Some guy called Napoleon seemed to know a little bit about maneuver warfare, and he was around before battleships. There was this little thing called the Battle of Austerlitz[1] that the author may be interested to read about.

Napoleon kind of knew what he was doing. His use of position and movement is actually mentioned in the Wikipeda's article on maneuver warfare [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Austerlitz [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maneuver_warfare#Napoleon.27s_u...