However, Clausewitz disliked Jomini personally and his concepts and may have instead emphasized the primacy of the political in warfare, and remained indifferent to theories arguing for any absolute solutions via the application of military force.
His archetypal attempt was at the Battle of Chancellorsville in which a classic Napoleonic flanking maneuver defeated but was not able to destroy the Union Army under Joseph Hooker.
Rather than pursuing the chimera of destroying John Bell Hood's army, Sherman chose to operate directly against the Confederate economy.
His famous march through Georgia, directly away from Hood, was basically the opposite of a Napoleonic strategy.
Armies were now too large to have flanks to turn and had too much firepower and too much defensive depth to be broken by assault.
The tactics executed by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War later served to inspire the blitzkrieg during World War II, with highly-mobile formations executing a battle of annihilation by charging straight into the enemy's weak point and attempt to encircle and destroy separate enemy pockets.
During the Pacific War, the Imperial Japanese Navy's strategy was fixated on the goal of luring the numerically-superior United States Pacific Fleet into a single decisive battle of annihilation, which would force the United States to sue for peace.
That was at least partially the motivation behind the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway but was loosely followed for as long as the IJN was capable of offensive operations.
Further, the IJN concentrated so much of its efforts on preparing for a single massive showdown, which never truly occurred, that it neglected devoting resources towards protecting its naval supply lines, which soon fell prey to a Fabian strategy when they were extensively targeted by US submarines.
Even Japanese victories such as the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands failed to annihilate their opponents utterly.