Page:Heresies of Sea Power (1906).djvu/280



Much is written and spoken about the eternal principles and grand truths of warfare. The general idea has been crystallised into an apt phrase that 'though tactics alter, the great principles of strategy remain the same.'

This is very generally accepted as an axiom. Undoubtedly it embodies a truth; but is it all the truth? Are the eternal principles no more and no less than those we generally have in mind? What indeed have we in mind? And what is the dividing line if any between strategy and tactics?

For convenience, rather than that any such line can be drawn, we are apt to define the two to ourselves by characterising as strategical moves everything that takes place before the hostile squadrons sight each other, as tactical operations all that they do when within sighting-distance.

It is, of course, merely a convenient convention: else the addition of top-gallant masts to our ships and the fitting of crows' nests thereto would suddenly make strategy into tactics! An academical definition