A History of Strategy Quotes

“four men who do not know each other will hesitate to confront a lion. But once they know each other and feel they can trust each other they will do so without fear.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Accordingly, the Chinese texts regard war not as an instrument for the attainment of this end or that but as the product of stern necessity, something which must be confronted and coped with and managed and brought to an end. Clausewitz emphasizes that war is brutal and bloody and seeks to achieve a great victory. By contrast, the Chinese texts are permeated by a humanitarian approach and have as their aim the restoration of dao.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Thus knowing oneself is no less, and may be more, of a requirement than understanding the enemy.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“a process by which we co-ordinate our ideas, define the meaning of the words we use, grasp the difference between essential and unessential factors, and fix and expose the fundamental data on which everyone is agreed. In this way we prepare the apparatus of practical discussion…. Without such an apparatus no two men can even think on the same line; much less can they ever hope to detach the real point of difference that divides them and isolate it for quiet solution.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“According to Clausewitz, the purpose of studying war was to provide commanders with a sound basis for their thinking and render it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel with every new situation.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The need for strict discipline as a basis for all military action is equally evident in the remaining texts. According to Ssu-Ma the perfect army, placed far in the legendary past, requires neither rewards nor punishments. To make use of rewards but impose no punishments is the height of instruction; to impose punishments but issue no rewards is the height of awesomeness. Finally, employing a mixture of both punishments and rewards—combining sticks with carrots, as modern terminology has it—will end up by causing Virtue to decline. Thus the basic idea of dao, which underlines every one of these texts, breaks through once again. Governed by necessity, the best-disciplined army is so flawless that it requires neither rewards nor punishments. Behaving as if it were a single personality, it will follow its commander of its own accord. However, as the remaining texts make clear, this is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, attained.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Appraise it [war] in terms of the five fundamental factors,” says Sun Tzu. “The first of these factors is moral influence… by moral influence I mean that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders, so that they will accompany them in life and unto death without fear of mortal peril.” In the words of Sun Pin, “engaging in a battle without righteousness, no one under Heaven would be able to be solid and strong.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The non-state organizations that wage it rely largely on terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and popular insurgencies. However, they also engage in small-scale conventional warfare. The perfect examples are Hezbollah in 2006 and Daesh (ISIS) in 2014–2015. Neither organization is a state. Neither maintains the usual distinctions between government, armed forces, and people. However, both have enough money, troops, and conventional weapons to do more than wage terrorism and guerrilla alone.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Lind’s scheme has been widely adopted. Note, however, that it is based mainly on developments on the tactical and operational levels. It has relatively little to say about strategy, let alone grand strategy and the kind of political, economic, social and cultural factors in which the latter is rooted. In this it differs from some other schemes, including my own which is based on the distinction between “trinitarian” and “non-trinitarian” warfare. Here the assumption is that there are two basic kinds of war, i.e. those in which the distinction between government, armed forces and people is maintained and those in which it is not.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The way Lind sees it, the only Western commander who ever mastered third-generation warfare was George Patton. All others remained stuck in second-generation warfare, a blunt, clumsy instrument that had long outlived its usefulness and only worked because of the overwhelming advantage in firepower they enjoyed over Germany.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“However, by 1990, at the latest, the Clausewitzian framework was beginning to show serious cracks. As has just been said, it proved incapable of incorporating warfare by, or against, non-state actors.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“As a result, from 1945 on general works which tried to come to grips with the nature of war very often devoted a separate chapter to guerrilla warfare. They almost treated it as if it stood in no relation to anything else.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“In The Prince he says that “a just war is a necessary war,” thus cutting through the Gordian knot formed by endless Medieval discussions of Just War from Saint Augustine to Saint Thomas Aquinas.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The first is extreme flexibility which will enable one to take advantage of fleeting opportunities. Said Sun Tzu, “an army is like water which adapts itself to the configuration of the ground.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“War was neither a means in the hands of policy nor was it an end in itself. Instead it was regarded as an evil; albeit one that was sometimes made necessary by the imperfection of the world.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“As Plato wrote long ago, the only people who will no longer see war are the dead. Which, of course, is precisely why we need to understand it as best we can.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind