Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
This probably did not really exist until about the 1930s, when people like JFC Fuller tried to create "Military Science" - and after which we see a plethora of nonsensical terms.
This is an unnecessary simplification, IMO. Obviously there were (many) soldiers out there who failed to use language and concepts with rigor prior to the 1930s. Militaries prior to the 1930s certainly did study their own history, and many came away with amazingly wrong conclusions about that history. The root of all good and all evil did not come from the 1930s, and much of the thinking during that period was in direct reaction to World War I.

Most armies have some sort of defining period for their self-images. These obviously shift over time (with the most extreme example being the French with their shifts from [to over-simplify] "all offense" to "all defense" in the aftermath of World War I), but they tend to shape thinking (or lack thereof) within the army in question. The U.S. has had a couple of these (the Civil War and World War II), and both had a major warping effect on our thinking. The British may have found one of their more recent ones in the 1920s and 1930s. And in just about every case these periods came from the army in question studying its own profession and coming away with lessons that may not have been especially helpful or accurate. Armies (like other large institutions) have shown a great ability to shed those lessons that they don't like or don't fit into their own self-image or visualization.

Sorry to divert the thread, but it's important to understand that history is a continuum of sorts, and that any event has things that led up to it and will have consequences that we cannot accurately predict based on those leading events and the reaction to them by each individual involved.