Army Competencies Quotes

[Standing armies] constantly threaten other nations with war by giving the appearance that they are prepared for it, which goads nations into competing with one another in the number of men under arms, and this practice knows no bounds. And since the costs related to maintaining peace will in this way finally become greater than those of a short war, standing armies are the cause of wars of aggression that are intended to end burdensome expenditures. Moreover, paying men to kill or be killed appears to use them as mere machines and tools in the hands of another (the nation), which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity.

Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach and labourers sweat. But in that silent baby, lying in that humble manger, there pulses more potential power and wisdom and grace and aliveness than all the rest of us can imagine.

The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.

Tell me, how many real motherfuckers feel me? I smoke a blunt and freak the funk until these jealous motherfuckers kill me I'm out the gutter, pick a hero I'm 165 and staying high til I die, my competion's zero Cause I could give a fuck about you, better duck Or I'll be forced to hit yo ass up I give a fuck I'm sick inside my mind, why you sweatin me? It's gonna take an army full of crooked ass cops to come and get me Niggaz know I ain't the one to sleep on, I'm under pressure Gotta sleep with my piece, an extra clip beside my dresser Word to God I've been ready to die since I was born I don't want no shit but niggaz trip and yo it's on Open fire on my adversaries, don't even worry Better have on a vest aim for the chest and then you buried

The Mongols loved competitions of all sorts, and they organized debates among rival religions the same way they organized wrestling matches. It began on a specific date with a panel of judges to oversee it. In this case Mongke Khan ordered them to debate before three judges: a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. A large audience assembled to watch the affair, which began with great seriousness and formality. An official lay down the strict rules by which Mongke wanted the debate to proceed: on pain of death “no one shall dare to speak words of contention.” Rubruck and the other Christians joined together in one team with the Muslims in an effort to refute the Buddhist doctrines. As these men gathered together in all their robes and regalia in the tents on the dusty plains of Mongolia, they were doing something that no other set of scholars or theologians had ever done in history. It is doubtful that representatives of so many types of Christianity had come to a single meeting, and certainly they had not debated, as equals, with representatives of the various Muslim and Buddhist faiths. The religious scholars had to compete on the basis of their beliefs and ideas, using no weapons or the authority of any ruler or army behind them. They could use only words and logic to test the ability of their ideas to persuade. In the initial round, Rubruck faced a Buddhist from North China who began by asking how the world was made and what happened to the soul after death. Rubruck countered that the Buddhist monk was asking the wrong questions; the first issue should be about God from whom all things flow. The umpires awarded the first points to Rubruck. Their debate ranged back and forth over the topics of evil versus good, God’s nature, what happens to the souls of animals, the existence of reincarnation, and whether God had created evil. As they debated, the clerics formed shifting coalitions among the various religions according to the topic. Between each round of wrestling, Mongol athletes would drink fermented mare’s milk; in keeping with that tradition, after each round of the debate, the learned men paused to drink deeply in preparation for the next match. No side seemed to convince the other of anything. Finally, as the effects of the alcohol became stronger, the Christians gave up trying to persuade anyone with logical arguments, and resorted to singing. The Muslims, who did not sing, responded by loudly reciting the Koran in an effort to drown out the Christians, and the Buddhists retreated into silent meditation. At the end of the debate, unable to convert or kill one another, they concluded the way most Mongol celebrations concluded, with everyone simply too drunk to continue.

Some of these Marines learned what they know on Guadalcanal, a basically useless island in the Southwest Pacific where the Empire of Nippon and the United States of America are disputing—with rifles—each other’s right to build a military airbase. Early returns suggest that the Nipponese Army, during its extended tour of East Asia, has lost its edge. It would appear that raping the entire female population of Nanjing, and bayoneting helpless Filipino villagers, does not translate into actual military competence. The Nipponese Army is still trying to work out some way to kill, say, a hundred American Marines without losing, say, five hundred of its own soldiers.

And so begins the strangest campaign in military history : a competent general and a seasoned army of eighty thousand men chased like deer, in their own country, by an invader who used his vastly smaller forces more like a pack of hunting dogs than men; laying them on the scent rather than mapping routes, caring no more for their feelings, their fatigues, their lives, than a hunter who is rather fond of a good dog. Up and down the map of East Germany they ran, hunter and hunted, in an Alexandrian zig-zag of the best manner. The only strategical question in Charles’ science was “ Where are they ? ” Never, “ How many ? How entrenched ? ” At last Charles had made war into what schoolboys dreamed it ought to be.

