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With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

B. H. Liddell Hart

As has happened so often in history, victory had bred a complacency and fostered an orthodoxy which led to defeat in the next war.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military Victory War
With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Growing Military Offensive
The theory of the indirect approach operates on the line of least expectation.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Expectation Indirect Line
While hitting one must guard … In order to hit with effect, the enemy must be taken off his guard.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military Order Taken
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.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military Strong War
Direct pressure always tends to harden and consolidate the resistance of an opponent.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Military Opponents Resistance
War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Evil Military War
In war, the chief incalculable is the human will.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Marine Corps Military War
[The] aim is not so much to seek battle as to seek a strategic situation so advantageous that if it does not of itself produce the decision, its continuation by a battle is sure to achieve this. In other words, dislocation is the aim of strategy.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Battle Decision Military
Guerrilla war is a kind of war waged by the few but dependent on the support of many.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Kind Support War
The hydrogen bomb is not the answer to the Western peoples’ dream of full and final insurance of their security … While it has increased their striking power it has sharpened their anxiety and deepened their sense of insecurity.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Dream Hydrogen Bomb Military
In a campaign against more than one state or army, it is more fruitful to concentrate first against the weaker partner than to attempt the overthrow of the stronger in the belief that the latter’s defeat will automatically involve the collapse of the others.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Army Military Stronger
The predominance of moral factors in all military decisions. On them constantly turns the issue of war and battle. In the history of war they form the more constant factors, changing only in degree, whereas the physical factors are different in almost every war and every military situation.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Issues Military War
Loss of hope rather than loss of life is what decides the issues of war. But helplessness induces hopelessness.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Issues Loss War
It is only to clear from history that states rarely keep faith with each other, save in so far (and so long) as their promises seem to them to combine with their interests.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Long Military Promise
The easiest and quickest path into the esteem of traditional military authorities is by the appeal to the eye, rather than to the mind. ‘The polish and pipeclay’ school is not yet extinct, and it is easier for the mediocre intelligence to become an authority on buttons, than on tactics.
B. H. LIDDELL HART

Eye Military School

With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

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With growing experience, all skillful commanders sought to profit by the power of the defensive, even when on the offensive.

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