The Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had but one: "Get there first with the most men." Some of the most commonly cited principles are the objective, the offensive, surprise, security, unity of command, economy of force, mass, and maneuver. Napoleon I, for example, had 115 such principles. Military commanders and theorists throughout history have formulated what they considered to be the most important strategic and tactical principles of war.
Strategic and Tactical Principles of Warfare
(Indeed, in the 20th century, tactics have been termed operational strategy.) Strategy is limited by what tactics are possible given the size, training, and morale of forces, type and number of weapons available, terrain, weather, and quality and location of enemy forces, the tactics to be used are dependent on strategic considerations. Tactics have always been difficult - and have become increasingly difficult - to distinguish in reality from strategy because the two are so interdependent. The change in the scope and meaning of tactics over time has been largely due to enormous changes in technology. In the 19th and 20th centuries, however, with the rise of mass ideologies, vast conscript armies, global alliances, and rapid technological change, military strategy became difficult to distinguish from "grand strategy," that is, the proper planning and utilization of the entire resources of a society -military, technological, economic, and political. Thus until the 17th and 18th centuries strategy included to varying degrees such problems as fortification, maneuver, and supply.
Strategy, for example, literally means "the art of the general" (from the Greek strategos) and originally signified the purely military planning of a campaign. The change in the meaning of these terms over time has been basically one of scope as the nature of war and the shape of society have changed and as technology has developed. The great military theorist Carl von Clausewitz put it another way: "Tactics is the art of using troops in battle strategy is the art of using battles to win the war." Strategy and tactics, however, have been viewed differently in almost every era of history. Tactics implement strategy by short-term decisions on the movement of troops and employment of weapons on the field of battle. Broadly stated, strategy is the planning, coordination, and general direction of military operations to meet overall political and military objectives. Military strategy and tactics are essential to the conduct of warfare.
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