The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.

A free Republic! How a myth will maintain itself, how it will continue to deceive, to dupe, and blind even the comparatively intelligent to its monstrous absurdities. A free Republic! And yet within a little over thirty years a small band of parasites have successfully robbed the American people, and trampled upon the fundamental principles, laid down by the fathers of this country, guaranteeing to every man, woman, and child “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” For thirty years they have been increasing their wealth and power at the expense of the vast mass of workers, thereby enlarging the army of the unemployed, the hungry, homeless, and friendless portion of humanity, who are tramping the country from east to west, from north to south, in a vain search for work. For many years the home has been left to the care of the little ones, while the parents are exhausting their life and strength for a mere pittance. For thirty years the sturdy sons of America have been sacrificed on the battlefield of industrial war, and the daughters outraged in corrupt factory surroundings. For long and weary years this process of undermining the nation’s health, vigor, and pride, without much protest from the disinherited and oppressed, has been going on. Maddened by success and victory, the money powers of this “free land of ours” became more and more audacious in their heartless, cruel efforts to compete with the rotten and decayed European tyrannies for supremacy of power.

A few scrapes, my ass,” she muttered, wringing her shaking hands. Constance shoved a bulb of garlic at her. “They’re Highlanders, dear. They’ll get themselves stabbed, dragged through a briar patch, thrown over a cliff, and punched in the face all before breakfast and call it ‘a fair interesting morn’.’ Now, peel those and put the cloves in the hot water.” The older woman nodded toward the steaming kettle a maid had deposited on the hearth. “Garlic water cleans wounds better than plain water and keeps infection away.” She latched onto the competence Constance radiated. While calming her with brisk assurances that all would be well, the older woman deftly deployed a small army of castle servants on various missions relating to “doctoring a bone-headed Highland husband.

In country after country where local moneys were abolished in favor of interest-bearing central currency, people fell into poverty, health declined, and society deteriorated12 by all measures. Even the plague can be traced to the collapse of the marketplace of the late Middle Ages and the shift toward extractive currencies and urban wage labor. The new scheme instead favored bigger players, such as chartered monopolies, which had better access to capital than regular little businesses and more means of paying back the interest. When monarchs and their favored merchants founded the first corporations, the idea that they would be obligated to grow didn’t look like such a problem. They had their nations’ governments and armies on their side—usually as direct investors in their projects. For the Dutch East India Company to grow was as simple as sending a few warships to a new region of the world, taking the land, and enslaving its people. If this sounds a bit like the borrowing advantages enjoyed today by companies like Walmart and Amazon, that’s because it’s essentially the same money system in operation, favoring the same sorts of players. Yet however powerful the favored corporations may appear, they are really just the engines through which the larger money system extracts value from everyone’s economic activity. Even megacorporations are like competing apps on a universally accepted, barely acknowledged smartphone operating system. Their own survival is utterly dependent on their ability to grow capital for their debtors and investors.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Wolin, who taught political philosophy at Berkeley and at Princeton, uses the phrase inverted totalitarianism to describe our system of power. Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers to subvert and thwart democratic institutions. Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering amounts of corporate funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists in Washington or state capitals who author the legislation and get the legislators to pass it. Corporate media control nearly everything we read, watch, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. In classical totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi fascism or Soviet communism, economics was subordinate to politics. “Under inverted totalitarianism the reverse is true,” Wolin writes. “Economics dominates politics—and with that domination comes different forms of ruthlessness.

Now, as we all know, the good field commander is the chief support of the realm. If the support is sturdy on all four sides, then the realm will be strong. But if the support is flawed, the realm will always be unstable. Therefore, there are several ways the ruler may imperil his armies: If he fails to understand when the army cannot advance or retreat, and he orders them to do so. (This is a classic case of hobbling the troops.) If he fails to understand the respective tasks of his Three Armies,7 and he governs them all in the same way, then his army officers will be confused. And if he fails to see how to balance and synchronize the operations of his Three Armies, then his officers will doubt his competence. Once the Three Armies are not only confused but also suspicious, then trouble from the local lords will surely ensue.8 (This is a classic case of “inducing chaos in the army and throwing victory away.”) To realize victory, go by five paths: (1) by figuring out whether it is possible to fight or not; (2) by recognizing how many troops are needed for the task;9 (3) by unifying the aims and ambitions of the high- and low-ranking; (4) by being prepared for the unexpected; and (5) by the ruler’s refusal to meddle with his able commanders.10 These five—they are the Way to taste victory. And so I say, “Know the enemy; know yourself, and you will meet with no danger in a hundred battles. If you do not know the enemy, but you know yourself, then you will win and lose by turns. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will lose every battle, certainly.

Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.

The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We

As we’ve examined, the anti-American insurgency in Iraq drew its strength from Sunni revanchism. One way to view Baathism historically is as one among many exponents of Sunni political power. It competed in its heyday with pan-Arab nationalism, as expounded by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Islamism of Sayyed Qutb’s Brotherhood, and the Salafist-Jihadism of bin Laden. Indeed, the Islamic Faith Campaign was meant to preempt Salafism’s usurpation of Baathism. Today, the secular socialist ideology is in a tenuous state of coexistence and competition with the caliphate-building takfirism of ISIS.

Fortunately for the cause of science and of humanity, we had as Governor-General of Cuba at that time General Leonard Wood, of the United States Army. General Wood had been educated as a physician, and had a very proper idea of the great advantages which would accrue to the world if we could establish the fact that yellow fever was conveyed by the mosquito, and his medical training made him a very competent judge as to the steps necessary to establish such fact. General Wood during the whole course of the investigations took the greatest interest in the experiments, and assisted the Board in every way he could.

Jares" or The Plain of Jars. We still refer to it by the French acronym as the "PDJ." Only two roads, an east-west dirt road and another north-south unpaved track traverse the PDJ. The roads meet and cross near the geographic center. There are no substantial villages or towns on the PDJ, just a few scattered hamlets along with the encampments of competing armies and a bumpy dirt airstrip or two. The hills surrounding the plain are controlled for the most part by Hmong tribesmen. The Hmong are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and temperamentally distinct from the lowland Laotians. The Hmong are fiercely independent, fiercely proud, and just plain fierce. They are on our side in the war, which is a good thing for us if not for them. The Hmong have little use for their Laotian countrymen and have even less tolerance for Vietnamese people, from either the North or the South.

Jeffers stretched up on his toes to see the back of the mob, “But James, we’re doing all this for you... We need this gold to build a united Alba. We need it to fund an army and to forge decisive leadership.” His voice was almost plaintive. “We want to hand your generation a real empire rather than just a loose collection of competing Families. We want to give you the foundations to achieve glory! What could possibly be wrong with that?” “Rubbish!” cried Tristan, not about to let honey-coated nonsense dissolve the glue that bound his army. “Absolute codswallop!” he let his calm facade slip for the first time that day. “What you’re actually trying to do is to build a legacy that you don’t deserve! You want to swan around as an armchair General for the next twenty years while your precious army strives and dies for hollow victories that do nothing more than feed your ego! And do you know who strives and dies in this picture?” He waved one arm at the figures behind him. “We do! We here in this alley, along with other young men and women just like us!” Tristan watched Jeffers from the corner of his eye, as he shook his fist towards deGroot, “Well we’re not having it! If you want us to fight and die, then we’re going to fight now, and we’re going to fight you! So come on down deGroot and take a swing!

For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war’s end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo valley, resulting in some 600,000 Italian casualties.

Once it became clear that the delay was a critical mistake, and that the army was seething with mutiny, Ts‘ao Ts’ao had two options: apology and excuses, or a scapegoat. Understanding the workings of power and the importance of appearances as he did, Ts‘ao Ts’ao did not hesitate for a moment: He shopped around for the most convenient head and had it served up immediately. Occasional mistakes are inevitable—the world is just too unpredictable. People of power, however, are undone not by the mistakes they make, but by the way they deal with them. Like surgeons, they must cut away the tumor with speed and finality. Excuses and apologies are much too blunt tools for this delicate operation; the powerful avoid them. By apologizing you open up all sorts of doubts about your competence, your intentions, any other mistakes you may not have confessed. Excuses satisfy no one and apologies make everyone uncomfortable. The mistake does not vanish with an apology; it deepens and festers. Better to cut it off instantly, distract attention from yourself, and focus attention on a convenient scapegoat before people have time to ponder your responsibility or your possible incompetence. I would rather betray the whole world than let the world betray me. General Ts‘ao Ts’ao, c. A.D. 155-220

