Israeli - Historian | March 5, 1946 -
In the future as in the past, both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu will undoubtedly have a lot to offer.
Martin Van Creveld
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As history since Hiroshima shows, the best, perhaps the only, way to curb war is to deter it with such overwhelming force as to turn it from a struggle into suicide.
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The defense of the West Bank by Arab forces would be a truly suicidal enterprise. The late King Hussein understood these facts well. Until 1967, he was careful to keep most of his forces east of the Jordan River. When he momentarily forgot these realities in 1967, it took Israel just three days of fighting to remind him of them.
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Sun Tzu does not need my praise. His work has lived for over two thousand years, and will surely live for another two thousand without any help from me.
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'Never' is too much of a word. Nothing lasts forever.
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The enemy resembles us. Therefore, he needs to be approached not as an assembly of 'targets' to be destroyed one by one; but as a living, intelligent entity capable of acting and reacting.
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It is simply not true that war is solely a means to an end, nor do people necessarily fight in order to obtain this objective or that. In fact, the opposite is true: people very often take up one objective or another precisely in order that they may fight.
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Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or 'the people,' constitute the great majority of those affected.
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The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself.
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Assuming China does not become destabilized and continues to grow, it will no doubt develop a military program in proportion to its resources.
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If you are strong and fighting the weak, then if you kill your opponent then you are a scoundrel... if you let him kill you, then you are an idiot.
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I want to put any number of assorted 'ists' - such as relativists, deconstructionists, destructivists, postmodernists, the more maudlin kind of pacifists and feminists - firmly in their place.
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