(UPDATE: beaten like a rented mule by Cheryl Rofer; see https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6619.html)
Apologies in advance for exceeding the recommended “above-the-fold” limit:
If war consisted of one decisive act, or a set of simultaneous decisions, preparations would tend toward totality, for no omission could ever be rectified. The sole criterion for preparations which the world of reality could provide would be the measures taken by the adversary — so far as they are known; the rest would once more be reduced to abstract calculations.
… if all the means available were, or could be, simultaneously employed, all wars would automatically be confined to a single decisive act or a set of simultaneous ones — the reason being that any adverse decision must reduce the sum of the means available, and if all had been committed in the first act there could really be no question of a second.
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Book I [On the Nature of War], Chapter 1 [What is War?], section 8 [War Does Not Consist of a Single Short Blow]), 1832
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? — Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! — All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
— Abraham Lincoln, Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, 27 January 1838
Time-of-flight equation for a ballistic missile:
t – t0 = √a3/ µ [2Ï€ + (E – e sin E) – (E0 – e sin E0)]
— Bate/Mueller/White, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics (Dover, 1971)
Having deliberately refrained from reading any of the other roundtable contributions so far, lest I become overwhelmingly intimidated, resign from my contributor status, and tell Lex to forget he ever heard of me, I have decided to comment on one very small portion of Book I, specifically Chapter 1, section 8 (page 79 in the edition we are reading). Because, of course, for an American baby boomer, no war that directly affected the entire population was, prior to the late 1980s, expected to be anything other than a single short blow.
So, with the sure knowledge of my limited qualifications ever before me, and the entirely unmanaged risk of merely restating, and poorly, what someone else has already said, I begin …
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