Battles Decide Everything.

The Deduction Of Effect From Cause Is Often Blocked By Some Insuperable Extrinsic Obstacle: The True Causes May Be Quite Unknown. Nowhere In Life Is This So Common As In War, Where The Facts Are Seldom Fully Known And The Underlying Motives Even Less So.

The Best Form Of Defense Is Attack.

Knowing Is Different From Doing And Therefore Theory Must Never Be Used As Norms For A Standard, But Merely As Aids To Judgment.

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 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.