Today’s fact is rather more martial than usual. It is simple: Combat is mental. It is won or lost through the mind.

Whether it is one man fighting the odds, or a hundred armies clashing on a global battlefield, the mind is always paramount. It may seem like it’s the weapons doing the talking, but the mind creates, positions and recontextualizes everything.

The mind is the arena. Say it with me, children. The mind is the arena. In it, jousting horses charge at each other, laser-sword-wielding techno-barbarians fight, and small drones fly at a world-historical-changing pace.

Adolf Hitler emphasized the importance of willpower throughout his rather checkered career. His first grab at power — an attack on the state — failed in the early 1920s, and as his putsch crumbled, he could have been brushed off the scene like a gnat but the better qualities of his mind rescued him. Willpower is a critical factor of the successful warrior, political or physical.

It is all too easy to give up in this world. To say, in effect, I have nothing more to give. But the well is always deeper. In a fistfight, you can pick yourself off the ground, dust off your suit, and raise fists to give it another go. In a firefight in an urban setting, you can regroup your forces and strike out once again. You don’t have to accept the end is predetermined.

Creativity is close behind willpower in importance. The creative warrior will always defeat the uncreative one. The Americans were more creative than the Japanese in World War 2. While the Japanese were copying with Zero aircraft, the Yanks were building breakthrough atomic bombs. This American sense of innovation has stood them in good stead since the days of the U.S. Civil War (1861-65). As the future onrushes toward us, creativity and general innovation have only become more important. The man who waves a paintbrush like a wand, and rediscovers reality in his imagined picturings, is the one who will put his foot on his opponent’s prostrate neck.

The ability to take pain and learn from mistakes is also important. Mike Tyson famously said that “Everybody has a plan until he gets punched in the face.” You have to shrug off the hurt, quickly reevaluate your situation, and derive new lessons from the agonizing experience. In love, as in war, this applies highly. To become a skilled player in the love matches, picking up and dropping women like cheap shiny baubles, you have to absorb the emotional pain of the Game and reshape it into something new. A great player beats a good player not by being physically better-looking, but by superior talking and charming ability. This fight for successful in-pussy, no-condom orgasm is a battle against the recalcitrant female mind opposing it. To win, you must be willing to cheat.

And that is the final lodestone of the successful warrior: a complete & utter lack of ethics.

A protesting man of honor once remarked that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” in regards to international spying. He was a fool. Anything is on the table where fighting is concerned, including kicks to the balls, and agonizing jabs to the eyes. There’s a reason that rules-based formal fighting bans these things. Because they work, at great cost to the enemy.

The Geneva Convention of War was a pussified attempt to neuter war of its more violent, outrageous qualities. The only thing that can work to humanize war is to end the existence of multiple states and turn all conflict into 911-calls of cops answering the call for help. Geneva was mere window-dressing.