p.23 Do not repeat the tactics which have gained you one victory, but let your methods be regulated
by the infinite variety of circumstances.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6, c. 500 BC, tr. Giles, 1910.
p.23-24 I have only one merit: I have forgotten... what I learned.
Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch
p.24 Success comes most readily to the commander whose ideas have not been canalised into
any one fixed channel, but can develop freely from the conditions around him.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, The Rommel Papers, 1953.
p.24 In any problem where an opposing force exists, and cannot be regulated, one
must foresee and provide for alternative courses. Adaptability is the law which governs survival in war as
in life - war being but a concentrated form of the human struggle against environment.
Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Strategy, 1954
p.40 The art of war is divided between art and strategem. What cannot be done by force, must be
done by strategem.
Frederick the Great, Instructions to His Generals, 1747, tr. Phillips, 1940.
p.41 The art of war is no more than the art of augmenting the chances which are in our favor.
Napoleon (1769-1821).
p.41 The art of war consists in getting at... what we do not know from what we do know.
The Duke of Wellington (1769-1852)
p.41 One does simply what one can in order to apply what one knows.
Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch
p.48 Battle is a complex and fickle thing. So command and control must be ready
to deal with abrupt changes in the situation, and sometimes to reshape an earlier plan radically.
Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail N. Tukhachevskiy
p.53 War is only a means to results...
Marshal of France Ferdinand Foch
p.53 men will prosper as long as they are in tune with the times and will fail when they are not.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, 1513.
p.58 In the whole range of human activities, war most closely resembles a game of cards.
Major-General Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1.1, 1832, tr. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 1976.
p.169 For success in the attack, two major problems must be solved - dislocation and exploitation.
One precedes and one follows the actual blow, which in comparison is a simple act. You cannot hit the enemy with effect unless
you have first created the opportunity; you cannot make that effect decisive unless you exploit the second opportunity that
comes before he can recover. (May 1930.)
Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, 1944.
p.175 The atom bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.
Admiral William Leahy to President Harry Truman before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 1945.
p.225 In all fighting, the direct approach may be used for joining battle, but indirect
methods will be needed in order to secure victory.
Indirect tactics, efficiently applied, are inexhaustible as Heaven and Earth
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 5, c. 500 BC, tr. Giles, 1910.
p.279 Military science consists in first calculating all the possibilities accurately and then making
an almost mathematically exact allowance for accident. It is on this point that one must make no mistake; a decimal
point more or less may alter everything. Now, this apportioning of knowledge and accident can take place only in the head
of a genius, for without it there can be no creation - and surely the greatest improvisation of the human mind is that which
gives existence to the nonexistent. Accident thus always remains a mystery to mediocre minds and becomes reality for superior
men.
Napoleon, conversation in the early 1800s
p.279 Nothing is better calculated to kill natural genius and to cause error to triumph, than those
pedantic theories, based upon the false idea that war is a positive science, all the operations of which can be reduced
to infallible calculations.
Lieutenant-General antoine-Henri Baron de Jomini, Summary of the Art of War, 1838,
tr. Mendell and Craighill, 1862
p.362-363 The art of war teaches to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on
our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made
our positions unassailable.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 8, c. 500 BC, tr. Giles, 1910.
p.366 If I appear to be always ready to reply to everything, it is because, before undertaking anything,
I have meditated for a long time - I have foreseen what might happen.
Napoleon
p.366 Given some acquaintance with actual war, and time for study, the mastery of strategy and tactics is
likely to be in proportion to the capacity for reflection, analysis, and originality of thought.
Captain Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Thoughts on War, 1944.
