Sublime

But the deeper I have gone into the study of war and the history of the past century the further I have come toward the conclusion that the development of conscription has damaged the growth of the idea of freedom in the Continental countries and thereby damaged their efficiency also—by undermining the sense of personal responsibility.

You control some things, but align yourself with others. You balance, while never forgetting that the reason you’re balancing is to get from where you are to where you want to go. You’re a fox and a hedgehog at the same time—even on water. That was the younger Pericles steering Athens: a polymath with a purpose. Over time, though, Pericles began tr

The decision-making structure in Washington is complex, diffuse, and at odds with itself. It has streamlined itself not for routine decisions but primarily for crises.

Theory versus practice. Training versus improvisation. Planning versus friction. Force versus policy. Situations versus sketches. Specialization versus generalization. Action versus inaction. Victory versus defeat. Love versus hate. Life versus death. Leading from within clouds versus keeping the ground in view. But no “versus” whatever between art

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

no one should benefit from having waged aggressive war and lost.

But Xerxes failed, as is the habit of hedgehogs, to establish a proper relationship between his ends and his means. Because ends exist only in the imagination, they can be infinite: a throne on the moon, perhaps, with a great view. Means, though, are stubbornly finite: they’re boots on the ground, ships in the sea, and the bodies required to fill t

Because information technology has undermined the capacity of centralized authority to project power and provide physical security for systems that operate at a large scale, the optimal size of almost every enterprise in the “natural economy” is falling. To respond to this technological change will entail a massive investment requirement (read oppo