War & Peace Quote by Jay Garner

Garner’s line is a soldier’s blunt antidote to the fantasy that wars end when the shooting stops. It lands because it flips the usual sequencing: “postwar” isn’t an epilogue, it’s baked into the opening act. The phrasing is tellingly clunky - “start building,” “start beginning” - like someone talking in real time, pushing back against a bureaucracy that treats planning as a stack of separate binders. That lack of polish is the point. It signals operational urgency, not TED Talk wisdom.

The specific intent is managerial and moral at once: if you can map targets, supply lines, and timelines, you can map governance, security, and basic services. Garner is arguing that destruction without a reconstruction blueprint isn’t strategy; it’s liability. The subtext is sharper: failure to plan for the day after is not an accident but a political choice, often driven by overconfidence (“they’ll sort it out”), ideological wish-casting, or a desire to keep the war’s sell simple. Postwar planning forces you to answer uncomfortable questions about power, legitimacy, and responsibility - who polices, who pays, who rules - before the first convoy rolls.

Context matters. Garner is inseparable from the early Iraq War era, where the gap between military victory and political stability became catastrophic. Read that way, the quote is both a warning and an indictment: if the war plan is meticulous and the postwar plan is improvisation, the improvisation will write the real story.