On the Psychology of Military Incompetence Quotes

“Коли він подав на військовий конкурс свою статтю на тему «Механізація армії», то її відхилили на користь іншого тексту, «Обмеження танка». Суддями були фельдмаршал, генерал і полковник.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Тоді як сучасна війна стає все швидшою і смертоноснішою, а засоби її ведення — все складнішими, інтелектуальний рівень тих, хто приходить в армію на роль офіцерів, може недотягувати. Це припущення ґрунтується на тому, що дедалі менше молодих людей вважають військову службу привабливою.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“calamity howlers”—for the way they exaggerated difficulties and spun excuses for their failures—and noted that such leaders inexorably demoralized their units and infected them with negativity.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“The possibility of this happening is increased by the fact that the ‘fog of war’, unlike the uncertainties which attach to most civilian enterprises, extends not only to the input but also to the pay-offs. Not only does the general have to make decisions on the basis of a great volume of dubious information and meet a programme of perhaps questionable validity; he may also not know the costs and benefits of what he does propose. He is like a man who places a bet without knowing the odds or where the bookie might be found when once the race is over.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On The Psychology Of Military Incompetence

“opprobrium”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Elders”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“It is indeed ironic that one of the most conservative of professions should be called upon to engage in activities that require the very obverse of conservative mental traits. It is rather like expecting the Pope to run an efficient birth-control clinic. And, when it is considered that the”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“people who are primarily concerned with preserving the constraining forces in society have a soft spot for authoritarians. Those who aren’t do not.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“One must not judge everyone in the world by his qualities as a soldier: otherwise we should have no civilization”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“In personality, Lawrence is probably the least authoritarian senior commander the world has ever known.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“I attribute my present vitality to the imbibing of my mother’s milk beyond the legal period of nine months.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“The least competent should have a personality which manifests profound disturbance of the ego, rigidity, dogmatism and fear-of-failure motivation.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“There are no bad regiments, there are only bad officers.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“mind encumbered with little more than a rudimentary knowledge of the humanities will somehow muddle through, provided its owner has irreproachable good manners, unquestioning loyalty, total obedience and a sense of public duty.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“As applied to education, this cult of manliness and godliness was admirably designed to fit boys for shouldering the burden of the heterosexually deprived white man in far-flung outposts of the Victorian empire,”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“It seems then that in the case of achievement-motivation (as with obsessive tendencies), military organizations attract and then reinforce those very characteristics which will prove antithetical to competent military performance”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Even if he has, like Haig, considerable ability, and can learn to overcome the more disastrous products of a weak ego, the man who reaches a position of high command out of a compulsive thirst for personal advancement will tend to lack that creative talent and flexibility of mind so necessary in modern warfare”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“BESIDES PROVIDING LEGITIMATE outlets for aggression, the gratification of obsessive tendencies and reassurances about virility, armies and navies also cater for another basic human motive: the need to achieve.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Nor was he unique in being a senior soldier who combined an exquisite sense of honour with overpowering vanity, and a renown for skill in duelling with an almost total lack of intellect.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Man is basically a battlefield . . . a dark cellar in which a well-bred spinster lady and a sex-crazed monkey are for ever engaged in mortal combat, the struggle being refereed by a rather nervous bank clerk.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Research on individual differences in cognitive dissonance suggests that its effects are likely to be strongest in those afflicted with chronic low self-esteem and general passivity.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“It is a feature of strongly held dogmas that they steadfastly resist not only unpalatable truths but even the faintest suggestion of the barest possibility of the most tangential reference to an unacceptable fact.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“The blindness of hard-headed sailors to realities that were obvious to a dispassionate observer is only explicable through understanding the place that ‘ships of the line’ filled in their hearts. A battleship had long been to an admiral what a cathedral is to a bishop.8”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“the twenty major technological developments which lie between the first marine engine and the Polaris submarine, the Admiralty machine has discouraged, delayed, obstructed or positively rejected seventeen.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“No one would deny that horses are more lovable than tanks”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“Horses took the weight off feet and enabled people to go to war sitting down. When they lay down you could hide behind them. When it was cold you could borrow their warmth, and when they died you could eat them!”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“The British Chiefs of Staff advanced a proposition which, in spite of its inspired lunacy, has remained to this day at the heart of much of what passes for military thinking in this country . . . We are, in other words, here because we’re here because we’re here. Those who subscribe to the theory that armed forces should be designed to implement the nation’s chosen external policies should therefore rid their minds of such childish delusions; it is the size and shape of the armed forces, their recruiting rate, their equipment and their conditions of service which matter, and those charged with the formulation of foreign and defence policy had better order their affairs accordingly.1 In the period between the wars the shape and the equipment, if not the size, of the armed forces were partly determined by a number of curious military attitudes.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“increasingly vulnerable to enemy attack. In Mesopotamia there were four enemies: the Turkish Army, marauding Arabs, the terrain and the climate.”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence

“In a situation where the consequences of wrong decisions are so awesome, where a single bit of irrationality can set a whole train of traumatic events in motion, I do not think that we can be satisfied with the assurance that “most people behave rationally most of the time”.’ C. E. Osgood”
― Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence