Page 204 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo I

204 XXXIX Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

What can be extracted from such distant historical cases and many others not so far is
that land and naval operations should be integrated in the same strategy, independently
they had been integrated or no in joint or combined operations. Synergy preconized
in the current operations manuals are born in strategy. However, in addition to be
appropriately agreed, it must be properly implemented, so that joint and combined
operations subordinated to it can produce the desired results, as can be deduced from
the landings at Gallipoli (1915), when a “runtime error” (HART 1967, p. 237) and not a
misconception led to the failure of an action that could have produced on that moment
decisive results in the First World War.
A consistent strategy implemented with determination can, further than conceive and
perform land and naval actions, joint or not, make those operations achieve results that
go beyond those directly derived for them, featuring the highly recommended synergistic
effect.

b. The seizure of the strategy by history
The major international conflicts during the twentieth century gave strategy a new
dimension, in that the single force application was no longer the best solution or,
sometimes, even a solution. The extent of the destruction the World War II and advent of
nuclear power have led to new theoretical formulations that emphasized the application
of power through economic, political, military and psychosocial expressions, and all
combined.
But this was a theoretical rational and consistent with the current stage of knowledge
and political evolution in the main centers of global power. Throughout history, however,
it is possible to find cases of direct or indirect application of power in its various
expressions, even though no contemporary theory proposes analytical and conceptual
schemes for both. Alexander (356-323), Julius Caesar (100-44), Charlemagne (742-
814), Frederick II (1712-1786) and Napoleon (1769-1821) were masters of direct
strategy, most famous, of course, that Belisarius (505-565), Alfred-the-Great (849-899),
Frederick Hohenstaufen (1194-1250), Charles VII (1403-1461) and William of Nassau
(1533-1584), masters of the indirect strategy. However, in both cases, these leaders
have undertaken concerted actions in a given space and time based on a reading of
the situation - that the events shown to be realistic - allowing their actions fitted in the
relative power at their disposal to achieve their goals.
Long before the chancery strategies assume its glow in the seventeenth century, that
the power of nation-states and empires in the eighteenth century elevates the status of
the war to arbiter of all matters and that advances in military science, technology and
geopolitics in the nineteenth century lend to war a scientific character, different societies
learned to find ways to survive and secure their interests against threats of various kinds,
not always unipolar, but often diffuse, coming from multiple opponents or antagonisms.
At all times, societies were able to establish from the past events and facts in its
course their objectives and procedures to be able to reach them, forming what we now
call policy and strategy. It was not by accident, coincidence or dilettantism that leaders
of major nations of the Western world were, until the nineteenth century, formed on