ng a war plan that
does not culminate in a Jena or a Sedan. It is a view surely which is the
child of theory, bearing no relation to the actuality of the war in
question and affording no explanation of its ultimate success. The truth
is, that so long as the Japanese acted on the principles of limited war, as
laid down by Clausewitz and Jomini and plainly deducible from our own rich
experience, they progressed beyond all their expectations, but so soon as
they departed from them and suffered themselves to be confused with
continental theories they were surprised by unaccountable failure.

The expression "Limited war" is no doubt not entirely happy. Yet no other
has been found to condense the ideas of limited object and limited
interest, which are its special characteristics. Still if the above example
be kept in mind as a typical case, the meaning of the term will not be
mistaken. It only remains to emphasise one important point. The fact that
the doctrine of limited war traverses the current belief that our primary
objective must always be the enemy's armed forces is liable to carry with
it a false inference that it also rejects the corollary that war means the
use of battles. Nothing is further from the conception. Whatever the form
of war, there is no likelihood of our ever going back to the old fallacy of
attempting to decide wars by manoeuvres. All forms alike demand the use of
battles. By our fundamental theory war is always "a continuation of
political intercourse, in which fighting is substituted for writing notes."
However great the controlling influence of the political object, it must
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 amoun