Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line is a cold splash of realism aimed at a culture that still wants war to look like a sepia photograph: brave men, clean deaths, noble landscapes. By setting “shot in a mountain valley” against “crashing an airliner into a skyscraper,” he’s not weighing bodies on a moral scale so much as puncturing the aesthetic hierarchy that props up old military myth. One death fits the inherited script of glory: distant, soldierly, framed by nature. The other is modern, mediated, urban, and designed for maximum spectacle. Keegan’s provocation is that glory is not an objective property of sacrifice; it’s a story we tell ourselves, and the camera angle matters.

The intent is diagnostic. As a military historian who spent his career tracking how warfare changes with technology and institutions, Keegan is pointing to a brutal evolution: the prestige economy of violence has shifted from battlefield endurance to theatrical shock. “Altogether less glorious” isn’t praise for terrorism; it’s an indictment of how “glory” gets assigned by audiences who aren’t the ones bleeding.

The subtext is about attention. A bullet in a valley is private; an airliner in a skyline is public, instantly legible, and politically catalytic. In the late-20th/early-21st-century context of asymmetric conflict, that legibility becomes a weapon. Keegan forces readers to confront the uncomfortable fact that modern combatants, especially non-state actors, fight not just armies but perception itself - and that our romantic vocabulary for war can’t keep up with the reality we’ve helped create.