Quotes About Strategy

Silence is the secret of war.' —PRIOR

The successful British air attack on the Italian Fleet at Taranto, throwing modern first-class battleships out of action for many months, profoundly impressed the Japanese Navy with the power and possibilities of the new air arm, especially when combined with surprise.

In total war it is quite impossible to draw any precise line between military and non-military problems.

Lo que hemos ganado por las armas en medio año —dijo Moltke— debemos protegerlo con las armas por medio siglo, si queremos que no nos lo vuelvan a arrebatar».

As Lord Kitchener observed after one heart-shaking discussion: 'We cannot make war as we ought; we can only make it as we can.

The more morally impossible a military operation, the better chance it will have of success if it is physically practicable. Surprise—that sovereign talisman of War—springs from the doing of the exact thing the enemy is certain will never be tried.

No operation of a war is more critical than a night-march.

In the autumn of 1942, at the peak of the struggle for Guadalcanal, only three American aircraft-carriers were afloat; a year later there were fifty; by the end of the war there were more than a hundred.

the Battle of Alamein, called Desert Victory.

It is not known which of the three chiefs first conceived the master-plan by which the peace of the world is now so well defended that national armaments are falling into increasing neglect.

It is a joke in Britain to say that the War Office is always preparing for the last war. But this is probably true of other departments and of other countries, and it was certainly true of the French Army.

There is nothing they [Russian leaders] admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness, especially military weakness.

unfortunately we have to make war as we must and not as we should like to.

Germany could not gain complete air superiority unless she could knock out our Air Force, and the aircraft industries, some vital portions of which are concentrated at Coventry and Birmingham.

he would in any case have saved the British Army in France from the futile slaughter of May, and possibly even discouraged the French from the long and frightful follies of their Spring offensive in Artois in which they squandered nearly a quarter of a million men.

The best method of acquiring flexibility is to have three or four plans for all the probable contingencies, all worked out with the utmost detail. Then it is much easier to switch from one to the other as and where the cat jumps.

I resisted these movements whenever they came to my notice. In this I was supported by Marshal Stalin, who followed the Russian maxim, "You may always walk with the Devil till you get to the end of the bridge.

Although general staffs present the results of their labours in simple and precise assertions, these are no sure foundations upon which to make intricate plans depending upon a few days or a few divisions one way or another.

The best method of acquiring flexibility is to have three or four plans for all the probable contingencies, all worked out with the utmost detail.

It is said by several authorities that on being in the saddle he declared, "This day I conquer or die." Nothing was more unlike him. Months before in England he had used such words to Wratislaw, and assuredly they did not go beyond the truth. But, arrived at the point of action, it is more probable that he made some considerate inquiry about his horse's forage or his man's rations.

No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion.

Battles are won by slaughter and manœuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manœuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.

The problems of the second year of war must be dealt with by the experience of the first year of war. The problems of the third year of war must be met by results observed and understood in the second, and so on.

Nearly all the battles which are regarded as masterpieces of the military art, from which have been derived the foundation of states and the fame of commanders, have been battles of manœuvre in which very often the enemy has found himself defeated by some novel expedient or device, some queer, swift, unexpected thrust or stratagem. In many such battles the losses of the victors have been small.