NATO is filled with political hacks whose most strategic thought is how they are going to lie their way through the next press conference. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:
To NATO, all its battles are black and white, and grand strategy is a matinee cowboys and Indians movie where they get to munch their popcorn
Monday, 2nd December, 1805, Napoleon’s finest day, saw his Grande Armée emerge victorious from the Battle of Austerlitz, the so-called Battle of the Three Emperors, which features prominently in War & Peace, Tolstoy’s superlative novel, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky lies seemingly mortally wounded at the great Napoleon’s feet.
Although Prince Andrei, who once worshipped Napoleon, now dismisses him as “a small, insignificant man… with his petty vanity and joy in victory”, that was probably a trifle unkind to the great Corsican, who was arguably history’s greatest ever military tactician and whose various campaigns formed the raw material for Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz’s classic On War, perhaps the greatest and certainly the most important book on military (or any other) strategy ever written; it can be downloaded here, here and here.
Von Clausewitz’s great work forms the backbone of modern military (or any other) strategy and it was because of his work that the Prussian (and then German) High Command became the world’s best from the fall of Napoleon to the fall of Herr Hitler, the little Bohemian corporal as von Hindenburg called him, some 130 years later. The Prussian (and German Prussian) High Command were like a colony of well-disciplined ants, collectively beavering away towards a common objective Otto von Bismarck, their Iron Chancellor, clearly adumbrated. It was not entirely their fault that those objectives, for which they bled, ended up being set by a failed painter (Herr Hitler), a drug addict (Göring), a club-footed loud mouth (Goebbels), a creeping Jesus (Bormann) and a conniving chicken farmer (Himmler).
If you do not learn to choose morality and free agency over selecting a leader, then you are condemned to choose which immoral enslaver you will sell your soul and life to. ~ Chad Chadburn