"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Room of Lost Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Suddenly the powerful found themselves fighting on several fronts.
Their massive armies and huge weapon systems were no match to the
smaller, more creative warfare of their enemies.

And it looked, for a long time, as if the massive armies would break.

Enter Commander Ewing Trekov and his cohorts. All of them had
been injured on one front or another. Most of them had come within a
heartbeat of dying.
 They ended up at the same treatment facility in the very center of the
sector, and there they realized they had the same philosophy about the
wars.

First, they believed that the Colonnade Wars were not wars at all, but
a single war—a large, scattered battlefield that spread across several
systems. These men and women, brilliant all, realized that fighting each
front as if it were a separate war was what was destroying the army. A
military could have no coherent strategy when it believed it was fighting a
dozen wars at once.

So these people, as they healed, began studying the history of
warfare—not just in this sector, but throughout human history, as far back as
they could go. They discussed superweapons and supertroops. They
discussed a unified front and a robotized military. They explored remote
fighting versus hands-on.

And they realized that nothing—no discovery, no miracle weapon, no
well-equipped soldier—had ever taken the place of living commanders with
a broad and unified vision.

And sometimes that vision was as simple as this: Annihilate the
enemy wherever you find him, whoever he might be.

According to the histories, the man who first articulated that simple
vision in the Colonnade Wars was Commander Ewing Trekov. Whether or
not that’s true is another matter.

What is true—and verifiable—is that Commander Trekov was the
most effective leader of the war. He destroyed more enemy strongholds,
captured more ships, and killed more soldiers—from all sides—than any
other commander in the war.

He was supposed to be at the victory celebration. More importantly,
he was supposed to be at the treaty signing ceremony. There wasn’t just
one treaty to be signed, but dozens—all with various governments (or, as
one observer more accurately called them, various survivors). Trekov’s
presence wasn’t just symbolic. He had negotiated several of the treaties
himself.