“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
“Related lessons: Don’t go hunting ghosts, and don’t get too deep into a situation where your civilizational advantage is of little help.”
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
“The details you don’t give in your orders are as important as the ones you do. With all hands aligned to your goals, their cunning and initiative unleashed, you need only transparent sharing of information (What do I know? Who needs to know? Have I told them?) to orchestrate, as opposed to “control” or “synchronize,” a coordinated team.”
― Call Sign Chaos
― Call Sign Chaos
“America is learning an ironic truth of empire: You endure by not fighting every battle. In the first century A.D., Tiberius preserved Rome by not interfering in bloody internecine conflicts beyond its northern frontier. Instead, he practiced strategic patience as he watched the carnage. He understood the limits of Roman power.”
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
“Simply put, there are actions of state that are the right things to do, even if they cannot be defined in terms of conventional morality.”
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
“With the Athenians, as with Darius, one is astonished by how the obsession with honor and reputation can lead a great power toward a bad fate. The image of Darius’s army marching into nowhere on an inhospitable steppe, in search of an enemy that never quite appears, is so powerful that it goes beyond mere symbolism.”
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
― The Return of Marco Polo's World: War, Strategy, and American Interests in the Twenty-first Century
Adam’s 2025 Year in Books
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