The Chinese have a long history of slaughtering each other without bothering their neighbors.

The important thing in war is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it.

Constraint theory asks: What is the price for doing this? Now one way around constraint theory is declaring your enemy crazy. Crazy and stupid are not concepts used in forecasting. When people say they're really stupid or they're crazy, that's laziness. That means I don't want to think through their position or about what they're really going to do.

By the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot.

One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].

I cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest - sometimes with extensive borrowing - when and where matters of life and death are at stake.