Bernard Brodie

There is no other science where judgements are tested in blood and answered in the servitude of the defeated, where the acknowledged authority is the leader who has won or who instills confidence that he can win.

— Bernard Brodie

We will be making a sufficient but necessary contribution if we simply jar the prevalent complacency on the doctrine of shoot-from-the-hip-and-empty-the-magazine.

— Bernard Brodie

Soldiers usually are close students of tactics, but rarely are they students of strategy and practically never of war.

— Bernard Brodie

In wars throughout history, events have generally proved the pre-hostilities calculations of both sides, victor as well as loser, to have been seriously wrong.

— Bernard Brodie

Yet the only empirical data we have about how people conduct war and behave under its stresses is our experience with it in the past, however much we have to make adjustments for subsequent changes in conditions.

— Bernard Brodie

Necessity, which frequently exists only in the mind, is less often the mother of invention than of obstinacy, and the obstinacy of those three years exacted from France a penalty which continued to exert its effects over the years, especially in World War II, and which cannot be fully summed up even now.

— Bernard Brodie

Military doctrine is universally, and has been since the time of Napoleon, imbued with the "Spirit of the Offensive." There are some very good reasons for this, which we shall review elsewhere. As with many other ideas which have a sound basis in reason, constant and fervent reiteration has created distortions, like the attitude, for example, which regards a healthy respect for enemy capabilities as defenseminded and hence ignoble.

— Bernard Brodie

Brodie wasn't inhibited or shocked by matter publicists in and out of RAND flaunted as the most advanced, most modern of developments. After all, he wasn't ashamed to talk to his colleagues about his psychoanalysis. He was too snugly burrowed in his liberal arts to enjoy the gyrations of simulation. His instruments of research were antiquated: no computers, no interdisciplinary teams, just his noggin, the library, table-talk, and the occasional colloquy.

— Bernard Brodie

His circle included the most prominent strategists of the period: Bernard Brodie, Albert Wohlstetter, and Thomas Schelling, among others. Virtually every substantative argument Kahn made about deterrence could be found in pages written by these men. OTW (On Thermonuclear War) was not a grotesque sideshow.

— Bernard Brodie