Quotes About Strategy

Clifford Rutledge II was the perfect diplomat. He believed in little beyond his own career, some vague notions of international amity, and his personal ability to make it come about and to avoid war through the sheer force of his brilliance.

good data organized effectively was the most important commodity for any analyst.

I remember when Deng said, 'It doesn't matter if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.' To which Mao responded with a livid snarl: 'What emperor said that?

how could a man lead without vision?

and air power had never won a war.

anyone who knew anything about military science could have seen it coming, because the tiny nation of Estonia had focused on diplomacy, not on its physical defense. Edgar Nõlvak had seen it coming, not because he was a soldier or a politician—he was a schoolteacher—but he had seen it coming because he watched television.

level attacks. Their primary

Confusion is the ally of the prepared

It's all about intelligence; and intelligence comes down to a bunch of faceless bureaucrats sifting through all this crap.

It is good to be brave, Lieutenant. It is better to be smart, and much less painful for those around you

Heavy enemy jamming activity to the west," the regimental commander announced. "Plan Three. Repeat: Plan Three.

It's a way to attack an enemy systematically—all over, all at the same time. And you can do real harm that way.

proverbial pros from Dover

Armada y sería una maldita tonta si no hubiera pensado que

you can follow along.

The U.S. military must be able to project massive, shattering force quickly from many directions—land, sea, air, and space—which means, among other things, that service parochialism is an expensive and dated luxury. The new military mantra is "jointness"—all the services must be able to work together as well and as comfortably as with members of their own organizations.

The new system created by Goldwater-Nichols was not universally popular in the Pentagon, but the people in the field loved it.

When the French high command had got wind of the German Schlieffen Plan prior to World War I, their reaction had been, "So much the better for us!" That assault had barely ground to a halt outside Paris. In 1940, the same high command had greeted initial news of another German attack with smiles—and that attack had ended at the Spanish border. The problem was that people tended to wed their ideas more faithfully than their spouses, and the tendency was universal. It

but the point of any deployment was not the movement and placement of forces, but the way the forces could be brought to bear against a potential enemy.

It described a horse without telling the listener how he intended to use the horse.

Cheating was a concept both foreign and integral to the fighting of wars.

Find the enemy. Don't let the enemy find you. Reconnaissance! Reconnaissance! Reconnaissance!

Like I keep telling people, the more thinking you do before things get exciting, the less exciting things will be. And they get plenty exciting enough.

Quentin leaned forward. A circle had just changed to a dot. A P-3C had just dropped an explosive sounding charge and localized an Echo-class attack sub five hundred miles south of the Grand Banks. For an hour they had a near-certain shooting solution on that Echo; her name was written on the Orion's Mark 46 ASW torpedoes.