The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.
In war, the chief incalculable is the human will.
The most dangerous error is failure to recognize our own tendency to error.
If you want peace, understand war.
In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance.
Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure.
Direct pressure always tends to harden and consolidate the resistance of an opponent.
The theory of the indirect approach operates on the line of least expectation.
Air Power is, above all, a psychological weapon - and only short-sighted soldiers, too battle-minded, underrate the importance of psychological factors in war.
War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.
The unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success.
The downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.
The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men.
Avoid self-righteousness like the devil- nothing is so self-blinding.
It should be the aim of grand strategy to discover and pierce the Achilles' heel of the opposing government's power to make war. Strategy, in turn, should seek to penetrate a joint in the harness of the opposing forces. To apply one's strength where the opponent is strong weakens oneself disproportionately to the effect attained. To strike with strong effect, one must strike at weakness.
For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.
The higher level of grand strategy [is] that of conducting war with a far-sighted regard to the state of the peace that will follow.
A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.
The most effective indirect approach is one that lures or startles the opponent into a false move - so that, as in ju-jitsu, his own effort is turned into the lever of his overthrow.
Every action is seen to fall into one of three main categories, guarding, hitting, or moving. Here, then, are the elements of combat, whether in war or pugilism.
The military weapon is but one of the means that serve the purposes of war: one out of the assortment which grand strategy can employ.
Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.
Air forces offered the possibility of striking a the enemy's economic and moral centres without having first to achieve 'the destruction of the enemy's main forces on the battlefield'. Air-power might attain a direct end by indirect means - hopping over opposition instead of overthrowing it.
I used to think that the causes of war were predominantly economic. I came to think that they were more psychological. I am now coming to think that they are decisively "personal," arising from the defects and ambitions of those who have the power to influence the currents of nations.
No man can exactly calculate the capacity of human genius and stupidity, nor the incapacity of will.
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