Military Planning Quotes

The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.

A war regarded as inevitable or even probable, and therefore much prepared for, has a good chance of eventually being fought.

Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.

In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.

Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed? If you have, prosecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try and assist you in the formation of some plan for the army.

I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing.

In war everything is uncertain, and calculations have to be made with variable quantities …. all military action is intertwined with psychological forces and effects.

Our military thought that they couldn't get to Pearl Harbor, that it was too long a journey from Japan to get there, and they proved us wrong.

Human affairs are governed by such a variety of whimsical circumstances, that we should always be prepared to stand the shock of that disappointment which the best concerted measures are constantly subject to.

The implication that there was something wrong with the war plan is amusing.

In Washington the semantics of the military muted the reality of war for the civilian policy-makers. In quiet, air-conditioned, thick-carpeted rooms, such terms as 'systematic pressure,' 'armed reconnaissance,' 'targets of opportunity,' and even 'body count' seemed to breed a sort of games-theory detachment.

No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Strategic thinkers were naturally rattled to find this outsider fooling around with their work. They had been thinking strategically when Reagan was just another movie actor playing opposite a chimpanzee, for heaven's sake. They think Reagan is too naive, too innocent, to grasp the intellectual complexities of cold war strategy.

In warfare, first lay plans which will ensure victory, and then lead your army to battle; if you will not begin with stratagem but rely on brute strength alone, victory will no longer be assured.

No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.

It is a common mistake in going to war to begin at the wrong end, to act first, and wait for disasters to discuss the matter.

The military has to think in terms of worst case scenarios. In a sense, they have to play the pessimist.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could — with 100 per cent certainty — know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

When we go to war we always make some wrong assumptions. The most common is that the war will be short.

Our military plans should be based on the assumption of unpredictability, rather than on carefully drawn, static models of the world.

Nothing so comforts the military mind as the maxim of a great but dead general.

The important thing to remember is war does not progress linearly. The future course of events is going to be very difficult to predict with a high degree of precision.

Accidents will happen. We have formulated our policy on the assumption that some bluffing contest will eventually go wrong, resulting in dead soldiers. The focus has to be on minimizing damage.

The enemy of our games was always Japan, and the courses were so thorough that after the start of World War II, nothing that happened in the Pacific was strange or unexpected.

The fate of a Nation may sometimes depend upon the position of a fortress.