ntioned. Clausewitz gave it
provisionally the name of "War limited by contingent," and could find no
place for it in his system. It appeared to him to differ essentially from
war limited by its political object, or as Jomini put it, war with a
territorial object. Yet it had to be taken into account and explained, if
only for the part it had played in European history.

For us it calls for the most careful examination, not only because it
baffled the great German strategist to reconcile it with his theory of war,
but also because it is the form in which Great Britain most successfully
demonstrated the potentiality for direct continental interference of a
small army acting in conjunction with a dominant fleet.

The combined operations which were the normal expression of the British
method of making war on the limited basis were of two main classes.
Firstly, there were those designed purely for the conquest of the objects
for which we went to war, which were usually colonial or distant oversea
territory; and secondly, operations more or less upon the European seaboard
designed not for permanent conquest, but as a method of disturbing our
enemy's plans and strengthening the hands of our allies and our own
position. Such operations might take the form of insignificant coastal
diversions, or they might rise through all degrees of importance till, as
in Wellington's operations in the Peninsula, they became indistinguishable
in form from regular continental warfare.

It would seem, therefore, that these operations were distinguished not so
much by the nature of the object as by the fact that we devoted to them,
not the whole of our military strength, but only a certain part of it which
was known as our "disposal force." Consequently, they appear to call for
some such special classification, and to fall naturally into the category
which Clausewitz called "War limited by contingent."

It was a nature of war well enough known in another form on the Continent.
During the eighteenth century there had been a large number of cases of war
actually limited by contingent--that is, cases where a country not having a
vital interest in the object made war by furnishing the chief belligerent
with an auxiliary force of a stipulated strength.

It was in the sixth chapter of his last book that Clausewitz intended to
deal with this anomalous form of hostility. His untimely death, however,
has left us with no more than a fragment, in which he