Quotes About Warfare

He would not be deterred by subtle arguments of strategy and tactics—he would simply throw everything he had at the enemy and slug it out until the issue was decided.

Possessing foreknowledge of Japanese intentions, Nimitz had been dealt a very strong hand. It is also true that he played that hand skillfully, indeed flawlessly. In arranging his forces, Nimitz had concentrated on one overriding objective to the exclusion of all others: to ambush and destroy the Japanese carriers. Whereas Yamamoto's plan was vast and fatally complex, Nimitz's was straightforward, and aimed at the enemy's most vulnerable point.

Though he knew the Japanese would attack the Aleutians, he had refused to divert the bulk of his forces from the main event north of Midway. He had been content to concede the loss of the westernmost islands in the Aleutians archipelago, knowing they offered little value as military assets and could be recaptured in good time.

That attitude was consistent with the teachings of Miyamoto Musashi, the renowned samurai swordsman of the sixteenth century. "As far as attacks made on you are concerned," Musashi had advised, "let opponents go ahead and do anything useless, while stopping them from doing anything useful. This is essential to the art of war.

The settlement was defending itself." "By shooting us and throwing bombs at us even though we're unarmed?

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

I was very careful to send Mr. Roosevelt every few days a statement of our casualties. I tried to keep before him all the time the casualty results because you get hardened to these things and you have to be very careful to keep them always in the forefront of your mind.

The commanding general publishes, for the information of all concerned, that hereafter all persons found within our lines who commit acts for the benefit of the enemies of our country will be tried as spies or traitors, and, if convicted, will suffer death.

Troops fighting for their lives should not have to ask a lawyer sitting in air conditioning 500 miles away for permission to drop a bomb.

On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.

However, the fact that the tanks had now been raised to such a pitch of technical perfection that they could cross our undamaged trenches and obstacles did not fail to have a marked effect on our troops.

If was, increased by a lack of railways in Russia - for bringing up supplies to our advancing troops.

Well British troops are superb in the field in terms of conflict.

When American troops find themselves fighting for their lives, there is no better sound than an A-10 - a plane officially nicknamed the Thunderbolt II but known affectionately by the troops as the Warthog - firing its enormous 30-millimeter gun at the enemy.

In the past, rulers led their troops into battle and, even in peacetime, called themselves fathers of their people. And modern politics retains abundant masculine rituals. Prime minister's question time in Britain, for instance, is a stylised duel and tournament redolent of testosterone.

I remain troubled by the deliberate killing of civilians, whether by the United States or by its enemies.

We made them drink poison last night and Saddam Hussein's soldiers and his great forces gave the Americans a lesson which will not be forgotten by history. Truly.

People do not want war. War springs from causes wholly outside the lives, interests, and feelings of the people.

It's not a problem taking out someone who wants your people dead. That's not a problem at all.

I love historical movies. I want to make a violent medieval epic.

Corporal Clasp crawled up beside him. 'That's one of those Fuckeral's, isn't it?

The game the mind must play to unleash destruction. He'd stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.