Education Quote by Otto Friedrich

War, in Friedrich's hands, becomes less a pageant of heroics than a machine for humiliating human certainty. His phrasing is deliberately plain, almost reportorial, and that restraint is the point: it drains the romance out of "great battles" and replaces it with a grim managerial truth. The first lesson is not bravery or strategy but failure: "even the most carefully prepared plans often go wrong". The subtext is an argument against the comforting myth that history is steered by masterminds. Planning matters, he concedes, but it is never sovereign.

Then he twists the knife: "lucky breaks are very important". Not courage, not virtue, not even superior intelligence. Luck. Friedrich is signaling a worldview shaped by the 20th century's catastrophic scale, where wars and political outcomes routinely turned on weather, timing, miscommunication, mechanical breakdown, a single decision made under fog and fatigue. He doesn't celebrate contingency; he insists we admit it.

As a writer, Friedrich is also quietly indicting how we narrate conflict. We love battle stories that launder chaos into inevitability: the brilliant general, the decisive maneuver, the clean arc. His sentence refuses that structure. It flattens the drama into two recurring realities: complexity produces error, and chance arbitrates the rest. Read culturally, it's a rebuke to any institution - military, corporate, political - that sells "best-laid plans" as insurance. Great battles, he implies, are great partly because they expose how little control anyone actually has.