Dietrich Heinrich von Bülow Dietrich Heinrich Freiherr von Bülow ( 1757 – 1807 ) , Prussia n soldier and military writer , and brother of General Count Friedrich Wilhelm Bülow , entered the Prussian army in 1773 . Routine work proved distasteful to him , and he read with avidity the works of Jean Charles , Chevalier Folard and other theoretical writers on war , and of Rousseau . After sixteen years service he left Prussia , and endeavoured without success to obtain a commission in the Austrian army . He then returned to Prussia , and for some time managed a theatrical company . The failure of this undertaking involved Bülow in heavy losses , and soon afterwards he went to America , where he seems to have been converted to , and to have preached , Swedenborg ianism . On his return to Europe he persuaded his brother to engage in a speculation for exporting glass to the United States , which proved a complete failure . After this for some years he made a precarious living in Berlin by literary work , but his debts accumulated , and it was under great disadvantages that he produced his " Geist des Neueren Kriegssystems " ( Hamburg , 1799 ) and " Der Feldzug 1801 " ( Berlin , 1801 ) . His hopes of military employment were again disappointed , and his brother , the future field marshal , who had stood by him in all his troubles , finally left him . After wandering in France and the smaller German states , he reappeared at Berlin in 1804 , where he wrote a revised edition of his " Geist des Neueren Kriegssystems " ( Hamburg , 1805 ) , " Lehrstze des Neueren Kriegs " ( Berlin , 1805 ) , " Geschichte des Prinzen Heinrich von Preussen " ( Berlin , 1805 ) , " Neue Taktik der Neuern wie sie sein sollte " ( Leipzig , 1805 ) , and " Der Feldzug 1805 " ( Leipzig , 1806 ) . He also edited , with G . H . von Behrenhorst ( 1733 – 1814 ) and others , " Annalen des Krieges " ( Berlin , 1806 ) . These brilliant but unorthodox works , distinguished by an open contempt of the Prussian system , cosmopolitanism hardly to be distinguished from high treason , and the mordant sarcasm of a disappointed man , brought upon Bülow the enmity of the official classes and of the government . He was arrested as insane , but medical examination proved him sane and he was then lodged as a prisoner in Kolberg , where he was harshly treated , though August von Gneisenau obtained some mitigation of his condition . Thence he passed into Russia n hands and died in prison at Riga in 1807 , probably as a result of ill - treatment . In Bülow ' s writings there is a distinct contrast evident between the spirit of his strategical and that of his tactical ideas . As a strategist ( he claimed to be the first of strategists ) he reduces to mathematical rules the practice of the great generals of the 18th century , ignoring friction , and maneuvering his armies " in vacuo " . At the same time he professes that his system provides working rules for the armies of his own day , which in point of fact were armed nations , infinitely more affected by friction than the small dynastic and professional armies of the preceding age . Bülow may therefore be considered as anything but a reformer in the domain of strategy . With more justice he has been styled the father of modern tactics . He was the first to recognize that the conditions of swift and decisive war brought about by the French Revolution involved wholly new tactics , and much of his teaching had a profound influence on European warfare of the 19th century . His early training had shown him merely the pedantic minutiae of Frederick ' s methods , and , in the absence of any troops capable of illustrating the real linear tactics , he became an enthusiastic supporter of the methods , which ( more of necessity than from judgment ) the French revolutionary generals had adopted , of fighting in small columns covered by skirmishers . Battles , he maintained , were won by skirmishers . We must organize disorder , he said ; indeed , every argument of writers of the modern extended order school is to be found " mutatis mutandis " in Bülow , whose system acquired great prominence in view of the mechanical improvements in armament . But his tactics , like his strategy , were vitiated by the absence of friction , and their dependence on the realization of an unattainable standard of bravery .