14 - Strategic command

Summary

This chapter examines the strategic command issues on the military history of the First World War, concentrating on certain important themes, and on the major belligerents. Strategy is subdivided into grand and military strategy. Grand strategy is concerned with the pursuit of national interests and overlaps with policy, involving not only a military dimension, but also wider logistic, social and technological aspects. Military strategy includes the raising, developing, sustaining and use of military forces, to attain grand strategic objectives. The strategic command relationships between civilian and military authorities in each of the major belligerents in the First World War were shaped first of all by the place of the armed forces within each country's nineteenth-century political traditions. During the later nineteenth century, the armies of all major powers adopted some version of a centralised military staff organisation, based on the German general staff, to plan future strategy and wars.