Quotes About Tactics

It is clear that whatever language of democracy [Barack] Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

It is clear that whatever language of democracy Obama and his administration use is very tactically deployed, and has as its main aim the extension of US power and interests.

A true master of politics is able to calculate, down to the smallest fraction, the advantages to which he may put his very faults.

If you have to choose between power and speed and it often turns out you have to make that choice, you've got to go for speed.

Never undervalue the enemies, especially if they are stupid.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.

Security is not a license for people in authority to hide tactics they would never openly admit to using.

When the game begins, let your rook remain in its position as the knight and the bishop advance to occupy the empty squares created by the moved pawns.

Don't one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.

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.

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 blitzkrieg, in short, had been perfected for a sleek, hard-muscled, superbly trained, and passionately motivated army, such as the German General Staff had fashioned during the decades between the wars. It was quite unsuited for a ponderous, top-heavy army of ill-trained soldiers led by timid officers, overseen by inexperienced party ideologues, and sent forth to conquer a country whose terrain consists of practically nothing but natural obstacles to military operations.

Education without excellence in techniques means action will not be timely or effective. But techniques without education means tactics will be formulistic, rigid, and predictable to the enemy.

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.

Maneuver warfare tactics are trust tactics. That is their single most important characteristic. And that's the biggest difference from what we do now." It is certainly the biggest change from the current command and control system. Trust and a shared way of thinking, leadership and monitoring, not fancy new C2 equipment, are what you need to be able to fight using maneuver warfare.

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.

When we teach tactics in the opposite order, that is, the mechanics ahead of the thinking, too often we produce, instead of soldiers, structured mechanics who find it difficult to think without rules. The art of war has no traffic with rules. Yet I have often seen students reject their best tactical ideas because they could not fit them into the format.

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.

Light infantry operations often follow a cycle that can be divided into four steps: Dispersion, Orientation, Concentration, and Action (DOCA).

We also see the power of weakness. In Fourth Generation warfare, the weak often have more moral power than the strong. One of the first people to employ the power of weakness was Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi's insistence on non-violent tactics to defeat the British in India was and continues to be a classic strategy of Fourth Generation war. When the British responded to Indian independence rallies with violence, they immediately lost the moral war.

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness.