Boldness Becomes Rarer, The Higher The Rank.

Where Execution Is Dominant, As It Is In The Individual Events Of A War Whether Great Or Small, Then Intellectual Factors Are Reduced To A Minimum.

If The Enemy Is To Be Coerced, You Must Put Him In A Situation That Is Even More Unpleasant Than The Sacrifice You Call On Him To Make. The Hardships Of The Situation Must Not Be Merely Transient - At Least Not In Appearance. Otherwise, The Enemy Would Not Give In, But Would Wait For Things To Improve.

By 'intelligence' We Mean Every Sort Of Information About The Enemy And His Country - The Basis, In Short, Of Our Own Plans And Operations.

If We Consider The Actual Basis Of This Information [i.e., Intelligence], How Unreliable And Transient It Is, We Soon Realize That War Is A Flimsy Structure That Can Easily Collapse And Bury Us In Its Ruins. ... Many Intelligence Reports In War Are Contradictory; Even More Are False, And Most Are Uncertain. This Is True Of All Intelligence But Even More So In The Heat Of Battle, Where Such Reports Tend To Contradict And Cancel Each Other Out. In Short, Most Intelligence Is False, And The Effect Of Fear Is To Multiply Lies And Inaccuracies.

Given The Same Amount Of Intelligence, Timidity Will Do A Thousand Times More Damage Than Audacity