Short Manpower Quotes

Whether or not you agree with the outcome, the tremendous amount that the Manhattan Project accomplished in such a short amount of time–just under three years–is astonishing. It makes you wonder what other kinds of things could be accomplished with that kind of determination, effort, and financial and political support. What if the kind of money, manpower, and resources that went into the Manhattan Project went into the fight against hunger? Cancer? Homelessness?

Where else short of colonizing another planet could they hide the required plant, machinery and equipment – and the manpower to operate it – away from the prying eyes of Joe Citizen, investigative journalists and inquisitive everyday people like us?

Although these firms deploy units that are often much smaller in manpower relative to their client’s adversaries, their effectiveness lies not in their size, but in their comprehensive training, experience, and overall skill at battlefield judgment, all in fundamentally short supply in the chaotic battlefields of the last decade.14 Utilizing coordinated movement and intelligent application of firepower, their strength is their ability to arrive at the right place at the right moment. The fundamental reality of modern warfare is that in many cases such small tactical units can achieve strategic goals.

Mughals to the importance of sea power. The Mughals had a predominantly continental outlook. Preoccupation with cavalry warfare blinded the Indian rulers to the maritime challenge of the European powers. The Mughals would only take an enemy seriously if he confronted them with large contingents of cavalry. Thus, they neglected the Indian Ocean as the most important element of the total Indian environment. They knew the monsoon would not permit a sustained maritime invasion of India. Thus, a maritime invader would find his supply lines cut in a short time-frame. The European powers, however, never attempted such an invasion. India itself had a huge military manpower pool with a mercenary orientation. It generally flocked to the banner of whichever local ruler paid the best. The European success lay in nativisation. They built up their military contingents in India by drilling local infantry troops who were far less expensive to maintain but in the end proved fatal to the Indian cavalry.

Even though deaths were lower among the rich who lived more spaciously and moved residence more easily, the plague reduced their control, creating a shortage of manpower that raised the status of ordinary people. The wool-processing workshops of Italy and Flanders, England and France were short of workers. The rise in wages and the fall in inequality led to higher spending power which doubled per capita investment, leading in turn to higher production in textiles and other consumer goods. Fewer mouths to feed meant better diets. Female wages – once half those of men – were now the same. Workers formed guilds. The new confidence felt by ordinary people empowered them to launch a spate of peasant revolts. The shortage of labour necessitated new sources of power – hydraulics were harnessed to drive watermills and smelting furnaces – and new unpaid workers were obtained from a new source altogether: African slavery. Demand for silk, sugar, spices and slaves inspired European men, bound by a new esprit de corps, to voyage abroad, to destroy their rivals, in the east and in Europe itself, so that they could supply these appetites. The competition intensified improvements in firearms, cannon, gunpowder and galleons. The paradox of the Great Mortality was not only that it elevated the respect for humanity, it also degraded it; it not only decimated Europe, it became a factor in Europe’s rise.

Necessary because it could not be suppressed, this role of poverty was necessary too because it made wealth possible. Because they labor and consume little, those who are in need permit a nation to enrich itself, to set a high value on its fields, its colonies, and its mines, to manufacture products which will be sold the world over; in short, a people would be poor which had no paupers. Indigence becomes an indispensable element in the State. In it is concealed the secret but also the real life of a society. The poor constitute the basis and the glory of nations. And their poverty, which cannot be suppressed, must be exalted and revered: "My purpose is merely to attract a share of that vigilant attention [that of the government] to the suffering portion of the People...; the succor it is owed derives essentially from the honor and the prosperity of an Empire, of which the Poor are everywhere the firmest support, for a sovereign cannot preserve and extend his realm without favoring the population, the cultivation of the Land, the Arts, and commerce; and the Poor are the necessary agents of these great powers which establish the true strength of a People." Here is an entire moral rehabilitation of the Pauper, which designates, at a deeper level, a social and economic reintegration of his role and character. In the mercantilist economy, the Pauper, being neither producer nor consumer, had no place: idle, vagabond, unemployed, he belonged only to confinement, a measure by which he was exiled and as it were abstracted from society. With the nascent industry which needs manpower, he once again plays a part in the body of the nation.

Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.

This is another part of the special expertise of the ST. The CIA would use secrecy and need-to-know control to arrange with a Cabinet-level officer for the cover assignment of an Agency employee to that organization, for example to the Federal Aviation Administration. The Cabinet officer would agree without too much concern and quietly tip off his manpower officer to arrange a “slot” (personnel space) for someone who would be coming into a certain office. He would simply say that the “slot would be reimbursed,” and this would permit the FAA to carry a one-man overage in its manning tables. Soon the man would arrive to work in that position. As far as his associates would know, he would be on some special project, and in a short time he would have worked so well into the staff that they would not know that he was not really one of them. Turnover being what it is in bureaucratic Washington, it would not be too long before everyone around that position would have forgotten that it was still there as a special slot. It would be a normal FAA-assigned job with a CIA man in it.

