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Military strategy is a collective name for planning the conduct of warfare. Derived from the Greek strategos, strategy was seen as the "art of the general". Military strategy deals with the planning and conduct of campaigns, the movement and disposition of forces, and the deception of the enemy. The father of modern strategic study, Carl von Clausewitz, defined military strategy as "the employment of battles to gain the end of war." Military strategy was one of a triumvirate of "arts" or "sciences" that govern the conduct of warfare; the others being tactics, the execution of plans and manoeuvering of forces in battle, and logistics, the maintenance of an army.1 Fundamentals of military strategy
Strategy and tactics are closely related. Both deal with distance, time and force but strategy is large scale while tactics are small scale. Originally strategy was understood to govern the prelude to a battle while tactics controlled its execution. However, in the world wars of the 20th century, the distinction between manoeuvre and battle, strategy and tactics, became blurred. Tactics that were once the province of a company of cavalry would be applied to a panzer army.
In its purest form, strategy dealt solely with military issues. In earlier societies, a king or political leader was often the same person as the military leader. If he was not, the distance of communication between the political and the military leader was small. But as the need of a professional army grew, the bounds between the politicians and the military came to be recognized. In many cases, it was decided that there was a need for a separation. As French statesman Georges Clemenceau said, "war is too important a business to be left to soldiers." This gave rise to the concept of the grand strategyGrand Strategy is a neologism to describe the particular form of military science that decides the movement and use of a nation state's resources, fleets and armies at a theatre or greater scope. Grand strategy has been in use for thousands of years, thou which encompasses the management of the resources of an entire nation in the conduct of warfare. In the environment of the grand strategy, the military component is largely reduced to operational strategy -- the planning and control of large military units such as corpsThis article is about a military unit. For alternate meanings see Corps (disambiguation). A corps (a word that immigrated from the French language, but originating in the Latin "corpus, corporis" meaning body) is a large military unit. In the United State and divisionA division is a large military unit usually consisting of around 10,000 soldiers. In most armies a division is composed of several regiments or brigades, and in turn several divisions make up a corps. Divisions are usually designated by an ordinal numbers. As the size and number of the armies grew and the technology to communicate and control improved, the difference between "military strategy" and "grand strategy" shrank.
Fundamental to grand strategy is the diplomacyThis page is about negotiations; for the board game, see Diplomacy (game). United Nations, with its headquarters in New York City, is the largest international diplomatic organization. Diplomacy is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between a through which a nation might forge alliances or pressure another nation into compliance, thereby achieving victory without resorting to combat. Another element of grand strategy is the management of the post-war peace. As Clausewitz stated, a successful military strategy may be a means to an end, but it is not an end in itself. There are numerous examples in history where victory on the battlefield has not translated into long term peace and security.
Strategy (and tactics) must constantly evolve in response to technological advances. A successful strategy from one era tends to remain in favour long after new developments in military weaponry and matériel have rendered it obsolete. World War IWorld War I (also known as the First World War , the Great War the War of the Nations and the "War to End All Wars") was a world conflict occurring from 1914 to 1918. No previous conflict had mobilized so many soldiers, or involved so many in the field of, and to a great extent the American Civil WarThe American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 until 1865 between the northern states, popularly referred to as "the U. the Union," " the North," or "the Yankees"; and the seceding southern states, commonly referred to as "the Confederat, saw Napoleonic tactics of "offense at all costs" pitted against the defensive power of the trench, machine gun and barbed wire. As a reaction to her WWI experience, France entered World War II with a purely defensive doctrine, epitomised by the "impregnable" Maginot Line.
