Military Strategy Quotes

“The strategist should take up specific situations only after the requirement for provision of the spectrum of concepts has been met, and then only for one of two reasons. The first is for the derivation of logistic and material needs.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The “war is a continuation of policy” idea is the basis of a great deal of coordinated planning, with the foreign offices and the military departments putting their collective heads together at frequent and regular intervals.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“There is a type of warfare in which the entire pattern is made up of a collection of lesser actions, but these lesser or individual actions are not sequentially interdependent. Each individual one is no more than a single statistic, an isolated plus or minus, in arriving at the final result.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“mass communications in free societies, is an indispensable element of terrorism. Closed societies, with control of mass communications, are not good targets.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“What are the relationships, the correlations, between destruction and control? What will this show of force (which is potential destruction) or that segment of actual destruction contribute, directly or indirectly, now or later, to the control we seek as our aim in peace or war? Only by facing up to that kind of question, clinically rather than emotionally, can we move from profligacy toward efficiency in the planning and conduct of war.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“With respect to strategy as a subject of study, its intellectual framework is not clearly outlined, and its vocabulary is almost nonexistent. These two primary tasks are badly in need of doing. . . .”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“a general theory of strategy must, I believe, be a theory of power in all its forms, not just a theory of military power.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“As a hypothetical illustration, let us assume a conflict involving us in Afghanistan.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“There are not many other such places where the maritime element of our national strength cannot be applied, but where this is true, where the underlying premises of the maritime concept are not directly applicable, the problem is much more difficult.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“If we examine the four major limited theories of strategy—the continental, the maritime, the air and the Mao theories—and add to them the broader Liddell Hart theory of indirect approach, we find that they will all fit within the postulated general theory to the extent that the assumptions of the limited theories mesh with the realities of whatever may be the situation at hand.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“It should be clearly understood that this term “equilibrium” does not mean a static halt to action, although it conceivably could be this. More probably it is a rather fluid and even dynamic state of indecisiveness in which neither side has a clear advantage and in which the minor advantages of both sides more or less cancel out in their cumulative effectiveness insofar as that relates to the control of the course of the war. It”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“AT THIS STAGE of the argument we find ourselves with four ideas relating to war and war strategy—that there will be war, that the aim of war is some measure of control, that the pattern of war is not predictable, and that the ultimate tool of control in war is the man on the scene with a gun. What,”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun. This man is the final power in war. He is control. He determines who wins.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The second reason for which the military mind addresses itself to specific assumed situations is on the occasions when there may in reality exist a set of circumstances wherein either the probability or the potential hazard is so great and so clearly marked that specific and realistic plans can in fact be drawn on the basis of those assumptions.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The requirement is for a full bag of strategic concepts that will always provide, before and during war, not only a strategy applicable to a particular situation assumed for the future or existing at any given moment, but a most comprehensive reserve of strategies ready for use whenever the situation changes or when a war fails to proceed in accordance with the plan in use.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“we cannot predict with certainty the pattern of the war for which we prepare ourselves. We cannot, with reasonable certainty, forecast the time, the place, the scope, the intensity, the course, and the general tenor of a war.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“we cannot predict with certainty the pattern of the war for which we prepare ourselves.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“As we have noted before, it may well be necessary to defeat the enemy army. It may even be necessary to defeat it to the last remnant. But if we always saddle ourselves with the self-imposed restriction that we must, no matter what, defeat the enemy army in combat, then we have indeed denied to ourselves consideration of a vast span of actions that might more readily and easily achieve the needed measure of control.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“If any two theories of strategy are not compatible, then neither of them is a valid general theory. Both of them have, somewhere in their structure, a limiting weakness; and these limitations should be uncovered and identified in order to forestall attempts to apply the theory in situations where it will not work, in situations where the underlying assumptions do not fit the realities of whatever actual situation may be at hand. The”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The incomplete vocabulary of strategy as an intellectual discipline limits the communication of the central concept of indirectness. This concept, as it now stands, is formless.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“it is interesting to note that, in its degree of sophistication, the Liddell Hart theory is much more receptive to the concepts of Mao than those of Clausewitz.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“He argues, in effect, that the strategist should unbalance the enemy’s system, should make him expend energy to regain balance.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“the problem is how do we oppose a cumulative strategy with a sequential strategy? Or must we, ourselves, develop some sort of cumulative strategy to oppose it? For”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“Guerrilla war is the war of the broad masses of an economically backward country standing up against a powerfully equipped and well trained army. . . . Is the enemy strong? One avoids him. Is he weak? One attacks him . . .”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The important point, and the crux of the Mao heresy, is that the rural peasant is the base of power. This is a rural, not an urban, revolution, and the important action takes place out in the country, not in the cities. There”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The bibles (in English translation) are Mao Tse-Tung on Guerrilla Warfare by Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith, USMC (Ret), which contains General Griffith’s excellent translation of Mao’s Yu Chi Chan of 1937; People’s War People’s Army by Vo Nguyen Giap; and Che Guevara on Guerrilla Warfare by Major Harries-Clichy Peterson, USMCR, which contains Major Peterson’s translation of Guevara’s Guerrilla Warfare, written in 1960 as a primer for Latin-American revolution. These”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“the soldier, few men realize, is the only one of the military men who cannot do his part of the war alone.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“the soldier cannot function alone. His flanks are bare, his rear is vulnerable, and he looks aloft with a cautious eye. He needs the airman and the sailor for his own security in doing his own job. This”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“The ultimate objective of all military operations is the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces and his will to fight.”* This sums up the gist of the soldier’s theoretical concept of war strategy in one succinct sentence.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control

“to any soldier, what he does is tactical and what his next senior does is strategic.”
― J.C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control