Poet1960 wrote:Your civ doesn't HAVE to be run by the military to get the most out of tech. It's like this. Your politicians/the people decide to declare war. Once that happens, the military then uses it's full capability to prosecute the war to a winning conclusion without further interference from politicians within reason, excepting of course possible diplomatic solutions and such.

Oh, of course - I was just giving an example in which technology isn't irrelevant.

One of the greatest books ever written on strategy was called exactly that: On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context, written by Col. Harry Summers, U.S. Army.

Summers falsified his age -- 15 -- to serve in the debacle that was Korea. After receiving a commission in the regular Army in 1957, he began to be known for his writing on military strategy. That didn't keep him from serving in Vietnam, where he was on the last helicopter that took off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1975.

From these experiences and others, and with a lot of careful thinking, Col. Summers wrote On Strategy. It's ostensibly about how the Vietnam war went, but it's in fact a clear explanation of strategy: what it is, what it's for, and how it works... or doesn't.

And the reason I bring it up here, especially that last part about poor strategy, is because in 1974, when Summers was the liaison for talks to recover U.S. prisoners, he had an exchange with his North Vietnamese Army counterpart, Colonel Tu:

SUMMERS: "You know, you never beat us on the battlefield."

TU: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."