Quotes from William S Lind

Remember, if you don't get the question right, your answer doesn't matter.

Wars have an unpleasant habit of evolving in ways that none of the participants anticipated. When, in the summer of 1914, Europe resounded with cries of "A Berlin!" or "Nach Paris!", no one imagined the Somme, or Verdun, or the starvation blockade of Germany that killed 750,000 civilians.

Education and training should work together to build common approaches to problems, not common solutions. Both should prepare you to know how to think in combat.

In June of 1944, when Field Marshal von Rundstedt, the German commander in France, was told that the Allies were landing in Normandy, he knew exactly what to do. He went out into the garden and pruned his roses. Von Rundstedt knew that in war, early reports, regardless of whether the news is good or bad, are usually misleading. Reacting to them with instant analysis merely makes the problem worse.

Education without excellence in techniques means action will not be timely or effective. But techniques without education means tactics will be formulistic, rigid, and predictable to the enemy.

In reality, a higher level of war always trumps a lower.

A basic rule of history is that the inevitable eventually happens.

In planning a war, the most important task is to understand what can be planned and what cannot.

Maneuver warfare tactics are trust tactics. That is their single most important characteristic. And that's the biggest difference from what we do now." It is certainly the biggest change from the current command and control system. Trust and a shared way of thinking, leadership and monitoring, not fancy new C2 equipment, are what you need to be able to fight using maneuver warfare.

The concept of surfaces and gaps is one of several concepts that bear on tactics. It is of the same level of importance as mission tactics and the main effort, which will be the subjects of the two tactics lessons following this one. All of the concepts should be constantly at work during the execution of battle.

When we teach tactics in the opposite order, that is, the mechanics ahead of the thinking, too often we produce, instead of soldiers, structured mechanics who find it difficult to think without rules. The art of war has no traffic with rules. Yet I have often seen students reject their best tactical ideas because they could not fit them into the format.