Quotes from Andrew J. Bacevich

The war that the officer corps prepared itself to fight was the war in which the prospects of actually having to fight were most remote. This made perfect sense.

As it turned out, Clark's shortcomings as a strategist—particularly failing to accurately take the measure of Milosevic—were as nothing in comparison to his deficiencies as a battlefield general.

Even as U.S. policy in recent decades has become progressively militarized, so too has the Vietnam-induced gap separating the U.S. military from American society persisted and perhaps even widened.47

Americans entrust their security to a class of military professionals who see themselves in many respects as culturally and politically set apart from the rest of society.53

careful deliberation. Parties on all sides agreed that whichever way the president came down, the implications were sure to be momentous. In fact, however, even as Obama pondered the question of whether to send ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand or forty thousand additional reinforcements to Afghanistan, the actual ability to exercise choice had already passed from his hands. In essence, the president found himself in the position of a man shopping