Quotes About Warfare

They wouldn't have believed me, and if they had they would have wanted me to explain. And I had no explanation, no answers. When you're on a battleground, you don't have the luxury of time to dwell on the various historical factors and sociopolitical influences that caused the war. You just keep your head down and try to survive it, to shove the pages back in the book, close the covers and pretend that nothing's broken, nothing's wrong.

Obama once reportedly told his aides, "[It] turns out I'm really good at killing people.

I would like to think that what we were doing was in some way trying to help Afghans," the source explained, but the notion "that what we were part of was actually defending the homeland or in any way to the benefit of the American public" had evaporated long ago. "There's no illusion of that that exists in Afghanistan. It hasn't existed for many years.

Based on his experience, he has come to believe that the drone program amounts to little more than death by unreliable metadata. People get hung up that there's a targeted list of people, he said. It's really like we're targeting a cell phone. We're not going after people – we're going after their phones, in the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.

When Obama took office, there had been only one U.S. drone strike in Yemen, in November 2002.6 By 2012 a drone strike was reported in Yemen every six days. As of August 2015, more than 490 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone.

special forces and drones replaced the type of large-scale ground invasion that destroyed Iraq. But the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the United States is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process rights of any kind—is very much alive and, in many cases, stronger than ever.

It's the squares who know how to fly the fighter planes and operate the missiles and the bombs and work the M-16s. Liberals would still be fumbling with the federally mandated trigger locks.

I think any student of military strategy would tell you that in order to attack a position, you should have a ratio of approximately 3 to 1 in favor of the attacker.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole; for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

Drone attacks subvert the rule of law - we become judge, jury, and executioner - at the push of a button.

The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.

As it turns out, many pharmaceuticals are offshoots of various chemical weapons developed and used during the two major world wars, and some were even tested on prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. You

When 'all is permitted' in the fight against terror, a counter-terrorist starts to become indistinguishable from the initial terrorist. Furthermore, all the terrorists in the world think they are counter-terrorists, merely responding to a prior act of terror. They are not the only ones: it is always possible, and easy, to find a prior violence that supposedly justifies our present violence. But, on this way of reckoning, war will never end.

Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.

You cannot make peace with terrorists. The normal dividing lines between war and peace do not apply.

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving.

No other terms than unconditional and immediate surrender. I propose to move immediately upon your works.

The distant rear of an army engaged in battle is not the best place from which to judge correctly what is going on in front.

Freedom is never free.

The victory of a war is not determined by the size of an army or the quality of armaments. Factors like unshakable determination, heroism, and desire for liberation determine victory.

Two riders led Williams to the body. "There lay Bandoola," Williams would write. He stared in disbelief at the rotting corpse, not quite ready to comprehend that his hero was gone. Bandoola's right tusk had been hacked off, and the left remained plowed into the earth where his head had fallen. A single bullet fired directly into his skull had killed him.

Merrill's Marauders, as well as the pilots of the Flying Tigers.

The enemy came. He was beaten. I am tired. Goodnight. (Message sent after the battle of Dunen, 658)

The Price of Neglect A PUBLIC THAT'S illiterate about the conflicts of the past can easily find itself confused during wartime. Without standards of historical comparison, people prove ill-equipped to make informed judgments when the dogs of war are unleashed. Neither U.S. politicians nor most citizens seem to recall the incompetence and terrible decisions that, in December 1777, December 1941, and November 1950, led to massive American casualties and, for a time, public despair.