Martin van Creveld > Quotes

“The problem is that you cannot prove yourself against someone who is much weaker than yourself. They are in a lose/lose situation. 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. So here is a dilemma which others have suffered before us, and for which as far as I can see there is simply no escape.”
― Martin Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, from the Marne to Iraq

“four men who do not know each other will hesitate to confront a lion. But once they know each other and feel they can trust each other they will do so without fear.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Accordingly, the Chinese texts regard war not as an instrument for the attainment of this end or that but as the product of stern necessity, something which must be confronted and coped with and managed and brought to an end. Clausewitz emphasizes that war is brutal and bloody and seeks to achieve a great victory. By contrast, the Chinese texts are permeated by a humanitarian approach and have as their aim the restoration of dao.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Thus knowing oneself is no less, and may be more, of a requirement than understanding the enemy.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“As so often in history, equality for some can only be achieved by discriminating against all the rest.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“a process by which we co-ordinate our ideas, define the meaning of the words we use, grasp the difference between essential and unessential factors, and fix and expose the fundamental data on which everyone is agreed. In this way we prepare the apparatus of practical discussion…. Without such an apparatus no two men can even think on the same line; much less can they ever hope to detach the real point of difference that divides them and isolate it for quiet solution.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Inequality, in other words, is precisely the principle upon which their social life is based and is made possible.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“However much some people may resent the fact, in nature inequality and not equality seems to be the rule.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“According to Clausewitz, the purpose of studying war was to provide commanders with a sound basis for their thinking and render it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel with every new situation.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“It is of course true that many modern combat sports are extremely demanding in terms of physical force, skill, and endurance. Indeed many athletes are much fitter and better trained than the vast majority of soldiers. However, all those various kinds of sport are based on artificial rules as to what is and is not permitted. Furthermore, and with the exception of fencing, a highly ritualized form of combat to which we shall return, even the most violent ones do not permit the players to use weapons. In their absence, most of those skills are too specialized to be of much military relevance.”
― Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

“Though Moltke was working with subordinates who were totally lacking in comprehension for whatever strategic plans he may have entertained and who on occasion abused the independence granted them, those plans were sufficiently flexible to accommodate errors; that is, a large safety margin was left to ensure that mistakes would not develop into catastrophes.”
― Martin Van Creveld, Command in War

“Thirst, hunger, heat, cold, discomfort, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, fear, and often pain and suffering as well all remain exactly what they have been since time immemorial. Any commander worth his salt will make sure his troops will get habituated to them, as far as possible, before he leads them on campaign. However, to speak with Epaminondas, the place to achieve this is the field and not the gym or the playing court. The members of football teams do not enter the field hungry; should they suffer a serious injury, they expect to be evacuated and taken care of immediately.”
― Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

“Though hand-to-hand combat has become rare, much modern warfare continues to involve physical strain such as those who have not engaged in it can scarcely imagine.”
― Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

“Thanks largely to the attempts to integrate women into the armed forces of many modern countries, the physical differences between the sexes have been precisely measured.[296] One study found the average U.S. Army female recruit to be 12 centimeters shorter and 14.3 kilograms lighter than her male brethren. Compared to the average male recruit, females had 16.9 fewer kilograms of muscle and 2.6 more kilograms of fat, as well as 55 percent of the upper body strength and 72 percent of the lower body strength. Fat mass is inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance, hence women are also at a disadvantage when performing activities such as carrying heavy loads, working in the heat and running. Even when the samples were controlled for height, women possessed only 80 percent of the overall strength of men. Only the upper 20 percent of women could do as well physically as the lower 20 percent of men. Had the 100 strongest individuals out of a random group consisting of 100 men and 100 women been selected, 93 would be male and only seven female.[297] Yet another study showed gthat only the upper 5 percent of women are as strong as the median male.[298]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“A closer examination of the facts would have shown that hordes of perfectly free men and women enjoying equal authority, status and access to resources of every kind, including each other's sexuality, have never existed and probably could not have existed. To paraphrase Hobbes, perfect equality, like its concomitant perfect liberty, can only exist when each individual lives alone in a desert, where it is meaningless.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“There is equality before God and there is equality here on earth. There is natural equality and there is the kind of equality that human society creates.”
― Martin van Creveld, Equality: The Impossible Quest

