e could set up such a situation that it would cost the enemy
more to turn you out than the object was worth to him.

Here then was a wide difference in the fundamental postulate of your war
plan. In the case of an unlimited war your main strategical offensive must
be directed against the armed forces of the enemy; in the case of a limited
war, even where its object was positive, it need not be. If conditions were
favourable, it would suffice to make the object itself the objective of
your main strategical offensive. Clearly, then, he had reached a
theoretical distinction which modified his whole conception of strategy. No
longer is there logically but one kind of war, the Absolute, and no longer
is there but one legitimate objective, the enemy's armed forces. Being
sound theory, it of course had an immediate practical value, for obviously
it was a distinction from which the actual work of framing a war plan must
take its departure.

A curious corroboration of the soundness of these views is that Jomini
reached an almost identical standpoint independently and by an entirely
different road. His method was severely concrete, based on the comparison
of observed facts, but it brought him as surely as the abstract method of
his rival to the conclusion that there were two distinct classes of object.
"They are of two different kinds," he says, "one which may be called
territorial or geographical ... the other on the contrary consists
exclusively in the destruction or disorganisation of the enemy's forces
without concerning yourself with geographical points of any kind." It is
under the first category of his first main classification "Of offensive
wars to assert rights," that he deals with what Clausewitz would call
"Limited Wars." Citing as an example Frederick the Great's war for the
conquest of Silesia, he says, "In such a war ... the offensive operations
ought to be proportional to the end in view. The first move is naturally to
occupy the provinces claimed" (not, be it noted, to direct your blow at the
enemy's main force). "Afterwards," he proceeds, "you can push the offensive
according to circumstances and your relative strength in order to obtain
the desired cession by menacing the enemy at home." Here we have
Clausewitz's whole doctrine of "Limited War"; firstly, the primary or
territorial stage, in which you endeavour to occupy the geographical
object, and then the secondary or coercive stage, in which you seek by
exert