never obscure the fact that it is by fighting we have to gain our end.

It is the more necessary to insist on this point, for the idea of making a
piece of territory your object is liable to be confused with the older
method of conducting war, in which armies were content to manoeuvre for
strategical positions, and a battle came almost to be regarded as a mark of
bad generalship. With such parading limited war has nothing to do. Its
conduct differs only from that of unlimited war in that instead of having
to destroy our enemy's whole power of resistance, we need only overthrow so
much of his active force as he is able or willing to bring to bear in order
to prevent or terminate our occupation of the territorial object.

The first consideration, then, in entering on such a war is to endeavour to
determine what the force will amount to. It will depend, firstly, on the
importance the enemy attaches to the limited object, coupled with the
nature and extent of his preoccupations elsewhere, and, secondly, it will
depend upon the natural difficulties of his lines of communication and the
extent to which we can increase those difficulties by our conduct of the
initial operations. In favourable circumstances therefore (and here lies
the great value of the limited form) we are able to control the amount of
force we shall have to encounter. The most favourable circumstances and the
only circumstances by which we ourselves can profit are such as permit the
more or less complete isolation of the object by naval action, and such
isolation can never be established until we have entirely overthrown the
enemy's naval forces.

Here, then, we enter the field of naval strategy. We can now leave behind
us the theory of war in general and, in order to pave the way to our final
conclusions, devote our attention to the theory of naval warfare in
particular.