xiv Maxims often are statements of what should be obvious.
To attain maxim status, a claim must be much more than merely the opinion of one person... These maxim essays comprise
the building blocks of strategic theory, stripped of the usual scholarly paraphernalia, which can impede clarity.
xv It is useful to conceive of strategy as the bridge between political
intent and military power, or power more generally if the subject is grand strategy.
xvi I believe that these forty maxims have universal validity... a strategic education
led by the judgments in these maxims increases the chances that one's errors will be small rather than large.
They will be tactical and operational, rather than political and strategic. This means that errors ought to be capable of
being corrected because they fall in the area of implementation rather than purpose. Strategic success can never be guaranteed.
p.5-6 The strategist inhabits a universe wherein complexity is authoritative. That is the
fact. But, the practical people who must decide upon and do strategy are ever on the look out for shortcuts...
Strategy is a pragmatic enterprise. Officials and soldiers need solutions, not an understanding of complexity bereft of usable
answers. As a consequence, strategy is eternally at hazard to the siren call of the technological solution, the cultural fix,
the promise of historical understanding, and so forth.
p.11 In its military dimension, war is relatively straightforward. The object of the exercise is to bend
the enemy to our will. This can be accomplished in two ways: physical control of the enemy's ability to fight, or by coercion,
which leads the enemy to choose not to resist further.
p.29 Policy should direct warfare, with strategy as the mediating, implementing agent.
But, policy usually cannot know what it should ask for until it understands what is practicable. And that knowledge
can derive only from the actual experience of warfare.
p.35 although warfare has a grammar and a dynamics of its own, it is wasted effort and sacrifice unless
policy retains a grip on strategy.
p.40 The least yielding dimension of war for the strategic gambler is, of course, the independent will of
the enemy. We can control our actions
up to that vital point where they first meet the foe, but beyond that prior calculation of expected advantage becomes guesswork.
p.43 Planning for certitude is the greatest
of all military mistakes. J.C. Wylie, 1989
p.48 What is strategy? ... it is the bridge that connects the worlds of policy and military power. It is
strategy that interprets the meaning of policy for military power, and which must devise schemes for the threat or use of
that power to serve the purposes of policy... My definition holds that "strategy is the use that is made of force
and the threat of force for the ends of policy."
p.49 most civilian officials and soldiers do not understand strategy well enough to know just how
badly they are in need of its perspective. So few people are required to make strategy on behalf of their security
community, and then they do so only episodically, that there is not a constant, let alone heavy, demand for genuinely
strategic expertise.
p.54 the strategist must translate political desires into plans for their realization.
p.55 The strategist will try to select a theory of victory and a strategy for its execution
that favors his country's (or other kind of security community's) strengths, and provides compensation for its weaknesses.
p.55 the strategist... is charged with ensuring that military assets are employed in ways ultimately
conductive to the securing of a high political return on effort... Bad strategy would be strategy that either could
not satisfy political needs or places impractical demands on the troops and their assets for logistical support.
p.58 Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, Sun-Tzu's Art of War, and Clausewitz's On
War comprise the essential trilogy for understanding strategy. Indeed, people cannot be regarded as educated
in strategy unless they are familiar, and more, with these books.
p.69 In consequence, they concentrate on what they can strive to control
p.70 [I]n war, time... is the great element between weight and force. Napoleon, 1809
p.70 once time has passed it is gone... Poor performance on every other dimension of strategy can,
in principle, be corrected and improved... In history, however, there is only one chance to use the stream of time.
p.80 Every example of strategy, past, present, and future has to be geographically translatable... All military
behavior must be ordered, executed, and exploited, in a geographical context.
p.82 Grand strategy refers to the employment of all the assets available to a belligerent, a state, or any
other kind of security community in pursuit of a common political goal.
p.83 The strategist studies and practices... the threat and use of force. That is the mission.
Because strategy for warfare has to entail the threat to inflict, or the actual infliction of... destruction as means
to influence the will of an enemy
p.129 Nothing is certain until it actually occurs.
p.139 It is hard to develop a coherent strategy if a coherent policy is lacking. And, to be fair, it is
difficult to decide upon a coherent policy if the information necessary for the construction of such a policy is missing.
p.156 Ignorance about the detail of future history is simply a condition for doing business in statecraft
and strategy.
p.157 the strategist as defense planner should follow the golden rule of minimum regrets. The goal cannot
be to make error free predictions about the future. Instead, it is to make only relatively minor mistakes. Excellence for
a strategist looking forward is to make no fatally irretrievable errors: to make no mistakes of the kind for which no ready
compensation can be found.
p.157 We judge the unknown to be unlikely. S. Douglas Smith, 2004
p.160 The only answer to the problem of surprise effect is to be adaptable and flexible over a range
of plausible, and some implausible but potentially deadly, threats. What the strategist struggles to prevent is the enthronement
of the kind of official strategic certainty which precludes the development of strategic and military postural flexibility.
p.165 the maxims... explained here... seek to convey not only knowledge, but useful knowledge. Strategy
is a practical pursuit.
