No Substitute for Victory: Lessons in Strategy and Leadership from General Douglas Macarthur

Chapter 5. Use Every Available Means

Strategies that are bound by the constraints of the past and the limitations of the present are often doomed to failure. Great leaders envision unbounded leaps from the present into the future and then apply all of their creativity and resourcefulness to enable those leaps. As MacArthur advised, they use “every available means” to achieve victory.

MacArthur emerged from WWI, a watershed in the history of warfare, with this principle firmly in mind. He had witnessed the death and destruction that resulted when military leaders attempted to apply traditional methods to a new kind of war. In 1920, he wrote from West Point:

War had become a phenomenon which truly involved the nation in arms…The great numbers ...