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My dad was a mathematician. And an Englishman, which is to say that the language of emotion was not his first language. Rather, it was like Latin, or French—something one could study and understand but never fully master.
I don’t think we lose our childhood fascinations.
But maybe the simpler answer is that the more a subject matters to you, the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it. The bar is higher.
While a naval commander may at the most be required to conduct a major action once or twice in the whole course of the war, and an army commander is engaged in one battle say once in six months or, in exceptional circumstances, as often as once a month, the commander of a bomber force has to commit the whole of it every twenty-four hours…It
Well, he would tell you that only God invents; humans discover. So for him, it was not “genius.” He would have refused to accept that term. He would not appreciate it, would not accept anyone calling him a genius. He would say he’s just one who discovers the greatness of God, the creations of God; that God reveals truths through people who are willing to work hard and to use their minds to discover God’s truths.
Revolutions are invariably group activities.
Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.”
That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.
And so we arrive at principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.
happened in Pittsburgh made him realize something. War, in its classical definition, is the application of the full weight of military forces against the enemy until the enemy’s political leadership surrenders.
“London raises her head, shakes the debris of the night from her hair, and takes stock of the damage done. London has been hurt during the night. The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.”
It turns out that people were a lot tougher and more resilient than anyone expected. And it also turns out that maybe if you bomb another country day in and day out, it doesn’t make the people you’re bombing give up and lose faith. Maybe it just makes them hate you, their enemy, even more.
The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds.
In short, [Don Quixote] became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.
But he was one of those guys that, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn’t ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to do it.
What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?
Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?
The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.
All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.
If you could put a fleet of B-29s on the Marianas, you could bomb Japan. The Japanese knew that, too, which led to another absurd moment: some of the ugliest fighting in the entire war was over three tiny clumps of volcanic rock that no one outside the western Pacific—no one—had so much as heard of before the war started.
Let’s start with LeMay, someone whose entire identity is about problem solving. It’s how he made sense of the world. He’s not a man of great personal charm and charisma. He’s not some towering intellectual. He’s a doer. As he put it much later: “I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something—even if it’s wrong he did something—than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.”
when a problem solver is finally free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.
Every revolutionary understands that the path to radical transformation is never smooth.
If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay…
Hansell embarrassed one of his officers in front of everyone, something no commanding officer should ever do, not if he wants to maintain the respect of his men.
he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering.
“the temptation to do evil that good may come; to justify the illegitimacy of the means by the greatness of the end.”
After the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” As many as one hundred thousand people died that night.
LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.
You wage war as ferociously and brutally as possible, and in return, you get a shorter war.
The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.
But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.
We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.
Without persistence, principles are meaningless.
There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will. Those are the hardest kinds of problems. But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity.
