Quotes About Strategy

In finance, everything that is agreeable is unsound and everything that is sound is disagreeable. Churchill

In the Second World War his bulldog obstinacy proved invaluable; during the Gallipoli campaign it left him appallingly vulnerable.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

Between 1793 and 1797, the French would lose 125 warships to Britain's 38, including 35 capital vessels (ships-of-the-line) to Britain's 11, most of the latter the result of fire, accidents and storms rather than French attack.15 The maritime aspect of grand strategy was always one of Napoleon's weaknesses: in all his long list of victories, none was at sea.

He had that ruthless side without which great affairs cannot be handled.

Churchill summed up the neutrals' position in a radio broadcast of 20 January 1940: 'Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.

Andrew Roberts

When Reynaud asked what would happen when the Germans attempted to invade Britain, Churchill replied, 'I haven't thought that out very carefully, but, broadly speaking, I should propose to drown as many as possible of them on the way over, and then "frapper sur la tête" [knock on the head] anyone who managed to crawl ashore.

Napoleon understood "that it is necessary never to inspire too much contempt for the enemy, because should you find an obstinate resistance, the morale of the soldier might be shaken by it."27 Instead, Napoleon openly recognized the worth of enemy units, thereby increasing his troops' morale when they overcame them.

Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts

Hatred plays the same part in Government as acids in chemistry

he demonstrated a flexibility of principle that verged on opportunism.

There are two people who sink U-boats in this war, Talbot,' he said. 'You sink them in the Atlantic and I sink them in the House of Commons. The trouble is that you are sinking them at exactly half the rate I am.

Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre,' he wrote in The World Crisis. 'The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.

set up to study the tactics and equipment required to defeat Japan, even recommended the use of mustard and phosgene gas against underground enemy positions, and was supported in this by Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Supreme Commander General Douglas MacArthur, but it was vetoed by President Roosevelt.

If he lasts a year, he'll go far.' Talleyrand on Napoleon's consulship

We don't let them rest,' said General Kurt Wallenius of the Finnish Northern Army; 'we don't let them sleep. This is a war of numbers against brains.

Above all, he was the first significant political figure to spot the twin totalitarian dangers of Communism and Nazism, and to point out the best ways of dealing with both.

Hitler in particular believed he learnt lessons about the performance of the Red Army that were to affect his decision to invade Russia the following year. Yet they were substantially the wrong ones.

When Stalin approved of issuing fake invasion plans for Overlord, Churchill said, to Stalin's vast amusement, 'In wartime, Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

My own experience of the First World War, and my readings in history,' he was later to write, 'had convinced me that the Prime Minister should be a man who knew what war meant, in terms of the personal suffering of the man in the line, in terms of high strategy, and in terms of that crucial issue – how the generals got on with their civilian bosses.

Another effect of the heavy rainfall of the night of 17–18 June that worked against Napoleon was the way that it softened the ground, to the extent that cannonballs tended to plough into the mud, rather than bounce along hardened ground. A cannonball fired at sun-baked ground might bounce as many as five or six times, leaving death and carnage in its wake, while one that merely buried itself after its initial impact had only a fraction of that lethal capacity.

The masses … should be directed without their being aware of it.' Napoleon to Fouché, September 1804