Quotes About Strategy

A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla army wins if it does not lose.

No foreign policy-no matter how ingenious-has any chance of success if it is born in the minds of a few and carried in the hearts of none.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

In the end, peace can be achieved only by hegemony or by balance of power.

A more immediate issue concerns North Korea, to which Bismarck's nineteenth-century aphorism surely applies: "We live in a wondrous time, in which the strong is weak because of his scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.

Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.

Realpolitik for Bismarck depended on flexibility and on the ability to exploit every available option without the constraint of ideology.

What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.

When statesmen want to gain time, they offer to talk.

If chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage.

Order should not have priority over freedom. But the affirmation of freedom should be elevated from a mood to a strategy.

Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of "center of gravity" and the "decisive point"—the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.

Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real dis­tinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.

The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.

The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat.

For the balance of power is never static; its components are in constant flux.

Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.

Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.

For Sun Tzu, victory is not simply the triumph of armed forces. Instead, it is the achievement of the ultimate political objectives that the military clash was intended to secure.

The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America

Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.