Being Ruthless in chess? How to attack strongly?

Greetings chess.com. This is Commander Cody. Clone Commander in the Clone Wars. I have a question today for any strong players. Hopefully above the rating of 1800 who are members of the USCF or FIDE. Also Masters are included. My question for you is this. How do you become ruthless in chess? How do you attack so strongly against your opponents lines? How do you counter their moves with attacking moves of your own? How do you prepare for tournaments outside this website? I hope you can give me some of your wisdom and advice.

That is more than one question there Commander ;)

Wrong question you ask. 

Ask not how, but what and when, and closer to insight you are.

The first thing is, you neeed to learn when to attack, and when not to. 

Lol Scandium, you are correct there ;D. That is more than one question. Thank you also for anyone else who posted for the advice and tips.

I'm no master but maybe I can add something, however small. Attacking is similar to other areas of the game in that it is about accuracy and precision. Move orders are very important. Don't allow your opponent to exchange off your pieces and don't play a good move too soon. Take your time, killing your opponent's counter play comes first. Build up slowly and when the correct moment comes, sacrifice that exchange/bishop/knight/pawn in order to split open your opponent. Don't exaust yourself trying to work out all of the possible variations. Good attacking players can use their intuition.

That advice is very vague and general, I think too much so to be very useful (however well intentioned).

I am no "strong player" (I define that as expert rated and above, which I'm not) but I did, once upon a time, make the leap (it was a big one for me) from playing a very passive game to a much more active and aggressive one.

I can break down exactly what made the transition:

I read the classic The Art of the Checkmate. This was very illuminating as it broke mating patterns down into their precise position, and then provided games and game fragments to illustrate how the pattern was created and the killing blow delivered the illustrated mate. It then followed up with some problems to reinforce the concepts it presented.

I followed that book up by studying Chess Tactics for the Tournament Player. The main focus of this book was the various tactical motifs. They were first explained, then illustrated with a few examples, then followed up with some problems to reinforce the material again.

I then worked through, twice, Winning Chess Tactics for Juniors. That book contained about 500 problems that were well arranged and easy enough that you could work through about 50 in under 30 mins. The main idea was to develop pattern recognition: in solving these elementary problems, you trained your brain to recognize similar positions during play.

There are much more sophisticated books written on the subject of attack, but I think there's a lot to be said for working through more elementary books first, as then you have the requisite foundation for studying more advanced works later (such as Vukovic's classic, The Art of Attack).