The new notion of victory

Discussion, whether of strategy or of tactics, has often been bedevilled by a lack of precision about what is meant by ‘victory’. To begin with there is (or there very easily can be) a confusion between the victory in a given battle and the victory in the war as a whole. Reference to this has been made in preceding chapters; but it may be as well to remind the reader at this point that the winning of a battle, though useful, is useful only in so far as it permits the winner to go on and win the war. Certainly from the viewpoint of this present book it is victory in the war as a whole that really matters; and the winning of a battle is no more than a minor component in the chain of events that lead up to that culminating victory. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.