Time

Time is a crucial factor in all forms of warfare, yet its role varies across the spectrum of conflict. At the high end of the spectrum-total or major conventional war-the role of time is succinctly captured in Civil War Commander Nathan Bedford Forrest’s recipe for victory: “Get there first with the most men.”1 In other words, the key to winning battles was to employ maximal force in the shortest time possible, a dynamic which helped drive the tight mobilization schedules of the armies participating in World War I.2 The advent of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles compressed the time factor by orders of magnitude meaning an entire total war could potentially be concluded in a few hours, as Tom Lehrer comically noted (“I’ll look for you when the war is over, an hour and a half from now”) even as the same point was more grimly made by US military officers.3