hn-classics/_stories/2007/8786550.md

created_at	title	url	author	points	story_text	comment_text	num_comments	story_id	story_title	story_url	parent_id	created_at_i	_tags	objectID	year
2014-12-23T02:38:24.000Z	How Good Was Napoleon? (2007)	http://www.historytoday.com/jonathon-riley/how-good-was-napoleon	diodorus	104			79					1419302304	story author_diodorus story_8786550	8786550	2007

By 1805, the year that Napoleon became sole head of state and supreme warlord of France, the notion of strategy was recognizably modern. Joly de Maizeroy had written in Théories de la Guerre (1777): ‘Strategy ... combines time, places, means, various interests and considers all ...

Tactics

geometrical like fortification.’ Achieving strategic objectives through means as diverse as diplomacy, economic power, information warfare and military power is not too far from this line of thought. The sort of strategy practised by Napoleon, his allies and some of his opponents, should be distinguished from that of his implacable enemy, Britain. Its worldwide empire, economic base, and naval reach, all meant that it was able to conduct strategy through other means than military power. Revolutionary and imperial France was not in this position – it had to use military force not in addition to the other instruments of national power, but in order to access them. Military power for Napoleon must be seen therefore as diplomacy, not merely, as in the Clausewitzian sense, an addition to it.