By the time of Sultan Suleyman’s death in 1566, the empire spanned three continents, possessed a huge army and a competent navy,

This was the thing that would strike me not just during the London summit but at every international forum I attended while president: Even those who complained about America’s role in the world still relied on us to keep the system afloat. To varying degrees, other countries were willing to pitch in—contributing troops to U.N. peacekeeping efforts, say, or providing cash and logistical support for famine relief. Some, like the Scandinavian countries, consistently punched well above their weight. But otherwise, few nations felt obliged to act beyond narrow self-interest; and those that shared America’s basic commitment to the principles upon which a liberal, market-based system depended—individual freedom, the rule of law, strong enforcement of property rights and neutral arbitration of disputes, plus baseline levels of governmental accountability and competence—lacked the economic and political heft, not to mention the army of diplomats and policy experts, to promote those principles on a global scale.

The military-industrial complex was one of Pakistan’s binding forces, alongside Islam, national pride, suspicion of India and America, and cricket. One common narrative about Pakistan held that its powerful army competed for power with civilian political families like the Bhuttos and the Sharifs.

This decision produced a scene that provides the most graphic and dramatic illustration of the two competing versions of what the American Revolution had come to mean in the 1790s. On one side stood the rebels, a defiant collection of aggrieved farmers emboldened by their conviction that the excise tax levied by Congress was every bit as illegitimate as the taxes levied by the British ministry. On the other side stood Washington and his federalized troops, an updated version of the Continental army, marching west to enforce the authority of the constitutionally elected government that claimed to represent all the American people. It was “the spirit of ’76” against “the spirit of ’87,” one historic embodiment of “the people” against another.

Many Catholics think that the deposit of faith lies first and foremost with the hierarchy, with the Pope and the bishops. The model they have in mind is a top-down flow of knowledge and communication, like the commander-in-chief of an army and his staff who hold all the information, make the plans and pass them down to the ranks. The true picture is different. The Church is more like a large family business in which the core of information is carried by all the family members jointly and individually, through a wide range of skill, experience and competence. The Pope and the bishops have the duty and the charism to articulate that knowledge as teachers of the Church. They can only do so by paying careful attention to the sensus fidelium, the faith that lives in the hearts of the faithful.

But I often wonder what would have happened if I had actually been drafted. I had failed military training in middle school, and I had no certificate of officer’s competence. There would have been no way for me to stay afloat in the Army. On top of that, if I had ever run into that Army officer who had been attached to Keika Middle School, it would surely have been the end for me. Even thinking about it now makes me shudder.

When Washington became president of the United States, he was still wrestling with the meaning of the American Revolution. He'd entered the conflict an unrepentant Virginia slaveholder. By the end of the war, he'd learned that his African-American soldiers were as competent and brave as anyone else in his army. He'd also befriended the idealistic French nobleman Lafayette, who later claimed, "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery." Gradually, ever so gradually, a new Washington was emerging, one who realized that "nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating bond of principle." But even if he had come to recognize the direction the country must take in the future, he remained a slaveholder himself for the rest of his life. A struggle was being waged inside Washington between his ideological aspirations and his financial and familial commitment to slavery at Mount Vernon. Yes, Washington freed his enslaved workers upon his death, but it had been a very long time in coming. And yet, given where Washington had begun in life--as a slaveholder through inheritance at the age of eleven, when his father died--his eventual decision to free his slaves was no empty gesture.

Zirkander.” Angulus sighed. “When was the last time someone told you it’s a good thing that you’re so competent at flying and shooting things because your mouth would have gotten you kicked out of the army years ago, otherwise?” “Yesterday, Sire.” “Consider it said today, as well.” “Yes, Sire.

AnyVision was not the only company implementing such AI technologies. Biometric facial recognition is a growth industry estimated to be worth US$11.6 billion globally by 2026. Cor-sight AI is a part Israeli-owned facial recognition company that works with the notoriously brutal police departments in Mexico and Brazil and the Israeli government.46 A former Israeli army colonel, Dany Tirza, partnered with Corsight AI to develop a police body camera that could immediately identify an individual in crowds, even if their face was covered, and match the person to photographs from years before. Tirza lives in the illegal West Bank settlement of Kfar Adumim and is one of the key architects of the Israeli separation wall that creeps through the West Bank. He supports facial recognition technology at Israeli checkpoints because it reduces “friction” between the IDF and Palestinians.47 The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes.

