An excerpt from, "Napoleon On War" Edited By Bruno Colson, Translated By Gregory Elliott, Oxford University Press, 2015, Pg. 309 - 311:
Napoleon practised attack much more than defence. Artillery was his preferred means:
Artillery has given attack an extreme advantage over defence, whose methods have remained the same. Previously, a camp protected by a feeble ditch was impregnable. Today, artillery would devastate everything inside it and render it uninhabitable. Machiavelli wrote about war like a blind man reasons about colours. I shall dictate some notes on these points to you.He who attacked seized the initiative, giving himself enormous advantages, as is suggested by a bulletin reporting the victory at Jena:
[ . . .] there are moments in war when no consideration must counterbalance the advantage of anticipating the enemy and attacking him first.In this regard, Napoleon felt himself to be very close to Frederick II:
To put it plainly, I think like Frederick; one should always attack.
Pressing his strategic attack as far as Vienna and into Moravia (1805), Napoleon shattered the third coalition in three months, whereas neutralizing the first two coalitions had taken five years and two years, respectively. This temporal contraction of operations was bound up with their spatial extension. In striking at the very heart of Austria, Napoleon not only beat its armies, but occupied its nerve centres of decision-making and force creation, thus arresting the whole country's will to fight. In 1806, against Prussia, the Emperor orchestrated a projection of strength of more than 700 kilometres, from the shores of the Rhine to the Baltic.
Attack, Clausewitz stressed, is not a homogeneous whole. An attack could not be pursued without interruption. When an army invaded a country, it must protect the space it had left behind it. In strategy, attack therefore always contained defensive elements. This emerges very clearly from the following text by Napoleon:
An army that marches to the conquest of a country has its two wings supported by neutral countries or major natural obstacles, whether large rivers or mountain chains, or it has only one of them, or none at all. In the first eventuality, it has only to see to it that it is not broken through on its front line; in the second, it must rely upon the supported wing; in the third, it must keep its various corps well supported in its centre and never separate. For if having two flanks exposed is a problem to be overcome, the disadvantage is double if there are four of them, triple if there are six, and quadruple if there are eight---that is, if one is divided into two, three, or four different corps. In the first case, an army's line of operations can equally lean to the left or the right; in the second, it must lean to the supported wing; in the third, it must be perpendicular to the middle of the army's line of march. In all cases, it is necessary every five or six marches to have a stronghold or entrenched position on the line of operations, for bringing together food and munitions depots, organizing convoys, and making them a centre of motion, a reference point that shortens the line of operations.For Clausewitz, the 'diminishing force of the attack' was a key subject of strategy. In particular, it derived from the need to occupy territory and protect lines of communication, from losses due to combat and illness, and from the increasing distance from sources of supplies and reinforcements. Gradually, attack thus progressed towards its 'culminating point', beyond which 'the scale turns and the reaction follows', often more violent than the initial clash. It was important to instinctively grasp this culminating point. 'Often it is entirely a matter of the imagination.'
Napoleon prefigured this notion somewhat in a reflection on his own career as a conqueror---which imparts to it a dimension that is even more political than strategic. He confided to Bertrand that it was in Russia that he had attained his 'culminating point'. He should have died in the Kremlin. He was at his height of his glory and reputation. After Waterloo, things were different. He had then carried out his retreat from Russia. People now knew his limits.
