Sublime

An efficient communications system is of the greatest importance in directing and controlling raw or inexperienced troops in combat.

Instead of testing men and institutions, we must examine the structures through which they work and explore how those structures stand up to the stresses they encounter.

CIA assessment,

The urge to blame military misfortunes on individuals runs as deep as the inclination to blame human error for civil disasters.

Russia’s appearance of strength, however, belied significant weaknesses that cut across its economy, demographics, public health, and social services. As former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright has observed, Putin’s Russia played a poor hand well.71 The United States and its allies, particularly in Europe, played a much better hand poorly

Yet as Pearl Harbor and other cases suggest, it is in the deficiency of organizations that the embryo of misfortune develops.

Here, we conclude with a few of the strategic insights that we find most instructive from this quiet, articulate, supremely confident, yet remarkably modest man from whom we have learned so much.

Finally, it is a cardinal principle of deception that the deceiver succeeds by reinforcing his opponent’s misconceptions.