Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Cold logic, delivered with the offhand cadence of a man describing the weather. Keegan’s line works because it strips war of its grand abstractions and forces the listener into the crudest arithmetic: threat equals target. The phrase “on the whole” is doing mischievous work here. It’s a little shrug of qualification that acknowledges exceptions - civilians, coercion, mistaken identity - while still bulldozing toward the operational reality soldiers are trained to accept. That small hedge makes the sentence feel less like a slogan and more like the private, grim reasoning people use to live with lethal choices.

Keegan, as a military historian, is often at his sharpest when he punctures the romance of strategy with the bodily fact of violence. This isn’t a moral endorsement of killing so much as a description of how moral complexity gets flattened under fire. The syntax is conversational, even faintly comic: “aren’t they?” invites agreement, turning complicity into a shared nod. That tag question mimics the social pressure inside armies and nations during war: once you accept the premise that “they” are trying to kill “you,” retaliation becomes framed not as aggression but as basic self-maintenance.

The subtext is about the psychology of enemy-making. “They” is a convenient plural, smoothing away individuals into a category you can shoot at. Keegan’s intent is to show how easily the ethics of war collapse into a survival narrative - and how that narrative, once installed, makes escalation feel not only permissible but obvious.