With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.
B. H. LIDDELL HARTIn strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there- a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender’s hold by upsetting his balance.
More B. H. Liddell Hart Quotes
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Ensure that both plan and dispositions are flexible, adaptable to circumstances. Your plan should foresee and provide for a next step in case of success or failure.
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An army should always be so distributed that its parts can aid each other and combine to produce the maximum possible concentration of force at one place, while the minimum force necessary is used elsewhere to prepare the success of the concentration.
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If you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.
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Natural hazards, however formidable, are inherently less dangerous and less uncertain than fighting hazards. All conditions are more calculable, all obstacles more surmountable than those of human resistance.
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For whoever habitually suppresses the truth in the interests of tact will produce a deformity from the womb of his thought.
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The downfall of civilized states tends to come not from the direct assaults of foes, but from internal decay combined with the consequences of exhaustion in war.
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For even the best of peace training is more theoretical than practical experience … indirect practical experience may be the more valuable because infinitely wider.
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The unexpected cannot guarantee success, but it guarantees the best chance of success.
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While hitting one must guard … In order to hit with effect, the enemy must be taken off his guard.
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Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.
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As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.
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The effect to be sought is the dislocation of the opponent’s mind and dispositions – such an effect is the true gauge of an indirect approach.
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War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.
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For the spread and endurance of an idea the originator is dependent on the self-development of the receivers and transmitters.
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In should be the duty of every soldier to reflect on the experiences of the past, in the endeavor to discover improvements, in his particular sphere of action, which are practicable in the immediate future.
B. H. LIDDELL HART