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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Knowing your enemy is good, but understanding their logistics is often better. No matter how they might want to respond, they’ll have limits that dictate their response far more than any desires they might want to indulge.”
“You don’t need learn to accept failure, or enjoy it,” Eric told him. “But don’t fear it either. Failure is the first step to success, and the most important. If you never fail, then you’ve never truly tried.”
Wars were not won on battles, they were won on understanding the true goals that defined the victory conditions, and those goals could be very different for each side in the conflict. In rare cases, in fact, it was entirely possible for both sides of a war to ‘win’, because their individual victory conditions didn’t negate each other. More often, though, the side that lost did so because it got tied up fighting the battles and forgot to fight the war.
The human brain was terrifyingly good at fooling itself into believing that it had a good handle on things… and there was little in the universe more dangerous than believing you understood what was going on when you really didn’t.
When something didn’t make sense, when the numbers didn’t add up, it was because you didn’t see all the variables at play. Ultimately, the numbers always add up, after all. There was no uncertainty in the universe, only in the perceptions of it.
When you were prosecuting a war over doctrine, well compromise rarely sat well with either side. How do you compromise with someone who’s faith ruled their actions? It wasn’t that it was hard, so much as it was utterly impossible, depending on what the point of contention was. If one side’s faith demanded that they kill the foreigners, well they weren’t going to bend on that… and the other side could hardly opt to compromise on it either.
