Word: axioms
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...came death or wounds. But at no time in the Civil War did any unit of more than 1,000 men suffer higher than 20% casualties. That was when war was still in the mule and carbine stage. But changes in war technique have not changed an old military axiom: you cannot expect a unit which has lost more than one man in five to continue effective. It must be withdrawn from action, given two months' rest, completely reorganized. One reason that World War I fell into so many clinches and deadlocks was that the 20% Axiom was often...
Remembering from "last time" the futility of trying to charge against a machine gun, Captain Liddell Hart lays down the axiom that in modern warfare the defense has a great advantage over the attack: no attack succeeds unless the attackers secure surprise or have at least a 3-to-1 preponderance over the attacked. This does not mean merely in men (in the last war some attacks failed with a 16-to-1 preponderance in men), but in fire power. Says...
...penknives, coins and pencils may be found distributed in the body, and occasionally outside objects such as pebbles, bits of masonry, and even the bones and soft tissues of a nearby victim may cause wounds." Grease, dirt and bits of clothing are driven into wounds. It is a military axiom that "every wound is infected...
...every great general has succeeded in expressing this axiom of military science so sententiously. But every real master of strategy, from Carthage's Hannibal and Rome's Caesar to France's Gamelin, has understood the intimate relationship between troops and terrain, countryside and conquest, strategy and topography. Sometimes God is on the side of the heaviest battalions; sometimes, as in the case of Switzerland, He is on the side of the country with the tallest mountains. Geography has always decided where wars are fought and how they are fought. World War I was no exception. World...
...axiom in the insurance business that insurance is not bought but sold. In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt sold Congress and Congress sold the U. S. the Social Security Act, the biggest, most comprehensive, most expensive mass insurance policy ever written. Since then its purchasers, the nation's taxpayers, have had occasion to read their policy carefully and, if they have detected no outright jokers, their reaction has been such that practically every politician in the U. S. from Franklin Roosevelt down has put revision of Social Security at the top of his must list. Last week, as the House Ways...