The Independent . s had expected. The people ofthe United States had not been trainedalong military and naval lines, andthey were very much impressed withthe superiority of the material re-sources of the Allies in comparison ofthose of their antagonists. We of theArmy and Navy said to them, You donot appreciate the advantages thatwise strategy confers; you do not re-member how quickly Austria andFrance were conquered by Prussia in1866 and 1870. The people replied,We do realize the advantages of whatyou call strategy, but in the presentwar those advantages have been util-ized already in bringin
The Independent . s had expected. The people ofthe United States had not been trainedalong military and naval lines, andthey were very much impressed withthe superiority of the material re-sources of the Allies in comparison ofthose of their antagonists. We of theArmy and Navy said to them, You donot appreciate the advantages thatwise strategy confers; you do not re-member how quickly Austria andFrance were conquered by Prussia in1866 and 1870. The people replied,We do realize the advantages of whatyou call strategy, but in the presentwar those advantages have been util-ized already in bringing about the su-perior state of preparedness which theCentral Powers enjoyed. The Allieswill soon get into the same state ofpreparedness, and then the decisivefactors will be material resources, ofwhich the Allies have the preponder-ance. We answered that the effects ofstrategy do not disappear immediatelyafter the beginning of a war; that thecauses which make one side more pre-pared than the other at the beginning. @ Harris and Hiring REAR ADMIRAL FISKE of a war make that side more preparedat the middle of the war also; becausethe causes are fundamentally intel-lectual and moral, and have their rootsin the characters of the peoples them-selves. The cause of the present prepared-ness of the Central Powers is the sys-tem that has been in use in Prussiasince 1640, when the Great Elector,impressed at the age of 20 by the de-plorable condition of Brandenburg,started to reform it. His first step,and his continuing policy thereafter,were to insist that the head of everydepartment should be a trained expert,and that he should labor unremittingly to improve his department. In otherwords, he applied military ideas tocivil offices. His system was continuedby his son, though somewhat less ef-fectively. It was continued, however,and even more effectively by his grand-son, who made Prussia, which Bran-denburg had then become, the mostefficient Government in Europe, andwho established an army
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