stly from the merchant service, and will be for
such auxiliary duties as those of hospital ships, supply ships,
fuel ships, and ammunition ships, with some to do duty as scouts.

For the purposes of the United States, therefore, the office of
naval strategy in planning additions to our fleet for war, is to
make a grave estimate of the naval requirements in both the Atlantic
and the Pacific; to divide the total actual and prospective naval
force between the Atlantic and the Pacific in such a way as shall
seem the wisest; to assign duties in general to each force; and
then to turn over to logistics the task of making the quantitative
calculations, and of performing the various acts, which will be
necessary to carry out the decisions made.

Objection may be made to the phrase just used--"to divide the total
force," because it is an axiom with some that one must never divide
his total force; and the idea of dividing our fleet, by assigning
part to the Atlantic and part to the Pacific, has been condemned
by many officers, the present writer among them.

This is an illustration of how frequently phrases are used to express
briefly ideas which could not be expressed fully without careful
qualifications and explanations that would necessitate many words;
and it shows how carefully one must be on his guard, lest he put
technical phrases to unintended uses, and attach incorrect meanings
to them. As a brief technical statement, we may say, "never divide
your force"; but when we say this, we make a condensed statement
of a principle, and expect it to be regarded as such, and not as
a full statement. The full statement would be: "In the presence of
an active enemy, do not so divide your force that the enemy could
attack each division in detail with a superior force." Napoleon
was a past master in the art of overwhelming separate portions of
an enemy's force, and he understood better than any one else of
his time the value of concentration. And yet a favorite plan of
his was to detach a small part of his force, to hold a superior
force of the enemy in check for--say a day--while he whipped another
force of the enemy with his main body. He then turned and chastised
the part which had been held in check by the small detachment, and
prevented from coming to the relief of the force that he attacked
first.

When we say, then, that strategy directs how our naval force should
be divided between the Atlantic and the Pacific, this does n