Quotes About Warfare

There were things violence could solve—you couldn't be a soldier and not believe that—but this wasn't one of them.

The poor soldiers always do their duty in the most brilliant manner; but as soon as matters come again into the hands of politicians and diplomats, everything is again spoiled and confused.

We live in a world that is ringing with the clangour of weapons. Mankind is arming on all sides, and it will go ill with a state that is unable or unwilling to rely on its own strength.

African mercenaries (the regulares)

requetés (the Carlist militia)

As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.

No war can ever be just air.

H)is action was merely "galvanizing the corpse" of an army that was already in retreat and heading for defeat.

No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force.

Henri Philippe Pétain

Recognition of belligerency as an expression of sympathy is all very well.

The reason the story runs so much with the little girls are the actual heroes in the warfare is because under most circumstances women are braver than men ..

What is human warfare but just this an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party.

A conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla army wins if it does not lose.

The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose.

What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military.

Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of "center of gravity" and the "decisive point"—the game usually beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.

A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.

The highest form of warfare Is to attack [the enemy's] Strategy itself; The next, To attack [his] Alliances. The next, To attack Armies;

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process, we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.

The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

The lowest form of war is To attack Cities. Siege warfare Is a last resort . . .   The Skillful Strategist Defeats the enemy Without doing battle, Captures the city Without laying siege, Overthrows the enemy state Without protracted war.34

may not lead to reduction in U.S. casualties until its final stages, as our casualty rate may be unrelated to the total number of American troops in South Vietnam. To kill about 150 U.S. soldiers a week, the enemy needs to attack only a small portion of our forces….