Tuesday, February 28, 2023

All Done

 All done, for the functionality. That was Django #4.

                                                            

So Django basically write one's html code, so that things show up as we wish. 

CRTL + u, to see the html page...


Looked at, here:

                                                           


The reverse term - from an imported package add-on to Django - is useful here. Pressing

the back-button leads back to the home page.

                                                                                                                     

                                                                     


                                       

 One can easily add or remove fields from a view.


                                                             


It's like working with html. Here, the title of the page was changed.

                                         *     *     *

Have started reading on Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Below, the French Wikipedia overview

of the work:

On War (German: Vom Kriege) is a treatise on military strategy written by the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz. Written mostly after the Napoleonic Wars, between 1816 and 1830, and left unfinished at his death in 1831, the work was compiled and published posthumously between 1832 and 1835 by his wife, Marie von Brühl.


On War is still the subject of periodic rediscoveries: French and German strategists before the First World War; Lenin and Mao Zedong meditating on the revolutionary war; Raymond Aron on strategy in the nuclear age; With each new strategic epoch, the teachings of the Prussian writer shed light on military theory.


Clausewitz forcefully demonstrated the compenetration of the political and the military in the act of war. Its second main idea is that of "absolute war": the dialectic proper to military struggle implies the "ascent to extremes" and the search for the annihilation of the adversary. Ideas that do not exhaust the richness of a book, On War, which stands out as one of the most influential treatises on military strategy ever written.

Background

Before being considered the highest figure in world military thought, Carl von Clausewitz was a soldier. As a cadet during the Rhine campaign of 1793–1795, it was as a young officer that he witnessed in Jena in 1806 the military collapse of Prussia, struck down by modern warfare. Deeply wounded in his patriotism, he conceived and organized with Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau the reform of the Prussian army. From 1812 to 1815, first in the service of the Tsar as long as Prussia was neutral, he participated in the war in Russia and then in the campaigns that led to the final defeat of Napoleon.


After the war, he became director of studies at the Berlin Military Academy and began writing On War. The writing of this book occupied Clausewitz for 16 years, during which he devoted himself to the thought of war with passionate rigour. Perceiving the need to consider war in a global way and to establish the link between military events (the Napoleonic campaigns) and politics (the French Revolution), he made the rigorous conceptualization of this relationship the basis of his theory.


Content

Analysis

The conceptual analysis of war is the subject of Book I. Book II sets out the scope and limitations of a theory of war. Books III to VII provide a rational examination of strategic problems.


Reduced to its abstract essence, war is comparable to a duel, an act of violence designed to force the adversary to carry out one's will.


The means par excellence to achieve this goal is the disarmament of the enemy, and the dialectic of struggle irresistibly leads to the "ascent to extremes". But experience, i.e. history, rarely offers the example of wars fought in the Napoleonic way, that is, of "absolute wars", where violence is unleashed in accordance with the concept. In reality, the duel is carried out by states, which proportion military objectives to political aims; for instruments they use armies, complex machinery whose constraints of use Von Clausewitz designates by the notion of "friction". War does not consist of a single blow without duration, but takes place in time and space; The intrinsic superiority of defense over attack favors the frequent suspension of the act of war.


Real war is not an autonomous reality, but a fragment of politics. Politics designates, on the one hand, the objective set of institutions, social and economic forms that give their general style to conflicts and, on the other hand, the subjective set of intentions pursued by governments in fighting. Finally, each war is absolutely singular and reveals the variable interplay of three principles: a political principle, a military principle, a popular principle. At the time of On War, the political and social movement of the French Revolution prodigiously amplified the popular and passionate element of the war, bringing it closer to its absolute form.


In Book II, the author rejects any claim to construct a positive doctrine of war. According to him, this would be to neglect the moral greatness with which the war is entirely penetrated: the talents of the warlord, the warlike virtues of the army, the state of mind of the population, any psychological element that comes into play and is not measured in numbers. Moreover, the face-to-face with an intelligent adversary who reacts, the uncertainty of all the data, the "fog of war", make it very difficult to constitute a theory that would teach a method of action. It is in the tactical field that it is possible and necessary to codify, to produce procedures and regulations. In fact, when it comes to strategy, theory exists to guide and advise the warlord's intellectual development rather than to actually guide him on the battlefield.


From Book III to Book VII, Von Clausewitz successively addresses strategy in general, engagement, military forces, defense, attack. The concern for conceptual rigour that he manifests is balanced by the permanent preoccupation with reality, with the true fact, with the technical detail. The long considerations, now aged, on the marches, supplies, fortresses, defense of the marshes, etc. which show the constraints exerted on the strategy by the geography and the nature of the military tools of the time, also illustrate the realism of the author.


Tactics and strategy are distinguished in relation to means and ends: the means of tactics is combat, its end victory; the means of strategy is the result of the fighting, with the end of the military objective of the war (Ziel), which does not necessarily merge with the political goal (Zweck). At the end of the Napoleonic era, the armed forces being approximately of the same level in terms of organization and means of combat, it is to numerical superiority that falls the decisive role on the strategic level.


As the elementary material of the act of war, combat, even if it is not fought and is content to speculate its probable outcome, is the ultimate reference, and the destruction of enemy forces the touchstone of all war action. This is why the Prussian strategist insists on the decisive character of the main battle: "center of gravity of the war".


The act of war, finally, takes two fundamental forms which, despite what intuition may suggest, are not symmetrical to each other. Conceptually, the purpose of the attack is to conquer, that of the defense is to preserve. All other things being equal, defense is an inherently superior form, as evidenced by the fact that it is always used by the weaker. This superiority is due to the fact that it benefits from the advantage of the field, and that time works to its advantage: the offensive, when it has not managed to immediately shoot down the opponent, always ends up reaching a climax beyond which the vulnerability of the attacker grows and allows the defense to turn into a counterattack.

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