If you lose yourself to rage in the complexity of battle, you are going to be lost.

Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.

The importance of the question and the availability of an answer are two different things. I'm not willing to state that because the question is fundamental, therefore I possess the answer. And I'm certainly not willing to say that since I don't possess the answer, I'll pretend that I do.

War is an extraordinary condition to be in - to be, for example, in the combat information center of a warship [and behaving] as though you were merely processing credit card applications. [Instead,] the information you're processing is that an incoming missile is 15 kilometers away, now 10 kilometers away, now 5 kilometers. You have to separate yourself psychologically from the fact that your mortal existence may well end. That is the ancient reality of war.

But every time new powers emerge they have to find their balance. New powers are emerging, old powers are declining. It's not that process that's dangerous, it's the emerging position that's dangerous.

War to me is very much like sex. You can develop a theory that says sex is primarily for the exchange of genetic material, or that it's a celebration of life, or you can make up 50,000 theories about why human beings have sex, all of which are in some sense true, all of which by themselves miss the point. Because the answer is extraordinarily complex. It may be for fun, it may be for reproduction, for financial reasons, any number of things.

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.