Quotes About Warfare

What is the use of building an expensive house when it will soon be sacked?

Back from 2001 to 2003, I wrote multiple editorials for The Washington Post about biological warfare and pandemic preparedness - issues that were at the top of everyone's agenda in the wake of 9/11 and the brief anthrax scare. At the time, some very big investments were made into precisely those issues, especially into scientific research.

By the breaking in of enraged merciless armies, flourishing countries have been laid waste, great numbers of people have perished in a short time, and many more have been pressed with poverty and grief.

I am not one of these guys who is just going to waste American lives by throwing people needlessly in frontal attacks up against the enemy if I can avoid doing that.

I do not have to watch late-night television, watch a movie, to find out what combat is like.

I've been to many countries and watched a number of conflicts or their residue, and I've served in the military.

Seeing the B-52s dropped from planes, watching the burning of civilians with Agent Orange, reading about the incarceration of Vietnamese militants in cages only big enough for tigers made me furious.

The French repulsed wave after wave of frontal attacks at Dien Bien Phu. The 1968 Tet offensive against the U.S. was a military disaster that effectively destroyed the Viet Cong. But Giap persisted and prevailed.

All we know is that, at times, fighting the Russians, we had to remove the piles of enemy bodies from before our trenches, so as to get a clear field of fire against new waves of assault.

My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.

We cannot kill or capture our way out of an industrial-strength insurgency.

None of us should play party to any corporate warfare. We cannot become pawns in the hands of corporate giants' warfare to constantly bully the government, to throw misinformation to the public, tell part-truth and part-story to the public.

There's no such thing as a crowded battlefield. Battlefields are lonely places.

You can always make peace with an F-16 in your pocket.

Being in combat is not unending high-five moments.

I have led men in combat.

It's one thing to say don't commit atrocities on the battlefield. It's another thing to say don't get caught doing atrocities.

I'm an entertainer in the military-entertainment complex.

I think no commander ever is going to come out and say, 'I'm confident that we can do this.'

Sometimes I sit down to dinner with people and I realize there is a massive military machine surrounding us, trying to kill the people I'm having dinner with.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

I cannot conceive of how more than 1% of us could possibly survive a cyberwar.

To step on a bomb, have your legs blown off and survive, is lucky. Everybody has a good-luck story. Mine was the fact that the senior medic was on patrol that day. Those who don't have a good-luck story are the ones who don't make it.

The soldiers that didn't come back were the heroes. It's a roll of the dice. If a bullet has your name on it, you're a hero. If you hear a bullet go by, you're a survivor.