Quotes About Warfare

After literally hundreds of firefights, Chosen Company became increasingly battle-hardened. And they also became increasingly suspicious of their Afghan counterparts, believing - with their lives on the line at the end of the day - that they could only truly rely on themselves.

The body of a dead enemy always smells sweet.

The sword is the axis of the world and its power is absolute.

No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody.

Will we forever live by our sword? We definitely will live with our sword. I don't think our children or grandchildren won't be soldiers. We must make efforts to try and not live only by our sword, but we will always be with a sword.

Now when the two armies met, many and fierce were the combats waged between them, and blows were given and received, and swords flashed and showers of arrows descended on all sides.

God made them as stubble to our swords.

Our enemy in Syria is Daesh: it's not about containing but destroying this organisation.

If you're in part of rebel-controlled Syria, and suddenly your house blows up or a building next to you blows up, it would be convenient for rebels to say, 'It was the Americans.'

There's nothing good about Russia's activity in Syria.

Bombing Syria will achieve nothing.

The only people that have ever fought ISIS in Syria is not the regime; it is the Free Syrian Army.

Here's the problem the Free Syrian Army has. They really want to topple the regime in Damascus, and this is where most of the fight takes place, between Aleppo and Damascus for the Free Syrian Army.

If Assad continues to conduct strikes against the Free Syrian Army at will, it would be very difficult for them to have any success against ISIS.

Alex glanced at Sam and David, who looked soberly back at him. "Okay guys? Remember your training: 'A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must desire life like water and drink death like wine.

The era of true peace on earth will not come as long as a tremendous percentage of your taxes goes to educate men in the trades of slaughter.

Like architecture, all paraphernalia of warfare are PC objects: the most rational possible instruments at the service of the most irrational possible pursuit.

It is also said that Genghis Khan wanted to attack the kingdom of Prester John, but that the latter repulsed him by unleashing thunderbolts against his armies.

It was so much easier to knock down than build up: a city raised over millennia could be razed in a day; the life of a man ended in a second's crack. In years to come, Edmund and his children would know the names of planes and tanks and battles and invasions and recall with facility the atrocities of the age, the names of those who committed them. But would any of them be able to name a single repairer of the breach or fixer of broken walls?

Guy Molony, who ran away from New Orleans at sixteen to fight in the Boer War. It was the era of romantic soldiering, when boys heeded the call of Rudyard Kipling ("Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst, / Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst," he wrote in "Mandalay").

When I was in Outremer, I got shot in the face with an arrow. Should've killed me instantly; but by some miracle it hung up in my cheekbone, and an enemy doctor we'd captured the day before yanked it out with a pair of tongs. You should be dead, they said to me, like I'd deliberately cheated. No moral fibre.

Many times Subotai fought against armies larger than his own, but he always maneuvered to insure that when the final blow was struck, he unfailingly achieved numerical superiority at the decisive point.

Subotai, the commander of the invasion of Europe, the Mongols had a commander far superior to any European commander who had taken the field in the preceding two centuries.

The ability to conceptualize war plans and implement them on a grand scale is one of the most difficult skills for any officer to acquire. Most never acquire this ability, something that may explain why warfare has, over the long centuries of its practice, produced only a few truly great generals. Subotai became one of those generals.