Sun Tzu offered 13 principles, Napoleon 115 maxims, and one Civil War general just one
Generals have long tried to bottle victory into rules. Sun Tzu set out 13 principles in The Art of War. Napoleon compiled 115 maxims. The American Civil War cavalry commander Nathan Bedford Forrest boiled everything down to a single idea: arrive at the fight before the enemy, and bring more troops than they have.
Oddly, the word strategy is a latecomer. It comes from the Greek strategos, a general, built from roots meaning army and leader, and in the 18th century it meant simply the art of the general, arranging troops for campaigns. It first appeared in German as Strategie in 1777, when Johann von Bourscheid translated the Tactica of the Byzantine emperor Leo VI, and spread across the West from there. Serious European study of the subject only began in that century.
The ideas are far older than the label. Sun Tzu, traditionally dated 544 to 496 BC, and the Indian thinker Chanakya, author of the Arthashastra, laid out principles around 500 BC. Eastern tradition leaned more on deception and asymmetric warfare than Western thinking did. In 1520 Machiavelli wrote his own Art of War, examining how civil and military affairs fit together, and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden displayed advanced operational skill in the Thirty Years War of 1618 to 1648.
Carl von Clausewitz, who lived from 1780 to 1831 and is often called the father of modern Western strategic study, insisted that war served politics, famously calling it a continuation of policy by other means. The French statesman Georges Clemenceau went further, remarking that war was too important to be left to soldiers, which fed the notion of grand strategy covering a whole nation's resources. Britain's Field Marshal Montgomery drew a crisp line: strategy is the art of conducting war, tactics the art of fighting.
Technology transformed how armies moved but not how many soldiers an officer could effectively lead. Telegraph, radio and better transport shifted huge forces quickly; Germany placed a radio in every tank. Yet one officer's span of control, if anything, shrank, so bigger armies simply needed more officers. Planners still disagree whether firm principles guarantee success or whether war is too unpredictable for any fixed recipe.
Source: Military strategy
