Success Quote by Chester W. Nimitz

Strategy, in Nimitz's hands, reads less like bravado than like a checklist that can kill you if you skip a line. The quote is built as a triage of questions, each one tightening the noose around romantic ideas of war. "Likely to succeed?" isn’t optimism; it’s probabilistic thinking under pressure, a commander forcing staff and self to quantify the odds rather than narrate them. Then he pivots immediately to "the consequences of failure" - the phrase that admits what wartime memos often try to hide: failure isn’t an abstract loss, it’s sunk ships, stranded Marines, momentum handed to the enemy, and political support evaporating back home.

The last question - "in the realm of practicability in terms of material and supplies" - is the quiet anchor. Nimitz was a Pacific war commander, and the Pacific is basically logistics with water on top: distance, fuel, repair capacity, carrier decks, replacement pilots, weather windows. By ending on material, he signals an ethic of responsibility: if you can't feed the operation, you don't get to have the operation, no matter how elegant the map looks.

Subtextually, the quote rejects the cult of the decisive battle. It treats war as systems management where ego is a liability. The clipped, interrogative style is also command culture in miniature: he’s not delivering a speech, he’s forcing accountability. The intent isn’t to sound cautious; it’s to ensure that when lives and national stakes are wagered, the wager is informed, resourced, and honestly priced.