War & Peace Quote by J. F. C. Fuller

Fuller’s line is a grenade lobbed at the most comforting lie modern states tell themselves: that war can be reduced to inventory. He grants the arithmetic premise without blinking - yes, mass matters, and if combat were a sealed laboratory experiment, the side with more bodies and more metal would eventually crush the other. Then he snaps the hinge: “other things” are never equal. That phrase does the real work, because it names everything politicians and procurement offices try to background as noise - morale, leadership, terrain, doctrine, logistics, timing, weather, intelligence, industrial resilience, even the psychological stamina to keep choosing violence after the first plan collapses.

As a professional soldier writing in an era when mechanization and “scientific” management promised a cleaner, more predictable battlefield, Fuller is warning against a seductive bureaucratic mindset. Counting men and shells feels objective; it turns strategy into a ledger. But his insistence that equality is impossible is really an argument about friction: the battlefield refuses standardization. The side with fewer resources can manufacture asymmetry through speed, surprise, concentration, and adaptation, while the richer side can squander its advantage through rigidity and misreading the moment.

There’s also an institutional subtext: Fuller is defending the intellectual autonomy of the military professional against civilian simplifications. Numbers are the language of budgets and headlines; “other things” are the messy, unphotogenic realities that decide outcomes. The quote doesn’t romanticize underdogs. It limits the arrogance of arithmetic and re-centers war as a contest between systems of judgment, not just stockpiles.