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

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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.

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About Thomas E. Ricks

Thomas Edwin "Tom" Ricks (born September 25, 1955) and is a member of the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy think tank. Ricks lectures widely to the military and is a member of Harvard University's Senior Advisory Council on the Project on U.S. Civil-Military Relations. Ricks is the author of several nonfiction books including Making the Corps (1997); the bestselling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and its follow-up, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006–2008 (2009); the bestselling First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (2020); and Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (2022).

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Alternative Names: Thomas Ricks Thomas Edwin Ricks

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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.

Additional quotes by Thomas E. Ricks

As the People are the Fountain of Power and Authority, the original Seat of Majesty, the Authors of Laws, and the Creators of Officers to execute them; if they shall find the Power they have conferred abused by their Trustees, their Majesty violated by Tyranny or by Usurpation, their Authority prostituted to support Violence or screen Corruption, the Laws grown pernicious through Accidents unforeseen or unavoidable, or rendered ineffectual through the Infidelity and Corruption of the Executors of them; then it is their Right, and what is their Right is their Duty, to resume that delegated Power, and call their Trustees to an Account; to resist the Usurpation, and extirpate the Tyranny; to restore their sullied Majesty and prostituted Authority; to suspend, alter, or abrogate those Laws, and punish their unfaithful and corrupt Officers. Nor is it the Duty only of the united Body; but every Member of it ought, according to his respective Rank, Power, and Weight in the Community, to concur in advancing and supporting those glorious Designs.

We do not call ourselves ‘Native American,’ because our blood and people were here long before this land was called the Americas. We are older than America can ever be and do not know the borders.

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In Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Montesquieu dwelled even more on the peculiar vulnerabilities of republics. “What makes free states last a shorter time than others is that both the misfortunes and the successes they encounter almost always cause them to lose their freedom,” the French thinker warned. “A wise republic should hazard nothing that exposes it to either good or bad fortune. The only good to which it should aspire is the perpetuation of its condition.

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