War & Peace Quote by Erwin Rommel

Rommel’s sentence reads like a calm diagnosis, but it’s really a warning shot aimed at commanders still thinking in World War I terms. He frames air power not as support but as the opening act that decides the script for everything that follows. The key word is “preceded”: by the time infantry and armor meet, the result may already be structurally rigged by who owns the sky.

The intent is operationally practical and politically pointed. Rommel is arguing for combined-arms realism: logistics, movement, surprise, and tempo are all fragile on a modern battlefield, and aircraft attack each at its root. If your supply columns are exposed, if your radios and HQs are hunted, if bridges and chokepoints are cratered, then your “tactics” become triage. You don’t pick the best plan; you pick the plan you can still execute under pressure.

The subtext sits in his phrase “compromise solutions,” which smuggles in a brutal idea: air superiority doesn’t just kill people and machines, it kills options. It forces improvisation, defensive postures, night movements, dispersed formations, slower advances - all choices that look like prudence after the fact but are often coerced by vulnerability.

Context matters. Rommel’s campaigns in North Africa dramatized the tyranny of supply lines and the outsized impact of interdiction in open terrain. Later, Allied air dominance in Normandy and beyond turned German movement into a daytime liability. He’s not romanticizing technology; he’s describing how modern war punishes the side that can’t move freely, concentrate forces, or even be seen without consequence.