Sublime

Sharing knowledge and learning from the past was crucial in making the navy the best in the world: between 1660 and 1815, combat fatalities among English (British) captains fell by an astonishing 98 per cent.18

À la grande époque des conquérants, l’art de la guerre pouvait rapporter gros avec des dégâts minimes. À la bataille d’Hastings, en 1066, Guillaume le Conquérant prit le contrôle de toute l’Angleterre en un jour au cours d’un affrontement qui lui coûta quelques milliers de morts. Les armes nucléaires et la cyberguerre, en revanche, sont des technol

The system that we inherited from the British was lopsided. Too much emphasis was laid on the examination and the paper qualification. We were, therefore, rearing a whole generation of softies, who are clever; who wore spectacles but who were weak from want of enough exercise, enough sunshine, and with not enough guts in them. That was all right fo

Sherman Eager, an officer in the Lost Battalion, who decades after the war brought his children to see Cher Ami at the Smithsonian and told them, “You all owe your lives to that pigeon.” Whatever the facts may be, the story of the self-sacrificing winged savior proved irresistible.[8]

“So we had won after all!” Churchill remembered exulting on getting the news from Hawaii. “[T]he United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death.” “[S]illy people” had thought Americans too soft, too talkative, too paralyzed by their politics to be anything more than “a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe.” But I had studied

The “hikes” did great damage, but they couldn’t themselves extirpate the rebellion. The guerrillas remained at large, and the towns kept feeding them. Perhaps Filipinos helped the rebels out of enthusiasm for Aguinaldo’s cause; perhaps they simply realized that the nationalists were a lot better at identifying and punishing traitors than the U.S. A

Both Napoleon and George W. Bush fell victim to the alignment problem. Their short-term military goals were misaligned with their countries’ long-term geopolitical goals. We can understand the whole of Clausewitz’s On War as a warning that “maximizing victory” is as shortsighted a goal as “maximizing user engagement.” According to the Clausewitzian