Strategic Decision Quotes

One minute can decide the outcome of the battle, one hour - the outcome of the campaign, and one day - the fate of the country.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

He [General George Marshall] brought up the event that we were likely to be attacked perhaps (as soon as) next Monday, for the Japanese are notorious for making an attack without warning, and the question was what we would do. The question was how we should maneuver them in to the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.

Strategy is the art of making use of time and space. I am less concerned about the later than the former. Space we can recover, lost time never.

Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.

War is best left to the Generals. I believe in letting the military authorities manage the army. If they manage it badly, we shall make a bad matter worse by tampering and interfering.

And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

The question of whether we should drop this new bomb on Japan involves such imponderable considerations as to remove it from the field of a military decision.

Failure is sometimes the best option if you view the process of entrepreneurship as a lifelong journey.

The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.

One mediocre general is better than two good ones.

Most of the things I do brand wise are both missionary and mercenary in their position, and that's really important to me; that's one of the first things I look at when I say, 'does it make sense to do a deal?'

My approach to running for office has always been driven by where can I do the most good and where are my skills best applied.

You want to win the wars you fight. That’s why you have to pick your wars carefully.

A commander-in-chief cannot take as an excuse for his mistakes in warfare an order given by his sovereign or his minister when the person giving the order is absent from the field of operations and is imperfectly aware or wholly unaware of the latest state of affairs. It follows that any commander-in-chief who undertakes to carry out a plan which he considers defective is at fault; he must put forward his reasons, insist on the plan being changed, and finally tender his resignation rather than be the instrument of his army's downfall.

The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.

The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.

The situation in Iraq was dire at the end of 2006, when President George W. Bush decided to implement the surge and selected me to command it. Indeed, when I returned to Baghdad in early February 2007, I found the conditions there to be even worse than I had expected.

I did several types of work about several investigations of application of game theory to international relations.

I believe that one can't command sitting on one's ass in the rear. One has to up among the forward brigade commanders, even as far as battalion commanders, especially if one is fighting a defensive action. One simply has to know what is going on.

The framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called — which only a nerd would call — a “regret minimization framework.” So, I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “Okay, now I’m looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.”

I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier.

Military action without political context is ineffective.

It has been said that one bad general is better than two good ones, and the saying is true if taken to mean no more than that an army is better directed by a single mind, though inferior, than by two superior ones at variance and cross-purposes with each other.

Have you already in your mind a plan wholly or partially formed? If you have, prosecute it without interference from me. If you have not, please inform me, so that I, incompetent as I may be, can try and assist you in the formation of some plan for the army.