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

Fuller writes like a man trying to stop a victory from curdling into a self-inflicted defeat. Calling a bombing policy "suicidal" is a deliberately jarring inversion of wartime logic: the tactic may be devastating to the enemy, he concedes, but it also detonates the very political outcome that war is supposed to secure. That opening move is rhetorically sharp because it refuses the easy metric of success (damage inflicted) and replaces it with a harder one (the kind of peace you are making possible).

The intent is not pacifist hand-wringing. Fuller, a professional soldier and theorist, accepts military efficacy as a given; his critique is strategic and moral in the old-fashioned sense: strategy includes the postwar order, and morality includes consequences. The subtext is that bombing, especially of industrial and civilian infrastructure, doesn’t just destroy factories. It breeds a politics of retaliation, hardens publics, and leaves the "victor" inheriting a wrecked economic landscape that must still be governed, fed, rebuilt, traded with. If your peace aim is stability or influence, you can’t torch the conditions that make stability possible.

His final clause - "unless that aim is mutual economic and social annihilation" - is acid. It implies that total war has a hidden ideology: if you act as though annihilation is acceptable, you’ll eventually get it, on both sides. Coming from a soldier, the line carries an insider’s warning: the tools of modern war can outrun political control, and the battlefield can quietly expand into the future you meant to win.