ABSTRACT
Eighteenth-century military capabilities and warfare are generally seen as being limited. David Chandler argued that there was “a ‘crisis of strategy’ in the late seventeenth and for much of the eighteenth centuries…these wars were undoubtedly ‘limited’ in a very real sense-namely in the restricted ability of armed forces to carry out the grand strategic or political aims ordered by their rulers and governments. Schemes of vast manoeuvre and rapid decision were beyond their scope. Campaigns and even wars were therefore largely controlled by logistical factors”. More recently, the most lengthy narrative treatment of the subject, that by Russell Weigley, concludes, “as a positive instrument of policy, as a weapon with which to win positive gains for the national interest at a cost not disproportionate to the gains, war in the age of battles was consistently a disappointment and a failure.” Bernhard Kroener has written of military operations degenerating into operettas.1
