in 1942 in an essay in which he meditated on some “visions of a totalitarian future.” In it, he explained why he thought the working class would be m… - Thomas E. Ricks

Overall, Zinni’s rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today’s conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest. Similar messages can be heard in many parts of the Corps, wherever there are good officers willing to seize the initiative — that is, who care more about their mission and their Marines than they do about their careers. This is how Major Davis at the Drill Instructors School summarizes the Marine Corps way of doing business: “Concentrate on doing a single task as simply as you can, execute it flawlessly, take care of your people, and go home.”That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the “doctrine”that the Army so loves to write and cite. But those four steps offer an efficient way to run any organization.

to study a situation, evaluate its facts, decide which ones were meaningful, develop a course of action in response to work toward a desired outcome, and verbalize the orders that needed to be issued. Those are the basic steps in critical thinking,

relatively powerless — the front-line American soldier doing his best in a difficult situation, the Iraqi civilian trying to care for a family amid chaos and violence. They are the people who pay every day with blood and tears for the failures of high officials and powerful institutions. The run-up to the war is particularly significant because it also laid the shaky foundation for the derelict occupation that followed, and that constitutes the