Montesquieu Quotes
Great commanders write their actions with simplicity; because they receive more glory from facts than from words.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. Mes Pensées. Translated by Henry C. Clark, Liberty Fund, 2012.
He was objecting to the current crop of senior military officer who have little experience in fighting and much in academic, strategic and technical training. Many however see him as a dinosaur who does not realized the complex nature of the modern military missions. In general, we have won almost all of our fighting battles but often failed in our maintaining civil society, occupation, nation building, military procurement, preventing sexual assault of our own troops by our own soldiers, assuring mental health of our soldiers. Hackworth, detractors argue, wants to change what already works and ignore what does not.
Von Stuben brought a formal discipline and organization to the American army and is referred to as “The Father of the U. S. Army.” Beaumarchais was a leading dramatist as well as a secret agent and his communiqués were doubtless the most flowery in the history of espionage and spying.
The General refused. He had already achieved a strategic victory and it was only a matter of time when the Dutch would withdraw on their own as their supply lines were cut off and the populations wanted them out.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher.