One way to make yourself less vulnerable to copycats is to build a moat around your business. How Can I Build a Moat? As you scale your company, you need to think about how to proactively defend against competition. The more success you have, the more your competitors will grab their battering ram and start storming the castle. In medieval times, you’d dig a moat to keep enemy armies from getting anywhere near your castle. In business, you think about your economic moat. The idea of an economic moat was popularized by the business magnate and investor Warren Buffett. It refers to a company’s distinct advantage over its competitors, which allows it to protect its market share and profitability. This is hugely important in a competitive space because it’s easy to become commoditized if you don’t have some type of differentiation. In SaaS, I’ve seen four types of moats. Integrations (Network Effect) Network effect is when the value of a product or service increases because of the number of users in the network. A network of one telephone isn’t useful. Add a second telephone, and you can call each other. But add a hundred telephones, and the network is suddenly quite valuable. Network effects are fantastic moats. Think about eBay or Craigs-list, which have huge amounts of sellers and buyers already on their platforms. It’s difficult to compete with them because everyone’s already there. In SaaS—particularly in bootstrapped SaaS companies—the network effect moat comes not from users, but integrations. Zapier is the prototypical example of this. It’s a juggernaut, and not only because it’s integrated with over 3,000 apps. It has widened its moat with nonpublic API integrations, meaning that if you want to compete with it, you have to go to that other company and get their internal development team to build an API for you. That’s a huge hill to climb if you want to launch a Zapier competitor. Every integration a customer activates in your product, especially if it puts more of their data into your database, is another reason for them not to switch to a competitor. A Strong Brand When we talk about your brand, we’re not talking about your color scheme or logo. Your brand is your reputation—it’s what people say about your company when you’re not around.

Wang Xing embodied a philosophy of conquest tracing back to the fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of a rebel army who outlasted dozens of competing warlords to found the Ming Dynasty: “Build high walls, store up grain, and bide your time before claiming the throne.” For Wang Xing, venture funding was his grain, a superior product was his wall, and a billion-dollar market would be his throne.

I grinned. “The unwritten law of all armies, Captain. The lower ranks have the privilege of questioning the sanity and competence of their commanders. It’s the mortar holding an army together.

David Goggins is a retired Navy SEAL and the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces ever to complete SEAL training, U.S. Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. Goggins has competed in more than sixty ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. A former Guinness World Record holder for completing 4,030 pull-ups in seventeen hours, he’s a much-sought-after public speaker who’s shared his story with the staffs of Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, and hundreds of thousands of students across the country.

Beware the people who are having fun competing with you!

One assumption that is already being shattered is the idea that only routine, semi-skilled jobs like taxi driving, food delivery, or household chores are susceptible. Even traditional professions like medicine and law are proving to be susceptible to platform models. We’ve already mentioned Medicast, which applies an Uber-like model to finding a doctor. Several platform companies are providing online venues where legal services are available with comparable ease, speed, and convenience. Axiom Law has built a $200 million platform business by using a combination of data-mining software and freelance law talent to provide legal guidance and services to business clients; InCloudCounsel claims it can process basic legal documents such as licensing forms and nondisclosure agreements at a savings of up to 80 percent compared with a traditional law firm.11 In the decades to come, it seems likely that the platform model will be applied—or at least tested—in virtually every market for labor and professional services. How will this trend impact the service industries—not to mention the working lives of hundreds of millions of people? One likely result will be an even greater stratification of wealth, power, and prestige among service providers. Routine and standardized tasks will move to online platforms, where an army of relatively low-paid, self-employed professionals will be available to handle them. Meanwhile, the world’s great law firms, medical centers, consulting partnerships, and accounting practices will not vanish, but their relative size and importance will shrink as much of the work they used to do migrates to platforms that can provide comparable services at a fraction of the cost and with far greater convenience. A surviving handful of world-class experts will increasingly focus on a tiny subset of the most highly specialized and challenging assignments, which they can tackle from anywhere in the world using online tools. Thus, at the very highest level of professional expertise, winner-take-all markets are likely to emerge, with (say) two dozen internationally renowned attorneys competing for the splashiest and most lucrative cases anywhere on the globe.

