Quotes About Strategy

Nevertheless Sir John French next day sent Joffre definitive notice that the British Army would not be in condition to take its place in the line "for another ten days." Had he asked for ten days' time out when fighting with his back to London he would not have survived in command. As it was, Sir John French remained Commander in Chief for another year and a half.

The Prime Minister was not the only person unconcerned with odds and ends of this kind. When a German official, foreseeing the change to a long war of attrition, presented Moltke with a memorandum on the need for an Economic General Staff, Moltke replied, "Don't bother me with economics—I am busy conducting a war.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip, and Germans, no less than other peoples, prepare for the last war.

The early removal from school of future officers of Britain's seapower, leaving them unacquainted with the subject matter and ideas of the distant and recent past, may account for the incapacity of no military thinking in a world that devoted itself to military action. With little thought of strategy, no study of the theory of war or of planned objective, war's glorious art may have been glorious, but with individual exceptions, it was more or less mindless.

The fact-finding mission was now the traditional Washington substitute for policy.

The one of you who bids nearest to the actual retail price of your own showcase without going over will win it. But if you're the winner and are $250 or less away from the price of your showcase, we'll have the pleasure of giving you *both* showcases!

Ballplayers do not argue with the umpire so that he'll change the decision in question. They want to be on his mind when he makes the next one.

The time to buy is when there's blood in the streets.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

A golf course is nothing but a poolroom moved outdoors.

I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.

Sex and politics are a lot alike. You don't have to be good at them to enjoy them.

It was like playing checkers, only to learn that your opponent was playing chess all along.

CEO Bill Hewlett personally authorized a $1 million crash program to develop a miniature, hand-held successor to the successful 9100 series desktop scientific calculator launched four years earlier. By that time, the HP catalog listed some 1,600 products, none of which sold more than ten units per day. Within six months of its launch in January 1972, the new HP-35 was selling 1,000 per day, and a year later accounted for a staggering 41 percent of the company's total profits.

In times of uncertainty or danger, when the net is cast, plan ahead or plan to think fast!

The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!

Never underestimate the kick to the groin.

But time and surprise are the two most vital elements in war.

It would seem that Caesar's recurrent and deep-rooted fault was his concentration in pursuing the objective immediately in front of his eyes to the neglect of his wider object. Strategically he was an alternating Jekyll and Hyde.

For Caesar met failure each time he relied on the direct, and retrieved it each time he resorted to the indirect.

Avoid a frontal attack on a long established position; instead, seek to turn it by flank movement, so that a more penetrable side is exposed to the thrust of truth. But, in any such indirect approach, take care not to diverge from the truth-for nothing is more fatal to its real advancement than to lapse into untruth.

Thus an excess of directness and a want of art, in the second phase, robbed Caesar of his chance of ending the war in one campaign, and condemned him to four more years of obstinate warfare all round the Mediterranean basin.

It was a strategic victory as bloodless for the defeated as for the victor-and the less men slain on the other side, the more potential adherents and recruits for Caesar. Despite the substitution of manoeuvre for direct assaults upon his enemy the campaign had cost him only six weeks of his time.

But Polybius brought out the basic lesson in his reflection-'for as a ship, if you deprive it of its steersman, falls with all its crew into the hands of the enemy; so, with an army in war, if you outwit or out-manoeuvere its general, the whole will often fall into your hands'.