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Napoleon was impressed with Istanbul. If all the world were a single state, he said, this city should be its capital.

As Hitler rolled through Europe, some Americans wondered if Britain could hold out. One military observer questioned whether the British army could handle the "high centralisation and co-ordination demanded by the machine age." Britain urgently sought American aid, which often fell short. Even before Lend-Lease, America sent Britain rifles leftover from 1919, still packed in grease, with bullets of the wrong calibre, which made them useless.

In Indonesia and the Philippines, more than 90% of female pris­oners have been charged with drug offences. In Ireland, 80% are jailed for non-payment of fines. Most Kenyans prosecuted for brewing illicit alcohol are women, perhaps because it is a crime that can be committed without leaving the children home alone. In Afghanistan, half the women in prison are there for "moral" crimes such as eloping.

America will need to act as enforcer-in-chief.

An Indonesian official announced he had found a way to save money on prisons: replace guards with crocodiles. Crocodiles, he noted, were sufficiently ferocious and more resistant to bribery.

California's treasurer, Bill Lockyer, is fond of saying that California will not default unless there is thermonuclear war.

Intelligence officers seeking to recruit a target work on four frail­ties, summarised in a CIA dictum as money, ideology, compro­mise and ego (MICE for short).

Having taken back control of their territory in Iraq and Syria, the Kurds have proved incapable of sharing it. The alphabet barely has enough let­ters to cover the acronyms of all their quarrelsome factions. A Syrian an­alyst counts 45 in Rojava alone. In Iraq there are almost as many." We're upholding Sykes-Picot borders," says one of its commanders wryly.

A retired general says that nuclear command and control during the cold war felt like "holding an angry tiger by the tail".

The incident is yet another illustration of the perils of matching first- world firepower with third-world decision-making.

As one general puts it, the American military is becoming "a Su­per Walmart with everything under one roof". Because its culture is proudly can-do, it gets on with the demands made on it without much complaint.

If a goat can get through, so can a man; if a man can get through, so can a battalion.

The major lesson of the Vietnam war is: do not rely on the United States as an ally.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Assured peace comes only at the splintered end of a long stick.

Scratch a South Korean and he will be unsure of America's commitment, ready to believe that Japan might turn aggressive again, resentful that China ignores his country's concerns and alarmed by a dangerous North Korea.

One community chopped off the sexual organs of another com­munity.

As Helmuth von Moltke, a 19th-century German field-marshal, put it: "No plan survives contact with the enemy." Or Mike Tyson, still more pithily: "Everyone has a plan 'til they get punched in the mouth".

Grover Cleveland even managed to dodge the draft during the civil war by paying $150 to a Polish immigrant to act as his substitute.

The U. S. military programme needs to overcome at least five critical vul­nerabilities. The first is that carriers and other surface vessels can now be tracked and hit by missiles at ranges from the enemy's shore which could prevent the use of their cruise missiles or their tactical aircraft without in-flight refuelling by lumbering tankers that can be picked off by hostile fighters. The second is that defending close-in regional air bases from a surprise attack in the opening stages of a conflict is in­creasingly hard. Third, aircraft operating at the limits of their combat range would struggle to identify and target mobile missile launchers. Fourth, modern air defences can shoot down non-stealthy aircraft at long distances. Finally, the satellites America requires for surveillance and intelligence are no longer safe from attack.

If a guy has been hit by 700,000 bullets it's hard to work out which one of them killed him.

Wars sound horrible in plain English, so they have always generated a smokescreen of euphemism. "Kinetic action" means "killing people". "Collateral damage" means "killing people accidentally". Politicians typi­cally use the word "kill" only to describe what our enemies do to us; not what we do to them. In a speech in May explaining his drone warfare policy, for example, Barack Obama spoke of "lethal, targeted action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces". As Orwell said, when "cer­tain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract."

We all know about Iwo Jima, but who in the West has heard of the defence of Taierzhuang, when Chinese soldiers defeated superior Japanese troops in hand-to-hand combat?