Quotes About Warfare

A jolt, a white flash, a thunderclap, and the Hayate was torn apart—her bow floated one way, her stern the other, each section bobbing pitifully on the sea, and then both quickly sank, taking 168 men down with them. The battery's crew let out a full-throated cheer. "Knock it off, you bastards, and get back on the guns!" bellowed Platoon Sergeant Henry Bedell. "What do you think this is, a ball game?

But thirty years after that, at the battle of Pydna in 168, the Roman general Aemilius Paullus remarked he had never been so fearful as when he faced the Macedonian phalanx in battle array (pp. 166–167).

It takes more courage to send men into battle than to fight the battle yourself.

Our strategy in going after this army is very simple. First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.

Officers have been trying for hundreds of years to outsmart soldiers and have still not learned that it cannot be done. We can always count on the native ingenuity of the American GI to save us from ourselves, and to win wars.

The expendability factor has increased by being transferred from the specialised, scarce and expensively trained military personnel to the amorphous civilian population. American strategists have calculated the proportion of civilians killed in this century's major wars. In the First World War 5 per cent of those killed were civilians, in the Second World War 48 per cent, while in a Third World War 90-95 per cent would be civilians.

The military and intelligence communities have vast resources at their disposal. They undoubtedly possess technological capabilities that are far beyond anything that is known in the public sector. And in the past, they have certainly demonstrated a willingness to carry out psychological warfare exercises, disinformation campaigns, and surveillance programs against unwitting civilian populations, even when such programs are clearly illegal.

Warmaking doesn't stop warmaking. If it did, our problems would have stopped millennia ago.

Don't one of you fire until you see the whites of their eyes.N.B. A lesser-known version of this quotation was supposedly said by Frederick the Great at Prague in 1757 By push of bayonets, no firing till you see the whites of their eyes.

When one wants to be famous, one has to dive gracefully into rivers of the blood of cannon-blasted bodies.

Know the enemy and you will know how to kill him.

The greatest joy a man can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them before him. To ride their horses and take away their possessions, to see the faces of those who were dear to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives and daughters in his arms.

For the khan, we will take their cities, their women, and their lands. This is the great raid, the farthest strike in the history of the nation of Genghis. We will not be stopped.

Xuan smiled at the thought of men sleeping peacefully next to those they would try to kill in daylight. Only humanity could have conceived such a strange and artificial way to die. Wolves might tear the flesh of deer, but they never slept and dreamed near their quarry.

Conquering enemy cities was far less complicated than the women in his life, or the children they bore for him.

Behold a people shall come from the north, and a great nation. They shall hold the bow and the lance; they are cruel and will not show mercy; their voice shall roar like the sea, and they shall ride upon horses every one put in array, like a man to the battle.

Within two years, they would be attacking us . The emperor has seen what we can do and he will not make the same mistakes again. One chance we have made for ourselves, Khasar. You cannot wound a bear and run. It will chase you down.

Nothing pleased the Mongols more than a good trick on the field of battle.

This is no game of thrones, but real endings and real blood.

I thought a man could throw his best years against enemies and then die, feared and loved both. I still think that. But when I am gone, the cities will rebuild and they will not remember me.

When Pelitas had died, he had wept, but there were no more tears in him for the others. He had no more lies for them, no more speeches. The grand lie had been that there was anything to fight for at all.

Conn Iggulden

God had mercy, he knew. The Mongols had none.

Guerrilla wars, and even more so terrorist assaults, are conducted only by forces with insufficient strength to carry out a real war.