoeuvre for strategical positions, and a battle came almost to be regarded as a mark of bad generalship.  With such parading limited war has nothing to do.  Its conduct differs only from that of unlimited war in that instead of having to destroy our enemy’s whole power of resistance, we need only overthrow so much of his active force as he is able or willing to bring to bear in order to prevent or terminate our occupation of the territorial object.

The first consideration, then, in entering on such a war is to endeavour to determine what the force will amount to.  It will depend, firstly, on the importance the enemy attaches to the limited object, coupled with the nature and extent of his preoccupations elsewhere, and, secondly, it will depend upon the natural difficulties of his lines of communication and the extent to which we can increase those difficulties by our conduct of the initial operations.  In favourable circumstances therefore (and here lies the great value of the limited form) we are able to control the amount of force we shall have to encounter.  The most favourable circumstances and the only circumstances by which we ourselves can profit are such as permit the more or less complete isolation of the object by naval action, and such isolation can never be established until we have entirely overthrown the enemy’s naval forces.

Here, then, we enter the field of naval strategy.  We can now leave behind us the theory of war in general and, in order to pave the way to our final conclusions, devote our attention to the theory of naval warfare in particular.

* * * * *

PART TWO

THEORY OF NAVAL WAR

* * * * *

CHAPTER ONE

THEORY OF THE OBJECT—­
COMMAND OF THE SEA

* * * * *

The object of naval warfare must always be directly or indirectly either to secure the command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it.

The second part of the proposition should be noted with special care in order to exclude a habit of thought, which is one of the commonest sources of error in naval speculation.  That error is the very general assumption that if one belligerent loses the command of the sea it passes at once to the other belligerent.  The most cursory study of naval history is enough to reveal the falseness of such an assumption.  It tells us that the most common situation in naval war is that neither side has the command; that the normal position is not a commanded sea, but an uncommanded sea.  The mere assertion, which no one denies, that the object of naval warfare is to get command of the sea actually connotes the proposition that the command is normally in dispute.  It is this state of dispute with which naval strategy is most nearly concerned, for when the command is lost or won pure naval strategy comes to an end.