structural:expansion
Principles

Many military strategists have attempted to encapsulate a successful strategy in a set of principles. Sun Tzu defined 13 principles in his The Art of War while Napoleon listed 115 maxims. American Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest had only one: to " there first with the most men". The concepts given as essential in the United States Army Field Manual of Military Operations (FM 3–0) are:

According to Greene and Armstrong, some planners assert adhering to the fundamental principles guarantees victory, while others claim war is unpredictable and the strategist must be flexible. Others argue predictability could be increased if the protagonists were to view the situation from the other sides in a conflict. Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke expressed strategy as a system of " ad hoc expedients" by which a general must take action while under pressure. These underlying principles of strategy have survived relatively unchanged as the technology of warfare has developed.

Strategy (and tactics) must constantly evolve in response to technological advances. A successful strategy from one era tends to remain in favor long after new developments in military weaponry and matériel have rendered it obsolete. World War I, and to a great extent the American Civil War, saw Napoleonic tactics of "offense at all costs" pitted against the defensive power of the trench, machine gun and barbed wire. As a reaction to its World War I experience, France attempted to use its Maginot Line to apply the principles of mass and economy of force, in that troops could be concentrated in the north for an offensive there while the Line acted as force multiplier in the south, and maneuver and security, by preventing the Germans from going directly from Alsace to Paris.