“Appraise it [war] in terms of the five fundamental factors,” says Sun Tzu. “The first of these factors is moral influence… by moral influence I mean that which causes the people to be in harmony with their leaders, so that they will accompany them in life and unto death without fear of mortal peril.” In the words of Sun Pin, “engaging in a battle without righteousness, no one under Heaven would be able to be solid and strong.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Lind’s scheme has been widely adopted. Note, however, that it is based mainly on developments on the tactical and operational levels. It has relatively little to say about strategy, let alone grand strategy and the kind of political, economic, social and cultural factors in which the latter is rooted. In this it differs from some other schemes, including my own which is based on the distinction between “trinitarian” and “non-trinitarian” warfare. Here the assumption is that there are two basic kinds of war, i.e. those in which the distinction between government, armed forces and people is maintained and those in which it is not.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“America’s current economic decline must be halted, or else one day the crime that is rampant in the streets of New York and Washington, D.C. may develop into low intensity conflict by coalescing along racial, religious, social, and political lines, and run completely out of control”
― Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War

“However, by 1990, at the latest, the Clausewitzian framework was beginning to show serious cracks. As has just been said, it proved incapable of incorporating warfare by, or against, non-state actors.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The way Lind sees it, the only Western commander who ever mastered third-generation warfare was George Patton. All others remained stuck in second-generation warfare, a blunt, clumsy instrument that had long outlived its usefulness and only worked because of the overwhelming advantage in firepower they enjoyed over Germany.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“The male imperative to compete for females often comes at a heavy cost. In some mammals, such as kangaroos, mountain sheep, deer and sea elephants, it leads to fights that can result in life-threatening injuries. At a minimum, the loser can expect a drop in status as well as eviction from the most favorable feeding grounds, leading to a shortened life expectancy. Moreover, sexual selection often operates at cross-purposes with other evolutionary forces.[152] A male who develops disproportionately sized organs, or displays brilliant color, or emits certain sounds, may well lose some of his mobility or become more vulnerable to predators. Trying to attract a female, in other words, may cost him his life.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“Just as warfare has often served as inspiration for wargames, so wargames can be, and often have been, played not just by amateurs (from the Latin amatores, lovers) for their own sake but by the military for training, planning, and preparation too. To the extent that they allow and force players to strategize, indeed, they are not merely the best form of training but the only available one.”
― Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

“In all developed countries, without exception, women spend fewer hours working. In the United States, female doctors work fewer hours than their male counterparts; the same is true for female lawyers.[403]”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The non-state organizations that wage it rely largely on terrorism, guerrilla tactics, and popular insurgencies. However, they also engage in small-scale conventional warfare. The perfect examples are Hezbollah in 2006 and Daesh (ISIS) in 2014–2015. Neither organization is a state. Neither maintains the usual distinctions between government, armed forces, and people. However, both have enough money, troops, and conventional weapons to do more than wage terrorism and guerrilla alone.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Few today believe that engaging in wrestling, boxing, or even much more violent combat sports such as Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) will help prepare either them as individuals or their nations for eventual armed conflict.”
― Martin van Creveld, Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes

“As a result, from 1945 on general works which tried to come to grips with the nature of war very often devoted a separate chapter to guerrilla warfare. They almost treated it as if it stood in no relation to anything else.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“Men’s lot in life is endless hard work whose fruits will be consumed largely by others. The more men bring in, the greater the demands. Should men fail, they may lose both what they made and those to whom they gave it. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Melville’s story is that, at times, Bartleby’s behavior and fate can tempt even the most active and successful man.”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex

“The need for strict discipline as a basis for all military action is equally evident in the remaining texts. According to Ssu-Ma the perfect army, placed far in the legendary past, requires neither rewards nor punishments. To make use of rewards but impose no punishments is the height of instruction; to impose punishments but issue no rewards is the height of awesomeness. Finally, employing a mixture of both punishments and rewards—combining sticks with carrots, as modern terminology has it—will end up by causing Virtue to decline. Thus the basic idea of dao, which underlines every one of these texts, breaks through once again. Governed by necessity, the best-disciplined army is so flawless that it requires neither rewards nor punishments. Behaving as if it were a single personality, it will follow its commander of its own accord. However, as the remaining texts make clear, this is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, attained.”
― Martin van Creveld, A History of Strategy: From Sun Tzu to William S. Lind

“the most famous handbook on witch-hunting, the Malleus Maleficarum,”
― Martin van Creveld, The Privileged Sex