pursuit

(pər-sūt')
n.

1. The act or an instance of chasing or pursuing.
2. The act of striving: the pursuit of higher education.
3. An activity, such as a vocation or hobby, engaged in regularly.

[Middle English, from Anglo-Norman pursuite, from pursure, to pursue. See pursue.]

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noun

1. The following of another in an attempt to overtake and capture: chase, hot pursuit. See seek/avoid.
2. An attempting to accomplish or attain: pursuing, quest, search. See seek/avoid.
3. Activity pursued as a livelihood: art, business, calling, career, craft, employment, job, line, métier, occupation, profession, trade, vocation, work. Slang racket. Archaic employ. See action/inaction.
4. A working at a profession or occupation: practice. See do/not do, work/play.

n

Definition: chase, search
Antonyms: retreat, surrender

Pursuit is the most demanding—and often most neglected—phase of war. Most casualties occur not in the initial clash of arms but when one side breaks and runs. However, once the initial fury of the assault is spent, the incentive to expend more effort pursuing a fleeing enemy rapidly evaporates. Pursuit is going that extra mile—or hundreds of miles—to ensure the enemy is either trapped or utterly destroyed and cannot reassemble to be a threat again.

The Mongols were probably the greatest exponents of pursuit, not stopping until the enemy was hunted down and annihilated. After their first encounter with the Russians, at the river Khalka in 1223, they pursued the Russian survivors ruthlessly. After the defeat of the Mamelukes at the battle of Salamiyet, pursuing Mongol troops were seen as far south as Gaza, some 311 miles (500 km) from the battle. This may have been because, to the Mongols, land was not important. It was just an element across which one moved, like the sea. As in naval warfare, therefore, it was not enough just to drive the enemy from the field, or into port. He had to be pursued, fixed, held in place, and eliminated. This may be one reason for the tremendous emphasis on pursuit in the Asiatic and, by connection, Russian and Soviet style of war. Timur, like his distant forebear Genghis Khan, also understood the importance of pursuit. He personally pursued Sultan Ahmed into Baghdad, and then out of the kingdom. Pursuit seems embedded in the Russian and Soviet style of war. Trotsky, even when exiled, was still hunted down and killed in 1940.

Cavalry was the arm best able to conduct pursuit, the harrying of the Prussian army after Jena/Auerstadt being a classic modern example. But it often failed to perform this function. The American civil war Confederate cavalry commander Stuart, for example, was criticized for never conducting ‘a pursuing raid after a victorious battle’, in other words letting the enemy off the hook. By contrast his colleague Jackson fought to the principle ‘move swiftly, strike vigorously and secure all the fruits of victory’. Students of armoured warfare will recognize that the latter and not the former understood the crucial interaction of breakthrough, exploitation, and pursuit.

At the end of the 19th century, partly as a result of the lessons of the American civil war, special attention was paid to ‘strategic raids’ by cavalry and its role in pursuit. Because pursuit on the battlefield, now disrupted by trenches and accurate rifle fire, was expected to be very difficult (which proved totally correct), strategic pursuit by cavalry was of greater importance than ever. Furthermore, pursuit would ideally be conducted in parallel with the retreating enemy on one or, ideally, both flanks, so as to continually threaten to envelop him and thus prevent him establishing new lines of defence. To pursue—and draw parallel with—a retreating enemy, and threaten envelopment required speed, above all, and the ability to cover great distances. See manoeuvre warfare.

During WW I, pursuit became as difficult as the pre-war military writers had all predicted. Armies dependent on railways could hardly move across the tactical zone beyond the railheads, never mind into territory vacated by an enemy who had thoughtfully destroyed every vestige of the transport infrastructure. This was the fundamental problem which affected the Allied forces in WW I. Having turned the ground into a quagmire with artillery fire and either bombed the railways and roads behind to oblivion or invited the withdrawing enemy to do so, it was hard enough to advance, never mind pursue. In the Middle East, it remained possible, and Allenby's offensive at Megiddo in September 1918 was a rare example of breakthrough, exploitation, and pursuit, the latter accomplished, in part, by the RAF which savaged retreating Turkish columns. At Amiens, in August 1918, the British and Commonwealth forces had also managed to pursue to some extent. The Australians caught a German corps headquarters withdrawing and the corps commander made his escape just in time. The Australian battalion commander noted: ‘our men killed the lot (using 3, 000 rounds) and left them there; four staff officers on horseback shot also.’

