... offensive, decisive and short. The offensive attack as the supreme form of defence was predominant in the military of all the belligerent powers; Schlieffen (Ger.), Knox/Hawking (Brit.), Joffre (Fr.), Hötzendorf (A.H.) and Sukhomlinov (Russia) all extolled the virtues of attack and ignored the consequences of the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars. `This idea may seem irrelevant to the question yet it raises some important points. Given Van Evera's definition and theory one could argue that the belligerent power that mobilizes or strikes first or even initiates and hastens a war is still fighting a preventive war and given that all the powers believed in a sophisticated form of "attack as the best form of defence" it can be further argued that all the major belligerent were fighting preventive wars. `The other aspect of Van Evera's article worth mentioning is his idea of "Windows". `For Van Evera, the cult of the offensive leads to the ...

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