Ender's Shadow (Shadow, #1)

by Orson Scott Card

No point in getting emotional about anything. Being emotional didn’t help with survival. What mattered was to learn everything, analyze the situation, choose a course of action, and then move boldly. Know, think, choose, do.

A quick mind is no replacement for a strong, agile body.

What does Vauban have to do with war in space? “I’m waiting,” said Dimak. “Give me the insights that occupied you for two hours just yesterday.” “Well of course fortifications are impossible in space,” said Bean. “In the traditional sense, that is. But there are things you can do. Like his mini-fortresses, where you leave a sallying force outside the main fortification. You can station squads of ships to intercept raiders. And there are barriers you can put up. Mines. Fields of flotsam to cause collisions with fast-moving ships, holing them. That sort of thing.” Dimak nodded, but said nothing. Bean was beginning to warm to the discussion. “The real problem is that unlike Vauban, we have only one strong point worth defending—Earth. And the enemy is not limited to a primary direction of approach. He could come from anywhere. From anywhere all at once. So we run into the classic problem of defense, cubed. The farther out you deploy your defenses, the more of them you have to have, and if your resources are limited, you soon have more fortifications than you can man. What good are bases on the moons of Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune, when the enemy doesn’t even have to come in on the plane of the ecliptic? He can bypass all our fortifications. The way Nimitz and MacArthur used two-dimensional island-hopping against the defense in depth of the Japanese in World War II. Only our enemy can work in three dimensions. Therefore we cannot possibly maintain defense in depth. Our only de...

Defensive war didn’t take brilliance, just alertness. Early detection, cautious interception, protection of an adequate reserve.

Two trees—knowledge and life. You eat of the tree of knowledge, and you will surely die. You eat of the tree of life, and you remain a child in the garden forever, undying.”

“Only a fool closes the door when the wolf is already inside the barn.”

The result was that you ended up with a command structure that was top-heavy with guys who looked good in uniform and talked right and did well enough not to embarrass themselves, while the really good ones quietly did all the serious work and bailed out their superiors and got blamed for errors they had advised against until they eventually got out.

Inattention can make clowns of us all, he thought.

there’s no such thing as a rule of strategy that you can’t break.

The trouble was, innovation never resulted in victory over the long term. It was too easy for the enemy to imitate and improve on your innovations.

As Napoleon said, the only thing a commander ever truly controls is his own army—training, morale, trust, initiative, command and, to a lesser degree, supply, placement, movement, loyalty, and courage in battle. What the enemy will do and what chance will bring, those defy all planning. The commander must be able to change his plans abruptly when obstacles or opportunities appear. If his army isn’t ready and willing to respond to his will, his cleverness comes to nothing.

Nobody was going to wait for you to strike. Because here’s the thing—we don’t give a shit about fairness here. We’re soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chance they get.

No fair fights

One mind can think only of its own questions; it rarely surprises itself.

You can’t rule out the impossible, because you never know which of your assumptions about what was possible might turn out, in the real universe, to be false.

Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton University Press, 1986).