The argument is this: that, as all strategic attack tends to leave points
of your own uncovered, it always involves greater or less provision for
their defence. It is obvious, therefore, that if we are aiming at a limited
territorial object the proportion of defence required will tend to be much
greater than if we are directing our attack on the main forces of the
enemy. In unlimited war our attack will itself tend to defend everything
elsewhere, by forcing the enemy to concentrate against our attack. Whether
the limited form is justifiable or not therefore depends, as Clausewitz
points out, on the geographical position of the object.

So far British experience is with him, but he then goes on to say the more
closely the territory in question is an annex of our own the safer is this
form of war, because then our offensive action will the more surely cover
our home country. As a case in point he cites Frederick the Great's opening
of the Seven Years' War with the occupation of Saxony--a piece of work
which materially strengthened Prussian defence. Of the British opening in
Canada he says nothing. His outlook was too exclusively continental for it
to occur to him to test his doctrine with a conspicuously successful case
in which the territory aimed at was distant from the home territory and in
no way covered it. Had he done so he must have seen how much stronger an
example of the strength of limited war was the case of Canada than the case
of Saxony. Moreover, he would have seen that the difficulties, which in
spite of his faith in his discovery accompanied his attempt to apply it,
arose from the fact that the examples he selected were not really examples
at all.

When he conceived the idea, the only kind of limited object he had in his
mind was, to use his own words, "some conquests on the frontiers of the
enemy's country," such as Silesia and Saxony for Frederick the Great,