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.… - Thomas E. Ricks

Public Virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics. There must be a possitive Passion for the public good, the public Interest, Honour, Power, and Glory, established in the Minds of the People, or there can be no Republican Government, nor any real Liberty. And this public Passion must be Superiour to all private Passions.47 This was about as succinct an example as exists of the influence of the classical model on the thinking of the Revolutionary generation.

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.

As Orwell once wrote, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear” — most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.