ABSTRACT
At the opening of the eighteenth century the word ‘strategy’ – ‘the art of the general (strateges)’ – was added to the military vocabulary to denote the methodical manoeuvres, marches and counter-marches prevalent in the age of strictly limited wars. Today, in most dictionaries, it is defined as the science or art of projecting and directing military movements, and after the Napoleonic wars, which, unlike the wars of the twentieth century, were still simple enough to bear some resemblance to Alexander's, Clausewitz defined strategy as follows:
Strategy is the employment of battle to gain the end in war; it must therefore give an aim to the whole military action, which must be in accordance with the object of the war; in other words, strategy forms the plan of the war, and to this end it links together the series of acts which are to lead to the final decision, that is to say, it makes the plan for the separate campaigns and regulates the combats to be fought in each.