In short, there is a great deal of stagnation among the settlers and the medium-sized enterprises. The native there is often mistreated, exploited and has no medical care. In the Menteau farm, we observed a considerable number of varicose ulcers, which hardly exists at UM and La Forminière. There is no dispensary on this farm. The small settler can succeed in the Congo, one can doubt it, he lives by the exploitation of the native whom he makes work like a convict and moreover, he takes back his meager salary by selling him bad goods. The settler is often doubled as a trafficker, they complement each other, the system truck. Besides, the whole colonial edifice rests on the negro's shoulders. He alone is the source of profit, thanks to the excessive exploitation of which he is the object. In a colony, where there are few transport routes, where those that exist demand exorbitant prices, where there is little or no mechanical handling, no workhorse, only the degradation of the workforce - work can maintain the commercial level of the cost price. Large companies have the merit, through their tools, their medical assistance, their works of providing more treatment and of not wasting manpower.

Writing serves to restore unity to the consciousness of the human race that is fragmented by the ceaseless interruptions of death, so that the thoughts arising in an ancestor can be completed in a distant descendent: it rectifies the disintegration of the human race and its consciousness into countless ephemeral individuals and defies the inexorable passage of time with its attendant forgetfulness. All this is accomplished not only by written memor- ials but by stone ones as well, some of which are older than written ones. Who would believe that those people who, at immeasurable expense, set in motion the manpower of many thousands of people over many years in order to construct the pyramids, monoliths, rock tombs, obelisks, temples and palaces that have endured for millennia – who would believe that they had only themselves in view, the short span of their lives which did not last to see the end of the construction, or even to see the ostensible goal that the crude masses demanded as a pretext? – Clearly their real goal was to speak to the most distant posterity, to enter into a relationship with it, and in this way to bring unity to the consciousness of humanity. The buildings of the Hindus, Egyptians and even the Greeks and Romans were calculated to last for many millennia, because their range of vision, brought about by culture, was broader; while the buildings of the Middle Ages and modern times were intended for a couple of centuries at most, which was also due to the fact that people were more reliant on writing once it came into more general use, and even more once it gave birth to the printing press. Yet we still see in the buildings of more recent ages the impulse to speak to posterity, and it is therefore shameful when they are destroyed or rebuilt to serve lower, utilitar- ian functions. Written monuments have less to fear from the elements than stone monuments, but more to fear from barbarism: they accomplish much more. The Egyptians wanted to unite both types of monuments by covering the stone monuments with hieroglyphics; in fact they added paintings in case the hieroglyphics could no longer be understood.

Writing serves to restore unity to the consciousness of the human race that is fragmented by the ceaseless interruptions of death, so that the thoughts arising in an ancestor can be completed in a distant descendent: it rectifies the disintegration of the human race and its consciousness into countless ephemeral individuals and defies the inexorable passage of time with its attendant forgetfulness. All this is accomplished not only by written memorials but by stone ones as well, some of which are older than written ones. Who would believe that those people who, at immeasurable expense, set in motion the manpower of many thousands of people over many years in order to construct the pyramids, monoliths, rock tombs, obelisks, temples and palaces that have endured for millennia – who would believe that they had only themselves in view, the short span of their lives which did not last to see the end of the construction, or even to see the ostensible goal that the crude masses demanded as a pretext? – Clearly their real goal was to speak to the most distant posterity, to enter into a relationship with it, and in this way to bring unity to the consciousness of humanity. The buildings of the Hindus, Egyptians and even the Greeks and Romans were calculated to last for many millennia, because their range of vision, brought about by culture, was broader; while the buildings of the Middle Ages and modern times were intended for a couple of centuries at most, which was also due to the fact that people were more reliant on writing once it came into more general use, and even more once it gave birth to the printing press. Yet we still see in the buildings of more recent ages the impulse to speak to posterity, and it is therefore shameful when they are destroyed or rebuilt to serve lower, utilitarian functions. Written monuments have less to fear from the elements than stone monuments, but more to fear from barbarism: they accomplish much more. The Egyptians wanted to unite both types of monuments by covering the stone monuments with hieroglyphics; in fact they added paintings in case the hieroglyphics could no longer be understood.

have a high percentage of fighter pilots, but there was no telling about the new crop of retreads. It was tough for them, with very little time in the airplane and the responsibilities of rank and leadership thrust upon them. The delicate balance between flying skill and tactical judgment was difficult to learn. Learning to subordinate your own fear was even more problematic. I knew now that everyone faced it in some degree. How you dealt with it determined whether you were a fighter pilot or simply someone flying fighters. The flow of retrainees from the short courses had begun to affect our losses. Filling the squadrons throughout Southeast Asia took a lot of manpower. We were getting the bodies, but we were no longer getting the skill levels. You couldn’t prove it, of course, but things were happening that didn’t bode well for the future.