Just got back in town. From the beginning of the 2008 presidential nomination campaign, I have said that the best Republican candidate was Fred Thompson. I now offer clear proof why. In a recent article about the fact that universities no longer teach military history, he writes:

All of this means that if there were ever a time to put our best minds to the study of warfare, it is now. I know that, for many people, it's an unpleasant topic they would just as soon avoid -- but history that ignores the importance of warfare is not history. There is a reason that both sides in the Civil War studied Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” – though it was written in the 5th or 6th Century BC.

How great is that quote? I love this guy! I started the Science of Strategy Institute because most people no longer have any idea how competition works, largely because we pretend that we want to cooperate instead of compete without realizing how these two ideas depend on each other. The study of what works in competition has been supressed largely because it isn't politically correct. We are a much poorer nation for it and college graduates are all poorly prepated for the real world of competition when they graduate. The fact is that we all live or die by our competitive efforts, which is exactly what Sun Tzu says in the first stanza of the Art of War. As far as the strategic importance of action over discussion, I like this quote of Victor Davis Hanson from the same article:

Hansen writes, "The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s."