That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.

We have for years been building a society in which everybody plunders everybody, and while we are weary of being plundered, we enjoy the plunder.

To stand on the firing parapet and expose yourself to danger; to stand and fight a thousand miles from home when you're all alone and outnumbered and probably beaten; to spit on your hands and lower the pike; to stand fast over the body of Leonidas the King; to be rear guard at Kunu-Ri; to stand and be still to the Birkenhead Drill; these are not rational acts. They are often merely necessary.

A smart soldier wants to know the causes of wars. Also how to end them. After all, war is the normal state of affairs, isn't it? Peace is the name of the ideal we deduce from the fact that there have been interludes between wars.

If you submit a search of the following phrase on Google, you get over four hundred returns, and they are often very strange ones: "I have more information in one place than anybody in the world."

And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.

The American way of war is to build an army, then another, then a third, while building fleets. If the war is still on at that point we smash.