On Defense & Offense: Revisiting Clausewitz, Mao Zedong &Thucydides
The article revisits the strategic philosophies of military leaders like Clausewitz, Mao Zedong, and Thucydides. It emphasizes the importance of defeating the enemy while preserving one's own forces, as highlighted by General Patton's famous quote. The discussion reflects on historical military objectives and the enduring principles of warfare.
- ▪General Patton emphasized that winning a war involves making the enemy suffer losses.
- ▪The article explores the strategic thoughts of historical military figures.
- ▪It highlights the balance between offense and defense in military strategy.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Real Clear Defense |
| Canonical URL | https://www.realcleardefense.com/2026/05/23/on_defense_and_offense_revisiting_clausewitz_mao_zedong_and_thucydides_1184399.html |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 05:34:28 -0500 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T10:42:26.389Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T10:42:26.389Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | KfLcXlyQbKhu |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” Patton’s remark, while it had not advanced the study of war by any measure, stated what had been the objectives of military commanders of history: to defeat the enemy and preserve their own forces. Read Full Article »
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Real Clear Defense.