Most commercial software vendors, though slow to wake up to this new reality, are beginning to move aggressively to court developer populations and update their engagement and outreach capabilities. Instead of relying strictly on an enterprisefocused sales force, armies of technical evangelists and developer engagement professionals are being unleashed on unwitting developer populations in an attempt to ensure a given software vendor’s relevance for the population most likely to be making technical decisions. The problem facing software vendors, however, is that while recognizing the problem is indeed the first step, the solution is less than obvious. Commercial software vendors are particularly disadvantaged, because they are compelled to compete in a two-front war with both free software and software made available as a service. From a competitive standpoint, this means downward pressure on price with potentially higher costs driven by a need to compete with different models.

The peace which Kulin Ban purchased by yielding to Rome was not of long duration, for he could not compel his people to observe its terms. On his death (1216) the Pope appointed a Roman Catholic Ban, and sent a mission to convert the Bosnians. The churches of the country, however, increased the more, and spread into Croatia, Dalmatia, Istria, Carniola and Slavonia. Some six years later the Pope, despairing of converting the Bosnians by other than forcible methods, and encouraged by the success of his crusade in Provence, ordered the King of Hungary to invade Bosnia. The Bosnians deposed their Roman Catholic Ban and elected a Bogomil, Ninoslav. For years the war went on, with varying fortune. Ninoslav yielded to circumstances and became a Roman Catholic, but no change in their rulers affected the faith and confession of the great bulk of the people. The country was devastated, but whenever the invading armies withdrew, the churches were found still existing, and the industry of the people quickly restored prosperity. Fortresses were erected throughout the country “for the protection of the Roman Catholic Church and religion”; the Pope gave the land to Hungary, which long ruled it, but its people still holding to their faith, he at length called a crusade of “all the Christian world” against it; the Inquisition was established (1291), and Dominican and Franciscan brothers competed in applying its terrors to the devoted churches.

I joined the army to learn how to kill my father. An irony; the only time the old man ever showed a glimmer of satisfaction with me was when I announced I was dropping out of college and enlisting. He thought I wanted to make the world safe for democracy, when in fact I wanted to make it safe from him. I intended to sign up under a false name. Become competent with a rifle. Then one night, while my father slept, I would sneak away from basic training, press the muzzle to his head - Harry Hines the failed and violent Pennsylvania farmer, Harry Hines the wife abuser and son beater, laying into me with his divining rods till my back was freckled with slivers of hazelwood - and blast him to Satan's backyard while he dreamed whatever dreams go through such a man's mind.

They’re all in the King’s Army,” Roen said, “all trained by Brigan’s people, all equally competent, and the men who went to Gray Haven already have a natural allegiance to your lady, Archer.” Allegiance wasn’t quite the word for it. The soldiers who’d gone to Gray Haven seemed to regard Fire now with something akin to worship; which was, of course, why Archer didn’t want them. A number of them had sought her out today and knelt before her, kissed her hand, and pledged to protect her. “Very well,” Archer said grumpily, somewhat mollified, Fire suspected, because Roen had referred to Fire as his lady. Fire added immaturity to the things she could accuse him of in the fight they weren’t going to have.

Leadership has mostly been studied in the context of armies (military leadership), nations (political leadership) and business (corporate leadership), with good reason. Fine leadership – by which we mean competent and moral, since one can be an effective, but morally bankrupt, leader – in these realms can win wars, defeat evil and create lasting prosperity, stability and happiness. Since these are desirable outcomes, it is natural to strive to understand and emulate effective leadership.

Rigid dress codes can indeed enforce authority and suppress individuality—an army uniform is intended to do just that. But in their time, uniforms—whether worn by schoolchildren, mailmen, train conductors or street-crossing wardens—bespoke a certain egalitarianism. A child in regulation clothing is under no pressure to compete sartorially with his better-off contemporaries. A

