Yet Orwell never fit into the BBC. At about the same time, he wrote in his diary, “Its atmosphere is something between a girls’ school and a lunatic … - Thomas E. Ricks

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership.

C. P. Snow, the son of a church organist, recalled in 1940 being reassured by listening to Churchill. “He was an aristocrat, but he would cheerfully have beggared his class and friends, and everyone else too, if that was the price of the country coming through. We believed it of him. The poor believed it, as his voice rolled out into the slum streets, those summer evenings of 1940.

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.