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Object 260 men of war 212/25/2023 ![]() Instead of trying to drive the enemy away by cutting off their supplies, he aimed to keep them there, by allowing short rations to reach them, so that the longer they stayed the weaker and more depressed they became. Whereas normal armies seek to destroy the opposing forces, the Arabs sought purely to destroy material - and to seek it at points where there was no force. Whereas normal armies seek to preserve contact, the Arabs sought to avoid it. (197) From these premises was evolved a strategy which was the antithesis of orthodox doctrine. Above all, it was Guibert’s vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon’s imagination and ambition. ![]() Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. To the same source can be traced Napoleon’s method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy’s front. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: “The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves of the attackes to take the enemy in flank without exposing one’s own flank.” And Guiberts’ prescription for the rear attack, as the means of uptsetting the enemy’s balance, became Napoleon’s practice. And in any sphere it is proverbial that the surest way of gaining a superior’s acceptance of a new idea is to persuade him that it is his idea! As in war, the aim is to weaken resistance before attempting to overcome it and the effect is best attained by drawing the other party out of his defences.įrom Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distirbution of an army in self-contained divisions. In commerce, the suggestion that there is a bargain to be secured is far more potent than any direct appeal to buy. The indirect approach is as fundamental to the realm of politics as to the realm of sex. Conversion is achieved more easily and rapidly by unsuspected infiltration of a differnt idea or by an argument that turns the flank of instinctive opposition. In all such cases, the direct assault of new ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook. It’s fulfillment was seen to be the key to practical achievement in dealing with any problem where the human factor predominates, and a conflict of wills tends to spring from an underlying concern for interests. With deepened reflection, however I began to realize that the indirect approach had a much wider application - that it was a law of life in all spheres: a truth of philosophy. (18) When, in the course of studying a long series of military campaigns, I first came to perceive the spueriority of the indirect over the direct approach, I was looking merely for light upon strategy.
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