And we publish our doctrine on-line for all to see. . . .BUT. . . we don’t slavishly follow it and that is our strength.
True.
I’m reading “Sun Tzu at Gettysburg” right now. Fascinating.
If we’d bothered to understand the oriental way of looking at war as well as they understood ours, Vietnam would have turned out quite differently.
I wrote an essay once arguing that General Giap was probably the most perfect disciple of von Clausewitz ever, and that this was no accident at all. It doesn’t matter who has the best military, it matters who wins, not at all the same thing. Reagan understood this, I believe, too- the recognition of our standard of living, freedoms and opportunity proved more powerful than all of the Warsaw pact and Chinese military units, espionage and propaganda in the end. War is an extension of politics, no more and no less.