Sarah Paine

It means those forces you have who are in excess of what's necessary for homeland defense.

It's not disposable force.

It's rather a force that if everything goes south, you won't ruin the homeland.

But you can afford to risk it on potentially very risky but potentially war-changing operations.

In addition, they've got to be joint operations.

Joint means cooperation of land and sea in this era.

And in order—you're going to come in by sea, you're going to supply by sea, but you'll be fighting on land.

You better coordinate all that.

And it's got to be combined operations.

What does that mean?

Coordinating with allies.

You need friendly locals who are going to help you do all of this.

And then you need to command your own forces.

Why?

Because you want to determine how they come in, how they go out.

If it all goes badly, you want to be able to leave, which is what they did at Dunkirk.

As much as the Continental Power might want to play this game, they cannot because they don't have the—

the requisite sea access to pull it off.

All right.

The war winds up with Britain and the United States going through four phases.