Quotes About Strategy

The enemy will never attack you where you are strongest. . . . He will attack where you are weakest. If you do not know your weakest point, be certain, your enemy will.

Promote a troublesome thorn up and out of the way if you cannot crush him, and then, once gone, impose whatever was planned in the first place.

Military commanders choose to overlook the Kenyan proverb that proclaims the power of the flea--"A flea can trouble a lion more than the lion can harm a flea." Most generals would rather be lions than fleas.

The Russian Army had always believed in the power of artillery.

Boulton's strategic plan was on schedule. He had discerned an opportunity; had exploited it;* and was soon enough unsatisfied by it. By the end of 1782, he had identified the next conquest for the steam engine, an arena whose potential dwarfed that of the mining industry: wheels.

In June of 1944, when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the German commander in France, was told that the Allies were landing in Normandy, he knew exactly what to do. He went out into the garden and pruned his roses. Von Rundstedt knew that in war, early reports, regardless of whether the news is good or bad, are usually misleading. Reacting to them with instant analysis merely makes the problem worse.

In reality, a higher level of war always trumps a lower.

In planning a war, the most important task is to understand what can be planned and what cannot.

The concept of surfaces and gaps is one of several concepts that bear on tactics. It is of the same level of importance as mission tactics and the main effort, which will be the subjects of the two tactics lessons following this one. All of the concepts should be constantly at work during the execution of battle.

The second precondition is developing a viable strategy before entering a Fourth Generation conflict. We have already noted that our strategic goals must be realistic; we cannot remake other societies and cultures in our own image. Here, we offer another warning, one related directly to fighting Fourth Generation war: our strategy must not be so misconceived that it provides a primary reason for others to fight us.

Requiring cats to hunt like dogs will benefit only the mice.

It is important both for the preparation for war and the conduct of war that they know that Fourth Generation war is, above all, light infantry warfare.

This leads to the central dilemma of Fourth Generation war: what works for you on the physical (and sometimes mental) level often works against you at the moral level.

At the mental level, Fourth Generation war turns Clausewitz on his head. Clausewitz wrote that war is the extension of politics by other means. At the mental level of Fourth Generation war, politics is the extension of war by other means. Not only are all politics local, but everything local is politics.

There's method in his madness.

We may outrun By violent swiftness And lose by over-running.

There's an old saying that applies to me: you can't lose a game if you don't play the game. (Act 1, scene 4)

In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,I shot his fellow of the selfsame flightThe selfsame way with more advised watch,To find the other forth, and by adventuring both,I oft found both.

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,With windlasses and with assays of bias,By indirections find directions out.

Bait the hook well: this fish will bite.

Springes to catch woodcocks.

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.

Here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling.

Every way makes my gain.