Word: prussian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...dressing as if you're going to church is necessary for the photo op boarding Marine One for the hop to Camp David. Statecraft may define a presidency, but so will small acts at the margin. Who knows? If Richard Nixon hadn't dressed the White House guards like Prussian police, he might have survived Watergate. There would have been no need for the fashion-obsessed Nancy Reagan to debase herself at a Gridiron Club dinner dressed up like a bag lady in hand-me-downs if the East Wing had not declared a tablecloth crisis and ordered new hand...
World War I put the Prussian military machine out of business and created new nations from the wreckage of the Habsburg Empire. But by humiliating and pauperizing Germany, the victors contributed to the conditions out of which Nazism arose. World War I also so weakened Czarist Russia that a band of conspirators who called themselves Bolsheviks and who had a blueprint to take over the world were able, for starters, to take over the largest country on earth...
...forces are needed at the front on Day Five. Relying less on brute force than on operational elegance, it requires commanders to concentrate their efforts on attacking the right thing in the right place at the right time. The enemy's crucial "center of gravity" -- a term borrowed from Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz -- is that target whose destruction will have the greatest ripple effect on the enemy's overall military operations...
Born in the East Prussian capital of Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad in the Soviet Union), Prager went to the U.S. as a student before embarking on a journalistic career that included long stints in Southeast Asia, where he covered the Vietnam War, and in the Middle East, where he was one of the first Western journalists, in 1975, to interview Saddam Hussein...
Iraqi armored and infantry units get good marks from military experts for the way they carried out the invasion of Kuwait. But they were operating against very light opposition. Everything becomes much more difficult in heavy combat when what Prussian military theorist Karl von Clausewitz called "the friction" of war confuses commanders, frightens troops and disrupts plans...