The talent of the strategist is to identify the decisive point and to concentrate everything on it, removing forces from secondary fronts and ignorin… - Carl von Clausewitz

If we do not learn to regard a war, and the separate campaigns of which it is composed, as a chain of linked engagements each leading to the next, but instead succumb to the idea that the capture of certain geographical points or the seizure of undefended provinces are of value in themselves, we are liable to regard them as windfall profits. In so doing, and in ignoring the fact that they are links in a continuous chain of events, we also ignore the possibility that their possession may later lead to definite disadvantages.

"To achieve victory we must mass our forces at the hub of all power and movement. The enemy’s "center of gravity

In conformity with all that has been said on the subject up to the present, two fundamental principles reign throughout the whole plan of the war, and serve as a guide for everything else.

The first is: to reduce the weight of the enemy’s power into as few centres of gravity as possible, into one if it can be done; again, to confine the attack against these centres of force to as few principal undertakings as possible, to one if possible; lastly, to keep all secondary undertakings as subordinate as possible. In a word, the first principle is, to act concentrated as much as possible.

The second principle runs thus to act as swiftly as possible; therefore, to allow of no delay or detour without sufficient reason.