Nope, that tactic was conceived by the Romans, in Latin: 'Divide et Impera' (literally: Divide and rule)

Julius Caesar and other Roman rulers applied that tactic. It actually originated in the political arena, and not on the battlefield.

Not really. All generals involved in the Civil War chose to not use newer warfare technology. Especially good old Abe Lincoln (namely his disreguard of a prototype machine gun that would have slaughtered the South). Know why he didn't use it? He was scared that it uses too many bullets to keep up with payment with.

Robert E. Lee basically disregaurded "new" technology because the south was poor and run down.

In the decade before the American Civil War, a new infantry hand weapon appeared, the single-shot Minie-ball rifle, which had four times the range of the musket and revolutionized warfare---although few commanders on either side recognized this fact.

One Comander did, Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, and he combined the vastly increased killing power of the rifle with a new variation of the defend-then-attack principle to devise a way to win the war for the South.

Though Jackson's concepts brought spectaculart results on the few occasions they were practices, he was unsuccessful in persuading his comander, Robert E. Lee, to adopt them fully. And when Jackson was mortally wounded at Chancellorsville in May 1863, Lee reverted to the extremely costly headlong assault tactics of nearly all the commanders in the Civil War. As a result, by the time the war ended, 600,000 Americans had died, one person in sixty in the entire population, not to speak of the enormous numbers who were maimed and crippled.

Jackson was unable to influence Confederate tactics till the second year of the war. By that time he realized the methods being used were causing distaster, especially to the Southerners, who had only one-third the manpower of the North.

Tactics in the war came straight out of the Mexican War, which had eneded thirteen years before. Soldiers formed up in close-ordered lines, two men deep, and moved forward to attack the enemy standing in identical formations. With mustkers, this made sense. Soldiers had to approach within a hundred yards, often closer, before muskets had much effect. Both attackers and defenders also fough standing up, because reloading single-shot muskets and rifles was virtually impossible lying on the ground.

Attacking forces thus had to remain exposed. Defending troops om theory might shield themselves behind barricades or fortifications, but doctrine rejected this because troops so located could not form up quickly to counterattack if their enemy was defeated. Furthermore, commanders believed troops behind barricades would be reluctant to abandon them and go over to the attack.

Consequently, soldiers both attacked and defended in closely packed lines. They did not build field fortifications,and, once the Minie-ball rifle came into existence, were shot down in apalling numbers.

Stonewall Jackson witnessed this carnage at the battle of First Manassas in July 1861, where his brigade had stood "like a stone wall" in the midst of a flood of fleeing Confederate who could not withstand the storm of Union rifle fire. Jackson's unyielding brigade was the rack around which the Confederate army rallied. This won the battle for the South and gave Jackson the name he will bear forever. However, Stonewall Jackson was more deeply impressed by the battles of the Seven Days, Jun26-July 2,1862, just east of Richmond, when the new senior Confederate commander, Robert E. Lee, ordered headlong attacks against defending Union troops, and lost a quarter of his entire army.

Jackson had already tried four times to persuade the Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, to abandon head-to-head confrontations, sweep behind Washington, cut off its trail of communications and hence its food supply, force Abraham Lincoln's government to vacate, and take the war to the Northern people. If Northern cities were occupied and factories destroyed, he was convinced, the North would concede the South independence. But Davis did not want to invade the North, and hoped the Northern people would tire of the war and grant peace.

Jackson knew this was not going to happen. Despairing of changing Davis' mind, he looked for other ways to defeat the North. Lee's concept of war offered no hope at all. Although Jackson soon became Lee's principal lieutentant as well as his most cogent adviser, he could not alter Lee's conviction that the best way to fight a battle was to attack his enemy head-on, to try and force a decision. Lee nuver fully grasped the fact that the Minie ball had changed battle fundementally, though five out of six attacks in the war failed.

Lee is one of the supreme examples in history of a commander who disregards the circumstances he finds himself in, and continues on a policy that is bound to result in disaster. Although most of the senior officers on both sides were unable to fathom the problem presenting by the Minie-ball rifle, Lee was offered a solution time after time by Stonewall Jackson, and time after time he had rejected it.

Robert E Lee's case especially is a cautionary tale. Lee was a model of honor, integrity, and devotion to duty and to his men, and the battle mothods he employed were enshrined in the successes of the Mexican War, in which he had been a hero. Other leaders found it difficult if not impossible to criticize him, even as disasters accumulated from his first days as commander.

Our real models for the future should be officers like the four commanders above[Belisarius, Narses, King Edward II, Stonewall Jackson], who studied their problems with logic, creativity, and imagination, and came up with original solutions. Lee, on the other hand, should show use that we must question concepts presented as axiomatic because they succeeded in the past.

You are leaving out great strategical points such as in the Battle of Yorktown and the Second Battle of Bunker Hill, which are great strategist points.