The lingering idea that gentlemanliness has a place in war can be seen in the 1991 Gulf war. The Iraqis who had raped Kuwait were retreating with some hostages and much booty, and the Allied air forces caught them on the Mutla ridge. The expected effect of the images of the massacre on public opinion was such that one of the muted objectives of the war—the destruction of the Iraqi Republican Guard—was abandoned. It was considered (possibly wrongly) that ‘public opinion’ would not tolerate the continued destruction of defeated troops clearly on the run. Thus prompt media coverage and political squeamishness meant that pursuit, without ceasing to be the only way to secure all the fruits of victory, was curtailed.

— Christopher Bellamy

Quarterly publication of the Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained. The Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained was founded in 1966 by explorer-author Ivan T. Sanderson (1911-1973), an enthusiastic student of the research of Charles H. Fort into strange and anomalous phenomena and events. Pursuit included reports on the wide range of Fortean phenomena, i.e., bizarre events, strange anomalies, synchronicities and scientific ambiguities often ignored or explained away, such as unusual falls from the skies, mysterious disappearances and reappearances, stigmata, earthquake and tornado anomalies, invisible assassins, teleportation, UFO s, levitation, monsters, inexplicable fires and explosions. The society died soon after Sanderson's death in 1973 and with it went Pursuit.

(DOD, NATO) An offensive operation designed to catch or cut off a hostile force attempting to escape, with the aim of destroying it.

IN BRIEF: The act of following to catch. Also: An activity to which one gives time and energy.

Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.

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Quotes:

"The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The rapture of pursuing is the prize the vanquished gain." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Men tire themselves in pursuit of rest." - Laurence Sterne

For a list of words related to pursuit, see:

• Hunting Practice and Techniques - pursuit: act of following game so as to overtake and kill it

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See words rhyming with "pursuit."

Common misspelling(s) of pursuit

• persuit

Dansk (Danish)
n. - forfølgelse, stræben, udøvelse

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    lige i hælene på
• in pursuit of    på jagt efter, under udøvelse af

Nederlands (Dutch)
streven, bezigheid, achtervolging, najagen

Français (French)
n. - poursuite, recherche (du bonheur), passe-temps

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    à vos trousses
• in pursuit of    à la recherche de

Deutsch (German)
n. - Trachten, Jagd, Beschäftigung, Verfolgung, Streben

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    dicht auf den Fersen
• in pursuit of    auf der Jagd nach, bei der Ausführung

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - δίωξη, καταδίωξη, κυνήγημα, επιδίωξη, ασχολία, ενασχόληση, επάγγελμα, εργασία

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    καταδίωξη κατά πόδας
• in pursuit of    κατά την/στην αναζήτηση του, σε καταδίωξη

Italiano (Italian)
occupazione, inseguimento, caccia, ricerca, ambizione

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    alle calcagna
• in pursuit of    alla ricerca di

Português (Portuguese)
n. - perseguição (f), busca (f), atividade (f)

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    em plena atividade
• in pursuit of    à busca de

Русский (Russian)
занятие, погоня, преследование, поиски

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    по пятам
• in pursuit of    для достижения чего-либо

Español (Spanish)
n. - profesión, ocupación, persecución, búsqueda, aspiración, pasatiempo

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    pisando los talones
• in pursuit of    en busca de

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - förföljande, förföljelse, strävan, bedrivande, utövande, sysselsättning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
追踪, 追击, 继续进行, 从事, 追求, 寻求, 事务

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    穷追
• in pursuit of    追求, 寻求

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 追蹤, 追擊, 繼續進行, 從事, 追求, 尋求, 事務

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    窮追
• in pursuit of    追求, 尋求

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 추격, 추적

idioms:

• in hot pursuit    맹렬히 추적하여
• in pursuit of    ~을 찾아서

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 追跡, 追撃, 追求, 続行, 遂行, 従事, 研究

idioms:

• in pursuit of    追って, 求めて

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مطاردة, متابعه, حرفه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮רדיפה, מקצוע, עיסוק, פעילות‬

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