Quotes About Warfare

What does a car bomb say about poverty, or the execution of a rural mayor explain about disenfranchisement?... The war had become, it it wasn't from the beginning, an indecipherable text.

It all amounted to the old British butcher-and-bolt tactic, done from the air.

The Taliban probably found it all amusing, as the ignorant occupiers essentially provided their foes' death benefits.

In white flowing Arabic script, dimmed since it had first been daubed months before, the bridge proclaimed for all to see: Fallujah—Graveyard of the Americans. Beneath it, Malay's Marines used black paint to write their message: This is for the Americans of Blackwater murdered here in 2004. Semper Fidelis 3/5 Dark Horse 9/11.

The Sahwa, however, paid tens of thousands of Sunni Arabs to kill each other, not Americans.

snarled up in firefights with the Pashtun Taliban, who were never a threat to the American homeland.

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 An' go to your Gawd like a soldier. —RUDYARD KIPLING, "THE YOUNG BRITISH SOLDIER

To be sure, Americans, and American Air Force planners in particular, were the only people in the world who believed that they had won a war by bombing, and, particularly in Japan, by bombing civilians. But the nuclear era eventually put that demonic temptation—to deter, defeat, or punish an adversary by an operational capability to annihilate most of its civilian population—within the reach of many nations.

A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: "I know exactly what that bomb was." It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened.

deliberate bombing of urban populations as the principal way of fighting a war by a major industrial power can be said to have started on February 14, 1942, with a specific British directive

you and I disagree…is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don't give a damn. I don't care.

Operations analysts turned to questions of what the mix should be of explosives and different sorts of incendiaries for the most efficient, cost-effective ways to burn German workers and their families alive.

had begun under Roosevelt, Stimson, and Leahy when, as their subordinate General LeMay put it, "we scorched and boiled and baked179 to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9–10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined

we were working to assure the survival under attack of a capability for retaliatory genocide

For every ton of bombs dropped on England in the nine months of the Blitz, England and the United States, mainly England, eventually dropped a hundred tons of bombs on German cities.

The major in charge of this little collection of Quonset huts and planes in the hills controlled six and a half times World War II's worth of firepower.

For every ton of bombs dropped on England in the nine months of the Blitz, England and the United States, mainly England, eventually dropped a hundred tons of bombs on German cities. More than half a million Germans—civilians—were killed.

The atom bomb did not start a new era of targeting or strategy or war making in the world. Annihilation of an urban civilian population by fire had already become the American way of war from the air, as it had been the British way since late 1940.

I really believe that carpet-bombing, bombing civilian populations, is a form of terror - it's state terror as opposed to vigilante terrorism.

The Sudanese army has retaken some towns. The people there are all living in caves because the Sudanese army is shelling their villages.

In defense of our persons and properties under actual violation, we took up arms. When that violence shall be removed, when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, hostilities shall cease on our part also.

The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads... It includes... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the number of violent extremist groups has grown across multiple continents. From Syria to Somalia to Pakistan, the United States is combating many of these groups - usually with bombs and missiles. Large numbers of innocent people are invariably caught in the middle.

When it comes to civilian deaths, violent hostilities play no favorites.