I originally posted this in the Journals section. I am posting it here per the Journal Section is no more. I find myself returning to the writings of the Stoics quite often.

(Any errors are due to my typing or I should say lack of typing skills.
I have found the writings of the Stoics, and commentaries on the Stoics, to be quite helpful. I hope you enjoy this as much as I have.)


Stockdale on Stoicism I:

The Stoic Warrior’s Triad

VADM James B. Stockdale, USN Retired


The Stoic Warrior’s Triad:
Tranquility, Fearlessness, and Freedom

A lecture to the student body of The Marine Amphibious Warfare School, Quantico, Virginia, Tuesday, 18 April 1995



I feel at home here. I’ve flown combat with Marines in their own air planes-VMF212 out of Kaneohe. I was wing commander of the carrier Oriskany on its 1965 cruise. One of our fighter squadrons was transitioning from F8 Crusaders to F4s. The gap was filled by the Marine F8 squadron. The skipper was Lieutenant Colonel Chuck Ludden, the Executive Officer was Major Ed Rutty, former Blue Angel. And my wingman in the squadron was a First Lieutenant named Duane Wills (later a Lieutenant General and head of Marine Corps Aviation). I spent 7 ½ years in prison with my shipmate Marine Captain Harley Chapman, who was shot down two months after I was. So I’m in familiar territory, and damned glad to have spent 37 years in the Naval Service with the likes of guys like you.

Now, that said, I’ve got to choose my words well and get to the point if we are to get anything out of this morning, We’re going to take some big steps right away. What kind of a racket is this military officership? Let’s go right to the old master, Clausewitz. He said: “War is an act of violence to compel
the enemy to do your will.” Your will, not his will. We are in the business of breaking people’s wills. That’s all there is to war; once you have done that, the war is over.

And what is the most important weapon in breaking peoples wills? This may surprise you, but I am convinced that holding the moral high ground is more important than firepower. For Clausewitz, war was not an activity governed by scientific laws, but a clash of wills, of moral forces. He wrote: “It is not the loss in men, horses, or guns, but in order, courage, confidence, cohesion and plan which come into consideration whether the engagement can still be continued; it is principally the moral forces which decide here.” Moral forces! Conviction! Mind Games!

I had the wisdom of Clausewitz’ stand on moral integrity demonstrated to me throughout a losing war as I sat on the sidelines in a Hanoi prison. To take a nation to war on the basis of any provocation that bears the smell of fraud is to risk losing national leadership’s commitment when the going gets tough. When our soldiers’ bodies start coming home in high numbers, and reverses in the field are discouraging, a guilty conscience in a top leader can become the Achilles heel of a whole country. Men of shame who know our road to war was not cricket, are seldom those we can count on to hold fast, stay the course.

As some of you know, I led all three air actions in the Tonkin Gulf affair in the first week of August 1964. Moral corners were cut in Washington in our top leaders’ interpretation of the events of August 4th at sea in order to get the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through Congress in a hurry. I was not only the sole eyewitness to all events, and leader of the American forces to boot; I was cognizant of classified message traffic pertaining thereto. I knew for sure that our moral forces were squandered for short-range goals; others in the know at least suspected as much.

Mind games are important, and you have to play them honestly and seriously in this business. Clausewitz’ battlefield enemy Napoleon not only agreed with his adversary, he made the same point of ethics in even more vivid terms. Napoleon said: “In war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

I’m going to concentrate on a major mind game today: Stoicism. Its seeds were planted in the fourth century (B.C.) Athens, as a backlash against
Plato’s preoccupation with inuring everybody to the perfect society. Diogenes of Sinope, a friend of both Aristotle and Alexander the Great, (they all knew each other and all died within a two-year period), struck out on his campaign not to conquer the east as did Alexander, not to stamp out ignorance as did Aristotle, but to do something about man’s condition as a cowed citizen of a city state, without anything to believe in that could difuse the inner fears and desires which continually obsessed him. Man had to take command of his inner self, control himself. The stoic goal was not the good society, but the good man.
And a lot of movements sprang up, mainly in the East, after the premature crumbling of Alexander the Great’s empire in Asia after his early death; dozens of cults designed t improve men’s souls organized themselves and headed West for Athens-among others, Epicureans, of course the Stoics, and finally, almost bringing up the rear, the Christians.