Sublime

10 He learned the importance of training and discipline, and how to deploy airpower and massed armor, particularly when confronting Germany’s superior panzer formations.

To win a war, it helps to have three things: more troops than the enemy, intelligence about the enemy’s plans, and superior technology. Alliance-building and patron–client relations helped leaders amass more troops and often learn about the enemy’s plans—and this is true whether a society is preindustrial, industrial, or postindustrial.

Fox Conner also viewed Woodrow Wilson’s concept that the nation had actually fought a “war to end all wars” as a “mere slogan of propaganda.” In contrast to the isolationist sentiment then prevalent in the United States, Conner repeatedly told Eisenhower that American participation in another large-scale European war was “almost a certainty.” Again

Napoléon n’aurait jamais dû s’approcher de la splendeur de Moscou. Il s’y brûla les yeux. Il y a comme cela des beautés interdites. En stratégie comme en amour : se précautionner de ce qui brille.

Never again, he swore, would he send young troops into “open ground against their superiors both in number and discipline.”36 This strategy was neither glamorous nor particularly congenial to Washington’s personality, but it might prove sure and effective.37

Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, at sixty-eight, was not only the oldest, but the most senior commander in the Wehrmacht.e Known as the “Black Knight” (Schwarzer Ritter), he had led the invasion of Poland in 1939, the breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940, and the capture of Kiev in 1941.

It was because he really understood war that he became so good at securing peace. He was the least militaristic of soldiers and free from the lust of glory. It was because he saw the value of peace that he became so unbeatable in war. For he kept the end in view, instead of falling in love with the means. Unlike Napoleon, he was not infected by the