To fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
Good officers decline general engagements where the danger is common, and prefer the employment of stratagem and finesse to destroy the enemy as much as possible in detail and intimidate them without exposing our own forces.
It is much better to overcome the enemy by famine, surprise or terror than by general actions, for in the latter instance fortune has often a greater share than valor.
A general in all his projects should not think so much about what he wishes to do as about what his enemy will do; he should never underestimate this enemy, but he should put himself in his place to appreciate difficulties and hindrances the enemy could interpose; he will be deranged at the slightest event if he has not foreseen everything and if he has not invented the means with which to surmount the obstacles.
While never despising his enemy in the bottom of his heart, the general should never speak of him except with scorn.
We need only envision what would go on among the civilian population of congested cities once the enemy announced that we would bomb such centers relentlessly, making no distinction between military and non-military objectives…. The very magnitude of possible aerial offensives cries for an answer to the question, ‘How can we defend ourselves against them?’ To this I have always answered, ‘By attacking.’…. The fundamental concept governing aerial warfare is to be resigned to the damage the enemy may inflict upon us, while utilizing every means at our disposal to inflict even heavier damage upon him…. Mercifully, the decision will be quick in this kind of war, since the decisive blows will be aimed at civilians, that element of the countries at war least able to sustain them. These future wars may yet prove to be more humane than wars in the past in spite of all, because they may in the long run shed less blood. But there is no doubt that nations who find themselves unprepared to sustain them will be lost.
The issue is of winning the battles of the future, and of winning them so completely, so speedily, and so comprehensively that they will bring the war to a rapid conclusion.
Battle is essentially a moral conflict. It requires a mutual and sustained act of will by two contending parties and, if it is to result in a decision, the moral collapse of one of them…. What battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually also of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration—for it is towards the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.
Compiled by Jay Worthington.