"If I had believed in your work, there would have been no need for war . . . " -or at least there woukl have been no need for combat!
To defeat, without fighting, a continental adversary who constantly exhausts himself by rushing into the spatial and temporal limits o(the terrestrial battlefield is, as we know, what England will manage to do. Hider, like Napoleon, will be defeated by the fleet in being,2 which will constantly draw its victory from its inaccessibility to combat, from its abandonment of the harmful principle that we must attack as soon as the enemy is in sight, that we must shorten the distance between them and us . The fleet in being is logistics taking strategy to its absolute point, as the art of movement of unseen bodies; it is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the enemy's will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity in which it will no longer be able to "decide" with certainty, to want-in other words, to win. Thus, it is above all a new idea of violence ,that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, b ut rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic eficiency. If Napoleon judged an army's strength in mechanical terms, Maurice de Saxe, one of the first on the European continent, understood that violence can be reduced to nothing but movement". "I am not in favor of battle," he states. "I am persuaded that an able general can wage war his whole life long without being forced to do battle. " Nonetheless, in Western Europe, in a restricted and uneven terrain, one could not claim to "melt away the enemy" without eventually being driven to direct confrontation between ever larger military masses. German incarceration is the best example of this historical territorial constraint, which created the brief and bloody war-mongering of Prussian theory. On the immense nautical glacis, on the other hand, the home fleet could elude battle almost indefinitely; it was not forced by the adversary into desperate combat as long as it stayed out of reach, all the while remaining present.
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I Speed and Politics