Not unlike Mussolini in his early laissez-faire period with Alberto De Stefani, Hitler named as his first minister of finance the conservative Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. For a time, the Führer left foreign policy in the hands of professional diplomats (with the aristocratic Constantin von Neurath as foreign minister) and the army in the hands of professional soldiers. But Hitler’s drive to shrink the normative state and expand the prerogative state was much more sustained than Mussolini’s. Total master of his party, Hitler exploited its radical impulses for his own aggrandizement against the old elites and rarely (after the exemplary bloodbath of June 1934) needed to rein it in. Another suggested key to radicalization is the chaotic nature of fascist rule. Contrary to wartime propaganda and to an enduring popular image, Nazi Germany was not a purring, well-oiled machine. Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other. The ensuing “feudal” struggles for supremacy within and between party and state shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, a young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility.” He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.” We saw in the previous chapter how the self-indulgently bohemian Hitler spent as little time as possible on the labors of government, at least until the war. He proclaimed his visions and hatreds in speeches and ceremonies, and allowed his ambitious underlings to search for the most radical way to fulfill them in a Darwinian competition for attention and reward. His lieutenants, fully aware of his fanatical views, “worked toward the Führer,” who needed mainly to arbitrate among them. Mussolini, quite unlike Hitler in his commitment to the drudgery of government, refused to delegate and remained suspicious of competent associates—a governing style that produced more inertia than radicalization. War provided fascism’s clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise). It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, “the war . . . made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.

Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal. True, a handful of women have made it to the alpha position, such as Cleopatra of Egypt, Empress Wu Zetian of China (c. AD 700) and Elizabeth I of England. Yet they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Throughout Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign, all Members of Parliament were men, all officers in the Royal Navy and army were men, all judges and lawyers were men, all bishops and archbishops were men, all theologians and priests were men, all doctors and surgeons were men, all students and professors in all universities and colleges were men, all mayors and sheriffs were men, and almost all the writers, architects, poets, philosophers, painters, musicians and scientists were men. Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies.

An investigation by the U.S. Army’s Combat Studies Institute found that the Waygal elders might have deliberately drawn out a meeting that had been called to discuss the site for the new American outpost, keeping the officers from 173rd Airborne talking long enough for an ambush to get into place to attack the Americans as they left.10 The same study found that the local community, for historical, ethnic and economic reasons, had a strong incentive to stop the U.S. Army building a road into their valley—a traditional buffer zone between two antagonistic local population groups, Nuristanis and Safi Pashtuns, who competed politically and economically and had a long history of violent conflict.11

Confidence without a minimum of competence to back it up is false confidence and is almost guaranteed to set you up for failure. False confidence often coexists with arrogance, and even if you have the score on the board to back your confidence, arrogance is a terrible attribute and should be avoided at all costs.

I have described the total and terrifying dependence of the modern combat soldier on the competence and trustworthiness of others in the army. This all-inclusive dependence not only means relying on the army to provide ammunition, intelligence, food, water, and medical evacuation, but also relying on your own not to kill you with weapons intended for the enemy. The soldier's vulnerability is never more dramatically apparent than when artillery, bombs, or napalm intended to support troops in a fight with the enemy kill the very men they are meant to protect.

In the plateau the able-bodied unemployed workmen are supported by a combination of cash and commodity doles for which they render no service. Thus, being able to work, they do not. They live in idleness on government largesse while around them on every hand lie countless tasks whose doing the national welfare urgently requires. A public policy is scarcely sane when it supports idleness in the midst of a region which desperately needs public improvements. If the taxpayer is going to pay men who are jobless through no fault of their own, every element of common sense requires that he pay them for working rather than for not working. The men would benefit morally, physically and spiritually from constructive employment. Condescending charity in any form is harmful to the moral fiber of a people. If persisted in long enough, it sees pride and self-respect drain away to be replaced by cynicism, arrogance and wheedling dependence. It undermines good citizenship and contributes toward the thing a democracy can least afford — a class of unproductive and dependent citizens. At the present time practically every skilled man in the plateau has regular employment. The few genuinely competent carpenters, masons, mechanics, metal workers and electricians find regular work for their hands. They have jobs at good wages with mining companies and at other essential building and maintenance tasks. While the tiny corps of skilled men are energetically at work, the great army of their unskilled fellows drift about in dejected idleness. Irrefutable logic requires that work be found for their hands and energies also.

William the Conqueror was an enthusiastic builder of churches and monasteries, but even by the time he and his invading armies arrived from Normandy in 1066, Britons’ national psyche – their customs, culture and language – had already been shaped by almost 900 years of wrestling for possession between competing religious doctrines, heathen, pagan and Christian.

