The first step... is to understand the difference between total strategy, that is Jehad, and military strategy. The term, Jehad, so often confused wi… - S. K. Malik

In his penetrating war, 'Strategy: The Indirect Approach,' Liddell Hart Made an attempt to epitomize, from the history of war, a few truths of experience which seemed to him so universal and fundamental as to be termed 'axioms.' According to him, the maxims applied to tactics as well as strategy alike. The great military think came to the general conclusion that all the principles of war could be concentrated into one single principle, that is, concentration of strength against weakness. To apply this principle, he put forward eight rules, six positive and two negative. The positive rules were: the maintenance of the aim; the adjustment of the means to the end; the adoption of the line of least expectation and resistance; the undertaking of a line of operation that threatened multiple objectives; and ensuring that plans and dispositions were flexible and adaptable to the circumstances. In the negative rules, he advocated that all the weight should not be thrown in one stroke while the enemy was on guard, and that an attack, once failed, should not be resumed along the same lines or in the same form.

In an article pertaining to the evolution of strategic thought, Harry L. Coles expresses the view that the history of strategy can be divided into two-time groups: the pre-1945 time-group during which strategy suffered from under think; and the post-1945 period in which it has been suffering from the opposite malady—the over-think. The climax of the pre-1945 strategic thought was the discovery that the decision should be sought in the psychological dimensions of war. With the advent of the nuclear bomb in the post-1945 period, the theory of strategy has, after passing through several evolutionary stages eventually come to be dominated by 'deterrence'.

When Clausewitz, the founder-father of modern military thought, defined war as a 'continuation of policy by other means', he did, in fact, throw a challenge to the students of Political Science and International Relations to develop a theory around 'policy'. Clasewitz thus put the cart before the horse and forced the policy-makers to conduct deeper research into the science of politics. It was not 'policy' that took the initiative to define the meaning, sphere, limites and extents of 'war'. On the contrary, 'war' forced 'policy' to define and determine its own parameters. It took the human mind hundreds of years to establish, if at all, the relationship between national aims and objectives, national interests, national policy and war; and even longer to realise that war was subservient to policy. Nonetheless, the political scientists did rise to the occasion to theorise; they opined that, in brief, policy was the pursuit of national interests and that war became an instrument of policy when vital but incompatible national interests were at stake. What they failed to establish, however, was concerning the rationale behind the determination of national interests.