President Putin made three foundational assumptions in launching his war against Ukraine that should have been correct but were not. First, Putin assumed the invasion of Ukraine would be a quick and easy fight. Second, he assumed the world would denounce the invasion but tacitly allow it. Third, Putin assumed the war would deter NATO expansion.
Almost eighty years after that war’s end, it sometimes seems little remains to be written about the war at sea. Is another history needed? Kennedy’s genius has always been his ability to highlight how the shifting tectonic plates of power underlie and help explain the surface history, sometimes represented in a single event. Rather than uncovering new history, Victory at Sea arranges existing history in ways that better reveal the whole.
This analysis is anything but exhaustive. What separates “Guide to Tactics, or the Theory of the Combat” is how it situates itself in relation to On War. In many ways it serves as its inverse. Given that On War functions to describe the relationship of war to politics, “Guide to Tactics, or the Theory of the Combat” describes the relationship of tactics to war.