The use of divination, for example, implies the claim that a meaningful connection may exist between two events (a sneeze and the future salvation of an army, to take one example from among many in Xenophon’s Anabasis) that does not stem from the events themselves, the deliberate action of human beings, or chance. Or, to refer to divine punishment for certain misdeeds, as Xenophon does very emphatically in the midst of his Hellenica, is to suggest that those deeds had consequences not stemming naturally, so to speak, from the deeds themselves. In particular, it is to deny the validity of the suggestion which seems to be conveyed by the beginning and the ending of the Hellenica: that human affairs are drawn out of their usual confusion only when, and so long as, they are directed by human prudence in the form of a competent leader at the helm.

First, the collective may have competing priorities–the need to make money, say, or the need to raise an army–and deny or water down the authority’s

demons. She doesn’t just carry weapons—she is a weapon against the enemy and the greatest weapon God ever created against darkness! Let’s talk about what virtuous means from a scriptural perspective. God defines virtuous woman in the same way He defines virtuous man—as someone who fears God, loves truth, and hates sin. The Hebrew word for virtuous in Proverbs 31 is translated several different ways. Translations of Exodus 18:21 and 1 Kings 1:42, 52 use words such as able, worthy, competent, capable, and honorable. The word virtuous used in Proverbs 31 is used to describe Ruth (Ruth 3:11), and it is also used to describe Boaz in Ruth 2:1—a man of standing (in him is strength). Ruth 3:11 says that everyone in the city knew Ruth was virtuous. That’s because real virtue is something that gets noticed even as the world tries hard not to embrace it. Ruth was the real deal, and everyone knew it. God is very purposeful in the way He makes us as men and women. As I mentioned earlier, Scripture says God made woman to be the crown of her husband (Prov. 12:4). The Hebrew word for crown is derived from atar, which means “to encircle (for attack or protection).”1 If the virtuous woman is the crown of her husband, then she is anointed to secure his domain, to encircle him like spiritual radar, protecting their territory from infiltration. The man who wears his crown securely on his head—who understands who his virtuous wife is and values her role—isn’t intimidated by her. Quite the contrary; he knows she is a spiritual force against the enemy, designed to work in tandem with her husband, offering not only protection in the spiritual but success and prosperity in the natural (Prov. 31:22), manifesting her God-given abilities through her labor (v. 24). The Hebrew word for virtuous is chayil, which accurately defines the role of the virtuous woman. Chayil, from the Hebrew chuwl, means a force [to be reckoned with], whether of men, means or other resources; army; might, power, riches; displaying strength, ability, and moral worth. A virtuous woman is a force to be reckoned with because she is worthy of war,

This is possible, in part, because the structure of exponential organizations is very different. Rather than utilize armies of employees or large physical plants, twenty-first-century start-ups are smaller organizations focused on information technologies, dematerializing the once physical and creating new products and revenue streams in months, sometimes weeks. As a result, these lean start-ups are the small furry mammals competing with the large dinosaurs—meaning they’re one asteroid strike away from world dominance.

The radical bloc, demanding the kind of warfare which only such men could provide, was actually making it harder for the administration to find these men and use them: for it was providing an ideological qualification for purely professional jobs, and instead of inquiring about men’s competence it was asking about their loyalty. The

Conservative complicities in the fascism’s arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left. One of the most fateful decisions in the German case was von Papen’s removal, on June 16, 1932, of the ban on SA activity. Mussolini’s squadristi would have been powerless without the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability. We have seen how Giolitti helped make Mussolini respectable by including him in his electoral coalition in May 1921. Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive and leader of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him. One at Bad Harzburg in fall 1931 made the public believe the two had formed a “Harzburg Front.” But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

But why does this all matter? Why is the math of arrows and swords relevant to understanding why you might have a boss, a boss’s boss, and a boss’s boss’s boss at work? For a simple reason: as ranged weapons became more common, the dynamics of warfare started to dramatically favor societies with more soldiers. If a few hundred people got together and formed an army under the rule of a single chief, egalitarian bands of twenty to eighty members just couldn’t compete. And when humans get together in larger groups, flat societies become impossible. Put enough people together, and hierarchy and dominance always emerge. It’s an ironclad rule of history. Some people had to learn this the hard way. Bands that stubbornly stuck to the old ways of flat society started to get wiped out by those who joined together and embraced chiefs. Plus, on the battlefield itself, having leaders (generals) with formal power over their soldiers was much more effective than a ragtag bunch of soldiers making their own decisions. It was the opposite of the !Kung hunting rituals. To win a war, you didn’t want to insult your best and bravest. You needed to elevate your best fighters, not cut them down to size.