The paramount concern, then, of maritime strategy is to determine the
mutual relations of your army and navy in a plan of war. When this is done,
and not till then, naval strategy can begin to work out the manner in which
the fleet can best discharge the function assigned to it.

The problem of such co-ordination is one that is susceptible of widely
varying solutions. It may be that the command of the sea is of so urgent an
importance that the army will have to devote itself to assisting the fleet
in its special task before it can act directly against the enemy's
territory and land forces; on the other hand, it may be that the immediate
duty of the fleet will be to forward military action ashore before it is
free to devote itself whole-heartedly to the destruction of the enemy's
fleets. The crude maxims as to primary objects which seem to have served
well enough in continental warfare have never worked so clearly where the
sea enters seriously into a war. In such cases it will not suffice to say
the primary object of the army is to destroy the enemy's army, or that of
the fleet to destroy the enemy's fleet. The delicate interactions of the
land and sea factors produce conditions too intricate for such blunt
solutions. Even the initial equations they present are too complex to be
reduced by the simple application of rough-and-ready maxims. Their right
handling depends upon the broadest and most fundamental principles of war,
and it is as a standpoint from which to get a clear and unobstructed view
of the factors in their true relations that a theory of war has perhaps its
highest value.

The theory which now holds the field is that war in a fundamental sense is
a continuation of policy by other means. The process by which the
continental strategists arrived at it involved some hard philosophical
reasoning. Practical and experienced veterans as they were, their method is
not one that works easily with our own habit of thought. It will be well,